For those who missed it, Bobblespeak delivers the goods on today’s Meet the Press:
Gregory: can the US still be the best in manufacturing?
[Google CEO Eric] Schmidt: yes we can lead the world in blogging, tweeting, and LOLCATs. [...]Gregory: can you still make money in America?
[Caterpillar CEO Jim] Owens: sadly no
It’s almost like it was written by for us.
Modern-day wingnuts may well be the dumbest group of organisms in the history of the known universe. Let’s imagine what would have happened if they’d been around in 1865:
******
ELITIST PRESIDENT LINCOLN TAKES WIFE TO ELITIST ANTI-AMERICAN PLAY AT FORD’S THEATRE!
Despite the fact that the South is still devastated in the wake of his War of Northern Aggression, elitist President Abraham Lincoln is somehow finding the time to take his family to a fancy theatre production! Tonight, Lincoln plans to bring his wife to Ford’s Theatre to see a production of “Our American Cousin,” which has been described as a “farcical comedy whose plot is based on the introduction of an awkward, boorish American to his aristocratic English relatives.” Think about that — just days after the end of the war, with much of the South laying in ruins, our president is watching a “comedy” that mocks America’s heartland! How can the president sit and watch as America is mocked, even as Americans across the nation struggle to make ends meet? Why does the president insist on trashing American values while at the same time promoting alleged “unity” with the South?
******
We need a smarter opposition ideology in this country. The current crop isn’t cutting it.
Shorter (if not smaller) Rick Moran:
Rick Moran, The American “Thinker”
The Most Expensive Date Night In History
*Bonus weekend entertainment! Which one in this picture is Zsu Zsu?
Pity poor Michelle Malkin — she’s having a rough week. It turns out that ‘Dealergate’ has less to do with a conspiracy against Republican Chrysler disties and more to do with total dumbasses who can’t do basic math. What’s more vexing is that even a classic Malkin ragegasm hasn’t made 2+2=5 this time around.
Maybe she just needs to glower more. That’ll teach those pesky numbers!
Meanwhile, Malkin’s also got Bill O’Reilly on her case, though apparently he’s kind of apologized for implying she’s an overtly hateful piece of shit, when in fact it is her fans who are overtly hateful pieces of shit (Malkin is much more passive-aggressive in her hateful shit-piecing).
So not the greatest couple of days for Michelle. But being embarrassingly wrong in public is a kind of tradecraft for wingnuts, and Malkin ranks high in the guild. So she set out to really show the world how implosion is done with today’s post:
Lefty blogs punked by Mancow “torture” stunt(?); Updated
Last week, liberal blogs went ga-ga over radio talk show host Mancow’s waterboarding stunt. …
Now, there’s a paper trail that suggests the glaringly obvious — that it was all an elaborate hoax, reportedly orchestrated with the help of Jerry Springer’s publicist.
Time for B.S. detector tune-ups, people. Next time, libs, don’t be so eager to hype a veteran radio entertainer crying “torture.”
You’re the ones who end up all wet.
And then, the inevitable update:
Linda Shafran, publicist for Mancow and Springer among other celebs, e-mails the following statement:
BORED BLOGGERS ARE ALL WET
By Mancow Muller May 29, 2008I am not a magician. Many news cameras were there!
Obviously, it was on the radio and I wasn’t in prison. I’m also not a radicalized Muslim terrorist. But it was not a hoax! I repeat: NOT A HOAX.
If nothing else, it must be admitted that Malkin has greatly increased the efficiency of the post-debunk-mock cycle that usually accompanies her output, here completely eliminating the third-party debunkers in a neatly self-contained story arc that takes her from heights of self-impressed gloating to the depths of defeat, all in a single post.
Now all she has to do is generate her own self-mockery, and we would be out of a job.
Meet Kristia Cavere, a new recruit at Renew America, who looks like she might give M’a'r’i'e’ J’o'n” a run for her money until you discover that she is not quite as hot as the ancient headshot she uses on her column suggests. But even if Kristia is decades older than M’a'r’i'e’ J’o'n” and not quite as as abundant with apostrophes, she’s every bit as lunatic as M’a'r’i'e’.
