Sadly, No!

Right-wingers like being wrong like Jughead likes pizza, so when they aren’t fantasizing over a Dumb-And-Dumber dream ticket of Sarah Palin and nega-populist Rick Santelli (with Joe the Plumber as presumptive Sec’y of State), they’re telling us that we should look to Russia to learn the evils of government interference in the economy.

But they aren’t talking about the Russia of the Soviet era; goodness, no. That wouldn’t make them nearly wrong enough. No, they’re saying that we should take as our model the Russia of today, by heeding the words of visionary leader/judo expert Vladimir Putin:

Even “Mr. KGB” Putin realizes that state control of the economy is a mistake. Rather than learn from Russia’s example the left in the U.S. thinks it can succeed where every other nation has failed.

Yes, let’s all gather ’round and learn from Russia’s example, shall we? Let’s take a look at how the economy of Russia has fared under Putin’s freeballin’ free enterprisin’ lately, with its “principle of personal responsibility of businesspeople”. Probably pretty good, right? Absolutely!

Pfft, “close to economic collapse”. Sure, the liberal America-haters at the Guardian would say that. Let’s see what cooler heads at the ol’ International Herald Tribune have to say.

Plummeting oil prices, a 70 percent descent in stock markets here, a global credit crisis and a slow-motion bank run on this country’s private banks — Russia has had to spend its reserves faster than anybody imagined.

On Aug. 8, the reserves, which include foreign currency, gold and other assets, peaked at just under $600 billion, the third-largest in the world. By this week, they had fallen to $484 billion, as money flew out of government vaults to support the ruble, prop up the banking system and bail out the businesses of the rich Russians known as oligarchs.

The fall this week — $31 billion — was the steepest so far. With no end to the global troubles in sight and a worldwide recession likely, which could further reduce oil prices, the question is: How long can Moscow keep this up before its reserves grow thin?

In the month of September, Russians withdrew 4 percent of deposits from private banks. Some went into state banks, perceived as more reliable, but about half remained in cash. Deposits dropped far more steeply in October: up to 30 percent for some private banks, according to an estimate by Citibank’s Moscow office. About a dozen Russian banks have failed so far.

This week, the government downgraded its economic growth forecast for this year from 7.8 percent to a still robust 7.3 percent. Independent economists called that estimate optimistic. Still, most of the actual effects on ordinary Russian citizens have been few, so far. A truck maker and the largest Russian steel mill reduced their operating hours; a cellphone retailer announced layoffs; and auto and consumer loans are drying up. Skeptical of the financial system, some Moscow cafés have stopped taking credit cards.

A dozen Russian banks have been bought by state banks in bailouts.

Okay, sure, maybe the panic-mongers at the IHT want to paint a bleak picture to sell more copies of their, koff koff, “international” publication. But surely the reliable pro-market folks at the Economist…

You know what? Screw all that biased old media, anyway. We all know they’re a bunch of liars. Yes, as a special whipped wrongness frosting on the Error Food Cake that they’re serving for dinner, the usual suspects are claiming that only the right-wing blogosphere has the courage to cover Putin’s words of wisdom. “Putin’s speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland in January might have gone overlooked if it wasn’t for our friend El Rushbo,” says Flopping Aces; the Flower of Christian Womanhood, as is her wont, goes even further:

Here, try this little exercise: Google putin warns don’t go socialist and see what it brings up. Blogs covering it…but not US news agencies. Hit the “News” button on that search and see what you get. You get bupkis.

Alternately, you could do a Google News search for “Putin speech Davos“, but even with that slightly more coherent and sensible approach, you get a mere 479 news sources, most of them from tiny little non-mainstream outfits like CNN, Reuters, the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and the BBC.

Give a wingnut you love some attention tomorrow, friends. It’s not easy, being this wrong all the time.

Steele: GOP needs ‘hip-hop’ makeover
Thursday, February 19, 2009
The Washington Times

Newly elected Republican National Committee Chairman Michael S. Steele plans an “off the hook” public relations offensive to attract younger voters, especially blacks and Hispanics, by applying the party’s principles to “urban-suburban hip-hop settings.”

