Above: The world owes him a wedgie
‘It’s Your Country Too, Mr. President’
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.
Shorter Karl Rove’s Latest Column:
The President Has Become a Divisive Figure
Compare his start with George W. Bush’s.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
The National Organization for Marriage is the deformed brain-spawn of Maggie Gallagher, who apparently spends more time fixated on where gay people put their naughty bits than any gay person alive does. News of recent events in Vermont and Iowa have set off a firestorm of gay panic and pot-luck comfort-food sleep-overs at Maggie’s place where plans are, as we speak, being made as to the appropriate response to the inevitable day when they are dragged out of their homes by the federal government and forced to gay-marry complete, but very gay, strangers. Apparently cyanide tablets have even been discussed.
Hoping to buy themselves more time before the gaypocalypse, the group launched a new ad ominously titled “The Gathering Storm.” It’s mostly a reliable brew of the the same old huffing and puffing that gay marriage will cause husbands to divorce their wives and run off with male hairdressers and will cause third-grade girls to trade in their Barbie dolls for flannel shirts and dental dams. But after I watched the ad, I couldn’t help but think that some awesomely evil gay genius in NOM’s ad agency had completely pwned the group. The actors, in a fey homage to George Romero, stand around like a bunch of zombies under stormy skies, intoning the horrors of gay marriage in a robotic monotone. Any normal straight person who saw this ad could have no other response than to think that maybe a little bit of butt-sex or a gay blow job or two (or fifty) would be more fun than hanging out with the un-dead missionary-position crowd in the ad.
With that in mind, the ad has been fixed to even more fully realize the intentions of its anonymous creator.
Step 1: Engage Right-Wing Message Machine
Call the Boston FOX News affiliate (their headquarters is right off the Common, diagonally across the street from the Statehouse) and tell them you’re a student at Harvard Law School where you work for Alan Dershowitz, and you’re a former speechwriter for the South African, uh, not black-people party, and president of Students Against the International Muslim Conspiracy, and X and Y conservative groups, bla-bla, this-that, and hey, Barney Frank is speaking at the Kennedy School of Government, and how about you come and cover it and we’ll give him some hell about his responsibility for the financial crisis?1 And FOX is like, Barney Frank? Ding-ding-ding! Heh-heh. Okay, sure, nothing definite, but if nothing else is going on we’ll send a guy. What’s your name — Adam? Joel? Okay, whatever, great. Maybe we’ll see you there.
Step 3: Hero! Of! Conservatism!
Step 4: Engage Liberal WTF!? Machine
We knew Glenn Reynolds would one day reach the end of this journey, and imagined correctly that it would be on a circus train, but there was no predicting the screech of ruined brakes, the concussion like a million shopping carts colliding, the greasy steam, the elephant parts and clown paste.
FAIRNESS: CBO: Top 1% Earned 19% of Income, Paid 28% of All Taxes. And got 1% of the vote.
Posted at 8:49 am by Glenn Reynolds
Just as every anarchist is in a way a failed dictator, give a libertarian1 some success and a bit of social capital (and in Glenn’s case we’re talking Internet dollars in the upgrade-to-Häagen-Dazs range, and a fan base roughly proportional, and significantly coextensive, with the market for signed Boris Vallejo prints2), and watch him revert to the naive and pre-theorized form that he held before discovering the Kurt Vonnegut story Harrison Bergeron and/or “Red Barchetta” by Rush, and thence falling into the arms, or rather hands, of Ayn Rand. That is, behold an aspiring aristocrat, the eternal petit bourgeois.
“And got 1% of the vote,” the man added astringently, suggesting unfairness to the wealthy not only in the progressive income tax, but in the principle of allowing non-wealthy people to outvote them simply by casting more votes. For what is this but government regulation of politics, set up specifically to punish success and reward failure?
In Glenn’s favor, the top 1% have freedom systematically expropriated from them under the current system, because if they gain any numerical advantage at all, the 1% is instantly recalculated.
Who is responsible for making the percents get recalculated? Heh. An interesting question.
In Glenn’s disfavor, this strain of political philosophy used to be called ‘feudalism,’ and was significantly unsettled by what we have come to call the Enlightenment, i.e. the end of what were afterward called the Dark Ages. Since then it has been forced to parasitize other political philosophies.