In Kristia’s second column ever for Renew America, she has uncovered a horrifying scandal in Baghdad, which she sees as the biggest breach of foreign protocol since Michelle Obama actually touched the Queen of England and since Obama bowed to the Saudi King. (Apparently, the correct foreign protocol with the Saudi King is to forcefully squeeze his left nut until he screams “Leggo my eggo, you damn fool!”)
In the short time that President Obama has been in office, there have been many breaches of foreign protocol such as an overt familiarity with the British Queen and bowing to the Saudi King. But the most significant indiscretion will occur tonight as homosexuality is promoted in our embassy in a foreign land — in Baghdad, Iraq, no less.
Oh noes! What has Obama done now? It sounds like he’s ordered the embassy staff to dress up as drag queens and as leather daddies in buttless chaps and then to parade through the streets of central Baghdad while throwing condoms and blowing kisses at all the male onlookers. Not so much. They’re having a gay costume party at the embassy employee association’s pub. Inside the embassy compound.
The Islamic culture does not appreciate or allow public sexual displays to begin with. Now the American embassy is going to display sexuality in a way that will do nothing but offend the host population, needlessly complicating an already sensitive situation.
Apparently the State Department must have invited Al-Jazeera into the embassy compound to televise the goings-on in the pub, particularly teh lip-synchng by teh drag queens and, of course, teh public buttsex, where the employees plan to let out climactic shouts of “Allahu Akbar” rather than the more traditional “Yeah, baby, yeah!”
The question becomes, who is going to suffer? Our embassy officials, or our soldiers on the ground who will endure the increased outrage when events such as this occur?
I think that must be a rhetorical question, don’t you? And I’m guessing that Kristia’s answer is our soldiers on the ground, who will be given the full Westboro Baptist treatment by the local Baghdadis. You know, they’ll be carrying signs saying “Allah Hates Fags” while throwing hand grenades and shit. They’ll, of course, be doing this because they have no other beef with the occupying troops other than the gays in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad carrying on and having parties and stuff — which is, of course, the very cliff that Kristia was just headed right off:
More offensive than our men in arms in an Islamic country are men in drag, as this strikes at the very core of propriety and decency within their culture.
There may have been stupider things said at Renew America but, if so, I’m hard pressed to think of them.
Brad adds: See, for a little bit I was wondering how these guys could on the one hand support overtly torturing Iraqis without fear of pissing off the Arab world, while on the other hand denouncing teh ghey for offending Islamic culture.
And then it occurred to me: torturing makes Amur’ka look strong in their eyes, while lip-syncing Cher’s greatest hits over a third-rate karaoke machine makes us look weak. In other words, the Arabs will hate us if we torture them, but at least they’ll also fear us. If we act gay, then the Arabs will hate us and think we’re fairies.
Toby Dials, RedState:
(Cartoon) – When empathy is applied to justice…
2 – Granted, the Shorter that’s actually longer than the original text is a funny-once-or-twice sort of dealo, except possibly when applied to Glenn Reynolds and his daily string of acid reflux burps (funny at least three or four times). But what if the original thing isn’t made of text at all? I’m just thinking out loud here.
Alternate setup: President Hussein McRoosevelt reads the comics over the radio.
I have a new article on AlterNet up about seasteading, the hilarious new glibertarian phenomenon where a bunch of rich guys try to flee the iron fist of democracy by living on concrete platforms in the middle of the ocean. Here’s an excerpt:
Seasteading: Libertarians Set to Launch a (Wet) Dream of ‘Freedom’ in International Waters
By Brad Reed, AlterNet [...]
At this point, some practical concerns arise. First, any offshore facility that specializes in narcotics trade is going to become the world’s No. 1 target for pirates. The seasteaders briefly address the threat of piracy by explaining that “most pirate attacks are either very small-scale, preying on unarmed ships, or very large-scale, with organized groups stealing entire cargo ships. A seastead will be too tough for small pirates and not financially worthwhile for big ones.”
Really! An entire sea platform filled with highly profitable illegal drugs would not be financially worthwhile for pirates to attack! Good luck with that.
The second big problem that seasteaders face is that most governments will be none-too-thrilled to have platforms located just off their coasts that pay no taxes and that profit directly from undermining their own legal systems.
In the best-case scenario, governments will enact heavy tariffs on any goods imported from a seastead, thus negating whatever competitive advantage is gained from erecting “patent-free zones.” In the worst-case scenario, they’ll send out their navies to shut down the whole operation.
