Why liberals are right to hate the Ten Commandments by Michael Medved
Ah, it’s like I never was away.
The left’s fiery obsession with removing Ten Commandments monuments from public property throughout the United States may seem odd and irrational but actually reflects the deepest values of contemporary liberalism.
Those last five words are bracketed by air quotes.
Even for militant separationists like the ACLU, this ferocious hostility to innocuous and generally uncontroversial monuments looks excessive, even self-destructive. The overwhelming majority of Americans instinctively accept the Commandments as a timeless, cherished summary of universal moral precepts. A closer look at the specifics of the Decalogue, however, suggests that it makes good sense for leftists to hate The Big Ten: each one of the commandments contradicts a different pillar of trendy liberal thinking.
This paragraph is packed so densely with stupidity and emotionally charged words that I’m afraid to unpack it for fear that it will pop open like those novelty snake nut cans and I’ll never stuff it all back inside. (However, I will call your attention to the singular “pillar” in that last sentence, which is nagging me like a boner in math class.)
Above: Much closer in form to my own idea of an innocuous, generally uncontroversial monument
Crooks & Liars covers the conservative outrage™ over Al Gore’s use of electricity, and brings up a startling question.
Do you suppose that they are equally up in arms by the fact that taxpayers are paying Dick Cheney’s electric bill at the Vice President’s mansion? You know, the one that had an $186,000 electric bill in 2001?
That’s not the startling question. (The correct answer is “Ha ha! Oh man, now you’ve done it: Pass me that forty of Crazy Horse.”)
The question is: A $186,000 electric bill?! What the flaming hell are they doing up there at the Vice President’s mansion!?
As kids we used to play “52 Card Pick-Up.� It starts by asking an unsuspecting friend, “Do you want to play 52 Card Pickup?!� “Well, I’ve never played before, but sure,� he says.
You then throw the deck in the air, let the cards separate and fly around the room, and say, “Okay, your turn. Pick-up!�
That’s not how the joke goes at all! It starts by asking an unsuspecting friend, “Hey Henry, do you want to play You Will Pick Up 52 Cards That I Throw In The Air?”
And he says, “Well, I’ve never played before, but sure.”
And then you run him over with one of these!!!
Above: This joke only works once
Something like that is going on in education. It has to do with the movement to discard the academic disciplines in favor of teaching students “what they really need to know� or introducing them to “the real world.�
The disciplines, however imperfect they may be, provide—well, discipline. They bring organization and accountability to the curriculum. A college education is not like “52 Card Pick-Up”, whereby you throw up the deck of cards and let them land where they will. The curriculum must be organized in some reasonable fashion. It’s a practical matter.
You can sense where this is going, right? Toward resentment of ‘liberalism!’ Let’s skip ahead. Read the rest of this entry »
But we do care! So what can we do to remedy the situation, to earn an endorsing link? Right, we have to avoid the singular crime of making fun of the appearance of a wingnut like Daffydd ab Hugh, who is a living, breathing, reactionary version of the Comic Book Guy. It’s mean, we understand. Beyond the pale. An atrocity, even. Perhaps a war crime. So we’ll stop that shit right now:
New, improved, morally-acceptable Dafydd ab Hugh picture
SANTA MONICA, Calif., Feb. 27 /Christian Newswire/
Xenon Pictures has announced today the March 13, 2007 DVD re-release of THE DA VINCI HOAX, a documentary debunking author Dan Brown’s fictional theories on the relationship between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, the beginnings of Christianity, and the Catholic Church. This thought-provoking film, hosted by best-selling authors Carl E. Olson and Sandra Miesel, as well as Jesuit biblical scholar Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J., exposes the inaccuracies and falsehoods of the popular novel, The Da Vinci Code.
If any filmmakers would like to collaborate on a project, we possess compelling evidence of a pattern of inaccuracies and falsehoods in the novels of wingnut author Dafydd ab Hugh.
Above: Theories of ‘zombie space marines’ ripe for debunking
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to eat my lunch by running over it. After that, it’s another long afternoon of jumping on crates and gibbing noobz — work’s a bitch, hoss, but those silver keys don’t just find themselves!
Update: Several have asked about the giant sandwich now missing from the picture of ab Hugh. This is an interesting question, and it reminds me of a story.
Actually, no — we were lectured about making fun of fat people.