But no, it’s almost impossible even adequately to make fun of this mindset.2 1/2 The 1% nugget above came not from some Dwight Schrute guy sitting next to you in some unpromising local bar you thought you’d give a chance to, but from a law professor familiar at least with the term, ‘Three-Fifths Compromise,’ if not with the term, ‘Prussian Three-Stage Enfranchisement.’ That’s the name of a system in which — we’re a liberal comedy blog here, by the way — votes were weighted according to the amount of tax a citizen paid. Not entirely a success in its purpose of preserving the monarchy, it was abolished when a democratic revolution overthrew the government, following two historic tests of Prussian upper-class governance and aristocratic decision-making:
But sure, let’s throw off these chains of history and roll naked in the grass. Hi, fellow libertarian. Say, I have thought about our philosophy’s stick-on precepts about natural human rights and ‘initiation of force,’ and I must say: Wouldn’t the Free Market regulate those things naturally, if they were real?
Here’s one. How about taking some non-superior-rich-people and paying them like $100,000 each to breed children, okay? And then before those future children get conceived, and then become actual babies with legal rights, bla-bla-bla, the parents sign them over to us as property.
And then we breed those children and get more, see, and then we’re really in business.
Or what, should government step in and handicap success, granting additional rights to hypothetical people? If a parent is to be prevented from deciding a child’s initial level of success, then should government seize inheritances too? If we are to interfere with the rights of parents for the ‘common good,’ shouldn’t children be delivered to communal education camps and raised equally by the state?
But perhaps we go too far.
It’s not that we’re alone: Like many of his colleagues, Reynolds has given in to the kook urge over the past year. His Instapundit persona still tries to distance himself from the appearance of irrationalism, of conspiracy thinking, racialism, and the other endemic weaknesses of the right, but like a lot of his colleagues, it seems Reynolds himself is increasingly unable to distinguish fringe thinking, thinking driven by fantasy and childish urges, by paranoia, by absolutism, from the kind that reasonable people try to cultivate, and must compromise with. The right has adopted a policy of no-compromise.
What happens lately is that I’ll start writing one of these posts, chop the top off it just to have something done and posted, and add the rest to the large and accumulating wad of paragraphs loosely classified as Erick Erickson/Wingnut Psychology. And here we are again, except I can’t let this one link go by unappreciated. Whatever else I end up saying with all those paragraphs, this is what I’m talking about.
2 We’re talking Frank Frazetta, tops; not some Patrick Woodroffe-type guy whose art you could conceivably hang in a dwelling shared with a woman, and certainly not one of the greats like Jean “Moebius” Giraud, the market for whose signed prints is coextensive with whimsical and attractive people who have to go to the bathroom.
Or, fine, really anyone with….hi, I’m back. Really, or anyone with clean draftsmanship and a sense of line, who doesn’t just draw a bunch of muscles and a face going “raaah!” and shade it as if there were some Photoshop ‘Shade Fantasy Art’ filter that makes things look like rubber bath toys extruding out of a flat background. A background, by the way, with a flat picture of a Lovecraftian monster on one side and one of a hot chick with a katana on the other, and since we’re going there, a distant spaceship flying around in the corner all like, “Check it out, I’m fantasy and science fiction.” Also, barring an incidence of the puzzling and apparently chilly fantasy convention, ‘the armored bikini,’ the chick has two huge, apparently radar-enabled handguns strapped to her thighs with crossed leather strappy things, above her fur or patent leather bikini, as though someone were familiar with Tomb Raider but naïve to handgun safety. Her head is unique among visual elements in the composition in that it is drawn in anime style, with three dots in each of the large, arch-shaped eyes, and a hang glider of blue hair framing what can only be described as torpedo tits.
As is taught at the Joe Kubert school, apparently.
3 There used to be a third footnote here, but let’s be reasonable.
2 1/2 But okay, it’s necessary to add: A reader sent Reynolds a correction noting that ‘all taxes’ actually only includes Federal taxes, and Reynolds added, “Good point, though I don’t know how much it changes things.” We’re too lazy to look it up too, but probably more important is the additional fact, noted in comments below, that ‘income’ doesn’t seem to include capital gains.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
You guys are getting so stupid that I’m actually starting to feel sorry for you.
When I graduated from college at the start of this decade, there were two things I never thought I would witness in my lifetime:
Now I have seen both of these things in just under a decade and I feel strangely empty. Does my life still have purpose?
Oh well, I guess I still have Erick Erickson to laugh at. Check this out:
ABOVE: Erick “The Dim” EricksonRebuilding the Movement: Online Investment
Posted by Erick Erickson
We’ve talked a lot about rebuilding the party. Let’s talk instead about rebuilding the movement.
