If there is one word to describe this nascent year in conservatism, it’d be batshit. If two, it’d be fucking batshit, but before this turns into a Monty Python skit, let’s skip straight ahead and note that beyond the usual doubling down of crazy, the season has been dominated by an incredible amount of dishonesty.
Now, dishonesty and wingnuts go together like Republicans and double wetsuit dildos, but even for our annually fact-challenged, there has been a noticeable increase in the usual areas. Projection has skyrocketed to accommodate their candidates realizing that the 27% are pretty much the only Republican primary voters left. And Republican candidates realizing that they no longer need to pretend to value truth to our bought-and-sold media have begun openly spinning their preferred model of reality as if the internet didn’t make it embarrassingly easy to disprove their fantasies.
Hell, one can say that we’ve gotten so used to conservatives defaulting to dishonesty as a first recourse, that it is rather shocking when they deliver some long lost honesty, much like a sickening flower blooming once every thousand years.
So it is, with this quaint post by Republican Senatorial candidate and professional tater lookalike, Adam Hasner.
I thought the interview with Anne Conlon was both impressive and instructive, and it stirred in me some thoughts about abortion in America, on this, the day of the annual March for Life in Washington.
Ah, right, the 39th anniversary of Roe v Wade has many conservatives reflective on how they always seem to be decades behind an issue they already decisively lost, but are still fighting anyways.
As a Jew, I can appreciate the evolution of Conlon’s — and others’ — thought process on the issue of abortion. And I know first hand what it’s like to disagree with family and friends on this fundamental issue.
I attended public schools growing up, and while the Jewish faith is theologically and historically a pro-life faith, the strong strain of secularism within Judaism has taken many in the religion away from its pro-life roots.
Well, he’s a conservative. He couldn’t have a post that was entirely honesty, so he sells a quick lie to keep his hand in and signal the mouth-breathers that he isn’t some traitor who acknowledges the sky is blue.
As the son of liberal Democrats, I didn’t inherit my pro-life views or have them engrained in me by schooling or my institutions of faith.
I have listened to the stories of people explaining how viewing an ultrasound for the first time or the experience of becoming a father or a mother can solidify a belief in the sanctity of life. I have not experienced this either.
And yet I still arrived at the conclusion that every life is sacred from conception until natural death. That is because we cherish life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in this country, and those rights should extend to every life, born and unborn.
Except women, of course.
But I have to hand it to him, a conservative not pretending that his “deeply held beliefs” has any connection to some sort of “profound event” often with a wink and a nod suggesting that evil liberal abortionists have never done something as profound as “seen an ultrasound”?
So Mr. Hasner, if not those things, what was it that made you such a staunch forced-birther? Will you spin some story about Planned Parenthood and Hitler? Seeing an aborted fetus reanimate itself and beg for the rescinding of established medical ethics and law? The gun currently being held against your head by a fanatical “pro-life” terrorist?
I arrived at these conclusions because, before I ever really thought of the abortion issue, I was a conservative.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you that rare and delicate thing.
Naked honesty from a conservative.
Appreciate this gem, for we will not see its like for many a day hence.
I came of age during the Reagan Revolution, steeped myself in conservatism, and registered as a Republican at age 18. Being pro-life isn’t just a moral issue for me; it’s a historical and constitutional one. Understanding the creation of Planned Parenthood and the pro-abortion movement helped shape my view. But I’m pro-life because I was conservative first. I wonder how many other people out there can say the same.
I have a much deeper faith today, and I find pride and comfort in Judaism’s historical defense of life. But I know that conservatism helped set me on the path.
He’s anti-choice because he was a conservative and being a conservative means you buy whatever half-formed insane nonsense is presented to you as the price of the tribe. And those beliefs are now dear to him, because being fanatically anti-woman is how you show membership to the tribe, to question it is to question the tribe.
If this seems suspiciously like a cult, then you should be ashamed of yourself!
…
Cults get better hats.
That’s why I recoil whenever I hear people — even those within my own party — say we need to get away from social issues.
Yeah! How dare we get away from social issues I only care about because I was told being conservative meant I had to care about those issues and conservatives are nothing if not firm believers in the practice of sunk costs?
Not changing even when reality and the will of the people say otherwise is the hallmark of a great man…or someone incapable of handling the task of dressing and feeding themselves daily. One or the other.
Or that we’re “on the losing side” of the marriage debate, or the sanctity of life argument. The defense of life just doesn’t “move voters,” I’ve heard more than one consultant say.
I hope that never becomes the majority view in our movement. If it does, we will never earn the right to be the governing majority in America, nor will we deserve to. I will continue to speak clearly and consistently on the connection between our moral values and economic prosperity.
Yeah, how would we ever manage to hold the governing majority in America if we cater to petty things like “the will of the people”? Or acknowledge that spewing archaic shit people thought settled decades ago just makes people less keen on electing us to positions of power?
The real path to power is to espouse reviled and bigoted beliefs long past their for-sale date. For instance, have you ever considered that the real path to power lies in ranting about the perfidy of the Irishman?
The anniversary of Roe v. Wade is a grim observance. It marks an uncorrected mistake in American history. If the conservative movement ever stops being the home of the pro-life movement, this grim observance — and its consequences — will mark many more anniversaries.
I’m not sure that sentence manages to actually successfully say anything.
But I guess you needed to demonstrate your fealty to the crazy train after basically spending a post noting that the only reason you are a “firm believer in this moral cause” is because you fear getting off this train is the fastest route to ending up on those lists “perfectly legal and not at all connected to the lone-wolf terrorist” “pro-life” organizations like to circulate with the home addresses and daily schedules of “enemies”.
