I still get the San Francisco Chronicle delivered to my door, meaning that when summer arrives and Chron sports columnist Bruce Jenkins turns his attention to baseball, I find myself mourning the loss of FireJoeMorgan.com all over again.
First, a few nice words about Jenkins. He writes decently about the NBA, very well about tennis, passably about soccer and magnificently about the Mavericks surf contest. That’s quite a bit of subject matter. And considering that the Chron already has John Shea and Henry Schulman covering MLB in the Sporting Green, there’s absolutely no reason Jenkins should ever be called upon to write a single word about a sport he deeply misunderstands.
Jenkins was regularly pilloried by the FJM boys for a few typical Morganesque qualities — he hates baseball statistics that are more useful than batting average, lamely mocking anybody who seeks a better understanding of the game through more rigorous statistical analysis as a basement-dwelling nerd, and he generally just writes stupid stuff all the time.
Case in point, in today’s 3-Dot Lounge column, following a dumb appraisal of Stephen Strasburg’s arm injury (‘Limiting young pitchers’ workloads turns them into pussies because Tom Seaver!’) he writes this:
Now that the Phillies have added Roy Oswalt and fabulous outfield prospect Domonic Brown, they could win the NL East in a runaway — and the Giants need that to happen. You don’t want Philadelphia anywhere near the wild-card race.
I don’t want to go overboard and say that this is the most idiotic thing anybody has ever said about anything ever, but it is. The 59-45 Giants, with a .567 winning percentage as of today, lead the Phillies (56-47, .544) by 2 1/2 games in the wild-card race. Currently sitting above the Phils in the NL East standings is Atlanta (59-43, .578).
So Jenkins is basically saying that it would be GOOD for the Giants if a team they currently lead in the race to the playoffs started winning a lot more games, thus relegating another team that actually has a better record than the Giants from division leadership to the wild-card chase, which would of course decrease the Giants’ chances of making the playoffs.
Seriously, I see no other way to interpret what Jenkins has written here. He offers no explanation for how his preferred scenario for the rest of the season would actually help the Giants other than to simply state ‘the Giants need that to happen’.
Can’t link to the Jenkins column because it’s ‘exclusive to the print edition’ — but if anybody can tell me what the hell he’s getting at here, I’ll be as appreciative as Rich Lowry getting a free replacement graphic for the shitty mess of pixelated blah currently illustrating The Corner.
NOTE: The Phillies do face the Braves six more times this year, so while he doesn’t say it, maybe Jenkins is thinking the improved Phils will beat up on Atlanta in those games, thus helping San Francisco. But the Giants also have to play this new juggernaut Phillies team for a three-game set down the stretch as well, so even crediting Jenkins for this logic seems questionable (and I would bet a jillion dollars he never even considered the remaining schedule before blurting out the above brain fart).
UPDATE: It occurs to me that Bruce Jenkins is very likely to write about baseball again, so it would be helpful to explain to him why he is so stupid. I’ll try to put it as simply as possible:
Baseball is a sport in which two ‘teams’ try to score ‘runs’ at the expense of the other over the course of a ‘game’, at the end of which the team with the greater amount of runs is declared the ‘winner’.
Major League Baseball, the highest level at which this sport is played, pits 30 such teams against each other over a ‘season’, with each team playing 162 total games against some portion of the other 29 teams in MLB. This is called the ‘regular season’ because it is followed by an extra season — called ‘the playoffs’ — in which only the eight teams who had the most wins in the regular season are allowed to play. The winner of the playoffs is crowned the winner of that particular season of baseball, which is why everybody hates the Yankees.
Now each individual team can only control the outcome of the games in which they actually play — and even then, there is a lot of luck involved. Thus a team like the Giants can work positively towards defeating a team like the Phillies in a regular season game, thus improving the Giants’ chances of getting to play in the extra season and decreasing the Phillies’ chances of same — but only when the Giants are actually playing the Phillies. When the Phillies are playing, say the Braves, the Giants can only hope for a particular outcome of that game, but cannot do anything to effect it.
