I’ve just noticed there’s a glaring lack in our lexical facilities, and I’m hoping some of you will help me coin a neologism to fill it.
I’m looking for a term to describe someone who creates a fake instance of martyrdom out of nothing; something with a soupçon of mockery about it, the way the term “wigger” is usually seen as mocking white suburban kids who emulate a way of life that they know nothing about personally. Because without this word, I’ll never be able to properly point out just how stupid Janet Folger is.
Above: The criminalization of Annie Sez
Go ahead: Arrest me
Censorship. Book burning. The Criminalization of Christianity. It’s here and it’s now the law in the state of Colorado.
The Ku Klux Klan can march. The Nazis can hand out brochures. Skinheads can do whatever it is that Skinheads do. But in the state of Colorado, the only group who is NOT allowed to be heard is … the Christians. They’re the ones who disagree with same-sex marriage, cohabitation, and believe the biblical view that homosexuality is a sin. But if they voice that objection from now on, it had better be inside the four walls of a church. If not, they’ll be staring at the four walls of a prison cell … for up to a year.
A year? Are you kidding me?
No kidding.
Oh. I guess you aren’t kidding me, then.
You see, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter signed into law SB 200 and turned public restrooms and locker rooms into a predator paradise where men can enter (and shower in) any female public facility in the state. You’d think that would be as bad as it gets – but wait: Section 8 of that same bill claims to trump the First Amendment:
Good Lord! This is serious. Colorado has finally declared itself a breakaway republic. Allowing state law to trump the Constitution? This is a Constitutional crisis! This will not stand. What does this detestable piece of legislation say, Janet? Read the rest of this entry »
The Supreme Court decision overturning DC’s handgun law is out. Scalia’s majority opinion is 64 pages.
Query: what great legal mind said this about the majority opinion in the recent Gitmo case?
Oh, and by the way, the Kennedy decision was 70 pages. If you have to write seventy pages to justify a simple, absurd decision, you know you’re wrong. You’re just fertilizing.
And will that towering legal intellect make the same criticism of Scalia’s opinion?
ABOVE: Max Boot really should be holding a giant dildo, but Gavin would get mad at me.
Over at America’s Second Shittiest Website™, Max “Brown People Can Lick America’s” Boot is pimping for our perpetual presence in Iraq, pumping his fist in the air and shouting “100 More Years! USA! 100 More Years! USA!” after even the most sycophantic McCain supporters have slunk away in shame from such a preposterous idea. Here’s how Boot defends spending a century in Baghdad:
Iraq has a sovereign government that, if it so desires, could tell us to get lost, and we would do it.
Yeah, right. Bush would, if told to leave, shrug his shoulders, say okay, and put all troops on the next boat home, even though for the last five years he’s been arguing that if we leave Iraq the terr-er-ists would swarm our shores and kill us all in our beds.
But wait, looky here! Boot, who was just saying we’d pull out immediately if asked, can’t get two more paragraphs into his cheerleading routine without pointing out the catastrophic consequences of withdrawal:
[I]f progress continues at the rate we’ve seen in the past year, there is no doubt we can pull out a lot of our troops. But that doesn’t mean that we can safely carry out the Barack Obama plan–all brigade combat teams out within 16 months.
Unless, of course, the Iraqi government asks us to leave, in which case it will be totally safe and we would do it immediately upon being asked.
Such a misguided policy would have many consequences. It might well ignite genocide in Iraq, destabilize its neighbors, export terrorism—and, yes, endanger the world’s supply of oil. What is wrong with trying to protect the world’s oil supply especially at a time when demand is as tight as it is?
Whoop, there is is. The oil thing. How things have changed. Wasn’t it only just yesterday that if someone said “no blood for oil,” Boot and the other neoclowns would start yelling that oil had nothing to do with the war, and that only deranged Bush-hating liberals could make such a preposterous — no, scandalous — suggestion? In fact, it wasjust yesterday that Boot was saying that oil wasn’t even the teensiest tiniest consideration for invading Iraq.
Of course, Max’s inconsistency here shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been keeping tabs on his unrelenting neoclownery. For the last three years, Max has been spinning around like a malfunctioning robot, spewing randomly generated defenses of our presence in Iraq, like his breathtaking claim that the walls in Baghdad separating Sunni and Shia neighborhood were no different than gated communities in the U.S. I suppose he’s hoping that one day one of his casus belli will make sense. And one day a monkey will type the complete text of King Lear.