It’s okay, just wink once for “he’s got a gun against my head” and I’ll totally come help you, once I’m done making a sandwich.
There is nothing left for me to read now that commie comic books are all about oil spills and shit like that.
The liberal media must be falling down on the job because the folks over at Newsbutthurters have now taken to complaining about comic books, apparently not being able to find, today at least, anything in the news to butthurt about.
First, let me get this out of the way: if you are a grown-up that eats Fruit Loops, wears a onesie to bed, or reads comic books, it’s probably best to keep that to yourself. But the Newsbutthurter in question, one D.S. Hube, admits that this is pretty much all he reads, if “read” is the correct word. At least this is all that he “read” before he decided to bring the whole comic book empire crashing down through his one-man boycott to punish the comic book publishers for trying to turn him into a communist by slipping subversive plots into their comic books.
As a big comicbook geek from waaaaay back (I have a section of my blog, The Colossus of Rhodey, dedicated to comics), and as one who continued to purchase comics up until the mid-2000s, I find this modern “progressive” trend not only disburbing, but disgusting. It’s what led me to stop purchasing contemporary comics outright, and lose some, if not friendships, associations, as a result.
So what’s an example of what D.S. finds “disgusting” and caused him to lose all his 12-year-old friends who hung out at the comic book shop with him?
You pick up a superhero comic book featuring a childhood favorite of yours, hoping to reignite some of that magic you felt way back when and you see that the opening sequence in the comic deals with an oil rig disaster. You immediately and disappointingly know what’s going to be said, either by your childhood favorite or by some other character given credibility within the story. You turn the page, and sure enough, your childhood favorite grumbles about his/her country’s dependency on oil or how inherently dangerous oil drilling is to the environment.
The disgusting idea that we should stop giving a fortune to the Saudis was enough, I imagine, that it sent D.S. Hube to go turn on all the lights in his studio apartment (all four of them) just to show Batman who is who and that he can’t keep shoving stuff down D.S.’s throat just because he’s Batman.
This cumulative effect eventually took its toll on me. I kept purchasing comics probably longer than I should have.
Yes, D.S., if you bought comics once you were older than fourteen, then that’s the smartest thing you’ve said in your entire post
Many of the stories were top notch despite my knowing the politics of the creators … but at a certain point, I had had enough. … I just asked myself “Why do I continue to support these guys? I give them my money — and they continually spit in my face.” … And, thus, all this is [partly] why I blog. I why I’ll continue to not shell out $3-4 for a comicbook any time soon.
Actually, I think I feel much better that this grown man with an overdeveloped interest in muscular men in tights has decided to start blogging instead of lurking around kids in comic book stores. So, maybe, just this one time we can honestly say that Newsbutthurters is actually performing some kind of public service.
Hollywood = Golden Globes. Golden Globes = Penis. Penis = Bad. Hollywood = Bad.
Sadly, No! all-time fave Ben Shapiro, who used to be America’s Worst Law Student™, and then America’s Worst Law Firm Associate™, and now is America’s Worst Unemployed Self-Employed Lawyer™, surfaces briefly at America’s Shittiest Website™ to complain about the Golden Globes award which, not surprisingly, is the perfect storm of everything that upsets Ben — foreigners, Hollywood, and penis jokes — all wrapped up into a 90-minute TV special that Ben hates so much that he can’t resist watching the whole thing, although he must have been on a Funyuns run when they gave an award to some Muslims, because he says nothing about that. But, for a guy whose penis is less useful to him than a basketball hoop to a Chihuahua, he is overcome by all the penis jokes on the show and dutifully reports them all to his fellow Cornerdomites.
I’ll let intrepid mango hunters analyze most of AWSEL™ Shapiro complaints about each of the Globe penis jokes, but I can’t resist bringing this mango back first:
Finally, Tina Fey and Jane Lynch explained how actors and actresses aren’t all that different from their real-life selves. “Matt LeBlanc is Matt LeBlanc,” said Fey. “And Hung’s Thomas Jane . . . really is a high-school coach,” replied Lynch. They then high-fived and shouted, “Yes! Penis joke!” Fey is widely considered the best female comedy writer on television. No wonder 30 Rock has swirled the toilet bowl for the last couple of years. As for Lynch — well, let’s just say her knowledge of the male anatomy is likely limited.
So, let’s see, at the same time Ben, who still probably refers to his own penis as his “woowoo,” is bitching about penis jokes, he makes a lame poop joke and an even lamer lesbian joke in which Ben thinks that since lesbians have never seen a penis, they can’t make penis jokes, or something. Given that the virginal Ben claims to only have any experience with his own little unused and dessicated pecker, it seems unclear where that gives him any greater experience with penises than any random woman on the streets, lesbian or not.
Weirdly enough, phallic jokes are a way for Hollywood to up its liberal street cred — by acting like third-graders fascinated with their own genitalia. Which many of them are.
In case you’re wondering why AWSEL™ had such a short tenure at a real law firm, take a careful look at that sentence quoted above. He appears to be saying that most people in Hollywood are third graders. He was trying to say that many people in Hollywood were fascinated with their own genitalia (as if that were some sort of affliction rather than the normal state for everyone else in the world but Mr. I-don’t-have-a-Penis Shapiro) but just doesn’t have the third-grade writing chops necessary to pull it off (so to speak).
Feel free to make your own penis jokes in the comments (as if you need my permission).
Conservatives have trouble enough with analysis. Trying to recognize a thing that is happening and actually process it on a real and meaningful level without massive amounts of projection and fantasy is a skillset far beyond their grasp.