The seastead manifesto keenly observes that ocean platforms would be “quite vulnerable to larger weapons” from navies since “concrete is tough but far from indestructible.” But even these limitations shouldn’t keep a good seasteader down, because “sea-skimming anti-ship cruise missiles like the Chinese Silkworm are fairly cheap and quite effective,” and “a rocket engineer in New Zealand has set out to prove that you can build a small cruise missile for $5,000.”
Incidentally, I’m surprised that the Ole Perfesser been dismissive of this phenomenon so far even though it involves both “Going Galt” and living in the company of like-minded transhumanist dweebs. I guess the prospect of having to actually fend for himself without the comfort of the American military is too much for him to handle.
Erick Erickson, RedState:
The Peter Principle
We hang together or hang separately.
1 This is in keeping with Erickson’s form, ‘title of a 1970s pop-nonfiction bestseller: phrase attributed to Benjamin Franklin.’
Erickson, a man intellectually as well as aesthetically capable of writing the title, “Vichy Republicans,” then stepping back from his easel and squinting with his thumb extended and adding the subtitle, “The quislings have formed a fire brigade to shoot at Cheney, Limbaugh, and others for burning down the quislings’ potemkin village,” is reading this right now in his customary brick-red, fuming manner, unable to see what the joke is, and therefore certain that it isn’t funny.
Further posts in the series may include Looking Out for Number One: A Friend in Need is a Friend Indeed, and Final Exit: In This World Nothing Can Be Said to Be Certain, Except Death and Taxes. Mr. Erickson is asked whether he likes fishsticks.
2 Cf.
Jonah the Whale is over at America’s Shittiest Website™ complaining about yet another scientific study that demonstrates that conservatives are stupid. Of course, Jonah ironically and unwittingly adds yet another data point to that demonstration by dismissing the study after admitting that he hadn’t even bothered to read it.
An even better demonstration of the intimate link between wingnuttery and stupidity is this new ad from Maggie “A Storm’s A-Comin’” Gallagher’s National Organization for Marriage, which closes with this image:
I added the red underlining, but nothing else about that frame grab from the ad has been altered in any way. You’d think that the people that are making such a fuss about how gay terrorists are going to start blowing up churches and temples until every Catholic and Mormon marries someone of the same sex would at least learn how to spell correctly the very thing that they are pretending to protect.
Because I’m a commie America hater, I sometimes read news sources from other countries. Earlier this week, I was reading an article in The Guardian about a British torture scandal. This is what I found (all emphasis mine):
MI5 faces fresh torture allegations
The home secretary Jacqui Smith faces legal action over allegations that MI5 agents colluded in the torture of a British former civil servant by Bangladeshi intelligence officers..
Right off the bat you notice a difference. A high-ranking government official is actually facing a legal action for her alleged role in torturing somebody. You’ll also notice that the opening graf contains no references to Jack Bauer or ticking time bombs. Continuing:
Lawyers for the British man, Jamil Rahman, are to file a damages claim alleging that Smith was complicit in assault, unlawful arrest, false imprisonment and breaches of human rights legislation over his alleged ill-treatment while detained in Bangladesh.
The claims bring to three the number of countries in which British intelligence agents have been accused of colluding in the torture of UK nationals. Rahman says that he was the victim of repeated beatings over a period of more than two years at the hands of Bangladeshi intelligence officers, and he claims that a pair of MI5 officers were blatantly involved in his ordeal.
The two men would leave the room where he was being interrogated whenever he refused to answer their questions, he says, and he would be severely beaten. They would then return to the room to resume the interrogation.
Oh wow! So it’s not like the British government even the MI5 to torture the guy themselves! They just left the room and pretended not to know he was being tortured by other people. And they’re still facing legal action over it! And again, still no mention of how tuff Jack Bauer is!
Now here’s the part that will really blow your mind:
The alleged complicity of the MI5 officers who failed to report or do anything to prevent torture appears to be in line with a secret government-approved interrogation policy at the time. Gordon Brown has ordered a review of the policy, but there have been numerous calls for an independent inquiry into the affair.
Among those demanding an inquiry are opposition leaders David Cameron and Nick Clegg; Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions; Lord Carlile of Berriew, the government’s independent reviewer of counter-terrorism legislation; Lord Howe, foreign secretary in the Thatcher government, and Lord Guthrie, former chief of defence staff.
