Dear Jane,
We here at S,N! send you all good wishes and look forward to your February blogging from DC. Best of luck to you.
Sincerely & Affectionately,
Seb, Brad, Gavin, Retardo, Travis, Demogenes Aristophanes
There must be some misunderstanding:
…Max Sawicky’s tirade against the netroots as “a mostly brainless vacuum cleaner of donations for the Democratic Party,” the message is nearly identical: the netroots are dumb and uninformed. It also really isn’t all that different from many older attacks on the netroots from sources such as Mike McCurry and Joe Klein, who have made it quite clear to me, in on and off the record sources, that they think netroots activists are pretty stupid.
I’ve been plagued all day by this gross smell that’s been, like, following me around, and then I remembered I read Richard Cohen’s column just before I left for work and I got some of it on my shoe:
When politicians and commentators detail all that the Bush administration did wrong, I wonder whether any of it really matters. Would things have turned out differently if we had done everything right? Was Iraq so “broken” we never could have fixed it? Was Hussein’s despotism an avoidable tragedy, or was it, instead, a tragic necessity? I wonder about all these things. I tend to think now we never could have made it work.
Now, of course, everyone looks like an idiot. Bremer was an idiot and Garner was an idiot and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Cheney and all the generals, with the exception of Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, who called for lots and lots of troops and was sidelined. But these men are not really idiots. They were merely wrong, sometimes on account of arrogance, but they were doing what they thought was the right thing. They simply didn’t know what they didn’t know. They didn’t know a damned thing about Iraq.
Honestly. Sometimes I wonder if Richard Cohen goes around walking into door frames and sitting down in occupied chairs and getting startled when he sees locator maps that point out “you are here.” No self-awareness at all, man.
Richard Cohen: Quite possibly invisible
Thanks (!) to reader cowalker, we discover Shelley the Republican:
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for adoption but if Liberals stopped having sex with everybody they laid eyes on then the only kids that’d need adopting would be the ones whose parents died.
That’s a good start. Then again, don’t stop ’til you get enough:
We know that President George W. Bush comes from a family that takes its commitiment to serving the United States of America seriously. We know that Bill Clinton’s family was white trash and he wound up marrying a lesbian that killed Vince Foster.
Let’s crank up teh stupid to 11, ok?
Democratic Party Profiles: Barrack Obama
Firstly, it’s well known that black men are the most likely segment of the US population to go to jail. They are the most likely to take crack. The most likely to sell crack. The most likely to get involved in ‘drive by’ shootings. They are the most likely to pimp out women of easy virtue. They are the most likely to listen to disgusting hip-hop music and turn decent American children away from God.
You could only improve on this by writing: They are the most likely to take teh crack. The most likely to sell teh crack… and so on. But then we decided that Shelley the Republican is Jesus General’s wife. So it’s all very, very funny. Really. A great joke. Or is it… sadly, no!?
Shorter Jane Galt:
Above: Jane Galt
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.
See Atrios here, Kevin Drum here, Nitpicker here, Josh Marshall here, David Neiwert here, and so on and so on.
Update: Since Whiskey Bar is gone from the Web (maybe for good), also see the Billmon retrospective below the fold.
I think the time has come to retire ‘Retardo Montalban’ as a pseudonym. I’ve used it since 1999 or so; it was my first and best internet identity. I’ll miss it.
Writing in the New York Times, the Ole Perfesser argues:
Greenleaf (Idaho) is following in the footsteps of Kennesaw, Ga., which in 1982 passed a mandatory gun ownership law in response to a handgun ban passed in Morton Grove, Ill. Kennesaw’s crime dropped sharply, while Morton Grove’s did not. [Emphasis added]
Hmm, Sadly, No!?
Gee, this story gets better every time it is told. Next time it is repeated I suppose we will hear about how the the Kennesaw gun law caused the rate to become negative.
Here are the actual numbers (from Sociology & Social Research v74:1 p51)
Kennesaw Burglaries 1976-1986
76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 48 85 86
41 21 22 35 35 54 35 35 29 32 70
Yes indeed, Sadly, No!:
Read the rest of this entry »
(This is another long post that is not funny. Sorry.)