So when a conservative skips that and goes straight into speculation, you know you are in for a treat. And Albin Sadar does not disappoint.
Now that the 2008 idea to “make history by voting for the first African-American president” is yesterday’s news, what will be done to spice up the current election season?
Cause that’s what it was, right? A transparent cynical attempt to capitalize on a minority like our failed ploy of Palin, right? Please say yes, my fragile mind just can’t take the truth. Read the rest of this entry »
To celebrate Martin Luther King day, here are five incompetent niggers and two worthless spicks that Obama hired just because of their skin color.
Of course, no Martin Luther King holiday would be complete without some poor oppressed white guy doing the tried and true schtick about how it’s the niggers that are the real racists, particularly the colored usurper in the White House who has spent the last four years taking America away from true Americans and giving it to his black buddies. Meet George Picard, who writes under a pseudonym at The American Genius for obvious reasons
President Obama has mocked Martin Luther King by policies and actions that judge people by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character. … Among his dreams was an America where his four children would be judged not “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”
You might be forgiven for imagining that King was expressing a desire that his children could eat at any lunch counter and sit anywhere on the bus, but only if you are a Negro-oppressed white man will you realize that King was in fact expressing a prophetic condemnation of affirmative action and that he lived in abject terror that his children might get into college with lower SATs than their white counterparts.
The man who campaigned on the theme that there was no “white America” or “black America” has used his powers as President to practice identity politics on a scale never before seen in America. Barack Obama has overtly chosen top officials on the basis of their skin color and not on the content of their character.
Because no president before Obama has ever chosen a white person of low character for public office and even if they had it was purely coincidental that they were white.
Of course, first stop on Picard’s white outrage tour is that wild-eyed, Black Panther loving Eric Holder whom
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer has called him one of the most incompetent attorney generals in American history
Both Kraphammer and Picard have apparently forgotten all about John Mitchell, which would, of course, have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Mitchell was, you know, white.
And don’t forget, while we’re being outraged, that uppity Negress at the EPA, Lisa Jackson:
She is blithely unconcerned that Congressmen have taken her to task for performance.
If she were truly competent (and white), she would immediately step down the moment someone in the opposition party criticized her.
When Obama went looking for a Supreme Court Justice is was so obvious that he had a very narrow filter of who would “qualify” that Time’s Mark Halperin wrote that “White Men Need Not Apply.”
And, of course, like Martin Luther King, George Picard and Mark Halperin, I too have a dream that I will live to see the day when there is finally a white man on the Supreme Court.
Bob Unruh might have some other reasons to hate the Kinsey scale.
Bob Unruh, Wing Nut Daily:
Exposing Kinsey Sex Atrocities Goes Global
I’m surprised that wingnuts don’t go after Alfred Kinsey more often. I mean, let’s be frank, the conservative opinion on sex is that if one puts their fingers in their ears and pretends any information about sex away, then that will also make sex and sexuality go away.
To a wingnut, as long as they don’t hear about it, then it must not ever occur, and their teenage daughter’s swelling belly must be because she has really let herself go on her exercise routine.
To be fair, that’s probably by design. A psychotic deliberately trying to ignore any evidence that gays aren’t minions of Satan (pshaw, like we don’t all know that they’re Venusian slavers come to rob us of promising conservative politicians) isn’t likely to look up exactly who did the research that proves they’ve been around forever.
“Luckily” for us, Bob Unruh is a well-read escapee of the mental asylum and wants his fellow inmates to know that there was a guy that looked into this nasty sex stuff they are all ashamed of, but its okay, because he’s really Hitler Times 12.
There is much butthurt in the wingnut universe. Their God-King come to life in George the Second was much maligned in his time in office by mean-spirited liberals daring to notice that some of the boots being given to the security state were decidedly jackbooted. Furthermore they dared to note that maybe having a uniform executive unilaterally deciding that most of the first ten amendments ceased to apply to certain people and that torture was peachy keen was a little bit fascist flavored.
Now, there have been many celebrated attempts to deal with this. The most famous of course being the Lord Doughboy’s famed treatise: Liberal Fascism, subtitled “Nuh uh, it’s you who are the fascist poopyheads”.
But why shouldn’t a meth-crazed designer of some of those right-winged photoshops that are 99% projection, 1% something snortable be denied their attempt to give it a shot? Read the rest of this entry »
There has been a change in the seasons. A new year dawning brings momentary lucidity. And for the pallid flaks of modern conservatism, the early year reflection has brought only one phrase to mind:
“Holy Shit, are we assholes!”
I’m sure every brief sober morning brings that reflection to their mind before booze and projection do their dirty work of protecting their fledgling synapses from the horror, so this is nothing new to them. However, this year is an election year and one they look to be losing even before they’ve picked their sacrificial lamb for the slaughter.
As such, there is the quick straightening of ties and the frantic desperate increase in projection in only the way wingnuts know how desperate to make all their post-Obama-election insanity look the fault of some other bastards far far away.
And of all the publications to be scrambling, none are scrambling quite so desperately as that stalwart of “intellectual conservativism” known as National Review. Read the rest of this entry »
Well, well, well, if it isn’t everyone’s favorite one-man minstrel show, Lloyd Marcus. One might think our buddy Lloyd having given up sense, dignity, and basic human respect to chain his star to the plummeting train-crash that was the “Tea Party Express” might be going through something akin to buyer’s remorse just about now.
Well, if you thought that, you just don’t know Lloyd. He paid too much for the mandatory lobotomy to stop now and has decided to engage in wingnut’s favorite game: Privilege Fails.
