Writing in the International Herald Tribune in late July, Mark D. White and Robert Arp had the courage to ask the question that people who aren’t thinking are thinking about:
But if we say that Batman should kill the Joker, doesn’t that imply that we should torture terrorism suspects if there’s a chance of getting information that could save innocent lives?
Explain the logic underlying the question, and please show your work.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
UPDATE: Never one to miss a ride on the crazy train, K-Lo expresses similar sentiments:
“The Next Cheney” [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
That’s the name of the DNC’s website devoted to McCain veep possibilities. They’ve unintentionally rallied me, as I get enthused by the prospect of a Cheney in the White House for another four years.
No snarky rejoinder is necessary –or even possible — in situations like this.
Above: Smug thug stomps on Orwell’s face,
Iraqi self-determination — forEVAR!.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
Above: Drunk on tribalism.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
Well, Tyson Foods and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) have gone and done it now. They’ve agreed to a new labor contract at Tyson’s Shelbyville, Tennessee poultry processing plant that replaces Labor Day with the Muslim holiday Eid al-Fitr, bringing the total of paid vacation days that cater specifically to the plant’s majority Muslim workforce to a staggering one in eight.
Observers on the right are quite naturally alarmed. Rhetorical boycotts of Tyson products are gaining pixelated steam and some disinterested interlocuters have even been forced to reluctantly conclude that it’s all Barack Obama’s fault.
A closer inspection of the wingnutosphere reveals more selective outrage:
Hoosier Army Mom is hard put to name an activity more un-American than allowing low-paid factory workers some small say in the scheduling of their thinly distributed respites from minimum-wage drudgery amidst dangerous machinery and bloody avian viscera.
And no wonder! The ingrates who loiter about at Tyson production facilities in her home state already take home a king’s ransom for their insolence, when by all accounts they ought to fall down on their knees and thank God each day that their betters banned indentured servitude in a long-ago moment of weakness.
Debbie Schlussel asks whether Tyson Foods — in making a financially neutral non-concession to a tiny portion of the bottom rung of economic society — may have ushered in “the beginning (or maybe the middle) of the end of America as we know it.” She also finds the whole affair ‘ironic,’ and concludes: “The United Dhimmi States of America. Tyson Foods is just a drop in the bucket compared to what we’re gonna see.”
The National Review’s Mark Krikorian, like Schlussel, is bemused by “the irony of a labor union dispensing with Labor Day.” Indeed, there are few things more ironic than labor successfully securing what it wants from management thanks in part to the existence of a holiday commemorating labor’s past successes at securing what it wanted from management.
Krikorian also bears bad tidings. In this particular instance, he cautions, “just complaining about illegal immigration won’t do.” And double drat to that, though it really rather won’t, seeing as how the Tyson workers in question are legal immigrants. Still, if ‘just complaining’ remains attractive, we would advise doing it more broadly about Muslims or labor unions or people with shitty jobs who want trivial things that will make them moderately happier and not affect you in the slightest.
Or better yet, chicken in general.
On the other hand, as Krikorian suggests, you could just complain about ‘elites.’ It seems that “[i]n this case, we see modern elites’ unwillingness to require newcomers to conform to our ways, and instead conforming to theirs.” Sounds vaguely sinister, doesn’t it?
To be fair, it’s difficult to determine precisely whom Krikorian has in mind when he describes ‘modern elites’ and their reluctance to do what it takes to put Somali refugees in their place — though it can be presumed he refers to a larger subset than just those people who employ the affected locution ‘won’t do.’ Perhaps he’s suggesting that tenured professors start breaking up union meetings … it’s hard to tell.
Krikorian’s main point, we guess, is that our ancestors were enlightened enough to whip the savages when they wouldn’t speak English, and goddamit, we ought to be, too.
And so, in conclusion: Fuck you, chicken. Fuck you for tasting so good and then betraying us to our enemies.
