Well, Thers, the war must go on, and nothing says war more than Romanian music videos.
Am I the only one that thinks that it’s a bad idea to keep a pistol jammed in your belt pointing at your dick?
And while we are in Romania, there is always this:
Jon Chait notes that Bill Kristol’s latest policy prescription to Republicans — which entails campaigning against the health care bill by pledging to restore Medicare cuts and to support the importation of cheap drugs — is a philosophical mess, especially since Kristol wants the entire health care bill repealed at some point as well. This leads Chait to wonder if Bill Kristol has any core convictions:
In all seriousness, there’s pretty clearly no intellectual coherence to Kristol’s worldview. As a political strategist, his worldview is basically the same thing as his foreign policy worldview. He advocates maximum partisan hostility against the opposition at all times. (As captured by this quintessential Kristol passage: “Fight on with respect to health care. Fight on other fronts. And recruit new fighters. In a word: Fight.”)
So, when health care reform hangs in the balance, Kristol fires up Republicans to fight by telling them that passage would be a political disaster. When its passage is all but assured, he fires them up to fight by crowing that it’s a looming disaster for Democrats if only the GOP will press its advantage. His method of fighting can take the form of advocating bigger or smaller government, whichever seems to offer the best tactical prospects. And, of course, the worst is always behind the Republican Party and glorious victories always lay ahead, especially if Kristol’s fighting words are heeded.
This is actually far too generous to Kristol, whose worldview is vastly more sinister than your typical partisan hack. When Bill Kristol is faced with a given scenario, his first and only concern is how its outcome will affect current and future wars. That’s it. That’s all he cares about.
So with the health care bill, Kristol doesn’t honestly give a rat’s ass about “free markets” and “intrusive government” or anything like that. Rather, he sees universal health care as a corrupting influence on Americans’ moral character, something that will make us soft and less willing to support crusades against dusky foreigners. He sees what’s happened to the once-proud Viking nations of Scandinavia — and boy, those folks could rape and pillage with the best of ‘em back in the day! — and he fears that the same thing could happen to us. Meaning, he’s scared that we could achieve both high standards of living and higher economic security, which would make us less pissed off all the time and thus not as eager to kick Ahmad and Habib in the throat. I’ll wager Kristol suffers from nightmares every night in which all angry Red State Americans are transformed before his eyes into inept chefs who are unable to defend themselves against their own ingredients:
I imagine it playing out thusly: “Well shoot, Jimmy Joe Bob Rex, I’d love t’ go t’ NASCAR with you, but I can’t afford it ’cause my kid’s sick and I don’ got no insurance, so… [AT THIS POINT THE DREAD SHADOW OF SOCIALISM PASSES O'ERHEAD]… Børk! Børk! Børk! Oo, now I have-a thee health in-a-surance! I canna go to thee NASCAR! Und afteer that I weell make yooou a loobster!!!”
[This is, incidentally, why Kristol gets such a funny feeling in his pants when he ponders President Sarah Palin. It's not that he really thinks she'll make a brilliant president or anything, it's more that he sees her as being easily manipulated by neocons' "good vs. evil" shtick and thus ready, willing and able to provide them with more precious, precious wars.]
UPDATE: I am reminded now of this classic John Holbo post on David Frum’s views of the welfare state. This is what Frum actually wrote all the way back in the mid-’90s:
Contemporary conservatives still value that old American character. William Bennett in his lectures reads admiringly from an account of the Donner party written by a survivor that tells the story in spare, stoic style. He puts the letter down and asks incredulously, “Where did those people go?” But if you believe that early Americans possessed a fortitude that present-day Americans lack, and if you think the loss is an important one, then you have to think hard about why that fortitude disappeared. [...]
Of course there have been hundreds of such changes – never mind since the Donner party’s day, just since 1945 … But the expansion of government is the only one we can do anything about.
All of these changes have had the same effect: the emancipation of the individual appetite from restrictions imposed on it by limited resources, or religious dread, or community disapproval, or the risk of disease or personal catastophe.
In other words: Americans used to be tougher and more moral back when they had to eat one another to survive. Now the government is making them weak by helping them not starve. Boo, government!
Yes, it’s hard to believe people this evil exist. And it’s really depressing to think that they themselves will never suffer economic catastrophe.