Now, you think that might be difficult for LLoyd, what with being overly melaninated and a one-man-pride parade, but Lloyd should be committed, I mean, is committed to wingnut excellence.
And so has decided to take offense that a single show starring a muslim family has come into existence and thus has erased all Christian TV families from existence and catapulted us into Sharia Law.
Although I have argued that Republican presidents have the power to crush children’s testicles in the name of national security, I am offended at Obama’s abuse of power when he chose to ignore a procedural trick implemented by the Republicans to prevent recess appointments.
Forcing everyone to use C.E. instead of A.D. is just another way that Jews oppress Christians.
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Alternate Shorter Elizabeth Lauren, The American Genius; AD 2012 or 2012 CE?
True inclusiveness would be if the Jews adopted and embraced Christianity rather than making Christians feel bad with all their complaining about Christ.
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Another Alternate Shorter Elizabeth Lauren, The American Genius; AD 2012 or 2012 CE?
It wasn’t enough for the Jews to have crucified Christ the first time; they have to keep doing it over and over again.
Today’s wingnut butthurt is an old perennial and comes from someone calling herself Elizabeth Lauren over at The American Genius. This is Ms. Lauren’s second post ever, the first being one where she waxes nostalgic for the good old days of censorship which would have forbidden any poet from publishing a poem referring to genitalia. Today she’s climbed up on the cross and nailed herself to it over the usage of C.E. and B.C.E. in place of A.D. and B.C. Her argument seems mostly to be that it’s something the Jews baked up and this:
For a number of reasons, though, not only does the new dating standard fail in its desired effect, but it may ultimately cause unintended confusion and polarization, not to mention offense to the Christian majority.
Apparently people are missing tests and appointments and saying “Oh, you meant January 7, 2012 A.D.? You should have said so.” I’m already planning to try that. Of course, I may not respond in the same way when a restaurant tells me that actually my reservation was made for 9 p.m. on January 21 about four thousand years ago.
But, of course, the whole point is the “not to mention the offense to the Christian majority,” who apparently take offense at each and every breath drawn by anyone who doesn’t subscribe to their particular flavor of Christianity. Other offenses to the Christian majority: Jews refusing to name their children after Christian saints, Jews taking shelf space in the grocery around passover from Christian food and giving it to Jewish stuff like matzoh, Jewish stores being open on Sunday, and Jews insisting on putting those mezuzah thingies on their door frames as an open affront to their Christian neighbors.
This being The American Genius website, Ms. Lauren throws out a number of additional and similarly irrefutable arguments in support of A.D. and B.C., including one that I’ll call the Thor Appeal
We all in our daily lives, in a Western society with a lengthy and complex history, use a great number of names of pagan origin. Our weekdays — for example, “Thursday,” named for the Norse god Thor — originate in decidedly non-Christian cultural history.
This would be a really excellent argument, I suppose, if the dominant culture in the U.S. practiced Norse mythology and prayed to Thor in public schools, then the maintenance of the name Thursday might actually mean something.
Finally, Lauren argues that A.D. and B.C. aren’t offensive because people are too dumb to understand what those terms mean:
“Before Christ,” if one is concerned about sensitivity towards non-Christians, may not necessarily be viewed as referring to the belief system that Jesus is the Messiah, since it is not always known in contemporary culture that “Christ” means just that.
Similarly, making the reasonable assumption that Ms. Lauren doesn’t speak French, she can’t possibly be offended when I call her a putain because she has no idea what that means.
Anyway, I think that the proper solution is to get rid of A.D., B.C., C.E., and B.C.E. and replace them with A.B. and B.B. for before and after butthurt, with the index year being 2008, and I think you know why.
Although I was quite prepared to give the best headline ever award for “Santorum Surges” to the numerous headline writers that crafted this classic with, obviously, a knowing wink to what Santorum really means, that was before I stumbled across John F. Di Leo’s “The Democratic Party’s War on the Poor” over at The American Genius.
This is sometimes why I think our job here at Sadly, No! is too easy. (It’s a good thing we don’t get paid for it.) Where really is the challenge to ridiculing wingnuts when they whip up headlines that have no basis in reality at all? And again where’s the fun when the ridiculous headline is illustrated by a preposterous non sequitur? Di Leo’s proof of the Democratic Party’s war on the poor is an escalator in Medellin. As in Colombia. As in a tiny third world country about a zillion miles from the United States and partly in another fucking hemisphere and where the only Democrats there are a few tourists getting drunk in hotel bars in Bogota. Yes, that escalator in Medellin is, somehow or other, proof of a war of the Democratic party against the poor.
The escalator that precipitated Di Leo’s hissy fit was built so that poor residents of a ghetto in Medellin could go from downtown to their homes in 5 minutes, replacing a 35 minute walk up 530 steps on the side of a mountain. How could anyone object to that, you must be wondering, but, if so, you’ve clearly forgotten that these are the kind of people who get upset when they hear that an orphanage is lavishing its residents with macaroni and cheese rather than the traditional and biblically mandated fare of stale bread and thin gruel. (If you give ‘em mac and cheese, they’ll never want to leave the orphanage and will become permanent parasites stealing my tax dollars, etc., etc. You may be laughing now at the preposterous notion that anyone would actually make an argument like that, but, if so, just be patient for a few minutes and let Di Leo get there all on his own.)
Now, why do we turn to a foreign country for an example of the critical failing of the American Democratic Party?
Gee, John, you beat me to it because I was asking myself that very same question.
Because the way American conservatives and liberals react to this story of misguided social programs is the American economic debate in a microcosm.
