‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
Jonathan Adler and Andy McCarthy have been flinging poo and calling each other names over at America’s Shittiest Website™. It all got started with Andy’s post endorsing Jack “Clinton Shot Ron Brown” Cashill’s claim that Bill Ayers ghost-wrote Obama’s first book.
Adler’s first slap (color commentary by me in, er, color):
C’mon Andy. Giving credence to Jack Cashill’s maybe-Ayers-wrote-Obama’s-book theory is a bit much. (A “bit much”? C’mon, Jon, you’ve got more fight in you than that!) This is even more outlandish (There, that’s better.) than his stuff alleging a possible connection between Enron and Ron Brown’s death. Even if Obama’s book was ghost-written — and I’ve seen no evidence that it was — fingering Ayers (two point deduction for disturbing metaphor and imagery) as the potential author is nutter-territory stuff. (Did I just hear Adler call McCarthy a “wingnut”?)
Jon, it’s very like the other side (Andy doesn’t take to being called a wingnut lightly and so is comparing Jon to the looney LIEberals) to engage in the attack ad hominem (“Attack ad hominem”? Andy is slipping into Swankian syntax. A bad sign.) and leave substance for another day (that never comes) so I’m surprised to find you doing it. Cashill has written a very thorough analysis. (Not.) If you’re content to have that be your reaction to it, so be it. … I expected to get gruff (“Gruff”? As in the three billy goats?), but I did hope it wouldn’t come from my own (diminishing) ranks. But such is the way it is these days. (Ya think that Andy is writing his note of resignation to K-Lo? Nah, probably not)
Andy — I agree that there are many troubling things about Obama, and there are many things that the press should — but has not — covered or investigated in any detail, including his relationship with Bill Ayers. (And don’t forget the gay blow job BO got by a crack addict in the backseat of a limousine.) I also don’t think it is at beyond the pale to speculate about the provenance of his books (but, Jon says, you have to be way smarter than Andy to do it), or even to suggest that to suggest he may have had help (like an editor, which would be totally cheating). But it’s still a giant leap to Cashill’s suggestion that Ayers was the actual writer of Obama’s book, his “analysis” (scare quotes . . . smooth move, Jon) notwithstanding. There are more serious issues at stake (like whether a remake of Red Dawn is a good idea), and we (well, I) can do better than that.
Gee, Jon, I guess it’s too bad that other than the Cashill post, I’ve done no other work on Obama’s background. (whiny sarcasm is, pretty much, an admission of defeat). I’ll try to “do better than that.” (Nice, Andy, trying to turn the scare quotes back on your opponent, but I fear it’s too late in the fight to do any good.)
Adler wins it by decision.
UPDATE: I read Tbogg religiously, and it looks like I engaged in some subconscious title plagiarism. If I ever come up with anything as funny as the stuff Tbogg regularly comes up with, he has my permission to steal it. (H/t to Smut Clyde)
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
ABOVE: Annie Jacobsen (right)
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
No, they promote violence all the time.
While goofy shenanigans such as these are sure to increase in frequency if Obama gets elected, it’s worth remembering that right-wingers don’t just promote violence and bigotry when they’re about to lose power. Indeed, when they’re in power, the Right promotes violence not against the state, but by the state. Some classic examples:
Civilized societies have found it harder, though, to beat the barbarians without killing all, or nearly all, of them. Were it really to become all-out war of the sort that Osama and his ilk want, the likely result would be genocide — unavoidable, and provoked, perhaps, but genocide nonetheless, akin to what Rome did to Carthage, or to what Americans did to American Indians. That’s what happens when two societies can’t live together, and the weaker one won’t stop fighting — especially when the weaker one targets the civilians and children of the stronger. This is why I think it’s important to pursue a vigorous military strategy now. Because if we don’t, the military strategy we’ll have to follow in five or ten years will be light-years beyond “vigorous.”
Why did Bosnia collapse into the worst slaughter in Europe since World War Two? In the thirty years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43 percent to 31 percent of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26 percent to 44 percent. In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography, except through civil war. The Serbs figured that out, as other Continentals will in the years ahead: if you can’t outbreed the enemy, cull ’em. The problem that Europe faces is that Bosnia’s demographic profile is now the model for the entire continent.
IF a prize were awarded for the most-improved government publication of the decade, we could choose the winner now: “Army Field Manual 3-24, Counterinsurgency” (MCWP 3-33.5 for the Marine Corps). Rising above abysmal earlier drafts, the Army and Marines have come through with doctrine that will truly help our troops. […]
In the spirit of constructive criticism, here are a few of the gaps remaining:
While the sometimes-you-just-have-to-fight realists are in the ascendant at last, the military’s academic side still has too much influence. You see it plainly in the illustrative vignettes chosen to accompany the text: They emphasize soft power (doesn’t work – sorry) over the need to kill implacable murderers to provide security for the innocent.
The bias in the case-study selection still favors the hand-holding efforts that helped create the current mess in Iraq (military academics, like all academics, won’t give up on their theses just because mere facts contradict them). The drafters cite the anomalous example of Malaya (while downplaying that campaign’s violence), but ignore the same-decade example of the Mau-Mau revolt, in which the British won a complete victory – thanks to concentration camps, hanging courts and aggressive military operations.
I’ll make a deal with the Left: You wanna impeach President Bush? Go ahead. Knock yourself out. In fact, let’s just go to the polls and turn the whole government over to the Democrats. You wanna run the whole show? Fine. Elect Howard Dean President. End all surveillance against possible enemy combatants, unless you can get a warrant based on probable cause. Withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan immediately. Permanently kill the PATRIOT Act. Do whatever you want to do. I’m perfectly willing, at this point, to do it your way.
I mean, really, what’s the worst that can happen? An American city goes up in nuclear fire? Well, it’ll probably be New York, Chicago, or LA. You know, a major city. I don’t live there, nor do most Americans. So we’ll be fine.
But here’s the other half of the deal: If that happens, we get to march on Washington, drag you naked and screaming from your offices, and hang you from the ornate lampposts that line The Mall. Then, free from roadblocks thrown up by infantile political fools, maybe we’ll get serious about defending the United States, her people, her freedoms, and her values, in an increasingly hostile world.
History never offers exact parallels, but it does have useful lessons. In assessing manning needs for Iraq, one would do well to look to prior conflicts of similar nature: one might look especially to the Boer War, in which a fractious, semi-fanatical culture was slowly ground into submission by an occupying force several years after the seeming success of the initial invasion. If it sounds familiar, it should: and so the means of victory there offer an instructive thought experiment for Iraq today.
Make no mistake: those means were cruel. I have stated previously that I endorse cruel things in war — to eschew them is folly. The British achieved victory over the Boers by taking their women and children away to concentration camps, by laying waste to the countryside, and by dotting the veld with small garrisons in blockhouses at regular intervals. The men who remained were hindered in their movements by the wire stretching from blockhouse to blockhouse (a phenomenon that the Morice Line experience has shown would be massively more effective now); they could either surrender or die. Absent women and children, the rules of engagement were lax. From implementation to victory took under 18 months. To accomplish this required over one-quarter million soldiers.
[W]e have a couple of choices, and everybody has been talking about being an honest broker, but there’s another choice, and that is to be a participant on one side, with the Shias and Kurds against the Sunnis. The Shias, while they are a bigger number of people, they don’t have the experience that the Sunnis have, but if you combine the Shia numbers with our technology and our support, technical support, we could in fact get a second best; not what we wanted, which was a government that was genuinely democratic, but perhaps a friendly, semi-theocratic Shia government that we had put in power by helping them win a civil war. That’s not a wonderful choice, but it’s a lot better than turning tail and leaving.
Fun, fun, fun.
It’s quite amazing to watch the same people who pushed for concentration camps, hanging courts and genocide during the Bush years to now talk about taking up arms against the tyrannical and violent government that Barack Obama is about to unleash. There are many words one could use to describe this mentality, but I think calling them “crazy assholes” will suffice.
Who better to explain a certain emergent trend toward naked insanity than Confederate Yankee?
I just dropped by my local pawn shop to get rid of some items around the house that were not longer needed, and found them to be extremely busy.
Because sure, that’s what most of us do when we have items that are no longer needed. We take them to a place that will loan us money with those items as collateral.
