Sadly, No!

Hooray, hooray, hooray!!!

S.Z. and Scott, the brilliant minds behind World O’Crap, have finally released their book!!!

Although Kos hasn’t given me the OK to do this (and btw, Kos, my PayPal account is feeling mighty damn lonely right now… if you don’t send some dinero pronto, I’ll totally spill the beans about that little tryst you had with Jeff Goldstein’s dog), I am now going use the power of this blog to encourage ALL of you to buy this fine book. C’mon, what else are you gonna spend $18.95 on- a subscription to The New Republic?

Gavin adds: Dude, you shouldn’t mention Kos. If we say “Kos” three times, he comes out of the mirror and… Oh, no.

“The recent candidates are Darcy Burner in WA-08
and Patrick Murphy in PA-08. Today we’ll be adding
Paul Hodes in NH-02.”

Aieee!!!

Bradrocket adds: “The recent candidates are Darcy Burner in WA-08 and Patrick Murphy in PA-08. Today, we’ll be adding Paul Hodes in NH-02.” Yes, Master.

Dear Glenn Greenwald: if you don’t ‘out’ the Townhouse mailing list like I ‘out’ anonymous liberal bloggers, I shall continue to taunt you as a Kos-worshipping hack as I simultaneously re-insert my own head into the collective asses of Mehlman, Instayokel, Malkin, Chuck Johnson et al.

Sincerely,
Jeff Goldstein

PS – Next time, I’m threatening to beat you with my cock while my commenters debate on whether to rape you or beat you with axe handles.

PPS – MMM paste is yummy!

It’s a conspiracy! cries Agent Mulder Andrew McCarthy, echoing even louder squeals coming from Santorum-Juice-Man and Rep. Ren Hoek Hoekstra: Why is the Intelligence Community withholding the proof that wingnuts need that there are WMDs in Iraq, that Saddam did have ties to al-Qaeda, and that — therefore — Dear Leader spoke truthfully all along?

So far, what’s been found does not match up with the IC’s expectations prior to the war.

But there’s a difference between being overly exuberant about a significant development and failing to report it. And there’s a similarly big difference between failing to report it and stonewalling.

Wingnuts: “Why is someone leaking evidence of the Bush Administration’s rape of the Fourth Amendment?!?! Treason!”

(Deep breath, jump-cut into opposite reality phase)

Wingnuts: “Why isn’t someone leaking bits of the clusterfuck of garbled “intel” and crayon scribblings that, if put through a Freeper’s version of a Berlitz language course, might allow us to lie about Bush’s lies about Saddam’s WMDs and terror ties? Treason!”

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Counterfactuals are usually the historical turf on which reactionaries tread. As AJP Taylor lectured more than once, “what if?” is not a proper question for historians to address.

Which is why “historians” like Victor Davis Hanson and Niall Ferguson love them so: after all, what’s better than going back into time to make the Lefties lose all the fights they actually won?

Playing with counterfactuals is wanking as a historical exercise. Yet, as a moral exercise, maybe there’s something to it?

Because morally, one doesn’t have to deal with the Hegelian problem of contingency in the same way: The ripples caused by a moral counterfactual aren’t, I don’t think, as problematic as the ripples that must be addressed by counterfactuals in a historical context.

Or, I dunno, maybe they are. Maybe I’m just warning you that I’m wanking, too.

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Above: A central failing of Transhumanism is that the other guy, who’s a dickwad, will have robot arms too.

My final post on Transhumanism — a collection of disjointed thoughts, incoherent dissents, and puerile name-calling:

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Nice piece in the L.A. Times about nutcase millenialists whose

…endgame is to speed the promised arrival of a messiah.

For some Christians this means laying the groundwork for Armageddon.

With that goal in mind, mega-church pastors recently met in Inglewood to polish strategies for using global communications and aircraft to transport missionaries to fulfill the Great Commission: to make every person on Earth aware of Jesus’ message. Doing so, they believe, will bring about the end, perhaps within two decades.

In Iran, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has a far different vision. As mayor of Tehran in 2004, he spent millions on improvements to make the city more welcoming for the return of a Muslim messiah known as the Mahdi, according to a recent report by the American Foreign Policy Center, a nonpartisan think tank.

To the majority of Shiites, the Mahdi was the last of the prophet Muhammad’s true heirs, his 12 righteous descendants chosen by God to lead the faithful.

Ahmadinejad hopes to welcome the Mahdi to Tehran within two years.

Conversely, some Jewish groups in Jerusalem hope to clear the path for their own messiah by rebuilding a temple on a site now occupied by one of Islam’s holiest shrines.

