Sadly, No!

UPDATE: OK, so it seems I might have been pwn3d a little bit, as this guy apparently was trying to write something satirical. All the same, he wrote it in a way that made it virtually impossible to tell if he was being funny or being just another dumb-ass right-winger. There’s virtually zero difference between this op-ed and your typical Jonah Goldberg column, so you can see why I had such an itchy trigger finger. At any rate, I think my take-down still stands, since it’s entirely possible that Fred Hiatt actually took this seriously and thought this would be informative commentary. After all, this is the same guy who regularly publishes Kathleen Parker’s rants demanding that women be banned from serving in the armed forces. Hell, just today the SOB published a completely-serious op-ed by Amity Shlaes called “Phil Gramm Is Right.”

In other words, this is all central to my point. Dig?

Pretend you’re Fred Hiatt. You run the Washington Post editorial page. You have the ability to seek out and publish some of the most intelligent and thoughtful writers and scholars in the world, many of whom are clamoring to gain exposure to a mass audience. So what do you do? Do you scour the globe for unique, fresh and informative voices to provide the very best expert commentary that will give your readers a better understanding of the world we live in? Or do you publish editorials like this one that call environmentalists a bunch of fags? Take a look:

Hummer, How We Need Thee

By Matthew DeBord

When General Motors announced that it would subject its Hummer division to what in the automotive business is known as a “review,” you could hear the tree huggers, the unreconstructed hippies, the postmodern Greens, Al Gore’s organic peanut gallery, every single customer at the Pasadena Whole Foods and the United Prius Owners of America shove aside their alfalfa sprouts and commence clapping.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. OMG ROFL IT IS TOO FUNNY FOREVER. PEOPLE WHO GIVE A SHIT ABOUT NOT POLLUTING THE FUCK OUT OF EVERYTHING ARE A BUNCH OF VA-JAY-JAYS!!!!1!! WHO EAT HEALTHY FOOD!!!! OMG WHO THE FUCK EATS HEALTHY FOOD THEY ARE TEH F4GZ!!!!!

It goes on like this:

[I]t would be a mistake for GM, assisted by the raving grease-monkey CPAs of Citibank, to sell the brand to an upstart carmaker in India or China or to breed it as a hybrid, as some have suggested. GM desperately needs an obnoxious, attention-grabbing brand to keep from turning into a dreary shadow of its former self. And America needs the Hummer to remind us of what has always made our automobiles stand out, from the tailfin 1950s to the muscle car 1960s and ’70s: swagger.

Uh, yeah. Enjoy your “swagger” when you’re paying $600 a month for gas, asshole. Bling-bling!

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“Make my day, fairy!”

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Cassy Fiano — America’s favorite double-wide-trailer-park blogger — has fired up her dial-up connection, cracked open a can of Old Milwaukee, lit up another Newport, and posted, at the CheezWhizBang blog, a dire warning to all straight white people of the dastardly trepidations of teh gays:

What happens if you don’t agree with the homosexual agenda?

Uh, I dunno. I suppose teh gay stormtroopers invade your trailer and force you to wear a spaghetti-strap get-up that is probably not the right fashion choice for you? No, worse:

They’ll do everything they can to defame you, shut down your business, and make sure you are never heard from in public again.

That’s right. There are roving bands of Pinochet-inspired gays who are kidnapping teh straights by the thousands from public places and “disappearing” them. Sadly, this has apparently not happened to Cassy because we are, obviously, still hearing way too much from, and seeing way too much of, her.

The latest offender is Doug Manchester, owner of the Manchester Hyatt Hotel, is [sic] going to be the victim of a gay rights protest. His “crime”? He doesn’t support gay marriage!

Poor Doug Manchester. There he was, minding his own business, when teh adherents of the homosexual agenda used their secret reverse gaydar mind rays to discover that he thinks that guys getting married to each other is icky. Well, not really. Manchester has given $125,000 to the California campaign for a ballot proposition designed to overturn gay marriage in California. Manchester’s contribution is one of the largest individual contributions to the anti-gay campaign and more than Cassy has so far made in her lifetime as (I would surmise) a part-time cashier at Kroger’s. Saying that Manchester simply “doesn’t like gay marriage” is rather like saying that General Sherman simply preferred New York to Atlanta.

From these people’s perspective, you aren’t allowed to have a different opinion than the one they hold.

