Sadly, No!

ABOVE: Breitblart!

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ABOVE: Dreher and “friend”

Michael Phelps is a pothead

• Why, O Why Lord can’t I find it in my heart to do more than wag a petulant finger at smokers of the Devil’s Weed, who corrupt our youth and ‘have on their bong-cradling hands the blood of poor Mexicans’ … what sort of a Christian am I anyway?

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

ABOVE: John Romano models the latest
solution for adult bed-wetting

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Over at Big Andy Breitblart’s Big Hollywood Big Website, a “musician” you’ve never heard of is complaining about a movie you’ve never heard of as further proof of the anti-American perfidy of Hollywood. The “musician” you’ve never heard of is John Romano, who, by his own confession, was a normal guy until 9/11 turned him into a bed-wetter. The movie you’ve never heard of is “Two Days in Paris.”

Hollywood’s utter distortion and sheer hatred for all things conservative or Republican continues to push me rightward. Especially over the last four years.

For instance, last month my wife and I rented the movie “Two Days in Paris.” … We were very excited about “Two Days in Paris.” Popcorn in hand, we settled in for the film. Not three minutes into the movie, Hollywood offers up one of the most anti-American and anti-Republican moments in film history.

If it’s one of the most anti-American and anti-Republican moments ever in the entire history of film, worse than, say, anything ever made by Michael Moore, it must be really bad:

The two lead characters are at Gare Du Nord (The North Station) in Paris attempting to get a cab. A group of overweight Americans, Hollywood’s clue that they aren’t from New York or LA, asks the lead, played by Adam Goldberg, for directions to the Louvre. Of course one of the untidy Americans is wearing a Bush Cheney ‘04 t-shirt! …

Adam Goldberg’s character nonchalantly sends them in the wrong direction. He intentionally sends his own countrymen the wrong way. His reasoning? “They voted for Bush. …” Me, I gave up on the movie right there.

You’d think that the most anti-American and anti-Republican scene in cinema EVER would be a bit more than a scene with a few fat Americans in Paris wearing Bush-Cheney t-shirts and asking for directions. I was expecting that Romano was about to complain about a scene showing Bush feasting on the remains of dead babies or Cheney flashing four-year olds in front of the Naval Observatory before heading into his basement to waterboard shelter puppies. These guys have such a sensitively-adjusted outrage meter that the needle apparently flies off the scale and breaks if anyone so much says “I’m not a Republican” in front of a rolling camera.

Like all of the other blinding intellects over at Breitblart’s Big House of Has-Beens, Romano has pretty much fucked up his central premise that Hollywood is controlled by a bunch of far-left, America-hating, matzo-munching scoundrels by complaining about a movie that was made in France. There may be some arguments among Angelenos about the precise boundaries of Hollywood but they sure as shit don’t extend to the Boulevard St. Germain. The writer, director, and producer of the film, Julie Delpy, is French, French and French. The movie was released in Germany, Canada and France before a limited release to only 148 venues in the United States. Less than one-quarter of its world-wide receipts were earned in the United States. Romano might as well blame Hollywood for mimes, stinky soft cheese, and Renaults.

*Cf. here and here.

Solipsism might be, though:

Republican is the New Punk

by Doug TenNapel

Johnny Cash was punk rock.

There’s really no point in reproducing any more of TenNapel’s incoherent, misinformed and singularly unhelpful (but thankfully pretty short) screed. The above pretty much says it all — Johnny Cash was not ‘punk rock’, at least not in the context that TenNapel presents, which is no context at all.

Realizing that, we feel it does not bode well for the larger argument that ‘Republican’, counter-intuitively and phrased in technically correct but awkward fashion, is also ‘punk rock’. There is, of course, a context in which Cash can be called ‘punk rock’ in terms of essence (less so for ‘Republican’, but we were intrigued enough to click on the above to hear the attempt, alas) as opposed to ‘punk rock’ in terms of, you know, actually being punk rock. In much the same way that one might weigh the ‘punk rockness’ of a raw egg (possibly), a Miata (not at all) or clumsy, mostly clothed sex in an alley (absolutely), one could decide whether or not this singer of demonstrably-not-punk-rock songs is ‘punk rock’. E.g.: There are certain qualities that Johnny Cash possesses (dark, raw, dead) that are essential ‘punk rock’ qualities, weighed against others (non-urban, lack of physicality, is Johnny-fucking-Cash) that are not.

