Sadly, No!

ABOVE: Bush’s finest hour of presidentin’.

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Over in the Washington Post, Norm Augustine trots out future wingnut talking points about how super-awesome Bush’s presidency has been:

If Nothing Else, We’ve Been Safe

What have been George Bush’s leadership strengths? That is a question that will perhaps best be answered with the perspective of history, considering that Lincoln, was at one time despised by half the country and questioned by many in the other half. There is also the dilemma of whether leaders must be fully successful to be judged good leaders (case in point: Robert E. Lee).

President Bush’s overall greatest achievement was that America has not suffered another 9/11 tragedy.

The fact we haven’t (yet!) all died gruesome, hideous deaths under Bush’s watch is considered an “achievement?” Are you serious? This is considered a standard for success?

Now, I don’t know if there’s some kind of document out there that lists bare minimum requirements for being president. But if there is one, I’ll bet that making sure the majority of your citizens don’t get senselessly slaughtered is at the very top of it. The fact that we’re even discussing whether or not we should be thankful that Bush hasn’t gotten us all killed demonstrates that he is the worstest, most crappiest president in the history of the United States. The only way a future president could get significantly worse, according to this “standard,” would be to detonate nuclear weapons in every major American city. And heck, who knows if we’re out of the woods yet in that regard — Bush still has a week and a half to go!

Things aren’t going so well for America’s Worst Lawyer who is on a downward spiral that led from Harvard Law School to about 8.2 seconds as an associate at a large L.A. law firm to solo practice as Benjamin Shapiro Legal Consulting with no clients and no website. That perhaps explains why Ben is trying out for the position of America’s Worst TV Critic™ over at Big Andy’s Big Hollywood Big Website. Since all good wingnuts must filter everything through the prism of wingnuttery, Ben is sharing his thoughts as to who is the most conservative character on Lost, an exercise somewhat comparable to attempting to determine what is the most conservative fixture in his bathroom.

Ben gives the nod to Sawyer who is not only the best conservative character on Lost but also the best conservative TV character EVAH:

Josh Holloway’s Southern con man, James “Sawyer” Ford, is the best conservative character on television, bar none. Sure he sleeps around – what con man worth his salt doesn’t? But he votes Republican – in Episode 16 of Season 1, Outlaws, Sawyer admits that he has never voted Democrat. He’s a proud gun-toter, carrying rifles and pistols with equal authority. He’s a true capitalist, buying and selling like Warren Buffet at a flea market. And he hates communism. When one female character suggests that everyone share a cache of food, Sawyer sneers, “Oh sure, Moonbeam, and then maybe we can all do Trust Falls and sing Kumbaiya.” Sawyer is the first to engage in racial profiling – he labels fellow crash survivor Sayid a terror suspect in Episode 1, Season 1 … And boy is he tough. In Season 2, he rips a bullet out of his shoulder with his bare hands. Ask Al Franken to do that.

In other words, the best conservative on television is a racist, selfish, lying con man and thief who can’t keep his dick in his pants. Wingnuts do occasionally speak the truth, even if only by accident.

Brad adds: As an official Lost addict, I couldn’t help but chime in. Here’s what he says about Ben Linus, who is brilliantly played by Michael Emerson:

3. Benjamin “Henry Gale” Linus: AKA Benry. Benry is evil to be sure – but he’s pure, solid, wonderful evil in the mold of Dick Cheney. He’s a conniving, backstabbing, brilliant leader, a guy who will do anything to win – and anything to save the Island. He’ll even speak Turkish, then kick Tunisian ass.

So what makes Ben a conservative? Apparently, he’s evil and he kills Arabs.

I can’t figure out whether there really is a Ben Shapiro writing these things or if it’s actually Gary Ruppert taking the piss at Breitbart’s expense.

HTML adds: That’s some flaming wingnuttery right there, but Virgin Ben is merely a novice Zhdanovian hack compared to a master like Jonathan V. Last.

Although I can’t speak for anyone else on this blog, I’m officially endorsing Jon Swift for Best Humor Blog this year. Plz go vote for him.

ABOVE: This could be the Ameristar if we stop acting like dumbasses.