And it is not stupid for the Giants to hope for certain outcomes for games involving the Phillies, Braves, etc. even though they can only directly control a handful of them. In fact, it would be logical for the Giants to hope that they, the Giants, win all of their games while the other 29 teams* win half of theirs and lose the other half. This would be the optimal result for the Giants because it offers the maximum assurance that they will make it to the playoffs, which is their overarching goal in any given baseball season.
We can see how hoping for certain results that you cannot control for can be a smart thing to do, with the following example:
1. I value my life and want to continue living it.
2. A giant asteroid crashing into the Earth would almost certainly kill me, everybody I know and the vast majority of all human beings.
3. Humanity would not currently be able to do much of anything about it if a giant asteroid happened to crash into the Earth.
4. Therefore, I hope a giant asteroid DOES NOT crash into the Earth.
5. Therefore, I am a smart person, because I smartly hope for outcomes that will positively reinforce the first premise listed here, my desire to continue living my life.
6. Conversely, I would be a dumb person if I were to hope for outcomes that threatened my life, given my assertion that I want to keep living it.
Similarly, it would be very, very dumb for the Giants to actively want one of the teams that they are competing with for one of the very few spots in the playoffs to actually become better and win more games. Because that would decrease the Giants’ chances of making the playoffs. Which is the whole fucking point of baseball, you dumbass.
Please make a note of it.
*I can say this because of inter-league play, though obviously the Giants will be more concerned about the performance of their National League competition than the teams in the American League.
So, yesterday I put up a Shorter ridiculing Steve Spruiell, a blogger at America’s Shittiest Website.™ Steve had gotten all pissy over at ASW™ about Krugman limiting the length of comments on his NYT blog in order to deal with an influx of cut-and-paste trolls.
The point of my post, in addition to taking a jab at Spruiell’s David Cassidy-ish 70s do, was that Spruiell wasn’t fast enough on the uptake to realize that he looked like a complete idiot and a total hypocrite accusing Krugman of censoring blog comments given that Spruiell was doing this from a blog which doesn’t even allow comments in the first place. Sir, have you no sense of irony?
Unable to comment on Spruiell’s post itself, and learning that Spruiell was a Twitterer, Milou (“Snowy” for you Francophobes) and I rushed over to Twitter and set up an account and twittered this to Steve:
Spruiell mulled for quite some time over my shameless reference to his passé teen idol coiffure and finally manned up enough to fire off this limp riposte:
Well, as we say over here, Steve, “Sadly, No!” The post wasn’t “entirely” devoted to your physical appearance. It was mostly devoted to the hilarity of your dissing Krugman about his comments policy from the safety of comment-free blog.
Now, as to the physical appearance business, I do readily admit that commenting on the physical appearance of some of your colleagues is part of our comedy schtick. And I’ll also admit that in the case of say, Jonah Goldberg, this is perhaps a bit unfair because, after all, Jonah didn’t get to pick his mother. But you, dude, you picked that haircut. Voluntarily. You marched straight into some suburban Hair Cuttery of your own free will and accord and said “Make me look like this” while pointing to the cover of an ancient issue of Tiger Beat.
Of course, you got me on the anonymity charge. But sometimes anonymity is a goodthing, as your son, whom you shamelessly hold up as some kind of human shield in your Twitter profile pic, would probably say if he could.
(Pixelation added by the Sadly, No! Graphics Studio)
Shorter John Hayward, AKA Doctor Zero, AKA Jim Treacher Stand-In, The DC Trawler Undocumented Brutality
If only modern democracies tortured, disappeared and extra-judicially executed leakers of classified information, then we’d be WAY better than despotic torture states!
Everybody knows that Pamela Geller is one of the bravest voices against Islamic jihad that we have. Blogging as ‘Pam Atlas’, the Long Island-based spitfire has for years defended Israel, America and freedom-loving people everywhere from the ululating hordes of deepest, evilest Islamistan.
It’s common knowledge, right? Not so fast.
First, some background. It goes without saying that anybody who has been as vocal in denouncing radical Islam as Pam has been over the years will necessarily have a fatwa, or Muslim call for assassination, placed on them. See Salman Rushdie for the positive proof of this fact, Barack Obama for the negative.
