Sadly, No!

If FoxNews is right (link until they fix it — scroll down, right side), Obama will have a really hard time winning the nomination given Clinton’s lead:

Don’t count 0 out.

Sorry, folks, I’ll stop hogging the site in a minute, but I wanted to do this (a) to decompress, (b) to prove I’m still capable of short, non-soul-melting whimsy, and (c) because Chris Muir really, really, really sucks.

While I was combing the blogs of some other CPAC attendees, I noticed that a lot of them, as do many right-wing blogs, had the Day By Day cartoon embedded on the front page. This one, from Thursday, really caught my attention, because it so perfectly encapsulates everything hacky and awful about the strip:

1. Pointless, cranky political opinionating.
2. A punchline that seems like it’s a joke, but only has the form of a joke and not the function of a joke, because it isn’t funny.
3. Women whose anatomy has either been drawn by someone unfamiliar with the actual appearance of a woman, or has been subjected to some kind of major spinal reconstruction surgery in the last few hours.

Here’s the original strip:

Note, if you will, that the female character appears to have a large Mr. Potato Head stuffed down her pants:

So, I think you all know what to do:

Clif adds:

Gavin adds:

Gavin also adds:

Getaway day, that’s what they call it, and I need to get away more than I need to keep breathing air. For once, Dan Riehl was right: “forget waterboarding, just strap a liberal in a chair and make them sit through it all.” Spoken like someone who’s never been waterboarded, but if this hasn’t been torture with a capital T like that advocated by the vice-president (“Dick Cheney is an authoritarian bully and a personal coward”, says Charles Pierce; his res ipse loquitor moment is seen in the fact that his approval rating is at 100% at CPAC and 19% everywhere else in the country), it has at least been little-t torture to have to hear the endless tributes to an underhanded cadaver and his sham ideology, the slyly delivered racial slurs in the elevators and hallway (“Hissing you’re good at, you slimy snakes”, says Sgt. Groper to the madmen). Ann Coulter’s slander du jour has multiplied like cancer cells among the puerile youth strutting the outer boroughs of the Omni Shoreham: I’ve heard “Barack HUSSEIN Obama” more times today than I’ve heard the name of John McCain, and I keep thinking of a friend back in the greater world who says whenever he hears it said that way, he thinks of the upper-crust pseudo-fascists and pro-Nazi pornographers back in the ‘30s who talked about “Franklin Delano Rosenfeld”.

Yesterday, I stopped in to see the Conquering Mustache, John Bolton, for this trip’s hairiest disappointment. The crowd was full of no-hopers, dead-enders, hangers-on and toadies of every age and temperament, warmongers and fear-fuckers and other assorted dry-humpers of the American Nightmare. I sat barely a stone’s throw, and G-d save her that there were no stones to hand, from Pamela Oshry, battered bride of Jewish Christ, who gazed up raptly at Bolton with “the Look” Nancy Reagan practiced on her husband until everyone made fun of her so much that she had to stop. As he talked about the Islamic bomb, the threat of North Korea, and various other national security bugbears, you got an idea of what a puffed-up, third-rate intellect the guy really is, a complete nothing elevated to laughable prominence by a willingness to say yes. Following, as he always has, the dictates of the President of StupidTown, he offers a lukewarm bucket of spit by way of endorsing McCain: conjuring, in one of CPAC’s most bizarre rhetorical flourishes, the specter of V.I. Lenin, he says that conservatives must not sit out the election, because to do so would leave it in the hands of those who will not defend it. (This would, of course, refers to liberal Democrats, who apparently live their lives in a constant state of suicidal ideation. This earns the most arbitrary standing o to date, a more or less perfunctory round of applause to Bolton simply for existing and reminding the crowd of how darky-fear trumps all.

