Above: Has extensive collection of letters never sent
It seems Iraq has learned more about American democracy than I’d thought (my emphasis):
A department of the Iraqi prime minister’s office is playing a leading role in the arrest and removal of senior Iraqi army and national police officers, some of whom have apparently worked too aggressively to combat violent Shiite militias, according to U.S. military officials in Baghdad.
Since March 1, at least 16 army and national police commanders have been fired, detained or pressured to resign; at least nine of them are Sunnis, according to U.S. military documents shown to The Washington Post.
Although some of the officers appear to have been fired for legitimate reasons, such as poor performance or corruption, several were considered to be among the better Iraqi officers in the field. The dismissals have angered U.S. and Iraqi leaders who say the Shiite-led government is sabotaging the military to achieve sectarian goals.
Learnin’ from the master, baby.
I would love, love, love it if Maliki described the generals’ firings as an “overblown personnel matter.”
Escort-style, that is:
ABC News’ Brian Ross revealed tonight that the list of customers of an alleged Washington-based prostitution service includes White House and Pentagon officials as well as prominent attorneys.
“There are thousands of names, tens of thousands of phone numbers,� Ross said. “And there are people there at the Pentagon, lobbyists, others at the White House, prominent lawyers — a long, long list.� Ross added that the women who worked for the service, potentially as prostitutes, “include university professors, legal secretaries, scientists, military officers.�
On Friday, Ross broke the news that U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Randall Tobias had frequented the escort service. Ross added new details to that story tonight, recounting how he asked Tobias in a telephone interview “if he knew any of the young women, their names. He said he didn’t remember them at all. He said it was like ordering pizza.�
Let’s read that last part of the second graf again:
Ross added that the women who worked for the service, potentially as prostitutes, “include university professors, legal secretaries, scientists, military officers.�
What clown in DC decided to hire PZ Myers* for a night of fun, huh?
*OK, so he’s not technically a woman, but I’m sure he’d pretend for the right price. I know I would.**
**In my case, “the right price” is a bag of chips. This is probably why I couldn’t get hired as an escort by the DC Madam- I’m just too cheap of a date.
Hi there.
I’m wasted. Or, as we say around here, wassive (= massively wasted). Oh, you don’t like our neologisms? Go fuck yoursefl!!!
Few can write while drunk. Drink ruined Hemingway and Faulkner. On the other hand, it invigorates the already vigorous Roy Edroso, and one is told it sustained Edmund Wilson, who ate hard candy whilst drinking and wrote like a fiend. Me, I suck regardless — but especially when drunk.
You don’t like it? FUCK YOU!!!1!
By the way, if I’m something of a liberal insult-comic to my wingnut targets, it’s only because I’ve followed the excellent example of my representative Mari0n B3rry (D – Barfansas), who called this wanker a “Howdy Doody looking nimrod“. Sweet, huh?
I learned it from watching you!!!
Anyway, I went out to the bar tonight, for the first time in a long while. Now, look, I can remember back in the day when I was told I looked like Eric Stoltz in ‘Killing Zoe’ or a red-headed Kurt Cobain or — best of all, that was a fortunate period — a near-David Beckham. That was a lucky epoch, believe me. But what did I hear tonight? “Hey, you look like that guy from Cross Canadian Ragweed!!” “Whuh?? Really?” “Yeah.” Losing my sex appeal. Blargh! I Am a TRICK CreaTure!!!
Anyway, vids to follow because I like, quit blogging and I’m crunk (God, Sol is such good Mexican beer) and I suck an’ stuff:
I accidentally left the channel on Glenn Beck’s show here at work, thinking it might be where the Reds game is on, and he’s hosting the authors of the Left Behind series with a font across the bottom of the screen that reads: “END OF DAYS?” Anyway, after this low-budget special effects segment that shows major cities of the world with ominous backlighting, Beck goes on a brief rant about how all these signs are piling up, etc., to suggest that the earth’s present inhabitants are, in fact, going to be the audience that gets to see the dramatic conclusion of this epic movie called History, and Beck indignantly concludes by saying, “But nobody’s talking about it!”
I swear to God, some of these people don’t recognize themselves when they walk past a mirror.
We’re Scaring Our Children to Death: Duck-and-cover drills were never this frightening.
Above: Once met Little Orphan Annie
Wow. Wow-wa-wee-wa-wow. What a chump:
Straight Talking Again
By David S. Broder
Credit John McCain with one thing: When you’re 70 years old, are running for president a second time and have been stumping through the country for many months, it’s difficult to spring any surprises in your formal announcement speech.
