Sadly, No!

While scouting for wingnuttery at the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page yesterday, I found this astounding letter to the editor that was so special that I just had to scan it and share:

Here is the text:

When the Democrats say they want to narrow the wealth gap, what they’re really saying is that they want to limit success.

“The rich have been very successful at evading taxes for the past six years, and now the Democrats want to stop them. For shame!”

In the ideology of the Democrats, it is unfair for one person to rise above others.

Hmmm, I don’t think I’ve ever discussed that idea with my Democratic comrades, but I’ll be sure to bring it up at our next cell meeting. (Ironically, the last time I went to Drinking Liberally, I spent a lot of the time talking with this dude Tim about bond prices and treasury yields.)

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s just past midnight. I think it might be Backwards Day again.

From Americablog:

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

E. coli outbreak leads to Taco Bell
by Chris in Paris – 12/05/2006 03:08:00 AM

“That’s funny,” I thought. “It’s usually the other way around.”

And then just at that moment, this came in from some Bizarro-world Atrios, via RSS:

Aiee!

Update: The usual forwards and not upside-down or diabolically laughing or bearded Atrios went and corrected it,* so I guess they had a big battle or it’s not backwards day again after all.

Welp, back to my Lego space station.

The Way Forward
By Mark Noonan at 08:16 PM

Victor Davis Hanson over at NRO’s The Corner shows what clear thinking results in:

Aiee!

Oh, it’s only Noonan. Whew, that was scary again there for a second.

* No really, read the comments.

From the right-wing Political Pit Bull:

Video: Comedy Central Plans Cartoon Mocking Bush Administration
By Greg Tinti on December 04, 2006 at 05:05 PM

Oy.

Comedy Central has ordered “Lil’ Bush: Resident of the United States,” a cartoon satire that re-imagines President Bush and key executives in his administration as elementary school misfits.

The title character is surrounded by close pals like Lil’ Cheney, who grumbles unintelligibly, and Lil’ Condi, who pines for Lil’ Bush and does his homework for him.

“Bush” is not without its risque moments. When Lil’ Bush’s school serves falafel instead of hot dogs for lunch in one episode, he and his pals torture the cafeteria employees with methods made famous during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Six episodes from writer-producer Donick Cary (“The Simpsons”) have been ordered to air on Comedy Central next year.

“Bush” got its start in September as six five-minute clips offered by Amp’d Mobile, a U.S.-based wireless service that packages video entertainment programming with cell phone service.

Honestly, I don’t have a problem with political satire, even when it mocks the Bush administration or Republicans (SNL’s skit on Rice’s confirmation is one of my favorites), but I do have one requirement: it has to be funny. And if you think ‘Lil’ Bush’ sounds totally lame in the description above, just watch the five minute pilot; not only is it not funny, it’s pretty much an amalgam of every bad Bush joke of the last six years.

Totally lame? Dude, this sounds funny! But let’s be scientific and see if this cartoon is really as bad as…oh, say, for instance, hmm, what’s something bad? Um, well, just to pick one at random…uh, let’s say, for example, Julia Gorin’s America Show.

Read the rest of this entry »

Fiji military overthrows government

Commodore Frank Bainimarama, the armed forces chief credited with resolving Fiji’s last coup, announced in a nationally broadcast statement that, “As of 6 o’clock this evening, the military has taken over the government, has executive authority and the running of this country.”

Historians will refer to this coup in the antipodean Republic of Fiji as the ‘Cruel Summer.’

Title of latest post by Paul Mirengoff:

Can AP’s credibility be restored?

You should keep hounding them to make a correction on the all-important Jamil Hussein story, Paul. The MSM’s inability to self-correct is what separates them from the rising tide of citizen-journalists who… Uh, because Rathergate, with the…

Is it cold in here? I think the entire universe just nulled out in some kind of meta-cosmic antimatter event.

Hello?

In comments I bet a pint of ice cream that Mirengoff would parry by trying the old ‘…um, hey, look at teh Clinton!’ trick. Of course everyone was way too smart to fall for the bet, but Mirengoff now owes us fifty billion pints of ice cream (and we want it now) because he not only tried to point the old bone at Clinton, he tried to point it at every postwar Democratic president, mentioning Richard Nixon only as a ‘successor’ of Lyndon Johnson’s, and blanking out utterly on Republican presidents Dwight Eisenhower, George H.W. Bush, and (you knew this was coming, wait for it…) Ronald Reagan.