My pills are gone but the rearrangement of my synapses that was their charge hangs in my head, making me crazy sick and aching for a fight…my cover is blown, or forgotten, and I wander the meeting rooms of CPAC in a fur hoodie, chains and street kicks, stumbling like a wounded rhino, aching for a fight…my every encounter with anyone not employed by the hotel is a silent plea to be dragged away, not responsible for my actions, to be put on a handrail and dumped on some drug corner in Baltimore…the American Milk Solids Council has cancelled my expense account, and I don’t have the cash for a six-dollar Pepsi…the bottom-drawer delegates are arguing the virtues of McCainist happy warriorism vs. convention stonewalling in favor of some pocket Hitler to be named later; it’s all just larks…Mike Huckabee thunders from the Regency Ballroom: “I didn’t major in math,” he says to cheers from the same people who hooted for intelligent design last night, “I majored in miracles”…Ouichita Baptist University may well have such an option for their hillbilly hell-shouters, but none of them are likely to become president; Mike is staying in he race, he says to a surprising amount of applause – there are a few people in the house, at least, who think Romney took the cheapjack way out – but at this point, he’s running only for Vice-President…the latest Hillary hay being made is her allegedly manufactured offense (ambitious as she is, and ambition is a crime only in Democrats, she cannot possibly feel real hurt) at MSNBC reporter David Schuster’s claim that she was “pimping out” daughter Chelsea; this makes for many an hilarious pimp joke from the ceaselessly white kids in the hallways…Ron Paul, after his combative speech earlier in the week which drew more jeers than even McCain when he suggested that America could ill afford any more foreign adventurism, is effectively out of the race, but there are no lamentations from his legions as there was for Romney – they have all retreated back to their homes on the internet, leaving the few diehards in the Libertarian Party booth to dream their minarchist dreams…many of the other booths are closing up shop, some of the big bloggers are already heading home in advance of the 5:30 ceremonial closing up shop, and the publishers are beginning to give away free books to save on transportation home. I pick out a handful, which will be my penance for having pretended that I belong here, for my repulsive pretense that I am one of them.

I have one final stop to make. My own flight time grows nearer, and I doubt I’ll have time to savor the fluffed-up diarrhea of Newt Gingrich, so if he positions himself as the new savior of the conservative movement, blowjob-free and ready to run, you won’t hear it from me. But I must stop by and gaze into the most abysmal bits of the abyss, into the Heart of Dumbness: I must see Mike Adams and Doug Giles, the one a scrawny, self-impressed misogynist and the other a beefy, self-flattering fanatic, and between them both not enough brains to spark a stuffed owl. Since most of the bigwigs have gone home by now, there’s a longish like to have books signs by both of these moronic hunks of right-wing meat on the hoof, and it’s a bracing tonic for the long trip home ot the dead city center of San Antonio to hear their bovine bleatings prior to hopping on a cab. In, but not of, thank whatever weird god holds this thing together: I am in, but not of, and now it’s time to get out. I’m tired of all this hazy hatred and self-satisfaction, of all these princes of privilege giving each other high-fives for having been born 90 feet from home plate. I’m ready to pick up my Mister at the coat-check and report to American Milk Solids Council HQ that my mission was a failure. My quiet little outpost of sanity on the edge of Texas-style legislative craziness ain’t much, but goddamn it, it’s mine, for as long as I can hold on to it. These people have real power, but being here, watching them claw at their cages when they don’t get everything they want, is a reminder that they’re not always in charge, and if nothing else, it’s been salutary to watch them squeak like bitched-up rats when they get Swiss instead of Camembert.

Holding a purloined copy of Adams’ latest worthless book, Feminists Say the Darndest Things: A Politically Incorrect Professor Confronts ‘Womyn’ on Campus, I ask him how it feels to know that the vast majority of the people he works with hate his guts. His answer is stock and predictable: when that many of those people think he’s wrong, he says, he knows he must be right.

You and me both, you bullying shitstain. Time to go home.

ABOVE: Don Surber at home.

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It’s been a while since we visited Don Surber, the Poe of the Pocatalico and the Keats of the Kanawha, and, as usual, Surber never fails to disappoint. Today Surber focuses his keen journalistic eye on some shocking plagiarism committed by Senator Maria Cantwell (D – Washington) when she introduced Hillary to a political rally as a “pioneer woman” instead of as the shrill socialist robo-lesbo that Hillary actually is:

Did Sen. Cantwell plagiarize a comic strip to praise Hillary? …

From Calvin Woodward of the Associated Press:

Sen. Maria Cantwell, one of them, introduced the New York senator to a crowd in Spokane and likened her to four-time Iditarod winner Susan Butcher and the Native American woman Sacajawea, who served as a guide for the Lewis and Clark expedition in the early 1800s. “We like women pioneers here in the Northwest,” Cantwell said. …

Now for the comic strip in question.