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Good piece from John Judis about other stuff Obama should consider in his stimulus package:

One area that is ripe for such investment–and that is not, from what I have seen, a declared priority of the Obama administration–is high-speed rail. Amtrak’s Acela trains–the closest thing we have to one–average less than 100 mph between Washington D.C. and Boston, whereas trains in Western Europe and Japan go more than twice as fast. Many of them also run on electricity. They would be the most energy-efficient and quickest means of getting between places like Boston and New York, or Los Angeles and San Francisco. But they would require a massive investment. For instance, installing high-speed rail in the Northeast corridor could cost about $32 billion, while California’s high-speed rail system would require up to $40 billion. A system that would address the other areas of the country could easily raise the cost to the hundreds of billions. The House transportation and infrastructure committee has currently proposed $5 billion in stimulus funds for intercity rail–not even a down payment on what it would cost to convert the U.S. to high-speed rail.

When I travel between Boston and New York, I actually prefer taking Amtrak despite the fact that it sucks. The reason, you ask? Because even sucky train systems are more enjoyable to ride than planes or buses. Consider:

• On a train, you can get up and walk around freely to the cafe car whenever you please. On planes, you have to sit and wait for flight attendants to bring you a crappy little bag of peanuts, which they’re now charging like $15 for you to eat.

• You can have your electronic devices on at anytime on the train. What’s more, you can even get cellular coverage.

• Legroom! Holy crap! Trains give you so much freaking legroom! And the seats are wide! You don’t have to be squished in with the smelly and insane people who regularly take the Greyhound.

• Unlike planes, you don’t have to go through a bunch of crazy security procedures just to board. No taking off your shoes, no emptying out your laptop, no placing your shampoo in a plastic baggie.

• Although terrorists like to blow up trains every now and then, there’s no chance they’ll hijack them and slam them into buildings.

If you could get trains that can travel quickly from city to city in the Northeast and Western US, I guarantee people will ride them. And as flying has gotten progressively suckier as a travel method, I think that more Americans are clamoring for alternatives. Sure, we’d still have to take planes to fly across the country, but in small pockets throughout the US, trains could become a really important part of US transportation infrastructure.

Thoughts?

UPDATE: Just curious — any of you hang out in Vegas on a regular basis? If you’ve ever seen their monorail system, you can see why trains get such a bad reputation in some parts of the You Ess Ay.

ABOVE: Debbie models new line of
necklaces for lushes

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Now that Debbie Schlußelscheißen has made an appearance at Big Andy Breitbart’s Big Hollywood Big Website, I think we can officially declare Big Hollywood as the most wingnutterific website ever.* Debbie’s contribution to Big Hollywood’s war on Hollywood liberals is a post that proves that Marvel Comics has been infiltrated by Mooslims. Her evidence? Barack Obama makes an appearance in a Spiderman comic book. No, seriously:

Once, comic books were against Nazis and Hitler and were very up front in supporting America’s fight against them. But those days are over.

Now the comic books are against America and for the Nazis.

Both DC and Marvel Comics long ago embraced left-wing politics, and when it came to the war on terror, they were for the most part silent. Fighting “global warming” … was far more important …

You may have missed the lecture in your American History class where it was revealed that Hitler’s desire for world domination was motivated chiefly by his desire to end global warming.

Now, though, comic books are back to supporting the President, since he embodies their far-left ideology.

Making money has nothing to do with it. All comic book publishers are secretly funded by George Soros.

Yup, Spider-Man is in the tank for Obama. … In a special issue, “Amazing Spider-Man #583,” out on Jan. 14th, the President-Elect Obama and Spidey are shown doing the fist-bump (wanna know what I think about the fist-bump?)

I can’t possibly imagine what Schlußelscheißen thinks of the fist-bump but, if I were to hazard a wild guess, I bet she thinks the fist bump is Arabic Sign Language for “Hey, Omar, let’s decapitate a bunch of Christians and Jews and then go establish a caliphate in America!”

I’m just wondering: When Obama goes to share some baklava with his new friend Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or his buds in HAMAS, will we see Spidey cheering that on, too?

Actually Spidey will help Obama and Ahmadinejad push the button launching a nuclear missile strike on the United States, and he will then immediately fly off to intercept and destroy the anti-ballistic missiles shot by the Red State Strike Force to save America from destruction.

Boy, I long for the days of Superman, Sgt. Fury, and other comic book superheroes fighting the Nazis . . . not sitting down to talk and eat wienerschnitzel with them or praising Presidents who want to do just that.

Speaking of eating wienerschnitzel, do you think little Ms. Schlußelscheißen has been … no, I better not say that or I’ll just get in trouble all over again.

