Ha ha! Here are some ways to make fun of Obama’s name. But not everything is fun and games: Evidence shows that the non-citizen Muslim-Hindu sleeper agent Obama [gibber gibber] has spectral horns growing out of his head [woop woop], and may be the False Prophet who heralds the Antichrist, i.e., the spectrally-horned [ee-yii, ee-yii] Bill Clinton.
Note: In one of the column’s many highlights, Kovach provides direct photographic evidence of Obama and Clinton sporting baleful and supernatural sign-of-the-devil marks, à la The Omen. We can find no rational explanation for these spine-chilling images, which are unique in the. . .oh wait.
Mickey Mouse Chair Professor of Law at George Mason, David E. Bernstein
Not all nutball conservative law professors are at the University of Tennessee School of Law. George Mason University Law School, a lower-tier law school in the DC area, has its fair share, including David E. Bernstein, who draws one of the more preposterous conclusions from the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the gun control case:
The Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, upholding the Second Amendment right of individuals to own firearms, should finally lay to rest the widespread myth that the defining difference between liberal and conservative justices is that the former support “individual rights” and “civil liberties,” while the latter routinely defer to government assertions of authority.
It seems to me that one instance doth not a “myth” retire. Professor Bernstein, obviously worried about the same thing, puts on his Mickey Mouse thinking cap, strains his brain muscle as hard as he has ever done before, and plops out some other examples of how Justice Scalia is such a great advocate of your civil liberties that he deserves to be given the Nobel Peace Prize. Twice.
For starters:
In Davis v. Federal Election Commission, decided the same day as Heller, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the Court’s conservatives, reaffirmed the “fundamental nature of the right to spend personal funds for campaign speech.” The dissenters argued that “in the context of elections . . . limiting the quantity of speech” is perfectly acceptable.
This is the sort of self-parody that makes our job — as juvenile parodists and purveyors of adolescent humor — so easy here at Sadly, No! In Davis, the court struck down the, get this, “Millionaire’s Amendment” to McCain-Feingold, thereby striking a blow for the rights of rich guys running for office. Woohoo! Give me more of those civil liberties. This is rather like calling the decision striking down the punitive damages imposed on Exxon for the Valdez oil spill a victory for the civil rights of large corporations to desecrate our coastlines.
And what the Supreme Court specifically did in Davis was strike down the right of people running against millionaires to receive individual campaign contributions in excess of the normal individual limits. The conservative justices were thereby, you see, safeguarding the rights of the poor candidates to have less money than their millionaire opponents, while the liberals were attacking the rights of millionaires to buy a seat in Congress. Bad liberals!
Ready for some more fun, SadlyNots? Here’s another example of Republican justices protecting your civil rights:
Liberals have also been more willing than conservatives to limit the First Amendment’s protection of “expressive association.” The Court’s conservatives held that forcing the Boy Scouts of America to employ a gay scoutmaster violated the Scouts’ right to promote its belief in traditional sexual morality.
In other words, the conservative justices are busy protecting the right to discriminate. But the right to equal access by gay scouts and scoutmasters to programs using public funds and public facilities? Not so much. And before the liberals messed up everything with Lawrence v. Texas, which struck down the Texas sodomy law, the conservatives were busy protecting the right of evangelical Christians who didn’t want to live next door to people having something other than Jesus-approved man-on-top-of-woman sex.
And the fun just doesn’t stop with this clown:
Liberal justices have been willing to uphold virtually any use of race by the government–including quotas in higher education, set-asides for government contracts, and raced-based assignments of students to public schools–so long as the government claims benign motives. The conservatives, by contrast, argue that the government must treat people as individuals, not as members of a racial caste.
More rights for whites! Less for blacks!! More for me; less for you! Now those are the sorts of civil rights a white guy like me (and Bernstein) can sign on to.
The conservatives, for example, have been … more inclined to forbid government regulation of “hate speech.”
So, to sum up, if you’re a rich straight white guy who wants to run for office and demonstrate at funerals holding up “God Hates Fags” signs, this Supreme Court is looking out for your rights. Who would have thought it?
Above: God attempts to seize Kevin McCullough’s Fonzie jacket.
Hi, everybody! Did you miss me? I know musclehead revolutionary Kevin McCullough did, because he got me a present.
I was hoping with a headline like “WHY OBAMA’S ‘CONDOMS’ DON’T WORK,” it would be about how Barry X is a rapacious, fecund Negro sex predator who was actually behind the tragic knocking-up of all those poor girls in Gloucester, MA. Sadly, that’s not the direction Kev took, but I’m not gonna say he disappoints:
When Barack Obama took his message of condoms to Rick Warren’s pulpit at Saddleback Church he knew at the time that he was about to advance deceit to the gullible congregation and get away with it.
Questions to the Obama campaign about the great condom deception were referred to mustachioed spokestwirler Snidely Whiplash.