The RNC’s first black chairman will “surprise everyone” when updating the party’s image using the Internet and advertisements on radio, on television and in print, he told The Washington Times.

Above: What do you mean? The swastika is an honored Native American symbol.

When Mona Charen complains that New York Times reporter Seth Mydans fails to mention ‘the “c” word even once’ in his recent account of the Phnom Penh trial of Tuol Sleng killer Duch, one immediately imagines she must mean Chomsky. Kissinger, after all, starts with a ‘k’.

Turns out she was talking about ‘communism’.

Duch, or Kaing Guek Eav, was commandant of the Khmer Rouge’s infamous prison and the first of five leaders of the regime to face trial in Cambodia’s capital. Mydans’ ‘spare account’ of the opening day of Duch’s trial lacks context, according to Charen, which apparently can only be supplied by lots of purple prose about the Paris Commune and rifle butts smashing eyeglasses:

But this spare account hardly does justice to the story. One cannot understand the catastrophe that befell Cambodia without knowing that the people who engineered this gruesome slaughter were intellectuals who dreamed of a better world. Nearly all of the Khmer Rouge leaders had studied abroad, in Paris, where they became drunk on tales of the French Revolution and learned their craft from the French Communist party.

Fair enough, in a Reader’s Digest sort of way. But if we’re going to demand context in our revisiting of the Killing Fields, we might also like to see mention of ‘b’ words, ‘l’ words and, if we’re feeling frisky, could even explore the irony of ‘v’-word ‘c’ words bringing the ‘k’-word ‘c’ words’ reign of terror to a close, even as ‘a’ words continued to support those very same ‘k’-word ‘c’ words now on trial for the ‘g’ word.

It’s an ‘f’ word old ‘w’ word, indeed.

Welp, might as well dive into this.

Aww: HuffPoster Terribly Offended by NY Post Chimp Cartoon

We haven’t reviewed Jammie Wearing Fool’s work until now, as far as I can remember, even though he’s something of a treasure.

Whenever you consider a timely issue and try to anticipate the crazy, way-overboard commentary that will emit from the right-bloggers, some of them will display what in other animals is called cunning. They will remain a couple of decisions ahead of you, anticipating your anticipation as it were, and will come at the topic from some sly, oblique angle that leaves unsaid anything that would, you know, make for a satisfyingly apropos Shorter or that could profitably be superimposed onto a photo of themselves in misspelled comedy text.

But Jammie Wearing Fool will generally say what you think he would say. His pseudonym suggests a self-awareness for which no other evidence has been found. We imagine him as a disheveled, feety smelling man of 5’6″ or so and a silhouette like a fireplug, drinking endless cups of bad coffee as talk radio yells and chatters around him in an endless blare, like the radio in Bad Lieutenant. We like him and think of him in a way as a friend, as our hypothetical Everynut. If he notices us, it’s certain his opinion is less salutory — ‘despision,’ if you could do such a thing to the verb, ‘(to) despise.’

Today with the New York Post cartoon that has lately been so much of note, he didn’t disappoint.

To be continued below shortly, i.e. this evening, i.e. not like those things that I intend to do all the time, yet do not do. (Excelsior.)

In between this and that, Jammie Wearing Fool noticed us noticing him and was moved to comment.

Update: Some leftwing douchebag with a bad case of projection decided to link. Figured you folks could use a good laugh.

But Jammie Wearing Fool will generally say what you think he would say. His pseudonym suggests a…

Well, there’s no need to quote the quote and make a whole postmodern hall of mirrors out of things.

Gee, they’re on to me. Only off by nine inches. And, well, everything else. I doubt they’re bright enough to figure out the genesis of the name, either, so let’s just let small minds wander.

Idiots.

There’s too much arguing on the Internet.

