Sadly, No!

Here’s Malkin on her latest rampage:

NAACP race-monger: Obama was “lynched” by a cartoon!
By Michelle Malkin • July 17, 2008 08:58 AM

Geez, I thought that the two Texas dunces who protested the phrase “black holes” had won the grievance-mongering morons of the year award.

They’ve got competition.

Enter Myrlie Evers-Williams, NAACP official and widow of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers. She is decrying the New Yorker cartoon of the Obamas as a “lynching.” Hey, never mind that it’s the critics of Obama who are the subject of the cartoon’s “lynching.” Evers-Williams’ cartoon comprehension score: F-. Some people to need to be kept away from the microphone.

Naturally, we looked around for about ten minutes and found a major conservative blogger advocating the vigilante killing of black crime suspects, i.e. lynching. It’s a smug, thoughtless blar-har of a post that will bring no criticism from the right — especially from Malkin, who is in her best element beating up on Medgar Evers’s 73-year-old widow. (Myrlie Evers-Williams, as it happens, retired from the NAACP board in 1998, and was speaking to a luncheon group.)

The situation is classic: A young black man is accused of molesting, or as the local FOX affiliate had it, of ‘grabbing the butt,’ of a 12-year-old girl. When the girl’s father confronted him, he and seven (young, black) friends allegedly brutally beat the father. The incident, at a Shakopee, Minnesota amusement park, was apparently very nasty, and seven of the eight young men arrested are reportedly facing felony assault charges.

And then John Hinderaker of Powerline (still and forever Time Magazine’s 2004 blog of the year) posts a picture of the main suspect, descends into archly quote-marked terms like “homies” and “men,” and asserts that it’s time to start shooting people:

Initially, the local media downplayed the story, presumably because of the race of the criminals. But today, the Minneapolis Star Tribune broke down and covered it. […]

The story is an infuriating one in several ways, but what strikes me most forcibly is that it would have been a good thing if a few armed citizens had happened by while the assault was in progress. It’s no surprise that the victim’s wife and daughters couldn’t protect him from eight “men,” and apparently [the Valleyfair amusement park’s] security force is unarmed. So the optimal outcome here would have been for one or more normal citizens to pull a firearm, shoot a couple of the criminals, and hold the rest until the police arrived. Criminals who carry out outrageous assaults in public do so on the assumption that passersby will not be able to stop them. Absent firearms, that assumption is reasonable. So let’s hear it for concealed carry.

[…] Against a gang such as the one that is now on the loose in the Twin Cities, only armed citizens can be effective.

Except “on the loose” means “in police custody,” since all eight suspects were duly arrested. Maybe Hindy and his friends can work out a midnight deal with the jailer. I believe the standard routine was to have suspects ‘transferred’ under light security, such that unforeseen, spontaneous events would often prevent them from reaching their destination. We know of someone who can help explain the procedures.

In all seriousness — and not to make too much of Hindy’s arrogant typing — it isn’t malice or thuggism that makes right-wing blowhards keep deciding, year after year and incident after incident, that it’s time to overturn the legal system and mete out rifle justice; and in any case, they’re unlikely to wheeze up from their couches and actually do anything, instead of just endlessly talking about it and egging each other on. It’s the notion that the world is divided into ‘good people’ and ‘bad people,’ and that they can always tell, by metrics as simple as reading a story in the newspaper, which ones are which. They expect the world to be simple, and when the world disappoints them, it is the world’s fault and problem and none of theirs. Suspects are guilty; the guilty should be punished.

Black suspects, though, are also guilty of acting in the way that liberals always try to convince us that blacks don’t necessarily act, which just goes to show you, and oooh doesn’t that just get you boiling, and we ought to show them a thing or two, etc. If the young men had been white — and here is the eternal, bleeding rub — no Hinderaker would have appeared to suggest that they be executed on the street.

But back to Michelle, with her shriek against the word, ‘lynching,’ used in a figurative sense by a woman whose husband was ‘slain,’ i.e. literally lynched. Evers was reported as saying that “political spin masters and the news media are painting the Obamas as unpatriotic and dangerous radicals.” Malkin smugly remarks:

And that, dear readers, is what we call self-satire.

