Iraq was a little bit like the recent passage of the healthcare bill. Once it happened, there really is no going back. (You can admit that now, can’t you?) You make the best of what you can.
Well, let’s see. One of those things will result in more of this:
While the other one resulted in a lot of this:
I know which one I’d like to see more of.
Say what you will about the /b/tards, but they are at their absolute best when screwing with a wacko Christian militia’s forum boards (very NSFW) left unattended because all the moderators were arrested for plotting to kill a bunch of cops.
Shorter Msgr. Ross Xavier Pius Douthat, S.J., O.P., O.F.M., S.S.J., Th.D+, The New York Fucking Times Pope-Ed Page
A Time for Contrition
*Douthat was born in 1979 and apparently gained his deep expertise on the zeitgeist of the 70s entirely from reading a single bad review of the recent revival of Hair on Broadway.
Erick’s interview with Howie Kurtz is a very special moment in American history:
KURTZ: Erick Erickson, welcome.
ERICKSON: Thanks for having me.
KURTZ: You have been getting hammered by liberal commentators since CNN decided to bring you on as a contributor to John King’s program, and it all revolves around the things that you have written. So let’s just go through some of them.
ERICKSON: Right.
KURTZ: On the administration’s health care spokeswoman, you wrote, “Linda Douglass is really the Joseph Goebbels of the health care shop.”
You’re comparing her to a notorious Nazi?
ERICKSON: Yes, to propaganda.
Now, I have no problem with calling everyone you dislike a Nazi. It may not be factually accurate all of the time but it does offer some sense of self-righteous emotional gratification at the end of a long day.
But then again, I’m also not being invited on CNN to be the voice of Real America like Erick is. I’m not sure I’m anymore in touch with the average Real American than Erickson is, but I doubt they spend their days thinking of new and creative ways to compare everyone they dislike to Hitler. You’d like to think that most Real Americans have social lives of some kind, after all.
KURTZ: The first lady, you wrote the following — the headline was, “Is Obama shagging hookers behind the media’s back?” And you write, “I assume not. I assume that Obama’s Marxist harpy wife would go Lorena Bobbit on him should he even think about it.”
Why would you describe Michelle Obama in those terms?
ERICKSON: Well, you know, back during the campaign trail in 2008, a lifetime ago, frankly, in blogging, I was very passionate, very aggressive in defending my side.
“Way, way back in the reckless days of my youth, a.k.a., a year and a half ago…”
ERICKSON: And at the time that I wrote that, the Eliot Spitzer story was breaking, and the point was — distracted by the language, obviously — that Barack Obama was as much a creature of the media as Eliot Spitzer was. Neither have been investigated.
This is simply glorious. I love the way Erickson turns the question back on the wicked liberal media: “Oh yeah? Well you guys have no evidence that Obama ISN’T shagging hookers! Why don’t you investigate it, huh?” If only some enterprising liberal smart-ass would use a similar construction when interviewed by Kurtz in the future for their thoughts on the Kaus for Senate campaign…
KURTZ: Well, let’s deal with the David Souter comment. When Justice Souter announced his retirement, you said, you wrote, “The nation loses the only goat (EXPLETIVE) child molester ever to serve on the Supreme Court.”
Do you regret writing that?
ERICKSON: Yes, absolutely. It was about the dumbest thing I’ve done.
No. No it wasn’t. The dumbest thing you did, for my money, was threatening to privatize your own city’s police force. For the life of me, I don’t understand how that didn’t earn you a lifetime’s supply of full-body cavity searches.
ERICKSON: You know, counterintuitively, I guess, some good came out of it.
There’s always an upside to calling someone a goat (EXPLETIVE) child molester.
ERICKSON: It was the very first time I realized, Howard, how what I do for a living affects my family as well. Having my 3-year-old heckled and booed in the front yard by a neighbor, having my wife be berated at her office, you know, being a blogger, up until that moment I always considered I was just a guy chatting with friends, even on Twitter.
In other words: “The upside made me realize how much of a victim I am.”
Now the kicker, from the beginning of the segment:
KURTZ: Erick Erickson made his debut this week as a CNN contributor. He is a Georgia lawyer, a church deacon…
I would say that Erick does a lot of repenting each week, but he probably thinks that smearing his enemies without restraint is all part of the Lord’s Plan. What a maroon.
Destined to be a “No-he-di’nt” moment for the ages, Erick Ericksdotter attempts a line-by-line critique of a Josh Marshall post. Erickson’s effort at this recalls, sadly enough, the epic, if lop-sided, Zimmer-Martinez brawl in Game 3 of the 2003 ALCS, except that Marshall doesn’t even have to fight back for Erickson to fall down on his own capacious butt.
Josh Marshall and the Democrats have descended into rubber and glue political commentary flat out blaming the Republicans for inciting violence, much of it fabricated and ignoring the Democrats’ own rhetoric and violence.
And, with the “rubber and glue” business, Erickson has descended into third-grade playground political commentary. All he’s missing is the obligatory “nyah, nyah, nyah.”
First of all, I would point out that it was the Democrats who just took over 1/6th of the American economy despite upwards of 56% of the American public being opposed. And they expect people to . . . what . . . clap?
