Watch out for falling objects

Snicker:

Scotland on Sunday has obtained remarkable details of one of the most memorably bizarre episodes of the Bush presidency: the day he crashed into a Scottish police constable while cycling in the grounds of Gleneagles Hotel. […]

As the President passed the junction at speed he raised his left arm from the handlebars to wave to the police officers present while shouting ‘thanks, you guys, for coming’.

“As he did this he lost control of the cycle, falling to the ground, causing both himself and his bicycle to strike [the officer] on the lower legs. [The officer] fell to the ground, striking his head. The President continued along the ground for approximately five metres, causing himself a number of abrasions. The officers… then assisted both injured parties.” […]

At hospital, a doctor examined the constable and diagnosed damage to his ankle ligaments and issued him with crutches. The cause was officially recorded as: “Hit by moving/falling object.”

Offered, thanks to Blair, without comments.

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The U.S. Troops Are Loser-Defeatists, Too

Hilzoy notes that reality has joined the sad ranks of loser-defeatists who are pessimistic about the Iraq war.

And according to the latest Zogby poll, America’s soldiers are dangerously close to becoming loser-defeatists too:

An overwhelming majority of 72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and nearly one in four say the troops should leave immediately, a new Le Moyne College/Zogby International survey shows.

The poll, conducted in conjunction with Le Moyne College’s Center for Peace and Global Studies, showed that 29% of the respondents, serving in various branches of the armed forces, said the U.S. should leave Iraq “immediately,� while another 22% said they should leave in the next six months. Another 21% said troops should be out between six and 12 months, while 23% said they should stay “as long as they are needed.�

72% of the troops think the U.S. should leave within a year? That sounds dangerously close to setting a timetable for withdrawal! That’s the most loser-defeatist position ever! You might as well support John Kerry’s plan to make everyone in the Army get gay married! Hey assholes, why don’t you just change America’s motto from “In God We Trust” to “Sacr&eacute! More brie, please!” and be done with it!

Well that does it! We clearly need a different brand of soldier in the military, one who won’t question the President’s pledge to stay the course and remain in Iraq until 2150! If any recruiters out there need help in locating such upstanding young patriots, I can recommend more than a few who post over at this site:

Hmmmmm. On second thought, they look a little soft to be in the Army. Oh well, at least they can keep fighting terrorists on the home front… by blogging!!!

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I Don’t Think Scientologists Would Like Me Very Much

From Rolling Stone’s excellent article on Scientology:

In [Dianetics], Hubbard denounced virtually every sexual practice that doesn’t directly relate to marriage and children. […]

In auditing, Scientologists are frequently asked about their sexual thoughts or practices, particularly in the special auditing sessions called “security checks.” This process requires a church member to write down any break with the ethical code.

Hm, I wonder what they’d say about my ultimate fantasy of hiring a gang of lesbian biker midgets to beat me up while I’m wearing a chicken suit.

Come to think of it, I wonder what any normal person would say about something like that.

You guys can forget I mentioned this, right?

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One of the Best Wingnut Op-Eds Ever

I’d like to give a big, big thank you to reader Steve D., who sent me this absolutely incredible winger op-ed by some guy named Michael Westfall. It’s called “WILLIE NESLON AND AMERICAS DECADENT MUSIC INDUSTRY” and it’s truly one of the most bestest mega-awesomest all-time things I’ve ever read ever:

WILLIE NELSON AND AMERICAS DECADENT MUSIC INDUSTRY

BY MICHAEL WESTFALL

The definition of an American icon has changed over the last fifty years. For Valentines Day country singer icon Willie Nelson debuted his groundbreaking “gay cowboy song� on the “anti-family� Howard Sterns satellite radio program. Nelson also sang in the recent gay movie “Brokeback Mountain�.

Nelson also played a benefit concert near Gay Head Lighthouse in Martha’s Vineyard, with Hall-of-Fame pitcher Gaylord Perry in attendence. A gay time was had by all. Also: gay.

This 71-year-old braided balladeer’s new “gay� music holds the promise of further polluting America’s airwaves.

That sentence ranks with Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy and Molly Bloom’s “yes” monologue in Ulysses as one of the greatest things ever written.
Read the rest of this entry »

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That guy is the worst, Jerry. The worst!

Never let it be said that Reagan’s Children aren’t a clever bunch:

Now before the guy over at the aptly named World O’Crap blog loses his composure–which, if his latest vitriolic rant correctly represents his understanding of normal intellectual discourse, might be a good thing–let me state the obvious.

Those are not Cheetoh stains! But wait, Ryan has more (to say, not stains. Well.):

Although many have claimed that Saddam abandoned his WMD programs after 1991, recent tape recordings demonstrate that, as early as 1995, Saddam had concealed from the UN the true extent of his biological weapons program.

