Sadly, No!

As some of you may remember, we recently had to fly home to attend a funeral. One thing we did manage to do while there was fly our entire collection of old SPY magazines to Germany, much to the dismay of our wife. (Fortunately, they managed to avoid the scrutiny of the Beamter at the Zollamt.) So for absolutely no good reason whatsoever, we copy here a letter published in SPY, May 1993:

From what I see, SPY is little more than the accumulated whinings of an assortment of snotty, pin-dicked misfits who hope to quell their sense of impotence by adopting a position of self-proclaimed ‘superiority’ so that they can criticize and ridicule show business personalities…

If only someone would pay a compliment like that to the pin-dicked staff of Sadly, No!

In case you thought we can only manage to upset guys who’ve tried to give Sheri Valera the tongue, you were way, way off:

My heart is sick and sad.

How often do we have to tell Pete M. we don’t play on that team — and we don’t care if your team needs a shortstop. Not even if it needs a shortstop real bad.

Wait a second. Wait a second! This isn’t about Pete “The M. stands for Man except that I forgot the L for Ladies’ in front of it” M. It’s about somebody else’s wish for a death blow (not because of who you are, but for different reasons altogether.) Yet who could it be?

It seems that my neighbour has forgotten me. After all my properly directed snark and vitriol — nay, after bravely joining in the fray after he had kicked the crap out of “the hottest conservative writer” of that particular day — after my several posts which were blatantly sycophantic judiciously praising of his style, nothing.

Well, the writing is a bit like Amber Pawlik with a touch of Engrish.com, so it’s hard to say.

To no avail. Each time I rang, a shifty-eyed tweaker would peer through the blinds, and if I persisted in ringing, would eventually answer the door, only to gruffly send me on my way.

Oh oh. Looks like someone had an unfortunate encounter with a certain someone who used to babysit here.

The post continues somewhat after that, although much of it deals with a young man’s decidedly unerotic [no, not neurotic] journey from Montreal to Munich, and the less that is said about such a journey, the better. We shall simply say to our unidentified assailant, in case he had hoped for a lengthy and witty riposte: we choose not to flame.

Now go show Retardo of elementropy some love, so we don’t have to.

and it’s not going to be east, west, south and north of Baghdad somewhat:

BAGHDAD – Iraq remains on course to hold landmark elections in January, but violence could force authorities to exclude hotspots such as the western city of Fallouja from voting, a top U.S. general said here Sunday.

Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, operations chief of more than 150,000 mostly U.S. troops, said in an interview that the “cancer” of anti-American militancy in places such as Fallouja would not derail national elections.

A “contingency” plan, Metz said, is to bypass Fallouja – and perhaps other violent enclaves – and concentrate on ensuring electoral security in Baghdad and other population centers where hostility is lower. [Emphasis added]

You really can’t make up shit like that. (Thanks to Blair for the link.)

Ah Richard, who would have ever guessed that you could be fooled by a friend?

Last fall, as the board of Hollinger International prepared to oust its founding executive, Conrad M. Black, the director most protective and supportive of him turned to a friend and balked.

“This is a kangaroo court,” a person recalled the director, Richard N. Perle, as saying in defense of Lord Black, who had been accused by investors of improperly siphoning millions of dollars to other companies he controlled.

But last week, Mr. Perle’s view of Lord Black changed. Issuing his first public statements since being heavily criticized in an internal report for rubber-stamping transactions that company investigators say led to the plundering of the company, Mr. Perle now says he was duped by his friend and business colleague. […]

In the face of federal investigations and a scathing internal report for Hollinger by Richard C. Breeden, a former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mr. Perle has broken ranks and turned on Lord Black. […]

Gee, he broke ranks with the good Lord Black? What else did that report have to say?

“With the notable exception of Perle, none of Hollinger’s non-Black group directors derived any financial or other improper personal benefit from their service on Hollinger’s board,” the report said. “It is, of course, possible for a conflicted board member to act at least somewhat responsibly. As a conflicted executive committee member, however, Perle did not. Rather, his executive committee performance falls squarely into the ‘head-in-the-sand’ behavior that breaches a director’s duty of good faith and renders him liable for damages.”

Perle was tricked by his friend into receiving financial or other improper personal benefit. And now he’s mad at his friend — well, who wouldn’t be really? Next thing you know Perle will admit it was very unusual that attractive women came to his hotel room to have sex with him.

From his vacation home in southern France late Friday, […]

Oh, we can’t add anything to that! (WCAATT is a registered trademark of The Dark Window.)