At this point, of course, I want to grab Cassy by the spaghetti-straps (metaphorically speaking only) and shake some sense into her. Teh gays aren’t pissed off simply because Manchester has a different opinion. Manchester could sit in his hotel and stew about gay marriage to his heart’s content for all anyone cares; the call for boycotting his hotel got started when he wrote a big fat check for Proposition 8.

And yet somehow, we’re the ones painted as intolerant and close-minded.

Next thing you know we’ll be hearing that gay marriage is a hate crime.

A NATION OF WHINERS

• Man, fuck everyone! I’m already rich, and by the time society collapses I’ll be downloaded into my new robot body and macking it with hot cyber-babes in my space brothel. Excelsior!

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

This will only get funnier:

Gramm Remark Adds to McCain’s Difficulty Addressing the Economy

Sen. John McCain ventured to an auto-parts supplier in this hard-hit Detroit suburb to express sympathy for those affected by Michigan’s economic malaise and to talk up his ideas for creating jobs in the region.

But a day after a top McCain economic adviser dismissed the nation’s struggles as a “mental recession,” the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s message landed with a thud, as workers sat in stony silence.

McCain was already running into a stiff headwind because of an ailing economy, and his task only became tougher after former senator Phil Gramm (R-Tex.) suggested that the United States has “become a nation of whiners.”

Gramm, who has helped shape McCain’s presidential campaign and is a close friend of the candidate, expressed no regret on Thursday for the comments he made in an interview with the Washington Times, saying: “I’m not going to retract any of it. Every word I said was true.”

See, Gramm’s “let the whiners eat goddamn cake” statement doesn’t really qualify as a “gaffe,” because he actually meant it to come off as it did. Gaffes are statements or phrases that are poorly-worded and that can be interpreted as crude or offensive. When Crazy Phil Gramm says that the economy is really in awesome shape and that the American people are just a bunch of sissified whiners, he really means it. This, my friends, is the crux of right-wing ideology: the idea that non-rich people are entirely to blame for any misfortunes they encounter. T’ain’t no gaffe, son.

Good luck dispwning this fool, St. BBQ.

UPDATE: More whining:

Options expert calls Fannie, Freddie shares ‘worthless’

Market analyst Jon Najarian at options research firm OptionMonster Inc. in a research note Friday morning said that, although he believes government-sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will continue doing business, “their shares in my opinion are likely worthless.” He said crude-oil prices hitting another record and tough talk from Treasury Secretary Paulson on banks had set the table for a “monster” day in the markets Friday. “There is no reading between the lines necessary here,” Najarian wrote. “I think Freddie and Fannie equity may be toast, which means the government will simply take over both, as [it] can’t let $5 trillion in mortgages vaporize.”

Anyone else want to store their life savings under my mattress?

UPDATE II: See also.

If any of your have time today, please send a well-written and intelligent note to University of Minnesota President Robert Bruininks defending our pal PZ Myers, who is under assault from the Catholic League for making fun of a cracker. Yeah, I’m serious. Crazy Dark Ages bastards…

Oh, Phil Gramm. Whatever will Ma’n’Pa America think when they turn on their teevee at night and find out that you’ve just called them “whiners”:

McCain adviser talks of ‘mental recession’

With the economy on the top of voters’ minds, Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s top economic adviser said the Arizona senator will lay down a detailed program to revive dynamic growth with dramatic tax and spending reforms.

In an interview with the Washington Times, Phil Gramm, a former Texas senator who is now vice chairman of UBS, the giant Swiss bank, said he expects Mr. McCain to inherit a sluggish economy if he wins the presidency, weighed down above all by the conviction of many Americans that economic conditions are the worst in two or three decades and that America is in decline.

“You’ve heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession,” he said, noting that growth has held up at about 1 percent despite all the publicity over losing jobs to India, China, illegal immigration, housing and credit problems and record oil prices. “We may have a recession; we haven’t had one yet.”

“We have sort of become a nation of whiners,” he said. “You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline” despite a major export boom that is the primary reason that growth continues in the economy, he said.

Yessir, this is gold. And when I say “gold,” I mean, “SWEEEEEET, SWEEEEEET GOLD IN THEM THAR HILLS!!!!!”

See, as much as a lot of us correctly complain about the Democrats, we’re still going to vote for them if only to avoid the insane “Let them eat cake” wingnuttery of richy-rich scumbags like Phil Gramm. Obama campaign, if you aren’t a-screamin’ to the high hills about this quote within the next 30 seconds, then y’all has already failed big-time.