*Big Andy’s Big Hollywood pretty much concedes its over-the-top wingnuttery and its resultant aptness for derision by attempting to prevent readers from selecting and copying the text of its blog posts. Apparently, the crack coders behind the site figured that we here at Sadly, No! couldn’t figure out how to copy the text directly from the source code of the page and would therefore would refrain from mocking the site. Well, don’t fuck with us, fellas, this ain’t our first time at the HTML rodeo.

UPDATE: Actually, readers using IE can select text, but those like me using Firefox 3.1 Beta can’t select text at the site. Perhaps the coders figured that lefties are more likely to use communist-inspired open source browsers like Firefox while patriotic conservatives do their bit for the country by using a corporate-developed browser like IE.

Thanks to bjkeefe for sending us this awesome graphic:

I think the Red State Strike Force will be providing us with a lotta lolz throughout 2009 and beyond*.

*Until, that is, they get tired of being laughed at and come up with some other new “revolutionary” blogging idea that will make them the most powerful people on the Internets evar.

2008 Weblog Banner (Fixed)

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Among the things that catch the attention here in rural Oregon is the fact that metal and plastic items that are left in any way idle, like unrunning cars and trucks, camper tops, mailboxes, kiddie pools, or lawn gnomes or flamingos, and also for that matter barns and houses, will grow a beardy green extravagance of moss, or possibly of some kind of lichen or air kelp, on them. Like, literally from some number of hours or days to the next.

I’ve identified one of the green dripping-from-objects things here as Lobaria oregana (cf), but that’s no guarantee as to the safety of the others; and indeed a reasonable impulse here, and the one I’ve most fallen to, is to caffeinate, speed up, and keep moving in some direction or another so that the creeping verdure won’t catch you.

Anyway, this is where I’ve been these past couple weeks, and the pre-contemporary Internet here on the literal Oregon Trail is the reason I haven’t been checking mail or reading anything online, or even successfully loading any pages with extravagancies such as JPEGs on them, since literally last year as it were.

Um, hi! Apparently, the Weblog Awards are on again. And in case anyone asks, we won a few of those already, and probably ought not to win any more of them, since there are tremendous writers, analysts, and artists in the liberal blog firmament who deserve such awards and more, but haven’t yet been given any.

The past couple times, we campaigned for second-place winners, and officially handed our first-place award to someone else. This time, we’d like to sneakily cook the voting to help someone else win first place, honestly and according to the rules.

But how? I’m in the woods, literally (outside the window are woods), and am picking up the Internet for another couple of days as though through a vibrating filling in a molar. But how can we, as a group, best exert our considerable dork-fu in order to make good people comforted and fulfilled, and bad people go ‘Aaah!’ and dive self-hatefully through a wood chipper?

“The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg on the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.”

• In Gaza as in Iraq and Afghanistan, if a great many civilians are dead, well, then it is because they wanted to die to make Israel and America look bad. Sadly, such carnage is really out of the stronger parties’ hands.

Also:

• Glenn Greenwald’s just some guy on the internet. I’ve fought for the IDF. Who ya gonna believe?

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

Can’t you just feel the regret and sorrow of glennocidal tendencies thwarted — thwarted, I tell you! Alas…

Shorter Verbatim Debbie Schlussel:

I’ve concluded that the only way this war can be “won” is if most of the Palestinians in Gaza–and the so-called “West Bank,” too, where HAMAS has a lot of support–are decimated, which the world will never allow Israel to do, and which Livni and Barak (and Olmert) don’t have the guts to do.

Shorter Verbatim Patrick Bateman Tony Hadley of Spandau Ballet Stephen Green:

The only process towards peace is the kind of war one side can’t commit, and the other side won’t.

Oh, Washington Monthly, don’t ever change! Not that you ever could even if you wanted; but I’m just saying that your consistent brand of wishy-washy opinion is like a breath of fresh swamp gas so totally unlike the other vapors wafting from the sewer ditch of Villager consensus.

It’s comforting to know that though the names and faces may change, the product will always be the same. Like, when I saw this post, dated 1-2-09:

I don’t think the piece is completely without merit. The Post doesn’t mention it, but the noteworthy aspect of concerns on the right about the liberals on Obama’s team is that it offers a counter-weight to the opposite criticisms the transition office has heard fairly often — that Obama has snubbed the left and failed to offer progressives any positions of significance.