Ah, the sweet smell of freedom:

BAGHDAD, Iraq – Two months ago, Baghdad had a spree of attacks on liquor and music stores. Now beauty salons are being bombed.

Women in Baghdad say it’s much more than an issue of unkempt hair. They say the bombings are part of a larger effort by unorganized, illegitimate armies to foist a more conservative lifestyle on them. The armies of Islamic militants have gained power on the street since the fall of the more secular Saddam Hussein.

Beauty shops in Baghdad often are run by women. Many of them have shut down in recent weeks because they can’t afford to rebuild after an attack or because their customers have been scared off. […]

The 47-year-old owner of a beauty shop in the Karada neighborhood, who asked not to be identified, said she used to take in up to 150,000 Iraqi dinar a day, about $100. On average, she now brings in 3,000 Iraqi dinar a day, about $2, “enough to buy bread and go home.” She let two of her staffers go last month and now runs the shop alone. She earns much of her living by going to the homes of clients who are afraid to come to her shop.

Thanks to Blair for the link.

Regular readers know that, while we often kid about Yosef or Justin Darr being the hottest conservative writers on the web, there is room for only one in our Hall of Flame. We speak of course of none other than Brian Cherry, whose last article reviewed on Sadly, No! was Marriage, Normal Behavior and the Gay Lifestyle. In that column, Brian had many un-gay things to say about gays, including this:

If you lived in their cultural, you would be working hard to co-op another more palatable identity as well. Pity them.

Well, we didn’t know then (nor do we now) whether we live in the “homosexual cultural.” We do know many homosexuals, and some of our neighbors are gay, but it’s just hard to know where a cultural really begins, isn’t it? In any case, that was then. This is now:

The Nazis are Back… and This Time They are Pink

Oh Brian, we just know this is going to be yet another serious, well-researched, coherent column for The Rant, with that patented “admittedly conservative slant.”

What is a Nazi? Well to anyone who is a recent graduate of the public school system a Nazi is someone who flies the American flag proudly, gets uneasy when thinking about how it is legal to pithe a baby as it exits the womb and doesn’t believe that how one chooses to use their genitals qualifies them for an additional set of rights.

What have we learned today? Well, for one thing we learned that Brian did not graduate from the public school system. We also learned that the new and proper way to refer to homosexuals is “people who choose to use their genitals in a certain way.” Whether this means that Puppetry of the Penis is gay, we don’t know. In addition, granting marriage licenses to same-sex couples means giving them an extra set of rights. (Well, at least compared to the unmarried Brian, a man who has, we’d guess, been told by countless women that he can’t use his genitals in their company, not that way, this way, or the other.) Remember dear readers, next time you find yourself with your partner enjoying a “special moment of privacy,*” you should be asking yourselves: “Would Brian Cherry approve of this particular way of using our respective genitals?”

Nazis began humbly enough as a radical political party that was in the extreme minority among the German people. Initially they didn’t have much going for them besides a keen eye for fashion and some really interesting ideas on what to do with people who didn’t agree with them.

If there’s one thing people appreciated back in the Nazi’s more humble days, it was their terrific use of colors. Didn’t Mein Kampf shock the world mostly for its chapter titled Hellgr?n ist das neue Schwarz!?

These numbers are backed up by the Oxford University’s 1997 addition of the “International Journal of Epidemiology” where it they have concluded the gay lifestyle reduces life expectancy by at least twenty years.

This isn’t Brian’s first attempt to use scientific research to back up his argument. Much as was the case last time around however, he displays seriously limited reading comprehension skills. (A private school education doesn’t buy as much as it used to.) What did the International Journal of Epidemiology have to say? We suspect Brian saw an article titled Modelling the impact of HIV disease on mortality in gay and bisexual men somewhere (IJE 1997:26, pp. 657-661.) You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the article really doesn’t say what Brian says it does:

Vital statistics data were obtained for a large Canadian urban centre from 1987 to 1992. Three scenarios were utilized with assumed proportions of gay and bisexual men of 3%, 6% and 9% among the male population age 20 years. … In a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 20 years less than for all men. If the same pattern of mortality were to continue…

There really is nothing like extrapolating from a mathematical model based on 12-year old data from a single Canadian city to make a sound argument. And it really is even more awesome when the main conclusion of the study (8 to 20 years) is misstated as being at least 20 years. Brian dear friend, please come to the service counter for a swift kick in the balls. (Or is that not the certain way in which you would normally use your genitals?)