And what was the true extent of his biological weapons program when the US decided to “disarm” him? Somewhere between zero and nil?

A tape from 2000 even records a discussion between Saddam and Iraqi scientists in which the dictator indicates his interests in pursuing a nuclear weapon.

Brad R. is interested* in having sex with Angeline Jolie — should she go out and buy condoms now, or can it wait?

In the tapes, Saddam also talks about his clandestine plasma uranium program, which was probably news to weapons officials at the UN.

Yeah, and why would anyone think for even a second Saddam couldn’t pull that off? Oh:

The plasma separation process (PSP) has been studied as a potentially more efficient uranium-enrichment technique that makes use of the advancing technologies in superconducting magnets and plasma physics. […] The only countries known to have had serious PSP experimental programs are the United States and France. PSP became a part of DOE’s Advanced Isotope Separation research and development program in 1976, but development was dropped in 1982 when AVLIS was chosen as the advanced technology of choice. The French developed their own version of PSP, which they called RCI. Funding for RCI was drastically reduced in 1986, and the program was suspended around 1990, although RCI is still used for stable isotope separation.

If you need Ryan, he’ll be conducting further experiments in his polyester-Cheetos separation program.

* Theoretically.

Bradrocket adds: My desire to get it on with Angelina Jolie is more than just a theory.

Also, Seb left out the very best part of Ryan’s post (my emphasis):
Read the rest of this entry »

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Always Some New Furor

Thanks to Jade for the tip. Apparently Der Spiegel edited an interview with Karen Hughes so that it’s different in the English-language and German-language versions — and translated a sentence that originally read, “[George W. Bush is] a very warm person, he’s a very thoughtful person, he’s a very decent person. He cares deeply about people, he’s a wonderful leader,” into…this:

Er ist warmherzig, nachdenklich und anständig. Die Menschen liegen ihm am Herzen, er ist ein wunderbarer Führer.

[Cue foreboding trumpets, crashing cymbals, oompahing tubas.]

‘Führer’ is the German word for ‘leader.’

That’s Davids Medienkritik playing the tubas. We know them from awhile back. They’ve got one of these proudly waving in the tuba-breeze on the site:

That’s the award that the Euro-expat wingnut site No Pasaran! wanted to win (see below), except they were busy clattering down the stairs in a grocery cart, which is what they do over there from day to day.

The charges are as follows:

1) No German would innocently use the word, führer, in such a way. It is practically a curse-word, it is so tied to Hitler — and Spiegel knows this and is attempting to besmirch America with sneaky code-words, which is…Oooh, liberals! Gah, traitors, treason, seize-them!

2) Spiegel edited the interview, taking out certain phrases from the English original.

The second charge is true, and Spiegel seems to have merely dumped the raw interview into the online, English-language article, while editing it for the German-language version — which needed to be set in type for the print magazine. This is a necessary practice, done whenever a piece of text must be made to fit into a certain physical space in a magazine or newspaper. It’s possible to minutely parse what was left in and what was taken out (and the Euro-WingNet is currently doing that with bulging foreheads), but the resulting German-language article is in fact very favorable to Karen Hughes. The title, for instance, is “Mein Job ist die Wahrheit,” when in fact, Hughes’s job is not ‘the truth,’ because she’s an offical White House spin-doctor: Her official job is lying like a big, huge lie-foghorn that constantly blows giant ah-ooga blasts of amazing lies all over the place — and everyone knows it. Nearly all the redacted bits can reasonably be divided into two categories: redundancies, and false statements meant to fool people.

As for the first charge, Sadly, No. And even if the word, ‘führer,’ can have unpleasant connotations (which it certainly can), and even if the editors of Der Spiegel sneakily used the word in a secret attempt to subliminally brainwash its readers into disliking George W. Bush even more than they already do (and that idea, when you think about it, is a wee bit tinfoil-paranoid to say the least) — then, well, who cares? How effective is that technique? If a bunch of us went around pretending to sneeze, but sneakily going, “Bushitler!” would that also be a threat to the geopolitical status quo? Honestly: What’s wrong with you people?

Davids Medienkritik: “It iss ze duty uff ze media uff all countries to zupport ze Amerrrican gufferment.”

What a bunch of Deutschbags.

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Video Friday (Saturday Edition) is Good Lovin’ Gone Bad

…Equals, good bands that are better known for the not-so-good stuff they did later.

This first one is personal, in the sense that Norbizness and I have absent-mindedly swatted in each other’s direction over The Damned, so far without evidence submitted to help exalt the wise (that’s me) and shame the foolish (that’s him). Briefly, my take is that they were a fun punk band for a couple of years, then a tremendous, world-class rock band for a few more, then later basically an annoying, pouffy Goth act with the occasional good song. The standard American analysis (which I believe Norb shares) is that they were a great punk band, then everyone over here stopped paying attention to them for awhile, and well, there must be a reason for that.