As this correspondent warned before it happened, Obama would be the victor (because of the concept of “implied endorsement”) and Warren’s congregation, the American people, and those who faced the threat of HIV/AIDS would be the ones to suffer. How I wish I had been wrong!
Obama was the victor, of course, because he wants people to get AIDS and die. And you can tell that McCullough is sincere in his wish that he had been wrong, because in the very next paragraph, he brags about how Rush Limbaugh gave him props for always being right about Obama.
Yet Obama is wrong on the Gospel of Condoms. For all the “Praise Jesus” and “Yes Lords” he may utter, his understanding of sexual advocacy, mental processing, emotional awareness, and most importantly adaptive behavior, run 100% in total contrary dispute to Biblical truth.
And, man, the last person you want in the White House is a guy whose understanding of mental processing and adaptive behavior is more than, say, 30-35% in contrary dispute to Biblical truth. Oddly, I did a search for “emotional awareness” and “sexual advocacy” over at Bible Gateway and nothing came up — but that’s what we have guys like Grant Swank and Doug Giles for, to find that stuff.
For the last seven years Congressman Waxman has annually held up funding for abstinence - claiming it didn’t work. Of course logical people everywhere are still scratching their heads at that one, because it is 100% scientifically provable that abstinence - when practiced is always 100% reliable.
Abstinence is also 0% reliable when not practiced, but pointing that out is probably against one of the commandments or another. So better not to mention condoms at all: Why tell people about a method of disease prevention that’s 90% effective when used, when they’ve already got one that’s better? It’s the same reason I don’t think we should tell drunk drivers that they can get a cab. We should just tell them not to drink, and whatever happens after that, we have done our duty.
This has been true since we first began seeing AIDS cases develop. Elected officials should have called for quarantine for the public good, forced those who were diagnosed early on to notify past partners, and a whole bunch of other common sense steps. Normal steps that had been our previous policy as it related to communicable diseases were all ignored.
Actually, given America’s shameful history of dealing with sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis and gonnorrhea, it’s quite in keeping with ‘normal steps.’ And, given its very specific mode of transmission and relatively low fatality rate, a quarantine would no doubt be seen as punitive. Finally, we do not require victims of other sexually transmitted diseases — especially ones suffered primarily by heterosexuals — to notify past partners, so it’s a bit hard to understand why we should “force” AIDS sufferers to do so. But all of this is secondary to Kev’s main point, which is that sex is bad:
Obama could have stood in Rick Warren’s pulpit and proclaimed that sex is a function that God designed for those in lifelong marriage. In doing so he certainly would have been biblical in his position - but it would have ticked off every gay activist that as of this week has now pledged money, grassroots support, and votes.
He might also have pissed off unmarried straight people, divorced people, or anyone who doesn’t like to think of sex as a “function” designed by God to create children, much like eating is a function designed by God to create turds. But who needs those people’s votes? Clearly Obama needs to be courting evangelicals, who have been such a big part of the Democratic base in recent years!
The sad thing is that in the CDC’s analysis they casually mention that the age group of “man” that is most at risk presently in the HIV surge are black boys 13-24 years of age.
A sad statistic, to be sure. Let’s see if Kevin can, through a percussive explosion of #1 super-ignorance, turn it into something even worse! I bet he can.
13 years of age? Why are HIV infected adult males raping 13 year old boys? Why are they getting away with it?
Gosh, Kevin, I don’t know! Could it be:
1. Because “13-24 years of age” implies a demographic range beyond merely 13-year-old boys?
2. Because there are ways to get AIDS other than sex?
3. One of which is on the increase among young black males?
4. Because even if they were contracting AIDS through sex, it wouldn’t necessarily imply being raped by savage infected adults?
5. For example, AIDS can be transmitted through consensual heterosexual sex, an activity traditionally enjoyed by young males of all races?
Oh, sure, all of those things seem reasonable enough, but they’re not going to let Kevin write awesome sentences like this one:
Without authentic discussion about the choices we make in life, without quality advice about the moral, physical, emotional and mental health consequences we will suffer as a result of our choices, children are literally being raped to death.
To recap: If Barack Obama is elected president, roving gangs of gay Negroes will rape your children to death. Only 127 days until Election Day!
Barack Obama, as he introduces himself to the broader voting public, is emphasizing centrist — even conservative — positions on hot-button issues.
In recent weeks, he toughened his stance on Iran and backed an expansion of the government’s wiretapping powers. On Wednesday, he said states should be allowed to execute child rapists. When the Supreme Court the next day struck down the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns, he did not complain.
These views would fit many Republican candidates, but they are the recent profile adopted by a man who has been called the most liberal Democrat in the Senate.
In the primary season, candidates’ chief goal is usually to win their party’s most ideologically driven voters; afterward the candidates often adjust their policy stances. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, has also changed tack on an array of issues. But Obama has drawn attention for the number of issues on which he has taken a moderate stance in recent days.