Maybe she didn’t see the comic strip, which appears in the Washington Post.

Cantwell likens Hillary to a female Iditarod winner and then Surber cries plagiarism after he uncovers an obscure wingnut cartoon strip that depicts Hillary talking about the Iditarod. The only explanation for this kind of stupidity is that someone suctioned out what once passed for Surber’s brain from his skull and replaced it with a slurry of pulverized pork rinds and Mountain Dew.

Saturday noon. Recollection of the last 24 hours is excruciatingly difficult; I have taken every remaining pill in my kit bag, and yet somehow, despite the presence of enough chemicals in my system to transform me into the Joker, I have developed a raging cold. My throat is nearly sealed shut, which may work to my advantage since I’m reaching the point at which the rude answers which bubble up in my skull every time someone speaks to me are threatening to spill over into actual vocalization. Ever since Wednesday I have been asking myself in re my pharmacopia: how many is too many? Crashing into every sharp corner in my hotel room, I know the answer: however many I took when I woke up this morning.

Last night was the Ronald Reagan Banquet, a dinner which was for and unfortunately not of Ronald Reagan. Eating a dehydrated teriyaki jerky chunk of the old fraud might have given me some of his strength. I’ve heard the words “Ronald Reagan” and “tax cuts” so many times now they’re beginning to lose whatever meaning they might have once had, and Will, that payola-stuffed bloviator of manifest destiny, will say them another three dozen times while I tuck into my mashed potatoes. After the ghouls-gone-wild reception given to Ann Coulter a few hours ago, the crowd receives him politely and respectfully, and even considering the fact that this is an older crowd, made up largely of the parents of the rich kids hooting and snarling at Ann’s anti-McCain jeremiad, it still has the tone of someone forced to hear their grandpa read cowboy poetry just after they’ve come back from yelling “SHOW US YOUR TITS!” to drunken frat girls. Will himself is perfunctory at best, showing his chipper cheerleader side only when discussing Old Mother Reagan; the rest of the time, he’s just there to pick up a check. He even senses the hostility in the room when called upon to mention the Supplicant McCain: urging the crowd to be “happy warriors” for the default candidate, he sounds like a bored Sunday school teacher leading his tenth consecutive round of “I’ve Got the Joy” for a group of sugared-up fourth-graders.

At some point I sneak into a screening of Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a Michael Mooreian abortion by Watergate apologist/novelty actor Ben Stein. An exciting tour through a number of major logical fallacies, Expelled features the wooden-souled Stein attempting to illustrate how the Stalinist mandarins of academia have systematically excluded the teaching of intelligent design from our universities just because it’s completely unscientific nonsense. Stein soft-peddles this idea, of course, choosing instead to focus on the fact that Richard Dawkins is kind of a jerk (and who among us would not be, if we were constantly being pestered by game show hosts about why voodoo isn’t taught in school?). Dawkin’s quasi-aristocratic hostility makes him look bad, to be sure, which would be relevant if atheism had anything whatsoever to do with the fact that ID is not science. Which it doesn’t. The fact that ID is not science has everything to do with the fact that it is not taught in university science classes, however, a point that seems not to have occurred to anyone in the crowd who hisses when those evil poindexters of academia won’t answer Ben’s questions about how come why for no they teach it. Ben would have gotten the same snippy, defensive answers if he had asked why Lawsonomy is not taught in physics classes, or why the teachings of Trofim Lysenko are not the focus of biology classes, but those questions remained unasked: Ben’s concept of “academic freedom” requires only that his favored brand of buncombe gets equal time. I attempt to wrap my thoughts around the notion that a movement that considers itself the only sane and reasonable guide to the challenges of the post-modern world is gleeful about the idea of demanding academic equal time for ideologically driven pseudoscience, but there isn’t time.