The Arizona senator came up with one: He is running as the anti-Bush.
After years of cozying up to the man in the White House, and emerging (for better or worse) as the most eloquent defender of Bush’s current strategy in Iraq, McCain this week reverted suddenly and dramatically to his 1999-2000 role as the leading Republican critic of politics as usual.
Gee, why would McCain want to suddenly run as the anti-Bush? It must be out of some high priniciple of maverickin’ straight talk! Or, maybe it’s because Bush has a goddamn 28% approval rating.
David, from now on I’d like you to begin every column you write with the following words: “I am a chump.”
Watch Moyers destroy Peter Beinart. Read Greenwald’s play-by-play. Thank C&L for breaking out the clip.
Done? Cool.
Now I happen to like Beinart, in a bacon and Play-Doh kind of way, and I’d hate to see such a young and foolish man lose his livelihood over something as trivial as pimping an insane and criminal war that has cost tens of thousands¹ their lives.
Unfortunately, Beinart has shown little aptitude for any sort of work beyond cleaning up Bill Kristol’s ravings and putting a boyishly concerned frown on them. (Although discovering somebody who is actually whiter than him to discuss hip-hop deserves some sort of grudging respect, I suppose.)
So, a gift for young Master Peter, the third-stupidest Rhodes scholar ever.² Here is the only thing that should ever come from your pen for the rest of your life:
I Don’t Know Shit About Shit And I’m Sorry
By Peter Beinart
Once I was young and stupid. Today I am older and I am still stupid. Nobody should ever listen to me because I am always wrong. I like my iPod and sleepovers at Jonah’s. I don’t like people pointing at me and laughing or calling me names. But that is what you should do when you see me. Because I am a miserable piece of shit who should never be allowed to live down the shame of my whorish dereliction of journalistic duty. It is up to you to decide whether my punishment should be collecting a gallon of sweat from Marty Peretz’s balls, or vice-versa. Or both, only it’s five gallons.
The End.
(With additional reporting by Andrew Sullivan)
That just might get him syndicated.
²See Lugar, Dick and Woolsey, Dicker
The dude is awesome. Get me my Gravel ‘08 pin now.
UPDATE: OMG, OMG. Gravel just kicked Chris Matthews’ ass in a post-debate interview. Chris asked him why so many Dems were reluctant to challenge Bush’s basic view of preventive war, and he said, “Because they’re running for office and it’s politics as usual.” He then went on to say that “they’ll keep doing it because you in the media let them get away with it keep building them up.”
I. Is. In. Love.
UPDATE II: Gravel-Wily Mo Peña ‘08.
UPDATE III: Despite my newly-found man-crush on Gravel, I still think vaginas are awesome. Unlike some people.
While making nervous fun of a stupid ABC ‘News’ article on how to tell if your husband is gay — he is a bit too emphatic, a bit too sarcastic with his ‘well, duhhhs’ if you know what I mean, and I think you do — Ace offers the following in an illuminating aside:
Best friend gay — okay, I can see that one going either way; one of my best buds is a homo. Turned off by cunninglingus? Eh, a lot of guys don’t dig that. Who the hell knows what’s going on down there. It’s like H.R. Geiger giving up ink and canvas to work in the avant-garde medium of Play-Doh and bacon.
I knew it! The vagina is a bio-mechanical horror made of clay and pork! It… it probably contains several sets of razor-sharp teeth and oozes a metal-eating acid that will even sizzle through George Bush’s Kevlar-titanium codpiece which is America’s sole defense against the Muslim Horde! The vagina is obviously such an abomination of anatomy that the only recourse for tough guys like Ace is to snuggle with other males in the Spartan lodge of Beleagured Masculinity — which is sooo not gay, dammit, NOT GAY AT ALL!!! — until some great Messianic PenisMan* arrives to penultimately cock-slap the vagina from humanity forever!!!
*Candidates are Rob Halford, Harvey Mansfield, and a resurrected George W. Bush, who was crucified by feminized, muslimized Liberals but will return, nailholes still in his codpiece, to bring not a piece of pussy but a sword, a porksword, dammit, which all will behold in its turgid glory.
Christopher Hitchens is pissed off. Pissed off at the “mawkishness” and “piffle” surrounding the American response to the Virginia Tech shooting. Pissed off that now he has to wait three columns to use the word “piffle” again.