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…and replace him with Billmon? Seriously, the dude rocks my world:

And, right on cue, we have the New York Times weighing in with a well-timed leak promising major U.S. troop reduction, beginning two months before the November elections. Now isn’t that a coincidence?…The next step, of course, will be for the same people who three days ago were demanding the execution of John Kerry and John Murtha for even daring to suggest a withdrawal timetable to immediately begin calling for a withdrawal timetable — that is, when they’re not hailing the Cheney administration for having won a smashing victory in Iraq. In fact it’s already started.

I really should have seen this coming. The tip off was the proposed amnesty for killers of U.S troops floated by one of Maliki’s aides several weeks ago, which was immediately greeted by a bevy of GOP heel clickers as the second coming of Nelson Mandela (thus stacking one stinking pile of hypocrisy on top of another.) In hindsight, it’s easy to see that they were just warming up for the BIG flip flop.

I can’t add anything to that, so I’ll just go back to orbiting Earth as a floating space fetus now.

Ol’ Malkin is stirring up teh hate as usual, and the current target is (again) the NY Times, for printing stories that supposedly might encourage terrorists to defeat America in the most dire war in all of blow up something making a scary, pants-peeing boom, forcing cowardly America to surrender. The solution as usual is to shriek at journalists, threatening to lock them up.

Meanwhile, David Brooks of the NY Times is attacking* Markos Moulitsas. Make sense? Me neither.

But the high-end WingNet has lately been concentrating really strongly on shutting down anti-Administration leaks, stopping investigations into government intelligence scandals, and demonizing journalists, with Malkin and Powerline blasting out anti-First-Amendment content like cheap bean burrito farts.

Normally this would suggest that their fax machines have been playing a sprightly little harmony tune (like ‘Pennsylvania 1-6-Hundred’), but we have recently come into possession of a number of messages from the super-secretive mailing list that controls the entire right-blogosphere by threat and intimidation.

That’s right, we’ve infiltrated the Clownhouse list.

And more on that later. (Goldstein, your days of tyranny are numbered!) But for the time being, Malkin has a Miss Shelly of Romper Room thing where she’s posting WWII propaganda posters for her genius readers to color on with fingerpaints and markers.

So we did one too!

We never win these contests. Michelle, it’s like we got chocolate in your peanut butter — two great tastes in one!

Ew. That’s actually really gross. I ought to go wash my brain out with Lava soap now…

*Not a parody column

From Deadheads Are What Liberals Claim to Be But Aren’t, An Interview with Ann Coulter, at Jambands.com:

TH: What’s your favorite Grateful Dead show, and why? Were you there?

AC: They were all my favorites – especially the shows at Shoreline. It’s a beautiful outdoor amphitheater, the Dead’s home field, with California chardonnay for sale by the glass (in addition to not being a pot-smoker, I’m not much of a beer-drinker), and I often ran into my college Deadhead friends there. We’d go sailing during the day and see the band at night.

I fondly remember seeing the Dead when I was at Cornell. It was the day of the fabulous Fiji Island party on the driveway “islandâ€? of the Phi Gamma Delta House. We’d cover ourselves in purple Crisco and drink purple Kool-Aid mixed with grain alcohol and dance on the front yard. Wait – I think got the order reversed there: We’d drink purple Kool-Aid mixed with grain alcohol and then cover ourselves in purple Crisco – then the dancing. You probably had to be there to grasp how utterly fantastic this was.

It just hasn’t been the same since she took the act national.

This is easily the weirdest story I’ve read all week:

Remember the egg, the frying pan and the message? “This is your brain,” the ominous narrator told us before cracking an egg over the sizzling skillet. “This is your brain on drugs.” Public service announcements have changed a lot since that foreboding culinary lesson. They now include exploding cars, flying Matrix-style stuntmen and exceedingly dire messages like “Don’t Suicide Bomb.” A new, American-made PSA aimed at discouraging these deadly attacks is currently in production. The ad is slated to air as a 60-second spot on Iraqi television this summer.

Religious fanatics who want to martyr themselves won’t be deterred by a fucking commercial, guys.

(Does anyone else get the feeling that Bush thought of this idea himself?)

It’s a tall order considering that post-occupation Iraq is now rife with militant groups and plagued by increasing sectarian violence. In March alone there were an estimated 175 suicide bombings. There’s also the question of just who will be able to see the PSA. The cost of owning a TV is often prohibitive for the average Iraqi, and those who are affluent enough to get Iraq’s state-sponsored programs are not always thrilled by what they’re seeing.

Hey, the suicide bombing ad’ll probably be the most exciting thing they see all year. It certainly beats the shit out of Iraqi Idol or reruns of The 69 Thousand Dinar Pyramid.

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