Teefer Madness

In RE: Rep. Slaughter’s comments at the health care summit:

Wealthy, overfed Rush Limbaugh said:

“If you don’t have any teeth, so what? What’s applesauce for?”

And wealthy, overfed Glenn Beck said:

“I’ve read the Constitution … I didn’t see that you had a right to teeth”

(via Digby)

Now I know from back in the old days when I was forced to listen to Rush Limbaugh at work that the Dirigible of Darvocet himself has said he pays cash at the dentist’s just like he does at the doctor’s and that’s the way the system should be for everyone. This latest is just more typical rightwing mean-spiritedness toward the poor who, in their view, deserve to be uncomfortable and humiliated because they can’t afford the dental care wingnuts can afford — that is, if wingnuts want it; some, apparently, do not. Here’s two more Cheeto-teethed, Mountain Dew-mouthed, um, mouthbreathers yukking it up over Slaughter’s testimony:

LS: I even had one constituent, you will not believe this, and I know you won’t, but it’s true. Her sister died, this poor woman had no dentures. She wore her dead sister’s teeth.

[Hugh Hewitt]: Mark Steyn…(laughing)

[Mark Steyn]: (laughing) That’s good. That’s good for the environment, isn’t it?

HH: (laughing)

MS: I’m in favor of that. If we can’t at least, if we can’t reduce our carbon footprint, at least we should be able to reduce our mastication mouth print by recycling dentures. I mean, this gets to the heart of why this is…is second-hand dentures, which I believe was the fourth chorus of that Barbra Streisand song, for those with long memories, but is second-hand dentures a huge problem in the United States? What are the number of people going around? There’s 300 million people here. Are 20 million going around with second-hand dentures? Are 5 million going around with second-hand dentures? The idea that you need comprehensive national health care for, to solve this particular lady’s second-hand denture crisis, I think is…

HH: But Mark, we’ve only got 15 seconds. It happened again and again. When the Democrats talked, you just looked the screen and said, “oh my God, they’re running the country.”

MS: (laughing)

HH: Oh my God, they’re running…Mark Steyn, always a pleasure, www.steynonline.com. Second-hand dentures, the chopper stopper, America.

Yeah, bwahahaha. Here’s a pic of Hugh Hewtit, undoctored:

Buy some fuckin toothpaste, Hugh. You can afford it.

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Health Bomber

Shorter Kathryn Jean Lopez, Townhall.com
Ailing Health Care

• Make no mistake: If President Barack Obama actually wanted to be the post-partisan agent of Washington change, his health care summit would have involved him capitulating completely to the partisans on my side of the aisle.

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Not Again

Spoke with my Hawaii kin — they will be evacuating their North Shore home for higher ground before 11am local time, when the tsunami from the Chili earthquake is expected to arrive. Others live further inland already.

I’m not the praying sort, but this sort of thing, on the heels of the Haitian quake, Katrina, the Indian Ocean tsunami, etc. etc.? Makes you want to beg somebody somewhere to keep your loved ones safe. Or at least shake your fist at the random cruelty of it all.

Let’s all hope the early warning system works where it’s most needed throughout the Pacific.

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So Sorry, Al Jaffee

A shocking secret is revealed!

Answer below the fold!

Read the rest of this entry »

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Road Trip

Let’s see, should I go to Schwagstock or should I go mingle with the American Taliban at “Wilderness Outcry”?

Woodstock-like gospel event planned in Missouri
Posted: Feb 12, 2010 4:08 PM CST Updated: Feb 13, 2010 9:19 AM CST

POPLAR BLUFF, MO. (AP) – A southeast Missouri man will host a five-day event in June that is set up like Woodstock, but with what he calls an opposite message.

Jerry Murphy owns a 400-acre farm in Butler County just northeast of Poplar Bluff. The Poplar Bluff Daily American Republic says he has linked with a group of ministers from around the country to host the gathering called “Wilderness Outcry” June 14-18.

The gathering will feature gospel music and religious speakers.

Murphy says Woodstock in 1969 marked a retreat from Judeo-Christian values in American culture. He hopes Wilderness Outcry helps turn that around.