But mostly Hitch is pissed off that, thanks to an “exhausting national sob fest” for the VT victims, he wasn’t able to slur menacingly about the president’s White House Correspondents Dinner speech at his Vanity Fair after-party, before retiring to the cloak room to projectile vomit on the gold trench coat of smokin’ gatecrasher Morgan Fairchild.
Seriously. That’s what Hitchens is most upset about, noting that he “watched disgustedly” as President Retard failed to perform his “annual duty” of entertaining sloshed Beltway media whores with witless and ill-considered wink-winkery.
Who is Andrew Klavan? He is, of course, a former Spider-Man villain turned Hollywood screenwriter, now living in Santa Barbara and palling around with the Libertas gang as they speculate over triple mochaccinos why Hollywood is too gutless to make movies about the war on terror.
Above: “Curse your left-wing lies, web-slinger!�
In his most recent column for City Journal, Klavan confesses that “the thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don’t have to lie.�
I don’t have to pretend that men and women are the same. I don’t have to declare that failed or oppressive cultures are as good as mine. I don’t have to say that everyone’s special or that the rich cause poverty or that all religions are a path to God. I don’t have to claim that a bad writer like Alice Walker is a good one or that a good writer like Toni Morrison is a great one. I don’t have to pretend that Islam means peace.
Boy, I know what you mean, Andy! The thing I like least about being a liberal is that I constantly have to lie. I have to pretend that we didn’t find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I have to claim that the Star Wars missile defense program isn’t wildly successful. I have to declare that white people haven’t invented everything about human society worth knowing. I have to fabricate evidence that we don’t live in the fairest of all possible societies where all you need to do to succeed is pull yourself up by your bootstraps. I have to say that Pauly Shore is less talented than Dave Chappelle. And I have to say, despite all the obvious evidence to the contrary, that Christianity is evidently more factual than and superior to all other religions.
This is leftism’s great strength: it’s all white lies. That’s its only advantage, as far as I can tell. None of its programs actually works, after all. From statism and income redistribution to liberalized criminal laws and multiculturalism, from its assault on religion to its redefinition of family, leftist policies have made the common life worse wherever they’re installed.
Another bullseye! Life is so much worse now that it was before liberalism and its dirty lies. Social security, labor laws, environmental protection, civil rights, expanded access to health care, the universal adult franchise, and massive government-funded infrastructure improvements from the highway system to Hoover Dam? That’s just a bunch of crap! We’d be better off without any of it.
It sometimes takes, I mean, a Rush Limbaugh or a Sean Hannity to withstand the obloquy attached to stating the facts of the matter.
And if there’s two people in America today whose names are synonymous with telling the truth, it’s Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.
Ah, America’s mayor:
Rudy Giuliani said if a Democrat is elected president in 2008, America will be at risk for another terrorist attack on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001.
But if a Republican is elected, he said, especially if it is him, terrorist attacks can be anticipated and stopped.
Hey, it worked like a charm the last time we elected a Republican president.
All right, first of all, let’s get one thing straight: I don’t know who this ‘Matthew Yglesias’ fellow is, but I do know that he’s never once sent me an e-mail telling me how awesome I am, so screw him, is my feeling on the subject. Second-thing-straightly, the only time anyone should read The Atlantic is when David Brooks is complaining about the hip-hop music and how it makes darkies burn cars.
Brooks: “Respeck due, seen?”
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about our imaginary girlfriends.
There are some who favor the button-down propriety of a Marie Jon’ in their imaginary girlfriends. Some are attracted to the steely domination of a Laura Ingraham, the naughty insouciance of a Michelle Malkin, the sexy mouth-foam of a Debbie Schlussel. As is made evidently clear every time she, er, ‘opens a thread,’ there are many people who are sexually attracted to the deranged inebriation of a Pamela Geller-Oshry-Von Valkenbergh-Ewing-Prager. And I am assured that there are even people left in America who think Ann Coulter is hot.
Not for me, friends. In the vast and fertile harem of right-wing lay-teez, there is only one for me, and her name. . .is Mary Grabar.
Above: Ooh baby baby, baby baby
Mary has a PhD. in English, so you know she’s all brains under that sensible navy top. Mary teaches at an unidentified university, which my research indicates is the Lower Georgia Community Bible College for Homeschooled Cattle. Mary is a sexy, saucy redhead who looks sort of like Khrystyne Hajj from Head of the Class after an unfortunate accident involving a baler. And Mary has taught us many valuable lessons for navigating our way through the complexities of modern life: the “atheists are dumb� lesson, the “atheists are undemocratic� lesson, and the “anyway, democracy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be� lesson.
