It’s Gone Way Past ‘Civil Inconvenience’

With wingnuts raising a big, wrathful treason-alleging yawp over the media’s growing use of the term ‘civil war’ to describe the civil warfare that’s taking place in Iraq, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s wire service, UPI, has demonstrated the resourcefulness and subtlety for which it is justly famed (among wingnuts):

Bush Amman talks pave way for pullout?
AMMAN, Jordan, Nov. 30 (UPI) — With Iraq sliding into civil strife and calls rising for U.S. withdrawal…

As has been noted, we’ve already been in Iraq longer than we were in World Strife II. They said the Strife on Terror would take awhile, but these striving factions in Iraq are just really… oh, forget it.

Less cozeningly, Time Magazine reports:

Read the rest of this entry »

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A Thursday Gomer Pyle Moment

The New York Times
Bush Dismisses Iraq Panel’s Pullback Plan
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg
November 30, 2006

AMMAN, Jordan, Nov. 30 — President Bush today proclaimed Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki “the right guy for Iraq,” and said the two had agreed to speed the turnover of security responsibility from American to Iraqi forces.

But Mr. Bush dismissed a reported decision by an independent bipartisan panel to call for a gradual withdrawal of troops.

“Surpraaahs, surpraaahs, surpraaahs!”

“I know there’s a lot of speculation that these reports in Washington mean there’s going to be some kind of graceful exit out of Iraq,” the president said during a joint news conference with Mr. Maliki, referring to the panel’s reports that are expected next week. “We’re going to stay in Iraq to get the job done so long as the government wants us there.”

[Also see this catch at Edroso’s joint.]

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The Comedy Never Stops

A big thanks to Roy for pointing me to this page, which contains several lengthy excerpts from Orson Scott Card’s Empire. The book, for those of you who didn’t read yesterday’s post, is about a civil war that breaks out between red and blue states when “a radical leftist army calling itself the Progressive Restoration takes over New York City and declares itself the rightful government of the United States.” The main plot revolves around “Card’s heroic red-state protagonists, Maj. Reuben ‘Rube’ Malek and Capt. Bartholomew ‘Cole’ Coleman” who “draw on their Special Ops training to take down the extremist leftists and restore peace to the nation.”

The book’s first five chapters are an all-out laughfest, jam-packed with the tired cliches and hammy polemics that we read on a daily basis from such leading conservative lights as Dan Riehl and Gary Ruppert. The prose reminds me of the stuff I wrote when I was 11 years old, just before I discovered the wonders of self-abuse. For a prime example, check out this sparkler:

They had killed no one in front of these villagers, and in fact they had killed no one, ever, anywhere. Yet there was something about them, their alertness, the way they moved, that gave warning, the way a tiger gives warning simply by the fluidity of its movement and the alertness of its eyes.

Yes, there was something about the way they moved that had to do with their movement… that was LIKE A TIGER, BABY, GRRRRRRRRRR!!!

Anywho, there’s a lot more where that come from, and I will dissect it tonight when I get home from work.

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That Would Seem To Be A ‘No’

Ding-dong. Who’s there? It’s Blogs For Bush again. And this time they have a hot one.

NSA Program: Impressive Safeguards for Civil Liberties
By Mark Noonan at 09:13 PM

Any liberal or lefty want to apologise about this?

WASHINGTON — After a delay of more than a year, a government board appointed to guard Americans’ privacy and civil liberties during the war on terror has been told the inner workings of the government’s electronic eavesdropping program…

…Board members said that they were impressed by the safeguards the government has built into the NSA’s monitoring of phone calls and computer transmissions, and that they wished the administration could tell the public more about them to ease distrust.

“If the American public, especially civil libertarians like myself, could be more informed about how careful the government is to protect our privacy while still protecting us from attacks, we’d be more reassured,” said Lanny Davis, a former Clinton White House lawyer who is the board’s lone liberal Democrat.

