Sadly, No!

Apropos the Weblog awards (which end today), Tim Lambert sends word that the anti-global-warming buffoons are lining up to defeat an actual science blog:

Junkscience endorses Climate Audit

Steve Milloy‘s Junk Science has now endorsed Climate Audit in the Weblog Awards, telling readers to vote for Climate Audit instead of JunkScience. I know that the we shouldn’t take the awards seriously, but other people will. Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy is a much better science blog and the best chance for beating them. Please vote for Bad Astronomy. You can vote once every 24 hours.

There’s nothing wrong with shifting votes (ahem–hem), but Tim is being quite gentlemanly in not mentioning that Steve Milloy is six bags of douche.

Army of Dude could also use a boost in the Best Military Blog category. Alex is home from fighting in Iraq, and is in second place behind the right-wing journalist Michael Yon.

ABOVE: Medved accepts the coveted
Medved Award.

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Every now and then I run across a sentence — a single sentence — that is such a perfect storm of wingnuttery and dumbfuckery that it really deserves a prize of some kind. Not a monetary prize or a lifetime supply of Deli Style Pepperoni Hot Pockets or even something less valuable, like an endowed chair at Pepperdine or Liberty University. But at least a moment of recognition and a name.

So Sadly, No! hereby establishes and awards the newly-created prize, which I’m calling the Medved after the name of its first recipient, for this jaw-dropping, brain-searing, wang-yanking, gag-inducing and yet awe-inspiring chef d’oeuvre* from Michael Medved:

Those who claim that the United States has become a rapacious, arrogant, destructive, domineering and imperialistic power must somehow explain the continued independent existence of the nation of Canada.

That’s a great argument and one with so many uses! For example, you say that Hitler was trying to take over Europe? Well, what about Switzerland? Huh? What about Switzerland??

People claim that Jeffrey Dahmer was a cannibal. But if he was, why didn’t he eat his next door neighbor, I ask you?

There may be future Medveds awarded, but this will, I believe, be the one that everyone remembers.

* Note to Dan Riehl: chef d’oeuvre is French for “masterpiece.”

** Note to S,N!’s sad-sack bunch of current trolls, all of whom appear to be too cranked up on sugar and caffeine from liter after liter of Mountain Dew Game Code to even be entertaining: I am not comparing the U.S. to Nazi Germany or a gay cannibal. This will no doubt be super double hard for you to understand given that most of you can’t even figure out which side of the Big Mac should be up when you bite into it. (Hint: the seeds should be on top.)

Torturing Ourselves to Death

• Centuries’ worth of ethical and religious teachings against torture cannot match the philosophical heft of a B-grade television thriller.

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

ABOVE: Last seen buying a Cadillac Escalade
with Regnery-issued Disinformation Chits.

Conservative Authors Sue Publisher

• Regnery Publishing doesn’t care about hack people!

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. Hanxxors: Kevin Drum.

Gavin adds: There’s more going on here than the Times story says. Regnery authors benefit enormously from this system: It provides guaranteed royalties on all those internally-shifted books, plus (and the Times knows this) Regnery is notorious for massive bulk-ordering from within the retail system, a practice designed to push titles onto the Times Bestseller List in the absence of actual large retail sales. (The Times marks books with significant bulk sales with a † symbol.)

The discovery stage in this case promises to be very interesting.

ABOVE: Fake, but accurate

‘Punked: Faking the Hate, Manufacturing the News’

• Leftist journalists use hidden-camera hijinks to expose conservatives as intolerant, racist boobs. However, the real intolerance exists on the left, which no doubt would be exposed in these hypothetical staged scenarios suggested by my readers.

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

Here’s one of those reader suggestions:

“I wonder if they would consider sending a professor wearing an ‘I Love W’ button and an American flag pin into the faculty lounge at Harvard or some other liberal ivory tower with a hidden camera.”

At this point, don’t you think everyone in America would realize this was a put-on? I mean, probably?

D. Aristophanes adds: Um, Michelle?

Okay, Alan let’s roll:

Although I am personally opposed to the use of torture …

Oops, sorry. We began with the most ass-tastically ridiculous statement in your latest homage to fingernail-extraction. Let’s start again from the beginning. It may take a while to rewind the tape, Dersh, so perhaps you might take the opportunity to step out to do some comparison shopping for pliers, testicle clamps and the like. There’s a sale on Medieval racks at the Home Depot, we hear.

Ahem.

Democrats and Waterboarding

The party will lose the presidential race if it defines itself as soft on terror.

BY ALAN DERSHOWITZ
Wednesday, November 7, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

I recently had occasion to discuss the Bush administration’s war on terrorism with one of the highest ranking former officials responsible for planning that war. He asked me what I thought the administration’s biggest mistake was.

