Shorter Mary Katherine Ham: Because the rich are apparently genetically superior to everyone, we must allow them to pass all their money to their children so they can keep providing jobs to the swarthy commoners.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.
UPDATE: Oh dammit, I posted this without realizing Leonard had done a number on it below. Oh well, just be sure to read his too. This piece deserves a good thrashing.
I was running a 104-degree fever yesterday, or maybe I was just drunk, because there’s no other explanation for the horrible dream I had where HBO decided to goose Big Love‘s ratings by replacing Bill Paxton’s wives with Mary Katharine Ham, Michelle Malkin, and Pamela Oshry Geller Coughlin Kissinger Liefeld.
Above: “Here I have Pelosi’s thumb, wrecked as homeward she did come.”
The three witches are imperfect speakers indeed, and yet we must charge them speak:
Mary Kate wants us to know that one shouldn’t judge an heiress by her criminal record or distracted-seeming, poor-quality blow jobs. I’m currently under a federal injunction that prevents me from writing anything about Paris Hilton, but I do highly recommend the article, in which the Ham Sandwich defends her claim to be “morally opposed to the death tax” by citing examples of many fine, upstanding professional descendants that “reflect well on the stock from which they sprung” and thus should be spared the horribly un-American indignity of having to pay taxes on their vast and unearned incomes. Such as, you ask? Well, such as…uh…Donald Trump.
No, really. That’s her first example. That’s her right-out-of-the-box paragon of decency, her primary argument that not all people of inherited wealth are vulgar, hopeless buffoons. Donald Trump. The man who almost single-handedly ruined New York for two decades. The man better known for his bad rug than any business deal he ever made. The man whose one major contribution to civic life has been an aggressive campaign to wipe out hot dog vendors. That guy.
But wait, she’s got more if for some reason you don’t like Donald Mayonnaise! There’s failed presidential candidate Steve “I Only Ever Had One Idea” Forbes, who claims that “passing down money” is no different than “passing down intelligence” and thus proves that he knows as much about genetics as he does economics. There’s Bill Ford, who did such a great job of running his family’s company into the ground. There’s cheap vintner Brooks Firestone, who’s leaving his own brand of anti-environmentalism as a legacy to California. There’s Georgina Bloomberg, who has turned her love of riding expensive horses into a charity that lets other people ride expensive horses, if they’re crippled or retards or something. There’s not-at-all-gay TV show host Anderson Cooper. And there’s Jay Rockefeller, who may be a liberal Democrat, but on the other hand, he’s super rich, so how bad could he be?
“Pluck, work, labor, trouble,” signs off Mary Kate, citing four things that none of these people have ever been forced to have, do, attempt, or encounter. Therein lies a valuable lesson for crazy people the world wide.
Over at Atlas’ impregnable Strong Island party barn, Crazy Pammy dispenses another valuable lesson: it is very, very easy to miss the point of things when you are an idiot. She cites ACLU criticism of an FBI terrorist watch list which contains over 500,000 names as clear evidence that liberals just don’t get it when it comes to Muslamofascunism. A different, smarter person might read the very same article and think “Wow, a list of half a million terror suspects, none of whom have done anything worth arresting them over — how useful can it possibly be?” But Pammy, blessed with the superior wisdom possessed only by the ignorant, the senile, and certain very stupid breeds of dog, takes it to mean that there are, in fact, at least half a million Islamic terrorists in the US and that, if anything, we’re not worrying about them enough.
Finally, speaking of worry, when I saw this post over at Hot Air, I was deathly afraid that I was going to have to hear Michelle Malkin sing.
Read the rest of this entry »
Above: Always touched by your presence, dear
‘General Pace’s Collateral Damage’
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.
Atrios linked to this Matt Yglesias post and appended his own kick-to-the-nutsack to it.
Well, I want to get in mine.