The Reagan Administration is, of course, the standing benchmark for corruption, indictments, and prison terms. Mirengoff manages to avoid such analytical challenges by moving the goalposts: Instead of talking about corruption, we’re suddenly for some reason talking about ‘when it comes to waging war’ (except for the ones waged by Republican presidents besides George W. Bush):

Foner baloney, Part Two

Yesterday, I commented on the assessment of the respected (at least at one time) radical-leftist historian Eric Foner that George W. Bush is undoubtedly the worst president in American history. Foner was so anxious to “mail in” that assessment that he neglected to mention the one issue that, depending on future developments, actually could cause objective historians to give President Bush low marks — the war in Iraq. But let’s compare Bush to some other post-World War II presidents when it comes to waging, or not waging, war.

You would be correct if you were to speculate that the comparison is Rube Goldberged such that teh Democrats always do wrong things and George W. Bush is a big hero genius.

Mirengoff does, however, offer one correction in this post.

CORRECTION: President Bush didn’t declare “mission accomplished.” He stood near a banner that said that.

Awesome1!!

Above: Paul Mirengoff radiating quantum stupetrons

December 03, 2006
Foner baloney

[Eric Foner] argues that some of our bad presidents were corrupt, and goes on to assert that Bush’s corruption is even worse than that of Harding. If there were a board that considers historical malpractice, Foner would have to appear before it for that one. Bush’s administration has been nearly corruption free by historical standards. I may be missing someone, but the only high-profile administration offical I can think of who has faced criminal charges or had to resign in the face of scandal is Scooter Libby, who worked for the Vice President and who is not accused of corruption.

TPM Muckraker is still compiling their helpful list for Powerline, who’ll read it and then hop up and down with the list crumpled in their fist, going, “Drats! The treasonous left foiled us aga… What’s that? Did someone say there’s some new crap floating around about a Saddam/Al Qaeda connection?” And then there’ll be a decisive fixing of green eyeshades and spitting-on of hands, as Powerline cranks another citizen-journalist onionskin into their wise old Olivetti Lexicon 80.

Regardless, if we stop trying to teach them, they will have no chance for a better future. Dear Powerline, you must have been away from the desk when we heard about:

* Lester Crawford – Commissioner, FDA – resigned after only two months on the job. Pleaded guilty to conflict of interest and making false statements.

* Carl Truscott – Director, Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Bureau – resigned. A report by the Justice Department’s Inspector General found that Truscott wasted tens of thousands of dollars on luxuries, wasted millions on whimsical management decisions and violated ethics rules by ordering employees to help his nephew with a high school video project.

* Joseph Schmitz – Inspector General, Defense – Resigned amid charges he personally intervened to protect top political appointees.

* Brian Doyle – Deputy Press Secretary, DHS – Resigned in wake of child sex scandal. Pleaded no contest to 32 criminal counts.

* Claude Allen – Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy- resigned, pleaded guilty to shoplifting from Target stores.

* David Safavian – former head of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy at the Office of Management and Budget – convicted of lying to ethics officials and Senate investigators about his ties to lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

* Steven Griles – Deputy Secretary at the Interior Department – resigned, currently under investigation by the Justice Department for his ties to Jack Abramoff.

* Susan Ralston – assistant, White House – resigned amidst revelations that she had accepted thousands of dollars in gifts from Abramoff without compensating him, counter to White House ethics rules.

* Dusty Foggo – Executive Director, CIA – stepped down following accusations of corruption in connection to the Duke Cunningham scandal. Under investigation.

* Larry Franklin – intelligence officer, Defense – resigned, pleaded guilty to passing secrets to Israel.

* Janet Rehnquist – Inspector General, Department of Health and Human Services – resigned in the face of allegations she blocked a politically dangerous probe on behalf of the Bush family.

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t want to steal B-Rock’s thunder or anything, but I have a lousy memory and would probably forget to tell him about this, and he might otherwise have overlooked this Pastor Swank column from yesterday – which would be a real shame, because P-Swank’s distinctive, hammery syntax reveals the dark heart beating at the center of the burgeoning cut-and-run faction at the farthest fringes of the wingnut coterie:

There will be no Muslim rulers pointing naughty fingers at America when multinational militia move out to leave Iraq to its own blood bath.

Instead, Iraq will reveal itself to be the greater fool. How so? Iraq will not have energy to poke fun at America. Surrounding Muslim countries will not have nerve to do so either.

Why? Because they will be overwhelmed with more Islamic carnage as is present in Muslim nations wherever.

The sooner US troops return to America, the sooner Iraqi blood rivers will flow endlessly while America tends to its own affairs.