For those of you who don’t follow British politics, Cameron is the leader of Britain’s Conservative Party. Which, as you may have guessed by its title, is the center-right party in the U.K. You’ll notice that Cameron is actually demanding an independent inquiry instead of giving a speech at the American Enterprise Institute telling us all how swell torture is. Nor is he telling us that Jack Bauer would so have approved torturing this guy because otherwise the terrorists would blow up the Queen Mum.
Why is our country the only Western democracy whose government officials outspokenly support torture? Have we become that depraved?
Say, let’s look at another article to see how David Cameron differs from our country’s right-wing leaders:
David Cameron: I would reduce No 10′s power
David Cameron will tomorrow pledge to deliver the most dramatic redistribution of power in living memory as he attempts to deal with the concerns of voters left disgusted by the row over MPs’ expenses.
In a broad-ranging article in the Guardian, Cameron declares that he would trim back the powers of the prime minister and boost the role of parliament to win back public confidence.
What the hell. Why can’t we get center-right leaders like this? Hey Britain, if you send us David Cameron, we’ll gladly trade you Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney.
Woof:
It Sticks in My Craw [Mark Krikorian]
Most e-mailers were with me on the post on the pronunciation of Judge Sotomayor’s name (and a couple griped about the whole Latina/Latino thing — English dropped gender in nouns, what, 1,000 years ago?). But a couple said we should just pronounce it the way the bearer of the name prefers, including one who pronounces her name “freed” even though it’s spelled “fried,” like fried rice. (I think Cathy Seipp of blessed memory did the reverse — “sipe” instead of “seep.”) Deferring to people’s own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English (which is why the president stopped doing it after the first time at his press conference), unlike my correspondent’s simple preference for a monophthong over a diphthong, and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn’t be giving in to.
Krikorian goes on to point out that his own last name is Armenian. Personally speaking, I don’t think people who descend from swarthy, terror-loving Middle Eastern MuslamoNazi* countries have any right to tell us how to pronounce their names. From this point forward, I shall pronounce Krikorian’s last name as “Crackwhoreian” and there’s nothing he can do to stop me.
*And yeah, I know most Armenians are Christians. But they’re located really close to Iran, which means that they have probably been brainwashed as MuslamoNazi sleeper agents and they’re highly likely to torch their Bibles and start slaughtering white people at any given moment.
Gavin adds:
Above: Golda rhymes-with-tire
Shorter Doughy Pantload:
Above: Chief Justice of the Supreme Fart.
Doug Ross, DirectorBlue:
RED ALERT: Did anti-Obama campaign contributions dictate which Chrysler dealers were shuttered?Critical Updates Below: Red State, American Thinker, Joey Smith and Reliapundit provide anecdotal and quantitative evidence that would appear to confirm a decided bias against dealers who donated to GOP causes or to anti-Obama Democrats.
Special note for moonbats: no one here is saying that the sole criterion for closing a dealership was partisanship. What we ask is: does it seem odd that the list of closed dealerships appears to have contributed a grand total of $200 to Barack Obama and millions to GOP candidates/causes?
Quote from an attorney who Deposed Chrysler’s president last week: “It became clear to us that Chrysler does not see the wisdom of terminating 25 percent of its dealers… It really wasn’t Chrysler’s decision. They are under enormous pressure from the President’s automotive task force.”
Stay tuned. Data crunching is underway.
Insert eight entire screens packed with fevered abba-dabba.
Hat tip: Bob. Linked by: Ace o’ Spades, Gateway Pundit, The Anchoress, Conservative Grapevine, Be John Galt, Bookworm Room, Memeorandum, Protein Wisdom, Say Anything, American Digest, TigerHawk, Atlas, Pat Dollard, Prairie Pundit, The Real Revo, TCOT Report and Nice Deb. Thanks!
Meanwhile, Malkin is advising caution.
This is going to be good.
First it was Vidkun Quisling and Michael Potemkin in dire concert:
Erick Erickson, RedState:
Vichy Republicans
The quislings have formed a fire brigade to shoot at Cheney, Limbaugh, and others for burning down the quislings’ potemkin village.
And now we find who the ringleader is.