I’m not going to win this in a single stroke, but this is The Damned at the very tail end of the tremendous-rock-band period, when they still had Captain Sensible on guitar, but after the unfortunate Goth dealo had started to take hold. What I’d really like to post would be a version of ‘Plan 9 Channel 7′ or ‘Melody Lee’ from the Machine Gun Etiquette album, but there aren’t any good ones floating around. That’s the album to swear by, in any case. It’s got it all.

The Damned - ‘Nasty,’ clip from The Young Ones (2:44)

Then there’s the Pretenders. Sure, half the band died, but jeez: If you’re Chrissy Hynde, how do you go from this (and ‘Kid,’ ‘Talk of the Town,’ ‘Birds of Paradise,’ et al.) to ‘I’ll Stand By You’ without realizing that something is hollow? I mean.

The Pretenders - ‘Tattooed Love Boys’ (2:58)

I’m working from a single time-period here, and apologies for that, but most of my examples from later are chronicled all over the place. Like, ‘That second Strokes album wasn’t really all that good,’ and so forth. But Paul Weller — now that’s a career where disappointment lives. The Style Council had like three good songs, and everything Weller, for like the next ten million years, band and solo, was teh suxxor. Gah, but he was so good once.

The Jam - ‘Going Underground’ (3:04)

Dag.

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Sadly, No Pasaran!

Here’s Powerline.

I’m Glad Someone’s Looking After His Rights

The alleged leader of the gang that murdered Ilan Halimi has been arrested in Ivory Coast, and French authorities are moving to extradite him for trial in France. No Pasaran!, a group blog some of whose members, at least, live in France, has been following the story in the French media:

Just 10 minutes ago on French cable TV i-Tele some jackass from an umpteenth French Human Rights group was moaning that this guy cannot be extradited from the Ivory Coast without violating his human rights. The French media machine is in overdrive in what is shaping up to be a succesful bait-and-switch on who the real victim is here as they quelch all media echos of anti-Semitism in this affair.

What is it about “human rights” groups that seems to make them insensitive to human rights?
Posted by John at 02:05 PM

Ah, it’s No Pasaran! again. We know those guys from awhile back. They have this image proudly displayed on their main page:

Startlingly, they’re even less well-respected than Sadly, No!, because we have one of these laid up for a rainy day, or for when we start to feel tragically unloved:

– and that should tell you something, by God. We’re not exactly at the glimmering pinnacle of sobriety and blogging-ethics.

So, this ditchwater blog full of bonk-headed loonies, No Pasaran! — which is down the ladder from us, even — says “some jackass” from an “umpteenth French human-rights group” said something unspecified on i-Tele. And aspiring ‘MSM’ pundit and Claremont Fellow John Hinderaker takes this hot tip and passes it on, adding a hardy-har dig at ‘human-rights groups.’

Dude, I was watching cable ten minutes ago, and this one jerk from like the millionth conservative group was saying he hopes there’s a really big terrorist attack on America so Bush can suspend the Constitution.

No, really, you can totally go check — it was on that one show, with the guy. You know, on cable.

“Yeah, I was sitting right here, why?”

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Shorter Glenn Reynolds

SOME ADVICE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE

I have some more advice to give about the port deal.

[see below]

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“I believe this only strengthens my point…”

James S. Robbins, Corner Kid and senior fellow in national-security affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council*

GOOD NEWS [Jim Robbins]
So much for Iraq’s civil war

Posted at 02:28 PM

[…]

Associated Press
Update 22: Sectarian Violence Continues in Iraq
By ALEXANDRA ZAVIS,
02.25.2006, 01:33 PM

A car bomb exploded in a Shiite holy city and 13 members of a Shiite family were shot to death Saturday in a surge of attacks that killed about 50 people despite heightened security to curb Iraq’s sectarian violence following the bombing of a revered Shiite shrine.

*Surprisingly, the American Foreign Policy Council is a right-wing nonprofit entity.

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There’s practically nothing on Ask Jeeves…

THE DUBAI DEAL [Jonah Goldberg]

A very, very small point: People keep using Dubai and UAE interchangeably. But Dubai is just one of the emirates in the United Arab Emirates. So when people say that DPW is “state owned” it’s really more like state owned — like if Texas or New Hampshire owned a company. Right? Or am I missing yet another thing?
Posted at 12:33 PM

If only there were some way to tell…

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And by the Way…

…here’s the Tony Blankley quote I was talking about the other day (my emphasis):

[W]e have a couple of choices, and everybody has been talking about being an honest broker, but there’s another choice, and that is to be a participant on one side, with the Shias and Kurds against the Sunnis. The Shias, while they are a bigger number of people, they don’t have the experience that the Sunnis have, but if you combine the Shia numbers with our technology and our support, technical support, we could in fact get a second best—not what we wanted, which was a government that was genuinely democratic, but perhaps a friendly, semi-theocratic Shia government that we had put in power by helping them win a civil war. That’s not a wonderful choice, but it’s a lot better than turning tail and leaving.

