This week in infamy: The McCain campaign has apparently decided to spread the notion among Evangelicals that Barack Obama is the Antichrist.
I mean, not that we haven’t seen this before, but the production values are certainly improving.
Update: Hey, it looks like somebody needs to interview this guy for a timely newspaper trend piece. Amy Chozick? Your Pulitzer is calling:
It looks like someone has reached the bottom of the barrel, broken through, and started tunneling under the pickle factory.
Mr. Darcy Comes Courting
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 3, 2008[…]
Despite Obama’s wooing, some women aren’t warming. As Carol Marin wrote in The Chicago Sun-Times, The Lanky One is like an Alice Waters organic chicken — “sleek, elegant, beautifully prepared. Too cool” — when what many working-class women are craving is mac and cheese.
In The Wall Street Journal, Amy Chozick wrote that Hillary supporters — who loved their heroine’s admission that she was on Weight Watchers — were put off by Obama’s svelte, zero-body-fat figure.
“He needs to put some meat on his bones,” said Diana Koenig, a 42-year-old Texas housewife. Another Clinton voter sniffed on a Yahoo message board: “I won’t vote for any beanpole guy.”
The odd thing is that Obama bears a distinct…
Yes, she quotes Chozick’s piece. And uses both quotes as published. Nearly in full.
Before this is over, Clark Hoyt is going to look as frazzled and shaky as Armand Dipthong of the Bloom County Picayune.
K-Lo, in a special guest appearance at Clown Hall, offers her forty-seventh reason why the birth control pill is bad and should be banned: It turns male fish into girly-men fish.
You’ve already heard about the pregnant man. But what about the she-man fish? “Intersex” freshwater fish are all the rage.
Apparently you can’t have a liberal cocktail party these days without having a few “intersex” freshwater fish as guests.
Estrogen pollution from contraceptive and abortion pills could be the culprit behind these piscine switcheroos. And thus the two holiest of holies for the left …
(The left’s two holiest of holies are, apparently, in no particular order, fish and fucking.)
… may be on a collision course. It promises to be quite the show.
Because, of course, none of the other chemical pollutants that are also found in in the nation’s waterways could possibly be responsible for this. So, I suppose the pill “could be” the cause. Of course, in that sense, gay marriage in California also “could be” the cause that the surge has allegedly succeeded in Iraq.
And because [the pill’s] introduction came 40 years ago, at a time when American culture was enamored with Woodstock, feminism and free love, prescient warnings and cautions — most notably from Pope Paul VI in his encyclical “Humanae Vitae” in the summer of 1968 — went unheeded.
Holy shit. You mean the pope predicted transgendered fish forty years ago? I really should start going to church more often since it’s obviously a source of extremely useful predictions.
For the first time, … the left may be forced to take a look at the side effects of oral contraceptives. Never mind the women, of course. Never mind the men and children affected in various emotional and other ways.
Didya notice K-Lo slip in reason number 48 that the birth control pill is bad? Think of the children, she says, who are affected in “various emotional and other ways” by the pill. It’s not clear how the children are affected, although I guess K-Lo imagines that children are being neglected because Mommy and Daddy, thanks to the pill, can spend all their spare hours fucking, rather than once a month and for conception purposes only.
Apparently K-Lo has picked up this fish story from global-warming denialist Iain Murray, who, according to K-Lo, predicts how the left will respond to revelations that the birth control pill has led to gender-confused trout:
So what does that mean for us and the fish? Nothing straight away, Murray tells me. There’s more than pollution at stake here for the left, so, expect “outright denial at there being a problem, obfuscation of the science when strong arguments are presented, attempts to deflect attention onto much rarer and less harmful [causes]
Doesn’t that sound oddly familiar? Outright denial that global warming exists. Check. Obfuscation of the science when strong arguments for anthropogenic global warming are presented. Check. Attempts to deflect attention onto much rarer and less harmful causes such as sunspots and breathing. Check.
How these people find their way home at night is really a mystery to me. Breadcrumbs, I suppose.
Shorter Confederate Yankee:
Above: A ‘citizen journalist’ considers his remaining readership
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
Bonus Yankee:
Update: Republican revolt in “Pelosi’s Politburo.”
Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats fled the House of Representatives, turning off the microphones and the lights as Republicans continued to debate energy policy without them.