Every day in Washington, there is some right-wing group somewhere bemoaning the efforts of the right online. Sadly, for them and the rest of the right, their first thought is “let’s do it ourselves”, instead of “let’s invest in the existing talent.”
There’s a reason for this: the existing talent sucks. That’s why they’re bemoaning you. No smart lobbying group wants to pay you guys six figures to run a public relations campaign only to have it devolve into 50-page manifestos describing how Democrats hate black people because they nominated a black guy to run for president.
It’s often bemoaned on our side that the left is much further ahead online than the right. This is true. The left has larger blogs than the right, though I still think the right has many more sites than the left.
I.e., the left blogs are more widely-read, but the right has a bunch of crappy blogs written by guys living in Montana shacks who post from their dial-up connections.
One area where the left has done a much better job than the right online is investing in blogs as a component of left-wing activism.
On the right, Heritage has its blog. Club for Growth has its blog. MRC has its blog. The GOP has its blog. The list goes on and on and on. When the right wants to get online, each organization does its own thing. That’s just the way its done.
To be sure, on the left, there’s a bit of the same thing going on, but then you’ve got groups like Media Matters that function more or less to subsidize left-wing bloggers. Oh sure, they say they are more important than that, but they aren’t really.
Gavin adds: This is one of the things, yesterday evening, that made me extend past the lower right corner of the panel leaving just my shoes sticking up surrounded by a dust cloud, with a bubble-lettered “OOF” on top tapering rapidly back to a cornball vanishing point, if you know what that feels like.
Mr. Erickson is paid to do RedState by the company that bought it from him and the site’s other founders in late 2006 (the company being Eagle Publishing, also the parent company of Regnery and the Conservative Book Club). That job is one of a stupendous array of wingnut welfare opportunities subsidized by innumerable foundations, nonprofits, private companies, and occasionally single right-wing billionaries acting alone, that has created an entire worthless pundit class of know-nothing conservative me-toos and arguers — literally hundreds in number — who do nothing but gas off misinformedly and be sloppily wrong about everything in a certain, expected way, for which they’re rewarded in cash, fellowships, laundered cash via hugely overcompensated speaking gigs, gobstopping article fees, book contracts with thousands in guaranteed sales via Eagle Publishing’s buy-its-own-books-and-give-them-away scheme, rigged chances at the bestseller lists via the same, endowed chairs of X, board memberships, project funding, consulting fees, research grants, and probably old parchment maps with a dotted line leading to a big, fat ‘X’ where they can dig down three inches and find a chest of doubloons that was buried there for them that morning. Golden tickets to Wonka’s chocolate factory.
I mean, fine, I’m trying not to get too far into this, but but Media Matters does what, now? They subsidize whom, exactly? ‘Groups like Media Matters’ comprises what, Media Matters plus Imaginary Soros Thingy, plus aah-whatever-let’s-just-round-it-up?
Oh God, Erickson, why can’t I quit you?
More importantly, though, is the advertising component. What is the online advertising budget for Heritage? What about for AEI? What about for Americans for Tax Reform? Family Research Council? Leadership Institute? NFIB? NTU? National Right to Work? Club for Growth? The list goes on.
See, it’s happening again.
In the past few years, SEIU, AFL-CIO, NEA, DCCC, and a host of other left-wing organizations have been buying ads on left of center blogs keeping those blogs going — allowing the bloggers on the left some financial incentive to keep blogging for the left.
Yeah, billions of dollars in funding, a middle-class salary for me, but hey, no, what about some right-wing foundations that are blowing lots of money around, sure, like a giant leaf blower in a basketball court piled with money, but what about their online advertising budgets? No really, what about them, because I didn’t bother to find out? What about this one? What about this other one? The list of ones I am listing goes on.
And wait, OMG, since everything must involve an invidious comparison between the good-us-people and the everything-bad-them-people, some unions have blatantly bought ads on left-of-center blogs during the past few years, giving money to them — money to them. They use this money to keep blogging, yet we received none of it!
Pajamas Media cuts off its funding to a bunch of B-list right-blogs, and what, within a week, everybody is looking at everybody else and seeing a hot dog? Erickson actually does look a little like a giant hot dog. I’m not saying; I’m just saying.