If you’re thinking that John is going to totally make up the liberal reaction to this story, then our work is done here and you can skip to the next paragraph. According to John, silly liberals like the escalators because they help poor people while keeping them poor, particularly because the stupid beaners didn’t know to cover the escalators so that they will now be destroyed by the first rainfall and the liberals won’t really care that this happens because the rain is not their fault.
Of course, the conservatives, who are truly wise, take the real lesson from the Medellin escalator:
[W]e see that the mayor and his friendly press down there in Colombia have exactly the wrong attitude: they are spending $6.7 million to help return people to a shantytown every day. What they should be doing is trying to free these poor people from Comuna 13 — to help them earn better salaries so they can, one day, come down from that mountaintop and never, ever be compelled to return!
But wait, you ask, couldn’t this argument be made against any form of public transportation? Certainly, he’s not going to condemn public transportation as well, is he? Sadly, Yes!
We subsidize the public transportation of our cities so that the poor can ride in an air-conditioned bus or train for free or nearly free.
All this does not make it a joy to be poor, of course. It’s still a miserable life. But all these freebies, all these misguided little benefits, have warped the ability of individuals to rationally judge the delta between their current lifestyle and their potential future lifestyle in a job, their potential future lives in the middle class.
Whoomp, there it is: the mac and cheese argument. Air-conditioned public buses will make the poor want to stay poor forever because they can get on an air-conditioned bus anytime they want and luxuriate their lives away rather than working hard to buy their own air-conditioned car. If you made all poor people walk to work, every single fucking one of them would be richer than the Koch Brothers in just a few months.
So turns out that Sadly, No doesn’t really cover psychological care in its Health Plan, so I’m back on the streets after a handful of days. Fortunately (for given values of fortunate), my recent “episode” leaves me in perfect mental condition to work through some of the less…lucid of wingnut writings and bring some mangoes back for your “enjoyment”. On a completely unrelated note, Sadly No Industries disavows any responsibility for any psychological injuries caused by trying to read sense in what follows.
In Western tradition it is Hamlet’s inner being that matters, his soul. Until the mid-20th century the English language used words like “soul,” or “dear soul,” to address people in everyday conversations. You can still read it in Agatha Christie mysteries of the 1940s. Addressing other people as “souls” was a simple country habit, but one that invoked worlds of sympathy and mutual respect. The trendy Left celebrates Buddhism for similar expressions, like the respectful greeting “Namaste.” (I greet the soul in you). That is important; but it’s just as important to know that the same idea dwells at the heart of our own culture.
No, no, this is the lucid part. Part of an initial argument that since in Christian dominated cultures or in Western interpretations of Eastern concepts, the soul comes up a lot, that it must exist and be super important. That whenever someone uses short-hand to talk about humanity they are admitting the existence of a soul by its interpretation by a narrow section of Christianity. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Tintin adds an update: Guess who reads Sadly, No? Krugman does, and he gives Cerberus a link.
I imagine this job looks easy from the outside.
And you’re right!
I just find some wingnut saying something stupid, boot up the automatic witty retort software and hit stop when it hits 3 million words or so (and you thought verbosity like this was organic).
So as a special treat, I’m going to show you how we craft the articles you so love. So join us dear reader on this relaxing mango safari.
Let’s start with something simple. Let’s see… Ah, yes, this:
So Steve, as a paid flak for AEI, has often had the unenviable task of pitting wingnut fantasies against Paul Krugman’s tyrannical skills of actual facts and history. By the first paragraph, it’s obvious his Washington Generals’ performance to Krugman’s Globetrotters has begun to wear at his soul.
So Paul Krugman phoned in his periodic “Keynes Was Right” column today, arguing that the Obama Porkulus failed only because, like “true” Communism, it wasn’t tried vigorously or faithfully enough.
Yeah, the single watered down version of the economic model that ended the Great Depression totally discredits it and demonstrates why we need to continue trying the model that started the Great Depression and has had zero success (despite being constantly tried).
What officer? Projection? I don’t see any projection here. That must also be something liberals do.
Disabled people belong in institutions not in sympathetic newspaper stories
Surely, you think to yourself, not even the unspeakably vile Heather Mac (“with a white space”) Donald would write a column, even at America’s Shittiest Website™, complaining about a story sympathetic to the plight of autistic adults. Certainly, even she would not declare that such people are too icky to have their relationships described in a newspaper of general circulation like the New York Times. Certainly it can’t be true that Heather, in the waning days of the year would interrupt her vacation to labor over long blog post mocking people with autism as socially inept weirdos undeserving of the attention of normal people like herself when she could have been sitting calmly by the fireplace reading Atlas Shrugged and sipping a tall tumbler of White Zinfandel on the rocks. Sadly, No!
The feminization of journalism reached a new low this week with the New York Times’ front-page story on a sexual relationship between two teenagers with Asperger’s Syndrome.
You know perhaps Heather has been sipping too heavily on that tumbler of White Zinfandel on the rocks because this sentence makes absolutely no sense. Even taking for granted that feminizing something is a bad thing (which Heather, who more or less appears to be a woman, oddly takes for granted), how does this story “feminize” journalism. Did someone tie a pretty pink bow around it or sell the reality TV rights to Bravo?
Although the article in question runs to over 5,000 words, Heather zeros in on the several paragraphs that she seems to think talk about sex, but which in large part talk about kissing and cuddling, in order to ramp up her outrage that the New York Times would force her to read about physical contact between weirdos.
It gets worse. Next up: the couple’s erotic proclivities, recounted in excruciating detail.