If Lanny Davis appears as ‘the sole liberal Democrat’ in something, it’s prudent to double-check the silverware. When last we encountered Davis, he was trashing liberal blogs as ‘anti-Semitic‘ on the Wall Street Journal editorial page, as part of his effort to keep Joe Lieberman in the Senate. Now he has a book out decrying partisanship on ‘the left and the right,’ blurbed by none other than our pal Michael Medved:

To many conservatives, Lanny Davis is a cherished anomaly: a thoughtful liberal, a decent guy, and a fair-minded Democratic operative who loves his country even more than he loves his party. This challenging book offers a road map for helping America climb out of the current mosh pit of ugly, partisan mud wrestling and to substitute constructive competition for today’s mutually assured destruction.

Anyone who wonders why a howling Republican bridge-troll like Medved would praise such a book is welcome to read it.

You might have noticed ellipses in the quoted AP story above. They conceal an important detail:

Read the rest of this entry »

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Obligatory Dennis Prager Post

There’s not much kicking left to do, alas, but our special relationship with Dennis the Menace means that we ought to get a foot in.

Above: the seat cushion smelled like pastrami farts

America, Not Keith Ellison, decides what book a congressman takes his oath on
By Dennis Prager

Keith Ellison, D-Minn., the first Muslim elected to the United States Congress, has announced that he will not take his oath of office on the Bible, but on the bible of Islam, the Koran.

He should not be allowed to do so — not because of any American hostility to the Koran, but because the act undermines American civilization.

[…]

When all elected officials take their oaths of office with their hands on the very same book, they all affirm that some unifying value system underlies American civilization. If Keith Ellison is allowed to change that, he will be doing more damage to the unity of America and to the value system that has formed this country than the terrorists of 9-11.

From Article VI of the United States Constitution:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

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Two-Minute Townhall

Words over here, words out there, in the air and everywhere. Words of wisdom, words of strife, words that write the book I like.

Shorter Michael Medved: Hey, I have an idea! Perhaps conservatives should address growing middle class anxieties.

Shorter Kathleen Parker: Frivolous lawsuits are symptomatic of a bankrupt society, and they are also what makes America great.

Shorter Walter E. Williams: All self interest is equal, but some self interest is more equal than others. For example, corporations…

Shorter Tony Blankley: Hopefully, Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Turkey will prove once and for all that Christianity can never be reconciled with Islam or the secular left.

Shorter Ben Shapiro: The flying imams have aided and abetted some future terrorist attack I just made up.

Shorter Linda Chavez: We have to stay in Iraq until the job is done. We just have to.

Shorter Terence Jeffrey: A side-by-side comparison of apples and public schools illustrates a clear need for vouchers.

Shorter Brent Bozell III: Propaganda is stuff you disagree with, right?

Shorter Jacob Sullum: As a libertarian, I believe anti-crime zones are mostly effective as political grandstanding.

Shorter Michelle Malkin: The Associated Press should promote their unreliability as relentlessly as right-wing bloggers.

Shorter William F. Buckley: I should hope the pope won’t concede too much to the dusky Turks.

Shorter Paul Greenberg: I was born the son of an immigrant shoemaker…

Shorter Maggie Gallagher: I doubt any good will come of Pope Benedict’s trip to Turkey, and I just hope he returns in one piece.

Shorter John Stossel: Are Americans cheap? I’ll ask some celebrities tonight on my new TV special…

Shorter Austin Bay: Being misled by an unreliable source is just as unethical as making up a source. Worse, even.

Shorter James J. Kilpatrick: Is anyone interested in copyright law? How about nude photos of Ruth Bader Ginsburg? Anyone?

Shorter Lee S. Wishing III: I achieved a state of epiphanic grace last Friday at the mall.

Shorter Janet M. LaRue: The Concerned Women for America have taken up the fight to protect the word “Christmas.”

Shorter Jay Sekulow: My column on the ACLU’s assault on Christmas runs a little short this week because I used up all the inflammatory words.

Shorter Cal Thomas: Newly elected Democratics have already been corrupted by Washington. I say, bring on the next round of reformers!

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“A Scratch? Your Arm’s Off!” “No It Isn’t.”

UPDATE: Although Gavin M. came back with a worthy response, I still feel compelled to declare victory.

You’d think right-wingers would’ve learned to stop doing that. Next he’s going to say that the results can’t be fairly judged for another six months, and when that stops working, he’s going to be all like, “Um, catastrophic sucking is actually a triumph for conservatism.”