In the abovelinked post on the chimp cartoon, the dense-packed, veering quality so enjoyable in Jammie Wearing Fool’s work makes it hard to do the normal close reading. I have instead begun by attempting a summary and providing footnotes:

These liberal wackos are always looking for hidden messages.¹ Clearly unable to understand what satire is,² except of course when they rush to use the satire defense themselves.³ Here’s Obama water-carrier Sam Stein, a nutroots blogger⁴ who magically found himself seated in the front row at the Obama press conference last week, so you know he’s in the back pocket of the administration.⁵

Summary: Liberals are faulty in a way appropriate to the topic. Ha ha can’t take a joke; howl shriek they are persecuting us. An individual is accused of poorly defined offenses, conclusion: conspiracy.

So we’re off to a pretty good start, more or less. Back soon, as above!

So, it’s surprising when you think about M.F.K. Fisher and realize how narrow was the range of the things she wrote about — food principally, Alsace and the food there, love and marriage through the medium of food, character sketches of culinary people. It’s surprising because of the spaciousness of her best work and its Technicolor vividness. It suggests that as a rule, writing doesn’t have to be ‘about’ its topic, because if you’re observant and honest as a writer, maybe also ruthless in a way that Fisher was, then you’ll necessarily pay more attention to worldly distinctions among things than to literary ones. I mean that whatever good writing tries to be about, it ends up being about the world in its damnable bigness and specificity.

Food is an excellent point of entry because of how soon and intimately it touches the vitals, as it were. I think all of these things presumptuously, in any case, because Fisher was a better technical prose writer in passing than I’ve managed to be on purpose. But I’m not sure anymore that there are any excuses in the topic I’ve been interested in, which is the topic of conservatism, specifically ditchweed conservatism, chiefly toward the end of calling it names.

A cartoon likening the author of the stimulus bill, perhaps President Barack Obama, with a rabid chimpanzee graced the pages of the New York Post on Wednesday.

No, because the world is in it like the moon in a puddle, or a mirror or a scanner darkly, or some metaphor. Because you try to be like, “Aah, chimpanzee, WTF, stupid buttclown,” but there’s a sort of negative genius to these things, and always more to them than you can quite get at, let alone finding words that make a kind of sense close to the one that you think is there.

In this case, as in an increasing number of others, part of the uncanniness is in the way the contemporary wingnut imagination seems to move naturally along tracks rutted by the Know-Nothings, and by the now-obscure enthusiasms and hatreds of the paranoid nuts of the 19th Century. Like artifacts from different site strata, the ravings of their wingnuts and ours are distinct and variously wrought, but recognizably from the same culture, the same people in the distributed, volkisch sense of the term.

[Back again, as above]

The “Truth to Power” Gap

• Biting the hand that feeds you doesn’t impress me — making fun of fags and Muslims is what really takes guts!

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Above: It don’t look like rain

Hal Turner must have heard something singing in the wires, because he’s gone searching in the sun for another overload.

This blog is ending

I have decided to cease publishing my views, hopes, observations and dreams on issues social, cultural and political.

There’s much real work to be done – including the use of brutal force and violence

Read the rest of this entry »

Ahem.

Obama’s Stimulus Creates Useless Jobs

by Ben Shapiro

Insert ‘Townhall columnist-slash-wingnut welfare’ joke here.

Theres one reason, and one reason only, that President Barack Obamas stimulus passed so swiftly through Congress: Most Americans are worried about their jobs. And Barack Obama promises to save or create four million jobs. Even Obamas most ardent opponents embrace the make jobs programs embedded in the stimulus. Construction projects that put people to work, that fits the bill, Sarah Palin told Greta Van Susteran of Fox News. But these big, huge, expanded social programs thats not right, thats not fair.

At the very least, mothballing the apostrophe factory was a mistake, youve got to admit.

Neither Republicans nor Democrats get it. The problem isnt just the pork barrel social welfare spending. Its not merely the redistributionist scheme disguised as tax cuts. The public relations backbone of this bill — government spending on our nations crumbling infrastructure — is misguided. While the countrys infrastructure may need revamping, this sort of spending will not stimulate the economy. It will not create the kind of jobs Americans need.

Weve yet to see ‘virginal pecksniff’ in the stimulus package, its true.

When politicians embrace government make jobs programs, they demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of employment in the economy. The goal of a thriving economy isnt full employment — its raising the standard of living.