Gavin adds:
Clif adds:
Sheez, all I have to do is say “giant dildo” and, next thing you know, Gavin trots out a menhir attended by one of its phallic acolytes. Does that mean I can put a giant dildo in Max’s hands as long as it doesn’t look too much like one?
Okay, wait. A little while ago, just down the page, Confederate Yankee was all het up on vigilantism, and he said:
There is a macabre old urban legend that has floated around for years in which an exceedingly bad person—a wife-beater, a child-abuser, or other such societal dreg—is found perforated with bullets, and knowing local law enforcement officials note that the miscreant’s death was a serious suicide, where the deceased if found having shot himself in the head and/or back multiple times, in some variations even taking the time to reload an empty weapon and fire again.
Such stories, of course, are told with a knowing smile.
And we were like:
Above: A knowing smile passes unto Confederate Yankee
I’m going to wander down there now and replace the old broken video thing with the new working video thing, except it would be really great if we could, like, transcend linear narratives, you know, by pretending things totally went off properly the first time.
Gavin adds: Maybe we can become Chris Dodd bitter-enders.
[ahem] Personally, I shall never in all my life forget the howling persecution that we endured from the O-bot smear machine and the Clintonazi long-knifers. They have tried to marginalize us, but ho! now we will band together and marginalize them.
Yes, as Dodd is our witness, it will be “unity” on our terms.
Above: We are prepared to battle our way to the frontier
Why, it’s Confederate Yankee again, and he’s been all stirred up by something he read on the Internet. Could it be the tide of liberalism destroying all that remains of our stand-up rooty-toot civilization of small landowners, prosperous non-unionized laborers, Know-Nothings, proponents of Free Silver, genial Ku-Kluxers, cowboys, soapy and pink-eared salesmen just in town for the convention, lone honest sheriffs, and independent Scots-Irish distillers?
Or is it the Supreme Court, that love/hate institution that keeps testing conservatives’ sense of constancy by issuing a ruling that makes them beam with pride for the democratic tradition of the independent judiciary, and then another ruling that makes them turn around and scream for the permanent abolishment of the treacherous viper-at-democracy’s-breast that has always been the so-called independent judiciary — or vice versa, depending on when you came in?
It almost reminds us of a macabre old urban legend.
There is a macabre old urban legend that has floated around for years in which an exceedingly bad person—a wife-beater, a child-abuser, or other such societal dreg—is found perforated with bullets, and knowing local law enforcement officials note that the miscreant’s death was a serious suicide, where the deceased if found having shot himself in the head and/or back multiple times, in some variations even taking the time to reload an empty weapon and fire again.
Such stories, of course, are told with a knowing smile.
Above: A knowing smile passes unto Confederate Yankee
Oh yes indeed. And indeed, one might even say that such stories about such stories are told with a knowing smile. Heh. Oh, this is subtle. We’re not sure, but we think he’s implying something.
We find before us—and perhaps a bit beneath us—a Supreme Court of the United States that in this session has found more sympathy and more previously unknown rights for suspected terrorists and child rapists than it has for the average American.
Because according to habeas-so-called-corpus, the average American is thrown into prison with no hope of… And, um, the Bill of Rights says that terrorists get to eat lemon chicken and walk free due to a technicality, because of the… See, unlike child molesters, the average American is executed for crimes that she never has a chance to… Aw, the hell with that confusing legal mumbo-jumbo. I say we kill some people, and I say we start soon.
From Bagram to Baltimore, expect to hear some names and dates begin to be associated with this and similar urban legends.
It is a truism of the human experience that when a people sees their system of justice fail due to inequities in the judicial process, they will find justice on their own.
Then again, it is a truism of the Confederate Yankee experience that he get something whoopingly, carpet-poundingly wrong every time he leave the gate, and pardon the double helping of subjunctive there, but we hasten to remark that of all the places in the world that begin with the letter ‘B,’ Bagram might not be the absolute best choice for an alliterative pairing with ‘Baltimore’:
In the chronicle of abuses that has emerged from America’s fight against terror, there may be no story more jarring than that of the two young men killed at a United States military detention center in Afghanistan in December 2002.
The two Afghans were found dead within days of each other, hanging by their shackled wrists in isolation cells at the prison in Bagram, north of Kabul. An Army investigation showed they were treated harshly by interrogators, deprived of sleep for days, and struck so often in the legs by guards that a coroner compared the injuries to being run over by a bus.
But more than a year after the Army began a major push to prosecute those responsible for the abuse of the two men and several other prisoners at Bagram, that effort has faltered badly.