Also, constructive criticizers, if you think I’m going to spend the time required to put together Worth 1000 level submissions, you need to put down the crackpipe/Jesus juice (depending on your political persuasion). I’m not on public assistance, in college, a graphic artist, or single–all prerequisites for that level of dedication.

I see something disappearing over the horizon, and I believe it is the goalposts.

Here’s one of those uniquely brilliant and technically demanding Worth1000 entries:

Above: every pixel spells ‘dedication’

Our challenge, Cadet Happy of IMAO, is to remix a Day By Day strip. The result must be, unlike the original strip, funny, and must unlike the original strip make sense.

The technical skills required for this challenge are quite modest, however points must be assigned for craftsmanship, attention to detail, and conceptual ambition (for instance, just changing some text or sticking in a random picture from Google Images would be teh l4m3).

Any and all Day By Day strips are fair game, but sneakily getting Chris Muir to help with an entry will result in automatic disqualification. Not least because it would violate the ‘funny’ requirement.

Update: This just in via e-:

Why don’t you two post the photoshops in the challenge anonymously? That way we can see what’s true criticism/praise and what is simple blatant sycophancy ?

Each one send the other his entry with no identifying marks and then each of you post the other’s entry without telling whose is whose so a true comparison will be forced on the readers. I would expect you to decline if you either of were only interested in seeing your side cheer for your own work.

Let me know what you think.

Sure, I’m totally down with that. Mine will be the one that isn’t clattering down the stairs in a shopping cart, on fire and trailing a plume of aerosolized sadness.

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Raise a Glass for the Ole Perfesser

If someone from another planet came to earth and asked me to find two sentences that summarized the insanity of Glenn Harlan Reynolds, I’d probably choose these two:

Is America in danger of civil war? Not immediately, perhaps, but famed science fiction writer Orson Scott Card thinks that we’re in enough danger that he’s authored a cautionary tale entitled Empire that’s set in more-or-less present times.

Is America in danger of being invaded by the Mole People? Not immediately, perhaps, but famed science fiction writer Stan Lee thinks that we’re in enough danger that he’s authored a cautionary tale entitled The Fantastic Four that’s set in more-or-less present times.

Above: Comic book… or prophecy?

Read the rest of this entry »

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Personal Responsibility? PFFFFFFFFT! We’re Americans!

What the hell is with this:

From troops on the ground to members of Congress, Americans increasingly blame the continuing violence and destruction in Iraq on the people most affected by it: the Iraqis.

Even Democrats who have criticized the Bush administration’s conduct of the occupation say the people and government of Iraq are not doing enough to rebuild their society. The White House is putting pressure on the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and members of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group have debated how much to blame Iraqis for not performing civic duties.

Hey, guys? We invaded their country. We destroyed their infrastructure. We tried rebuilding it by hiring twentysomething Heritage Foundation staffers. If you really want find somebody to blame for Iraq’s troubles, don’t you think the mirror is the first place to look?

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Teh Flying Imams

Cadet Happy of IMAO insisted on a low-tech picture, so I found this in one of my old issues of Air Enthusiast.

Above: Teh Flying Imams, China, 1941

Note the technical badness. Whoever did this didn’t even use dodge/burn on the highlights and shadows.

This one’s from scarshapedstar:

[cue: ‘baby elephant walk’ with spike jones burps and ah-oogahs]

Say, now it’s our challenge. Let’s think of something really hard and frightening that demands technical acumen…

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Hmmm…

Flying Imams Terrorize Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport
Posted by Cadet Happy at 08:53 PM | TrackBack (0)

OK Gavin M., I’ll take up your photoshop duel challenge–if you mess with one of my street ‘ho’s, you mess with me.

Your challenge is to come up with a funnier take on the “flying imams” story than the one above. After you fail, you get to pick the next topic, create a photoshop, and I will try to best you, and so on and so forth. No points will be given for technical acumen

Hey wait. I almost missed that, so happy was I to join the challenge.

Let’s back up a bit.

No points will be given for technical acumen

Huh. I can only think of one reason why someone would attempt to make such a stipulation in a fair contest: It’s a special equal-opportunity clause to enable sucktastic suckiness and an inability to not suck.

so feel free to use whatever crappy photo editing software you desire.

