Sadly, No!

Above: Fur and abs abound at the PDX Drinking Sadlyly

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gavin takes two shots. t4toby approves

There was a point there at the beginning when we could have said No. Glad we missed it…

[Marita: I’m wondering if I posted a link to our registry, how long it would be before Gav noticed and removed it…]

mikey here. What are we doing again?

Hey, I have to actually live on in this town… somewhere. –What bar is this again?
gnu-limpet

Djur: HOLY CRAP FOLKS GARY RUPPERT IS HERE AND DOING KEGSTANDS WITH GAVIN

[Marita adds: more updates soon. As the designated driver, I am the only sober person here. Umm….. open thread?]

[Marita updates: Lessee – Toby #1 has been beatboxing for a homeless busker, Mikey has an adorable little laptop and a veritable armory in his bag… what am I missing?]

[Marita updates: Almost everyone is over at the pool tables playing 8-ball, and our table has been displaced by the DJs who are setting up. Toby looks like he’s focusing on not falling over. He’s decided that the coat hanger on the wall is a Klingon message. Hmmm…]

[t4toby updates: blargh blargh argh… trying to update… zip…]

John Kenneth Galbraith:

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

Above: Irving Kristol

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Irving Kristol, as quoted by Sidney Blumenthal in Rise of the Counter-Establishment (pg 154.):

Business understands the need for intellectuals [he, self-flatteringly, means neoconservatives]… Basically, it wants intellectuals to go out and justify profits and explain to people why corporations make a lot of money.

Just as every whore will eventually find his/her perfect john, neocon publicists finally found their dream clients: the malefactors of great wealth. Irving Kristol was and is not just a well-paid whore, but also the liaison — or, to properly continue the analogy — pimp for this relationship:

Kristol included scientists, lawyers, city planners, social workers, educators, criminologists, sociologists, and public health physicians whose hidden agenda, he discerned, was to propel the nation toward an economic system “so stringently regulated in detail as to fulfill many of the traditional anticapitalist aspirations of the Left.”…

…Kristol asked whether it was in the long-term interest of corporations to continue to support institutions that had proved so hostile. He appealed for a more discriminating corporate philanthropy that would identify and support those academics and intellectuals who believed in a strong private sector. Though they were few, they could be found, he insisted. And through the *Institute for Educational Affairs which he and William E. Simon founded in 1978, financial resources directed toward sympathetic scholars and the research projects of think tanks.

And that, children, is how the fink tank/wingnut welfare tradition started.

KERNERS ARE GO!

Monday, June 2nd., Ringlers Pub, 1332 West Burnside!

Above: Ringlers Pub

5PM until whenever (with a possible raid on Voodoo Donuts)!

Auxiliary jaunt at 4! To see the tall ships! At the waterfront!

This combination Drinking Sadlyly event and gender-neutral bachelor party may be liveblogged (if you’re lucky) by the inimitable and awesome Mikey, who is making the trip to PDX for the occasion!

It’s been a rough week for Dan Riehl, Steve Gilbert and their fellow dumpster-diving, countertop-appraising Stinkertons. In pursuing the riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma that isn’t the military record of Barack Obama’s great-uncle, they’ve had their ears boxed by a WWII vet, been easily proven wrong in their speculative fantasies and come this close to breaking bread with Holocaust deniers as they parsed the differences between stops on the Nazi roadmap to the Final Solution.

It really couldn’t get more embarrassing for these people, could it? Well, it could, but we’d have to imagine a twist to this story so far-fetched as to beggar belief. Like, say, if the eager investigator on Gilbert’s ‘Sweetness and Light’ blog who sent harassing emails to WWII vet Ray Kitchell and his son Mark:

—– Original Message —–
From: cigarskunk
To: [mark kitchell]
Sent: Wednesday, May 28, 2008 6:38 PM
Subject: Searching for Charles W Payne

Dear Sirs,

In light of the recent controversy over the military service of Barrak Obama’s grandfather, Charles W Payne, I was hoping to contact you to get some kind of verification of his membership in the 89th.

I’ve checked the records of http://www.kshs.org/genealogis…..p;branch=N and they only list him as being in the Navy.

I would like to get a second source to confirm that Obama is still lying on this subject as my grandfathers, father and uncles all served in WWII, Korea and Vietnam and I don’t particularly care for politicians lying about the service of family members to further thier political agendas.

Thank you in advance!

From: [Mark Kitchell]
To: cigarskunk
Subject: Re: Searching for Charles W Payne
Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 18:52:48 +0200

You are the one who is lying. Mr. Payne served in the 89th Divison, 355th Infantry Regiment, Company K.