Heather then quotes a few paragraphs dealing with a back massage, kissing and hand-holding. I was expecting to get a graphic description of mutual oral sex or something but, alas, the excruciating detail of their erotic proclivities scarcely makes it past what I think the kids still call first base.
Inexplicably, the Times fails to give us Jack and Kirsten’s favorite coital positions, or the details of their foreplay; such matters await in another article, no doubt.
One minute Heather was bitching that she was getting too much information and now she’s complaining that the story doesn’t tell us who’s on top. Am I the only one with a sneaking little suspicion that Heather is a little disappointed that she got all her tingly parts warm just to be let down by the absence of a money shot?
But if Heather is upset that she didn’t get a money shot, that doesn’t stop her from giving us one:
There may be a place for an exhaustive account of the most quotidian aspects of Aspergians’ lives in order to — I can hear the pitch now — “illustrate their challenges and triumphs in achieving personal intimacy.” That place, however, would once have been the Women’s pages. Now, every page of the Times is a Women’s page. Any hierarchy between public and private has been obliterated; what was once considered the “masculine” realms of politics, war, and diplomacy, worthy of front-page treatment, now possesses the same claim on the reader’s attention as the most treacly or gratuitously explicit details of people’s private lives. … Likewise, in many college history departments, courses in political history have been crowded out by a focus on previously “silenced” identity groups, usually female and non-white, rather than on individual (mostly male) leaders and thinkers.
I have to say that part of me is in awe as to how quickly and easily Heather can morph a story about two autistic adults into the perennial wingnut butthurt about the oppression of white men by crippled black Lesbian academics.
The “Aspergians have sex” story is not even a case of the “personal being political”; it has no political import. The couple is not oppressed by racist, classist, sexist, or heterosexist social structures; they merely respond to some emotional and social cues differently than the norm.
And to prove her preposterous notion that Asperger’s adults are treated just like everyone else and aren’t subject to any societal discrimination, Heather then, just a few sentences later, calls them “Asperger’s syndroids.” I suppose from her point of view she was showing her personal compassion for their plight by calling them that rather than simply “retards.”
I just have one remaining question. If any story unrelated to invading foreign countries, calling the President a Kenyan Muslim socialist or ridiculing the French (“politics, war, and diplomacy”) is only fit for a “Women’s” page, shouldn’t Heather’s own little rant about this be relegated to a new “Women’s” page at America’s Shittiest Website™? Isn’t she herself feminizing journalism? And if the measure of good journalism has something to do with a penis and testicles, I suggest that she try, no matter how hard and admittedly distasteful it might be, to look between her own two legs and see if she notices a penis and two testicles there. Or even, say, just one testicle.
I’m going to start off serious for a moment. It’s actually kind of frustrating that of all of the things to get the Republicans in trouble, it’s a motherfucking tax cut for the middle class that’s sticking on them. They’ve been openly bragging about how they’ve been working for Party First and have openly sacrificed the only chances a lot of people have had to survive entirely to “deny Obama wins” and extend the Depression into 2012 to hurt Obama’s re-election chances and have abused every single legislative trick to basically ensure that the Democrats could pass nothing even if they wanted to, not even confirmations on Cabinet members and executive staff.
But no, what sinks them is them doing that “how will this hurt Obama” game to a middle class tax cut. Because tax cuts are sacred, don’t you know? Ending the Depression, keeping people from losing their shelter and dying on the streets? Pff. Small potatoes to our Holy God Lord Tax Cut.
But you didn’t come to hear me bitch. You came to hear wingnuts bitch and me mock them.
As you wish, dear reader.
Chalk one up to President Obama. He’s got a 2-month extension of payroll tax cuts in the teeth of opposition from those wascally Wepublicans
Aw, poor babies, did you get bitch-slapped so hard, everything you eat tastes of copper? Here let me give you some iodine to make it all better.
so that two months from now we can have the fight all over again.
Well, seeing as how your whole fight was just an attempt to hang Obama on “he raised middle class tax rates during a recession” in the 2012 election, you could just not fight it next time and thus not look like chumps.
Oh wait, we’re talking conservatives. It’s now going to be their “Right to look like a Chump” and they’ll fight to the death over the chance to do the same fail all over again just in case there was anyone left in the universe who didn’t notice that “we’re just against tax cuts” meant “we’re for giving all the money to the rich.”
I suppose that the president’s chief objective in this vicious little fight was to remind the voters which of the two parties was the Stupid Party.
Shorter Chris Chantrill: “It’s Obama’s fault we were stupid amateur chumps who knocked ourselves out on our own nunchucks.”
It’s been a good break. I killed an interview and I got to spend Christmas with family perpetuate the War on Christmas with my army of lesbian feminist demons. So what does the internet have for my return?
Sigh, okay, how to explain the backstory on this one? if you have been out actually spending time with loved ones instead of scouring the internet for news, you may have missed that the Republican Primary’s search for Not Romney has gotten to the point that the Republican bigwigs have been terrified that perennial also-ran Ron Paul might have a chance and fired the opening salvos accordingly. This means our lazy media has actually almost started looking into Ron Paul’s positions and actions, such as his long-standing political newletters and their various conspiracy theory ideologies and massive racism, sexism, homophobia, and so on. Since then, Paulbots have been out on force at any blog that mentions them** to try and argue that the sky is green and thus Ron Paul and the Libertarian movement aren’t really racists.
Got all that?
Good, now forget all that, because frankly who gives a damn and besides, this former staffer gives us much fresher mangos in his overzealous urge to defend his old boss. Let us dive in.
I’ve noticed in some media that my words have been twisted and used for an agenda from both sides. And I wish to set the record straight with media that I trust and know will get the story right: conservative/libertarian-conservative bloggers.