Over at America’s Shittiest Website™, the reaction to the underpants bomber has been as swift as it was predictable. Naturally, because his flaming jockey shorts scared some people on the plane and has left right-wingers quaking with fear and soiling their own non-explosive underpants, this is the worst terrorist attack on American soil ever. And it’s completely Obama’s fault. In fact, the first thing Obama should now do is fire everyone in sight, admit that he’s the worst president ever, come back from Hawaii, and have his picture taken in the Oval Office while wearing sackcloth and ashes and apologizing profusely to the Dutch guy who burned his fingers and is getting paid the big bucks to do TV interviews.
Leading the charge, natch, is Andy McCarthy, who is dismayed that instead of whisking the underpants guy off to Gitmo to waterboard him for a couple of days, we are doing silly shit like filing indictments, holding judicial hearings, and giving him a lawyer.
The people now in charge of our government believe Clinton-era counterterrorism was a successful model. They start from the premise that terrorism is a crime problem to be managed, not a war to be won. …
Here, no thanks to the government, the plane was not destoyed [sic], and we won’t get to the bottom of the larger conspiracy (enabling the likes of Napolitano to say there’s no indication of a larger plot — much less one launched by an international jihadist enterprise) because the guy got to lawyer up rather than be treated like a combatant and subjected to lengthy interrogation. But the terrorist will be convicted at trial (this “case” tees up like a slam-dunk), so the administration will put it in the books as a success … just like the Clinton folks did after the ’93 WTC bombers and the embassy bombers were convicted. In their minds, litigation success equals national security success.
It is a dangerously absurd viewpoint.
Hey, SadlyNauts, let’s hop in our super-secret time machine, courtesy of Google, and take a peek at Andy McCarthy back when the best president ever after St. Ronnie was in office and knew how to put on his flight-suit get up and put the terrorists in their place:
John Ashcroft reminded Americans Monday of how effective the government’s post-9/11 effort to thwart Islamic militancy has been, announcing the indictment of a second conspirator in the most audacious plot for a second wave of aerial terror. … The indictment, returned by a federal grand jury in Boston, alleges that Saajid Mohammed Badat conspired with already-convicted “shoe bomber” Richard Reid to destroy American aircraft in flight. … [T]he American charges are a powerful reminder that aggressive domestic law enforcement remains a key component in the Bush administration’s comprehensive approach to fighting what Norman Podhoretz, among others, so aptly calls “World War IV.” … Most importantly, Badat is a dangerous terrorist looking to harm the U.S. and its allies. The looming American charges will underscore the importance of ensuring that he is duly hammered in the British system.
Surely that can’t be the same person writing both those things, can it? Sadly, er, yes.
Of course, Jonah dislodged his snout from the holiday feedsack long enough to call for Janet Napolitano’s resignation. How dare she continue to hold her job when the TSA didn’t stop a guy from getting on a plane in Lagos and connecting to a flight in the United States. How dare she didn’t make sure that the Dutch check everybody’s underpants before they get on flights to America. How dare she continue to breathe?
I would wager that not one percent of Americans think the system is “working” when terrorists successfully get bombs onto planes
So let’s set our flux capacitor to January 7, 2002, just days after Richard Reid snuck a shoe bomb onto a plane and see Jonah calling for Tom Ridge’s head on a platter. Oh dear. Not a word about shitcanning anyone in the Bush administration. Instead we have Jonah making the deliriously insane argument that the Reid incident is an argument for racial profiling because had Reid been an Arab named Mohammed racial profiling might have kept him off of the flight from Paris. No seriously.
I think a fun project for the holidays will be for us all to put on our snuggies, fire up Teh Great Gazoogle, and go back to the days after the shoe-bombing attempt and dig up everything these yahoos had to say about that. It will certainly be more fun than watching a ball drop in Times Square.
ABOVE: James Percival Hoft, Fourth Earl of
Grosconnard and First Pundit of Gateway
Shorter Jim Hoft, Gateway Putz:
After Passenger Saves Plane From Terrorist Bombing– New Rules Require Heroic Passengers to Stay Seated During Last Hour of Flight*
*Hoft’s penchant for long, rambling, semi-absurdist post titles (à la Atlas Juggs) allows us now to claim a first in shorter history — namely, a shorter which is shorter than the title of the post being shortened.