No, of course not, we fully expected that opponents of health care reform would cut propane lines at the home of a Congressman’s relative and threaten to kill legislators who voted for the bill. But, er, Erick, if your point is that the notion of Republican violence is “fabricated” by the Democrats, it is probably not a good idea to lead off with an argument that the Democrats deserved it. The reason for Erickson’s short-lived career as a lawyer probably was that closing argument he made where he said that his client did not murder the victim but, if he did, it was in self-defense.
As I said earlier today, violence is unacceptable, but none of us should be surprised — especially the left, which feeds off riots, protest, and molotov cocktail parties every time they strongly oppose something. The Weather Underground was not a Republican insurgency at the Weather Channel.
Oh where, oh where, to begin? I suppose by observing that Erickson has confused a weather website with a decades old terrorist organization known as the Weathermen, later known as the Weather Underground Organization. And, of course, that the Weathermen weren’t Democrats. And that Erickson had to go back more than forty years to find an example of violence to support his argument. And that protests aren’t violence. Not to mention that Democrats didn’t have molotov cocktail parties after the GOP passed Bush’s tax cuts for the rich.
And now? Police say the bullet that hit Eric Cantor’s office was most likely random, but it is not definitive.
Right, it’s not definitive. Even though the Richmond police report said that the bullet landed on the floor a few feet from the window at 1 a.m. in the morning, there remains the definite possibility that some Democratic sniper flew by in a helicopter and fired a bullet at an empty room in the middle of the night without being noticed by anyone. There’s also a good possibility that Al Gore himself was responsible for all the car bomb explosions in Iraq.
And, now, for Erick the Redneck’s coup de “gras,” in a footnote no less:
I had intended to put in one more clear expression that perpetrators of violence should be arrested, prosecuted, and sent to jail, but no matter what I say the Democrats and left will say I am actually encouraging and excusing violence. They have a vested intereste [sic] to play up the violence and, perversely, do exactly what they are accusing the GOP of doing — incite it so that the media narrative that started building on Monday highlighting all the immediate taxes and pain while the benefits don’t show up for a few years would disappear and focus instead on the racist angry white men.
Shorter footnote: By mentioning the violence at all, Democrats have become solely responsible for inciting it, so I can say whatever the fuck I want. I am rubber, etc., etc.
At last, all the health reform craziness is winding down. It seemed like we’d never…
…oodstock …oodstock …oodstock [screeching dragster tires] [explosions, Godzilla bellowing]
…aturday …aturday …aturday [sped-up maniacal laughter] [blatting funny car engines]
With Motels & RV Parks Full, Conservatives & Tea Party Activists Turn to Houseboats & Tents for “Showdown in Searchlight”
Ach.
So wait. Are we just primed at this point by a term like “Conservatives & Tea Party Activists” to expect sort of a catalogue deraisonné of human folly, or is there something a bit unnerving about the procession of nouns in that passage? Like, if that’s the narration over the opening credits, aren’t we spoiling for an Act Two that opens upon that ur-wingnut condition of slapstick self-tragedy — in an opening montage, for instance, of Spike Jones’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy” intercut with X-ray prints of rectal foreign bodies?1
I mean, hmm:
With Motels & RV Parks Full, Conservatives & Tea Party Activists Turn into Hoseboats & Pitch Tents for “Chowder Chowdown With Both Hands And a Searchlight”
That actually seems less weird, but I guess I’ve been doing this for long enough that everything seems less weird.
Curtis Dahlgren, RenewAmerica:
You can’t tell the professor much if he thinks he’s funny (part 2)[...] WE NEVER SAID that an asteroid, or hemorrhoids, would hit the moment you signed the FedMed HELLth Bill. What we said was that the pot with the frogs in it would now be put on the front burner.
Fine, I take it back.
It’s being hailed as a “Conservative Woodstock” – a historic event in the tea party movement where thousands upon thousands of patriots will gather in Harry Reid’s hometown of Searchlight, NV and demand an end to his term in public office.
This Chex Party Mix on Pop Tarts sandwich that we made is being hailed as a “Junk Food Aire Helado de Parmesano con Muesli en el estilo de Ferran Adrià,” as we just hailed it. Chom-chom-chom, burp, ahh! A historic event in ourselves-made-cuisine-eating history, if we do say so chez us. We demand an end to this glass not having Dr. Pepper in it.
So many people are heading to Searchlight, NV for this historic event (which takes place this Saturday, March 27th) that the local motels and campgrounds are now totally full.
So many drunkards are staggering toward a tent in order drunkenly to insert a light bulb in their rectum that the rectums in that tent are now totally full of that light bulb. Wait, what?
Ah, never mind. Narratives, think pieces, and news stories about the event are turning up, as well as the contemporary right’s signature after-action leavings of blame-engineering, lying accusations of lying, and cowardly tattling.
Above: Needs T.P. for bunghole
“But it says it’s a Woodstock,” one might remark. “As such, are things not ultimately all about the music?” Yes they are, and that’s why we’ve collected this treasury of Searchlight ‘Conservative Woodstock’ performers, as listed in the official program!