Now on some level this should seem normal. Candidates have traditionally moved toward the center after winning their primaries to attract more undecided voters. Except that that isn’t happening with John McCain, who has if anything gotten crazier in recent months. As Matt Taibi notes:
But the idea that John McCain is kicking off his trek to the White House by fleeing at top-end speed from the faltering Republican brand is the kind of absurdly facile misperception that only the American campaign press could swallow whole. The reality is that the once independent-thinking McCain has by now completely remade himself into a prototypical, dumbed-down Republican Party stooge — one who plans to rely on the same GOP strategy that has been winning elections ever since Pat Buchanan and Dick Nixon cooked up a plan for cleaving the South back in 1968. Rather than serving up the “straight talk” he promises, McCain is enthusiastically jumping aboard with every low-rent, fearmongering, cock-sucking presidential aspirant who’s ever traveled the Lee Atwater/William Safire highway. [...]
McCain enters the general election in the form of a man who has jettisoned the last traces of his dangerous unorthodoxy just in time to be plausible in the role of the torchbearing leader of the anti-Obama mob, waving the flag and chanting, “One of us! One of us!” all the way through to November. He now favors making the Bush tax cuts permanent, he’s unblinkingly pro-life every time he remembers to mention abortion, and he’s given up bitching about torture. With his newfound opposition to his own attempts to reform immigration policy and campaign finance, McCain is perhaps the first candidate in history to stump against two bills bearing his own name.
McCain’s transformation is so complete that at a recent town-hall meeting in Nashville, when asked to name an author who inspired him, the candidate — who once described televangelists of the Jerry Falwell genus as “agents of intolerance” — put none other than Joel Osteen at the top of his list. “He’s inspirational,” McCain said.
How does this happen? How has wingnuttery so poisoned our elections that both candidates are striving to show the rest of the country just how stupid and crazy they are? Don’t we need, to coin a phrase, a choice not an echo?
ABOVE: The American Thinker Logo (improved version*)
Meet Helen Cadogan, this week’s New Wingnut of the Week, who comes to us by way of The American Thinker, that cesspool of pseudo-intellectual racism which gives free rein to lengthy dissertations on the alleged inferiority of the darker-skinned races. As is our normal practice, we’ll first provide a little biographical background on our latest NWOTW and then move on to her award-winning contribution.
Ms. Cadogan currently is a freelance copy-editor from Newport News, Virginia. Free-lance copy editor means, of course, that Helen is unemployed and has plenty of time to sit in her trailer and muse about the various indignities that have been done to her, no doubt all perpetrated by liberals, Negroes, and apparently her former students. She had a brief stint as an English instructor at Thomas Nelson Community College, where her typical rating at RateMyProfessors.com ranged from “unorganized” to “worst instructor I’ve ever had.” Former students called her “very unhelpful,” “rude and inconsiderate,” “horrible,” and “unclear.” She was also accused by several students — why am I not surprised? — of constantly interjecting religion into her English class, one student saying:
She interjects too much religion/biblical analogies in the literary discussions–and does not accept differing opinions when they differ with hers.
So naturally a former instructor at a junior college who was, apparently, universally despised by her students is the perfect person to explain the failings of the American educational system. Naturally, the problem isn’t the schools or the teachers — the problem is … are you ready? (cue drumroll) … all the black students, who are all shiftless and stupid and incapable of learning how to read even if they were given 20 years of 24/7 instruction by Mr. Chips himself.
I was talking to a friend the other day who teaches at an elementary school and has a student whom I shall name Shakir.
Now, Helen couldn’t pull a name like, say, Mike or Josh or Chris from her foundation garments, because then, of course, it wouldn’t be clear that the student was black. We should be thankful, I suppose, that at least she didn’t decide to call the student Barack.
Shakir is ten, and he’s barely literate. My friend’s class is not a large one; she has five to eight students. She also has a teaching assistant, and between them, the kids receive a lot of personal, one-to-one attention. Nevertheless, Shakir still can’t read. The why of this phenomenon is quite important; you see, there are lots of Shakirs in the black community.
So, what do we know about all these Shakirs?
All across America, schools are confronted with Shakirs who either do not show up for school or who attend school but hang out in the hallways, bathrooms, and other hideaways. Even in well disciplined schools, there are Shakirs who go to class and put their heads on the desk. They refuse to work; the same way, their parents refuse to attend parent-teacher meetings. They sleep, they disrupt, curse, fight, and do no work
By now, it’s plain that “Shakirs” is just being used by Helen as a synonym for “n**g*rs.” Reread the passage above, substituting the n-word for “Shakirs,” and you get the true flavor of what Helen means here.
What can the schools do, confronted with thousands of Shakirs all across America?