Because they have a fantastic record of not twisting words towards an agenda. Oh wait, this is the famous Palin definition of the term, where quoting someone verbatim and providing the context is “taking their words out of context” and “twisting them around”.
Is Ron Paul a “racist.” In short, No. I worked for the man for 12 years, pretty consistently. I never heard a racist word expressed towards Blacks or Jews come out of his mouth. Not once.
And you can trust him on that, white Southerners are the best judges of what is and isn’t racist. Like when rappers use the word n***er but right wing bloggers aren’t allowed to. He’d be able to see that as racist faster than anyone!
He has frequently hired blacks for his office staff, starting as early as 1988 for the Libertarian campaign. He has also hired many Hispanics, including his current District staffer Dianna Gilbert-Kile.
And as we know, bigots never ever hire and employ members of the minority they are bigoted against. Especially when they are trying to appear less biogted as a desperate attempt to curry favor with left-leaning white college kids who are looking for a “reasonable conservative” or “an alternative to the two-party system, man”.
I don’t even know why I’m talking about it, seeing as how it never happens.
One caveat: He is what I would describe as “out of touch,” with both Hispanic and Black culture.
Oh? Really? Why, please, do go on.
He is completely clueless when it comes to Hispanic and Black culture, particularly Mexican-American culture. And he is most certainly intolerant of Spanish and those who speak strictly Spanish in his presence, (as are a number of Americans, nothing out of the ordinary here.)
There is absolutely no racism in his body, as long as you never ever make him aware that you are in any way a black or hispanic person.
And he completely freaks out the second someone speaks Spanish around him like literally hundreds of non-racist grandmas around the country.
“Hello, 911, what’s your emergency?”
“I heard two unsavory types speaking that secret devil language, I think they may be one of those gangbangers I hear so much about.”
“Mr. Paul, please stop calling.”
Is Ron Paul an Anti-Semite? Absolutely No. As a Jew, (half on my mother’s side)
Wait, wait, wait. You really felt the need to bring this up? Don’t you have to wait for the accusation before you start defending them. If someone introduced me to a guy by going “Is he a serial killer? Absolutely No.” I might have to start wondering exactly why he felt the needed to be pre-emptively defended.
I never heard anything out of his mouth, in hundreds of speeches I listened too over the years, or in my personal presence that could be called, “Anti-Semite.” No slurs. No derogatory remarks.
Wow, Ron Paul had the self-restraint to avoid calling you a kike bastard or refer constantly to your jew nose. Give that man a medal for that astonishing work on behalf of a hated minority.
He is however, most certainly Anti-Israel, and Anti-Israeli in general. He wishes the Israeli state did not exist at all. He expressed this to me numerous times in our private conversations. His view is that Israel is more trouble than it is worth, specifically to the America taxpayer. He sides with the Palestinians, and supports their calls for the abolishment of the Jewish state, and the return of Israel, all of it, to the Arabs.
Memo to anyone left-leaning who finds themselves agreeing with Ron Paul on anything. He is not supporting it for the same reasons you do.
So yeah, most people might see the oppression and lack of real representation of the Palestinian people as a civil rights issue.
Ron Paul just thinks that waiting for Christ’s return to get rid of all the Jews in the holy land is a waste of damn time. But, no anti-semitism. Just like the rest of the evangelical Christian “allies of Israel”.
On the incident that’s being talked about in some blog media about the campaign manager directing me to a press conference of our opponent Lefty Morris in Victoria to push back on Anti-Jewish charges from the Morris campaign, yes, that did happen. The Victoria Advocate described the press conference very accurately. Yes, I was asked (not forced), to attend the conference dressed in a Jewish yarlmuke, and other Jewish adornments.
Who’s a good little set piece? You are!
Ah, how cute and totally non-bigoted it is to force your minority members to perform as ornaments to block accusations of bigotry. And so very humanizing too! Yes it is! Yes it is!
Now, dress up in your silly costume for a cookie. Good staffer!
Is Ron Paul a homo-phobe? Well, yes and no. He is not all bigoted towards homosexuals. He supports their rights to do whatever they please in their private lives.
Demonstrated by his strong voting record on…
You know, I can’t keep a straight face for that one, so I’ll just note that he’s got a 38% record on gay rights from HRC and getting a 100% from them is so easy, certain people’s moms have done it by accident.
He is however, personally uncomfortable around homosexuals, no different from a lot of older folks of his era.
Oh do tell.
In 1988, Ron had a hardcore Libertarian supporter, Jim Peron, Owner of Laissez Faire Books in San Francisco. Jim set up a magnificent 3-day campaign swing for us in the SF Bay Area. Jim was what you would call very openly Gay. But Ron thought the world of him. For 3 days we had a great time trouncing from one campaign event to another with Jim’s Gay lover.
Snrk. Sorry, I’ll be more mature.
Snrk.
The atmosphere was simply jovial between the four of us. (As an aside we also met former Cong. Pete McCloskey during this campaign trip.) We used Jim’s home/office as a “base.” Ron pulled me aside the first time we went there, and specifically instructed me to find an excuse to excuse him to a local fast food restaurant so that he could use the bathroom. He told me very clearly, that although he liked Jim, he did not wish to use his bathroom facilities. I chided him a bit, but he sternly reacted, as he often did to me, Eric, just do what I say. Perhaps “sternly” is an understatement. Ron looked at me directly, and with a very angry look in his eye, and shouted under his breath: “Just do what I say NOW.”
He loves gay people as long as they aren’t doing anything gay like using his toilet. His gayness could rub off on the toilet seat, corrupting his anus and making him desire the man-cock. Do you want to live in a world where Ron Paul is a slavering gay lust beast?