Obama needs to grow a pair. This woman needs to grow a brain.

Insert snarkily sprightly rejoinder. It looks like Malkin is at that point in her cycle where she’ll keep saying more and more poisonously vicious things until a general uproar roars up against her. It’s always educational to watch her later, when she goes around feigning innocence and everyone seems to forget how evil she’d gotten, how utterly off the map of sane discourse. This woman needs to grow a soul.

When K-Lo writes an article at America’s Shittiest Website™ called “Holy Sex@40,” it would be a grave disservice to our readers to pretend that this didn’t happen. And when the article gets some of the other Cornerdomites ramped up about Cosmopolitan magazine and sluts, it would be not just a disservice, but a crime, to let this all pass by without comment on our part.

K-Lo’s article is a fond recollection of the 1968 Papal encyclical that sought to assure a steady supply of Catholic altar boys for the delectation of the clergy by declaring that contraception was even more sinful than touching your naughty parts (unless, of course, you provided every single detail of that experience with your naughty bits to your parish priest during a very lengthy confession):

Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops in Rome, said recently that “the encyclical is not simply a ‘no’ to contraception but also a defense of the dignity of woman against whatever might degrade her greatness as a person, wife and mother, reducing her to an object of pleasure.”

Apparently the best way to recognize the dignity of the woman is to elevate her to the status of a baby-making machine.

Of course, the worst thing about contraception is that it resulted in Cosmopolitan magazine:

[T]his month’s Cosmo … announces that the “one exception” to the rule that “The Pill has many positive effects” is that it might not be good for your bones. (No mention, of course, of your mental health or the quality of your relationship(s).)

Masturbation makes you go blind and the pill makes you go crazy. And don’t forget all the relationships that were destroyed by the use of contraception. The fact is (hehe) that the reason most guys leave their girlfriends or go gay is that their girlfriends were on the pill.

Forty years ago this summer, Pope Paul VI predicted that men will lose respect for women. They will “no longer (care) for her physical and psychological equilibrium.” The man would reach “the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion.” Could Pope Paul have been predicting the August 2008 cover of Cosmopolitan?

Or maybe he was predicting that Madonna would dump Guy Ritchie and shack up with A-Rod?

Over at the Corner, Mona Charen was the first to chime in on the Cosmo angle:

I was in the supermarket yesterday with my 14-year-old son who asked “What’s up with Cosmopolitan? What is that?” I replied, “It’s a magazine for sluts.”

What do you want to bet that when young Master Charen starts calling all the girls in his class sluts and hos, this filthy-mouthed mommy will try to blame it on MTV?

Charen’s “magazine for sluts” remark prompts this barely literate post from K-Lo:

A lot of girls we know and love who we don’t think of and who don’t want to be sluts read it —and take it in, absorbing more than they realize — alas.

And then go out and buy Barbie dolls that are dressed up in fishnet stockings. No, seriously, that’s what K-Lo means.

Then Iain Murray, who apparently wanks off to comic books, points out that the Black Canary wears fishnet stockings.

As you can see, it’s a slippery slope from condoms at Walgreen’s to a Barbie doll in fishnet stockings.

Gavin adds: Have we heard from Derbyshire yet, or is he down in the basement watching Sailor Moon?

Obama: Right Wing to Blame for Wife’s Negs

• In an interview in Glamour, Barack Obama claims that the conservative press has systematically ‘gone after’ his crazy wife who is scary. In this, my fourth anti-Obama Townhall column in two days, I call this a conspiracy theory. [Full disclosure: I also blog for Glamour.]

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

See also: Amanda Carpenter and the Case of the $600 Earrings.

Ms. Carpenter, a former anti-Hillary specialist, is the National Political Reporter for Townhall.com, an enterprise spun off from the Heritage Foundation in order to skirt laws against partisan political campaigning by nonprofit organizations. Townhall is headed by the Nixon attaché and right-wing radio howler Hugh Hewitt, the author of the book, If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It.