‘Employment’ plays a ‘role’ in the ‘economy’? And here we thought ‘government make jobs programs’ was is good make thing, but not: make fact true is really make: all worlds is stage and all hobos and bums makely players.

Employment rate means nothing if the jobs it measures do not create wealth for the economy. During the Great Depression (1930-1940), the United States had an average unemployment rate of almost 18 percent; the USSR, by contrast, had full employment. …

Government make jobs this, fuzzkin commie bazztards! Make like think what have stale old analogies unexplained make same like modern circumstances? Shut up! Head hurt! Make sense like not make think too hard!

Thats because not all jobs are created equal. Valuable jobs provide products and services the free market supports; useless jobs provide products and services the free market would not support. Valuable jobs provide products and services that enrich quality of life, making it cheaper to live better; useless jobs provide products and services that have minor impact on quality of life.

Gahhh! Ben make think too make hard but make think too good! No want useless government make jobs but want valuable government make jobs!

Heres the magic of private sector jobs. Imagine Bill owns a fruit stand. He sells his fruit for $2 per pound. Herman sees that Bill is doing well, and decides to open a fruit stand of his own. He figures he can undercut Bill and live on less of a profit margin, so he sells his fruit at $1 per pound. Pretty soon, Herman runs Bill out of business. Its tough for Bill. But meanwhile, customers are spending $1 less for their fruit than they were. Theyre spending that extra money at Bobs clothing store, keeping Bob employed — and Bob can now hire Bill. The bottom line is this: The power of free enterprise creates competition that raises production, lowers prices, and makes lives better for consumers and producers. And thats true even if employment declines in the fruit stand business.

Yaaay! Bob make Bill job good job unless shitty Bill job useless Bill job now hate Bill and job and Bill job! Noooo! Bob make Bill Obama job like make bad job bad for economy! Fruit Bob fuck job make job eat job hate Bob but like Herman and like Bill but hate-like Bob hate Bob Herman Bill-Bob but like Bill Bob hate Herman hate job like fruit eat fruit good for economy hate like eat fruit Bill job hate Bill! Head hurt but not hurt like good bad Bill job!

Now lets look at government jobs. Imagine Cool Hand Luke works for the government as a menial laborer. He builds roads in New York. People dont choose to pay Cool Hand Luke — the government forces them to pay his salary. Now, certain people in New York may benefit from the new road. But they would rather have spent their cash on a new car, or a new computer, or a new business.

Eat egg lots egg fuck road yay car fuck Luke yay Bob eat fruit drive car kill road buy computer crash car no road sometime failure to communicate is real cool hand! Head hurt sleep now get job buy fruit crash car make road kill road eat Luke eat egg play hand like Ben good Ben get job Bill job thanks Ben like Ben make job now smart real smart like Ben smart so smart yay job!

Shorter GayPatriotWest, aka Dan Blatt, aka America’s Most Ridiculous Gay Man™, aka The Theoretically Gay Man™, aka The Only Gay Man in Los Angeles Who Hasn’t Had Sex Since He Blew His Best Friend In The Basement In Sixth Grade™, aka The Right’s Favorite Fag™, aka The Gay Neville Chamberlain™:

“Why the big fuss over banning gay adoption? I can
still adopt a watermelon, you know.”

Defining Opposition to Same-Sex Marriage as Hate Speech

• There is nothing hateful about anyone telling me that I have less rights than they do.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Even though I only occasionally leave a comment over at the Theoretically Gay Patriot’s place, it seems I’ve been banned, as I learned when trying to post a nice little thank you note this morning for Dan. Here’s what Dan didn’t want his readers to see:

Well, Dan, this has been fun. And thanks for all the pie. Where else can you go to watch a bunch of straight commenters defend gay marriage while a bunch of gay commenters (regulars at your site) argue against it. My favorite moment was when one of your more whack-a-doodle-dandy regular commenters compared gay marriage to beastialist marriage. That was great! (Have him get back to us when people are storming city hall to marry their sheep, okay?)