[Gav out]
As someone who has made some small amount of money off blog ads over the years, let me assure you that I still have to work a full-time job. The “financial incentive” I have to keep blogging basically amounts to a six-pack of beer at the end of the week. It’s appreciated, sure, but it’s not something I can quit my job over.
Hell, Republicans are supposed to be smart business people, so take a hint: Put up an ad on a right wing blog to promote your business and you get to deduct the costs of advertising1. If you were to make a cash contribution, there would be no taxable benefit to you. If you are a doctor and you put an ad in the yellow pages, you deduct the cost as the cost of doing business. Same with a blog in your state. Same here at RedState.
In other words, “MORE WINGNUT WELFARE!!! NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW!!!! IF THIS KEEPS UP I MIGHT HAVE TO START LOOKING FOR REAL WORK!!!! AND I HAVE NO SKILLS!!!!!! HAAAAAAAAAAAAAY-YELLLLLLLLLLLLP!!!!”
UPDATE: While mocking Erickson has provided me with a new feeling of purpose, this video is once again sapping my will to live:
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(Via.)
Shorter Cap’n Ed Morrissey:
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
Hi, and welcome to Erick Erickson Chumpwatch for April 2nd, 2009.
When last we encountered the brick-hued and meaty-handed Mr. Erickson of RedState, on March 31st, Calgon had taken him away, and he was fantasizing about attacking people and “beat[ing] them to a bloody pulp,” about people rising up in armed rebellion and himself holing up in some shack or bell tower with a firearm, and that whole sort of thing that the right has been prone to lately. Nobody who appreciates the strange psychology of these people will find it surprising that his next epistle was about the liberal thugs and goons who are going around thugging and gooning people.
Yes, and if anyone is squinting around with a little Trotsky-style pince-nez pinced at the end of his long, curious nez, hoping to spot whoopsies and boners, joy awaits them at the local astronomical observatory, for the charts there will confirm that today is April 6th.
Why the holdup? I suspect my old enemy, time. It has also been literally — and I don’t mean ‘literally’ in the perverse figurative sense, where it somehow means ‘figuratively’; but literal in the literal sense, where that second ‘literal’ isn’t figurative either — impossible to finish writing this thing because Erickson keeps rendering it obsolete. He keeps topping it, keeps negatively outsmarting me.
Such as the following, anent the prior Yosemite Sam tantrum, where it was like he suspected we were up to something, and wanted to make sure we didn’t spoil a laugh-a-minute thrill ride by investing his character with too much self-reflection:
I asked the question [about violent revolt]. Since then I’ve been under a leftist barage of criticism. Keep in mind that the people now attacking me for wanting a revolution (something I don’t want) are the same people who were convinced Dick Cheney was going to launch a coup and refuse to vacate the premises earlier this year.
In addition to not having a great reading comprehension, they are crazy.
Does it get any better than that? I thought not. I thought wrong. Today it was this.
Until today, I wouldn’t have been able to walk silently away from such a masterpiece of fail, such a veritable, meaning ‘figurative,’ anglerfish lure of mixed antagonistic, self-pitying, triumphal, and flattering styles — one with almost no statement not false or trivial, almost no idea not backwards and upside-down. It’s like finding money on the sidewalk. Worse in the sense of moral hazard, it plays into many of my pet theories, including the one referenced just above of the four Wingnut Emotional Modes (a.k.a. the ‘yum, yuck, yikes, and yawn’ theory), reinforcing the illusion, fatal to theories, that people are simple and can be divided into types.
I’m walking away. Brad has dibs on it, and maybe he has even done a post on it already — I haven’t looked.
Because okay, where were we? Headache, weary self-assessment, recess with snack and juice, Erickson.
Oh dear God. Let me, you know, go back to it tonight. There’s a part at the end that depends on pictures, and doesn’t have the right ones yet because I kept rewriting the parts-not-at-the-end, and who even knows if Brad is doing the…heh, almost got me again there. Maybe I’ll just go look at it. I won’t actually touch it or poke at it or anything.
Until then, what’s with this inarticulate wingnuts questioning people’s language skills thing? Like, is this guy actually trying to say that an expression isn’t used correctly unless it’s already been hardened into a cliché? And if so, who gets to overuse it in the first place?
Shorter Ed Whelan:
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
*John Yoo worked for the Office of Legal Counsel and penned the OLC memo that said that there was no such thing as illegal torture, except, perhaps, boiling someone in oil might, in certain limited circumstances (say, boiling a child in oil for more than thirty minutes), be considered as an illegal form of torture.