Admission will be free, though Murphy may charge for camping to help recover the cost of hosting the event.

Officers with the Poplar Bluff Police Department say they’re worried about not having the resources to staff an event that’s rumored to possibly bring in up to 100,000 people.

Heehee. Oh, I’m sorry: HeeHAW.

X-files thought of the day: there might be such a thing as political telluric currents, positive ones drawing certain ideological types, negative ones repelling them. Nixon considered San Diego his “lucky city;” we moonbats are fond of places like Berkeley and Taxachusetts. Democrats have excellent reason to dodge Dallas since you know what; Republicans hate NYC and try to avoid New Orleans, especially after a hurricane. And the southern Missouri foothills seem to draw Republicans. Poplar Bluff is where Bush lamented that OB-GYNs were kept from practicing their love, plus it’s not too far from Vegas for people like Ned Flanders.

But then there’s Schwagstock, full of awesome, stinky hippies who want to free Mumia and save Darfur and eat crazy tofu, psilocybin, and human fetus-based fusion food, so there goes my theory. Anyway, I know where I belong, but I also know where I must go.

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*rattle, rattle*

Pst. Hey. The Tip Jar over on the right-hand side of the page is working again. Please consider sending us some money if you feel like it. Reading crazy assholes is hard work!

Also, if you guys send money, I’ll be sure to post the story I’ve been writing about Charles Krauthammer, Dick Cheney and Glenn Reynolds forming their own moon colony. So there’s incentive!

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Stone Poddie Before He Kills Again*

Slightly Shorter John J-Pod: Neocondescensions
Condescending

• That tiresome boy in the White House has no right to be condescending to his Republican superiors just because they are recycling debunked slogans on his cutesy-pie little universal health care hobby-horse.

*Incredibly tasteless reference to Bryan Fischer’s claim at RenewAmerica that SeaWorld is going to hell for not having followed the biblical injunction to stone a whale to death.

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I Share Becuz I <3 U

When I said this was the worst music video ever made, I was probably wrong. Ya rly. But maybe you should judge for yourself. You know you want to.

When Homer and Marge listened to a “Rappin’ Ronald Reagan” tape, it was funny. This… is a fucking atrocity.

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Let’s Gang Up On Women!

Shorter Dr. Mrs. Ol’ Perfesser, Dr. Helen
Women Suck!

• Women are weak and they suck! Memeorandum, here I come!

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Three-Day-Old Sociopathy

Above left: Kraphammer. Above right: Justice personified.

Shorter Charles Krauthammer
National Review Online
“Krauthammer’s Take”

• Ordinarily, I deeply resent so-called “rules of engagement” imposed by non-heroic civilians which, in tying one hand behind our military’s back, makes it harder for our troops to blast civilians into deliciously splattery bits. However, since the military leadership itself seems to want our troops to abide by these rules, I suppose I’ll grudgingly put up with less fapping material, but only because its decision seems to have been made for strategic, not moral, reasons.

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I Formally Apologize To James O’Keefe For Overstating His Manhood

Our good pal Patterico lawyerly and alpaca-ly insists that I correct an old Sadly, No! post that questioned Andrew Breitbart’s claim on Twitter that Dave Weigel ‘DENIES’ that James O’Keefe of black stereotype cosplay fame ‘manned a table selling Neo-Nazi claptrap during a White-Man-Negro-Haters Club meet-and-greet held at Georgetown University in 2006.’

It turns out that Weigel, while not in fact ‘denying’ that O’Keefe may have manned such a table (I await Patterico’s insistence that Breitbart retract his tweet, perhaps in vain), later reported that though he attended the 2006 event, he could not confirm another attendee’s report of said table-manning.

So consider this an apology to James O’Keefe and a formal retraction of the part of the post in question that describes him as having ‘manned a table’. Furthermore, to my knowledge, O’Keefe is no man at all with regards to other types of furniture, physical objects in general or even concepts such as honesty and fair-dealing, so I will endeavor in the future not to linguistically associate him with masculinity in any way or form.

I am truly sorry.