Atrios I think takes Comrade Max the wrong way. Atrios takes Max personally. I was tempted to as well but then had second thoughts. Atrios asks exactly “which Internets [Max was] reading?” That’s easy: the non-Dirty Fucking Hippie “Leftwing” Internets; the “Left” that was stridently partisan but morally and ideologically tepid and mealy-mouthed; that was either equivocal on Iraq during the run-up to the war and the early days of its prosecution, or was mildy against it but insisted that its reasoning was the only acceptable sort and therefore was just as or more likely to attack parts of the anti-war Left which didn’t conform to said model as it was likely to attack the actual looters and war criminals who engineered the whole operation. Think of Jonathan Chait, one of the most egregious Democrats in punditry, who “hates George Bush” but loves or loved the Iraq War.
Stephen Spruiell, age roughly 12, of the National Review’s Media Blog, is onto another hot story, and this time it involves everybody’s favorite post-Lacanian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek:
Žižek: Far more empirically grounded,
all in all, than Jean Baudrillard
THE MARKUP
NYT Edits Out Op-Ed’s Final Line: “Who Will Hang George W. Bush”Michael Moynihan, a friend of mine who works at the Swedish think tank Timbro, sends along this item:
A story you might be interested in: The New York Times published an editorial a week or so ago by Slovenian Marxist Slavoj Zizek ostensibly on the Saddam execution. It was a typically muddled affair, pieced together from earlier Zizek screeds. But it seems that the Times (and the IHT, whose op-ed editor Serge Schmemann told me that he hadn’t seen the original) edited out Zizek’s final sentence, which was published unexpurgated in both Sweden (Aftonbladet) and Spain (El Pais). And what was the offending line? “Which is another reason to ask: Who will hang George Bush?�*
You can find the El Pais version reprinted on a number of Spanish-language anti-war web sites. Just search Slavoj Zizek and “¿Quién ahorcará a George W. Bush?”
I like how the New York Times sees nothing wrong with publishing these nutty rants, so long as a generous dose of white-out is applied to anything that might tip off readers to their true nuttiness.
Meanwhile, in an alternate universe:
THE MARKUP
OMG!1!!! NYT Publishes line, “Who Will Hang George W. Bush”!!1!!!one!Everybody in the whole wide world is in a titanic rage at the latest anti-American salvo by the terror-supporting New York Times!11!!!
Woop! Woop! Incoming! The New York Times published an editorial by Slovenian Marxist Slavoj Zizek ostensibly on the Saddam execution. It was a typically muddled affair, pieced together from earlier Zizek screeds. It ends with the line, “Which is another reason to ask: Who will hang George Bush?� Ah-oogah!
Gabble-yabble-yabble woo-woo! Treason, arrests, punishments! Shocked, appalled, outraged!
At last the Times shows its true face, as everybody knew it would all along. TEH CRAP BASTARDS!1!!!eleven! (Seize Them!)
* Among Žižek’s points is that the trial (and the spectacle of the hanging) of Saddam Hussein carefully avoided the dictator’s most grievous crime against the Iraqi people and the world community: that of military aggression against Iran. Žižek draws an obvious connection between this omission and the Bush Administration’s desire to use Iraq, once again, as a means of pursuing a military campaign against Iran. An answer to the question, ‘Who will hang George Bush?’ would be, ‘Naturally, no one.’
Really, that’s the gist of his column today:
Men: last great hope of the Republican Party
Carey Roberts
January 15, 2007A few years ago, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake sounded the alarm that the Dems needed to reach out to male voters, or else resign itself to becoming a party of the perpetual minority. At first everyone laughed her off.
Since the majority of people in this country are actually women, I can kinda see why.
Then candidate John Kerry disastrously admitted in the 2004 campaign that his wife and daughters “kick me around,” and New York Times writer Frank Rich accused Kerry of being a Girlie-Man.
So after the Dems counted their losses and licked their wounds, Representative Rahm Emanuel, Senator Charles Schumer, and John Lapp, former director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, sat down for a long, hard talk. They decided to put together a new game plan — one that would feature new faces, all men — check that, macho men.
Macho men like Claire McCaskill and Tammy Duckworth!