I don’t usually follow college football, but the puns for the Oregon State/USC game totally write themselves.
Above: Booty shaken
Update:
Some Guy said,
October 29, 2006 at 6:06Nothing about the World Series?
God do I love Dolemite:
You no-business born-insecure motherFUCKAS!!!
Mark Noonan, of Red State and Blogs for Bush, has crafted a sequel to his notorious ‘Death of Science’ essay — because, like they always say, when you find yourself standing in a hole, you’d better keep digging.
I’d like to make one thing clear here – a lot of lefty posters on the original Death of Science thread tried to make out that I was some sort of Luddite opposed to scientific pursuit. This assertion is rather flabbergasting when made against a man who favors a massive increase in spending on NASA. When I say “Science” in this context, I mean that worldview which placed science athwart religion and said the two cannot mix. My contention is not only that they mix fine, but that you can’t really do science unless you are firmly grounded in faith and have a general knowledge of theology.
Oh, brilliant. Like we didn’t learn a lesson from Ye Greate Spayce Rayce of 1538, when the Anglicans’ new lean, efficient prayer engines won the tech war, but the Catholics’ desperate Mass Accelerator research nearly brought Jesus back prematurely.
“Ho, heretic! Make way!” “Eat mine fumes, Papist!
There are some things mankind wasn’t meant to meddle with!
Say, it’s quiet tonight — too quiet.
Above: Cue V.D. Hanson theme music.
Uh-oh. Let’s see what’s brewing with our favorite formerly reputable historian:
Watching and reading the recent Washington punditry, whether in print or on television, is a depressing spectacle. Almost all—Charles Krauthammer is the most notable exception—have somehow triangulated on the war, not mentioning why and how in the B.C. days they sort of, kinda, not really called for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. For some the Road to Damascus was the looting or Abu Ghraib, for others the increasing violence. Still more now say the absence of WMD did the trick.
But almost none of the firebrands of 2003 speaks the truth behind the facade: They supported the war when it looked like few casualties and a quick reconstruction and thus confirmation of their own muscular humanitarianism—and then bailed along the way when they realized that wasn’t going to happen and the unpopular war might instead brand them as “war mongers�, “chicken-hawks� or just fools.
Instead of that honest admission, we get instead either cardboard cut-out villains of the “my perfect three-week war, your screwed-up three-year occupation� type—a Douglas Feith, Gen. Sanchez, or Paul Bremmer—or all sorts of unappreciated and untapped brilliance: from trisecting the country to “redeploying� to Kurdistan, or Kuwait, or Okinawa?
[…]
[H]ad the United States had a republic secure and up and running in Baghdad 3 months after the end of the three-week war, at a cost of, say, 400 fatalities, missing Weapons of Mass Destruction and all other the other complaints would not have been real issues, as supporters would have pointed to the other 22 writs of war in the October 2002 Congressional resolutions that are as valid now as they were then.
Shorter V.D. Hanson: “Support Our Oops.”
I can’t believe I failed to mention conservative Jon Swift’s outstanding analysis of Battlestar Galactica. Here’s an excerpt:
Some are calling the sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica the best show on television so I decided to check out the season premiere to see what all the hype was about. It turns out to be even better than I had heard. The Sci Fi Channel show is a moving and haunting allegory about why we should stay the course in Iraq. The heroes are a deeply religious race, called the Cylons, who struggle to bring democratic ideals and Christian values to a planet called New Caprica (Iraq, of course) in the face of an increasingly violent insurgency. In a clever and ironic twist the Christian Cylons (Americans) are actually very human-like machines, while the villainous “humans” on New Caprica (al Qaeda) are brutal terrorists who follow a primitive polytheistic religion and behave like animals.
Although I am not generally a big fan of science fiction (my favorite genres are biblical epics, alpine mountain dramas, and women’s prison movies), Battlestar Galactica is not really about the future as much as it’s a subversive analysis of current events.
Read the whole thing.
Also, I forgot to give a shout out to Ezra Klein for helping me get this sucker published. Thanks, homey!
With a crucial election only days away, social critic Camille Paglia has some advice for her fellow Democrats:
Above: Camille Paglia
The way the Democratic leadership was in clear collusion with the major media to push [the Mark Foley] story in the month before the midterm election seems to me to have been a big fat gift to Ann Coulter and the other conservative commentators who say the mainstream media are simply the lapdogs of the Democrats. Every time I turned on the news it was “Foley, Foley, Foley!” — and in suspiciously similar language and repetitive talking points.
[…]
We saw the beginning of this in that grotesque moment in the last presidential debates when John Kerry came out with that clearly prefab line identifying Mary Cheney as a lesbian.