If you think this threat is aimed just as [sic] Pamela Geller you simply do not understand the dimension of the problem. This death threat is aimed at all of you, and Islam means to impose this threat on all who do not submit to its dictates.
And if you think this threat is just a single, dumb-ass tweet by some asshole who finally rose to the bait after years of provocation from Geller, you also need to just shut up.
But what if there is more to all of this than just garden-variety fatwa-ing? How is it that Pamela Geller managed to stay fatwa-free for so very, very long in the first place? And how is it that she was conveniently fatwa’d just when questions were being raised in certain circles about the implausibility of her years-long fatwa-less run as a supposed she-man muslim hater?
These questions do not prove that Pamela Geller is secretly in cahoots with al-Qaeda to establish a New Global Caliphate stretching from Rangoon to Greater Teaneck, N.J. What these questions do do is raise questions. Questions like these:
- Was the real Pamela Geller replaced at birth by a deep sleeper agent of the Islamic Brotherhood so that her unsuspecting parents would raise her as an almost stereotypical JAP — the last person anyone would suspect of secretly preparing the world for sharia law?
- Was Pamela Geller recently seen secretly praying to Mecca five times a day for the last 40+ years and reciting the Hadith Qudsi in perfect Classical Arabic in accordance with the Ibn ‘Amir ad-Dimashqi school of Qira’at — suggesting a Yemeni origin for the ‘Pamela Geller’ sleeper agent that has been fomenting jihad in our midst lo these many years?
- Given that Muslims are forbidden to drink alcohol, does ‘Pamela Geller’ appear grossly intoxicated so often in order to throw off would-be discovers of her jihadist secret?
- Was ‘Pamela Geller’s’ very public split with erstwhile anti-Muslim ally Charles Johnson an elaborate charade? Is Johnson himself under a secret, time-delayed fatwa that will only go into effect if he reveals that he discovered that ‘Geller’ is in fact a deep-cover agent of global jihad?
- Did Geller’s — widely suspected — multiple plastic surgeries include anti-aging treatments that hide the fact that as a 35-year-old woman, she conspired with Malcolm X in the early 1960s to help him impregnate dozens of unsuspecting co-eds in the hopes of producing the ultimate prize — an eventual Black Muslim president in the first decade of the 21st century — as part of an Arab League-funded social engineering project codenamed Operation Horsecock Kill Infidels?
We do not claim to know with full certainty the answer to this question: ‘Is Pamela Geller really a female clone of Carlos the Jackal who was hidden in plain sight in our Judeo-Christian country in order to undermine reasonable arguments against radical Islamic practices by saying ridiculously stupid and insane shit all the time?’
*The redesign of America’s Shittiest Website™looks even worse than it did before the redesign, if you can believe it (and I certainly can). Pay special attention to the pathetic graphic of a corner — a poorly rendered image of a dark, lonely corner and perhaps an unintentionally accurate portrait of the souls of Jo-Dough and K-Lo. The graphic is so obviously lame that the site is begging for readers to submit something better in exchange for the princely recompense of nothing more than the eternal gratitude of Rich Lowry. The newly designed ASW™, of course, still doesn’t allow reader comments.
UPDATE: Commenter Angry Geometer pointed out that Spruiell can be tweeted. So Tintin now has a twitter account and sent this as his very first tweet.
It’s called ‘The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War On America and John Bolton’s Hawt Mustache’. Co-writer Robert Spencer gets bottom billing and Bolton himself is listed as ‘Forward’ … rowrr!
FrontPage in-house heavy Jamie Glazov interviews Pam Geller about the book here. Pam’s remarkably lucid throughout the interview, which makes us think it was conducted over email and Spencer probably answered the questions.
But we do get this nugget:
Apostasy is punishable by death in Islam. Yet there have been no calls for Obama’s death from the Islamic world. Why is this? Islam gives no free passes.
Ah, yes. Absence of a fatwa on Obama is evidence that he is a secret Muslim conspiring with the mullahs to visit sharia law on us all. Ipso motherfucking facto.