For instance, when my last car had outlasted its usefulness, I did the smart thing and took out an auto loan. Then a few weeks later, as I was still finishing the cases of beer I’d bought, the loan company provided free towing.
Actually, I think he’s fibbing in that characteristically childlike Confederate Yankee way of his. What really happened? We suspect that the now-accustomed wingnut welfare checks have narrowed in distribution, such that he had to liquidate some investment properties.
Unless he means ‘pwn shop,’ in which case, you know, here we are holding his items again.
The high level of traffic in the shop wasn’t all the surprising considering this economy Congressional Democrats engineered,
The vexatiousness of my breakfast wasn’t surprising considering the pot that Republicans had forgotten to put back in the coffee machine, soaking the countertop and denying me coffee until I could again put things aright. Also, The Warriors did it; they shot Cyrus. Tonight’s special report: When Snowball destroyed the windmill, was he aided by traitors within?
but what was surprising is why people were there. Other than myself, it doesn’t appear anyone was there to pawn unwanted things.
Of the 12 people in the shop when I was there, the 11 others were all looking at firearms. A CZ-58 and an AK-47 variant were on the counter in front of one pair of customers. An off-duty sheriff and his friend were picking up what I think was a DPMS LR-308 complete with scope and bipod. Another guy was looking at a used Polytech M-14, and the remainder were looking at handguns… mostly Glocks and CZ-75s.
I overheard one of the guys behind the gun counter say that gun sales among the shops in the area were up about 35-percent. Later, when he wasn’t as busy, I asked him why he thought that was. His answer was simple, and perhaps predictable.
“Barack.”
It’s worth noting that this post went up on Friday the 10th, while Barack Obama was in the very same metropolis of Asheville, North Carolina on Sunday the 5th. In other words, they’re starting a bit late if they want to kill Obama without embarking on some kind of interstate yee-haw convoy.
But then, that’s not what Mr. Yankee thinks he means — or what he wants you to think he thinks he means. This rush to buy guns, whether real or not, has become a conservative shibboleth lately, stemming from the avidly held prospect that an Obama administration would outlaw gun ownership, and the even more eagerly dreaded couch-time fantasy of a socioeconomic catastrophe that calls for the stockpiling of canned and dehydrated food and ammunition, the appointment of a ‘bug-out vehicle’ (in the imagined form, perhaps, of a suburban minivan with a jerry-built roof turret and spikes welded to the wheel hubs), and the merciless shooting of revenooers, bushy-haired and/or dusky-hued strangers, strangers in general except for attractive young women in distress, stray dogs and other previously non-huntable wildlife, and actual or potential thieves of canned and dehydrated food and ammunition.
The ongoing stock market crash has given a keen edge to this perennial daydream, this powerful intersection of the desires of the cod-Libertarian science-fiction fan and those of the cod-populist rural crank. When Confederate Yankee drops the name “Barack” at the end of his tale, it’s meant to invoke something that he, himself might not be able to explain in plain language, but that’s nevertheless pretty easy to understand for anyone who’s experienced the antics of the Confederate-Yankocracy since the mixed blessing of the Internet enabled them in media other than the micro-scrawled journal and the talk radio call-in line.
It signifies a return to the wingnut ethos of the Clinton years, before the conspiratorial, wackadoo right wing fell in love with George W. Bush, and thus with government power and weird neo-royalist notions of the Executive Branch. It’s a return to the “jackbooted government thugs” iconography of the ’90s, in which incidents such as Ruby Ridge and Waco were seen as defining a historical fault line between an illegitimate, runaway Federalism and a perpetually threatened organic America — the often agrarian, invariably pre-capitalist order imagined and extolled throughout the early 20th Century by characters from William Jennings Bryan to Father Coughlin, and later in even sillier fashion by conservatives from Pat Buchanan, to G. Gordon Liddy, to Rod Dreher. Armed militias, or at least groups of fat yo-yos with guns, sprang up to oppose a hallucinatory, originally Birch-concocted trend toward world government and to defend the sanctity of the Constitution — whose feckless shredding they would later, as we know, cheer, as soon as a spite-lofted pseudoconservative administration again controlled the White House.