You’ll be excited to learn that OneNewsNow, the “news” outlet for the American Family Association, has its very own blog, and that one of its A-team bloggers is Johnnie Moore, a former magician turned youth pastor of some sort at Liberty University. Apparently the conversion to pastor didn’t quite take, because Johnny still believes in magic tricks, judging from his latest post — “Hey, Let’s Make Middle School Lesbians!”
But first, we bring you a stupid joke. Allegedly someone once penned the following above a urinal at one of the colleges at Oxford University: “My mum made me a homosexual.” Some wit shortly afterward made the appropriate rejoinder by writing: “If I give her enough yarn, will she make me one too?” Thank you! We’re here until next Sunday. Try the veal.
Now, let’s get back to making us some lesbians, mkay?
Billboard Magazine just deemed Katy Perry’s debut single [“I Kissed A Girl”] to be the “Song of Summer” after maintaining six straight weeks in the number one slot on their Hot 100’s chart.
What’s interesting is the song is anything, but “straight.”
“Straight.” Get it? Har, har, Johnnie made a joke. (And you thought my yarn joke was bad.)
In order to get the full picture of the implications of this number one hit you might consider following around an average middle school or high school student this weekend.
Warning: Professional fundie youth minister on a closed course. Do not attempt. Following middle school students in malls can get you arrested.
No doubt, the song will be blaring in every tween or teen store in your local mall, and you’ll most definitely hear its lyrics incoherently sung through the lips of plenty of teenagers. … This weekend there will be many thousands of young girls who will “playfully” choose to “kiss a girl to try it” after they are nonchalantly coaxed by this “fluffy” hit.
What happened to the good old days when you had to suck cock (or, for the ladies, eat pussy) to become a homosexual? Now, apparently, you can become one simply by kissing a member of your own sex, something that will come as a great surprise to, well, these guys:
ABOVE: “I Kissed A Shiek”
Now, I’m no legalistic.
Nor, Johnnie, are you a grammatical.
My iTunes library has its share of secular music intermingled among the latest Christian tunes, and Podcasts of every shape and size, but I just can’t handle this one. How long will all these media moguls be allowed to sit around board room tables and make decisions that alter the healthy development of our nation’s kids?
Query: if kissing can make you gay, how come kissing a girl didn’t make me straight?
Now, if you want to see something that can really turn a girl into a lesbian, watch this.
[Thanks to Kikuchiyo Jones for pointing out the heretofore unnoticed properties of videos of Uncle Jimbo and Kev.]
I guess I’m having a hard time with one because usually when the Republicans bring on the stupid it can at least be roughly grafted onto one of their pre-existing narratives about Democrats. But in the world of that mythical heartland, every manly man is an amateur mechanic and forever tinkers with his roadster and, yes, does things like change oil and check tires and keep them properly inflated.
As the Obama campaign kicks off “energy week” with a new contrast ad and a policy speech in Michigan, Time’s Mark Halperin reports, “McCain supporters in Michigan will distribute tire gauges at Obama’s energy speech in Lansing. The RNC will also deliver gauges reading ‘Obama’s energy plan’ to Washington newsrooms.”
As of this morning, it looks like far-right blogs have received their copies of the Republican script, too. RedState.org’s Erick Erickson is on message: “Inflating your tires and getting a regular tune-up sounds more like Obama’s plan for ego maintenance than it does for helping American families.” Ed Morrissey added, “…Obama refers to ‘big oil’ and the need to reduce our use of oil by 35% over the next twenty years. How do we get there? Keep inflating those tires, folks.”
We are, quite obviously, in the midst of a very aggressive roll-out here. John McCain criticized the notion of well-inflated tires on Friday, and Newt Gingrich described Obama’s remarks as “loony toons” during a Fox News interview. Yesterday morning on ABC, McCain said, “It seems to me the only thing [Obama] wants us to do is inflate tires” to improve gas mileage.