Tonstant Weader fwowed up.2
1 In my experience with evenings, whensoever foolishness is invited in for a drinkie, regret will arrive as a montage of imagined self-embarrassments atop Maureen McGovern’s “Morning After,” from The Poseidon Adventure.
That’s a kind of literalism that I can’t stand, by the way, avoiding (e.g.) the radio and TV every New Years Day so that U2 doing “New Years Day” can fail, primarily, to happen to me; and secondarily to begin with those brief piano phrases that it begins with, and then assert that “all is quiet on New Years Day,” creating an alarming Möbius of causality when in an immediately subsequent moment my hand arrives at the switch that makes it be quiet.
It’s almost worse than those brief piano phrases that have for so long warned that Bob Seger’s voice would momentarily emit from the stereo, suggesting an appropriate remedy to the heartbreak caused by itself. “Juh stake the sold wrecker, Zoff the Chef,” Seger’s voice counsels as the switch is arrived at by my hand. “OMG Seger,” I remark as I take from the shelf a number of old records, intending to sit and listen to them by myself because of a lack of the same soul in the kind of music that day.
It’s almost worse, even, than those bars of trebly, oddly hi-hat-driven reggae that have for so long warned that Sting is nigh, and along with him a kind of literalism that I can’t stand. The instruments pause on a chord, and the overtones ring down, and into the gap he appears. “Roxanne,” he announces, for indeed the song is called that. “Hey, what’s this song called again?” I will sometimes ask in the following few seconds of vocal music before another pause comes due. “Roxanne,” he answers before resuming the lyrics, and indeed he speaks truly, for such is the song’s name. “So you say the song is called ‘Rumpity-Bumpy, O! Cucumber Lumber?’” I say as the music elapses again. “RAAAHX-anne,” he grouses, annoyed, rejoining a song that to my mind should have been called something else, because to call it “Roxanne” is to give in to the onomatopœia of the remembered sound — as if many or most death metal songs were to be titled, “CÖÖÖKIE, ÅÅRÜM-NÜM-NÜM-NÜM-NÜM,” and Black Eyed Peas songs would often be called things like “Ooby-Ooby-Ooby-Ah,” because of the ease with which will.i.am may step onto such a metrical pattern and ride it like an airport walkway all the way through a song and out the back end, onto a pile of unclaimed will.i.ams. As if the name of that perpetual Romantics song of +6 unstopping-already, which is on some new TV commercial again, were “Hey!”
2 Cf. P. Dotty.
Matt Welch of Reason dialed up the Chatroulette earlier in the week, only to land on the besotted albino non-partisan blogatrix of his dreams, Ann Althouse. As you will see, the conversation is halting at first, the flirtations clumsy, until Ann offers up the coy declaration that she loves being covered in ‘goo’. Matt, no dummy and sensing her receptiveness, piles in with some idle Obama-bashing chit-chat as a show of his male plumage before regaling his would-be conquest with anecdotal tales of HCR proponents’ lack of statistical proof for their position.
All is going smoothly and it sure looks like the Reason offices are about to get splashed with some Welch’s fruit juice if you know what I mean, and I think you do. But even as Ann reaches for that fifth glass of Merlot that usually signals it’s bow-chicka-wow-wow time for hoary old emus, Matt completely ruins his chances with, get this — an out-of-nowhere story about his recent pool party with Mickey Kaus and Eugene Volokh! Talk about killing the mood!
Sure, Matt and Ann do continue to drone on for another 47 minutes about how stupid liberals are, but their hearts aren’t really in it anymore. We predict with confidence — no second date. And just to prove that this really happened, below is photo intertubes evidence of Matt demonstrating to Ann some of the monkeyshines the boys got up to in the swimming pool. Unconfirmed but almost certainly true is that goats were involved.
Above: Oh, forget it.
Steve “Stewie” Forbes, FOX News:
Could a Chavez-Style Media Crackdown Be Coming Our Way?
1 Oh, forget it.
Megan McArdle has been in a mathematical uproar since HCR passed, honking on about how she’s 95 percent certain that three-fourths of half of a third of Ezra Klein’s predictions about a baker’s dozen of 17-sixteenths of the cosine of future mortality rates are eleventy percent likely to be a sham. We can’t quibble, but then this:
But the biggest problem is how much we’d then be spending per year to get this added benefit. I think it’s entirely plausible that we’ll be saving 3,000 people a year. But 3,000 people a year, at a cost of $200 billion, is almost $70 million per life saved.
Well, $200 billion is indeed a big number in simoleons, material even, but we feel obliged to point out that McMegan is freaked out about a per capita yearly expenditure of $666 on the part of the American personage to achieve this, which … well, you have to wonder if she jiggered the numbers a bit to get so Satan-y with it.
At any rate, the cost and/or savings that we’ll eventually associate with health care reform is important stuff. We passed this bill (and continue to hope for much more by way of HCR) because we think it’ll lead to better overall health outcomes for the country’s citizenry.
But that’s not all that this is about. It’s also about a much-needed bit of equity in an increasingly stratified society, where wealth disparity has been accelerating like a runaway freight train in recent decades.