Radio next. Two shows: an Air America appearance and a Pacifica player to be named later. It’s hard to gather my senses because at this point I’ve learned of the existence of a liquor store across the street from the hotel and am coping with the last day of this non-stop death-worship of Reagan the same way I dealt with the last few years of his presidency: by soaking my every cell in C_nH_2n+1OH. Sam Seder (who I can’t stop thinking of as Fenton Muley) brings up an important point about Reagan that I’m too unfocused to remember myself: the Reagan around which this conservative circle is jerking is a myth, a fabrication, a fiction. The real Reagan raised taxes (or rather engaged in “revenue enhancements”), presided over a massive recession, cut and ran when faced with bloody terror attacks, talked constantly about a balanced budget and a line-item veto but did nothing about them, and “won” the Cold War by spending nonexistent money that would be handed down to his heirs, never to be paid off, as if this were somehow more fiscally conservative than the tax-and-spend model with which he vilified Democrats. Reagan’s strength as a paragon of conservativism is identical to Christopher Reeve’s strength as Superman, a pleasant fiction propped up with special effects and made believable by the empty shell upon which it was impressed. This is, by no means incidentally, the reason the CPAC crowd loves Romney so much: he is their new Ulrich, their man without qualities, upon whom they can press the rubber mask of Reagan.

But it’s too late, too late: the mashed potatoes go down with a sour wince, and the cash bar is only serving off-brand Scotch. Unless the few desperate rumors that the failed revolutionary and fourth-rate historical novelist Newt Gingrich will announce his candidacy tomorrow are true, the cretins of conservativism are stuck with McCain, a man who inspires them as much as did George H.W. Bush (a man who, himself, inspired them as much as a leaky, pebbly bowel movement in the middle of the night). In the bars, on the streets, in the lobby, in their rooms screaming obscenities at Chinese hookers, the CPAC crowd is frustrated and cross, angry at their own partisans for their failure to be as rabidly ideological as they wanted, for their failure to open wide enough when they snapped “Bend over!”. They’re looking around for a dog to kick, but the only dogs are running…

Playing the roles of the Quiet Americans today are Michael O’Hanlon and Omer Taspinar:

Time for Kurdish Realism

[…]

Why would the United States even want bases in Kurdistan? If it ever goes to war against Iran, numerous other countries are better positioned, being adjacent to international waterways and airspace. Those countries may not all be as pro-American as Iraq’s Kurds, but if the threat posed by Iran grows, some will probably make common cause with the United States.

Yep, sorry there Kurds, but we’re going to deny you the honor of being America’s official airstrip for our future war with Iran! We promise that once we get around to hitting Syria, though, we’ll give you a second look.

Gavin adds: So if this ‘threat posed by Iran’ were to ‘grow,’ it would ‘probably’ make ‘some’ countries out of the ‘numerous other countries’ over there join forces with the US in blowing Iran up?

This is why we need O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution — for clear-eyed, liberal-leaning counsel in assessing today’s complex geopolitical landscape.

Oh wait, when I said ‘O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution,’ I meant ‘a momentary and distracted Google search.’ O’Hanlon is the other one — the one who tends to gets things flip-ass backwards time after excruciating time.

[Hanx! ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®©]

Gavin also adds: So okay, wait a second. O’Hanlon is veering from the received narrative that the permanent bases in Iraqi Kurdistan are supposed to help ensure the security of Iraq, not to help launch new invasions hither and yon across the Middle East. Meanwhile, he’s teamed up with a Turkish Peter Lorre who’s being all like, “Sa-ay, I’ve got an idea to advance US interests: If Kurdistan doesn’t play nice with Turkey, why not — indeed, why not — abandon those no-good and useless US bases, leaving the area totally free of any, you know, [cough-cough] foreign military presence?”

Is O’Hanlon freaking high on drugs here? I mean, Jesus.

Leonard is going to be talking about the CPAC carnivalia on the Mike Malloy radio show (with Sam Seder) tonight at around 11:15 EST.

(Live audio stream here)

It’s become very fashionable lately to avoid any mention of Ann Coulter. Like the slow-wit down at the package liquor store who hoists it out of his trousers if you pitch him a quarter, attention only rewards her, this argument goes. Without our rage and affront to feed upon, it’s supposed that she will just dry up and blow away, a forever-forgotten well-born aberration, and not at all a ghost of our time.