**You really have to wonder what Hoft has done to his synapses (head injury, consumption of wood alcohol, electro-convulsive therapy, huffing computer duster cans, etc.) to think that even his intellectually challenged fan base can imagine a flight attendant saying “Sir, I don’t care if the gentlemen in seat 19A is setting his pants on fire or lighting a fuse on his loafers, a rule is a rule and you must return to your seat now!”
ABOVE: Bruce “Gay Patriot” Carroll
The incident on the Amsterdam-Detroit flight yesterday has, inevitably, elicited a torrent of nonsense from the usual suspects, all of whom apparently rushed to their computers before the Christmas roast had even been carved to share their almost entirely predictable, if completely ludicrous, takeaways on the subject.
Jim Don Bob Surber says it all in the title of his post “Flight 253 terrorist shows moving Gitmo to Illinois is a bad idea.” It also shows that the college bowl system is a bad idea. I mean, seriously, what the fuck? This would only make sense if the Supermax facility in question has a travel agency and could book flights for the terrorists inside, help them escape and then hand them bomb-making manuals as going-away gifts. This is yet another post by Jim Don Bob that definitively proves that second-hand meth smoke kills brain cells.
And what failed terrorist attack would be complete without our friends at NewsBlusters weighing in? In this case, Mark Finkelstein is all wound up because the New York Times didn’t say that the pseudo-bomber was a Muslim and instead simply called him a “Nigerian man.” One of the things that makes the pseudo-critics at NewsBlusters so amusing is their insistence that newspapers should just ditch the silly notion that they should print facts instead of assumptions. Well, not ourselves being a paper of record, we can oblige with dispensing with this silly notion about not publishing naked assumptions as facts and note that Finkelstein spent yesterday trying to figure out how to fellate a dead goat.
Oooh, look, the dumbest fucking ghey man on the face of the planet, Bruce Carroll aka The Gay Patriot, has been moved to actually post something at his own blog. (Bruce is usually content to let the second dumbest fucking ghey man on the face of the planet, Dan Blatt, handle all the posting duties). Naturally, Bruce blames the attack on Obama and points out that if Bush were still President this would never have happened.
Bringing up the, er, rear, we have the Ace of Play-Doh and Bacon in high dudgeon over imagined attempts by the White House to edit a WaPo story on the fizzled bomb. According to Ace, Obama’s only response to the incident was to call up the WaPo and force them to remove a phrase that said that Obama learned of the event a few hours after the plane landed. This was, of course, an opportunity for Ace to remind everyone that Obama is, you know, black:
TERRORIST THREAT LEVEL RAISED! All the way from “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” to “Hakuna Matada.”
So the question now is which of our favorite bloggers will be the first to speculate that the would-be terrorist is a distant relative of Obama’s? My money is on Hoft.
UPDATE: Thanks to the other Roger Ailes, I forgot to see what Atlas Juggs had to add to the discussion. She thinks that the Obama administration will charge the passenger who assisted in subduing the burning passenger with hate crimes. No doubt that will occur right after Obama gives the wannabe bomber the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
And here that is in the binary language of moisture vaporators:
’0100110101100101011100100111001001111001001000000100001101 10100001110010011010010111001101110100011011010110000101110011′
Against an enemy so malignant, so depraved, and so immoral, the principles of just war permit a massive counter-attack even on Christmas Eve.
This is getting serious, people:
When Gov. Pat Quinn accused Comptroller Dan Hynes of playing politics on a plan to use short-term borrowing to pay a backlog of state bills, the governor said that when he was state treasurer he ‘worked together’ with a Republican governor and a Democratic comptroller on borrowing plans ‘on behalf of the common good.’
What Quinn didn’t mention is that as state treasurer in 1992, he single-handedly blocked an effort by then-Gov. Jim Edgar to borrow money to pay overdue bills to state vendors in a failed effort to leverage money for the Chicago Public Schools.
Quinn’s move so enraged then-Comptroller Dawn Clark Netsch, she accused fellow Democrat Quinn of trying to playing a ‘political chess game’ at the expense of state vendors who were owed money.
Files -> Disappeared -> Mysteriously … just an educated guess.
ABOVE: Travis Kavulla
Travis Kavulla, America’s Shittiest Website™
Avatar’s Central Fallacy
1Er, no, Mr. Gates Scholar, the Iroquois were in upstate New York and Pocohantas was a Powhatan in Virginia. So given your obvious expertise in this matter we await with keen interest the comments we anticipate you’ll soon make about how awful indigenous Americans were.