Of course not. No one does. So let us salute this proud patriot!
“Bobby,” a well-known and rather flamboyant and well-liked gay man in Freeport came to the BBQ. Let me stress Ron likes Bobby personally, and Bobby was a hardcore campaign supporter. But after his speech, at the Surfside pavilion Bobby came up to Ron with his hand extended, and according to my fellow staffer, Ron literally swatted his hand away. Again, let me stress. I would not categorize that as “homo-phobic,”
So he believes that the touch of a minority member will corrupt his very soul and is literally terrified of the idea of any type of contact either direct or indirect by a gay person. But to call that homophobic?
That’s just mean***.
It’s his foreign policy that’s the problem; not so much some stupid and whacky things on race and gays he may have said or written in the past.
Yeah! It’s the few locations where his bigoted nuttery interferes with conservative orthodoxy that are the problem, not a level of bigotry that might make George Wallace say “hey, now!” Damn liberals, always making a big deal out of the wrong thing****.
I think we can all agree that the hole Ron Paul dug himself into is not at all at the same height it once was, thanks to this article*****.
*That’s the real name, no funny edits needed or possible. Well played nutjobs. Well played.
**You’re welcome for the incoming troll infestation, by the way.
***There’s some stuff after this about some meanness surrounding a lone female staffer who may or may not have been the fall guy for an embezzlement scandal (one of several in the Paul campaign) which was totally worse than all the faithfully transcribed bigotry and thus caused him to leave. I’d recommend checking it out for those with strong enough stomachs to leap off the boat.
****After this there’s a long bit about the war votes that get so much press by Paulbots. Naturally it points out that its Paul’s isolationist xenophobia that is the root of those votes, though there’s a funny line where he blames the famous “almost no” vote on Afghanistan on “being under the spell of left-anarchists”. I didn’t include it, because this is already so long that some people died of scroll fatigue. By the way, I’ll notify your next of kin immediately.
*****I’ll also note that the staffer didn’t even try to defend against the sexism charge. What, Ron Paul doesn’t think there should be a government, except for a singular office which is wholly obsessed with women’s vaginas and what women do with them? Yeah, I don’t even got nothing. It truly is refreshing to see someone so committed to the excavation once down in the hole realize briefly that an extra tunnel into the depths of Moria, might not be the best idea.
ABOVE: Erika Johnsen (left) and two lucky duckies in a Chinese sweatshop
As my special Christmas gift to everyone, I offer you the relentlessly perky Erika Johnsen at Clownhall who displays the rare talent of seeing the bright side of other people’s suffering, a talent no doubt aided by the fact that Erika’s most painful moment so far in her brief life was when her mother bought her a pink cashmere sweater instead of the green one she had specifically and clearly requested.
Liberals should just shut up about child labor and sweatshops and acknowledge that they are simply the way the beneficent and invisible hand of the free market makes sure that poor children don’t starve to death.
Now for some tasty mangoes:
This is another example of the type of headline that I never in a million years would have imagined myself writing, but yes, it’s true–I unexpectedly find myself jumping to the defense of the Kardashian family, of Kim Kardashian-fame.
Is anyone else but Erika surprised that she finds it more remarkable that she would defend Kim Kardashian than that she would defend child sweatshops? You shouldn’t be because one of the questions on the wingnut welfare eligibility exam is to write an essay explaining the benefits of child sweatshops, poll taxes and climate change. (Cheap clothes! Republicans win!! Vineyards and beach resorts in Northern Scotland!!!)
The liberal media, of course, has never taken umbrage with debauchery or poor judgment; in fact, they glorify it and bring it to the masses, because hey, it sells! But the liberal media do find themselves egregiously, outrageously, morally offended when they perceive that an ostensible slight to their bleeding-heart code of ethics, including the supposed exploitations and injuries caused by free enterprise, has occurred in their out-of-touch, uneducated community of ignorant idealogues.
In other words, the media isn’t allowed to talk about the exploitation of child workers until they start complaining about people in sitcoms fornicating off-camera. It’s a little known fact but talk about sex on television has ruined more children’s lives than sweatshops have. Think how much worse off those sweatshop children would be if they actually had time to watch television or even the money to afford a television. Am I right?
Working long hours in hot, smelly, boring sweatshops for a very small wage does sound extremely horrible, especially in a deplorable communist nation fraught with government-sponsored human-rights abuses like China.
No argument from me, but something tells me Erika is about to tell us that it’s not as bad as it sounds based on her own experiences working for more than a decade in a sweatshop. Well, maybe not based on her personal experience, although having to do the dishes when she was a teenager seemed pretty sweatshoppy at the time, which is what now allows her to opine so authoritatively on sweatshops in third-world countries.
But here’s the question that the inane faux-crusaders currently boycotting the Kardashians’ clothing lines are utterly failing to ask: for the laborers working in the factories in these Third World countries, what are their alternatives?
You know, people should ask themselves that question more often. If the northern aggressors had realized that the alternative to slavery for blacks was a poor, disease-ridden, Godless existence in an African jungle, we could have totally avoided that Civil War business.
The alternatives to sweatshop labor in these usually socialist/dictator-controlled, poverty-stricken countries often amount to child prostitution, sexual slavery, the drug market, getting malaria while breaking your back in a rice paddy, or just living in squalor and starving to death.
Of course, by this measure you can argue for the benefits of child prostitution by noting that it still beats malaria in a rice paddy or starving to death. The only problem is that Erika doesn’t get cheap cocktail ensembles from child prostitution.