We now flee the blogosphere, turning off the blogs and the wi-fi (i.e., adjourn for the evening as ding-dong usual, just like every doo-dah day) as Mr. Yankee continues to fulminate and catapult peas from his spoon without us. Remark pre-loaded for end of post: “Whee, Kids Incorporated!”
They seem to be having loads of fun with it:
Rep Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) just pretended to be a Democrat. He stood on the other side of the chaber and listed all of the GOP bills that the Dems killed.
He then said “I am a Democrat and here is my energy plan” and he held up a picture of an old VW Bug with a sail attached to it. He paraded around he house floor with the sign while the crowd cheered.
Update: Well, he apologized. Maybe this marks the turn of a new leaf for citizen journalism. We’ll know for certain by seeing whether he deletes the hilarious comments mocking his post — i.e., burns books in the fashion of 1933 Nazi Germany.
Debbie Schlussel doesn’t know for sure yet if the Canadian Greyhound murderer is Muslim but she does know that she would have taken down the soon-to-be-determined jihadi at that rest stop back in Neepawa or better yet, before the high-ranking Hamas official even got on the bus.
Or she would have, but for the marginally mitigating factor that she wouldn’t have:
If I were in that situation, I’d probably run, too. But that’s because I’m a woman, and I’m tiny. I could not possibly overpower this murderer, though perhaps I’d try to kick him in the cojones to temporarily neutralize him.
But if Little Big Woman is man enough to admit her own frailty, she’s not so kind to the legion of eight-foot-tall professional mixed martial arts fighters who populate Manitoban long-haul passenger buses — which total fucking pussies had the craven impudence to flee a knife-wielding maniac brandishing a recently severed head without, you know, breaking his balls a little bit:
Most troubling to me is that, instead of pouncing on the beheader and stopping him from murdering an innocent person, the passengers on the bus all fled like cowards. A beheading from what I know from the videos we’ve been ‘treated’ to, by our friends in the ‘Religion of Peace,’ is not an instant thing. Hate to be graphic, but it’s not as quick and easy as cutting soft butter. And there was a lot of stabbing of the victim before that. It could have been stopped and no-one tried, from what I can gather from the story …
Schlussel is also wise not to discount, as a potential ingredient in the affair, the Kremlin’s standing order to its global operatives to behave at all times like sniveling cowards:
While I do not know if it has anything to do with nationality, I’m struck by what I can imagine was a bunch of scaredy-cat people (in this case, socialist Canadians), who didn’t want to risk of themselves to help this innocent victim of a brutal murder.
Alarmingly, not all of Schlussel’s readers agree with her measured reporting. Notes ‘guitarguy’:
….I’m not too sure I’d want to tackle a guy whose holding/using a ‘Rambo-knife’…..unless I had a baseball bat…..or a Desert Eagle. A bus is a confined environment, and this animal was already stabbing/hacking away at the passenger. The passenger was probably already beyond help after the 2nd or 3rd stab. The guy was described as ‘calm’, but no physical description is given. The screaming, the blood, the panic……I can’t fault the passengers for this one.
But the heresy of music-playing faggots does not go unanswered by Debbie’s defenders. Coming to her aid are such Hectors as ‘softwaregurus,’ whose fearsome screen name suggests a grim-visaged fellow who wrestles lines of programming code into place by the force of sheer masculinity alone:
Pussies!!!! On the bus and posting here. “I’m scared of someone with a knife…” COWARDS!!!!
Such is his disgust that by the close of his comment, ‘softwaregurus’ seems to be channeling Patton channeling Gollum channeling Irvine Welsh:
There are lots of ways to take a knife away. How about some MEN stepping up, you know, like more than one? How about throwing a blanket over him? How about a tire iron? Bussess do hae them. Canadians=pussies.
Canadians=pussies, indeed. But what if there had been someone aboard who wasn’t a Canadian pussy? Someone or someones with, say, the blood of a more heroic nation coursing through their veins? Debbie wonders too:
That was in Canada.
I contrast that with the shoe bomber, Abdul Raheem a/k/a Richard Reid, on the Air France flight to Boston. American men on the plane — including a minor league basketball player –pounced on this guy and beat him black and blue like he deserved, saving the day.
In that instance, though, the people on the plane knew that if they didn’t stop him, they would all die. On the Canadian bus, they knew if they just ran away, only the victim would be hurt — in this case, fatally.
Would this happen in America?
Commenter ‘FreeAmerican’, not realizing that Debbie’s question is rhetorical — because, duh! — responds in the negative:
… a quick thinking American probably would have smashed this cat on the head with something strong enough to crush his skull a bit.