Yglesias says:
I see Bob Shrum observed that “The blogosphere was a lot more right about Iraq than all the experts in the Democratic party.” This is a nice thing to say to bloggers, but in important ways it’s not really true. After all, lots of progressive bloggers (your truly, Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, Matt Stoller, Ezra Klein, I’m sure there are more) got this wrong.
See, he and his clique are the progressive blogosphere. Those bazillions of DFH bloggers against the war whom Shrum was really talking about? They don’t exist. Never happened. I knew I’d read a post like this eventually.
Wow, lookee here:
There are still plenty of illegal immigrants here — some with terrorist designs — who snuck into the country pre-9/11. The left — and Bush, of course — would like to bury the fact that the Fort Dix Six Duka brother terrorists had illegally enterred the country from Mexico, for example.[…]
[O]ne day we’re going to have 100 or, who knows, 1000 people killed due to our governments’ blithe disregard for terrorist immigrants — both illegal and legal — and the government will claim “We couldn’t possibly have known, we couldn’t possibly have done more,” the same as MI5 and Tony Blair’s government claimed after 7/7.
Bullshit. After 9/11, you’re all on clear notice. You cannot claim you haven’t been warned. You were warned, to the tune of 3000 dead and the spectacular destruction of the Twin Towers.
If megaterrorism like this was supposedly “inconceivable” before 9/11 — a shaky propostion at best — it is certainly no longer inconceivable.
And yet, despite the promises made immediately after 9/11 that everything would change and we would never forget, not much at all change and we have almost entirely forgotten.
How many have to die, exactly, before government shakes out of its business-as-usual don’t-rock-the-boat mode? 3000 didn’t do it; perhaps 10,000 is necessary.
In other words, “If more people must be killed in order to justify my insane paranoia about brown people, then bully! Do it, England!”
So: last night, I wrote an angry rant about Tony Blair’s alleged desire to clamp down on the free press through state regulation. It turns out that the Guardian took the gist of Blair’s speech out of context and made it look creepier and more authoritarian than it really was.
The Ole Perfesser, however, read the Guardian’s report, took it at face value, and gave Blair’s ideas on press regulation as presented in the Guardian a weaselly, plausibly deniable, coated-in-just-enough-cheap-caveats-to-leave-himself-an-escape thumbs up:
I’m against Euro-style press regulation, of course. But much of the British press has been even more shoddily political and dishonest in its war coverage than its Ratheresque counterparts here. Lack of patriotism and honesty, plus lack of self-discipline, are likely to lead to calls for regulation. And if it were any other industry putting out a similarly shoddy and corrupt product, the British press would be demanding government regulation, wouldn’t it?
I’m sure that government regulation will be worse than press freedom, but irresponsible behavior tends to produce demands for government regulation. I should also note that one of Blair’s targets was the BBC, which is both exceptionally politicized and government funded, making Blair’s criticisms more significant in that case.
In other words: “I’m completely against regulating the press, but some people want to do so, and you can’t really blame them since the press is entirely to blame for the Iraq disaster. Heh.”
Now here’s something I know isn’t being ripped out of context! It’s Steve, one of Ace’s super-awesome readers (thanks to Al_in_Arabia for the tip):
What I say next will surely identify me as the geek I am, but here goes anyway: as a Lord of the Rings fan of longstanding (I first read the trilogy in the late fifties, when it was fjirst published in America), I can’t help but compare our present situation to the gathering storm in the Two Towers: the forces of darkness on the move, massing for war, America is Gondor, holding the line, and that Western Europe is the Shire, populated by clueless Hobbits who have no idea that just beyond their borders the armies of the Dark Lord are massing.
Did I say that I am a geek?
Y’know, I never would have guessed otherwise.
Further down in the thread, we find this (my emphasis):
TO quote a doggerel from my childhood:
“Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb-bomb-Iran!”Geez, that was in 1980-81. Those fuckers in Tehran are WAY overdue for the rain of explosive death they deserve. They feel like they can play in the majors, eh? Fine, bomb their leaders, bomb their Revolutionary Guard, bomb their gas stores and their oil refineries, bomb their ports, bomb their motorboat fleet, bomb their nuke plants and army bases. Bomb everything, and then play “God of Thunder” and “We Will Rock You” so loud it makes their ears bleed. It won’t solve all the world’s problems, but by Beelzebub it will diminish some of them.
The Great Satan rocks like AC/DC.
Hey Steve, kudos to another long-standing Tolkien fan. Sometimes I feel the USA isn’t Gondor, we are Rohan. Our leader is a prematurely senile fart who used to be a badass, the young warriors are out in the cold, and policy direction is in the hands of a spineless craven traitor who sold out for the promise of gold and a trophy wife. But still, we ride out to hunt the Orcs, with steel in our hands, fire in our eyes, and a song in our hearts.
What is wrong with these people? Is there some kind of clinical diagnosis for stuff like this?
UPDATE: Thanks to Codepope in the comments for pointing out that the Guardian did a really crappy job of reporting Blair’s remarks. His actual speech, posted in entirety here, is vastly saner and less wingnutty than what had been reported. And ironically, the Guardian’s awful coverage of his speech goes quite a long way toward proving his actual point:
So – for example – there will often be as much interpretation of what a politician is saying as there is coverage of them actually saying it. In the interpretation, what matters is not what they mean; but what they could be taken to mean.
At any rate, I’m leaving my crazed, profane rant intact in its entirety below, since I think it still stands as a fairly amusing rebuttal of what I thought Tony Blair was saying when he didn’t say it. If that makes any sense 🙂
Also, Blair is still a loser.
[END UPDATE]
Remember the days in the late ’90s when Tony Blair was considered hip and with it? Me neither:
British newspapers will and should be subject to some form of new external regulation, the outgoing prime minister, Tony Blair, said yesterday in a broadside that attacked the media for behaving like feral beasts and eschewing balance or proportion.
In a sweeping critique of the industry, Mr Blair claimed newspapers, locked into an increasingly bitter sales war in a 24-hour news environment, indulged in “impact journalism” in which truth and balance had become secondary to the desire for stories to boost sales and be taken up by other media outlets.
Now, I’m not one to refrain from slamming the news media. In fact, I think much of our elite press corps is shallow, inept and embarrassing. But what really struck me about Tony’s statement is this:
British newspapers will and should be subject to some form of new external regulation, the outgoing prime minister, Tony Blair…
You must, simply must, be shitting me.
These days I see “progressives� who, given a time machine and a bad haircut, would have felt more at home inside the International Amphitheatre in Chicago in 1968 than they would have with the people outside.
That’s not a perfect metaphor. For one thing, the male 1960s radical leadership had an even longer way to go on feminist-related issues than your run of the mill 2007 moderate conservative male does, to say nothing of GLBT issues. But I still think it apt. I’ve written before to compare the “progressive� response to radicals in the electoral process with the Republican response to their own radicals: for those disinclined to click a link for that all-important context, here’s a summary:
1992: A third-party candidate arguably costs the GOP the presidential race. GOP response: find out what the disaffected wanted that the GOP failed to offer, and offer it.
2000: A third-party candidate arguably costs the Democrats the presidential race. Democratic response: demonize the disaffected.We see that second one repeated every time the Progressive Marshmallow Consensus gets poked at from any perspective that could be interpreted as to the PMC’s left[.]
(My emphasis.)
To the PMC’s left? Um, no.
The term ‘PC’ has been poisoned by the Reichwing, so I call ‘over-invested Identity Politics’ what Clarke wrongly describes as the ideology on my Left. OIIDP, on the contrary, is neither Left nor Right but simply radical. I reject tout court Clarke’s equating it to generic left-of-liberal positions, as if it’s a mere component of a garden-variety social-democratic platform.