…Turned out to be a sexual fetishist who regularly commissions artwork of himself as a cigar-chomping skunk getting its knob sucked by a menagerie of voluptuously drawn cartoon rabbits, gophers and other assorted mammalia. If he turned out to be a regular attendee of ‘furry’ gatherings so desperate and noxious in his social interactions that members of that oft-maligned subculture shunned him as a pariah.

Which is preposterous, of course. There’s just no way a person like that could be one of the leading figures in the Wingnutosphere’s ongoing Great Uncle investigation. It would be far too surreal if… Wait, what’s that you say?

No, you must be jok-

OMFG. You are fucking kidding me.

Above: Art hiked from Crush Yiff Destroy

(h/t: Archer 813 in comments.)

Gavin adds: Props and apologies to our furry commenters Cargo and Simba. From Crush Yiff Destroy comes an encomium, excerpted below:

In August, Cigarskunk came to CYD in order to assert his heterosexuality and to explain why the furries hated him: He was 100 percent straight, he smoked, he was conservative, and he brought females to conventions, because he was not gay. He stated, restated, and then stated some more that he really loved women and was totally straight, and then went on to call everybody else gay. Literally; he responded to every negative post by calling the poster a closet homosexual or a homophobe, and he did so in the kind of haughty manner that makes you want to plunge your hands through your computer screen and wrap your fingers around the throat of the person on the other side.

After babbling endlessly that he wasn’t gay and everyone else was, Cigarskunk began to ramble about cigars and how great they were. It was fetishistic: “Cigars, cigars, cigars, by God, I love cigars. My favorite color is cigar-brown. Cigar smoke, cigar smell, cigar taste; cigars are fucking great. I really, really like cigars. Cigars make my day. Cigars have a Zen-like quality to them, and they’re so damn good. Ooh, yes, cigars. I think about cigars all the time. I fucking love cigars.”

Rest assured, by the time his ass was banned in record time (after a mere 3 posts), everyone knew that he really, really, really loved cigars. Afterwards, Cigarskunk pounded out essays of staggering length, detailing how everyone at CYD was a lunatic and all the hate was heaped upon poor little him. Plus, cigars were great. Everyone pointed and laughed.

ABOVE: Right-wing diet tips

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Jonah Goldberg is piling on the McClellan business. Although that might be physically painful if literally true, Jonah’s takedown is scarcely perceptible in the metaphorical sense.

He starts out with a swipe at McClellan’s grasp of the English language:

It’s been rumored that McClellan was hired by the Bush White House to appeal to a specific sub-constituency: pasty middle-aged men with a thumbless grasp of the English language.

Although you may snicker at DoughBob LoadPants calling anyone else pasty, you should be convulsed in laughter and spewing your morning coffee all over your laptop that Jonah would have the temerity to accuse anyone else of having “a thumbless grasp of the English language.” Item:

In McClellan’s book, What Happened (oddly missing a question mark), the author purports to explain how the Bush White House launched a “propaganda machine” to push the country into a war of choice.

Sweet Fowler’s Modern English Usage on a pogo stick, this feckless fleshlump doesn’t even know that interrogative pronouns can be used both to ask a question and to introduce a noun clause. Goucher College should be quite proud of its most famous alumnus.

Gavin adds: To be rigorously charitable, he might have been attempting a joke. But as usual, the joke is ultimately on Jonah:

Jonah Goldberg, January 10, 2008:

[Ezra Klein] calls John Holbo’s “review” of my book “one of the finest pieces of writing I’ve ever read in the blogosphere.” Of course Holbo hadn’t actually — what’s that word again? oh right — read my book before he crafted this oh so fine piece of writing. Once again, Ezra is so perfectly, comically, Ezra. He himself famously finds it very hard to read books (It’s hard and it’s boring and it takes a really long time, he says). So he outsources criticism to people who haven’t read it either. It’s a pas de deux of phone-it-in hackery.

Wait, let’s have that phrase again:

…phone-it-in hackery.

Jonah Goldberg, May 30, 2008:

In McClellan’s book, What Happened (oddly missing a question mark), the author purports to explain how the Bush White House launched a “propaganda machine” to push the country into a war of choice.

I have not read the book. I will once I finish eating the contents of my sock drawer (which ranks slightly higher on my to-do list).

Don’t forget the crow drawer.

Clif adds: At the request of commenters sagra and Doctorb Science, we have Jonah with paste:

Hi there. I’m writing regarding your application to the 2008 Democratic National Convention’s General Blogger Pool.

As you may know, we’ve had overwhelming interest in the credentialed blogger program this year. Several hundred great blogs submitted applications. But we have very limited space. Unfortunately, your blog will not be credentialed at 2008 Democratic National Convention.