Helen doesn’t really say, other than to imply, that they should all be expelled, but some of her more lunatic commenters have ideas. Here’s what the exquisitely literate “Louise” would do with all those illliterate little Shakirs:
Social survices need to take that child away when he is very young, and bring back oprhanages, etc. must be better than this ghetto life.
after mom has more kids and cannot take care of them. puther in jail.
And to top it all off, Shakir and his ilk are allowed to vote.
So, we can solve the Shakir problem, apparently, by expelling all the Shakirs from school, throwing their mothers in jail, and repealing the Fifteenth Amendment. Any other ideas?
*Cf. the original improvement of the logo, which served as the inspiration for this version, and which, in turn, was suggested in part by commenter g.
For a while now, the Editors has beenpromoting the crazy claims of Crazy Bob Dornan, who seems to think that the Vietcong implanted radio receivers in John McCain’s teeth during his captivity to send him subliminal pro-commie messages and turn him into a 21st-Century Manchurian Candidate. I don’t normally give these sorts of claims much credence, but now I think we may have found the proof that will blow this story wide open (emphasis mine):
John McCain has an unusual endorsement — from the Vietnamese jailer who says he held him captive for about five years as a POW and now considers him a friend.
“If I were an American voter, I would vote for Mr. John McCain,” Tran Trong Duyet said Friday, sitting in his living room in the northern city of Haiphong, surrounded by black-and-white photos of a much younger version of himself and former Vietnam War prisoners. [...]
Duyet said one of the reasons he likes McCain for president is the candidate’s willingness to forgive and look to the future. [...]
Duyet, 75, grew testy during the interview when repeatedly questioned about torture and why so many other former POWs say they too were mistreated. He preferred to talk about McCain as an old buddy.
His photo collection doesn’t include one of him with POW McCain, and he said they have not met on any of McCain’s postwar visits to Vietnam. But Duyet said he often met the young Navy pilot when off duty, that McCain would correct his English, and that he had a great sense of humor. And although they never saw eye-to-eye on the war that killed some 58,000 Americans and up to 3 million Vietnamese, he said they listened to each others’ views.
Now obviously this doesn’t prove per se that John McCain is a VC plant who will give away all our defense secrets to the Red Chinese upon taking office. It does, however, raise some questions. Why was McCain so friendly with this particular jailer? What views did the jailer express that McCain “listened” to while in captivity? Why does one of America’s sworn enemies think we should vote for McCain for president? What “future” do McCain and the jailer look forward to together? A future of freedom and prosperity? Or a future where hard-working American boys will be forced to toil in Charlie’s slave labor camps while the VC has its way with our women folk? So, so many questions; I wonder if mainstream reporters will start asking them, just like they did when this guy was running for president.
We’ve noticed there’s been something on ol’ Bryan Fischer’s mind lately. That is, other than the fact that homosexuals are Nazis, and vice versa, and that liberals are Nazis, and so forth. No, it’s not that the exact same thing as Darwin’s Theory of Evolution preceded Darwin by 2500 years, and was rejected by all great minds including the Founding Fathers (who espoused Intelligent Design). Rather, it would seem by reading Fischer’s recent columns that criminals are being coddled by the judicial system.
BOISE - City of Boise officials say two local activists have until July 15 to pay $10,131 in legal fees over a court case concerning the removal of the Ten Commandments Monument from Julia Davis Park in 2004.
In a letter sent to anti-abortion activists Brandi Swindell and Bryan Fischer, the City of Boise states it has put a lien on the property and assets of Swindell and Fischer.
Swindell and Fischer each received a certified letter from assistant city attorney Scott Muir on June 23 informing them that if they do not respond by July 15, the city will proceed to collect the amount plus interest and costs. Currently there is $563.74 accrued interest on the account.
“This is to inform you that we have filed the above referenced judgment with the Ada County Recorders Office which places an automatic lien against all real and personal property under your individual names. This judgment will remain on your credit record until the debt is paid in full,” the letter stated.
Swindell, co-founder of the Keep the Commandments Coalition and director of Generation Life, issued a media statement: “The recent actions by Mayor (Dave) Bieter and the Boise City Council to go after a former pastor and a single woman, who both run non-profit organizations, is deeply disturbing on many levels. Forcing peaceful citizens to pay legal fees, 4 1/2 years after the court case, is vindictive and clearly a tactic designed to punish citizens who freely embrace their constitutional right to engage in the political process.
Swindell and Fischer’s explanation is that, basically, up is sometimes down, cats may be dogs, by losing the Ten Commandments initiative they actually won it on points, by not asking for legal fees they shouldn’t have to pay any either, and by God in heaven, this malicious and disgraceful act is a desperate act of revenge from a desperate and malicious government disgracefully gone desperately mad (i.e. for revenge).
But then Fischer’s Renew America buddy Adam Graham, attempting a letter of support, spills the beans that Fischer knew about the judgment all along, but decided not to pay, hoping the city would forget about the whole thing.