Hmm.

Above: what are these ‘warez’ of which you speak?

Choose a particular picture, a phrase, a theme, a person–I don’t care. Let’s see what you’ve got . . .

First, I challenge the unilateral suckiness stipulation. Call me biased against sucking, but I think it becomes necessary at this point to ask for a vote. Otherwise we could each just draw something with crayon on an old pizza box and declare ourselves the ‘winner.’

I mean, not to be unfair here or anything. We’re the squishy liberals, after all, while you guys are supposed to be the steely-nosed right-wingers…

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Centrism: Anti-Populist And Wingnutty (The I’m-Naming-Names Edition)

Atrios:

Mostly centrism is used be elite opinionmakers to denote sensible, set off against real or (more often) imagined “extreme” positions which are of course wrong because anything “extreme” has to be wrong. Except, perhaps, invading countries for no good reason.

Heh indeedy. Centrism is a clusterfuck of pseudowonkery (presented as a product of deep collective mentation), sneers, douchebaggery, windbaggery; a hacktastic consensus. As such, it’s hard to analyze but it still can, I believe, be objectively fixed on the ideological spectrum. Consider that centrism is:

Politically dead set against social democracy, which it considers unacceptably ‘extreme’. Now this is of course halfway to a legitimate sort of centrism; but since it’s not dead set against hard authoritarianism/protofascism (in other words, Bush’s utopia; something that is worthy of serious discussion) the objective center has failed to strike right as it had struck left — objectively, ‘centrists’, then, aren’t of the true center: they are right-wing.

On economics, centrism is neoliberal — which is to say, anti-populist. Some centrists are for Free Trade because “everyone” else is. But others know good and well Stiglitz’s rule that such schemes’ social costs can only be mitigated by a Scandinavian model of public services; and yet, these same centrists actively participate in preventing a Scandinavian model to be set up here yet still actively support Free Trade, so much so that it’s the central dogma of their weltanshauung. What’s hilarious is that many of these centrists are marketed (with many believing the marketing) as some sort of leftwingers when actually they have far more in common with the late Milton Friedman than they have with the late John Kenneth Galbraith. Incidentally — yet gloriously — it is precisely this group (and one other) of miserable fuckers who were repudiated by the last election.

On foriegn policy, centrism is liberalhawkish/neoconservative (the other group conclusively repudiated by the election) — or at least it was until recently; now it is ‘realist’, which is to say that it may now be slightly less radical. But it is perhaps better to put centrist foriegn policy as such: it’s against anything the filthy hippies are for. Again the centrists aren’t so centrist: for them, the hard rightwing position, overtly imperialist and symbolised in Richard Perle’s gleefully extended middle finger at International Law, is eminently respectable and, indeed, is the course usually followed.

And last but not least, centrists, in chattering matters, prefer ‘civility’ to decency every fucking time.

Anyway, I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know. Still, the point that centrism-is-actually-pro-wingnuttery bears repeating. But then if you’ve read this far, you’ve done so only for the parenthetical reference. Well, okay then. But first lemme say that several centrists don’t follow the all the above points; some are centrist about one thing, something else about another. Still, the tendency to be a centrist frequently coincides with the tendency to follow all the above ‘rules’; or, put another way, a centrist is often a ’sensible liberal’ is often a neoliberal is often a liberal hawk is often a ‘third way’ maven is often a pseudoliberal is often cupping his ears respectfully and attentively to the most batshit-wingnut position when not actually making the batshit-wingnut argument himself.

The following pundits and pundettes have been or still are ‘centrists’:

Anne Applebaum
David Broder (no link necessary)
Richard Cohen
Mickey Kaus
Joe Klein
Peter Beinart
Kenneth Baer
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Jonathan Chait
Brad DeLong
Kevin Drum
Franklin Foer
Tom Fucking Friedman
Joshua Green
David Ignatius
Michael Kinsley
Mark A. Kleiman
Ezra Klein (no linky; in his Pandagon days, however, he was against whatever the smelly hippies were for; has since made amends)
Nicholas Kristof
Sebastian Mallaby
Matthew Miller
Thomas Olyphant
Cokie Roberts
Jack Shafer
Jacob Weisberg
Matthew Yglesias
Fareed Zakaria

So there ya are, a list of past or current wingnut-enablers! Now I go back on hiatus, floating away on a gay-marriage magic rainbow, fiddling with my Swiss Army Abortion Kit and remembering to activate FAGG0TR0N, Thadly No!’s thiny new threadbot.

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Tally Ho!

Right-wing sites of similar traffic that are cowards and have begged off on our Photoshop Duel challenge, knowing that we would utterly destroy them because they suck:

1) IMAO

Right-wing sites of similar traffic that are not yet proven abject cowards, and have not yet begged off on our Photoshop Duel challenge, despite sucking:

1) Dan Riehl
2) Six-Meat Buffet
3) Does anyone else on the right even do Photoshop?
4) Yeah, you. We challenge you, chunderbot. Here’s a bullet. Aroo! Aroo!

Above: Something Brad wanted in September that I forget what
it was supposed to be about. Note the hand-drawn shadows on
the shoulder, becuz that’s how da Sadly rollzz.

I pretty much just hear crickets here. Could it be so easy?

Dudes, it’s not like we’re asking you to enlist!

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Gimme one reason to stay here

Mmmm … fresh intelligence:

A senior American intelligence official said Monday that the Iranian-backed group Hezbollah had been training members of the Mahdi Army, the Iraqi Shiite militia led by Moktada al-Sadr.

The official said that 1,000 to 2,000 fighters from the Mahdi Army and other Shiite militias had been trained by Hezbollah in Lebanon. A small number of Hezbollah operatives have also visited Iraq to help with training, the official said […]

The interview occurred at a time of intense debate over whether the United States should enlist Iran’s help in stabilizing Iraq [and … the] claim about Hezbollah’s role in training Shiite militias could strengthen the hand of those in the Bush administration who oppose a major new diplomatic involvement with Iran.

Josh Marshall detects Cheney’s sepulchural hands all over this, which sets him to wonderin’:

The truth or falsity of this new intel from the same sources of the reliably bogus intel of recent years, though, seems of secondary interest to the debate that’s getting set up. It’s a recipe and the argument for staying in Iraq permanently … [a]nd brings us back to the key question: what’s our goal in Iraq. Not what it may or may not have been three years ago. But what is it right now?

The whole point of the war was to start it, and then to stay. That’s it. That’s been the only goal all along. It didn’t matter much how things shook out, because there were poltical and economic benefits to be gained by a select few, whether the war progressed quickly and peacefully or slowly and disastrously. It’s like when I was underage and used to sneak into nightclubs; my elaborate planning extended just past the bouncer. After that – who cares? There were plenty of possibilities – liquor, an awesome band, older women, a hilarious story about getting kicked out – all of which were entirely acceptable to me. This new intel sounds like when I’d tell the bartender I’d left my I.D. in my other pants. Maybe I had, but that license showed I was 17, and not 21 (i.e., the facts were fixed around the policy). My goal was to buy myself a little more time, if not a cocktail.

Our mission in Iraq has long been accomplished, from the administration’s view, and it will continue to be accomplished until we leave. Even then, they can always cast the dudes who made them leave as the heavy in some, as-yet-untold story.

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Oh, No Way…

Oh, ripoff-tastic. Oh, they wouldn’t.

Can IMAO be so humiliated as to feel shame?

Shopping Ideas from IMAO!

The Christmas season is here and it’s time to reach out to each other in the spirit of the season and move our country forward. It’s time to reach out to liberals.

But how do we do that? What kind of gift do you give somebody who might be offended at the idea of saying Merry Christmas?

That’s where the IMAO giftshop comes in. We have a special line of toys and other gifts that are sure to make you a hit with all of your liberal friends.

For example, try today’s gift suggestion…

Uh-huh. Here’s Number One in our Weblog Award-winning series last year. There are more.

I mean really.

Sweet Jesus on a hoppity-hop: Caught stealing from ‘the left.’ How about that Photoshop Duel, IMAO?

(Here, kitty-kitty… CAT FUD!1!!!)

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