I am so blinded by my love for this exceptional woman that I could scarcely discern the lesson in her latest column. I had to read through it slowly and carefully, alone, with a bottle of Everclear and some Kleenex; and now, so will you.
Read the rest of this entry »
This is basically what I was trying to say here. What made Halberstam so much better is that he could say it without gratuitous profanity.
Two Althouse funnies. First, thanks to the reader who sent in this lovely graphic of his local Alethouse:
And thanks to reader Joe for passing this wicked-sweet video along to us:
Both the graphic and the video are to funny forever. Neither is made of ham, however. Nor are they beanbags. All the same, they’re pretty cool.
The amazing and super-awesome Digby (who should also be paid to write a regular column, by the by) directs us to this appalling- but alas, not surprising- piece at the Politico about the White House correspondents’ dinner:
After the fracas had quieted down, the next logical question of the evening was, “What party are you going to?� In the past, there have been only one or two after-parties to attend, the most prestigious being Bloomberg’s.
But last year, things began to change when Capitol File magazine and Reuters offered their own competing post-parties. And this year, Vanity Fair reignited its after-party—which the mag stopped hosting in 1999—at the Adams Morgan condo of scribe Christopher Hitchens.
The VF party was the evening’s most sought after ticket, precisely because it was billed as so exclusive. Heavy-hitting journo names filled the guest list, whereas Bloomberg and Capitol File mixed beltway insiders with people outside the political tent.
In our informal poll before the dinner, taken while attending “Hardball with Chris Matthews� Executive Producer Tammy Haddad’s famous garden party (which she co-hosts with a slew of others), most people reported they were going to Bloomberg.
As the Weekly Standard writer, Matt Labash told us: “I’m going to Bloomberg with my friends. Do you think I want to stand in a room with Sean Penn and Doug Feith? I know how that story ends. In blood and tears. And oil. Oily tears. I’m going to Bloomberg because I’m a man of principle.� Of course late that night we saw him cabbing over to Hitch’s house, but that’s neither here nor there.
Syndicated radio host and Democratic commentator Bill Press confessed: “I’m crashing the Vanity Fair party—here’s why. I have crashed the Bloomberg party so many times it’s no fun anymore. It’s true. I’ve been to the party so many times it’s no fun anymore.�
Former Washington Poster and New York Daily news gossip columnist Lloyd Grove told us: “I’m on the list at Bloomberg. I haven’t tried Vanity Fair, maybe I’ll show up…since my coach turned into a pumpkin and I’m no longer important I hope people who I’ve been nice to and done favors for will pay up!�
Needless to say, I have some major, major issues with journalists who enjoy schmoozing it up with the politicians they’re supposed to be covering. It’s like one of those stupid Tom & Jerry episodes where the cat and the mouse decide suddenly that they’re good friends and that they can work together to win boat races and play tennis and shit.
Not only do those episodes suck major ass, but they’re violating one of Brad’s Key Laws of Nature (If he Ever Got to Run Nature, At Least): that natural enemies are natural enemies for a very good reason. Tom and Jerry should not be shaking hands and being buddy-buds. Journalists should not be cozying up to elected officials.
While the Mencken and Yglesias tumult roils on about six inches down that way, how about something non-controversial?
How About Something Non-Controversial? You Know, Like the Creation/Evolution Debate? (Bumped Again)
By Mark Noonan at 03:36 PMWe seem to still be having fun with this, so I’ve pushed it back up.
Mark Noonan over at Blogs For Bush has been flogging it sore again — ‘it’ in this case being his theory on why humans never evolved and Earth has no life on it.
Where does a thought come from? How much does it weigh? What is its physical makeup? It is these quesitons which demonstrate that the neo-Darwinist “its all blind, evoutionary chance” school of thought is, well, insufficient: The two major flaws in evolutionary theory are that it can’t explain how life arose from lifelessness, and it can’t explain how my material brain plays host to my immaterial mind (or thoughts, if you like).
We think the first one has something to do with monomer formation, then polymerization of nucleotides, creating ribozymes and forming primordial soup — which became primordial Mulligatawny, and then chowder, and eventually Phở or Cioppino. This takes us to the Cambrian, owing to the presence of crustaceans. And if Mark wants to know the rest of the story, hey Mark — here’s a quarter, call Paul Harvey!
As for the brain playing host to the thoughts, and so forth:
If we are all the result of inexorable evolutionary processes, then I shouldn’t be able to have any thought which does not immediately coincide with the last thought in my brain…
This is easily addressed by the observation that none of Mark Noonan’s thoughts coincide with the last thought in his brain.