Of 27 soldiers and officers against whom Army investigators had recommended criminal charges, 15 have been prosecuted. Five of those have pleaded guilty to assault and other crimes; the stiffest punishment any of them have received has been five months in a military prison. Only one soldier has been convicted at trial; he was not imprisoned at all.
On the other hand, damn: Maybe ol’ Con-Yank is a worse person than we thought.
Nuke ‘Em Lucom was never our beat (ah, how we miss The Dark Window!), but someone has to cover these things:
In life, Wilson C. Lucom was not exactly child-friendly. The curmudgeon never had children himself, nor was he especially close to the offspring of his third wife, Hilda. When he opened his ample checkbook, friends say, it was more likely to finance a conservative political cause than to help underprivileged youth.
After doling out relatively small portions of his tens of millions of dollars to survivors, he left the rest to a foundation he had dreamed up in secrecy to aid the poor children of Panama, where he spent the final years of his life.
Bonus fun fact:
Other amounts went to former household employees and to friends, including Christopher Ruddy, founder of NewsMax Media, which published many of Lucom’s writings online. Ruddy, who owed Lucom more than $1 million at the time of his death, has hired lawyers to represent his interests.
The bell has tolled: The American Prospect has a hard-edged piece today on Larry Johnson’s rise and fall as a liberal hero. Alas, Johnson.
There’s a bit more to say, though. The problem wasn’t just that Larry went so hard for Hillary Clinton that he began crediting nasty right-wing smears against other candidates: A lot of other liberal bloggers fell into the same trap, to some extent or another, and indeed some of them did us the courtesy of swinging by and going apeshit in comments, where it at least jazzed up our otherwise creaky and threadbare act. The problem seems more in the fact that Johnson is the sort of guy who experiences argument as affront — one of those forceful but brittle people we’ve all encountered who, if you tell them they’re doing something that drives you crazy, will feel compelled to double down and do it even harder, just to prove (perhaps to themselves) that you can’t tell them what to say or do.
The Prospect piece covers Larry’s mongering of the Michelle Obama ‘whitey’ rumor, but even that isn’t such a big deal in itself. A lot of wack narratives and mudclot rumors were slung around during the Democratic primary this season, and as we’ve seen with Corrente, Talk Left, and most of the other heavy-hitting Clinton sites, folks have tended to forget their differences pretty quickly since June 3rd, when no doubt remained as to who would be the Democratic nominee. What’s become a bigger deal is that as the complaints and protests mounted against the bogus ‘whitey’ thing and other such anti-Obama rumoroids and memelets, Johnson upped the rancor. He kept it up even after Clinton suspended her campaign, and even now shows no sign of stopping. His advocacy is, in short, an activity no longer coupled to cause-and-effect, to a rational sense of outcome. It has become the obsessive work of a Clinton cargo cultist, a bitter-ender, a retailer of spite.
Johnson’s latest idée fixe has been an as-yet-unspecified scandal believed to be encoded in a JPEG scan of a copy of Obama’s birth certificate — a field of inquiry in which his efforts have exactly paralleled those of the far-right Freeper crazies. In fact you can read the former piece, a stupendously ding-whoop, yar-yar investigative cowflop emitted by Johnson’s co-blogger TexasDarlin, either at Johnson’s No Quarter site, or at Free Republic. A comparison of the comments at the two sites is guaranteed to make you wonder who’s on which side, and why. Try it and see if you don’t come away lightheaded yet crushingly sober. Who are these people?
An irony that often attends upon characters like Larry Johnson (i.e. spooks and related personality types) is that they can be genuinely stunned and hurt when opinion turns against them. The irony dwells in the fact that their professional-issue, otherwise adaptive touch of narcissism can lead them to engage in provocative, chaos-seeking behavior, firstly without realizing that they’re doing it, and secondly without realizing that they’re doing it specifically to make people react. Sometimes this leads to gems and riches, as when Johnson hilariously left cranky notes in David Brooks’s mailbox. Sometimes, though, it just makes you want to crawl under the bed until the yeek goes away. Note to Johnson: It’s dusty under here; please just stop.
Update:
Candy asked if we could fix Johnson’s Agent Flowbee hairdo, and Rightwingsnarkle and Paul G provided the following solutions (hair at right courtesy Donnie Osmond):
Also, if anyone’s in the mood to stare into the heart of the sun, there’s a movement building in the Clinton-or-else cargo cult that leaves behind even Lambert of Corrente, one of the most grudging of hatchet-buryers:
The prog-bloggers kept shouting: Go! Go! Leave us, Clintonistas! This is OUR party now. Get out out OUT!