But that’s the sort of amusing late-night categorization that requires some sort of rules-based framework, a better-than-passing grasp of what ‘punk rock’ refers to, and probably some meth, none of which the author provides, to his discredit.

No, TenNapel has no guidelines for what he is attempting to say here. He makes no effort whatsoever to define ‘punk rock’, which wouldn’t be a terrible omission if he was able to demonstrate even indirectly that he grasps fuck-all about the concept. He might as well have said, ‘Polenta is the new risotto’, then spent 500 words talking about oatmeal, for all the light he sheds on this supposed punk-rockness of Republicans.

Still, as disjointed as this cautionary-tale-level feat of wilful unrigorousness is, it does have some merit as a delivery system of dull mirth — the kind of reaffirmation that ‘wingnuts are stupid’ which winds up on our doorsteps day after day yet periodically occasions a weary smile. Thus, TenNapel, attempting to label anything and everything that’s vaguely non-conformist (or else isn’t at all) as ‘punk rock’, skips ungainfully through a series of counter-cultural bogeymen that have made various ‘it’ scenes in the past 50 years. ‘Punk rock’, in TenNapel’s world is sometimes decked out in black like Cash, or wearing hippy beads, or plugging iPods … or even, we kid you not, knocking back cocktails with Joey Bishop at the Dunes. How else to explain this line:

This [Obama] is the mainstreaming of the bad boy, complete with rat-pack suit and cigarette in hand. A snappy skin spread over the boring, failed, liberal Democrats of the sixties.

As to whatever kernel of a nugget of a morsel of a point that TenNapel is trying to make, one of his commenters sums it up briefly and better than I’ve done:

I mean, your argument goes

punk = anti-establishment
Obama = establishment
GOP = anti-Obama

Therefore GOP = punk

That’s incredibly silly. Did that make Walter Mondale punk?

Hint: Walter Mondale was not punk

While we struggle to make sense of the Pajamas Media collapse,* as well as other such tragic collapses, it seems the world is rolling ever onward, minding its own business except for the strange guy sitting next to me on the Red Line today, who for some reason had crapped in his pants, and was trying to be all like, “Ew, it smells like a sewer in here — who’s stinking the place up?” in order to mislead other riders into thinking that it was another person, and not himself, who had for some reason crapped in their pants on the Red Line. Anyway, that’s what the world is mostly not doing, as it rolls along minding its own business.

Except for that guy and Chris Muir.

Above: Hair drawn by Mike Grell

It seems as though Muir is transcending narrative form and moving toward an aesthetic of pure abstraction, deploying a vocabulary of shape and word that confronts the viewer with her own expectations of the linearity of the comic form, but it’s also possible that he’s just way suckier than we thought.

* We are honestly trying to make some decent sense of this limitlessly enjoyable event.

Please No More Super Bowls for NBC

• Teh liberals should not be allowed to talk about sports on the teevee set, particularly in a pre-game show before a sacred national event like the Superbowl where you have a captive audience of millions of conservatives who can’t figure out how to turn off the teevee set or change the channel.

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

The Anchoress has been mocked on this site in the past, but perhaps it really is time to engage face-to-face rather than criticize from afar:

Pajamas Media Bloggers go bye-bye

… the Lord’s overgenerous endowment in my chestal area makes any notion of camera work unthinkable, particularly in HD where the girls might terrify some.

Mmm, I was just thinking I could use a good scare.

Gavin adds:

Above: Boo!

Have you been following the war of all against all?

I’m pausing to take in the astonishing new developments in this fast-moving story — a story that we are helpless to resist, and indeed must cover with greatly alacritous joy.

Ohboyohboyohboy…

D. Aristophanes adds:

Poking around the Ol’ Perfesser’s digs for some comment on what I shall dub ‘A Very Public Karmic Reckoning’, we find the esteemed Doktorer of Legamalism up to his usual trick of arranging others’ opinions in a Kabuki dance of plausible deniability.