Scott Martin, Phoenix Conservative Examiner:
Andy Rooney being a Useful Idiot on Memorial Day, War and Peace
Uh, conservatives being stupid every day, Anna Karenina.
Bruce Thornton wrote:
Lenin called them “useful idiots,” those people living in liberal democracies who by giving moral and material support to a totalitarian ideology in effect were braiding the rope that would hang them.
…selves.
[zeerp] Hello, dum-dums.
Oh hi, Great Gazoogle. We were just…
Yes, well Lenin seems never to have said any such thing. Ta-ta!
Thanks, because it… Wait, he’s gone.
Why people who enjoyed freedom and prosperity worked passionately to destroy both is a fascinating question, one still with us today. Now the useful idiots can be found in the chorus of appeasement, reflexive anti-Americanism, and sentimental idealism trying to inhibit the necessary responses to another freedom-hating ideology, radical Islam.
Throughout Andy Rooney’s three decades on 60 Minutes, he has served as a useful idiot on behalf of nearly every enemy of freedom and anti-American idea that has come around the bend. Brilliantly, too. One minute he’s waxing romantic on the smell of old books recently found in the attic, and the next minute he’s making a seemingly reasonable statement about climate change.
Guh? The what, now?
[...] Andy Rooney’s vision of peace is a recipe for hell on Earth. It is a recipe for chains and slavery, and there is no virtue in either.
Scoring the extra point with aplomb, or rather with two or three plombs, the milk-cheeked Martin accuses Rooney, a World War II veteran, of knowing nothing about war. And does so on Memorial Day.
Brainy go kerplunksplat. More like this, please!
Shorter Bickering Wingnuts:
Rod Dreher:
Mark Levin (via S,N! favorite Dan “Tor Johnson” Riehl):
Rod Dreher:
Robert Stacy McCain:
Rod Dreher:
Robert Stacy McCain:
“Rod Dreher: Truman Capote Con
The Bearded Church Lady speaketh”
Brian Faughnan, RedState:
WTO: US Must Drop Protectionism for Trade Deal:
Will Obama Again Choose Unilateralism & the Status Quo?
1 – Title cf.
2 – Clip-’n'-save value: 9.5! When next someone says to you, “Whoah-whoah-whoah, hold on just one second there: The conservative intelligentsia does not abandon patriotism whenever it gets in the way of something that rich people want,” then you will have them.
As we remember our fallen servicemen and servicewomen today, we should also take time to be thankful for the fact that we have a civilian-controlled military in this country and that our country’s top admirals, air marshals and generals are not sociopaths such as Col. Ralph Peters. Here is Crazy Ralph’s latest essay in which he enthusiastically condones launching military attacks against journalists who posit negative opinions on our country’s foreign policy:
The killers without guns
While the essence of warfare never changes—it will always be about killing the enemy until he acquiesces in our desires or is exterminated—its topical manifestations evolve and its dimensions expand. Today, the United States and its allies will never face a lone enemy on the battlefield. There will always be a hostile third party in the fight, but one which we not only refrain from attacking but are hesitant to annoy: the media.
While this brief essay cannot undertake to analyze the psychological dysfunctions that lead many among the most privileged Westerners to attack their own civilization and those who defend it, we can acknowledge the overwhelming evidence that, to most media practitioners, our troops are always guilty (even if proven innocent), while our barbaric enemies are innocent (even if proven guilty). The phenomenon of Western and world journalists championing the “rights” and causes of blood-drenched butchers who, given the opportunity, would torture and slaughter them, disproves the notion—were any additional proof required—that human beings are rational creatures. Indeed, the passionate belief of so much of the intelligentsia that our civilization is evil and only the savage is noble looks rather like an anemic version of the self-delusions of the terrorists themselves. And, of course, there is a penalty for the intellectual’s dismissal of religion: humans need to believe in something greater than themselves, even if they have a degree from Harvard. Rejecting the god of their fathers, the neo-pagans who dominate the media serve as lackeys at the terrorists’ bloody altar.
This is really good stuff, and it’s only going to get better:
Pretending to be impartial, the self-segregating personalities drawn to media careers overwhelmingly take a side, and that side is rarely ours. Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.
If I had to sum up Peters’ views in one sentence, it would be this: “Freedom is so precious that we must eliminate it in order to preserve it.”