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Aww, Crap

I was just getting excited about the Giants’ prospects this year:

David (Florida)

Hey Joe! Who do you think is the best improved team this year?

Joe Morgan (12:02 PM)

I guess you would have to say the Giants in the National League because they have made the most moves. If their moves work out or not, we’ll have to wait and see. In the American League I’ll say Seattle. On paper both teams did a good job of improving themselves.

We’re doomed.

PS Sadly, the professionals are long since retired, but I’m guessing they’d agree that ‘because they made the most moves’ is not, strictly speaking, particularly rigorous reasoning for why you are selecting a ballclub as the most improved. The word Joe may be looking for is ‘best’, as in ‘because they made the best moves’.

Oddly, David (Florida) uses the word ‘best’ in the construction ‘best improved’, when he seems to mean ‘most’ as in ‘most improved’. There is always a bizarre kind of aphasia in Joe Chats … and this little exchange is a most best example of it.

Brad adds: The Giants are going to be competitive based on their pitching alone. Lincecum is a special talent, Cain isn’t far behind and Zito… well, he pitches a lot of innings. Offensively, Sandoval is a mid-order bat but he’s pretty much alone out there. Buster Posey will be an asset when he comes along. They’ve got enough chips to acquire another bat during the season. They should be pretty good.

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Do I dare hope for something good to happen?

Steven Pearlstein is probably the most interesting Village columnist. While he instinctively takes standard Washington positions on most issues, he does delve into policy a lot more than the Milbanks and the Sally Quinns of the world. So I was a little heartened this morning to read the following:

Dodd, Corker and Democratic Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia are putting the finishing touches on a plan reflecting these judgments. As they envision it, any time a big financial institution is threatened with insolvency, the government would be authorized to take it over and close it down in a bankruptcy-like process. The government could provide temporary loans to ensure an orderly liquidation process and prevent financial panic, but only to the extent that the loan would be repaid from proceeds of the sale of the bank’s assets. Although insured depositors would be protected, creditors, counterparties and investors would all suffer losses.

This is… actually a pretty good idea, at least to my non-expert eyes. The big problem with Geithner’s absurd bailout “plan” is that is was designed primarily to benefit bank shareholders and not American taxpayers. This new proposal would wipe out the shareholders of failed financial institutions — which is perfectly fine, since investment ain’t supposed to be risk free.

On the other hand I should probably stop saying that this could be a good idea, since we all said the same thing about the Medicare buy-in and look where that wound up…

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Justification: Fail

Hmm, this story seems harmless enough:

Led by Sergeant Savage, a team of officers is to spend the next year stopping drivers who flout the rules on particularly accident-heavy stretches of road.

Except:

Mr. Smith, the road safety manager, said that the campaign’s name was a homage to motorists’ endless litany of fruitless rationalizations. “I was out about a year ago and we stopped a lady who had three children in the back of the car,” he related. “The officer said, ‘Why aren’t these children belted in?’ and she said, ‘They’re not my children.’”

10-4!

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“Law, Law”? MOAR Like Lord Haw-Haw, Amirite?

  =  
Above: Mark Steyn

Shorter Mark Steyn
Maclean’s
“THE PEOPLE vs BLAIR, BUSH AND THE WAR ON TERROR”

• Why should heroic nations like ours even need a legal reason to blow shit up, anyway? Isn’t greed reason enough? What about vengeance? Geopolitical strategery? How about just for the hell of it? No? Apparently pussified Britons, Canadians, and Americans want an Anglosphere of laws not of men. Yeah well, enjoy your suicide pact, ya namby-pamby, multi-culti, appeaser, fagg0rtz!

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The most hilarious sentence I’ve read in minutes

I’ve been trolling the depths of wingnut publications searching for hilarious praises of Ahmed Chalabi from the early part of last decade. Here’s the best one so far, from Max Singer writing at the National Review:

Chalabi’s strength comes not from American neoconservatives, but from the widespread support he has among Iraqis not only Shia, but Sunni and Kurd and other minorities. Not only among exiles, but among Iraqis in Iraq who have maintained contacts with the exile community.