Renew America really is on a roll, serving up new entrées this week from Don Cobb and Dan Poop. Cobb’s prix-fixe is pretty much standard Gnomes-of-Zurich fare, with only the added spice of a tortured ‘The Truman Show’ analogy. Poop’s table is where the real lumpen mess is served:
LeBron James is, from what I can gather, a basketball player.
The moon is, from what I can gather, a satellite in near-Earth orbit.
A very good, and famous, and rich one. But this article is not about basketball. The only reason I even know about Mr. James is that he’s from my area, and he recently left to play for Miami.
Don’t worry, Mr. Poop — your secret is safe with us. We won’t tell anybody that you secretly know who world-famous black athletes are.
It isn’t just basketball fans that are loving or lamenting the Decision. It’s hotel maids and potato-chip-truck drivers and skycaps. It’s sign makers and sandwich makers and decision makers. It’s messengers and manufacturers and municipal governments. It’s hospitals and schools and charities.
It’s bakers and bellhops and billiard cue makers. It’s salesmen and sadists and sousaphone players. It’s hookers and haberdashers and hothouse horticulture nay-sayers.
Now, someone may object that the cause of this mania isn’t the rich men, but the economic activity surrounding them.
Perhaps Poop is correct and the average Cleveland Cavaliers fan is quietly calculating the annual hit to his or her bank account likely to result from LeBron’s exit for more pussy-filled shores. Alternatively, ‘the cause of this mania’ is legions of desperate people yearning for some fleeting, vicarious triumph — say, an NBA title — to fill the vacuum of their dull and increasingly uncertain lives. You say tomato, I say you’re dumb as a box of rocks.
It’s a short step from saying, ‘My life is better if LeBron James lives here,’ to recognizing that ‘Millionaires improve my life.’
Actually, it’s one-and-a-half long steps and a thunderous dunk, but why quibble. Poop’s on a roll!
If you were to ask a Cleveland cab driver whether LeBron James got rich by exploiting people (in other words, whether Karl Marx was right), the cabbie would probably laugh at you. ‘The only thing he exploited was his talent … and his opportunity to get out while the gettin’ was good,’ the driver might quip.
Made-up cab drivers always drop their ‘g’s. And take note Friedman — you don’t actually have to interview a real one to get the quote you want!
If you’re with me on this, please go to the nearest window, stick your head out, and shout:
Rich people, we’re sorry. We’ve committed the sin of envy, the sin of covetousness, and the sin of slander. We have believed the lie and borne false witness against you. Forgive us for the nasty things we said. Please don’t go. We want you here. We are all better off with mega-successful neighbors. We’re going to tear down the ‘Keep Out’ signs. We’re going to stop robbing you of the rewards you’ve earned, confiscating your wealth as if you were convicted criminals. Please come and do what you do: increase the quality of life for all of us.
We tried, we really did, but the nearest window has been boarded up by the millionaire bankers who served us an eviction notice last week. Will they take a check? Or better yet, an IOU on a hate fuck?
CORRECTION: The name of the author of ‘LeBron-onomics’ is in fact Don Papp.
Good news, flock! Pastor J. Grant Swank, Jr. has recovered from his semi-annual stroke and is churning out aphasia-soaked columns again! We’ll midrash two of ‘em shortly, but first a word from our sponsor:
ABOVE: Delicious when served with White Deviled Eggs
Now then, first up is a bodice-ripping yarn from the good pastor:
And a holler, Pastor Swank! Let’s imagine how this boy-meets-debunked-Creationist-stealth-campaign story played out.
Swank catches Intelligent Design on the rebound after it was dumped by Ben Stein, who had decided to replace it with a younger trophy theory with more junk science in the trunk. Swank, gentleman that he is, doesn’t try to cop a feel until the third date. Intelligent Design, sensing its theological clock ticking and giving up hope on holding out for Kirk Cameron, consents to marriage just a few short weeks later. Swank is over the moon, but as the wedding date approaches, ID begins to sense that he’s too clingy and grows increasingly distant. It all ends rather badly when Intelligent Design has to resort to a restraining order against an increasingly unhinged Swank, whose angry, profanity-laced voice messages are leaked to Beliefnet and the world is stunned to hear the once-beloved pastor demanding that ID give him a blow job or he’ll burn down the Discovery Institute.