[…]
All that’s been accomplished by [the Foley] scandal is to call into question one of the central erotic archetypes of gay male tradition — the ephebic beauty of boys at their muscular peak between the ages of 16 and 18. It goes back through Western iconography from Michelangelo’s nudes to Hadrian’s Antinous and beyond that to Greek sculpture. It’s a formula at the heart of Plato’s dialogues, as in the Symposium, which shows Socrates in love with but also declining sex with the handsome young Alcibiades.
[…]
And why didn’t Democrats notice that they were drifting into an area which has been the province of the right wing — that is, the attempt to gain authoritarian control over interpersonal communications on the Web? It’s very worrisome and yet more proof that the Democrats have lost their way.
[…]
Every feminist who wants to smash the glass ceiling should realize she has a stake in Condi Rice’s success.
[…]
The Democrats’ portrayal of Republicans as fat cats out of touch with ordinary Americans just doesn’t fly anymore, and they should drop it. I think the center of the Republican Party really is small-businessmen and very practical people who correctly see that it’s job creation and wealth creation that sustain an economy — not government intervention and government control, that suffocating nanny-state mentality.
The good folks over at the American Prospect Online were kind enough to publish a piece I wrote about Republicans and Battlestar Galactica. Go check it out if you want (and tell ’em how much you think it RULES!!!11!).
Cheers!
PS- Now y’all know my last name. Yippee. Please don’t let Patterico know- I don’t want him stalking me at my home address. Thx.
Yes, it’s depressing how far we’ve fallen as a nation when headlines like this are no longer surprising:
Cheney endorses simulated drowning
And yes, that really is our vice president they’re talking about and not a convicted serial cannibal sex offender.
Wait, it does get better:
Dick Cheney, US vice-president, has endorsed the use of “water boarding” for terror suspects and confirmed that the controversial interrogation technique was used on Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the senior al-Qaeda operative now being held at Guantánamo Bay.
Cheney was responding to a radio interviewer from North Dakota station WDAY who asked whether water boarding, which involves simulated drowning, was a “no-brainer” if the information it yielded would save American lives. “It’s a no-brainer for me,” Cheney replied.
The comments by the vice-president, who has been one of the leading advocates of reducing limitations on what interrogation techniques can be used in the war on terror, are the first public confirmation that water boarding has been used on suspects held in US custody.
Gee, that sounds like torture, doesn’t it?
“For a while there, I was criticized as being the ‘vice-president for torture’,” Cheney added. “We don’t torture … We live up to our obligations in international treaties that we’re party to and so forth.
“But the fact is, you can have a fairly robust interrogation program without torture and we need to be able to do that.”
I repeat: this is not some fringe wacko writing at NewsMax. This is, in fact, our vice president. God help us.
Gavin adds: The best description of waterboarding that I’ve seen is here. It’s a lot worse than most descriptions suggest. Let’s also not forget that an ‘enemy combatant’ is now whoever the President decides to name as one, without judicial review.
Morally-, mentally-, and dietetically-disabled fucktard Jonah Goldberg says:
Ben Adler at Tapped has two posts (here and here ) in which he reveals that he works from the assumption that Republicans “in all seriousness, have it in” for people with disabilities. You can judge the merits of his argument on your own. What I find interesting is the worldview here. Adler assumes that Republicans operate as actual villains who want to do bad things to disabled people — that sticking it to the diabled is an actual animating passion on the right. Just for the record, I’ve now been party to, let’s say, hundreds of thousands of intra-conservative conversations large and small, public and private, written and spoken. Not once have I ever heard such a mustache-twirling desire put forward.
As a progressive, I shall of course kindly refresh Pantload’s memory with an example. Here’s Mark Steyn expressing real contempt for the disabled:
The post-Cold War interlude is over, an era of follies–OJ, Monica–and fatuities, a few of which Tuesday’s horror stories cruelly underlined: employees in wheelchairs, whom Bob Dole’s Americans with Disabilities Act and the various lobby groups insist can do anything able-bodied people can, found themselves trapped on the 80th floor, unable to get downstairs, unable even to do as others did and hurl themselves from the windows rather than be burned alive.”
Dan Riehl, that is.
Riehl: “I don’t particularly hate gays, you fag douchebag who is a clown! I will bitch-slap you.”
Update: This one ought to please the ladies, though I doubt many ladies use the MTA facilities as it is:
The line for the girls’ room just got longer.
Men who live as women can now legally use women’s rest rooms in New York’s transit system under an unprecedented deal revealed yesterday.The Metropolitan Transportation Authority agreed to allow riders to use MTA rest rooms “consistent with their gender expression,” the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund announced yesterday.
Ace notes that the NJ Supremo’s did leave it to the Democratic process, what’s left of it, to name Gay Marriage. lol That’s so freaking silly, as if it needs another name. But I suppose we could call it the Homo-Cohabitation Bill, or would bill be sexist?
Dan, you know, if there’s something you feel a need to share…
Above: cheap pun loaded with cultural freight
We’re not saying anything here; we’re just saying.