Sadly, No!

Roy gets this right (as is his wont) in summarizing Jonah Goldberg’s latest cocktail napkin note. But he leaves us with a bit of teh stupid:

Part of my reasoning [for not being pro-choice] is politically pragmatic. Right-wing activist Grover Norquist once told NRO’s David Freddoso that anyone who can go to black-tie dinners and face the haranguing of rich donors for his pro-life stance has the backbone to support tax cuts, too. [Emphasis added]

Backbone [or sheer lunacy] is needed in order to support things that are extremely unpopular — you no more need backbone to support tax cuts than you do to announce that you love America, don’t much care for the French, or find that Canadians have a funny accent. (And we don’t mean the English-speaking ones). Having a backbone when it comes to fiscal policy looks a lot more like this. (And that).

Jonah then goes back to his award-winning act consisting of making “a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care“:

But I am convinced that a baby minutes, days or weeks before full term is, simply, a baby. And despite what you constantly hear, Roe v. Wade doesn’t recognize that fact.

Roe v. Wade doesn’t recognize the fact that a baby minutes [!!!] before full term is a baby? Could you find anyone in the motherfucking United States who supports aborting a baby minutes or days before full term? Are you arguing with real people, or are you having time travel fantasies again? As for the Roe v. Wade bit, Sadly, No!

With respect to the State’s important and legitimate interest in potential life, the “compelling” point is at viability. This is so because the fetus then presumably has the capability of meaningful life outside the mother’s womb. State regulation protective of fetal life after viability thus has both logical and biological justifications. If the State is interested in protecting fetal life after viability, it may go so far as to proscribe abortion during that period, except when it is necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother. [Emphasis added]

* This post is dedicated to Canada, our home and native land. (link)

More S-CHIP Poster Children:

Above: Wingnut welfare poster child Mark Hemingway

• Living a miserable, fearful life is the only acceptable way for parents to keep their sick children alive. It’s the new American Dream!

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

Incidentally, Republicans, I think you should take the wingnuts’ advice and start attacking more working-class people who can’t afford health insurance. I guarantee it’s going to be a win-win stance on election day.

Via Thers.

I haven’t checked in with Fudgehammer lately, possibly because I’ve been remembering to take my high blood pressure medication. It’s not really worth it, as it happens — he never posts anything that you can’t get in drunker form from Crazy Pammy, or with eighty times the long-windedness from The Darkies Are Coming.

But I did want to bring to your attention a couple of comments from this post. In brief, Fudgy opposes a new book directed at Muslim teenagers because it teaches them unacceptable jihadist lessons like “communicate with your parents,” “talk about your values,” and “don’t just blindly accept religious teachings.” Of note is the fact that the author’s 15-year-old son was harassed by his classmates, who called him a member of the Taliban.

Let’s see what the Rhodes scholars who comment over at Fudgehammer’s site have to say about this:

R. Hartman says:

“I can imagine the son didn’t like the Taliban reference, but hey, light tinted skin in itself doesn’t mean much, so it must have been some Islamic demand that made him stand out.

Hey, that’s true! Just being a darkie isn’t enough to get you race-bashed in this crazy modern world of ours! Surely this upstart teenager must have insisted that his schoolmates genuflect towards Mecca, or refuse to eat sausage, or behead a meddling Jew, or something.

And SoteriA says:

My 12 year old son hates Islam with a passion, without me saying anything to him about it…in fact I tried to keep my opinions isolated from him in order to limit his exposure so I could explain things to him over time, so he doesn’t create any bad situations for him in public school by mouthing off to teachers [he is not shy at all about expressing himself]. To me this is a exciting development, so many of his friends feel the same way. There is hope for the younger generations!

Wow! If pre-adolescent children are able to spontaneously manifest a deep-seated hatred of people from different cultures, with little or no prompting from their parents, maybe there really is hope for the world after all. I don’t know about you all, but I feel very optimistic for mankind tonight.

Roger L. Simon, new media tycoon and Scenes from a Mall co-scribe, would like to remind you, in case you somehow missed the message from every other conservative commentator for the last forty years, that hippies are bad.

Above: Enjoy this image of Roger L. Simon as a dirty hippie until Gavin shows up and replaces it with something less incompetent

Gavin adds: Um, I actually haven’t had my coffee yet, so here’s all I can manage whilst on the spot:

Above: Note the general technical suckiness of this image.

Looking back on that year now, I am puzzled by two rather curious and related phenomena – one, 1968 (about to have its forty year anniversary) seems relatively far away, yet its values continue to dominate our culture;

Boy, ain’t that the truth? Every day, I think to myself “Gosh, Mister Leonard Pierce, I just can’t get over how much America in 2007 resembles the chaotic year of global revolution that was 1968! I bet it would seem even more so if I was a self-absorbed, navel-gazing Boomer like Roger L. Simon!”

1968 is considerably closer to World War II than it is to today. Almost shockingly from a larger historical perspective, the Chicago Convention was a scant twenty-three years after the liberation of Auschwitz.

This is a nice bit of pseudo-reference here — something that sort of seems like it means something, but really, it doesn’t. Like a unicorn. What’s that unicorn doing here, Roger?

So what am I driving at here? The Fifties, as is generally acknowledged, were a natural era of calm conventionality [Gavin adds: Except for, no they weren’t.] – decompression after a period of extraordinary, almost incomprehensible violence. The generation coming home – the so-called Greatest Generation – wanted nothing more than peace and quiet, a return to normality. Why wouldn’t they have? But their children needed something else. They hadn’t participated in the war, weren’t direct victims of its horror but rather spectators at a storytelling. Nothing could be as bad for them as what their parents had seen with their own eyes and they knew it. In a sense the younger generation were weaklings, outsiders. They needed something of their own.

Gee, if only they’d had some kind of huge, violent, horrifying war of their own to fight in.

So through these men – and others obviously – the era of sex, drugs and rock and roll was born. What’s interesting about this ethos is that it denies evil – just love each other and we will all be fine.

Yes, of course. Because, you know, why would you mount a huge protest against an unjust war and fight for the civil rights of your oppressed fellow men and women unless you just didn’t believe in evil? After all, opposing an unnecessary war is exactly the same as opposing all wars, and no one who had ever fought in a real war could come out of it with a somewhat jaundiced view of war in general.

And yet how evil was the Holocaust. Even so, “Zimmy,” born while the ovens were in full operating mode, doesn’t sing about it. [Gavin adds: Except for, yes he does.] He preferred the “times they are a-changin’.” Moving right along, as the saying goes. We don’t want to contemplate evil – in fact we don’t believe in it.

Clearly, the author of “Masters of War,” “Hurricane,” “The Murder of Emmitt Till,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” and “Oxford Town” was not interested in contemplating evil, let alone opposing it. If he was, he would have spent all his time singing about evil things that had already happened and were over, instead of wasting his time singing about evil things that were still going on.

Nothing in human life could be as the extremes of World War II

Uh, what? Lay off the brown acid, Rog, it’s no good for you.

Now I am not saying everything was wrong about the “1968 Revolution”. I still like the music

Sure, I may have just written an article in which I imply that the cultural revolution of the 1960s was orchestrated by a sinister cabal of moronic, self-hating, Holocaust-denying Jews, but boy, the Mamas & the Papas were really groovy! And Sha Na Na totally rocked Woodstock!

and it helped spur women’s and homosexual equality, among other things.

Gee. Did women and homosexuals achieve equality and I didn’t notice? Well, good! I guess we can quit worrying about that. (I’m guessing the “among other things” would be the civil rights movement, which Rog doesn’t want to mention by name because he’s still not sure we should have given the coloreds the vote.)

The Chicago Seven were, after all, the “cool guys”. Everybody wanted to be like them. I know that was true for me. I remember well sitting in a tiny London flat – I was twenty-four and in Europe trying to write a novel – watching the Convention on the BBC. Oh, how I wanted to be there! And soon enough – I was, marching and protesting and enjoying that life of sex, drugs and rock and roll (well, to some extent – I have my Puritan side).

I really didn’t think this piece could become more pathetic, but it somehow does, with this admission that even in the ’60s Roger couldn’t get any.

But now, when we live an era of another virus whose ability to spread is bred in its ideology

I’m not even sure what he’s talking about here. Islam? AIDS? Liberalism? Baggy trousers?

thinking back on the self-indulgence of this is oddly disquieting, though I don’t mean to flay myself for what I did or what I was then. We are all creatures of our times. And I am glad for the experiences I had.

Okay, raise your hand if you wish that Roger had been at the ’68 convention, so a Chicago cop could have bashed his head in with a nightstick. Or, you know, getting his face shot off in a Vietnamese rice paddy, instead of bumming around Europe trying to write a novel. Then we’d see how glad he was about the experiences he had.

Over at America’s Shittiest Website™, Mark Hemingway explains why it’s a-okay for him to smear Bethany Wilkerson, a two-year-old with heart problems who has been cited as an example of a deserving S-CHIP recipient:

For the love of all that is holy, keep your children out of political debates. It’s dishonest and exploitative, and it makes complex policy arguments needlessly personal.

Of course, it’s totally unfair and completely mean for liberals to mention any actual children in a debate about health insurance for children.

Over at Butt Propulsion Laboratories, Paul Mirengoff schools us all on the War on Terror. Unfortunately, it turns out the school is an unaccredited land-grant clown college.

Peter Bergen at the New Republic has declared Osama bin Laden the victor over President Bush. The claim is absurd on its face.

I agree with that, if only because I think it’s an absurd construction more suited to internet death-matches than it is for serious political analysis. There can no more be a clear victor in the the duel between the ideologies of these two men than there can be a marked victory in the war against terrorism. So, let’s get down to cases, shall we? Mirengoff:

Al Qaeda has failed to attack our homeland since 9/11

True enough. But then, if all we’d done to stop Japan after Pearl Harbor was keep them from attacking America again, that wouldn’t be much of a victory. And if, say, the Imperial Armed Forces were estimated to be stronger in 1947 than they had been in 1941, we might very well say that Hirohito was the victor over President Roosevelt. But, of course, the War on Terror is nothing like WWII.

and has had little success in attacking our interests anywhere else in the world, a rather big place.

Well, I guess that kinda depends on how you define ‘our interests’.

Nor has al Qaeda succeeded in toppling or seriously threatening any regime in the Middle East. To the contrary, American policy has deprived AQ of its host government in Afghanistan

Some people dispute exactly how weak the Taliban and al-Q’aeda are in Afghanistan, but what would a bunch of Indians know about the political situation in central Asia? Everyone knows we won the war, so there are clearly no more al-Q’aeda terrorists in Afghanistan.

Probably because they’re all in Pakistan.

and has toppled a friendly regime and potential collaborator in Iraq.

So, we only sort of defeated them in Afghanistan, and we opened up whole new havens for them in Pakistan, Iran and Syria, but hey! We defeated a government that had nothing to do with them before they were able to potentially collaborate! Shit, let’s go invade San Marino. They’re a potential collaborator too! Potential collaborators everywhere!

Indeed, as Peter Wehner points out, Bergen’s argument seems particularly ill-informed in light of recent developments in Iraq. Wehner juxtaposes Bergen’s assertions with this report in yesterday’s Washington Post regarding the devastating and possibly irreversible defeat AQI has suffered.

So, to recap: we know that we’ve won the war against al-Q’aeda because we have almost managed to defeat them in a country they weren’t even in before we invaded it. Now that’s what I call MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

Ace of Spades has real sexual frustration issues, judging by the frequency with which bitter misogyny finds its way into his posts, via gratuitous aside or by direct address: Boobs characterized as “bags o’ sand,” vaginas likened to “Play-doh and bacon,” his creepy and hateful obsession with Amanda Marcotte. The subtext is always the same: women are meanies because they won’t fuck Ace.

Above: Lonely wingnut blogger ISO LTR w/anyone other than Rosie Palm

So you just knew that with the Randi Rhodes story, Ace would be true to form. Yup. Here’s the caption Ace put under Rhodes’s photo:

A computer simulation of what Randi Rhodes might look like
after extensive maxillo-facial reconstructive surgery and years of
more conventional cosmetic surgeries…
wait, that’s what she looked like before her fall?
You’re shitting me. Really? Oh, okay.
Well, I’m sure she’s funny. Or nice.
Or into anal or something.

See? ‘Bwahaha! Stupid, homely liebruhl woman! She has to take it in the ass to get any action at all!’

Yeah, well, I’m betting that Randi does just fine, which is more than can be said for (stupid, homely) Ace, who probably hasn’t been laid in this millennium.

Update: ZOMG! What wingnuts say about teh ekonomicks is true! Ace demands, so the market supplies! (Link hanx to Jillian.)

Ann Coulter Wants Jews to Become Christian — So What?

Above: Some hippies protest a noted proponent of multicultural tolerance

• I feel entitled to speak for all Jews when I say that my people have no greater friend than Christian Zionists, whose intentions are pure, honorable, and in accordance with the prophecy.

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

Poor Dan Riehl. He’s always struggling with abstract concepts and the English language. Today he tried to do a gotcha on Hillary that went hilariously awry because he seems confused over the words “born” and “vote.” See for yourself:

Two-minutes [into her appearance on “The View,”] Hillary starts talking about “all these women in their nineties” who come to her events and tell her about “being born” when women couldn’t vote and how they say they just can’t wait to see a women elected President for that reason. She even mentions the age 95. The dates jibe but does the narrative, especially to support her claim of large numbers of women expressing such a sentiment? For example, a 95 year old woman would have been born in 1912. The Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920. Do the Math [sic].

Okay, Dan, let’s do the math. That 95 year old woman would have been born before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified (although, frankly, you don’t have to “do any math” to figure out that 1912 comes before 1920). So what’s your point?

I don’t doubt that there may be a few women “in walkers” who might think that way, but given that there likely isn’t a single woman Hillary has encountered while campaigning who was ever prevented from voting for her gender and a 95 year-old woman was given that Right when she was 8 years-old, I have a hard time believing her.

Uh, Dan, let’s go back and read very carefully (move your lips if you must) what you wrote in the preceding paragraph:

Hillary starts talking about “all these women in their nineties” who come to her events and tell her about “being born” when women couldn’t vote

They said when they were born, women couldn’t vote; they weren’t saying that they were themselves deprived of a vote. You know, there is just plain stupid and then there is Riehlly stupid.

UPDATE: Dan accuses me of being unable to read his crystal-clear prose. Apparently he claims to have meant something like this: Hillary says she met “all these women” who were born before the Nineteenth Amendment, which is, of course, impossible because most women born before 1920 are dead — or something like that.

I still don’t know if Randi Rhodes was mugged or not.

But I do know that Patrick Bateman Stephen Green is a douchebag:

I know this is hardly the time for cruel honesty, immediately after a brutal assault. But when you work for Air America, muggers are going to pretty much assume that you walk around unarmed.

Above: Qualified expert in all NATO and Perry Ellis International
small arms, demolitions, M-79 grenade launcher, cuff links.

Gavin adds: Following the Rhodes tip, Malkin finds a way to misunderstand various clear English sentences in order to cry victim about the menace that is J.A. Baker.