In short, the belief that we’re offered a fair shake despite the accidents of our assorted births is not something that anybody’s figured out a way to put a price tag on. But we do know that America has had a pretty good run of it in the past 100 to 200 years, and a big factor in that streak has been an idea amongst the people that — contra other, shittier places — any one of us can hit it big via grit and keeping our nose clean and a bit of hard work. And that even if hitting it big didn’t happen, we’d still have a solid, middle-class peg upon which to hang our hat.
It’s not clear if that communal faith in America’s willingness to give everybody a fair shake was the biggest factor in our success as a nation, or if it was trumped in its beneficence by various historical accidents — geography, resources, the convenient self-destruction of Europe just as industrialization and its fruits were on the cusp of peaking in the 20th century — but most of us Americans agree that at the very least, it’s made us who we are, that it is the very stuff of our national mythology. And we continued to believe in that story for a long, long time.
But then something happened to crush that healthy attitude — or rather, fermented over time until one day we woke up and realized that everything had gone to shit. More and more of us were fucked in a merciless system that shat buckets on you if you slipped up just a couple times, or were born with a hole in your heart or with asthma or as a woman with working ovaries and a natural desire to fuck, or otherwise didn’t hit that increasingly improbable succession of lucky streaks at the crap table of life that gave a vanishing few the run of the place. Our great middle class kept getting smaller, until it wasn’t as much of a bulwark against the general hopelessness and cynicism that’s always knocking at the door, even in the best of times.
But, as any study of probability would predict, a few people continued to hit the lucky streaks against all odds, collected those overflowing buckets of extra chits that signaled they were winners and that the rest of us chumps milling about and coughing into our sleeves were losers, and this kept getting worse and more pronounced until this great and mythological haven of opportunity, America, was in fact home to a greater gulf between the very richest and the working poor than even the most outrageous and cruel satrapies existing in exotic tales could ever purport to match.
And yet the McMegans of the world, not quite big winners in the new arrangement but rather apologists for them, still insist — perhaps out of stubbornness or pique — that the old social glue that held us together still ought to do, despite it having long been eroded. That ethics long since abandoned by those who hold all the cards should be upheld by those who are being demonstrably gamed in every possible way. That what we need isn’t a radical reappraisal of our ancient national mythology befitting our new, cruel circumstances, but a reaffirmation of its most base and exploitable tenets.
It’s true — we can’t know for sure if the health care bill just passed will eventually yield the returns its advocates hope for, in the strictest statistical measures. Probably not. It wasn’t even our first or second choice for dealing with the problem. But one thing it is, at long last, is a visible rebellion against the cruel jungle law of three-plus decades that relentlessly sought greater spoils for the few at the expense of the many.
You can’t put a price on a return to sanity. You can’t assign an exact dollar figure to a strong and encouraged middle class. You can’t measure the economic value of a citizenry’s restored faith in a livable baseline for their prosperity when emerging from an era where no floor for that basic security seemed to exist at all.
Megan can’t see that, but it’s hardly surprising. She’s fucking thick.
That’s ‘young’ as in from 2003, when our old, old friend Kitty, recently in the news again, was still able to jitterbug, to grow her own oats for hot, homemade Cheerios, and to reliably reach the second round in the annual Pie- and Hitler-Eating Contest at Our Lady of… Wait a minute, Hitler Eating Contest?
Above: “…And we hope you like frauin’ too.” 2
Kitty Werthmann, Sioux Falls Argus Leader:
Freedoms can disappear in a hurry if we aren’t carefulThose of us who sailed past the Statue of Liberty came to a country of unbelievable freedom and opportunity.
That depends upon which way they were sailing. But it’s also true that those who sailed into the Statue of Liberty would’ve come to a country of unbelievable freedom and opportunity,3 unless they could believe the freedom and opportunity.
Since as we’ve seen, Werthmann can believe any old darn thing, this is a gotcha, and she is docked two Hitlers.
I lived in Austria under Adolf Hitler’s regime for seven years. Dictatorship did not happen overnight. It was a gradual process starting with national identification cards, which we had to carry with us at all times.
You could say that the gradual process started with the March 11, 1938 seizure of the Austrian government by Nazi Party hacks, or you could take a more concrete view and say that the gradual process started with the March 12, 1938 rollout of the German military, who moved across the largely demilitarized Austria as if they owned the place, which ipso facto they did. We’ve studied the dates and times back and forth (the Wehrmacht were apparently early risers — all the more reason the Nazi juggernaut, whatever that word even freaking means — needed to be stopped). And it, um, pretty much does seem to be the case that it happened “overnight.”
But then, you could say that the gradual process was the rise of Nazi influence in Austria culminating in the March 9, 1938 announcement by Nazi opponent and right-wing dictator Kurt Schuschnigg that Austria had its own Christian Austrofascism already, thank you Mr. Grouchy McHitler, but that he would reluctantly hold a vote on the unification question just to quiet things down already, jeez, can’t a guy preside over a goddamn fascist regime4 around here?
And in such a case no, that dictatorship didn’t happen overnight, for on March 4, 1933, when Austrian chancellor and subsequent Vaterländische Front founder Engelbert Dollfuß dissolved the parliament and became the regime’s first dictator, it was daytime.