UPDATE: A commenter over at Roy’s place accurately describes Peters’ master plan:
The ultimate endgame for the General is to be the last man standing…on the planet. His story is bound to conclude bleeding to death in a mall or college campus, surrounded by police, dead civilians all around him. I just hope I’m not in the same town he is when the psychopath snaps and starts unloading his ammunition into the pansies that try to resolve problems with their “pretty words” and “book logic.”
Oh my. Oh, oh my:
The Worst Thing About Gay Marriageby Sam Schulman
There is a new consensus on gay marriage: not on whether it should be legalized but about the motives of those of us who oppose it. All agree that any and all opposition to gay marriage is explained either by biblical literalism or anti-homosexual bigotry. This consensus is brilliantly constructed to be so unflattering to those of us who will vote against gay marriage–if we are allowed to do so–that even biblical literalists and bigots are scrambling out of the trenches and throwing down their weapons.
OK, so we can expect Schulman from here to advance his argument against gay marriage in a way that does not invoke Jesus and does not call gay people “icky.” I’m skeptical that he’ll be able to pull this off, but I’ll be interested to see him try.
When a gay man becomes a professor or a gay woman becomes a police officer, he or she performs the same job as a heterosexual. But there is a difference between a married couple and a same-sex couple in a long-term relationship. The difference is not in the nature of their relationship, not in the fact that lovemaking between men and women is, as the Catholics say, open to life. The difference is between the duties that marriage imposes on married people–not rights, but rather onerous obligations–which do not apply to same-sex love.
If I’m interpreting this correctly, Schulman is arguing that gay people aren’t miserable enough to be properly married as straight people are. I wonder how Schulman’s wife feels about the fact that he’s finding himself envious of gay couples.
The relationship between a same-sex couple, though it involves the enviable joy of living forever with one’s soulmate, loyalty, fidelity, warmth, a happy home, shopping, and parenting, is not the same as marriage between a man and a woman, though they enjoy exactly the same cozy virtues. These qualities are awfully nice, but they are emphatically not what marriage fosters, and, even when they do exist, are only a small part of why marriage evolved and what it does.
The entity known as “gay marriage” only aspires to replicate a very limited, very modern, and very culture-bound version of marriage. Gay advocates have chosen wisely in this. They are replicating what we might call the “romantic marriage,” a kind of marriage that is chosen, determined, and defined by the couple that enters into it. Romantic marriage is now dominant in the West and is becoming slightly more frequent in other parts of the world. But it is a luxury and even here has only existed (except among a few elites) for a couple of centuries–and in only a few countries. The fact is that marriage is part of a much larger institution, which defines the particular shape and character of marriage: the kinship system.
Ah, now this is the argument I’ve been waiting for! The argument that not only are gay marriages corrupt but that modern hetero marriages are corrupt as well because people are actually enjoying their lives and are not adhering to Medieval traditions where an 80-year-old man married a teenage girl. Let’s see where he takes this:
Consider four of the most profound effects of marriage within the kinship system.
The first is the most important: It is that marriage is concerned above all with female sexuality.
Wait. What?
The very existence of kinship depends on the protection of females from rape, degradation, and concubinage.
Uh, we also have a legal system for that. And I’m pretty sure that rape and degradation occurred pretty frequently in the elderly-man-on-teen-girl days of yore that you seem to be pining for.
This is why marriage between men and women has been necessary in virtually every society ever known. Marriage, whatever its particular manifestation in a particular culture or epoch, is essentially about who may and who may not have sexual access to a woman when she becomes an adult, and is also about how her adulthood–and sexual accessibility–is defined.
So. Marriage, then. It’s actually about controlling what a woman does with her vagina.
Y’know, I actually wish this article had invoked Jesus or just called gay people icky. But no. And it’s only going to get worse:
This most profound aspect of marriage–protecting and controlling the sexuality of the child-bearing sex–is its only true reason for being, and it has no equivalent in same-sex marriage.
OK, dude. What if we made all lesbians wear Ye Olde Chastity Beltes until they found someone to marry. Would you be happy then?
Anyway, it goes on for about a billion more paragraphs, so I’ll just skip to the wholly masterful ending:
Can gay men and women be as generous as we straight men are? Will you consider us as men who love, just as you do, and not merely as homophobes or Baptists? Every day thousands of ordinary heterosexual men surrender the dream of gratifying our immediate erotic desires. Instead, heroically, resignedly, we march up the aisle with our new brides, starting out upon what that cad poet Shelley called the longest journey, attired in the chains of the kinship system–a system from which you have been spared.
Jesus Christ. Does Mrs. Schulman know that her hubby considers their marriage to be “the longest journey” that is “attired in chains” and that tragically forces Sam to “surrender” from realizing his “immediate erotic desires?” Does this sound like a well-adjusted person who should be giving marriage advice to, like, anyone?
(Via.)
UPDATE: Holy crap, how did I miss this part:
Few men would ever bother to enter into a romantic heterosexual marriage–much less three, as I have done–were it not for the iron grip of necessity that falls upon us when we are unwise enough to fall in love with a woman other than our mom.
Three failed marriages and an unresolved Oedipus complex! You must be a devil with the ladies!
(Thanks to Xecklothxayyquou Gilchrist for pointing this gem out to me. I must have read it the first time and then used advanced self-hypno-therapy to convince myself that it wasn’t real.)
UPDATE II: Apologies to the non-crazy Sam Schulman for posting your pic in connection with the crazy Sam Schulman. I have replaced your pic with one that I think accurately depicts the crazy Sam Schulman.
First, the best find on Red State ever, courtesy of Balloon Juice:
Misinterpreting the Christian Response
Posted by roetenks (Profile)
Saturday, May 23rd at 2:44PM EDT… It’s likely even Jesus would have OK’d water boarding if it would have saved his Mom. He would’ve done the same to save his Dad, or any one of His disciples. For that matter, He even died to save all humans.
And the diarist should know, seeing how ‘[a]s a devout Catholic, Roeten has a high interest in politics. His background as a Chemical Engineer gives him special insights to subjects not normally discussed.’
Subjects like Jesus’ pro-torture bona fides. We’re not sure how being a chemical engineer gives one that particular ‘special insight’ … but then, we’re more qual than quant anyway. Perhaps ‘turn the other cheek’ was an instruction in a lost manual for securing the heads of torture victims.
The Golden Rule — Now With Thumbscrews!
Next, on Meet the Press, David Gregory stumbles into this interesting interchange with Newt Gingrich:
MR. GREGORY: How long should Gitmo remain open?
REP. GINGRICH: Until the war is over.
MR. GREGORY: When is that?
REP. GINGRICH: We’ll — when the terrorists disappear. I mean, you’re faced with…
MR. GREGORY: Well, you’re talking about a pretty long-term proposition here.
Long-term, indeed. We’re reminded of Philip Agre’s frustration with the language being used to define the Sept. 11 attacks and the dangerous future that was being outlined in the then-nascent ‘War on Terror’, just a few days after 9-11:
Let us say, then, that George W. Bush commences a war against Osama bin Laden, or even against the greater abstraction of “terrorism”. What happens then? A state of war is a serious thing. States of war have routinely been used to justify censorship, the curtailing of civil liberties, and the repression of dissidents. States of war are also understood to require the opposition in the legislature to moderate its otherwise essential functions of criticism. Calls are issued to stand behind the political leadership and to display unity, with the implication that the enemy is watching and that failure to unite is tantamount to treason. These are not healthy conditions for a democracy; indeed, they are the opposite of democracy.
War in the old conception was temporary: the idea was explicitly that the state of war would end, and that the normal rules of democracy would resume once their conditions had been reestablished. Civil liberties and the institutions of democratic government are not entirely eliminated during wartime; rather, they are reduced in their scope while retaining their same overall form. Even in conditions of total war mobilization, clear boundaries between the military and civilian sides of society are maintained. But war, we are told, no longer works that way. No such boundaries are possible. It follows, therefore, that “war” in the new sense — war with no beginning or end, no front and rear, and no distinction between military and civilian — is incompatible with democracy, and not just in practice, not just temporarily, but permanently and conceptually. If we conceptualize war the way the defense intellectuals suggest, then to declare war is to destroy the conditions of democracy. War, in this new sense, can never be justified.
So going on nine years later, Gingrich is still pushing for ‘war with no beginning or end’. But can we at least stop inviting him to talk about it on TV?
Gary Bauer, Human Wingnuts Online:
‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ for Christians