The concept is simple: the McCain campaign knows that it will never get the GOP base excited about their candidate because they hate him. Thus, the only way to inspire Winger Nation to flock to the polls in November is to conduct a Three-Month Hate against Obama by portraying him as a pansy.
How do the tires fit in, you ask? I outlined it thusly on Friday:
The GOP’s echo chamber:
“Hey Beavis, Obama wants you to, like, fill up your tires,
huh-huh, huh-huh.”
“Fill up my tires? That’s, like, the gayest thing I’ve ever
heard Heh-heh-heh-heh, yeah! TIRE!! TIRE!!!”Although recommending that people inflate their tires makes sense, it also sounds sorta… wimpy. As if President Hussein Obama X is already a-warmin’ us up to surrender to the Ay-Rabs by a-tellin’ us to git used to them high gas prices. “Oh, there ain’t nothin’ we can do ’bout them Ay-Rabs a-chargin’ us our first-born child fer gas,” Hussein X seems ta be a-sayin’. “Best
bend over and take it up the poopshaftgit used t’it by a-fillin’ up them tires!” And what would McCain do about gas prices, by contrast? Why, he’d do the manly, All-American thing: he’d drill for more oil (them drills sure do look, er, penis-y, after all) and invade another Islamic country to show them li’l peckers that Uncle Sam is bossa this here town.
And it’s working. Just last month, the wingnut bloggers were whining about how poorly the McCain campaign was being run. Now even Michelle Malkin is getting excited about voting for him, simply because he’s decided to play the Spite Card that worked so well for Nixon back in ’68.
As I’ve said before: spite works, and good liberals need to stop pretending that we can get people to vote for our candidate merely by smiling and presenting them with the facts.
Gavin adds: The Spite Caucus was formed during the Goldwater campaign of 1963-’64, when the crankish right-wing conspiracy thinking of characters such as Robert Welch, the wealthy founder of the John Birch Society, was grafted onto ‘conservatism,’ the formerly conservative kind of politics that conservative people espoused.
Via Richard Hofstadter’s indispensable book, here’s how Richard Rovere of The New Yorker described the Goldwater people who were swept up in the candidate’s barnstorming, ground-level campaign and took over the Republican party at the 1964 National Convention. They were mostly young and affluent, and…
…smartly dressed, well organized, and well spoken. And they were as hard as nails. The spirit of compromise and accommodation was wholly alien to them. They did not come to San Francisco merely to nominate their man and then rally his former opponents behind him; they came for a total ideological victory and the total destruction of their critics. […] They wished to punish as well as to prevail.
Our own Generation of Malkins is eerily similar, if individually less presentable and well-spoken than the typical Goldwater delegate. It’s rarely about policy for them, but about ideological purity, ceaseless argument and contention, and imposing punishment on their foes.
Like the Goldwater campaign (which went down in a cackling blaze in the national election, giving Johnson the presidency), it’s not even about winning, per se, but about shoving it in your face, whatever the ultimate result. Victory is their constant ideal and the eternal object of striving, but winning often means that the argument has to stop — and the argument must never stop.
The Spite Caucus would be back for Nixon in ’68 (and ’72), and by the Reagan campaign in ’79-’80, it would be comfortably at the mainstream of the Republican Party. Today, if these people were for some reason to leave the party, the GOP would be a hollow, floppy elephant skin lying in a sad-eyed heap. They are its very bones and muscles.
Over at the National Post, the go-to paper for analysis of all political things dealing with the Ferengi and also known as Canada’s shittiest newspaper, Peter Schweizer explains why Al Gore is a big fat poopy head:
During the 2000 election, George W. Bush was often given the moniker “stupid.” A Boston television reporter tripped him up with a “pop quiz,” asking him the names of foreign leaders. At the same time, his opponent, Vice President Al Gore, was presented as the consummate intellectual. He went out of his way to drop phrases like “Cartesian revolution” and used complex metaphors like “the clockwork universe” in his speeches.