We could not board a bus or train without our ID card. Gun registration followed, with a lot of talk about gun safety and hunting accidents. Since the government already knew who owned firearms, confiscation followed under threat of capital punishment.
Ah, it’s the German Weapons Act of 1938, in which rifles and shotguns were actually deregulated, among other whoopsie-doodles. And then came the confiscation. That was in 1945, and ‘the government’ was the, um, Allies.
Freedom of speech was the next target. Free speech was curtailed with the enforcement of the federal police (Gestapo). With a large network of informers, people were afraid to say anything political, even in their own homes.
This was entirely different during the so-called Austrofascist period, when only Social Democrats, Marxists, Nazis, Anarchists, and anticlericals were afraid to say anything political, for fear of being thrown into the concentration camps set up in 1933 to contain political dissidents.
The liberal mindset in America has promoted gun control for a long time and is beginning to advocate national identification cards.
I’m imagining a bulky old cathedral radio with a pulsating brain inside. “Wobble-wobble-wobble!” [boing, skreek, white noise] “You’re listening to WIWW, America’s wobbliest rock. Stay tuned for more gun contro…um, ah, national ID cards, plus a Tracy Chapman rock bloc!” [scree! static, canned radio noises]
And the pulsating brain is like, “Alright! Woo! You got a fast car… I want a ticket to any-where. Maybe we can make a deal…”
Law-abiding American citizens should not have to carry national identification cards. Aliens and non-citizens should be required to carry ID cards.
Ev’rybody scapes the Jews,
Some-time.
There’s no excep-tion to the ruse…
Even their driver’s licenses should be different than a citizen’s driver’s license.
“Wass that say, mang?”
“‘Not valid for bouncy ranflas or scrapes with less than 4″ ground clearance, or with excessive kaboom in the ka-booty, or bass in the trunk.’ That means bass in the trunk, Señor Upscale Holmes.”
“Aw, mang! If you could drive aroun’ rockin’ the treble, why not kick it to a CD such as Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica? Civilization ‘ud fall, vato.”
“Some say it has, miclo.”
Our government also needs to take strong measures against illegal aliens and tightly close our borders to protect American citizens.
Even though we are in a state of war, we have to protect our civil liberties. While some people need power to secure our freedom, we must be ever-vigilant to maintain a system of checks and balances.
I am sorely disappointed with France and Germany. If it was not for the United States, the French would be speaking German today. And if our troops had not protected Germany, Russian tanks would have rolled all the way to the Rhine River.
Well, if not for the British, who defeated Napoleon, the Germans would have been speaking French, so where does that end? Plus, the shock-horror of ‘speaking German’ seems quaint when you realize that Finland was an Axis country, and might have Finnished us once and for all.
How ungrateful those nations are. We have to stand by our country and our troops. I am grateful that our troops are protecting freedom.
America is the greatest country in the world. After America, there is no place to run.
Not with the dagger of Argentina poised at the heart of Antarctica. That’s what’s keeping the Chthitler from awakening and sounding his pale and fatal oompah tuba, may his oompah tuba soon sound.
1 Cf. Goethe.
2 Cf.
3 I’m just thinking out loud here, but those who flew The Icarus past the Statue of Liberty came first to the Forbidden Zone, and then to Ape City. This is funny because if you work out the distances, Ape City seems to be on the site of present-day Union, NJ.
4 Austria, weird in many ways, sits geographically as a buffer between the beer, no-mustache, morning-person, and skinny-woman/fat-man society of Germany, and the wine, mustache, evening-person, skinny-man/fat-woman society of Italy, while lacking the compensations granted the Swiss of mutual incomprehension and remoteness from the Croatio-Albanian moonshine and mustache-woman juggernaut. Whatever that word, etc..
In the 1930s, situated thusly as well as between the inverted cultural extremes of a Hitler (a beer-abstaining, bemustached, skinny-man evening-person operating among Germans) and a Mussolini (a wine-abstaining, clean-shaven, fat-man morning-person operating among Italians), Austria was the site of vicious intra-fascist conflicts as the ideology’s harsh and emerging Germanic mode displaced the corporatist Italianate one that had shed much of its radical mystique since attaining power in the 1920s.
The eventual losers were what we’d now see as reasonable or moderate fascists, as ‘conservatives’ before the modern term emerged, who believed as most people did in the ’20s and ’30s that the modern, industrial society faced a choice between the technological progress and future-forwardness displayed in The Italian Miracle, and the social progress and egalitarian ideals of Marxism, an ideology then operating under what focus-groupers of later decades would call ‘rising negatives,’ with Stalinism to account for and a Stalinized Comintern with which to do so. The winners were what we’d now see as Freeper-Teabagger fanatics of no particular conviction but of ever-certain persuasion, attracted to the gleeful anger and spite-driven iconoclasm of the German NSDAP, or Nazi Party.
When Dollfuß (who incidentally, at 4’11,” wins the giant lollypop as the Littlest Dictator) was shot and killed by domestic Nazi party haxxorz in 1934, Mussolini threatened war with Germany, while rioting broke out in northern Italy as Nazis attempted various shows of force and power grabs there. By the time of the Anschluss, in 1938, Italy had lost its claim as the seat of modernity, and was pulled into the Axis as though by force of suction, leaving as the defining political choice of the period the one between Nazism and Stalinism — i.e., between two ecosystems in which the Freeper/Teatard reigned as apex predator. At least until the Hitler-Stalin pact (and the war) simplified things even further.