Our own opinion is that if someone is going to archly accuse others of cowardice for not having a military background and blogging from the war zones of Iraq or Afghanistan — as ab Hugh recently did to Eric Boehlert — then it had better not be, you know, funny if for example that person wears a red shirt (see above) and some wag shouts out “Hey, Kool-Aid!”
However, sensitivity is Job One around here, and comity our mission.
MUSCAT (Reuters) - Vice President Dick Cheney was whisked into a bomb shelter immediately after a Taliban suicide bomber struck the main American military base he was visiting in Afghanistan on Tuesday.
Up to 14 people were killed, including one U.S. and one South Korean soldier, in the Bagram Airbase attack which rebels said was aimed at Cheney.
He had been in his room at the base where he had unexpectedly had to stay the night after bad weather forced postponement of his trip to the capital, Kabul, about 60 km (40 miles) away.
“At 10 a.m. I heard a loud boom,” Cheney said.
It’s time someone accounted for the fact that our Vice President’s life is punctuated with loud booms, invariably followed by tragedy unto others and a speedy whisking. Boom! — and a plane hits the Pentagon as Cheney is ‘whisked away.’ Boom! — and someone’s face gets in the way of his shotgun blast, whereupon Cheney is ‘whisked away.’ Boom! Suicide bomber, Afghanistan. Whisked. F-bombed in Mississippi; whisked.
Boom-whisk, boom-whisk.
“Rrrrr!”
For the love of God, Dick: Either stop with the booming, or stop with the whisking. Or whisk first, if you would; boom in private. Boom and whisk simultaneously if you like. Whoom! Bisque! That would be splendid. But no more of this, please, because we’re getting quite tired of the aftermath:
“They moved me for a relatively brief period of time to one of the bomb shelters nearby,” [Cheney] said. “As the situation settled down and they got a better sense in terms of what was going on, then I went back to my room until it was time to leave.”
NATO’s death toll in the attack was four, officials said. A Reuters photographer at the scene saw an additional 10 bodies, putting the total at 14.
A U.S. government contractor, whose nationality was unknown, was among those killed and 27 people were wounded, NATO said.
“We wanted to target … Cheney,” Taliban spokesman Mullah Hayat Khan told Reuters by phone from an undisclosed location.
Wo-ho-ho, look who’s in the ‘undisclosed location’ now, Mr. Cheney. It’s Bomby McExplodowitz calling about the boom! Seems like Mr. Khan was pre-whisked. Although truly, how much whisking is necessary in Afghanistan if insurgents can target an American vice-president in a place he occupied ‘unexpectedly,’ and then have someone talk to Reuters about it, being all like, “Hey, this is Mullah Ayat Khan. Yeah, you can quote me. So, about that suicide bomber we just sent to kill the Vice President…” Read the rest of this entry »
All right, Bradrocket’s done it now. The bed has been shit, the can of worms opened…
Oh yes, Ludds, it’s Glenn Reynolds’s theme song set to anime:
2095, 2095, 2095, 2095
I love you, sincerely
Yours truly, yours truly…
I sent a message to another time
But as the days unwind, this I just cant believe
I sent a note across another plane
Maybe its all a game, but this I just cant conceive.
Can you hear me?
I drive the very latest hovercar
I dont know where you are
But I miss you so much till then
I met someone who looks a lot like you
She does the things you do
But she is an IBM.
2095, 2095, 2095, 2095
I love you, sincerely
Yours truly, yours truly…
Shes only programmed to be very nice
But shes as cold as ice
Whenever I get too near
She tells me that she likes me very much
But when I try to touch
She makes it all too clear.
She is the latest in technology
Almost mythology
But she has a heart stone
She has an i.q. of 1001
She has a jumpsuit on
And shes also a telephone.
[…]
I realize that it must seem so strange
That time has rearranged
But time has the final word
She knows I think of you, she reads my mind
She tries to be unkind
She knows nothing of our world
Although her memory banks overflow
No one would ever know
For all she says: is that what you want?
Maybe one day Ill feel her cold embrace
And kiss her interface
til then, Ill leave her alone.
Imagine a stupid future where rock’n'roll has been banned and where morality is strictly enforced by fruity C3PO-wannabe robots. All looks hopeless when suddenly, out of the darkness, comes some loser whose most attractive qualities are his tight pants and shitty haircut. He can’t really act, and his voice makes him sound like he’s being chainsawed up the butt by Satan, but dammit, he knows the meaning of ROCK. And as Mick Jagger’s sexual history tells us, knowing how to ROCK can magically transform you from an ugly, ill-mannered lout with goofy lips and crappy teeth into a righteous baaaaaaaaaaaabe magnet. LONG LIVE ROCK:
In all fairness to the evil totalitarian government of the near-future: if Styx were still the biggest band on the planet, I’d want to ban rock as well.