I could not, as it were, think one second about space flight and the next about a cheese sandwich.
Which certainly challenges all the data on morphological and molecular homology. More frighteningly, it might be an accurate illustration of Mark’s normal train of thought.
As for my views: I simply don’t know. God (literally) knows how it all got started and I’m not terribly interested in that subject, in and of itself…I am, however, greatly interested in the need for us to allow human reason to move forward. To shut off parts of human inquiry because they don’t agree with preconceived notions is to prevent the consummation of human thinking – which is to take data and organize it into a coherent answer to whatever question occupies it. The problem is not with the theory of evolution, but the fact that this theory is considered Holy Writ and may not be questioned.
‘Holy Writ!’ is phonetically similar to what this paragraph made me say, in the moment just before I gave up on all human endeavor and cored my brain out with a melon baller.
I respectfully dissent from Bradrocket’s last post.
Brad’s my comrade, and anyone who tries to fuck with him will have to go through me first. That said, the sentiment, very popular on ‘our side’, conveyed in Brad’s post is what has over the last few months brought me to a boil, a sun-surface inferno of rage and disgust formerly reserved for Cubs fans (i.e., the true scum of humanity). And while Cubs fans will always be ‘other’ on the excellent grounds that they are masochistic psychopaths with obscenely inflated senses of entitlement, the sort of wishy-washy, centrist, forgive and forget sentiment expressed by the Matt Yglesias Fan Club perhaps has begun to gall me more because it comes from allies.
If the thesis is phrased like so: ‘Yglesias deserves to be paid for his opinion by the same Atlantic magazine that has employed Mark Steyn and Michael Fucking Kelly, and continues to employ Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens.’ Then, yes, I tend to agree with it. But of course the point is heavily sarcastic.
Sensible Liberalism has grown and metastized enough to the point that gradations — or perhaps even separate strains — can be discerned within the whole. There’s, for instance, Liebermanism, a movement dedicated to wingnut fellow-travelling to the bitter end. Then there is Colmesism, which people mistake for a sensibility simply lacking in pride and gumption — a sensibility personified by a cowering bobblehead whose claim to fame is being the cablenews version of a pinata. But Colmesism, I would posit, is not about that at all; rather, it’s about gullibility and a congenital and suicidal desire to compromise on ideological grounds. To be plain: Colmesism is not about personality but about ideology.
“But Marge! Look at that hangdog expression. He’s learned his lesson… Let’s get him a present!” —Homer Simpson meting out Bart’s punishment, minutes after Bart has destroyed the house.
Matt Yglesias will be the Alan Colmes of the Atlantic. That’s why he’s been hired. While it’s true that Yglesias has a phenomenal work ethic (something very difficult to understate), I don’t think it’s enough when considered with everything else about him.
Please: just because someone this late in the day fisks Charles Krauthammer columns doesn’t make them fucking Yoda. Anyone who tears into a Krauthammer column or David Frum diary entry or some piece of propagandic shit from the Weekly Standard is right simply by default. True, that makes them better than a Bush dead-ending wingnut, but then again it’s wise not to base decency and intelligence against whatever a clueless retard like Jules Crittenden, say, has been writing lately.
You know who doesn’t deserve being paid for their opinion? Just out of principle? Anyone anywhere who was for the Iraq War for whatever amount of time. Period. I mean, that’s a fucking minimum. And Matt Yglesias doesn’t meet it.
And why Matt Yglesias got that one wrong — again, a very very fucking hard thing to get wrong — isn’t because he’s precisely not a polymath — though real polymaths who ought to be paid for their opinion, people like John Emerson or even Brad DeLong, got Iraq right. It’s because his first instinct is accomodation with the Right; it’s because his political judgement was forged post-Clinton, thus he was completely naive to the facts of innate wingnut depravity. I suspect he thought of the Kosovo operation as the rule rather than an exception; for such bovine people, the sicky-sweet neocon catchphrase “I believe America is a force for good in the world” functioned as a cattlecall. Of course some of us could recognize imperialism’s euphemisms when we heard them; for those who couldn’t, well … it doesn’t really make any difference whether it was from ignorance or stupidity. Fuck ‘em. They need to spend a long time in the journalistic wilderness before they again deserve serious attention.
Iraq is too important to forgive and forget the stupid fucking idiots who got it wrong (and often, not only got it wrong, but concentrated on attacking those who got it right). It’s the touchstone of a pundit’s political judgement.