While this sort of thing can easily spiral out of hand, fortunately all around, Idaho forbids the execution of the mentally incompetent.
I think that we all have a God-given duty to spread awareness of this website to as many disaffected Republicans as humanly possible.
We know that George Bush was God’s Candidate in 2000. We know that George Bush was God’s candidate again in 2004. And George Bush has been God’s president for the last 8 years.
Trust in God and vote your faith. Keep America safe. Write-in George W. Bush for President in 2008.
Gavin adds: Wow, it’s like the satirical opposite of the Clinton bitter-enders. When Clinton went on national TV and specifically asked them to vote for Obama and not for McCain, it only made them dig their heels in harder.
Incidentally, sorry for light posting on my part lately. I’ve been working on Something Big that’s taken me a while to write, but should hopefully be published on Monday! Will keep y’all posted!
We know that the 2008 UEFA European Football Championship isn’t the biggest story in America — that honor goes to the scandal that, because he never served in the armed forces, we don’t know the “core principles for which, in some sense, [Barack Obama ] is willing to die” — but we’ll link to this bit from the German TV show Frontal21 and translate the punchline for our non-German speaking readers:
The last time we began an international competition with a win against Poland, it was the Russians who celebrated at the end.
I’ve just noticed there’s a glaring lack in our lexical facilities, and I’m hoping some of you will help me coin a neologism to fill it.
I’m looking for a term to describe someone who creates a fake instance of martyrdom out of nothing; something with a soupçon of mockery about it, the way the term “wigger” is usually seen as mocking white suburban kids who emulate a way of life that they know nothing about personally. Because without this word, I’ll never be able to properly point out just how stupid Janet Folger is.
Above: The criminalization of Annie Sez
Go ahead: Arrest me
Censorship. Book burning. The Criminalization of Christianity. It’s here and it’s now the law in the state of Colorado.
The Ku Klux Klan can march. The Nazis can hand out brochures. Skinheads can do whatever it is that Skinheads do. But in the state of Colorado, the only group who is NOT allowed to be heard is … the Christians. They’re the ones who disagree with same-sex marriage, cohabitation, and believe the biblical view that homosexuality is a sin. But if they voice that objection from now on, it had better be inside the four walls of a church. If not, they’ll be staring at the four walls of a prison cell … for up to a year.
A year? Are you kidding me?
No kidding.
Oh. I guess you aren’t kidding me, then.
You see, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter signed into law SB 200 and turned public restrooms and locker rooms into a predator paradise where men can enter (and shower in) any female public facility in the state. You’d think that would be as bad as it gets – but wait: Section 8 of that same bill claims to trump the First Amendment:
Good Lord! This is serious. Colorado has finally declared itself a breakaway republic. Allowing state law to trump the Constitution? This is a Constitutional crisis! This will not stand. What does this detestable piece of legislation say, Janet? Read the rest of this entry »
The Supreme Court decision overturning DC’s handgun law is out. Scalia’s majority opinion is 64 pages.
Query: what great legal mind said this about the majority opinion in the recent Gitmo case?
Oh, and by the way, the Kennedy decision was 70 pages. If you have to write seventy pages to justify a simple, absurd decision, you know you’re wrong. You’re just fertilizing.
And will that towering legal intellect make the same criticism of Scalia’s opinion?
ABOVE: Max Boot really should be holding a giant dildo, but Gavin would get mad at me.
Over at America’s Second Shittiest Website™, Max “Brown People Can Lick America’s” Boot is pimping for our perpetual presence in Iraq, pumping his fist in the air and shouting “100 More Years! USA! 100 More Years! USA!” after even the most sycophantic McCain supporters have slunk away in shame from such a preposterous idea. Here’s how Boot defends spending a century in Baghdad:
Iraq has a sovereign government that, if it so desires, could tell us to get lost, and we would do it.
Yeah, right. Bush would, if told to leave, shrug his shoulders, say okay, and put all troops on the next boat home, even though for the last five years he’s been arguing that if we leave Iraq the terr-er-ists would swarm our shores and kill us all in our beds.
But wait, looky here! Boot, who was just saying we’d pull out immediately if asked, can’t get two more paragraphs into his cheerleading routine without pointing out the catastrophic consequences of withdrawal:
[I]f progress continues at the rate we’ve seen in the past year, there is no doubt we can pull out a lot of our troops. But that doesn’t mean that we can safely carry out the Barack Obama plan–all brigade combat teams out within 16 months.
Unless, of course, the Iraqi government asks us to leave, in which case it will be totally safe and we would do it immediately upon being asked.
Such a misguided policy would have many consequences. It might well ignite genocide in Iraq, destabilize its neighbors, export terrorism—and, yes, endanger the world’s supply of oil. What is wrong with trying to protect the world’s oil supply especially at a time when demand is as tight as it is?