2And, woot, there it is. The wholly-anticipated and inevitable slander of Native Americans as crazed arsonists who burned forests for the fun of it. In fact, it is generally believed that Native Americans, although they did set fires, did so in a controlled fashion to increase habitat diversity and to provide security.
We want in on the end-of-the-decade list pr0n, thank you very much:
10. 2001: The year started ominously with a peasant blouse revival and only got worse with the worst thing that ever happened ever. Thankfully, a new generation of wiser heads with larger nutsacks would prevail in the cauldron of the very next year, and both transgressions would be avenged to this very day.
9. 2009: Some say that 2003 was worse. You know who also said 2003 was worse? Hitler, that’s who.
8. 2007: Historians will remember this year as the calm before the storm, but also as the unending nightmare two years after the hurricane. And how many Olympic gold medals did America win in what is now regarded as a nebish of a year? Hint: Just three, and they were in rhythmic gymnastics.
7. 2003: On the one hand, 2003 saw the end of a tyrant who cut off people’s hands. On the other hand, the hand just referred to was blown off in the effort to topple that same hand-cutting tyrant.
6. 2000: In 2000, it was still possible to trick non-Dilbert readers into paying you to fix their Y2K bugs. But not really. Fitting for a year that was confused as to whether it even belonged in the decade under review at all.
5. 2006: Dick Cheney shot this year in the face. Can’t say we blame him.
4. 2002: Ahh, those innocent days of 2002, as yet unspoiled by the alarming realization that you just took a massive dump on every principle you ever held out of simple, shorts-staining cowardice.
3. 2005: Goldman Sachs gave the GNP of this year to a junior trader as a year-end bonus, some of which eventually trickled down to a coke dealer we know.
2. 2004: In 2004, the American people set an example for the world in their remarkable tolerance for four-year assfuckings.
1. 2008: An energetic young politician was poised to replace an aging failure. A corrupt financial system came tumbling down to make way for a new era of reform. In the distance, if you squinted your eyes just so, the rainbow coats of the gathering ponies could be glimpsed by the pure of heart. And as the whisper of their whinnies came to you on winds of change, you swore they formed the words, ‘You betcha.’
Over at Nate Silver’s joint (we’re on first-name-plus-surname terms, me n’ Nate Silver), Nate Silver says we all need to state our preferences on health care reform ‘explicitly’. Nate Silver then provides a handy graph of his own preferences.
Nate Silver is smart.
Anyway, I can’t do graphs unless they are somehow related to shit, so here’s my effort:
Shorter Msgr. Ross Xavier Pius Douthat, S.J., O.P., O.F.M., S.S.J., Th.D+, The New York Times Pope-Ed Page
Heaven and Nature
John J. Miller reads a story to his children and gets stumped by a fourth grader:
I read ["The Gift of the Magi"] to my kids last night. My daughter (fourth grade) noticed something funny about how it starts. Here are the first three sentences …:
One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies.
This can’t be correct. If sixty cents of it was in pennies, that would leave $1.27. Wouldn’t there have to be 62 pennies? Or maybe 57 pennies?
Even though Miller’s self-published historical novel takes place in the 1860s, he apparently is completely unaware that two-cent and three-cent pieces were circulated during that period. I wonder if he has one of the characters in his literary chef d’oeuvre ordering a Coke Zero at the Marriott at 14th and Pennsylvania.
The Techno Chicken provides the perfect excuse to put and end to the YouTube War with Thers once and for all. We will not entertain a plea for a peace treaty without obtaining a massive indemnity from the defeated party.
ABOVE LEFT: Velasquez, Portrait of the Dwarf Little Person Marco Kricoricano (c. 1636-1646)
ABOVE RIGHT: Bernardo Strozzi (attr.), Man in Full, Portrait of Jonassandro del Oroburro (17th cent.)
Shorter Mark Krikorian, America’s Shittiest Website™
‘There Went Out a Decree from Caesar Augustus …’
Slightly Shorter Jonah “The Whale” Goldberg, America’s Shittiest Website™
The Census, Do it For Baby Jesus: Update
Shorter Jonah “The Whale” Goldberg, America’s Shittiest Website™
The Census, Do it For Baby Jesus: Update II
Megan McArdle, The Atlantic:
More Snow in Copenhagen
1 Notice, O! comedians of the right, that there is no ‘win’ in it. In fact, try the “Duh, how can there be global warming when it’s snowing?” routine one more time, and we’ll stop by with some egg nopg and take turns admiring your crepche.