No problem!

See, I was gonna cut my hair, start pretending that Anne-Marie Slaughter is a Dirty Fucking Hippie, go back into my archive and change a few things (I believe the cachet thing is to have been for the Iraq War before one was against it), adopt a thoroughly Panglossian attitude about one or other of the Democratic candidates; I was gonna go the whole nine yards; I was gonna be a Sensible Liberal. And I totally would have pulled it off. People would have been saying, “My, who’s that handsome and informed fellow there? He could be the next Peter Beinart.” Sure, I would have had to stop fucking cussing, stop being occasionally funny, stop insulting wingnuts — and stop popping pills, too. But I was prepared to make the necessary sacrifices. And I could really use that extra 25 cents the establishment pays for a social democrat’s soul. I was gonna do it…

Until the DNCC murdered my embryonic career-change like.. well, rather like the partial-birth abortionists we all admire!

So now, I’ll have to go to Denver and blog from the “Big Tent” (I knew Armando’s ego was huge, but large enough to contain a whole media facility?) that the DNCC has kindly provided for the rejects from whose uncouth, Unserious opinions it wants maximum distance. I dunno where I’d stay, though; maybe some of my comrades in ANSWER have a spare cardboard box? (I do have an ex in Boulder but she’d probably shoot me if I knocked on her door. Not that she’d be wrong to do that.) Or how about you people from NORML? I mean, I’ll sleep on the street if I have to. I can pop enough tuinal, smoke enough crack, mainline enough meth, and down enough vodka to make it through — and being a dirty fucking hippie (a real one!), Lord knows I don’t need a place to bathe. I’m sure I’ll figure something out.

At any rate, fuck you thank you, DNCC. I’ll blog outside while others with half our traffic snack on your hors d’oeuvres. You could have had a Sensible Liberal. Now you’re gonna get Hunter S. Mailer Mencken.

So. Did anyone catch Lost tonight?

ABOVE: Mark Hemingway (no Photoshopping required)

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As copies of Scott McClellan’s book fall into the hands of über-partisan Bush nuts, we can expect that there will be an orgy of sleuthing, as the Bush nuts comb meticulously through McClellan’s book looking for intimations and hidden clues, rather like ancient Egyptian priests casting animal entrails and finding evidence of calumny in the particular twist of a goat’s small intestine.

Mark Hemingway has taken up this task at America’s Shittiest Website™ and believes he has evidence that McClellan was all along merely a liberal in disguise who took the Press Secretary position merely as an opportunity to write a lie-filled exposé that would allow him to enrich himself at the expense of his former employer.

I should have more to say about it later when I finish reading it, but I just got my grubby paws on McClellan’s book and this jumped out on page 36:

One of my favorite classes at UT was a leadership course taught by Sara Weddington, a longtime friend of Ann Richards who was known for her involvement representing the anonymous “Jane Roe” in Roe v. Wade, the case that made abortion legal across the United States.

Coming from an allegedly conservative Republican, that’s quite revealing.

Liking a class on leadership taught by a lawyer who once represented the plaintiff in Roe v. Wade is evidence that McClellan was a liberal mole in the Bush White House? No doubt Hemingway will also find conclusive evidence that McClellan was a donkey in elephant’s clothing from passages where McClellan confesses that he liked Jurassic Park even though it was directed by a liberal Jew, went to Starbucks once with a friend who ordered a soy-milk vente latte, and was twice close enough to Bill Clinton that he could have spit in his face, and didn’t.

Gavin adds:

ABOVE: Mark Hemingway
(Photoshop-enhanced)

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Google news search: Malkin+Donuts

Above: Another weekly staff meeting at Malkin, LLC

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

McClellan’s Publisher a Liberal

• The guy who published McClellan’s book is a LIBERAL!!! Who LIKES GEORGE SOROS!!! And MOLLY IVINS!!!! And he even SAID MEAN THINGS ABOUT RUSH LIMBAUGH!!!

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

[Gavin adds: Oh lord, Little Green Footballs has been on this as well. One of Charles’s goblins has traced the corporate structure of Public Affairs Books, and the comments are aroil with suggestions that McClellan was an undercover operative the whole time, and that conspiracies lurk everywhere, and wheels-within-wheels, and so forth. They have yet to become aware that a sister company, Basic Books, publishes William F. Buckley, Dinesh D’Souza, and other such luminaries. KERNERS ARE GO!]

As an aside, watching these schmucks go into complete meltdown mode never gets old. Who’s the next ex-loyal Bushie to write a blistering tell-all? Colin Powell? Gonzo? Rummy? Brownie? Harriet Miers? The possibilities are both tantalizing and endless.