Frankenstein Endorses Obama

• When I say Madeline Albright is like Frankenstein, I mean because she killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis in the wrong way, not that she is a gross ugly monster. Wink, wink.

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

Above: One of these things just doesn’t belong

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Apparently, America is not producing enough domestic scolds and has had to start importing them from Slovenia. Yes, Mary Grabar, everyone’s favorite humorless right-wing academic, is back, and her granny-panties are, as always, in a twist.

“University classrooms are starting to look a lot like Oprah,” she says to our confusion. Does she mean black? Expensively dressed? Constantly fluctuating in size? No, she means that they’re filled with “emotive, postmodern bunkum”.

Let’s skip my usual rant about how the only thing these people seem to actually know about postmodernism is that they hate it, and head straight for the buffet.

I suppose I should not have been surprised that Oprah Winfrey gave the commencement address at Stanford University.

When you’re a professional outrage manufacturer, you’re not surprised at anything, especially unsurprising things like a famous person giving a commencement speech at a prominent school. Your job is not to be surprised, but to be offended.

My college classroom, if I follow the dominant pedagogical directives, should resemble Oprah’s emotive coffee klatches.

Mary, of course, is a professor of literature, and as we all know, emotion has nothing to do with art.

And it’s something that I sense my students have come to expect, already versed as they are in the mantra of “I feel” and “that’s your opinion.”

It is unacceptable in Grabardemia to feel something about literature, or to claim that someone else’s opinion might not necessarily be valid, but it is perfectly acceptable to make sweeping generalizations based on what you “sense” your students have come to expect.

The hands are quick to pop up when I pose a question like “Did you like the poem?” or “What did you think of the Misfit?” But when it comes time to closely interpret a couple of lines from Paradise Lost, most of the students (those who have brought the book) do not deign even to look at the page. Few bother to note my clarifications or explications.

In other words, when Mary asks her students what they thought of something, they answer readily. But when she tells them what they are supposed to think about something, they don’t pay much attention. What a great teacher she must be!
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I don’t normally mix in my work with my blog life, but this slideshow is fairly relevant to a lot of the insider Internets humor that we at Sadly, No! deploy on a daily basis. So if you’ve ever felt confused by the litany of LOLCats, 1337 and nerdy video game references that have plagued this blog from the outset, feel free to use this as a reference. As I write in the introduction:

A concise history of silly Internet traditions

Let’s face it: the Internet can be a strange and intimidating place. After all, it only takes one foolish click on a dodgy link embedded within a spam email, and then BAM! A haxxor is ROFL because he pwn3d you with a Rick Roll and proclaims that all your base are belong to us. And despite the fact that you have no idea what the heck just happened to you, you do feel vaguely annoyed that you’re suddenly humming “Never Gonna Give You Up” against your will.

Enjoy!

I tell ya, there’s nothing more creepy enjoyable than to read a bitter winger complain about the state of the dating scene these days. It gets even better when the winger in question puts all the blame on one side (i.e., women) for his lack of success. We can see this phenomenon in effect over at the Modern Conservative blog, where a wingnut calling hisself “The Stranger” bemoans the lack of “real” womenfolk populating the Yoo-Ess-Uv-Ay:

Women Are the New Men

by The Stranger

Turn on the TV these days and what you see mostly are strident, angry women. In your face, particularly if it’s the face of a male. Sarcastically putting the males in their places. Lately, and increasingly, punching the lights out of the men when its called for and sometimes when its not – just to let the men know who the bosses are these days: WOMEN: THE NEW MEN!!!

Why is it that in most commercials being shown on TV the man is the goofball, the doofus? In family commercials Dad is the dummy of the household, butt of derision, the one who is lame, who needs to be brought up to speed, often by the kids in the family. And if they’re not the ones doing it, then there’s the man of the house – MOM!! – the authority figure, the one who wears the pants (think Hilary Clinton) – the one with the BALLS (again, think Hilary Clinton). Poor dad – he no longer knows best. Its all about mom now.

The silent majority, the oppressed, the disenfranchised, life force being discriminated against, and disrespected today – are men.

Indeed — why are there so few men in positions of power these days? It’s not enough that both presidential candidates are men, or that men comprise the majority of big-bucks CEOs, or that most members of the Supreme Court and elected members of Congress are men. No, none of that shit means nothin’: women got all the power today, man, as evidenced by the fact that I saw a couple of movies and I watch too much television. Dudes got it rough!

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