Sadly, No!

Shorter Debbie “Bee Key” Schlussel:¹

Above: Foxy Lady!

“Winning” In Iraq?: As U.S. Doubles Visas for Iraqi Refugees, One Arrested in Teen Sex Sting

• While I support the surge, an increase in visas for interpreters, contractors, and military personnel who can’t remain in Iraq because they helped America means that the surge is not working, because why are we letting more of these criminal America-hating Iraqi Muslim scum into our country!? [head explodes]

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

¹ Lit. from the Hebrew and the German

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A couple of days ago, Jesse Taylor got a piece of something when he associated Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism with the outraged gabbling and honking that we’ve been hearing from the right wing in regard to the popularity of Barack Obama. Obama is, we have been hearing, too popular. His Messianistic campaign of so-called ‘hope’ is nothing short of a personality cult. The closest political cognate to Barack Obama is Adolf Hitler.¹

Among other things, this explains what Goldberg’s strange, long-delayed book was about. Right-wing intellectual works don’t come from nowhere: Each new title that tips off the line at Regnery, for instance, has been hatched up and slapped together to meet a perceived policy need, with such short-term intellectual joke fodder as Mark Levin’s Men in Black (occasion: assist in the confirmation of Bush’s Supreme Court nominees) bounding up and down the bestseller lists almost in the absence of an actual book between the covers. Long-term, you have stuff like the Politically Incorrect Guides, which are designed to look like works of general history or instruction, but are in fact brazenly wrought attempts to dress up the year-to-year policy aims of movement conservatism in general, and of the Republican Party in specific, as eternal verities.²

And then there’s Goldberg. Take it away, Jesse:

The Jonah Goldberg Election

[…]

[What] Goldberg has done is provide intellectual cover for a growing meme: Obama is the leader of a new fascist revolution. Why, you may ask? Well, it’s all got to do with the defining downward of fascism towards a gooey puddle that virtually anyone not a movement conservative can step in.

The Goldbergian view of fascism (and I’m sure he’ll deny it, which will then be followed by a criticism of my argument, which will in turn be fascist, which will in turn be the exact point he was trying make) is that the marriage of any measurable popularity whatsoever to any state action whatsoever outside the boundaries of Reaganite conservatism is de facto fascist. The point was never to explore fascism or provide an analysis of the phenomenon that cast new light on it – a feat of which Goldberg was summarily incapable – but instead to provide the exact utility we see on display now, and provide a way to brand any popular Democrat or liberal as the handmaiden of evil.

I’m going to finish this post as the day goes on, so expect new text to appear here and there without warning. But let’s skip to the end and recall for a moment a phenomenon that we saw for years on the right, ending perhaps eighteen months ago. Let’s remember the unbelievably mythologizing praise of George W. Bush, the cynically concocted heroics and carrier-landings, the right wing’s gleeful, full-throated bayings about our ‘Commander in Chief’ and the treasonousness of all who opposed him. Let us recall the right’s flirtation with a Bush Personality Cult.

And let’s recall it directly, by turning to a brand new Andrew Klavan op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

What Bush and Batman Have in Common
July 25, 2008

A cry for help goes out from a city beleaguered by violence and fear: A beam of light flashed into the night sky, the dark symbol of a bat projected onto the surface of the racing clouds . . .

Oh, wait a minute. That’s not a bat, actually. In fact, when you trace the outline with your finger, it looks kind of like . . . a “W.”

There seems to me no question that the Batman film “The Dark Knight,” currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society — in which people sometimes make the wrong choices — and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

[BISY BACKSON]

¹ This coexists and freely alternates with images of Obama as (in rough order of prevalence) a Marxist, a Muslim extremist, a black-power activist, a cynical Chicago machine politician, an inexperienced naïf, a ’70s-style liberal, and a drug-addicted homosexual.