My new plan is to start doing titles like those in the old Tatler, the Addison/Steele coffeehouse joint of the early 1700s. The crux of the plan is that, since all of my zany retro ideas end up failing, I might as well trim down the project specs.

Ok wait, here’s one now.

She Is Not Just Whistling Dixie

McCain Gets My Vote
Marie Jon’
July 16, 2008

While some might be undecided on who to vote for this coming Election Day, for others it’s a no-brainer.

Update: I realized just now that I was thinking of The Spectator, Addison and Steele’s second periodical. Then I looked through some of its archived numbers and found no such titles, meaning that I’d have to wade into all this sort of thing to make sure I hadn’t, you know, just made the whole thing up.

So once again, one of my zany retro-publication projects goes down. I’m sure I’ll soon be back with another.

ABOVE: A Bert in a world of Ernies

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The ever-industrious and à la mode Gateway Pundit responds to the latest banal revelation from that dumb gotcha-tape that FOX News has been peddling as though it were the 21st Century version of the Richard Wright/James Baldwin feud:

Jesse Jackson: “Barack… He’s Telling N*****s How to Behave”

…Jackson says Obama’s telling n*****s how to behave.

The rest of the Jesse Jackson tape was released today.

Not surprisingly, Jesse used the n-word when describing Obama.

But that’s just the excitement talking. He links to this TVNewser story, and then quotes the entire story in plain sight, including this line:

Jesse Jackson did use the “N” word. But it was not directed at Barack Obama.

We don’t want to be like, “Oh that Gateway Pundit, gee whiz: always jumping up and down all like ‘Oh boy! Oh boy! The n-word!’ with his finely tuned N-dar pinging, gleefully poking at the asterisk key.” But it seems like we just worked through this issue with him, and after a smooth and congenial season in which he huffed and whooped and made stuff up day after day in a race-neutral fashion, now he’s back joyously ‘n’-hyphening all over the place — as if he were, you know, unable to freaking help himself.

Also, since we’re nit-picking, the phrase, “The rest of the Jesse Jackson tape was released today,” is contradicted by the fact, also quoted in plain sight in his very post, that no tape at all, but only a single sentence of an alleged transcript (which is, you know, quoted in full in the original story, in his post, and also above) was leaked to TVNewser.

How he gets away with this stuff, we’ll never understand. His daily visits are something like 25,000. You’d think the number would keep slipping downwards due to fatal bagel-cutting accidents, forks in toasters, hair dryers in bathtubs, perambulatory scissorings, walkings through plate glass doors, and drownings due to his readership gaping upwards during rainstorms.

He’s supposed to be a nice guy in real life, actually. But here’s the trick that’s getting really, really old:

Could you imagine if that would have been a white conservative mumbling that on tape?

And, this dude is supposed to be a civil rights leader? The double standards in our society are outrageous.

So say the damn word then, thou warrior of freedom. Knock out those asterisks and say it loud and often. Freedom means that we can say what we like. But here’s the part you seem unable to understand: It doesn’t mean that we can say whatever we like, and nobody is allowed to divine our intentions or think worse of us. Freedom of speech also means that if you say dumb, offensive things that make you look like a buffoon, people are free to exercise their own free speech by calling you a dumb, offensive buffoon.

Can we imagine a white conservative mumbling such a thing on tape? Oh gee, how about one also named Jesse, during a national TV appearance?*

But of course, to conservatives, that’s different.

* Note: I couldn’t nail down the source for the TV remark, so changed the link to a brief and incomplete compendium of Sen. Helms’s greatest hits. There ought to be something there for almost everyone.

Also, to end this foolishness once and for all, perhaps we ought to find a word meaning ‘white people’ that only white people are allowed to say. In fairness and for parallelism’s sake, it should be chosen by someone non-white. Any ideas?

ABOVE: Malkin explains position

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This is one of those things that’s incredibly obvious, but that would also set off days of howling and gnashing of teeth from the wingnutosphere if Obama said it:

Gates Warns of Militarized Policy

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned yesterday against the risk of a “creeping militarization” of U.S. foreign policy, saying the State Department should lead U.S. engagement with other countries, with the military playing a supporting role.