He has such a unique degree of Iraqi support, despite the strong and well-funded efforts of the State Department and the CIA to find and promote an alternative leadership, because Iraqis recognize his integrity, loyalty, and ability.

Do you have to possess knowledge of anything to be published by the National Review? The answer, to coin a phrase, is sadly, no.

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God, Iraq again?

The Washington Post has many, many bad columnists. Jackson Diehl often gets overlooked among the Krauthammers, Samuelsons, Gersons, Wills and Kagans, but he’s still very, very bad:

During the years when Iraq was at the center of U.S. foreign policy, pundits and policymakers would regularly and prematurely proclaim that the following six months would be crucial to the war’s outcome. Now, at last, that forecast is warranted: The next six months in Iraq could decide whether the country emerges as a democracy friendly to the United States, a cleric-dominated satellite of Iran or a cauldron of sectarian conflict — and whether Barack Obama can pull off the “responsible withdrawal” he has promised.

How odd, then, that Iraq — where the United States has invested $700 billion and the lives of more than 4,300 soldiers over the past seven years — is no longer a top priority for the White House, the State Department or nearly anyone in Congress.

God, we’ve spent $700 billion on Iraq. We’ve spent $700 billion bailing out the damn banks. That’s $1.4 trillion (!!!!!!!!) thrown right down the crapper. Anyone serious about government waste would have to conclude that those two projects were some of the most wasteful in American history.

As for the rest — look, dude, I just don’t care about Iraq right now. We’ve got 10% unemployment and a government that is wholly owned and run by the clowns on Wall Street. These are things we need to fix before we double down on ill-considered military occupations. I’m all for setting up a refugee program to help Iraqis move to the U.S. if their situation spirals downward again, but we can’t just occupy the place forever. At some point you have to acknowledge sunk costs and move the hell on.

Two Americans who understand how big the stakes are — U.S. Ambassador Christopher Hill and top commander Gen. Raymond Odierno — were in Washington last week to explain. Iraq’s March 7 election and what follows it, Hill said, will “determine the future of Iraq . . . and also the future of the U.S. relationship with Iraq.”

Said Odierno: “We have an opportunity in Iraq today that we might never get again in our lifetimes . . . to develop a democratic Iraq that has a long-term partnership with the United States.”

Compare that with Obama’s account of Iraq in his State of the Union address: “We are responsibly leaving Iraq to its people. . . . We will have all of our combat troops out of Iraq by the end of this August.” That pledge means that even while Iraq passes through this crucial turning point, U.S. forces will be reduced from 98,000 now to 50,000 on Sept. 1.

Yuh-huh.

The thing is, we’ve been hearing this since, oh, I don’t know, forever. Whenever we start to pull troops out of Iraq — in this case so they can be transferred to fight yet another Village-approved war — we hear cries that we can’t leave just yet or we’ll be killing Iraqi democracy in its infancy. This has happened over and over and over and over again, as Diehl himself acknowledges with his reference to Friedman Units. But this “Boy-Who-Cried-Whiskey-Freedom-Sexy!” routine has gotten extremely old by now and mostly people are just sick of seeing lives and money wasted on this colossally stupid imperial adventure.

Read the rest of this entry »

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“Small government” conservatives

One of the more fascinating spectacles over the past week has been watching the leading lights of the wingnutosphere react with horror and dismay at Ron Paul’s victory at the CPAC straw poll (Roy has a good roundup here). Let’s take a look at a typical reaction by a typical wingnut, namely one John Hinderaker:

Pee-Wee for President?

Ron Paul has won the CPAC straw Presidential vote with 31 percent of the total. This is dismaying, to the extent one takes it seriously. Ron Paul is the crazy uncle in the Republican Party’s attic. He is not a principled libertarian like, say, Steve Forbes. Rather, as I noted in this post, where I likened him to Pee-Wee Herman, Paul has a rather sinister history as a hater and conspiracy theorist. He has no business being taken seriously as a Presidential contender–and that’s before we even start talking about his inadequate vision of national security or his disgraceful performance in the 2008 Presidential debates.