So out we went.
And we ain’t coming back soon.
[…] We will not forgive those who bigot-baited us simply because we refuse to doublethink our way around the Lightbringer’s nonstop lies.
We have only one way to cleanse the party of Moulitsas, Stassinopoulos, Aravosis, Marshall, Obama, Axelrod, Plouffe, Dean, Brazile and all those other pieces of subhuman sewage. We must make sure that Obama fails — either in August (very unlikely) or in November (more likely) or, if need be, in his presidency.
After that, and only after that, comes unity. On our terms.
There’s a larger (and I think more interesting) story here, but what’s striking at the moment is how quickly, in this Internet age, dunces can organize into confederacies.
ABOVE: Dafydd Ab Hugh né David Friedman, Le Roi du Sammich
Woohoo! Dafydd ab Hugh, the science-fiction writer and wackdoodle conservative blogger, has taken off time from writing about the mating rituals of the Straqnothlvorians, the hermaphroditic warrior race on the moon Phobos, to write a post revealing the truth about racist attacks on Barack Obama. Naturally, Dafydd’s idea of the truth here bears about as much relation to reality as his description of the mating rituals of the Straqnothlvorians (which, it would appear, could only have been dreamed up by a man whose entire sexual repertory is limited to self-gratification with the inside of an empty Snickers wrapper):
Everybody is reporting this little racist meme worm that slithered from the lips of Barack H. Obama on Friday:
We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”
…So how long will it be before a series of thuggish, racist e-mails, street-mailings, and YouTubes crudely attacking Barack Obama really does materialize? My guess is that it will wait until the election itself looms; possibly one week beforehand, just like the DUI hit on George W. Bush in 2000.
Why wait? For a very good reason: The perpetrators of that series of attacks do not want there to be enough time to discover the actual source of the “attacks”… which will originate from some radical leftist group hoping for a “backlash” against McCain.
Holy Tribbles, Lieutenant Uhura! You mean the Republicans did the DUI hit on W in 2000? No? Oh, I see. Republicans would never do such a thing. If it’s a late campaign hit against a Republican, it’s done by the Democrats. And if its a late campaign hit against a Democrat, it’s done by the Democrats All bad things are done by Democrats. Like the Democrat who spread the rumor in the Republican primary of 2000 that McCain fathered an illegitimate black baby. Because the Democrats wanted Bush to beat McCain, you see.
I am about 70% convinced that somebody on the Left will attempt just such a dirty trick.
Whew! At least he’s not 80% convinced, or we’d really be in trouble here.
The only defense is an immediate credible counter-accusation that if Democrats want to find the real racists, they should look in a mirror.
I know I’m gonna get in way too much trouble for saying this, but I can’t resist — I really don’t think Dafydd ought to be tellin’ other people to look in a mirror.
After all, so far in this election cycle, the only candidate to raise the point of Obama’s race has been — Hillary Clinton, who noted (correctly) that the only reason Obama was ahead of her in the delegate count was his overwhelming support by black voters.
Hold on there, big fella. Are you saying that it’s racist to observe (correctly) that Barack got more black votes than Hillary did? What planet are you living on? Oh, wait. This one:
Elsewhere on the planet, the Cardassian prisoner, Gul Ragat, walked in front of Julian Bashir like a man already dead whose legs had not yet gotten the message. Jadzia Dax followed somewhere far behind and to the side, so that she and Julian would not drift dose enough to make a single target. I wish we could talk, thought the doctor. But speech would have informed the prisoner that they were Federation, and Dax wanted to hold that information in reserve.
The Gul had recovered somewhat. The doctor quietly scanned him while he rested and determined that Ragat had no serious injuries — minor burns and abrasions, smoke inhalation, bruises, and other blunt-force trauma, but nothing life-threatening. The diagnosis was a relief. Had Gul Ragat required medical treatment, not all the wild splitheads on Sierra-Bravo 112-II could have stopped Bashir from doing his medical duty, and their cover as “Natives” would have been blown, Ragat would then realize that Starfleet officers had infiltrated the Cardassian/Drek’la occupation.
And so, you see, you can be 70% sure that the Democrats will be smearing their own candidate by disguising themselves as Cardassian natives and infiltrating the Drek’la occupation of the New York Times. Then they will enlist the aid of hermaphroditic Straqnothlvorian warriors to create a diversion while they say racist things about Gul Ragat, which will actually make people think that the Cardassians are doing that and rise up in rebellion. Or something like that.