Above: Actually knows some Asians, as well

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Watching the lines of bad haircuts and suits filled with gangly limbs stretching halfway down Calvert Street, I’m not so sure. Ann Coulter is an entertainer the same way a schoolyard punchout is an entertainment, but she’s unbelievably popular. Every book she writes is a best-seller, every TV talk show appearance is must-see TV, and her popularity suggest not the depths to which people will sink to get attention, but the significant size of that portion of the vox pop that really is longing for a Jester of the Apocalypse, someone to keep ’em laughing while the bombs fall and the oil runs out. She’s the Joey Bishop of genocide, and while we might just live long enough to find her a quaint and possibly baffling relic of the past, for the time being, her Rat Pack runs the country. Right into the dirt.

Ann’s intemperate punch lines got her disinvited from CPAC’s official schedule this year, or so the story goes. The whole thing smacks of a publicity stunt, given that she’s right here, hagged out and surrounded by adoring hate-groupies as always, broadcasting on a Town Hall feed from hotel premises instead of via jerry-rigged webcam from a burnt-out gas station in Southeast somewhere. Her introduction glows like a freshly scrubbed toilet, calling her a woman of “unbelievable courage” who “doesn’t let left-wing pseudo-intellectuals push her around”. Never has one New Canaanite braved so much as does the supernaturally pampered Ann Coulter; courage has been redefined many times at this conference — always to describe people who have never had to suffer through war or horror, and often to specifically exclude one particular candidate who has — but the word is stretched as far as the language can bear to accommodate her bony frame, which won’t pick up a cup of coffee that an immigrant touched.

Showing her keen grasp of the fundamentals of comedy, Coulter starts her performance with a call-back to an earlier episode: Hillary’s campaign can’t use “I Am Woman” as its theme song, because it’s already taken by John Edwards. This is the point at which I’d normally say “Why doesn’t she just come right out and call John Edwards a faggot?”, but goddamned if she’s not ahead of the curve on that one. She does prove me wrong by not calling Barack Obama (or, as she puts it, “B. Hussein Obama”) a nigger, but she does say that his greatest accomplishment was being born half-black, and if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be where he is today. This gets big cheers, being a familiar argument to anyone born after the passage of the Civil Rights Act: no darky can accomplish anything on his own. Darky do well, darky owes it all to massa. Massa feel guilty, yes sah, else ways darky ain’t do shit. B. Hussein, in Ann’s thoroughly-modern-Millie p.o.v., simply does not know his place. (The racial sensitivity doesn’t end there: later in the act, Ann says she could help Hillary Clinton with her fake accent, because “I actually know some black people.” No doubt: there’s the boy who parks her car, the boy who opens the door to her building, the boy who hands her a towel down at the health club…)

Before she launches into her half-hour invective against John McCain — who is apparently slightly to the left of Ward Churchill — she gets off a couple of pieces of vintage Ann Coulter shock-out-with-your-cock-out: her reaction to simultaneous terror attacks on two cities would depend on which two cities. Liberals hounded poor Rudy Giuliani because he supported “dripping water down their noses”. Comparing Hillary to Stalin is an insult to Stalin. It’s all very funny, and the YIFfies laugh clubbily except for a few awkward silences when they don’t get the joke because it has a sub-clause in it. Still, the funniest moment from where I’m sitting (hunched over between two nearly-abandoned booths in the Exhibit Hall) is her delivery of a line she apparently meant to be serious: speaking of the Republican Party, she says, “Conniving is not our strong point. Honor is our strong point.”

At one point, Ann confuses the crowd by busting out the word “contumacious”, and her blackleg dad smiles from the great beyond knowing all that tuition money for Cornell wasn’t wasted. But right up until the end of her performance, she tips the game: when she hits a particularly thorny passage, when she’s about to say or has just said something that would make any decent member of society upend a gallon of paint over her head, the person who laughs loudest at her joke is Ann Coulter. That’ll be the way for her until no one’s laughing anymore.

(A few more photos under the cut.)

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So funny, we had to hide it below:

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Ah, kids with their innocence and their crazy ideas: Over at RealClearPolitics, John Ellis writes:

In a crisis, people (voters) naturally gravitate to the smartest guy (or woman) in the room.

Uh, Sadly, No!: