I went back to Powerline musing on whether I’d been unfair to poor old Hinderaker. Perhaps he’s genuinely as dull as a wad of Play Doh, and his stupidity. . .you know, only coincidentally reaches a crescendo every time he finds himself in a rhetorical cul-de-sac, as it were. Perhaps it’s brought on by emotional stress, as with The Hulk.
[insert graphic of Hinderaker wearing nothing but purple shorts]
“The majority of Sen. Levin’s and Rep. Hoyer’s constituents, along with a majority of the country, and a majority of Democrats in Congress want a quick and responsible end to the occupation in Iraq,� said Eli Pariser, the executive director of MoveOn.org Political Action.
“Occupation”? Good grief. MoveOn may turn out to be the Republicans’ best friend, but it certainly isn’t the country’s.
No, see? He’s totally losing control of himself. He’s like, “Good grief,” and the next thing you know, he’s rampaging around all like, “Occupation!? The wacky doctors game? Ooh, those surrender-eating cheese monkeys! Everyone knows that Iraq is a. . . it’s a slow war that happens in the same place all the time. Occupation, my left eye! Well, I never. This helps Republicans. I blame Clinton. Ack, get these bugs off me. Tunafish. Heliotrope.”
Friday vids:
Swell Maps — ‘Let’s Build A Car’ (3:00).
(From the album, Jane From Occupied Slow War That Happens In The Same Place All The Time Europe.)
New York Yankees slugger Jason Giambi says Major League Baseball should apologize to the public for its widespread performance-enhancing drug problem.
Claiming he’s likely been tested for performance-enhancing drugs more often than anyone, Giambi told USA Today in a story on its Web site Friday that the apology is long overdue.
“I was wrong for doing that stuff,” Giambi told the newspaper Wednesday before the Yankees played the Chicago White Sox. “What we should have done a long time ago was stand up players, ownership, everybody and said: ‘We made a mistake.’
“We should have apologized back then and made sure we had a rule in place and gone forward. Steroids and all of that was a part of history. But it was a topic that everybody wanted to avoid. Nobody wanted to talk about it.”
Is there anyone out there who thinks Giambi isn’t still taking performance-enhancing drugs of some kind?
Sometimes when we visit Powerline, we picture John Hinderaker dangling in the air with his briefs hitched to a telephone pole, trying to make up an argument that flying wedgies are bad for the Democrats.
One of the Democrats’ frequent talking points about Iraq is that the administration failed to plan the mission there adequately. It is ironic, then, that nearly all of the Democrats in the House of Representatives have voted to bar the administration from planning for the contingency of hostilities with Iran.
That squeaking noise you hear is my brain hitting itself with a little rubber mallet. It is ironic, then, that wha…?
Bradrocket adds: Hey look, some dudes are doing work on Hindy’s outdoor patio!
Bradrocket adds again: And for good measure, here’s a nice diagram of Hindy’s reasoning:
[Brad out]
Hinderaker is a lawyer of the incurious Dartmouth variety, and as such, he seems unable to imagine political discourse as anything but a species of litigation, in which opposing parties are expected to craft a version of reality that favors their side. Hindy’s notion of himself as an analyst (he’s a Claremont Institute fellow) isn’t about pursuing facts and insights, but about thinking up instrumental arguments to help support his imagined client, George W. Bush.
There are a lot of right-wing commentators like that, out in the gabble-and-honkosphere, but Hindy is the most like that. He’s the type specimen. And the trouble with juridical wingnuttery is that legal debate, unlike political debate, is refereed, such that you can only get away with so much sophistry and smoke-blowing before the judge tells you to stop stinking up his or her courtroom. Here, the right-wing litigators more or less run amok. Hindy’s signature means of enjoying his free-stinking privileges — his flatus operandi, as it were — is to pretend not to know things. He rarely tells outright fibs, but instead deploys a powerful tactical stupidity that’s quite distinct from the strategic and moral one that he actually possesses. Read the rest of this entry »
Over at Hooty Hoo Hewitt’s blog, Patrick Ruffini calls our attention to an exciting new initiative by Congressman Eric Cantor (R-VA). Eric is sick and tired of certain people (*coughDEMOCRATScough*) who are always criticizing the ideas of others, but have no ideas of their own, and he’s going to do something about it! Of course, he doesn’t have any ideas of his own either, so he’d like to steal some of yours!
Above: “Sigh. Okay, Congressman, let’s go over it one more time. ‘Build a teepee, come inside, close it tight…’ TIGHT! Christ.”
Working closely with the El Salvadorian orphans employed by his “Solutions Factory”, Cantor has plucked the freshest fruits of the Virginia GOP’s voter base, and the ideas are DYNAMITE! Clearly, no member of the left-wing “blame America first” party can compete with the ragin’ rapids of the Republican renewal — not when they’re spitting out brilliant ideas like these every time you hit ‘refresh’ on your browser:
Of course, not every great idea comes from Virginia Republicans! Hugh’s readers sound off with their own fascinating ideas for better government, including: “LOVE of country…………….MORE love of country………………YET MORE love of country……………..APPRECIATION of American Exceptionalism…………….Clarity about the essence of islam, which is jihad”; “a leader with no conscience when it comes to advancing conservative principles, destroying Democrats, marginalizing the Media, killing Islamofascists, and ignoring world opinion”; and praying for “the only thing that can save Conservatism now” — that is, “a massive catastrophe, such as a terrorist attack on mainland America. Something along the order of a suitcase nuke on a major American city.”
Now that’s an idea we can ALL get behind! Hooray for the Solutions Factory!
August 1980: After Southern Baptist Convention President Bailey Smith tells a Dallas Religious Right gathering that “God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew,” Falwell gives a similar view. “I do not believe,” he told reporters, “that God answers the prayer of any unredeemed Gentile or Jew.” After a meeting with an American Jewish Committee rabbi, he changed course, telling an interviewer on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “God hears the prayers of all persons. God hears everything.”
[…]
March 1993: Despite his promise to Jewish groups to stop referring to America as a “Christian nation,” Falwell gives a sermon saying, “We must never allow our children to forget that this is a Christian nation. We must take back what is rightfully ours.”
[…]
January 1999: Falwell tells a pastors’ conference in Kingsport, Tenn., that the Antichrist prophesied in the Bible is alive today and “of course he’ll be Jewish.”
“A few of you don’t like the Jews and I know why,” Falwell sanctimoniously told his congregation. “They can make more money accidentally than you can on purpose” (The Washington Star, July 3, 1980).
Now the punchline, coming as only it can from a batshit yenta who has accused everyone from Google’s programmers and NBC network producers to Moveon.org and George Soros (she and her JDL friends have a list) of anti-Semitism:
Jerry Falwell RIP
Reverend Falwell has died. A fine man. A great American. Israel has lost a true friend and supporter. May his soul rest in peace.
Posted by Pamela Geller Oshry on Tuesday, May 15, 2007 at 02:17 PM | Permalink
Bwahahahaha. Because there’s, like, a heirarchy of values whereby… ah, fuck it.
Ronald Reagan’s supercharged renewal of the arms race and destruction of detente singlehandedly obliterated the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War, right? I mean, that’s what the wingnuts say. It’s been repeated so often that it’s conventional wisdom.
Except it’s not true. And thanks to an unintended consequence of wingnut welfare, there’s even more evidence that it’s not true. David Frum, hack, excerpts a paper paid for by the American Enterprise Institute and delivered by the former Prime Minister of Russia, calls it “deeply interesting”, and, of course, makes no mention of Ronnie Raygun.
If I ever see this cocksucker in person, I’ll take a swing at him.
Giuliani called him out and invited him to withdraw the remark. He refused.
Brave maverick?
It’s pretty easy to vote against everything when you’ve decided to not actually be part of an actual working, governing majority.
The minority party always has the most fun because it gets to do nothing but posture. Ron Paul has made a career of being a minority party of one.
Fucking useless anti-American crank. He’s a Truther and he belongs in his own circle of lunatic Hell with the rest of them.
Above: A. O. Spades In Repose, With Wild Goose (2007)
When Ace says he’s planning to take a swing, we can only imagine some kind of playground rampage, because the notion of punching Ron Paul (or any other adult person) contradicts everything we’ve come to know and love about him.
Mise en scene: Somebody pops a paper sack in the movie theatre, and Ace is under his seat with popcorn and Jolly Joes in his hair, scanning for Jihadis. Anger darkens his brow. Later, with a single squashed Raisinet adhered to his sleeve, Ace pounds forth a 2,000-word blog post about shooting liberals with a tactical firearm of specified manufacture, for their traitorous enabling of the Jihadis who will, it is certain, one day attack us with big loud bangy noises in places such as movie theatres.
Repeat this in regular cycles, interspersed with lots of posts gleaned from Fark.com and News of the Weird, as well as a bunch of uh, other stuff.
Basically, the only thing Ace is likely to punch is the remote buttons whilst switching back and forth between Future Weapons and women’s kick-boxing. We love him so! Read the rest of this entry »
Can any guys (or lesbians) conjure anything more depressing that having sex with a wholesale subscriber to strong-form feminist theory like Amanda Marcotte? Is anyone else’s idea of dirty-talk Baby, I am going to empower you all night long… ?
I can’t think of anything more miserable.
I sure can.
It’s called a woman who has such low self-esteem that she’ll sleep with a guy who thinks of her genitalia as “Play-Doh and bacon.” Thankfully, I don’t think such women actually exist.