I was reminded of this classic from 9-17-04 (and its wonderful follow-up posted four days later):

Jon Chait now has a weekly column in the LA Times. He’s a great choice to be a columnist […]

Michael Kinsley’s tenure as editorial page editor is now about three months old, and the weekly columnist lineup looks like this so far:

*Two centrist liberals: Chait and Kinsley himself.

*One embarrassing lefty: Robert Scheer.

*One appealing neocon: Max Boot. (As near as I can tell, Boot is the neocons’ best ambassador to the real world. He’s a good writer and smart enough to stay away from the more Strangelovian aspects of neocon looniness.)

*One local color columnist: Patt Morrison.

Overall, this isn’t bad. I’d like to see Kinsley get rid of Scheer and replace him with someone who’s more persuasive, but who knows? Maybe that’s in the works. And how about a weekly blog column? Maybe pick a couple of good blog posts from the previous week and run them side by side or something.

Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. But then, how could it not be thus? From Cockburn and Silverstein’s Washington Babylon:

[Charlie Peters:]Former Peace Corps bureaucrat who started The Washington Monthly in 1969 on money from Jay Rockefeller, plus a department store heir and a toy magnate. Like The New Republic, the Monthly has given enormous pleasure to Babylon’s elites with its safe essays in neo-liberal iconoclasm. Jack Shafer, then of Washington’s City Paper, once persuasively argued that the worship of Peters by his disciples amounts to a Peters Cult, with its own initiatory rites and sacred mysteries. This stable of acolytes — James Fallows, Michael Kinsley, Nicholas Lemann, Mickey Kaus, Gregg Easterbrook, Jonathan Alter, Timothy Noah, Jason DeParle — all carry the Peters mark, a bright boy-ism represented in its most undiluted and irksome form in Kinsley. Main characteristics of breed are extreme political orthodoxy, sedulous careerism, smugness.

Not that one has to convert to get a WM gig. Let’s say you’re a bright boy who feels besieged by all the skankified hippies in your UC Santa Cruz* milieu. Well, if you also write stuff like, say, this:

Here’s what I would propose, the Realignment Party. This party would seek to break down the division between Left and Right, much like the book The Radical Center does. Both sides have good ideas, worthwhile ends, and good methods on their issues but, because they are forced to carve out a distinct position on everything, when they get to an issue late they often end up with very bad ideas, methods, and ends because the smart ground is already occupied. That’s why the Left wants to liberate Palestine but can’t advocate for the liberation of Iraq, the Right’s already got it.

…then you’ve got a shiny new internship waitin’ for ya, from which you can graduate to bigger venues of Sensible Liberalism. Or as John Emerson put it, though slightly more sourly about another WM alum:

I wrote in response to this post by Kevin Drum, in which he said “I continue to believe that on a list of problems with the American media, ideological bias barely cracks the top ten.” (Remember, guys — in theory, Kevin is on our side.)

This kind of post is why I think that Kevin is worthless, and a good part of the reason why I gave up on blogging, the Democratic Party, and the US.

Kevin thinks what he thinks, and he’s always thought what he thought, and please don’t disturb him with reality.

The Washington Monthly has had this attitude written into its charter for decades. No one connected with that journal is allowed to think differently. (Though Kevin already thought that way and isn’t being coerced.)

Kevin, you ******, ********* ***** ** ****, it’s NOT SYMMETRICAL. And everyone knows it’s not, except you and other ****** of your ilk. There’s a hefty conservative media in this country, and there’s a big moderate / neutral media in this country, but there’s only a puny liberal media. A little radio, almost no TV or cable, and no national newspaper.

Kevin doesn’t see this because he thinks that he is the real left and that everyone to his left is just plain crazy.

It’s hopeless, guys. Bush won, and Kevin hasn’t even noticed yet.

P.S.
I just realized that part of the problem is that Kevin is unable to understand the idea that there could be “neutral bias” or “centrist bias”. To him bias is only right / left bias, and he’s very happy that the left is as feeble as it is, because that means half the bias is gone.

(Cf. this post by the late, great Steve Gilliard.)

Remember, it’s not just a magazine, it’s a mentality. Our elected Democratic officials are very “Washington Monthly,” which is why

[I]f the Senate had magically gone 100-0 Democratic in the last election, Reid would build a totem Republican out of papier-mache and feces just so he could ritually cave to it.

* Corrected as per Banana Slug expert Pinko Punko‘s suggestion.