In a way, I suppose this is the logical conclusion to blaming Iraqis (“stop hitting yourself”) for the indisputable failure of our horribly misguided and poorly executed decision to wreck their country and shrug off its reconstruction for reasons that still can’t be clearly articulated.

Or, in other words, we’ve gone from purple fingers to “democracy’s too good for them” in just under 12 months.

Having found herself unable to blame John Bolton’s resignation on anti-Semitism (and if we know Pammy, we know she took a run-through on that position — possibly as the blender was churning a third pitcher of lime-kiwi daiquiris, perhaps as a Technotronic CD skipped maddeningly in the background), Atlas Shrugs instead blames American Muslims’ outrage over Dennis Prager’s infamously shark-jumping bible-oath column on…

Oh, guess. No, really. Take a guess. No, after you.

Keep in mind that the above link leads to a condemnation of Prager by the Anti-Defamation League.

CAIR DARES TO SMEAR HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL APPOINTEE

CAIR is attempting to bully the White House and the Holocaust Memorial to remove Dennis Prager? If this isn’t the height of hypocrisy. WTF does CAIR have to do with the Holocaust (considering the Quran calls for death to the Jews.) If anything, Muslims have much to atone for.

Muslims joined with Hitler to annihilate the Jews. This is too rich, too disgusting.

Photograph of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem reviewing the Nazi “Handzar” SS division in Yugoslavia 1944. In an address to the Muslim troops the Mufti puts Islam and Nazism on the same level claiming there were “considerable similarities between Islamic principles and National Socialism” More here

That’s genuinely awful. Then again, these stories of Pam’s always seem to have something crucially wrong with them, and that thing is often context. Even if we overlook her classic bigot algebra, in which the concept, ‘[certain people] in [a certain part of the world] did [something] at [some point in history],’ factors cleanly into concepts like ‘the Jews Muslims killed Jesus joined with Hitler,’ there’s also at least one other thing. From the Village Voice:

Oy McVey
From the Irv Rubin Bust to the Stern Gang: The Rich History of Jewish Terrorism
by Jason Vest
December 19 – 25, 2001

…[Avraham] Stern was appalled when the Irgun decided to make common cause with the British against the Nazis, and created the even more underground and more violent Lehi (Lohamei Herut Yisrael, or Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), also known as the Stern Gang, which held there was no greater threat to the Jews of Palestine than the mandate’s British administrators.

To this end, Stern actually made overtures to the Axis powers; September 1940 found him in dialogue with an emissary from Il Duce in Jerusalem, and in January 1941 he dispatched an agent to Vichy-controlled Beirut with instructions to convey a letter to representatives of the Reich. In it, Stern held that the “establishment of the historical Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, and bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East. Proceeding from these considerations, [the Lehi] in Palestine, under the condition [that] the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognized on the side of the German Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on Germany’s side.”

The Germans declined to take Stern up on the offer, but Stern held out hope as his organization continued to engage in terrorism against the British. After Stern died in a shoot-out with British police in 1942, his mantle was picked up by future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir.

So by Pam’s logic, Jews have no right to participate in the decisions of the Holocaust Memorial Board.

Um.

Luckily for all of us, Pam’s Logic would be one of the shortest books in the world — like Swiss Naval Victories, or Women I’ve Slept With by Adam Yoshida.

John Bolton Resigns as U.S. Ambassador to U.N.

By Peter Baker and William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, December 4, 2006

President Bush today accepted the resignation of John R. Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, expressing deep disappointment that “a handful” of senators had blocked his confirmation last year.

Emphasis and ellipses Pam’s (as always):

Bush Accepts Bolton’s Resignation

Speechless …………….. hardly surprising. There is no way a man of John Bolton’s character would be the willing mouthpiece for the terrible foreign policy direction the administration has taken.

There is no way he would lie and put a happy face on something so very bad. What a stunning loss.

What is surprising is how quickly Bush rolled over………………. John Bolton was a loyal Bush stalwart. Clearly he was at odds with recent Bush policy decisions that were chock full of carrots but no sticks for savage bullies, but he never said a cross word. Never. Loyal. No wonder Bush is isolated.

A very bad day for America. The Bush Doctrine RIP.

We’re screwed.

When that third or fourth appletini kicks in, there’s going to be some dishware flying chez Geller.

…If she knows where the dishes are. On second thought, brace yourself for a hail of Dean & Deluca takeout trays and half-eaten containers of Lobster Empanadas Provençal With Peanut-Wasabi Foam (from that funky new place in Massapequa).