Whoop, there is is. The oil thing. How things have changed. Wasn’t it only just yesterday that if someone said “no blood for oil,” Boot and the other neoclowns would start yelling that oil had nothing to do with the war, and that only deranged Bush-hating liberals could make such a preposterous — no, scandalous — suggestion? In fact, it wasjust yesterday that Boot was saying that oil wasn’t even the teensiest tiniest consideration for invading Iraq.
Of course, Max’s inconsistency here shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been keeping tabs on his unrelenting neoclownery. For the last three years, Max has been spinning around like a malfunctioning robot, spewing randomly generated defenses of our presence in Iraq, like his breathtaking claim that the walls in Baghdad separating Sunni and Shia neighborhood were no different than gated communities in the U.S. I suppose he’s hoping that one day one of his casus belli will make sense. And one day a monkey will type the complete text of King Lear.
Gavin adds:
Clif adds:
Sheez, all I have to do is say “giant dildo” and, next thing you know, Gavin trots out a menhir attended by one of its phallic acolytes. Does that mean I can put a giant dildo in Max’s hands as long as it doesn’t look too much like one?
Okay, wait. A little while ago, just down the page, Confederate Yankee was all het up on vigilantism, and he said:
There is a macabre old urban legend that has floated around for years in which an exceedingly bad person—a wife-beater, a child-abuser, or other such societal dreg—is found perforated with bullets, and knowing local law enforcement officials note that the miscreant’s death was a serious suicide, where the deceased if found having shot himself in the head and/or back multiple times, in some variations even taking the time to reload an empty weapon and fire again.
Such stories, of course, are told with a knowing smile.
And we were like:
Above: A knowing smile passes unto Confederate Yankee
I’m going to wander down there now and replace the old broken video thing with the new working video thing, except it would be really great if we could, like, transcend linear narratives, you know, by pretending things totally went off properly the first time.
Gavin adds: Maybe we can become Chris Dodd bitter-enders.
[ahem] Personally, I shall never in all my life forget the howling persecution that we endured from the O-bot smear machine and the Clintonazi long-knifers. They have tried to marginalize us, but ho! now we will band together and marginalize them.
Yes, as Dodd is our witness, it will be “unity” on our terms.
Above: We are prepared to battle our way to the frontier
Why, it’s Confederate Yankee again, and he’s been all stirred up by something he read on the Internet. Could it be the tide of liberalism destroying all that remains of our stand-up rooty-toot civilization of small landowners, prosperous non-unionized laborers, Know-Nothings, proponents of Free Silver, genial Ku-Kluxers, cowboys, soapy and pink-eared salesmen just in town for the convention, lone honest sheriffs, and independent Scots-Irish distillers?
Or is it the Supreme Court, that love/hate institution that keeps testing conservatives’ sense of constancy by issuing a ruling that makes them beam with pride for the democratic tradition of the independent judiciary, and then another ruling that makes them turn around and scream for the permanent abolishment of the treacherous viper-at-democracy’s-breast that has always been the so-called independent judiciary — or vice versa, depending on when you came in?
It almost reminds us of a macabre old urban legend.
There is a macabre old urban legend that has floated around for years in which an exceedingly bad person—a wife-beater, a child-abuser, or other such societal dreg—is found perforated with bullets, and knowing local law enforcement officials note that the miscreant’s death was a serious suicide, where the deceased if found having shot himself in the head and/or back multiple times, in some variations even taking the time to reload an empty weapon and fire again.
Such stories, of course, are told with a knowing smile.
Above: A knowing smile passes unto Confederate Yankee
Oh yes indeed. And indeed, one might even say that such stories about such stories are told with a knowing smile. Heh. Oh, this is subtle. We’re not sure, but we think he’s implying something.
We find before us—and perhaps a bit beneath us—a Supreme Court of the United States that in this session has found more sympathy and more previously unknown rights for suspected terrorists and child rapists than it has for the average American.
Because according to habeas-so-called-corpus, the average American is thrown into prison with no hope of… And, um, the Bill of Rights says that terrorists get to eat lemon chicken and walk free due to a technicality, because of the… See, unlike child molesters, the average American is executed for crimes that she never has a chance to… Aw, the hell with that confusing legal mumbo-jumbo. I say we kill some people, and I say we start soon.
From Bagram to Baltimore, expect to hear some names and dates begin to be associated with this and similar urban legends.
It is a truism of the human experience that when a people sees their system of justice fail due to inequities in the judicial process, they will find justice on their own.
Then again, it is a truism of the Confederate Yankee experience that he get something whoopingly, carpet-poundingly wrong every time he leave the gate, and pardon the double helping of subjunctive there, but we hasten to remark that of all the places in the world that begin with the letter ‘B,’ Bagram might not be the absolute best choice for an alliterative pairing with ‘Baltimore’:
In the chronicle of abuses that has emerged from America’s fight against terror, there may be no story more jarring than that of the two young men killed at a United States military detention center in Afghanistan in December 2002.