Now it’s true that Paul has some pretty deep connections to some fringe groups in American politics — for instance, his former aid happens to be the founder of the creepy, authoritarian Oath Keepers group. But is that really any worse than the Moose Eater Formerly Known as the Alaskan Governor? For chrissake, her husband was part of a damned secessionist party!

No, what really upsets the wingnuts about Paul isn’t that he hangs out with gun-toting anti-government radicals but rather that he’s opposed to The Precious, a.k.a. the state of perpetual warfare that gives the wingnuts’ pathetic, mediocre lives a sense of blood-stained purpose. For people like Hindy and Daniel Pipes war is always the answer. It sends a thrill up their leg. Every minute not spent launching missiles at foreign nations is a minute where their collective libido continues on its downward trajectory into an impotent death spiral. For people like this, it’s perfectly sane to use mere video footage to diagnose Terri Schiavo’s condition on the Senate floor or to claim that tears can give you AIDS. But to oppose a state of perpetual warfare against swarthy foreigners? Shit, son, that’s crazy talk.

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War is always the answer

Fareed Zakaria dissects the ramblings of Dr. Strangemoose:

It is important to recognize the magnitude of what people like Palin are advocating. The United States is being asked to launch a military invasion of a state that poses no imminent threat to America, without sanction from any international body and with few governments willing to publicly endorse such an action. Al-Qaeda and its ilk would present it as the third American invasion of a Muslim nation in a decade, proof positive that the United States is engaged in a war of civilizations. Moderate Arab states and Muslim governments everywhere would be on the defensive. And as Washington has surely come to realize, wars unleash forces that cannot be predicted or controlled.

Meh, I don’t know. I think there would be some clever ways to get around the “third-Islamic-country-in-a-decade” meme.

For instance: We could have the CIA replace every single atlas. globe and map in the entire world with new versions that merged Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan into one big country called “Iranqistan.” That way, we could say that we’ve always been at war with Iranqistan and could claim with justification that we are simply moving the war from the east and west of the country into the center, similar to how the Allied powers came from both the east and west to engulf Berlin in World War II. It could work is all I’m sayin’.

As for the rest of the stuff about destabilizing allied Arab governments… well heck, that’s just par for the course in heightening the contradictions, eh, comrades? Once those governments fall to Islamic radicals, we can justify invading them as well!

War: It’s always the answer.

UPDATE: The hits just keep on coming:

Q: What about ordering a village of resistants to be massacred? … Is that a power that the president could legally–

Yoo: “Yeah. Although, let me say this. So, certainly, that would fall within the commander-in-chief’s power over tactical decisions.

Q: To order a village of civilians to be [exterminated]?

Yoo: Sure.

Q: Can the president create a bolder that’s too heavy for him to lift — and then lift it up anyway?

Yoo: Sure.

Q: Can the president order the military to go back in time and kill Baby Jesus in the manger?

Yoo: I don’t see why not.

Q: Can the president violate the laws of physics by creating matter out of empty space?

Yoo: Oh hell yes.

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Will wingnuttery ever go too far?

Egad. I never thought it would come to this:

In an apparent reference to John McCain, Beck condemned a “guy in the Republican Party who says his favorite president is Theodore Roosevelt.” He then read disapprovingly the Roosevelt quote that “we grudge no man a fortune in civil life if it is honorably obtained and well used . . . so long as the gaining represents benefit to the community.”

“Is this what the Republican Party stands for?” Beck demanded. He was answered with boos and cries of “no!” “It’s big government, it’s a socialist utopia and we need to address it as if it is a cancer.”

I have mixed views on Teddy Roosevelt myself. He did some good stuff at home — Busting the trusts! National parks! Sanitation standards at meat-packing plants! — while leading a horrific neocons-on-’roids foreign policy abroad.

But dudes. You’ve already been engaged in a death struggle with one Roosevelt (Franklin) for the past several decades. Are you sure it’s really time to open up a second front? And once you’ve vanquished those two, how far back will you go? Does Abe Lincoln get tossed over the side for his failure to protect states’ rights (I’m pretty sure he does, yes)? Will you guys rethink your adoration of Thomas Jefferson when you realize that he was at heart just a hippie farmer boy? How much further will Teh Crazy take you?

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