Oh wait, this just in: Gleiwitz Radio Station Attacked By Poles.
From the “shit you can’t make up” files:
We Can’t Let Bart Stupak Go Without A Judas Like Parting Gift
We can’t Bart Stupak go without a parting gift. Judas, after all, got 30 silver coins to sell out our Lord. Stupak needs something for selling out all the children sent off to be slaughtered thanks to his “compromise” that any President can pen away to oblivion — notwithstanding the questionable legal assumptions behind it.
Let’s send him 100 silver coins. It’s only a $4.00 investment on your part.
Hey, I want some silver coins too! How many kids to I need to abort to qualify???
(Also, CNN: You picked a real winner. May I suggest Mark Noonan next?)
Above: Teabagger-embracing conservapundit, self-conception.
John “The Manliest LOLcow” Hindrocket, Esq.sez:
In large part, the current focus on threats of violence is aimed at the tea partiers, just as they were accused, apparently falsely, of racism. It is not hard to understand the Democrats’ motives; the tea parties are the most vital force, and likely the most popular force, in American politics, so smearing them is mandatory. But anyone who has attended a tea party rally will consider laughable the idea that the movement somehow tends toward violence.
The tea parties, and conservative pundits’ reaction to them, was the subject of Glenn Reynolds’ interview of Jonah Goldberg on PJTV. It’s a fun conversation between two very smart guys. Glenn posed the question, “why are so many conservative pundits wimps?” But he made clear that he wasn’t talking about web-based pundits like us. Or him.
It is important for conservative leaders to embrace the tea party movement, and it seems that nearly all do. For what it is worth, I do not consider David Brooks to be a conservative leader. To be a leader, you need to have at least a handful of followers.
Above: Teabagger-embracing conservapundit, reality.
Lulz. Now there’s too much stupid and too many lies in his post for me to bother with unpacking, but this little digression got my attention. I want Sadlynaughts to know I suffered through the entire 16 minutes of this piece of crap, and that’s not including the several second introduction/solicitation to register with PJTV by Stephen Green, aka Patrick Bateman. But I never heard Perfesser Corncob or Pantload call anyone a wimp, though you can tell Reynolds hates David Brooks. I might have missed it; whatever; I’m disappointed. Still, it’s what Hindrocket heard, which says something about him — and them. Obviously, for Hindrocket, it requires some kind of manly-man ramrod Prussian strength for a wingnut to support the Teabaggers, which he finds lacking in the Emessem wingers and Republican establishment types, but finds in abundance in 82nd Chairborne members like himself.
I have to say I’m impressed. He’s so butch. I bet he likes gladiator movies.
Thomas Friedman, The New York Times:
A Tea Party Without Nuts
† Cf. Frank, Thomas, “Harsh Realm, Mr. Sulzberger” The Baffler (Winter-Spring, 1993) 12-13
‡ Mr. Friedman explains the broken political system in Washington:
My definition of broken is simple. It is a system in which Republicans will be voted out for doing the right thing (raising taxes when needed) and Democrats will be voted out for doing the right thing (cutting services when needed). When your political system punishes lawmakers for the doing the right things, it is broken.
Our definition of ‘broken’ is also simple. It is a system in which Republicans will be voted in for doing the wrong thing (subverting the principal rôle of representative government, viz. protecting the rights of citizens against lawless and unaccountable private power), and in which Democrats will be voted out for not doing the right thing (raising and deploying sufficient quantities of Hell).
Americans are often motivated to vote for the party that’s doing a thing, and fall easily into a fan relationship with winners who are out for the win, as opposed to losers who are being scored upon. The right figured this out sometime in the ’90s, and have since learned to either spin every outcome as a victory (the rational transaction that leads to headlines of the familiar category, ‘Democratic Landslide: Good For Republicans?’) or, often more usefully, to spin a non-win outcome as a shocking and brazen attack by sneering liberal malefactors who have trampled every rule of human decency under their muddy clogs right in the middle of your good carpet, forcing decent Americans to rise up heroically as one to protect the last precious shreds of the American freedoms that are being spit on and giggled at by traitor leftist miscreant bla, etc. wah-wah, accuse, threaten, preen. That is, they present failure as an incitement to victory, as a press opportunity for WWE trash talk and a chance to let issues drop and to broadcast the main message: The liberal evildoers at war with America remain on the loose.
That is, pace Friedman, when your political system rewards lawmakers for disrupting your political system, it is broken, bonked, borked, brokez0red, baked, Brookingsed, and in sum, we are through a glass, Blankley.
Above: “Happy Warrior” Trike Force to teh rescue.