The two Afghans were found dead within days of each other, hanging by their shackled wrists in isolation cells at the prison in Bagram, north of Kabul. An Army investigation showed they were treated harshly by interrogators, deprived of sleep for days, and struck so often in the legs by guards that a coroner compared the injuries to being run over by a bus.
But more than a year after the Army began a major push to prosecute those responsible for the abuse of the two men and several other prisoners at Bagram, that effort has faltered badly.
Of 27 soldiers and officers against whom Army investigators had recommended criminal charges, 15 have been prosecuted. Five of those have pleaded guilty to assault and other crimes; the stiffest punishment any of them have received has been five months in a military prison. Only one soldier has been convicted at trial; he was not imprisoned at all.
On the other hand, damn: Maybe ol’ Con-Yank is a worse person than we thought.
Nuke ‘Em Lucom was never our beat (ah, how we miss The Dark Window!), but someone has to cover these things:
In life, Wilson C. Lucom was not exactly child-friendly. The curmudgeon never had children himself, nor was he especially close to the offspring of his third wife, Hilda. When he opened his ample checkbook, friends say, it was more likely to finance a conservative political cause than to help underprivileged youth.
After doling out relatively small portions of his tens of millions of dollars to survivors, he left the rest to a foundation he had dreamed up in secrecy to aid the poor children of Panama, where he spent the final years of his life.
Bonus fun fact:
Other amounts went to former household employees and to friends, including Christopher Ruddy, founder of NewsMax Media, which published many of Lucom’s writings online. Ruddy, who owed Lucom more than $1 million at the time of his death, has hired lawyers to represent his interests.
The bell has tolled: The American Prospect has a hard-edged piece today on Larry Johnson’s rise and fall as a liberal hero. Alas, Johnson.
There’s a bit more to say, though. The problem wasn’t just that Larry went so hard for Hillary Clinton that he began crediting nasty right-wing smears against other candidates: A lot of other liberal bloggers fell into the same trap, to some extent or another, and indeed some of them did us the courtesy of swinging by and going apeshit in comments, where it at least jazzed up our otherwise creaky and threadbare act. The problem seems more in the fact that Johnson is the sort of guy who experiences argument as affront — one of those forceful but brittle people we’ve all encountered who, if you tell them they’re doing something that drives you crazy, will feel compelled to double down and do it even harder, just to prove (perhaps to themselves) that you can’t tell them what to say or do.
The Prospect piece covers Larry’s mongering of the Michelle Obama ‘whitey’ rumor, but even that isn’t such a big deal in itself. A lot of wack narratives and mudclot rumors were slung around during the Democratic primary this season, and as we’ve seen with Corrente, Talk Left, and most of the other heavy-hitting Clinton sites, folks have tended to forget their differences pretty quickly since June 3rd, when no doubt remained as to who would be the Democratic nominee. What’s become a bigger deal is that as the complaints and protests mounted against the bogus ‘whitey’ thing and other such anti-Obama rumoroids and memelets, Johnson upped the rancor. He kept it up even after Clinton suspended her campaign, and even now shows no sign of stopping. His advocacy is, in short, an activity no longer coupled to cause-and-effect, to a rational sense of outcome. It has become the obsessive work of a Clinton cargo cultist, a bitter-ender, a retailer of spite.
Johnson’s latest idée fixe has been an as-yet-unspecified scandal believed to be encoded in a JPEG scan of a copy of Obama’s birth certificate — a field of inquiry in which his efforts have exactly paralleled those of the far-right Freeper crazies. In fact you can read the former piece, a stupendously ding-whoop, yar-yar investigative cowflop emitted by Johnson’s co-blogger TexasDarlin, either at Johnson’s No Quarter site, or at Free Republic. A comparison of the comments at the two sites is guaranteed to make you wonder who’s on which side, and why. Try it and see if you don’t come away lightheaded yet crushingly sober. Who are these people?
An irony that often attends upon characters like Larry Johnson (i.e. spooks and related personality types) is that they can be genuinely stunned and hurt when opinion turns against them. The irony dwells in the fact that their professional-issue, otherwise adaptive touch of narcissism can lead them to engage in provocative, chaos-seeking behavior, firstly without realizing that they’re doing it, and secondly without realizing that they’re doing it specifically to make people react. Sometimes this leads to gems and riches, as when Johnson hilariously left cranky notes in David Brooks’s mailbox. Sometimes, though, it just makes you want to crawl under the bed until the yeek goes away. Note to Johnson: It’s dusty under here; please just stop.