There are scores of other sources that prove that homosexuals are perpetrating their own special brand of genocide on each other.

Amazing then that you couldn’t find one to quote. As for Brian, he then goes to reveal that after some column or other, he received emails that suggested conservatives shouldn’t have civil rights, and another suggested that they (conservatives that is) should be sent to concentration camps. Which leads Brian to this:

Can judgment of homosexuals as a whole be based on these emails? Of course not. That would be almost as silly as an entire population defining themselves by who they choose to stick bits of their anatomy into.

Of course — that would be totally silly! Almost as silly as having your column bear the title: The Nazis are Back… and This Time They are Pink. In order to conclude that homosexuals are the new Nazis, it turns out that you first have to find two gay writers who have argued killing conservatives:

Richard I say is an author, psychologist and is considered one of the leaders in the Gay movement. In a letter he wrote to the NY Times he states that those who don’t see things eye to eye with the homosexual community “should be quarantined and denied employment”. […] Gay Author James Robert Baker describes the murder, torture and mutilation of conservatives in his book “Tim and Pete”. […] When questioned about what he would do if he were diagnosed as HIV positive Baker is quoted as saying, “I don’t think I’d just take AZT and hug a teddy bear …. I think I’m capable of acting out some of the scenarios described in the book.”

So there you go! QED! Q-E-D!

[Homosexuals] may not be able to build death camps, but we are always one activist judge appointment away from an erosion of our freedom of speech or any other civil liberty they find inconvenient.

And you know all homosexuals want to build death camps because some of them said things that a man of simple intellectual means took seriously and interpreted, presumably with the help of his genitals, as meaning just that! (Give credit to Brian for not writing sentences like that though.)

Will a bunch of well dressed thugs with rainbows on their armbands instead of swastikas perpetrate another holocaust? Unlikely. [!] If it ever does happen at least we can be sure the gas chambers will smell like CK for men.

Brian, can we be totally honest? Go fuck yourself.

* Many years ago, our then-girlfriend and ourselves were in a hotel in Japan. A plumbing problem in the bathroom forced us to call maintenance, and within a minute a maintenance fellow and the hotel’s assistant manager came to our room: one to fix the problem, the other to apologize. When we ran into the assistant manager the next morning, he told us “I am sorry to have had to disturb you in your special moment of privacy.” (And no, you really can’t make up stories like that.)

Link thanks to The Dark Window.

… but it’s as close as you’re going to get:

U.S. Changes Arrest Techniques in Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – The U.S. military is avoiding once-common arrest techniques like bagging suspects’ heads, the U.S. commander in charge of the Iraqi capital said, because such actions are considered humiliating by Iraqis and pushing new recruits into the insurgency.

“You’ve got to see it from a force protection standpoint: You’re making more enemies,” U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli told The Associated Press. “When we mistreat one person I’ve got a net increase of nine enemies.”

Coming up next: U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Peter Chiarelli will reveal that letting Iraqi prisoners be sodomized while in US custody may be counterproductive after all.

Rush Limbaugh, September 3, 2004:

No doubt to the consternation of his one-time media admirers, Mr. Schwarzenegger described how, in 1968, he observed a presidential debate between Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon.

Oops!

“Listening to Nixon speak sounded more like a breath of fresh air,” Schwarzenegger said.

There’s only one thing wrong — Nixon never debated Humphrey.

According to the prepared text of Schwarzenegger’s speech the passage was written, “I remember watching the Nixon-Humphrey presidential race on TV…”

Mercury News reporter Jim Puzzanghera, who was in Madison Square Garden during Schwarzenegger’s address and who taped the speech, said after reviewing the audiotape that the governor said “race” not “debate.”

Apparently then, Rush couldn’t be bothered to watch the GOP convention either, and used the CNN report to “write” his editorial.

This post is little more than stealing a page from alicublog, but nobody ever called us original. David Adesnik in the Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2004:

This time around, OxBlog will provide an inside look at how journalists come up with publishable stories about a non event.

David Adesnik on his blog, August 29, 2004:

OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! Miss America Erika Harold is visiting Bloggers Row!

If you scroll up, you can see that David talked to Ari Fleischer (remember him?,) and it turns out that Ari agrees with Scooby Doo McClellan’s strategy re: 527 organizations:

dodge the question by condemning all 527s.

David did manage to ask Ari a question:

That was when OxBlog asked, “How do you score hot Jewish chicks on J-date? I’m still single and Jewish.”

This guy is still single?

You don’t say.

If so, Sadly, No! recommends:

This one goes up to 11 12.