Shorter Erick The Red Erickson
Red State White Trash
“A note from Congressman Randy Neugebauer”
Shorter Jimdolph The Red-Nosed Pundit Geraghty
National Review: Campaign Spot
“Please, Democratic Donors, Please Give To These Hopeless Candidates”
Periodically, about every full moon, some wingnut will resurrect the tired old trope that liberals have no ideas while conservatives are all about ideas. Last time I bothered to deal with it, the culprit was David Frum, but I’ve also seen it lately from Dr. Kraphammer, Darth Kristol, Pantload, and much of the rest of the whole goddamn Hee Haw gang. Though you can be reasonably sure that it’s flat-out wrong, lying-lie wrong, Orwellian wrong just because of who’s saying it (not to mention the wtf? merits of the argument per se), they never, ever stop trying.
I’ve been reading and re-reading good old AJP Taylor lately, smacking around that same argument advanced by his wingnuts, a.k.a. Tories:
[E]ven in the twentieth century the Tories, despite their loyal phrases, were responsible for the only real subversion of modern times, the Ulster rebellion of 1914. If Toryism means anything, it rejects the sovereignty of parliament and the doctrine of the Social Contract… In practice, as Macaulay observed, Toryism amounts to no more than defending Whig achievements of a previous generation. In the world of ideas, the Tories have had to make do with unprincipled adventurers, like Bolingbroke and Disraeli, or to borrow from the other side. Burke, whom [Keith] Feiling calls ‘the largest mind ever given to politics in our island’ and ‘the inspiration of a second party of Tories,’ was a corrupt Whig hack. A century later, the Tories learnt their imperialism from the renegade radical, [Joe] Chamberlain. It would be unfair to blame Toryism for being short of ideas. Ideas are an affair of the mind, and Toryism distrusts the mind in politics. In essence, Toryism rests of doubt in human nature; it distrusts improvement, clings to traditional institutions, prefers the past to the future. It is a sentiment rather than a principle.
– “Tory History”, May 1950, The New Statesman
Disraeli riveted on our political life the conception that politics consist entirely in two parties fighting for office. These two parties were to represent not programmes but interests. What interests Disraeli did not much mind. Sometimes he talked of the Conservative Party as ‘the landed interest’; sometimes he appealed to all who had ‘a stake in the country’ [cf. Nixon's "a piece of the action" - HTML]; in practice his party was an alliance between the City and the mob. None of this mattered. The important thing was the struggle for power — a tradition which the Conservative Party has faithfully observed to this day. It is true also to Disraeli’s tradition in not knowing what to do with power when it has got it. To catch the other side bathing and make off with their clothes is still its only resource.
– “Dizzy”, January 1955, The New Statesman
Now the cf. here, as it were, is the modern repugs’ obstructionism vis-a-vis… pretty much everything. Macauley’s famous observation holds as true today as ever, except for the fact that modern wingnuts are less sincere than those of his day — or Taylor’s for that matter. Wingnuts at the time insisted that Social Security amounted to the lash of the dictator; now they claim to be for it and protectors of it — mostly disingenuously, of course, since they also want to privatize it. Wingnuts, including St. Reagan and St. Goldwater, insisted at the time that Medicare was the tool of the Marxist devil and would eventually destroy America; during the healthcare fight they cited their desire to protect Medicare as a partial reason why they opposed ObamaCare. Lastly, and most infamously, wingnuts claim to have always been for the Civil Rights victories of the 1960′s, but to the small extent that such victories owe to Republican support, it is to Liberal Republicans, a species wingnuts have driven to extinction (concomitantly, they welcomed the Dixiecrats who continued to oppose civil rights); and their arguments are usually only made in the service of some lame gotcha at the supposed expense of repentant, reformed segregationists like Robert Byrd.
To the extent that they have any “new” ideas they get them from former leftists, aka neocons, who, being what they are, like to have a bit of fun playing games with dialectics. Christopher Hitchens, for instance, and even before his complete transformation after 9/11 into a Kristolmethodist, liked to sneer that the environmentalist movement was “essentially conservative.” After 9/11, of course, he accused everyone opposed to blowing Iraq to bits of “conservative” or “reactionary” sentiment; this sort of thing was then amplified by creeps like Oliver Kamm and the gang of useless idiots at Hurry Up Harry. Anyway, whether about war or about economics, this crap is all of a piece: neocons and neoliberals are merely types of wingnuts; put another way, they are enemies of — destroyers of — social democracy, our work, us. As Taylor said, if it is about anything, it’s about the rejection of the Social Contract. Our ideological ancestors beat theirs to an admirable extent, but the children, our coevals, keep smashing at the result, the Welfare State as idea and in practice, which puts us on the defensive. This is a fact of posture, nothing more; but of course it doesn’t stop wingnuts of all stripes accusing us of embracing what is “old” at the expense of what they’re peddling, which they allege is new and fresh. Tony Judt is good on this:
In the contemporary United States, at a time of growing unemployment, a jobless man or woman is not a full member of the community. In order to receive even the exiguous welfare payments available, they must first have sought and, where applicable, accepted employment at whatever wage is on offer, however low the pay and distasteful the work. Only then are they entitled to the consideration and assistance of their fellow citizens.
Why do so few of us condemn such “reforms”—enacted under a Democratic president? Why are we so unmoved by the stigma attaching to their victims? Far from questioning this reversion to the practices of early industrial capitalism, we have adapted all too well and in consensual silence—in revealing contrast to an earlier generation. But then, as Tolstoy reminds us, there are “no conditions of life to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees them accepted by everyone around him.”
