Sadly, No!

You know you suck at debating when you are outwitted by “Warrior”:

This is easily the most entertaining episode of “When Brownshirts Attack … Each Other!” since Misha the Traitorous Dane squared off against Debbie “The Syphilitic Little Ignorant Slut” Schlussel.

Seriously, that Hannity-Warrior tilt is like watching one of those old cartoon fights represented as a churning cloud of dust, and you’re afraid that any moment an arm is going to reach out of the screen and pull you in.

Baseball Crank:

Now, the idea that what is going on in Iraq is “civil war” is debatable as a matter of military doctrine as well as popular understanding among Iraqis, given the large areas of the country not engulfed in conflict …

Well, yes. There aren’t pitched battles taking place on every square inch of the vast Iraqi desert at all hours of the day. The entire country does not precisely resemble the Boar’s Nest after some of Boss Hogg’s hired heavies “accidently” spill some beer on Luke Duke before the big race to save Cooter’s garage. But then, Johnny Reb wasn’t exactly laying siege to Martha’s Vineyard during our own Civil War, either. Let alone driving Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane off the road just outside Kennebunkport.

… and the absence of organized factions that are openly seeking to secede from or overturn the government.

If Ichiro’s inside-the-park home run in last night’s All-Star game* was “The Truth, Plainly Spoken,” then with the above sentence, Baseball Crank just traveled back in time to Japan and murdered Ichiro’s grandfather when he was a little boy.

*Ask me about my presence at last night’s All-Star game! Whoo-hooo!

You know, things were better a little while ago, when image uploading was broken and we had to keep reusing old pictures. Because OMG, ew:

Above: 2007 Atlas Shrugs calendar

Encounter the tragedy here. To help preserve some dignity in the world, we’ve crafted a limited-edition coffee mug featuring Pam in a more lifelike pose — i.e., eating a baby panda.

On the way into work today I listened to a discussion on the radio about nationalized health care. Owing to convention, a cross-section of retirees, stay-at-home moms and traveling sales execs called in and waited on hold to offer their attempts (e.g., “Joe Stalin would be your wife’s OB/GYN!”) at winning the host’s dulcet approval. I’ll admit I remained fairly unconvinced by their arguments until one caller said that America wasn’t ready for such a tax-draining scheme because, as he explained, he’d recently gone to a hospital emergency room and seen signs all over the place informing patients that no one would be denied health care, regardless of their current coverage or lack thereof.

So, if you’re scoring at home, the caller argued that the United States should not convert to a universal, single-payer health care system because … we’ve already got one.

Above: A girl uses logic to explain her point

This story is making the rounds today:

Santorum Suggest New Terror Attacks Will Change View Of War

[…]

Santorum went on to clearly imply that terror attacks will occur inside America which will alter the body politic and lead to a reversal of the anti-war sentiment now dominating the country.

“Between now and November, a lot of things are going to happen, and I believe that by this time next year, the American public’s going to have a very different view of this war, and it will be because, I think, of some unfortunate events, that like we’re seeing unfold in the UK. But I think the American public’s going to have a very different view,” said the former senator from Pennsylvania.

That would really rescue the Republican Party’s fortunes, wouldn’t it? A little boomity-boom between here and November, and America will be terrified back into voting for conservative bunco artists like Rick Santorum.

One finds it hard not to wonder what Rick might know that a grand jury might later find interesting. Because here are ‘unnamed officials’ and Michael Chertoff plowing the same turf:

White House calls meeting on al Qaeda threat

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The White House has called an urgent multi-agency meeting for Thursday to discuss a potential new al Qaeda threat on U.S. soil, ABC News reported on Tuesday.

Top intelligence and law enforcement officials have been told to meet in the White House Situation Room to report on steps to minimize or counter the threat and what steps are being taken to tighten security at government buildings, ABC said.

The meeting would be one of a number that have been convened in light of new intelligence and information learned from the recent failed car bomb attempts in London, ABC reported, citing a senior U.S. administration official.

Is it that home-grown terrorists are usually total chumps? Incapable of building a car bomb and liable to resort to a desperate Plan B, such as crashing their car into a wall and setting themselves on fire? Because we knew that already. Eek-terror-plot. Eek-terror-plot. Eek-terror-plot. Eek-terror-plot. With enemies like these, who needs Mr. Bean?

The unnamed official told ABC the level of concern of a new attack in the United States was now higher than it had been in some time.

The White House had no immediate comment on the report.

[…]

ABC News cited senior U.S. intelligence officials as saying that new information suggests a small al Qaeda cell was on its way to the United States or may already be in the country.

Separately, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board his “gut feeling” is that the United States faces an increased risk of attack this summer.

Chertoff said his assessment was based on past patterns of terrorists in Europe, intelligence he did not disclose and recent al Qaeda statements, the Tribune reported.

If something happens between now and November ’08, we can naturally expect a sustained shriek of ‘we told you so’ from the right-wing high-chair-thumpers, with immediate shrieky-hooting demands to shred the Constitution and surrender America into despotism, George W. Bush variety (i.e., ‘tin-pot’). It’s a mistake to note that these folks are always saying contradictory, illogical things, and to assume from it that they have no principles. They do. It’s just too simple for us to see, much of the time.
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Just off Der Road from traveling.

Here’s a piece of teh infamous video of The Cramps performing at Napa State Mental Hospital in 1978:

The strip-mining hipsters don’t seem to have gotten to that one yet. It’s actually really cool when you see how the band adapts to the audience coming onstage and performing with them (and vice versa).

Oh hell, lemme compound the damage here. I’ve been on the road since three this afternoon, and am slippy and malleable.

Here’s Teh Sound:

I updated this just now. Adrian Borland is one of those lost-whatsits of the ’80s. Every period produces lost-whatsits who are worth revisiting and championing, either while the aesthetic is fresh — which is hard — or later, when it’s clear what they were in a larger context, and clear that no one loves them enough for it. (Which is easier, but also more ambivalent.) We all find a few, and Adrian Borland’s The Sound is one of mine. Who are some of yours? From the ’20s or the ’80s, or from whenever?

(Another of mine is Ivan Bilibin.)

Hey, since when do I write about Blogs For Bush? The world has gone topsy-turvy. I mean, I don’t even read that site. What possible interest…

I mean to say, what is there over there that could possibly draw my…

What I’m getting at is that the whole thing is beneath my…

All right! All right already! What is it, Mark? What’s that you say? Why, yes! I do remember when you listed ten things you thought were worse than war! We all had a good laugh. But that was a long time ago, and…what? You want to prove that your ability to count to ten wasn’t just a one-time fluke? You…you say you’ve compiled a new list, of ten things that are more important than global warming? Well, of course we’ll look at it! If it’s good, we’ll put it up on the refrigerator next to that fingerpainting you did of a chicken for your 41st birthday!

It is put out by the global warming zealots that it is the problem we must deal with – it is more important than any other issue. Why this should be is rather a puzzle – it isn’t like there is an optimum global mean temperature, after all. Even supposing the worst is true of global warming, it would still just be a cilmate shift which would do this and that thing we’d all have to adapt to…but, there it is, the zealots, led by their Goracle, are saying there is nothing more important.

Actually, Mark, there is an optimum global temperature: it is “below that point at which life will be unsustainable”. But I’m sure that if the temperature went up to 120 and we burned through all the planet’s energy just trying to keep a hothouse going, we’d eventually “adapt”, because we’re way better at that than some crappy dinosaur. So, let’s get to it! What’s more important than global warming?

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Because they generally crank it out faster than we can laugh at it, here’s nearly a day’s output of commentary, in sequence, from Powerline. (Note that John Hinderaker is absent from this particular run of posts — the equivalent of the Three Stooges performing without Moe Howard.)

The pork index

Here’s a study showing something that we all know to be true: The biggest pork-barrel spenders are Democrats. When you click through the links, you find that it’s from a right-wing journal and a Glenn Reynolds enterprise, and is carefully designed to make Republicans look good and Democrats look bad. Heh-heh. I somehow forget to tell you that.
-Paul

Explicating Mr. Islam

On Sunday I linked to Debbie Schlussel and Little Green Footballs, who are outraged about Cat Stevens, a.k.a. Yusuf Islam, who performed at the Hamburg Live Earth concert. Today I reproduce an inflammatory remark from an apocryphal pamphlet allegedly written by Mr. Islam in 1988, the only reference to which is on right-wing websites. Except you don’t know about that, because in a moment of absent-mindedness (heh-heh), I quoted it as though he said it at the concert.

Andrew Bostom writes explaining that the entire Islamic religion is vicious and rotten.
-Scott

The Truth About Keith Ellison

Democratic congressman Keith Ellison was once a Black Muslim, therefore he is a raving radical who represents anti-Semites and cop-killers, and the Democrats, generally speaking, have a political alliance with radical Islam. Here’s a quote from Ellison that makes him seem not at all as I’m describing. See how fiendishly clever the man is? Those Democrats and their nutball conspiracy theories!
-Scott

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Dennis Prager:

Why Are Atheist Books Best Sellers?

It is not due to their eloquence, originality or persuasiveness that these books have become best sellers. I believe other factors are at work. And they are:

First and most significant is the amount of evil coming from within Islam. Whether Islamists (or jihadists, Islamo-Fascists or whatever else Muslims who slaughter innocents in the name of Islam are called) represent a small sliver of Muslims or considerably more than that, they have brought religious faith into terrible disrepute.

How could they not? The one recognized genocide in the world today is being carried out by religious Muslims in Sudan; liberty is exceedingly rare in any of the dozens of nations with Muslim majorities; treatment of women is frequently awful; and tolerance of people with different religious beliefs is largely nonexistent when Muslims dominate a society.

If the same were true of vegetarians — if mass murder and violent intolerance were carried out by vegetarians — there would be a backlash against vegetarianism even among people who previously had no strong feelings about the doctrine.

Um, Dennis? Also, let’s not get into which religionists have the worst records on “mass murder and violent intolerance”.

All right! More proof that the surge is working (my emphasis):

Official: Report will say none of Iraq’s goals met

A progress report on Iraq will conclude that the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad has not met any of its targets for political, economic and other reform, speeding up the Bush administration’s reckoning on what to do next, a U.S. official said Monday.

One likely result of the report will be a vastly accelerated debate among President Bush’s top aides on withdrawing troops and scaling back the U.S. presence in Iraq.

Are you kidding? Staring in the face of total failure only convinces the Bushies that they were right all along! We’ve seen it happen again and again and again, kids. Don’t delude yourselves into thinking this will be any different.

The “pivot point” for addressing the matter will no longer be Sept. 15, as initially envisioned, when a full report on Bush’s so-called “surge” plan is due, but instead will come this week when the interim mid-July assessment is released, the official said.

“The facts are not in question,” the official told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because the draft is still under discussion. “The real question is how the White House proceeds with a post-surge strategy in light of the report.”

I’ll tell you precisely how they’re going to proceed: by giving you the finger. Then the next day the New York Post will run a headline calling y’all a buncha Surrender Va-jay-jays. And thousands more people will die before Bush leaves office in 2009. It’s how these people operate.

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