Aw, screw it. It hurts our eyes to wade through your rambling attempt to, yet again, dig out a loop-hole for torture in the eroding pile of sand that is our nation’s moral high ground. To put legalese lipstick on your piggish surrender of our most basic rights, just so you might one day be able to remove the rubber sheets from your piss-drenched bed.

Why do you do it? Why do you show up every four years or so to prattle on about ridiculous “ticking time-bomb” scenarios and lobby for the most insanely destructive power we could possibly give to the state? Is it a leap year thing? Or did you recently catch ‘Saw III’ and it got you thinking?

Look here, asshole. We’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again. If this was good enough for Thomas Jefferson …

It is incumbent on those only who accept of great charges, to risk themselves on great occasions, when the safety of the nation, or some of its very high interests are at stake. An officer is bound to obey orders; yet he would be a bad one who should do it in cases for which they were not intended, and which involved the most important consequences. The line of discrimination between cases may be difficult; but the good officer is bound to draw it at his own peril, and throw himself on the justice of his country and the rectitude of his motives.

… then, goddamit, it’s good enough for us. Seriously, what part of that don’t you understand?

This most perplexing defense of censorship contains everything we’ve come to know and love about Blogs For Bush:

I discovered a lengthy anti-Bush comment preceded by the following taunt:

I don’t think you have the b***s to allow this post to the blog. Let’s see.

Well, guess what? The comment was published… But I’ve taken it down.

ABOVE: A Blogs For Bush reader reacts to the previous paragraph

Not because of what the comment said — it wasn’t particularly intelligent — but because comments that imply that we (a) censor comments based on ideology and/or (b) don’t have enough confidence in our positions to handle opposing views are immediately nixed regardless of what they say.

Implying has a totally different definition than saying. They’re not even verbatim!

[L]ook around. Read the comment thread in any post. There is an abundance of opposing views present in the comment threads, and I am beyond insulted at any insinuation that comments are screened or censored by ideology. I’m sick of it. And I’m sick of people who pretend like the only way they can get their comments published is with these phony challenges.

Actually, those phony challenges sound like the only way those people can not have their comments published. Those people don’t sound very smart.

Further, I’m not going to empower any pompous liberal commenter by giving him/her reason to believe that I’ve been shamed into letting their comment be published. Not a chance.

You tell ’em, Matt! No shame!

I’ve said it plenty of times before, if you want to guarantee that your comment will not be published or deleted, then go ahead and accuse of censoring and of being too afraid to publish a particular comment. It’s only your time that is being wasted.

Au contraire, Monsieur Margolis. I would consider that time spent as an investment.

I’ve considered it a source of pride that, unlike liberal blog communities, we allow opposing views in our comment threads. If some unintelligent egotistic liberal wants to pretend that B4B censors, then that person doesn’t deserve to have their comments published. Plain and simple.

Freedom of speech, as we all know, goes both ways: I can say what I want and Matt Margolis can tell me to shut up. Conversely, Matt Margolis can say that he doesn’t censor reader comments and I can imply that he does.

Truly, the marketplace of ideas caters to every taste.

Barring unforeseen developments (these Freepers are sneaky, and it’s generally a mistake to encourage them in their campaigns), we would like humbly to endorse Jon Swift for Funniest Blog in the 2007 Weblog Awards.

ABOVE: Thomas Sowell, or
Rodin’s The Thinker?

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Tom Sowell, the embarrassment of the Hoohah Institute, which is, in turn, the embarrassment of Stanford, is at it again. His latest column is a yummy and scrumptioulicious stew of wingnuttery, as bracing as a warm shot of Aqua Velva and cheap tequila. And as good for you too!

The column is about things that don’t mean what they sound like and that really annoy Sowell. You know like why is it a hamburger when it’s made of beef? Why do we call it a driveway when we park in it? Except here Tom wonders why we use the phrase “giving back” for acts of charity when poor people have never given us anything. And why we tell people to “make a difference” as if it were a good thing when, of course, change is bad.

Let’s start with “making a difference.” Tom is perplexed that people who want to “make a difference” do things like feeding the hungry. In fact, that just allows hungry people to sit on their asses rather than get out there and actually work for their food:

Even the simplest acts have ramifications that spread across society the way waves spread across a pond when you drop a stone in it. Among those who make a difference by serving food to the homeless, how many have considered the history of societies which have made idleness easy for great numbers of people? How many have studied the impact of drunken idlers on other people in their own society, including children who come across their needles in the park — if they dare to go to the parks?

So the next time you aspire to be a Mr. (or Ms.) Goody-Two-Shoes and “make a difference,” just remember that for every homeless person you help, a baby steps on a dirty needle.

Next, Tom goes after “giving back”:

“Giving back” is a similarly mindless mantra. I have donated money, books, and blood for people I have never seen and to whom I owe nothing. But we are not “giving back” anything to those people because we never took anything from them in the first place.

And “rush hour” is pretty stupid too because there’s too much traffic then to “rush” anywhere.

Which, of course, brings Tom to slavery. Don’t ask me how. Something about how we should give back to our ancestors (not poor people). And we can give back to our ancestors by acknowledging that black people enslaved white people too. Don’t believe me? Just go read it for yourself and weep.

In next week’s column, Sowell responds to critics that say he’s a douchebag by pointing out that he neither douches nor is made of paper or plastic.

In the first installment, we explained why we had to risk this experiment.

A wingnut has formidable powers. Equal to any intellectual or moral challenge, he prevails through wrongness and bwaa-haaing. Attacks on him are turned magically against the attacker, or against a hapless bystander. He doesn’t get embarrassed or feel shame, or have to exercise or change his clothes like regular people. If a woman, he is protected from ridicule by hordes of angry male wingnuts; if a man, protected from sexual interest by an aroma of feet and hot dogs. The male’s characteristic face mullet isolates the mouth from the rest of the visage, giving the effect of a ventriloquist’s dummy where the ventriloquist is any of several AM talk-radio personalities or Daws Butler characters. While physical attacks are -3, spells such as Befuddle and Whine at Unfairness are 9 and above to hit, 5d4 damage.

Above: Cheetos and reagent and the other suspiciously retro-style kind
of Cheetos

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However, with great power comes great responsibility, as someone once said in some comic book, perhaps The Amazing Spider-Man during the Gil Kane years. And this was just one of many popular expressions that were not being thought by me as I obtained the Cheetos, and next secured a quantity of the reagent. I would be performing this experiment under the supervision of a doctor,* whose clinical notes are interspersed below in italics.

Above: LiveWire, Baja Blast, and AMP varieties
suggest physical activity, failed evaluation

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Prior to commencement of testing, subject presented as a normal, healthy male of average height and build. Subject’s attention span and cognitive function were normal, and healthy levels of empathy and compassion were demonstrated. Subject scored particularly well on the Jon’–Grogan Punctuation Battery, and skewed strongly to the ‘puller’ extreme of the Daubenmire Pasta Continuum All physical metrics are normal, and subject is deemed physically and emotionally fit for the testing to follow.

There were no instructions on any of the labels, so it wasn’t clear how these items were to be prepared. Were Cheetos edible, as they seemed to be, or were they a rub or poultice? They looked a bit like styrofoam peanuts, especially the ones that looked like Cheez Doodles. Both kinds looked like they’d be difficult to swallow, but then again so is this, so there you go.

Above: My 9/11 ‘America Shall Rise Up’ mug had some kind of moldy
coffee residue in it

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I found what seemed an appropriate mug for the Dew, and arranged the Cheetos in the vessel commonly held as appropriate to their consumption. I ate a few dry, and then tried the Game Fuel. It smelled a bit like brake fluid, and also looked like brake fluid, but tasted more like if a hooker drank some brake fluid and then you ate a Maraschino cherry out of her ass. The Cheetos started off salty, moved quickly to a lactic umami sort of flavor, and finished by tasting like Cap’n Crunch, equally the dandruff-shouldered hacker and the breakfast cereal.

The aftertaste was like a heartbreaking absence of another Cheeto. I fought the pull of all the world’s Cheetos yet uneaten by me, and went to the Internet to see what new kinds of dumbness and defeatism the dopey Dhimmicrats were devising, blar.

Subject is displaying increased agitation and a propensity to pore over news sources, questioning the veracity of every photograph and news item. Subject’s clothing has been soiled with orange residue, and is emitting the odor of perspiration mingled with Axe body spray. Scores on the Treviño Integrity Inventory are beginning to decline, and intelligence as measured by the Noonan Aptitude Test is suffering as well. A Horowitz Assessment of blame transference was planned, but given the current condition of the subject, this may be unadvisable due to the risk to others. Subject will be closely monitored for further degeneration.

Cheetos are fine and good, I knew in every molecule of every cell. And yet, there had to be more to life than chasing the dragon from one sip of Dew to another sip of Dew, from one Cheeto to the next. What I needed was to catch that dragon.

Above: The less said about this experiment, the better.

Above: Woo, this is more what we’re talking about, bwaha (snort).

[Continued in Part III]

‘Don’t Eat It’ concept created by Steven at The Sneeze.

* Not a medical doctor.