Our only issue is with the qualifier ‘probably’, but yes, of course that would have happened if an American had been present, seeing as how that’s always what happens when Americans are present.
Meanwhile, ‘FreeAmerican’ admits that the skull-crushing do-goodery he details might not have saved the victim’s life, seeing as how the poor fellow seems to have been stabbed to death with a ginormous knife before anyone could plausibly react. But that’s really beside the point. Quick-thinking American skull-crushers don’t restrict their quick-thinking skull-crushing to situations where actual lives can actually be saved — their willingness to engage in violent confrontations with armed maniacs extends even to aesthetic concerns:
I agree with FIVEOFNINE, that poor boy was in grave trouble after the first stab wound, but at least his body would have retained its human dignity.
Alas, we are finally left with the bitter realization that American testosterone cannot be everywhere present at once, leading to this wry but poignant bit of geopolitical melancholy from ‘Jeff_W’, with which we shall conclude:
To be fair it could happen anywhere, but probably even more so in America, Jr.
After all, they have so much of the Frenchy influence, and WE KNOW how zee French surennders at the drop of a hat and hope America does their dirty work.
Then, what a stupid country that sends us losers like Pam Anderson, Celine Dion, Michael J. Fox, and Bryan Adams among others and ends every single sentence with ‘Eh?’
Um, wow. You know that Amy Chozick piece in the Wall Street Journal that asks whether Barack Obama might not be fat enough to be President?
Here’s the on-the-ground research that enabled Ms. Chozick to pose such a bold and allusive query:
Amy Chozick starts a thread:
Is Obama too skinny to be president?
15-Jul-08 06:04 pmDoes anyone out there think Barack Obama is too thin to be president? Anyone having a hard time relating to him and his “no excess body fat”? Please let me know. Thanks!
A reply is posted:
Re: Is Obama too skinny to be president?
15-Jul-08 10:21 pmYes I think He is to skinny to be President.Hillary has a potbelly and chuckybutt I’d of Voted for Her.I won’t vote for any beanpole guy.
Amy responds:
Re: Is Obama too skinny to be president? 16-Jul-08 09:12 am
Love your response and your username (onlinebeerbellygirl). Would you mind shooting me an email so I can ask you a few more quesitons? My email is [redacted] Thanks so much!
-Amy
The entire rest of the brief thread consists of people saying that the question is stupid, and/or making fun of Chozick.
…Actually, try this Google-cached copy, because Ms. Chozick seems to have deleted her messages from the thread literally as I was typing this.*
No More Mister Nice Blog also finds that Chozick was nipping text from a McCain press release.
Just Wow.
* If and when the cache is updated and the comments disappear again, we’ve made a (sigh) screen-shot, as though this were some kind of flaky comment-altering Usenet dispute of the primordial 1994 variety. I mean, wow.
Update: No wait, I was wrong. Her comments are still there; they’ve just been marked with such low ratings that they’re now hidden in a troll hole unless you select a special viewing option. Avast ye.
[Hanx! J— and Lawnguylander]
Uh-oh. Jonah is hitting the Cheetos hard today:
The Spoiled Children of Capitalism
It’s an old story. Loving parents provide a generous environment for their offspring. Kids are given not only ample food, clothing and shelter, but the emotional necessities as well: encouragement, discipline, self-reliance, the ability to work with others and on their own. And yet, in due course, the kids rebel. Some even say their parents never loved them, that they were unfair, indifferent, cruel. Often, such protests are sparked by parents’ refusal to be even more generous. I want a car, demands the child. Work for it, insist the parents. Why do you hate me? asks the ingrate.
Indeed. If only more children followed Jonah’s career path of using their mother’s status as a wingnut hero to secure a cushy job at the National Review. Kids, if your mother becomes obsessed with Clinton’s penis then YOU TOO!!! can get a job as a prestigious public intellectual!
In large measure our wealth isn’t the product of capitalism, it is capitalism.
And yet we hate it. Leaving religion out of it, no idea has given more to humanity. The average working-class person today is richer, in real terms, than the average prince or potentate of 300 years ago.
Hear that, blue-collar wimps? You’re not dying of cholera like your relatives were 300 years ago, so shaddup about not being able to pay yer bills! Who cares that your house isn’t worth shit or that you aren’t making any real wage gains! Suck it up!
This is the irony of capitalism. It is not zero-sum, but it feels like it is. Capitalism coordinates humanity toward peaceful, productive cooperation, but it feels alienating.
Uh, has Jonah ever heard of stuff like this? Or this? Or this? Or, er, ah, this little thingy?
Collectivism does the opposite, at least when dreamed up on paper. The communes and collectives imploded in inefficiency, drowned in blood. The kibbutz lives on only as a tourist attraction, a baseball fantasy camp for nostalgic socialists. Meanwhile, billions have ridden capitalism out of poverty.
And yet the children of capitalism still whine.
Pictures are often better at illustrating economics than words are. For instance, I look at the economy and I see charts such as this…
…showing that real wages, with the exception of brief upticks in the early ’80s and the late ’90s, have been flat or shrinking for the past 30+ years. That’s not a good thing, and it may go a long way toward explaining why so many people are unhappy with our current economy. It makes more sense than calling everyone a bunch of delusional whiners, at any rate.
Of course, charts such as this aren’t what Jonah sees when he looks at the economy. No, Jonah takes a look across the American economic landscape and sees only this:
It’s a different perspective, to be sure, but I’m not sure it’s an entirely accurate one.
[Thanks to Dover Bitch for sending me the pic!]
Maybe you’ve already heard this story:
Man Stabbed, Decapitated on Bus in Manitoba
July 31 (Bloomberg) — A man in Canada was stabbed to death and decapitated on a Greyhound bus by a stranger in the seat beside him, the Globe and Mail reported.
We were like, “Jeez, that’s awful.” And then we were like, “Wow, Pam Atlas is going to go cawing off her perch trying to tie it to Muslims.”
And then we were like, “Nah, Pam and all those people have gotten more careful lately. They’re not as gullible as they used to be.”
[…]
UPDATE: I emailed the reporter. The police have not released the name of the beheader or the victim or if the victim was wearing some identifiable religious symbol BUT there are a lot maniacs out that to lunatic shiz. DEVELOPING STORY.
UPDATE: Waiting for verification of details on who and why. Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day called the attack bizarre, but did not discuss details, saying he did not want to jeopardize the investigation.
Um, yeah.
There are indeed a lot maniacs out that to lunatic shiz. But it seems to us as though there’s one more maniac that to lunatic shiz since Pam arrived on the case.
Or maybe several. Let’s look at her comments:
Even if the offender wasn’t muslim, it can still be traced to them.
When anyone does something, whose blamed? Hollywood and video games. If they’re seriously blamed, I’m sure a certain group is responsible for embedding the idea of doing this into peoples heads. If there weren’t so many beheadings, and video’s all the time, I don’t think the thought or idea to do it by hand would be in most peoples minds! If a non-islamic person strapped bombs onto themselves, where did they get the inspiration from?Like Abbas said, he taught the world terrorism.
Posted by:jusa | Thursday, July 31, 2008 at 06:45 PM
D’oh!
Compounding the tragic fun is the way in which, in one short comment thread, they manage to conflate the victim (who was aboriginal) with the assailant (who is of unspecified ethnicity) and to blame the incident on ‘aboriginal gangs’; to blame Muslims (as above); to properly correct the ethnic misidentification’; and to end up in a reverse-double backflip, claiming that the very fact that the assailant’s ethnicity and religion are unspecified stands as evidence that his Muslamitude is being concealed by PC dhimmi liberals and the jihad-sympathizers in the media.
Because, you know, Islamic extremists behead people on Canadian Greyhound buses all the freaking time. It’s gotten so that whenever someone is beheaded on a Canadian Greyhound bus, you just naturally assume it was an Islamic extremist.
I mean, sometimes someone is beheaded on a Canadian Greyhound bus and your natural inclination is to blame it on Islamic extremism, but then it turns out to be some maniac just randomly beheading a guy. And then people are all like, “Well if you can’t be totally 100% super-sure that the beheader is a Muslim, then nyeah nyeah, don’t say anything at all.”
See, I think that just encourages the global Muslim conspiracy. I think it makes them send out more lone maniacal assassins to behead people on Canadian Greyhound buses, because how would you feel if you’d just sent your man Hassan Farouk Mohammed to go behead a person on a Greyhound bus in Winnipeg, and you’re eating breakfast the next morning, and in between bites of egg you open the paper and see the headline, splashed right across the page, right where people can see it, “Man Stabbed, Decapitated on Bus in Manitoba.”