NOW that’s what I call fASScism, Vol. 2!

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Objectively Pro-Fascist

Ben Shapiro’s latest piece is a real doozy:

Last Sunday, former Vice President Al Gore spoke before the Jiddah Economic Forum. He told the mostly Saudi audience that the United States had committed “terrible atrocities” against Arabs after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

What a fucking bastard. What so-called “abuses” is that crack-head Gore even talking about? I mean…

…oh, OK, so there’s that… but that still doesn’t excuse Gore saying that…
Read the rest of this entry »

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Saturday Morning Video, German Edition

While it lacks the cool display in browser quality of Gavin M.’ Friday Night specials, This is the German Coast Guard is well worth your time… (2.5MB MPEG file)

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Shortering: not as easy as it looks [updated for extra length]

So The Liberal Avenger starts snapping on Jeff ‘Protein Wisdom’ Goldstein in Goldstein’s comments.

Shorter Jeff Goldstein:
“I don’t care if GEORGE W BUSH says that we’ve lost the war - victory is ours, goddamnit!�

And then he does another.

More shorter Goldstein:
“The Samarra bombing was a major event, but it doesn’t count because al-Qaeda was responsible for it.�

Then a third one.

More Shorter JG:
“Aside from the foreign-run insurgency and al-Qaeda’s role in Iraq, we’ve already won!�

And then Goldstein is all like, “Oooh!” and shakes his fists and grabs his hat off and jumps up and down on it, and goes:

Shorter “Liberal Avenger�: “Burn Iraq! Pushing for a civil war will teach us the lesson of our imperial arrogance—and so therefore, I am FOR IT! GORE IN ‘08! Oh, and DON’T YOU DARE QUESTION MY PATRIOTISM!�

Dear Jeff Goldstein,

The ’shorter’ concept was invented in early 2003 by Daniel Davies (now of Crooked Timber), as a way to make fun of long-winded right-blogger Stephen Den Beste. Today, the acknowledged master of the form is Elton Beard of Busy Busy Busy, but the ’shorter’ is also used by countless other left-bloggers, almost exclusively against targets (such as yourself) on the right. I am not aware of a prior attempt by a right-blogger to use this technique. I certainly welcome you to it, and hope that you can benefit from my (admittedly limited) experience.

Those who attempt to do a ’shorter’ for the first time quickly learn that the form is much harder than it looks! The object is to distill a twisty, mendacious right-wing argument into a single brief passage that manages both to accurately portray the thoughts and sentiments of the victim, and to highlight the argument’s absurdity. Many hints and insights are embedded in Daniel Davies’s original ‘Shorter Stephen Den Beste’ series, the beginning of which is here.

In my judgment, the following is one of best ’shorters’ ever written. It’s a 2005 composition by Elton Beard that shares a quality with many other great works of art in that any attempt to describe its appeal must ultimately fall short in the face of the work itself: Its appeal is imminent, yet elusive; its economy not unlike that of Haiku. Much more is revealed than is said. I find myself returning to it again and again, nearly always discovering qualities in it that before had escaped notice.

Shorter Kenneth M. Pollack:
Five Ways to Win Back Iraq

I have some more advice to give about Iraq.

Now, I don’t even know who Kenneth M. Pollack is. That’s the beauty of it: His column becomes a mere footnote to the main work, a near-irrelevancy, for it’s impossible to experience him in this way and not to know him more deeply than his own words would allow. Here we see Pollack in apotheosis — we see all the Pollacks, the multiple incarnations of ever-opining, oddly misinformed, media-enabled Pollackitude past, present, and to come. Always talking, these Pollacks! Even after it should be clear that nobody in power is listening. This is evoked gesturally, algebraically. The economy is architectonic.

I hope you find the above example as rich in inspiration as I do, Jeff, because I’m trying to use it to clearly preface what I’d have to call a basic criticism of your first attempt at the ’shorter’ form. I’ll reproduce it again.

Shorter “Liberal Avenger�: “Burn Iraq! Pushing for a civil war will teach us the lesson of our imperial arrogance—and so therefore, I am FOR IT! GORE IN ‘08! Oh, and DON’T YOU DARE QUESTION MY PATRIOTISM!�

See, it’s really pretty much a foundational rule that a ’shorter’ should be less long than the thing it’s supposed to be making fun of. Otherwise, I guess it would probably be called something else — like maybe a ‘longer.’

Here, I’ll do one for you.

Shorter Jeff Goldstein:
YOUR MAMA’S SO UGLY [droning voice, snores, crickets] AL GORE!

(Den) Best(e) Wishes,
-G.M.

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