This “disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition…is…the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” Those are not my words. They were written by Adam Smith, who regarded the likelihood that we would come to admire wealth and despise poverty, admire success and scorn failure, as the greatest risk facing us in the commercial society whose advent he predicted. It is now upon us.
[...]
We must revisit the ways in which our grandparents’ generation responded to comparable challenges and threats. Social democracy in Europe, the New Deal, and the Great Society here in the US were explicit responses to the insecurities and inequities of the age. Few in the West are old enough to know just what it means to watch our world collapse.[7] We find it hard to conceive of a complete breakdown of liberal institutions, an utter disintegration of the democratic consensus. But it was just such a breakdown that elicited the Keynes–Hayek debate and from which the Keynesian consensus and the social democratic compromise were born: the consensus and the compromise in which we grew up and whose appeal has been obscured by its very success.
… Rather than seeking to restore a language of optimistic progress, we should begin by reacquainting ourselves with the recent past. The first task of radical dissenters today is to remind their audience of the achievements of the twentieth century, along with the likely consequences of our heedless rush to dismantle them.
The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. Social democrats, characteristically modest in style and ambition, need to speak more assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.
The truth is that all wingnut activity is done of the service of the only idea they have, and have always had since the beginning of time, perfectly encapsulated by J.K. Galbraith: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” Everything “new” they offer is just a different spin on this theme.
PS — This, from Judt, is good to throw in the face of the next Reasondroid glibertarian douchenozzle you encounter:
Thus Keynes sought an increased role for the social security state, including but not confined to countercyclical economic intervention. Hayek proposed the opposite. In his 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom, he wrote:
No description in general terms can give an adequate idea of the similarity of much of current English political literature to the works which destroyed the belief in Western civilization in Germany, and created the state of mind in which naziism could become successful.
In other words, Hayek explicitly projected a fascist outcome should Labour win power in England. And indeed, Labour did win. But it went on to implement policies many of which were directly identified with Keynes.
And of course was never fascist. Incidentally, whom does Hayek remind you of here? Ahh. I said it at the time of Pantload’s book’s release and I’ll say it again: Goldberg’s thesis is nothing more than tired glibertarian reiterations of Hayek, but where they had repeatedly scribbled on their chalkboard “According to Hayek, food stamps = totalitarianism”, Pantload stupidly yet, strategically, cleverly substituted the f-bomb, so as to get his own side’s political history off the hook, as it were, and say to liberals in so many words, “I know you are but what am I?”
I’ve long found Confederate Yankee amusing, but his latest ramblings are actually starting to creep me out. Place your bets — how long before he makes headlines for crashing his John Deere rider mower into the Chigger Creek Post Office? I give him three weeks.
HTML sez: Also.
Oh Dow, why hast thou forsaken us?
Dow Finishes Up 100 as Health Care Becomes Law
The Dow advanced more than 100 points Tuesday, despite a mixed assessment on the U.S. housing market, after President Obama signed a comprehensive health care reform package into law.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 103 points, or 1%, to 10,889. The S&P 500 gained 8 points, or 0.7%, to 1174, and the Nasdaq went ahead by 20 points, or 0.8%, to 2415.
Though actually, I’d feel a wee bit better if Obamacare had sent the Dow crashing and reeling into the Earth. The fact that it’s rising during an alleged government takeover of one-sixth of the economy shows that the government isn’t doing a good job of crushing private industry into dust, comrades. Furthermore, there’s this:
Bob Auer, senior portfolio manager for Auer Growth, attributed recent bullishness to the fact that there’s nothing else competing for the money.
“There really is just one thing, and it’s been said before, but it can’t be ignored: There’s nothing competing for the money. It’s not like you can go into a bank and ask for a CD,” Auer said, adding that municipals are a dicey situation, too. “The Fed said it’s going to keep rates low for a long time. They basically turned on the spigot. Nothing is going to compete with the stock market right now.”
I understand why the Fed is keeping monetary policy extremely loose right now since, you know, plunging the economy into a depression is a bad thing. I do worry about the potential for another long period of nonexistent interest rates leading to another bubble involving some stupid bullshit or another. Snatch up those collateralized POG obligations while they’re cheap, fellas!
HTML addz: And regarding another dire wingnut threat/prediction that didn’t come true: Wall Streeters didn’t Go Galt after all.
The other day at AIPAC:
The biggest divergence came in the discussion of “smart power.” Kurtzer said we haven’t done enough. Here, to the audible gasps of some conservatives in the room, he proclaimed that we can’t aspire to promote American values when we have 30 million people without health insurance. (The woman next to me declared in a stage whisper, “And he teaches this at a university.”) And, citing the controversial CENTCOM report, he said that the U.S. military was implicitly arguing that the U.S. has been insufficiently dedicated to resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict. (More crowd murmuring.) He then bemoaned the Iraq war, which had cost so much and in which we had lost so many lives. Kristol joked that he wanted to defend “dumb power” — that is, the indispensible role of American military power. The issue, Kristol said, is what types of policies work — citing the failure of Iran engagement and the Obami’s Middle East approach.
Ya rly cuz “dumb power” worked so well in Iraq, dumbass.