² Interesting in a context that I haven’t typed yet is the jacket copy of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History:

One of the first things Stalin, Hitler, Mao and other totalitarians did was rewrite the histories of their nations, remaking the past to foster their control of the present. The American Left has done the same thing in our country. But now at last conservatives and patriotic Americans have an antidote…

K-LO and PaTrick RUFFin1 has hAv h4d it eZackly right. BaRr4k HoozEin OBAMA aRe trieying to Make us TOCK FORR1N J1BBER J4BB3R! Andd IT iS wUrs th4n U thank!

YeS FOKES, aRE MUNNY Hasv foRin Jiber j4BBuR on It’s to:

EnD th4t iS noTtt All:

wHen 0 wen 0 WHEN w1ll teh LI3BRuLs STOP at NExt in thay’re QWIx0$Tic QWuesT 2 MAke US aLL SLAYVES 2 tEh JibbER JAvvBER e3ELete?

I $aY: END/ t3h MADDNEs! I WaNt& 2 GeT Off!!1

Shorter Tom “Twin Blacksmith”² Kovach:

Obama name shocker: “crooked”
Is there prophetic meaning in Obama’s name?

• Hi, it’s me again. I’ve been telephoning innocent Kenyans trying to make them reveal the prophetic meaning of the Luo word, ‘obama.’ Findings promising!

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

¹ Lit.: ‘Reddish Wagonmaker,’ from Latin and English.
² Lit. from Aramaic and Hungarian or Slavic.

Bankrupt ‘exploiters’

Banks are only in this mess because the government forced them to lend money to destitute minorities.

Oh K-Lo. K-Lo, K-Lo, K-Lo. You can’t really be this dumb can you?

Just Curious [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

If Obama could go to Germany and give a speech in English and be not only understood but well-received, why does he say we all need to learn another language?

Similarly, why should kids ever learn to do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division if they have calculators to do it all for them? Hell, why should we bother teaching kids to read when they can just listen to books on tape? Game, set, match, LIE-beral scum! That’ll learn ya to try to teach our kids yer elitist “knowledge!”

At this rate, I expect the Republican Party’s platform will soon degenerate into a collection of grunting sounds and vaguely menacing snorts. Anything more than that will be too much for their intellects to handle.

The wankers have been out in force (yes, we’re looking at you, Chuckles!), so we figure there’s no better time to see what the person who broke the story in the first place, and has the added advantage of living in Berlin, has to say:

“What Obama does not seem to understand is that the Brandenburg Gate is something you earn,” writes Krauthammer. Wrong. […] Krauthammer is just making this shit up. There are no rules like this in Berlin. He’s just inventing stuff to correspond with two big presidential speeches in Berlin that he and his readers remember with some measure of awe. But Bill Clinton spoke in front of the Brandenburg Gate in 1994 without any of these supposed qualifications. No one remembers that speech. So why isn’t it possible that Obama just wants to be a new Clinton (not such a vaulting ambition)? Krauthammer doesn’t bring this up because it does him no good rhetorically.

Bring out the whip:

Just to be clear about the Victory Column: It is not a Nazi monument. Obama has not flunked history — or offended Germans — by choosing to speak there. The original source of this story is, again, my own employer, so I know when bloggers inflate the details out of all proportion. Some minor German politicians have grumbled about the Siegessäule’s history, for political reasons, but their comments aren’t very important.

There’s plenty more of the good stuff over at Radio Free Mike, and you are strongly encouraged to read the thing in its entirety.

I don’t really like to play the “just-imagine-the-wingnut-outrage” game, but this is, I think, a perfect opportunity to do it. John McCain went on the attack and said this about Obama:

I had the courage and the judgment to say that I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war. It seems to me that Senator Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.

This loathsome little effort at reading Obama’s mind, of course, elicited a round of huzzahs from the usual suspects, including the pretend pirates pirate at Pirate’s Cove

But suppose that Obama had said this:

I had the courage and the judgment to say that I would rather lose a political campaign than spill more American blood. It seems to me that Senator McCain would rather spill more American blood in order to win a political campaign.

They’d still be scraping pieces of John Hinderaker’s skull from the ceiling in his office

Patrick Ruffini, another one of those puzzlingly well-placed Republican blogger-consultant-columnist-Webmaster-operatives, as well as a general all-around cigar cutter and Kool-Aid drug mule, thinks he’s found a good one:

Obama Campaign Prints German-language Flyers for Berlin Rally
by Patrick Ruffini | July 22, 2008 at 10:36 PM

This is pretty extraordinary. A candidate for the American Presidency is using flyers printed in German to turn people out for his campaign rally in Berlin on Thursday. This flyer can be found on a bilingual page on BarackObama.com advertising the event:

The German flyers bear Obama’s campaign logo and say “Paid for by Obama for America.”

Get that? …For America! For America! But it’s in German!!!

I’m surprised at this lapse in judgment in an otherwise well-oiled and professional Obama campaign. The last time they printed up campaign paraphenalia in a foreign language, it didn’t work out so hot for them.

Here he’s referring to the tongue spoken in Lata, and also in its former colonies in Latin America. This attempt to pander to the Latts was widely derided by fellows such as Patrick Ruffini (whose name means “Patrick, the Little Ruff” in his native dialect of Miscegenated Catholic Immigrant). When English is declared as the official language of the United States, there’ll be no more of this ‘Novus Ordo Seclorum’ and ‘Semper Fidelis,’ not to mention ‘Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc’ or what’s that other one? Oh yeah, ‘E Pluribus Unum.’ It’s a veritable Tower of Babel; it’s tearing this country apart.

So, this isn’t just some sober, high-minded foreign policy speech, part of a foreign trip occurring under the auspices of his official Senate office. It is a campaign rally occuring on foreign soil. They are using the same tactics to turn out Germans to an event as they would to any rally right here in America.

Tactics like telling people where the event will be, and at what time.

This after Obama’s campaign said this:

“It is not going to be a political speech,” said a senior foreign policy adviser, who spoke to reporters on background. “When the president of the United States goes and gives a speech, it is not a political speech or a political rally.

“But he is not president of the United States,” a reporter reminded the adviser.

And he therefore has no right to travel overseas and speak to foreigners. Has he forgotten that there are foreigners who want to kill us? This unconditional meeting-with-foreigners sends a dangerous message, emboldening those who have rejected America by choosing to back foreign regimes, etc.

The sea of Germans drummed up by the Obama campaign…

Are we alone in picturing the following?

Above: Screee-eee-eee!

…will be used as props to tell us Americans how to vote, and the campaign isn’t trying to pretend otherwise.

…As is demonstrated by the campaign saying otherwise without declaring it to be Backwards Day — because if it is Backwards Day, they must backwardsly not declare it to be; and you can see how their little scheme falls apart from there. Also noted: Whenever Germans do something, Americans are helpless not to follow. Cases in point: Klaus Nomi, Zungenwurst, der Urin-Therapie.

But the campaign is clearly attempting to make it seem as if Obama can attract an audience, using the crowds that attend Obama events as pawns in their crooked game. These cynical attempts to make the candidate look good, and thus to tell us how to vote, are beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse.

On the other hand [heh heh], do you know who else used to drum up a sea of Germans to be used as props, and who did not try to pretend otherwise? [heh heh] I’m not going to say, but he sure did cause quite a “furor.” [heh heh]

That’s breathtakingly arrogant, and par for the course for Barack Obama.

So to sum up: The sea of Germans drummed up will be used as props, and while this is breathtaking, it is par for the course. That would be a geographic metaphor, a music or sales metaphor, a stage or film metaphor, a metaphor based on a bodily sensation, and then a golf metaphor, all smashed together like the cars of a wrecked circus train.

Yes, we’ll go for the cheap shot. ‘Arrogance’ is writing a broadside like Ruffini’s, and doing it in such crappy English.

Update: Ruffini responds via Twitter:

Anyone who thinks that the issue is a German flyer in Germany is a nitwit. The issue is electioneering on foreign soil and personality cult

Anyone who thinks we’ve been making fun of Patrick Ruffini’s political utterings is a nitwit. The issue is shiny suits and ‘the wet look’:

[Hanx! Dragon-King Wangchuck]