And when I was hanging outside the Worcester Centrum on a schoolnight, and when I had to subject my freely-chosen babysitting money purchase of “Hemispheres� to the haughty gaze of the punk rock clerk girl at Tower Records, I saw a lot of people, but I sure as hell didn’t see you there. I WAS THERE. Not you. So I fucking earned it. And I’m using this street cred to warn any kids out there who are thinking of starting a band, and think it would be a cool idea to dress like rejected characters from Barbarella and sing about happy Hobbits and space kingdoms and, like, how you went to Coleridge’s Xanadu BUT OMG IT’S A TRAP to just, like, not do that. It doesn’t have to be this way.
The supremely vile Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiller, whose ‘loyal citizen’ fanbase seems to have dwindled down to Lord Spatula and the rotting crumbs from Dan Riehl’s eliminationist buffet, offers his gratitude for the efforts of the withdrawing Brits in Iraq:
Oh, and His Majesty would like to take this opportunity to, once again, thank Tony Blair (who is otherwise an odious socialist fuckwit that we wouldn’t piss on if his nose was on fire) for standing up for us in SPITE of his own party.
Two if by land, one if by sea (anti-psychotic pills, that is).
Also, I’m just drunk enough to lie to myself about quitting smoking tomorrow. Josh Treviño. Josh Trrrrrrrrreviño. Josh Trrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrayvinyo.
Really trill the ‘r’ when you say it. And unglottalize the ‘v’. It’s fun.
Cheers to Shane, who probably made more money with that one fucking Escalade commercial than he did his whole career.
Perky cartoon character Prince Pickles — with saucer eyes, big dimples and tiny, booted feet –poses in front of tanks, rappels from helicopters and shakes hands with smiling Iraqis.
The cutesy icon hardly calls to mind the Japanese military that conquered and pillaged its way across Asia in the first half of the 20th century, and that is just the way the country’s leaders want it.
As Japan sheds its postwar pacifism and gears up to take a higher military profile in the world, it is enlisting cadres of cute characters and adorable mascots to put a gentle, harmless sheen to its Self-Defense Forces deployments.
“Prince Pickles is our image character because he’s very endearing, which is what Japan’s military stands for,” said Defense Ministry official Shotaro Yanagi. “He’s our mascot and appears in our pamphlets and stationery.”
The Metropolitan Police Department tries to lighten its stern image with Peopo, which looks like a cross between a rabbit and a space trooper.
The government hopes the same tactic can work overseas.
Foreign Minister Taro Aso has proposed sending animation or cartoon artists abroad as cultural ambassadors, and the government has named a panel of experts to advise ways to market Japanese animation and culture to foreign audiences.
Aso argues warm feelings for Japanese animation can translate into warm feelings for Japanese foreign policy.
I can only picture how well this is going over in Iraq.
“Oh hey, Iraqis, sorry that you’re being occupied by a foreign power, that you get less than six hours of electricity a day, that you have no real government and that your neighborhoods are being overrun by whack-bag sectarian militias. But hey, here’s a cute fucking cartoon character! Don’t you feel better now?”
At any rate, I’d like to address Dr. Hilzoy’s original assertion, which was this:
I do not understand Japanese culture.
See, I’m not an expert on Japanese culture, but it seems their particular expertise lies in taking elements of our stupid and vapid popular culture and making them vastly weirder. Here’s Exhibit A- the Japanese Spider-Man:
“How did the fake mariachi load his guitar with ammunition?” you might ask. “What are mariachis doing in Japan, anyway? Why did the guy in the winged helmet suddenly grow to be 100 feet tall? WHERE THE FUCK DID SPIDER-MAN GET THAT GIANT ROBOT?”
These are all valid questions, but they can never be answered. You might as well be asking, “Why are Americans so fat?” or “Why do the Brits suck at cooking?” or “Why are the French such assholes to everyone?” Doing weird crap with American popular culture is just something that comes naturally to the Japanese. There is no logical reasoning behind it.
Gavin adds: The thing that gets me is the franchising. I mean, that Japanese stuff doesn’t always travel well.
Above: Prince Falafel campaign has yielded little success