Now I understand your position, at least as expressed in these comments, that you aren’t against gay marriage, per se, but just against courts allowing gay marriage. Many people made that argument during another civil rights struggle that you might have read about. I don’t like, they’d say, putting coloreds in second class schools, per se, but it’s a states rights issue to be decided by the state legislature, not by some activist judges in Washington. We pretty much know what the judgment of history and the courts was on that argument, don’t we? (I wouldn’t be much surprised, however, if some of your more extremist commenters still hold that position).

But, it is most peculiar that after offering that argument to confirm your own second-class citizenship you would do so in a post about a kid who couldn’t read anti-gay Biblical passages in class and then sued over it. Shouldn’t he be petitioning the California legislature?

Anyway, thanks for the entertainment. Keep up the good work even if its real value isn’t quite what you think it is.

Now, I thought that was a lovely little note, and I can’t imagine why Dan would be afraid to let it appear in the comments section. Lord knows, all kinds of other insanity can be found there. Dan really should be grateful for Sadly, No!’s attention because any time we have fun with him he gets hundreds of comments as opposed to his usual eleven or so.

Shorter Wes Vernon:

You want a truth commission, Senator Leahy? I’ll show you a truth commission

• A proposed investigation of alleged Bush administration misdeeds is an outrage, is unfounded, is ludicrous, is reminiscent of Soviet Moscow, is driven by ill motives, and is concocted by persons of bad character who should themselves be investigated for crimes. Take FDR at the 1945 Yalta Conference…*

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

* Golden Wingnut Hits of the ’50s Vol. 1 is now available on CD with added bonus tracks.

ABOVE: Mike DeVine, Bird Poop (left)

---

Just when you thought there were no more holidays for secular humanist homo-loving liberals to declare war on, Red State Strike Force member Mike “Gamecock” [No seriously, “Gamecock,” I’m not shitting you. – ed.] DeVine has uncovered the liberal war on Washington’s Birthday. I think that the only holiday now left for us liberals to debase is National Corn Dog Day.

And yes, today’s federal holiday is still, and always has been, declared in federal law, as Washington’s Birthday, not any so-called amorphous “President’s Day” requiring celebrations of 43 Presidential oath takers. This is the law.

Okay, then, Mr. Gamecock . . . but don’t let me catch you calling Independence Day the “Fourth of July” or, worse, the “Fourth,” okay?

So why do most calendars and so many people refer to this day as “Presidents Day“? …

In 1968, Congress passed the Monday Holidays Act, which moved the official observance of Washington’s birthday from Feb. 22 to the third Monday in February. Some reformers had wanted to change the name of the holiday as well, to Presidents’ Day, in honor of both Lincoln and Washington, but that proposal was rejected by Congress, and the holiday remained officially Washington’s Birthday.

Reformers? Code word for the liberals that have been trashing American history as a tragedy and the Founding Fathers as mere slave owners for the past 40 years. Their propaganda in academia and media is the reason for the so-called “strong hold” of the false name of the holiday on the public consciousness.

Do you get the feeling that DeVine has been running around all day yelling “Happy Washington’s Birthday!” to clerks in WalMart, Best Buy, Sears and any other store that advertised “President’s Day Weekend” sales? He’s probably even wearing a button that says “It’s Okay to Say Happy Washington’s Birthday To Me!”

The real impetus, of course, for the use of President’s Day as the name for the holiday came from advertisers in the 1980s, not liberals with George Washington Derangement Syndrome (“GWDS”). Well, I probably should also admit that one of my liberal professors in college, the same one who gave a take-home orgy in place of the final exam, used to spend almost half of each of his lectures railing about the insidious tradition of having a holiday named after George Washington.

The true reformer was the man whose birth we celebrate today. The man who admitted chopping down a cherry tree and went on to chop down the barriers to Liberty so that men could be truly free.

Oh Sweet Precious Parson Weems in a Winnebago, this dolt actually believes the cherry tree story. I’m surprised he didn’t mention the silver dollar thrown across the Potomac and the ascension of George Washington into heaven. Has this guy read a book since the sixth grade? No, really, has he?

Gavin adds: Guess he doesn’t like Lincoln much, or something. Why in the world might a Republican have a problem with Lincoln, the first president of their party? Blarg-it-is-a-mystery.