“We cannot kill or capture our way to victory” in the long-term campaign against terrorism, Gates said, arguing that military action should be subordinate to political and economic efforts to undermine extremism.

Indeed, the Wingnut Queen basically goes after Obama for making the same points years ago as Gates made today.

Why is our country populated by so many rank idiots?

Also, does Gates understand that he’s working for a preznit whose Grand Foreign Policy Doctrine was precisely that we should kill or capture our way to victory? I mean, does he even know who his boss is?

UPDATE: Oh my. The Ole Perfesser weighs in:

The problem, of course, is that the State Department hasn’t been up to the job. Given its abject failure in Iraq, and its — to put it charitably — very limited success in the Middle East generally, it’s no surprise that State has lost influence, while Defense, which has been far more successful, has picked up some of the slack. But if the State Department is to wield its traditional influence, it needs to start doing a better job. Otherwise its decline in influence is inevitable. The same is true for other agencies — like the CIA — that have dropped the ball repeatedly in recent years.

Uh-huh.

In the Perfesser’s world, the reason that the CIA and State have “failed” in their jobs is that they haven’t been nearly as keen to let Bush launch more stupid and pointless wars as the Perfesser would like to see. Let’s remember that this is the Ole Perfesser’s Grand Strategic Doctrine:

We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists, supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran, putting the mullahs’ expat business interests out of business, etc.

And:

If Bush’s effort here fails, it won’t be because the antiwar critique of bloodthirstiness and warmongering is correct. It will be because Bush hasn’t been vigorous enough in toppling governments and invading countries in the region. What happens with Syria in the next little while may answer that question.

And:

Regime change. More of it.

And that’s basically what it comes down to. If State and the CIA aren’t a-helpin’ in the killin’, then they has got to git got.

More signs that our economy is strong:

Price jump worst since ’91

Record gas and higher food prices took the government’s key inflation measure to the biggest annual jump since 1991, fanning fears that inflation pressures were much worse than expected.

The Labor Department reading is also another sign, along with mounting job losses and declining home prices, of the economic pain being felt by Americans as prices outstrip increases in paychecks.

The latest reading comes as Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is warning that inflation could be a major drag on the economy the rest of this year.

Prices paid at the retail level were up 5% on an annual basis in June, the biggest 12-month change since May 1991 – an annual figure that was skewed by the surge in gasoline prices related to the first Gulf War.

A separate Labor Department report showed the average hourly wage up only 3.4% over the same 12-month period, meaning the typical American is having trouble keeping up with the price increases.

Bush is going to leave this country with two unfinished wars, record oil prices, negative real wage growth, and enormous budget deficits.

Heckuva job.

And incidentally, Mr. Obama, do not expect anything resembling a honeymoon period if you get elected. You’re going to have a lot of shit on your plate and people will not be in a forgiving mood if you don’t jump right on it. Get ready to work your ass off, buddy.

Gavin adds: Oh, they’re warming up already.

ABOVE: Flunked Kraftwerk audition

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Why Wall Street fears Obama
The Democrat’s rhetoric on taxes and health care is frightening people in the investing classes over what critics call ‘wealth redistribution.’
By Jon Markman

Investors this summer have been placing their bets on an Obama presidency, and for the most part that hasn’t been good for the market.

Without giving him a chance to explain himself in detail on the campaign trail or at the Democratic National Convention, they are voting with their shares by tossing financial, health insurance, manufacturing and high-dividend stocks into the ash can, and are growing skeptical about energy companies as well.

Oklahoma Rebellion

• If the South had been allowed to secede from the Union, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today. Fortunately, there are signs that States’ Rights is once again becoming… Um, because they’re tired of Federal judicial decisions forcing them to… With the… Okay wait, why is everybody looking at me like that?

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

Shorter JR Dieckmann:

The AP Steps In Its Own Excrement

• Many are the stories that you will never hear from the treasonous hard-left liberal media. For instance, here is an AP piece about Iraqi yellowcake uranium that says the opposite of what I think it does.