But we do find this bit of oddness …

MORE STILL: Some business points from Tim Oren, including this one: “Anyone who’s paid attention knows that the effective CPM for both click-through and exposure ads on blogs s***s. I mean really s***s – like up to an order of magnitude less than run-of-site ads on big, topically diffuse web properties.”

… which has me perplexed as to what horrible string of mind-blasting letters this Tim Oren person is self-redacting, presumably on his family-oriented blog, when he writes ‘s***s.’ Because “… the effective CPM for both click-through and exposure ads on blogs shits. I mean really shits …” does not make sense to me.

Shitfuckcocks? It’s verby-sounding, no? Anyway, this whole PJM implosion must really shitfuckcock for the participants, I mean really shitfuckcock.

Why it’s the Littlest Emperor, as we live and breathe! What say you, Misha, to Barack Obama’s fledgling presidency?

You Got What You Wished For, Usurper, Now Enjoy It

Posted by: Emperor Misha I in Public Notice, The Obamessiah
7:28 pm

Not much to add to the posts below, really.

Until Barack Hussein Obama has proven his eligibility for the office, he is not my president.

Until Barack Hussein Obama’s paid henchmen in ACORN have been investigated thoroughly and, if found guilty, punished to the full extent of the law, he is not my president.

He can play president all he wants, ignorant fools often get a huge kick out of indulging in their delusions, and his mindless followers can bleat and bray about their Anointed One at the top of their lungs, but he still isn’t my president.

I owe him no loyalty, I owe him no allegiance and I owe him no respect. All of that he has to earn, because he puts his pants on the same way as I every morning, one leg at a time.

The only thing owed by me is covered by my Oath, and that was not given to any son or daughter of man, it was given to the Constitution, the sacred foundation of our nation. The pathetic trappings of office that he surrounds himself with, the waves of adulation washing over him from his braindead sycophants in the Obamedia, all of that is but dust in the wind and I regard it with the same indifference that I show toward a worm writhing under my foot as I step on it. Here today, gone tomorrow. He, too, shall pass.

Oh, huzzah, LE! What marvelous adventures are in store for us over the next four years at the expense of the upstart blackamoor, with our fingers in our ears, shouting at the dust in the wind! Pray tell us more!

But my Oath is forever, and so is the document, the nation to which I swore it. His every word, his every deed, every “law” that his Congress passes shall be weighed, by me, against the words put down by our Founders centuries ago and, if found wanting in any way, I shall ignore them as I would ignore a fly hitting the windshield of my car.

And if he and his tyrannical henchmen try to force me to obey his illegal orders, laws and regulations, I shall meet them with force as well. If I die, I shall die a free man. If I live, I shall have done my country a great favor.

Either way, I shall have done my duty.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

So help me G-d.

Hip-hip-hooray! What fun we shall have with the Littlest Emperor and his gang of rascals … we shall shout and stomp and swear all we like and eat all the lollies and marzipan we want … and the grown-ups will be ever so cross but we shan’t care because we shall build a post-apocalyptic sex cult compound where no grown-ups can ever come to live … and there will be pirates versus soldiers and patriots versus ATF agents and no bedtimes at all forever and ever and parcel bombs if we fancy ’em, for there’ll be no one to tell us we can’t, and Dave Neiwert will never want for material or a job for even so long as the recession may last!

Oh for Christ’s sake:

Daschle Owed Back Taxes That Exceeded $128,000

Thomas A. Daschle, nominated to be secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, did not pay more than $128,000 in taxes over three years, a revelation that poses a potential obstacle to his Senate confirmation.

The back taxes plus $12,000 in interest and penalties involved unreported consulting fees, questionable charitable contributions, and a car and driver provided by a private equity firm run by entrepreneur and longtime Democratic Party donor Leo J. Hindery Jr., according to a “confidential draft” report prepared by Senate Finance Committee staff.

A spokeswoman for Daschle confirmed last night that he recently paid back taxes in excess of $100,000, but she did not disclose the extent of his tax errors and the timeline of when he and others addressed them.

Daschle paid the back taxes just six days before his first Senate confirmation hearing, the report said.

I am sick to death of rich assholes who cheat the system and don’t pay their goddamn taxes. Screw Daschle. I hope his nomination goes down in flames.