Update:
Candy asked if we could fix Johnson’s Agent Flowbee hairdo, and Rightwingsnarkle and Paul G provided the following solutions (hair at right courtesy Donnie Osmond):
Also, if anyone’s in the mood to stare into the heart of the sun, there’s a movement building in the Clinton-or-else cargo cult that leaves behind even Lambert of Corrente, one of the most grudging of hatchet-buryers:
The prog-bloggers kept shouting: Go! Go! Leave us, Clintonistas! This is OUR party now. Get out out OUT!
So out we went.
And we ain’t coming back soon.
[...] We will not forgive those who bigot-baited us simply because we refuse to doublethink our way around the Lightbringer’s nonstop lies.
We have only one way to cleanse the party of Moulitsas, Stassinopoulos, Aravosis, Marshall, Obama, Axelrod, Plouffe, Dean, Brazile and all those other pieces of subhuman sewage. We must make sure that Obama fails — either in August (very unlikely) or in November (more likely) or, if need be, in his presidency.
After that, and only after that, comes unity. On our terms.
There’s a larger (and I think more interesting) story here, but what’s striking at the moment is how quickly, in this Internet age, dunces can organize into confederacies.
ABOVE: Dafydd Ab Hugh né David Friedman, Le Roi du Sammich
Woohoo! Dafydd ab Hugh, the science-fiction writer and wackdoodle conservative blogger, has taken off time from writing about the mating rituals of the Straqnothlvorians, the hermaphroditic warrior race on the moon Phobos, to write a post revealing the truth about racist attacks on Barack Obama. Naturally, Dafydd’s idea of the truth here bears about as much relation to reality as his description of the mating rituals of the Straqnothlvorians (which, it would appear, could only have been dreamed up by a man whose entire sexual repertory is limited to self-gratification with the inside of an empty Snickers wrapper):
Everybody is reporting this little racist meme worm that slithered from the lips of Barack H. Obama on Friday:
We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”
…So how long will it be before a series of thuggish, racist e-mails, street-mailings, and YouTubes crudely attacking Barack Obama really does materialize? My guess is that it will wait until the election itself looms; possibly one week beforehand, just like the DUI hit on George W. Bush in 2000.
Why wait? For a very good reason: The perpetrators of that series of attacks do not want there to be enough time to discover the actual source of the “attacks”… which will originate from some radical leftist group hoping for a “backlash” against McCain.
Holy Tribbles, Lieutenant Uhura! You mean the Republicans did the DUI hit on W in 2000? No? Oh, I see. Republicans would never do such a thing. If it’s a late campaign hit against a Republican, it’s done by the Democrats. And if its a late campaign hit against a Democrat, it’s done by the Democrats All bad things are done by Democrats. Like the Democrat who spread the rumor in the Republican primary of 2000 that McCain fathered an illegitimate black baby. Because the Democrats wanted Bush to beat McCain, you see.
I am about 70% convinced that somebody on the Left will attempt just such a dirty trick.
Whew! At least he’s not 80% convinced, or we’d really be in trouble here.
The only defense is an immediate credible counter-accusation that if Democrats want to find the real racists, they should look in a mirror.
I know I’m gonna get in way too much trouble for saying this, but I can’t resist — I really don’t think Dafydd ought to be tellin’ other people to look in a mirror.
After all, so far in this election cycle, the only candidate to raise the point of Obama’s race has been — Hillary Clinton, who noted (correctly) that the only reason Obama was ahead of her in the delegate count was his overwhelming support by black voters.
Hold on there, big fella. Are you saying that it’s racist to observe (correctly) that Barack got more black votes than Hillary did? What planet are you living on? Oh, wait. This one:
Elsewhere on the planet, the Cardassian prisoner, Gul Ragat, walked in front of Julian Bashir like a man already dead whose legs had not yet gotten the message. Jadzia Dax followed somewhere far behind and to the side, so that she and Julian would not drift dose enough to make a single target. I wish we could talk, thought the doctor. But speech would have informed the prisoner that they were Federation, and Dax wanted to hold that information in reserve.
The Gul had recovered somewhat. The doctor quietly scanned him while he rested and determined that Ragat had no serious injuries — minor burns and abrasions, smoke inhalation, bruises, and other blunt-force trauma, but nothing life-threatening. The diagnosis was a relief. Had Gul Ragat required medical treatment, not all the wild splitheads on Sierra-Bravo 112-II could have stopped Bashir from doing his medical duty, and their cover as “Natives” would have been blown, Ragat would then realize that Starfleet officers had infiltrated the Cardassian/Drek’la occupation.
And so, you see, you can be 70% sure that the Democrats will be smearing their own candidate by disguising themselves as Cardassian natives and infiltrating the Drek’la occupation of the New York Times. Then they will enlist the aid of hermaphroditic Straqnothlvorian warriors to create a diversion while they say racist things about Gul Ragat, which will actually make people think that the Cardassians are doing that and rise up in rebellion. Or something like that.