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

Update: It looks like Dieckmann has been standing on the shoulders of giants, as it were. But with all the triumphant sky-hooting that Saddam’s elusive WMDs have been found, vindicating George W. Bush and all who sailed on him as super-geniuses who saved the world, there’s one thing that everybody seems to have missed or forgotten, or has for some reason decided not to mention. It’s the following part of the AP piece — which, admittedly, is cunningly hidden in a paragraph several column-inches from the top, practically demanding a municipal-water-records level of research in order to piece together the gloamy narrative, such as it is, from the fragments and hieroglyphs which remain:

Israeli warplanes bombed a reactor project at the site in 1981. Later, U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said.

Excelsior. Welp, we’ll certainly be hearing more about these shocking proven facts about the existence of Iraqi WMDs, which have been withheld from us by the liberal media. They hide things in paragraphs, you know.

ABOVE: Amanda Carpenter

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There’s a tsunami of tstupidity out there today as some mysterious cause — perhaps salmonella-tainted Beef Taco Hot Pockets or psilocybin-laced Cherry Coke — has gotten a major part of the right-wing blogosphere hopped up into such a howling, slobbering frenzy that Brad and Gavin can scarcely keep up with it. The least I can do is pitch in, and I barely had my browser fired up before I came across Amanda Carpenter, sitting on her tuffet, and shrieking about those elitist, hybrid-driving, espresso-sipping, book-reading, Ivy-League-attending, snooty-nosed Negroes that want to move into the White House instead of that down-to-earth, poor-as-dirt, straight-talking white guy with his underprivileged, salt-of-the-earth, beer-drinking, pizza-and-pretzels wife.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, complained the government’s $600 economic stimulus check was only enough to buy “a pair of earrings” while stumping for her husband. …

Although Mrs. Obama has been praised by fashionable outlets like Vogue magazine for her sense of style, her comments about $600 earrings reinforces an unflattering image of the Ivy-league educated Obama lawyers. They’ve both been called “elitist” several times though the course of the presidential campaign season.

Hearing this constant refrain from the likes of Amanda Carpenter about the “elite” Obamas is, I imagine, the closest I’ll get to understanding what it feels like being sodomized repeatedly by a glow-stick in a prison camp. Except, of course, ultimately the person shoving the glow-stick up my butt would get tired and stop.

Six-hundred-dollar earrings positively pale in comparison to Cindy McCain’s AmEx bill which, during one month not so long ago, made it up to $750,000. Not $750. Seven-hundred-and-fifty-fucking-thousand dollars. And don’t get me started on the $3,000 Escada suits. Or the $4.7 million condo in Phoenix; the $4.7 million pied-à-terre in Coronado, California; the “scenic ranch” in Sedona; the condo in Arlington, Virginia; the little shack in La Jolla; and the household staff that got paid $273,000 last year to keep Cindy in the working-class, down-to-earth, I-feel-your-pain style to which she has become accustomed. And when Cindy steals a recipe to share on the McCain website, it’s not a tuna-noodle casserole or a even an Oreo-cookie pie, it’s Ahi Tuna with Napa Cabbage Slaw. That’s right, Ahi Tuna — an ingredient that you can find in every Kroger’s in middle America, right next to the Osetra caviar, the Kobe beef, and the fresh white Piedmontese truffles. Give me a break.

To make this cluster-fuck of stupidity even worse, Michelle didn’t even say what Amanda says she said. Here is what she said:

“You’re getting $600,” she told an audience of mostly African-American women here. “What can you do with that? Not to be ungrateful or anything. But maybe it pays down a bill, but it doesn’t pay down every bill every month.”

“Barack’s approach is that the short-term quick fix kinda stuff sounds good,” she continued. “And it may even feel good that first month when you get that check. And then you go out and you buy a pair of earrings,” she joked.

She doesn’t say that she or anyone else would use the entire $600 to buy earrings or that the earrings were the only thing one could buy with the $600. Indeed, she first talks about people using the $600 to pay down some bills.

The truly pathetic thing is that there are people who will listen to these mouth-breathing, nose-picking, spittle-drooling disingenuous right-wing chumpweasels like Amanda and buy the preposterous notion that the Obamas are elitist and the McCains are not. We’re doomed. Really.