Yes, and one more time after that, and we’ll return your motorcycle hitchingpowderelmet and tub of Turtle Washoepolishx, and oh wait, your wife said she wanted to watch that VHS tape we borrowed of The Magnificent AmbuttblastersIXersons.
Let Lieberman and his obstructionist pals filibuster the goddamn bill with a full public option in it. I don’t know what the Senate rules are, but make all these assholes sit there reading the dictionary through Christmas. Have cloture votes every single day and twice on High Holy Days just for Lieberman. Give them all 15 seconds of floor time a jillion times a day. Have whole weeks of debate where Senators must make their arguments through hand puppets. Make it a staring contest played out in front of the American voter.
Then again, that’s probably why I’m not a Senator. Also because I’m lazy, a crappy public speaker and nobody would ever vote for me. And I have anal string warts.
. . . I see your yodeling Swedish drag queen and raise you by an androgynous punk mannequin imitator now turned evangelical pastor in Hawaii.
This is laughably unsurprising:
WSJ/NBC News Poll: Tea Party Tops Democrats and Republicans
The loosely organized group made of up mostly conservative activists and independent voters that’s come to be known as the Tea Party movement currently boasts higher favorability ratings than either the Democratic or Republican Parties, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll coming out later today.
More than four in 10, 41%, of respondents said they had a very or somewhat favorable view of the Tea Party movement, while 24% said they had a somewhat or very negative view of the group. The Tea Party movement gained notoriety over the summer following a series of protests in Washington, D.C. and other cities over government spending and other U.S. economic policies.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party, which controls both the White House and Congress, has a 35% positive rating compared with a 45% negative rating.
The Republican Party identifies closest to the Tea Party movement’s ideology, but the group has also caused splits within the GOP. Republicans currently hold a 28% favorability rating compared with a 43% negative one.
And why is this not surprising? Because of stuff like this:
President Obama and the Senate leadership can’t whip up the votes necessary to pass a public option or even a Medicare buy-in compromise, but they didn’t have any trouble persuading 30 Democrats to vote against prescription drug reimportation Tuesday night — thus preserving the deal cut between the Senate Finance Committee, the White House and Big Pharma.
So I’ve been thinking about this, and I’ve come to the conclusion that America just ain’t governable anymore. Corporate interests continuously override the public good and it doesn’t make a difference which damn party you vote for.
Sorry to be such a downer, but I cannot believe how much the Democrats have failed at governing. Even by my already-low standards this has been a thorough disaster.
UPDATE: Climbing back from the ledge a bit, I’m still actually on the fence over whether this bill is worth killing or not. On the one hand, it basically makes the uninsured serfs to the insurance industry. That sucks, it’s disgusting and it’s immoral. But on the other hand, I read stuff like from this guy…
My wife has a terminal illness and we can’t get insurance outside a pool from my employer, which is not the greatest. People like you are about to ruin the chance to improve health care for the foreseeable future. You are making the perfect the enemy of the good.
…and I have a really, really tough time arguing that we should kill the bill.
But then, as Atrios notes, there are the politics:
I feel like those more supportive of this bill are attacking anti-mandate strawmen. The reason for thinking that without a public option or similar mandates are going to be a disaster is that without competition or sufficient affordability (due to not quite generous enough subsidies), you’re forcing people to buy shitty insurance that they can’t afford.
If the Senate bill passes as is, lots of people are likely to hate it and it will lead to the GOP (or the Tea Party!) taking back the government and working to repeal the bill. And how much better off will people like the woman mentioned above with terminal illness actually be?
But then I think of it this way: once the principle of universality is established — and for all its faults, the Senate bill would establish universality for American citizens — then it’s going to be very hard to take away. Once it’s passed the GOP will never be able to pass legislation that will take away health insurance from 30 million people. Really, if they tried they wouldn’t leave office alive.
So I’m leaning right now toward, “pass the piece of shit and add to the subsidies through reconciliation with the goal of adding a public option through reconciliation further down the road.”
What say you all?