In brief and to sum up, an Obama presidency will yield us a bounty of delicious 180-degree reversals, hanging contradictions, forehead-smacking discontinuities, and flaming self-pwnages from our wingnut pals, as their entire political edifice turns heliotropically to face the warming light of the new Hated Thing. Their doings of the past eight years will seem, to them although not to ourselves, like fragments from a dream. They will charge the George W. Bush presidency with a Reaganlike aura of indistinct, dumb uplift and nonspecific moral rectitude. And they will struggle to recapture those great days of America, always so intrinsic but so sadly vanished, held always and each time just out of their grasp.
And most of all, they will fear the omnipresent, hovering hand of the Other, always trying to take away the dignity that is their rightful birthright as Americans — the dignity that their intrinsic, bone-deep, wizening fear, their spite-fueling fear, keeps them ever from breathing freely enough to know or enjoy.
“Barack!”
…Because the election won’t happen for weeks, and they’re already running out of clean drawers. As for Mr. Yankee, we thought of a bumper sticker the other day: “You can have my foot when you pry it from my cold, dead mouth.” We’re prepared to offer a deep discount on case lots.
Christopher Buckley, perhaps America’s only intentionally funny conservative, has endorsed Obama. This, needless to say, has created a great deal of consternation and fork-banging over at the special needs shelter that Christopher’s father built. Jonah the Whale is all over it:
I am a great fan of Christopher’s. I am proud to call him my friend and I am grateful for his many kindnesses. None of that changes because of his decision to endorse Barack Obama. But I think he’s wrong.
I would very much like to leave it at that.
But, of course, Jonah won’t leave it at that
[Buckley] thinks McCain has lost it. I think that is unfair and untrue. His only real evidence stems from McCain’s recent political performance.
Grandma thinks Grandpa has lost it, but I think that is unfair and untrue. Her only real evidence stems from that recent incident where they found Gramps three miles from home, wandering in a parking lot in his boxer shorts screaming “Traitor!” each time he saw a Volkswagen, Porsche or Audi.
But even if you think McCain has run a less than honorable campaign …, it’s hard for me to take the complaint all that seriously from someone who worked for — and greatly admires — George HW Bush. Campaigns often require a certain tackiness, as was conspicuously the case with poppa Bush. But Bush pere was not a tacky president.
Yes, even though Bush 41 ran the Willie Horton ad, he refused to call that Negro Clarence Thomas “boy,” and once he even let Thomas eat some picnic leftovers in the White House kitchen with the staff.
Meanwhile, Christopher invokes Oliver Wendell Holmes’ famous line that FDR had a “first-class temperament” and so too Obama. Indeed, he suggests that Obama is a man of great character because he’s a man of great temperament. Conceding for the sake of argument that Obama’s temperament is first rate, are the two really the same thing? I don’t think so.
‘Cuz, you know, it’s no problem having a barking mad lunatic with his finger on the nuclear trigger as long as he believes in cutting taxes.
The McCain-Palin campaign is getting a lot nastier. This losing strategy of riling up the base and alienating undecideds reeks of a desperation, not to make a last push towards victory, but rather to raise enough money before election day in a last-gasp effort to pay the campaign’s bills.
Meanwhile, many have noted the race-baiting similarities with George H.W. Bush’s notorious ‘Willie Horton’ ad that helped torpedo Michael Dukakis’ presidential bid. Rest assured that Ace O’ Spades doesn’t like those similarities either — he wants to dredge up the original smear:
On the other hand, the issue inherently underscores a major tension between the parties, and the races, since 1998: The Democrats’ overarching drive to do certifiably insane things, like letting murderers out on weekend furloughs from prison, in response to constant agitation from minority pressure groups.
We are so gonna party like it’s 1988.
Don’t let the floor hit you on your way down, Bob:
Did Ayer’s Write Obama’s Autobiography?
Author and occasional book doctor/ghostwriter Jack Cahill is making an interesting case that Barack Obama did not write Dreams From My Father.
As if that wasn’t an explosive enough charge, Cahill makes the case that Bill Ayers was the ghostwriter of Dreams, and notes many similarities between Obama’s book, and Ayer’s quasi-fictional book released at roughly the same time about his role as a terrorist in the Weather Underground, Fugitive Days.
All well and good, but what we really need to know is whether Treat Williams flew John McCain’s combat missions for him.