This week’s edition of New Wingnut of the Week brings you Robert Stacy McCain, a man who was too crazy and too racist even for the Moonie Times. As one of his fellow (and conservative) reporters at the Moonie Times said about him after he left:
I know Stacy McCain, an ill-tempered racist who sat on the other side of my desk for many years and carried on loud telephone conversations almost every day full of racist and ultra-right comments, and often got into loud verbal fights with both reporters and editors in the newsroom.
Robert now keeps himself busy during the day by blogging at the egocentrically-titled “The Other McCain.” McCain’s blog is, as you might imagine, a horrifying cornucopia of wingnuttery which, by comparison, pretty much makes Michelle Malkin’s place look like it was written by Mother Teresa. So let’s spend a few minutes with “The Other McCain” — you may want to ask the children and any easily-frightened pets to leave the room first. And if it’s after five when you’re reading this, you might consider a resolve-steeling and bracing shot or two of Maker’s Mark before proceeding.
McCain’s award winning post would be worthy of a NWOTW award for the title alone: “Equality Is For Ugly Losers.” And, yes, its a rant about ugly feminists coupled with the claim that the pretty girls secretly enjoy a little misogyny, a claim that apparently has its origin in McCain’s own monkey-spanking fantasies: “Ooh, tell me I’m a bad girl, Daddy.” Oh, and the pretty girls don’t mind lower salaries either because, of course, they’re pretty and that’s reward enough.
“Equality” is contrary to human nature. The human spirit naturally desires distinction, and anyone with a scintilla of ambition wishes not to be equal, but rather to be acknowledged in some way as superior.
And what better way to be superior than to put on a white sheet or call feminists a bunch of ugly, whiny bitches?
Frankly, chicks dig a misogynist oppressor.
This is where we get our first clue that McCain probably has some neurological disorder that makes him unable to read the cues given to him by other people during basic social exchanges. My guess is that an ordinary expression of contempt and disdain from a woman is interpreted by him as a desire by the woman to worship his throbbing manhood and clean his kitchen floors. A woman who says she’d sooner drink a cockroach and sewage smoothie than spend another second with him is just playing hard to get
Chicks also dig a sense of humor.
Which is also why “chicks” get all giggly over misogynist oppressors, who, you know, are just so damn funny. When McCain starts telling his dumb-blond-with-big-tits jokes, the girls just can’t get enough of him, or so he thinks. No doubt, the “chicks” just call him a “loathsome prick” and walk away, which he apparently takes as an expression of admiration for his wit.
(Fun fact: Laughter and orgasm are both autonomic reflexes.)
About all that we can really make of this is that it’s an unintentionally candid admission that whenever he’s doing the nasty with his wife, all the while vocalizing his deeply misogynist feelings about her, she starts to laugh at him. And he thinks she just came.
Sacrificing your SUV, personal spending won’t help anyone
I spend therefore I am.
Valentine has much to share with us of course, including the notion that he’s doing everyone a favor by buying the least fuel efficient car he can find, or the notion that spending money in and of itself produces prosperity for everyone:
If you want to help people who are less fortunate than you, it makes sense that America should be as prosperous as possible. This may be counter-intuitive to some liberals out there [straw liberals, perhaps?], but the better off we are, the better it is for the rest of the world. Not only does our government come to the aid of millions of people around the world, but our people help out millions more with their private contributions. We’re the most generous nation on earth, but if we’re hurting, the rest of the world hurts, too. By keeping our economy strong, we continue to feed the goose that lays the golden egg.
While Phil does subsequently point out that he’s not advocating going into debt to keep the economy going (which is why we assume he’ll pay cash for his new Canyonero), there’s little he offers that differs from the old “spend yourself rich” philosophy that has never failed to work. As to why saving money is considered a (bad) liberal policy, Phil offers little. We offer this:
“The American dream begins with saving money and that should begin on the very first day of work,” Cheney told a conference here exploring how to encourage people to boost savings and be better prepared for retirement.
Thanks to a reader for the link.