You would be like, “‘Man stabbed!?’ Nice passive voice there, so-called journalism experts. Bismillah, man stabbed BY WHOM? Man stabbed in the neck and then his ENTIRE HEAD CAME OFF, no? Who writes these papers these days? Kids — it’s as if they barely train these kids.” And then you would read down the column and see that ol’ Hassan Farouk Mohammed’s name and ethnicity, not to mention religion, were unmentioned, and you would be like, “Is this really so-called helping us, oh press lackeys and sympathizers of jihad of the media? HOLY JUMPING ALLAH, can we please get some solid press coverage around here!? This is not terrifying.” You would turn to your friend Jawad, with whom you were having breakfast. “Is this terrifying?” you ask.
“It is not so terrifying, no”
“This stabbing-on-a-bus, this now-apprehended mystery stabber?”
“I would not be terrified.”
“What are we attempting to do? What is our raison d’etre in this endeavor, as the French would phrase such a thing?”
“Oh, it begins with a ‘T,’ I think.”
“This has no ‘T’ — this is just an ‘error.'”
“Ha ha! Oh, it has no ‘T!’ It is ‘errorism!’ Ha ha! Oh, there is a good one!”
“Freaking liberal media.”
“I will send out another ‘sabber’ to ‘decapiate’ another ‘vicim.’ Ha ha! Excuse me, for I have once again forgotten the freaking ‘T.'”
“Would you like a cup of?”
“Ha ha, I almost did not get that one. Oh, it is soothing to laugh when our job is so thankless.”
Sigh. Will Debbie Schlussel be the next to pick this story up and twist it into a demented balloon animal? First we were like, “Oh definitely.” But now we’re like, “Nah, Schlussel has gotten a lot more careful lately.
…And indeed, she has weighed her options and concentrated on this story, as helpfully provided by Pam Atlas.
Is there a moral to this? No, no I don’t think there is, alas. No, probably not.
D. Aristophanes adds: The plot thickens. The media is now reporting the names of the suspect and victim. Not much to see at first glance:
But scroll down for the real truth:
Coincidence? Not likely.
Mr. Yglesias writes:
Gas prices are on the rise. Consumers are feeling pain, harm is being done to the economy. Oil companies begin posting record profits. John McCain and the GOP propose a series of giveaways to oil companies that economists doubt will do anything to reduce gasoline prices in the short run. These measures will, however, starve the government of revenue for infrastructure, harm the environment, and devastate coastal economies. Barack Obama counters with a tip that will do no harm to the economy or the public purse but will allow people to save money in the short, medium, and long runs. Obama’s proposal is endorsed by the auto industry as sound (similarly, fully inflated bike tires make you go faster), and has been embraced by the most successful politicians in the Republican Party today. But Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity mock it along with the rest of the “Republican echo chamber.”
The upshot is deemed to be . . . success for the echo chamber, “an effective GOP shot.” But why? Maybe the attack will be reported in a way that’s helpful to Republicans. But why should it be reported that way? Why should slamming Obama for offering sound, bipartisan, industry-endorsed advice by an effective attack?
The short answer is because PEOPLE ARE STUPID.
The slightly-less-short answer is that the Republicans are now in the stage of their campaign where they will do absolutely ANYthing to make their opponent look like a lactating-homo-vajayjay-wimpazoid. It doesn’t matter if the attacks make sense on any level, only that there be several of them and that they be repeated over and over and over again until Obama makes the crucial mistake of wind-surfing, or appearing on a tank, or sighing too loudly at a debate. At which point: game, set, match.
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 poopshaft git 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.
Again, this sort of thing wouldn’t have such an impact if so many people weren’t economically illiterate. But remember, we do live in a country where presidential candidates are roundly criticized for suggesting that our children learn foreign languages, so you’ve gotta expect it.
So it’s come to this: Americans may not vote for Obama because he eats well and he exercises. No, really:
Too Fit to Be President?
Facing an Overweight Electorate, Barack Obama Might Find Low Body Fat a Drawback
By AMY CHOZICK
August 1, 2008; Page W1Speaking to donors at a San Diego fund-raiser last month, Barack Obama reassured the crowd that he wouldn’t give in to Republican tactics to throw his candidacy off track.
“Listen, I’m skinny but I’m tough,” Sen. Obama said.
But in a nation in which 66% of the voting-age population is overweight and 32% is obese, could Sen. Obama’s skinniness be a liability? Despite his visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique just might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them.
A few points: