Sadly, No!

When Canadian über-wingnut Mark Steyn praises someone, particularly when it’s another Canadian wingnut, you can rest assured that the person being praised is likely to be as crazy as a closeted congressman on crank. So, say hello to Kathy Shaidle, a Canadian who, from her front-row seat in Toronto, knows more about poor people in America than we silly Americans do:

Are there even a thousand really poor people in all of America? Really poor. Dying-on-the-sidewalks-with-open-sores poor? The so-called poor have cars and cable tv and free medical. They live in America in the 21st century, where school is free and libraries are free and a bus ticket to a better town costs less than a bag of crack. If they’re “poor” it’s because they were too lazy and stupid to a) finish high school and/or b) keep their pants on. Jesus had something to say about folks who didn’t properly manage their money or other people’s, and who squandered free gifts and good will. He told the adulteress to sin no more, not to find herself another baby daddy.

You have just seen a rare view of the parallel wingnut universe where Jesus tells the poor to get a job and where free schools and free libraries eliminate poverty. It is a little known fact, but library books are indeed quite nutritious and can be eaten by the poor to stave off malnutrition. You can feed a family of four for over a year on War and Peace alone. Library books can even burned in the winter for heat! One must be careful not to eat the books that explain how to treat cancer and heart disease, however, since these books come in quite handy when you have no health insurance. And free public schools will keep a roof over your kids’ heads until the shelters open at night.

Once all the books in a library have been eaten or burned, a family can, for the price of a bag of crack, take a bus to a town with a library full of more books to eat and to burn. (By the way, it would appear that in Toronto either bags of crack must be very expensive or Greyhound tickets must be very cheap)

Finally, if Ms. Shaidle doesn’t think there are a thousand poor people in America, I invite her to forgo her next bag of crack and take a bus to Washington, D.C., where I will give her a guided tour of Ward 8. And, since there are no poor people there, she won’t be able to complain if I dump her out of the car and tell her to finish the tour on her own.

(Bonus Abuse: Kathy writes bad poetry too.)

[Thanks J— for the link to Kathy on TV, which was the source for the second picture.]

By the gods, I’ve never seen such sensitive people. Look at what they’re attacking Google for this time:

Google Inc. occasionally features light-hearted doodles on its colorful home-page logo to commemorate special occasions. But now they are drawing criticism from conservatives for not being more patriotic.

The Mountain View, Calif., company bathes its logo in stars and stripes every Independence Day, but last week’s decision to honor the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch — the second “g” in Google was replaced with a drawing of the Soviet satellite — is being blasted by some conservatives.

Not only did Google honor an achievement by a totalitarian regime that was our Cold War enemy, they griped, but it did so without having ever altered its logo to commemorate U.S. military personnel on Memorial Day or Veterans Day.

“It’s a kick to your belly,” said conservative blogger Giovanni Gallucci, 39, a social media consultant from Dallas. “I understand these guys are scientists and engineers and they have their quirks and want to make sure people are recognized who might not normally be recognized . . . but why not celebrate the struggles that we’ve come through as a people?” […]

“When they ignore Veterans Day and Memorial Day, I think they’re telling us something about the way they view America,” said Joseph Farah, editor of WorldNetDaily.com, a conservative website that has criticized Google’s logo decisions.

ON NOES!!! LOOKY HERE!!!!!! IT’S A PRO-ABSTINENCE AD FEATURING…

(DRUM ROLL)

…KIDS!!!!

OK, all you Citizen Journalists out there! The fact that these kids let themselves be used by the government to spread a pro-abstinence message means they’re fair game!!! It’s time to ask questions and subject their political anecdotes to scrutiny. Start by hanging around their schools and asking their peers if they’re real virgins or pretend virgins!!! Then you can fact-check their claims- is sex all over the Internet? Is it just another MSM lie, like the idea that anyone has ever died in that magical desert paradise we call Iraq??? THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO STOP THE EXPLOITATION OF CHILDREN FOR POLITICAL PURPOSES!!!!*

*Actually, you shouldn’t do any of that stuff because it’s creepy and wrong. Much like Michelle Malkin.

(Video via Yglesias)

Gavin adds:

First, thanks to reader Mac for sending me this:

Truly LOL-worthy.

Gavin adds:

Second… yes, I’m still laughing about the Yankees losing last night. It’s a shame that Torre’s going to be fired, since he really does deserve better. But heck, he’ll learn to love not dealing with Steinbrenner. Take a nice, long vacation, Joe.

To the person who left a trackback in the comments containing information about Michelle Malkin’s address: please knock it off. I’ve deleted your link and would ask that you not link again.

Stalkin’ Malkin is complete scum, don’t get me wrong, but her stalking doesn’t justify your stalking. That is all.

Above: Graphic by Anastasius

UPDATE: Jesus H. Via Thers, here’s the reliably crazy Mark Steyn:

Sorry, no sale. The Democrats chose to outsource their airtime to a Seventh Grader. If a political party is desperate enough to send a boy to do a man’s job, then the boy is fair game.

Didn’t Lenin once say something along those lines?

Clif reminds us (thanks a lot for that) of the existence of The New Media Journal and so off we go to make friends. For example, Armand C. Hale:

I am for business. It drives the U.S. economy.

Yeah, way to take a stand there, Armand. Given his ability to say what he thinks regardless of the consequences, surely Armand also has lots of good “advice:”

How Can I Find American Made Items?
[…] Do something as simple as checking the “label” of the item to see where it’s made.

Yes, checking the “label” — why didn’t we think of that?

Read the rest of this entry »

The wingnutosphere has found another Jamil Hussein/Scott Thomas Beauchamp figure to attack. And this time it’s a 12-year-old boy who was involved in a severe car accident. I wish I were making this up.

Gavin adds:

Confederate Yankee didn’t pile onto the 12-year-old kid, so true to our promise, we got him a…

Above (l-r): Confederate Yankee, BRAND NEW SPANKIN’ CHAR-COAL GRILL!

[Hanx! t4toby]

Roger Cohen, you are a pathetic excuse for a person:

When I weigh this picture — a middle Eastern Pol Pot (and who cares that the United States once supported him, it makes no difference to anything at this stage) on one side; more than four years of war and killing and Iraqi disintegration on the other — I agonize.* […]

The difference between the Iraqi hell of yesterday and the Iraqi hell of today is that the former was without hope (Saddam would have handed over to his even more sadistic sons) while the latter is characterized by flux that may, over a long period, produce some semblance of a decent society.

Sigh, I don’t have to go through today’s headlines, do I? Well, why not then:

* NEAR TIKRIT – A suicide truck bomber killed three people and wounded 13 at a police checkpoint near the city of Tikrit, 175 km (110 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.

* BAGHDAD – A car bomb killed four people and wounded 10, including four women and three children, near the Technology University in central Baghdad, police said. Another police source said it was a roadside bomb attack.

* BAGHDAD – Four explosions hit near the Polish embassy in central Baghdad, a Polish diplomat said. There were no injuries or major damage, he said.

* BAGHDAD – U.S. forces killed five gunmen and detained three suspected Iranian-backed “Special Groups” members during a raid in the Shi’ite Sadr City district of northeastern Baghdad, the U.S. military said.

* BAGHDAD – A car bomb killed one person and wounded six in the al-Kamaliya district of eastern Baghdad, police said.

* BAGHDAD – A roadside bomb wounded four people in the northwestern Kadhimiya district of Baghdad, police said.

* BAGHDAD – Six bodies were found in different areas of Baghdad on Sunday, police said.

* BAGHDAD – A roadside bomb targeting a U.S. patrol wounded two civilians in eastern Baghdad, police said.

Hey, cheer up, dead Iraqis. If it makes you feel any better, know that Roger Cohen is agonizing just as much as you are.

But here’s the best line:

Civilized disagreement is the mark of any healthy society.

Again, I’m sure the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis thank you for agreeing to keep it civil.

Loser.

* Gavin adds: To see how seriously Cohen “agonizes” over Iraqi casualties, let’s revisit one of his greatest hits, from January of this year.

With 6,438 murders in the state (not just the city) of Rio de Janeiro in 2005 (the state had a 2005 population of 15,383,407), Cohen declares that Brazil is at war — a War that Dare Not Speak Its Name:

As a result, Rio’s loveliness has never been without its taint of blood. More than 18,000 violent deaths in less than three years are a lot. If the toll were in Baghdad, people would be talking about it. But the world’s attention is a capricious thing.

It seems from the way he frames the piece that Cohen was in Rio for a winter vacation, and decided to break out the notebook and cell phone for a poolside report. Perhaps, then, we can arrange a vacation for him to the Baghdad of hopeful flux, where he can be plied with cocktails to research the deaths under his “Middle-Eastern Pol Pot” as they compare to actual, and not entirely Cohen-generated, estimates of Iraqi wartime deaths:

Study Claims Iraq’s ‘Excess’ Death Toll Has Reached 655,000
By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, October 11, 2006

A team of American and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.

Truly, if violent deaths in Baghdad during the three years from 2003 to 2006 were as high as 18,000, “people would be talking about it.” But Roger Cohen’s attention is a capricious thing.

Here’s an interesting piece on Kanan Makiya, one of the wonderful ‘intellectuals’ that helped get us into the Iraq war. This part really struck me:

That the Americans committed error after error in Iraq, Makiya takes as a given: their biggest mistake, he maintains, was the decision to occupy Iraq and govern the country themselves, rather than allowing the Iraqis to take over. “I did not want to see the United States micromanage Iraqi affairs because, I feared, that is where things might go wrong,” he said.

Uh, dude? It doesn’t take a heck of a lot of brainpower to understand that this was the plan all along.

Hell, just open up any edition of the Weekly Standard and you’ll see brazen calls for America to transform itself into a 19th Century imperial power. Here, I’ll help you find some examples. Like this one, from Max Boot:

The irony is that there is no shortage of U.S. experts in all these fields, in and out of government, many of them veterans of prior peacekeeping operations. What is lacking is a central office that can marshal their expertise. We need to create a colonial office–fast.

Of course, it cannot be called that. It needs an anodyne euphemism such as Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. But it should take its inspiration, if not its name, from the old British Colonial Office and India Office. Together, these two institutions ran large swaths of the world with a handful of bright, honest, industrious civil servants. They had an enormous impact, given the small numbers involved; there were seldom more than 1,000 members of the Indian civil service to administer hundreds of millions of Indians. Like its British predecessors, the U.S. colonial service needs to be an elite civilian agency that can call on forces for assistance where appropriate.

Boot adds in some weaselly nonsense at the end about how we shouldn’t really become like the British empire, but rather we should merely learn from how we operated. In other places, though, he’s much more explicit:

Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.

There’s also this:

What is the greatest danger facing America as it tries to rebuild Iraq: Shiite fundamentalism? Kurdish separatism? Sunni intransigence? Turkish, Syrian, Iranian or Saudi Arabian meddling?

All of those are real problems, but none is so severe that it can’t readily be handled. More than 125,000 American troops occupy Mesopotamia. They are backed up by the resources of the world’s richest economy. In a contest for control of Iraq, America can outspend and outmuscle any competing faction.

The greatest danger is that we won’t use all of our power for fear of the “I” word–imperialism.

And of course there’s this classic by Jonathan Last:

STAR WARS RETURNS today with its fifth installment, “Attack of the Clones.” There will be talk of the Force and the Dark Side and the epic morality of George Lucas’s series. But the truth is that from the beginning, Lucas confused the good guys with the bad. The deep lesson of Star Wars is that the Empire is good.

Here’s another good one that laments the withdrawal of European imperial powers from Africa.

These people are old-skewl Imperialists, buddy, and they’re quite open about it. They don’t have your country’s best interests at heart — they simply believe they’re entitled to rule the world.

Famed journalist Aliza Davidovit — best known for her groundbreaking article “How to Win at Cheating – 19 Steps to Successful Adultery” — is displaying her journalistic skills today at Wingnut Daily in a piece promisingly titled “Can Scotch Tape Heal America?” [SPOILER ALERT! Davidovit thinks that the answer is . . . “No!”]

Aliza starts off intriguingly enough:

In the name of the [sic] freedom of speech, I spoke up against it, in quite a benign manner I might add.

Don’t try to parse that Escher-like construction too carefully; it will make your brain hurt. But I’ll bet you’re dying to know how Aliza defended free speech by attacking it. Well, here goes:

I said Ahmadinejad shouldn’t speak [at Columbia] and tore my diploma. The end!

Of course, it wasn’t really “The End!” because immediately after tearing her diploma up, she went onto Faux News to talk about it:

I was actually putting my make-up on one morning, and I hear on FOX TV — which I watch every morning — that Columbia invited him, and I actually had to walk out of the room to make sure that Comedy Central wasn’t what my TV was focused on. And I went back to put my make-up on, and I said, “Sister, you don’t look so good without make-up, but if you don’t do anything about this, then I can’t even look at your face ever again.” I was enraged. I was enraged. I worked hard to get into Columbia and even harder to get out of Columbia, and giving up this degree was a big sacrifice for me. But today I didn’t tear up a photo copy, and I didn’t tear up a multiple whatever people were thinking. I tore up the original.

If Aliza really believes that tearing up the diploma is giving up her degree, shouldn’t she at least have the decency to quit the job she got because of that degree as well? And to be certain, I think she needs to ask Columbia to withdraw her degree which, I suspect, she hasn’t quite found the time to do yet.

Anyway, after her appearance on Faux News, the real sorrow, passion and martyrdom of St. Aliza commenced:

The stream of insults, threats and harassment haven’t ended. … Some have called for my liquidation, others have called me, well a dumb blonde who is bereft of any proof of brains since tearing her diploma.

Even as she wrote that, a mob of angry Iranians and Islamahomoiranofascist Columbia grads were outside her window chanting “Death to Aliza! Death to Aliza!!”

I was asked a good question. How, as a journalist, can I not be in support of the freedom of speech? OK! But being an advocate of the freedom of speech doesn’t preclude one from being an advocate of using your brains.

Well, that clears that up. Let’s move on:

I stood that day outside of Columbia University in protest, as a journalist and as “a blonde” whose empirical evaluations led me to know, not to hypothesize, that Ahmadinejad is an enemy to this country. … Did anyone notice that he never wears tie [sic]? Reason being is that ties represent Western culture, and, thusly, no Iranians wear them.

Not wearing a tie is, I suppose, probably as good a reason to attack a country as, say, non-existent WMDs. Oh, and if Aliza hadn’t torn up her diploma for her Master’s Degree in journalism from Columbia, I think Columbia would have had every right to ask for it back after she used “thusly” in a sentence.

Gavin adds: Huh. If Iranians find Western neckwear uncongenial, then perhaps Ms. Davidovit would like to explain this:

U.S. Says Captured Militant Has Iran Ties

IRAQ: Iran Ties Weaken Government Further

Europe Resists U.S. Push to Curb Iran Ties

Clearly these Iranians would be dandying around in silken cravats with diamond stickpins if not for America’s, you know, eternal vigilance on the Islamo-haberdashery front.