Folks who say he’s a good writer – We’ll just have to differ on that. I can’t read his smirky crap without feeling like I should be on the side of whoever he’s pissing up at. He seems to prefer targets that can’t respond. I could see his worldview in a comic page gag panel:

HATLEKS’S “THEY’LL DO IT EVERY TIME!”

Joe and Jane Liberalpants think we should have a free and open society “for the children.”
(“Bugging people for no reason is unamerican!” “Yeah, what about the children?”)

BUT — Where are ol’ Joe and Jane when it’s time to lock up all strangers? That’s “for the children,” RIGHT?
(“Let ‘em all go free, I say!” “Yeah, you’re harshing my mellow, man!”)

It’s a bully mentality, and there’s a reason so many visible conservative ‘wits’ are loathsome, greasy little pricks who seem overdue for a goddamned swirly. They’ve had a lot of practice picking on the smallest and weakest; my guess is that they’re so far down on the pecking order growing up they make their bones taking the piss out of that one girl in the wheelchair who smells like farts or the kid from the projects without any friends.

Of course, the kind of friends this makes them are usually other little loathsome assholes; between that and how much conservatism loves picking on victims, you’ve got a perfect ideological match for the fat little men and ugly little girls with decent middle-class educations to act sanctimonious about having.

The reason Lileks is so pure in that regard – the reason I say that he couldn’t get purer as one of those pathetic grade-school loser-wags grown up into well-paid awful reactionaries – is that literally none of his victims could ever possibly defend themselves.

He takes potshots at the aesthetics of the 70s, which has never threatened to revive itself, and the advertising and cultural ephemera of the 50s. He’s one of those little trolls whose 50s boner is based on what he grew up with, an uncomplicated world where civil rights were clearly some kind of Communist scheme to undermine the perfectly just American society and Eisenhower – 90%-marginal-tax-rate military-industrial-fearing McCarthy-burying Eisenhower – is a retroactive Reagan pioneer. He and his kind will cop in public to the racism of the 50s being bad, but get a few beers in them and I’d bet my bottom dollar they’d tell you that it was just men being men and nobody being Politically Correct(TM).

In other words, in order to fantastically reenact the days before he had to feel shame about being a virgin and the time around his early 30s when he finally took care of that, he windmills pretty much every martyr of progress in 20th-century America.

Covertly, of course. No need to mumble about why on earth anyone could name a street after a Marxist adulterer like MLK when you can pile fulsome praise on the flat-top and cowboys-and-injuns vogue aesthetic. Doing it the second way makes sure your audience won’t feel any guilt about it.

As if to underscore all that, hateful man-lump Lileks devotes this post, under the absurd pretense of ‘protecting his child’ – rather like the Klan was all about protecting Southern womanhood from carpetbagger and freedman depredation – to specifically assaulting first child molesters (with no risk of his audience thinking of pedophilia as a disease instead of a moral failing) and then, by absurd, absurd extension, a random, outwardly civil homeless man – who, by Lileksian fiat, deserves his plight for being a pederast. (OK then.)

There you have it: two groups of victims without particularly visible advocacy groups to castigate Lileks for his abusive, petty behavior get slandered to make Jimmy-boy look hip and snarky.

You’re surprised now? He does this for a living. And he makes better money than you.

Hooray for capitalism!

And don’t forget that St. Ronnie Reagan presided over an era of corrupt, greedy business practices that led to the tearing down of millions of single-room housing units to make way for “redevelopment” (because we needed 10 more Gap stores and 1000 new condos downtown), also exponentially increasing the homeless population.

God forbid we should teach our kids some compassion and some social history when a homeless man shows up at the wading pool. Let’s be Christian and drive him out of our chi chi neighborhood instead.

Lileks has no one to blame but his own half-assed politics. If he doesn’t like some creepy dude in dirty clothes hanging around his suburban park, he needs to re-examine how so-called creepy dude got there in the first place.

BTW, how do we know said creepy dude wasn’t Jeff Goldstein? Have we heard from him lately? Has he gone off his meds? Has he found a pony?

Lileks has no one to blame but his own half-assed politics. If he doesn’t like some creepy dude in dirty clothes hanging around his suburban park, he needs to re-examine how so-called creepy dude got there in the first place.

I have no reason to doubt you, mikey.

Clearly, from Evil Men, Nevada….

You know, every time you guys talk about Lileks, I think it says Daleks.
Hey, Daleks and Pinhead(ish)!

mikey

Wow. Towns of Evil Men? I’d stay outta those neighborhoods, if I were you. Are they in Nevada?

I never read his blog, as I was not ‘hip’ to that ‘jive’. Since I have been visiting Sadly, No! (some say too often) I was pointed to his craven, vapid war mongering nature.

So I look back, fondly, on those halcyon days of ignorance. But now that I’ve discovered his true nature…F*ck ‘im!

Fourth, you don’t get to look like the fellow who shows up to collect the Hellraiser cube and hang around the kiddie pool. Good bye.

Now that’s the kind of myopic suburbanite thinking I’ve come to expect from conservatives. You don’t get to look like a ragged, cockroach-eating homless person?

Because really, homeless people have a lot of control over their appearance; they don’t have to be dirty, disheveled folks wearing ragged clothing. They could easily purchase hygenic supplies, haircuts, and clean clothing using food stamps. The free hobo-barbershop is located right next to the fashionable transient clothing supply, across the street from the soup kitchen.

It’s a perverse sort of circular logic at work:
“Why are homeless people always so dirty looking? Can’t they just go home and get a shower? And while they’re at it, a job?”

Asshat.

Nope, therapy is not going to help this asshat out. He’s gonna need meds…

mikey

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: He is NOT a good writer. Nothing I have ever seen from him is witty, funny or interesting. Anyone that sincerely uses the word ‘bleating’ to describe their own writing should be instantly ignored.

Also, he once said that he whips out a tape he made on 9/11 of the towers coming down about once a week (warporn) to make sure his war hardon doesn’t go away. Seriously. He really does sit down and watch that shit when he feels like his vigour is flagging.

it’s the mousy, weasely little fucks like lileks that turn out to be the most fucked in the head. daffyd and lileks – besides a few hundred pounds, there’s no diff.