Those pro-God have to walk on eggs because they are considered dumb if they use the word ‘God’.
Also if they fuck up the phrase ‘walk on eggshells’.
Therefore, they have coined Intelligent Design in hopes of squeezing in various nitches.
‘Nitches’ are what you catch to win the game in Retarded Quidditch.
As for myself, I have fallen in love with Intelligent Design so that He has secreted to me His real name. It is ‘God’.
God secretions would get anybody hot under the collar. Oh yeah, baby! Felch the controversy!
Moving on, we are horrified to learn of an ‘atrocity’ that recently transpired at the Maine Medical Center in Portland, Maine:
Christians could not find a Bible in the chapel. However, traditionally Bibles have been there on the back shelf.
(Clutches pearls, faints)
‘Well, Christians can walk across the hall to the chaplain’s office and ask for a Bible.’ That is what the chaplain’s secretary told me when I phoned about this intolerable situation.
Wait, that’s the payoff? Obama didn’t order the chapel stripped of Bibles or something? To get a Bible, you just had to walk across the freaking hall? Swank’s sputtered out some craaaaazy shit in his day, but freaking out about the book-shelving arrangement at a hospital chapel may be the craziest.
Muslims get front row seats. Christians are slid into the basement.
Technically, no. They have to walk across the hall, you see … oh, never mind.
‘This is not going to happen,’ I said. ‘Christians are demoted while Islamics are treated like royalty. Not.’
Pastor Swank watched Wayne’s World for the first time last week.
I phoned the religion editor at the Portland Press Herald and told him the discrimination against Christians and the elevating of Muslims at the hospital chapel.
I phone TV Channel Six with the same data.
The nervous giggling you heard on the other end of the line was them agreeing with you, Pastor.
Later that day I drove to the hospital, walked into the chapel and there were six Bibles of varying translations lying out in plain sight on the back shelf, per traditional usual.
There were several more Bible standing on their ends at the left hand of the shelf.
There was the pulpit Bible on the lectern.
In a silver framed picture frame was a letter from Jesus positioned neatly at the far right hand shelf. Many have read this letter from Jesus for it has become popular as a devotional read.
So not only was there an assload of Bibles in the chapel, but there were other Christian objects displayed prominently? We can see why you were so upset.
What had happened is that a friend of mine was admitted this week to the hospital for open heart surgery. He was rushed there and therefore had no time to get his personal Bible.
When in his room, an acquaintance of mine noted that the patient had no Bible. She went to the chapel to pick up a copy for his use in his room. No Bibles! But instead there were Muslim prayer mats and copies of the Torah. However, no Bibles!
Okay, this sort of explains what happened. Maybe next time you can put the bits of the story in proper chronological order — instead of doing this weird Pulp Fiction thing where the first thing we see is you harassing some poor secretary over the phone, then it cuts back to Jesus stabbing Mary Magdalene in the heart with an adrenaline shot the day before and then fast-forward to a scene where Yahweh walks in on Allah taking a shit and shoots him dead.
So she walked to the front of the chapel, lifted the huge copy from the lectern and exited the chapel. It ended up in the patient’s room — unwieldy copy but nevertheless a Bible. She was determined that the hospital provide the patient with God’s Word.
So the moral of the story is: If you ever get sick, steal the only Bible in the hospital chapel for your own use and sic a crazy pastor on local media.
When I learned about this atrocity I made a speedy phone call to the chaplain’s office per above conversation.
Do you not just love that this flap over literally nothing is characterized as an ‘atrocity’?
The end result was the hospital put out an all-hospital alarm for the missing chapel pulpit Bible, finally retrieving it.
Good Lord, man! Your friend STOLE the missing chapel pulpit Bible! Yet you write about it here as if it was an event of unknown provenance — and apparently you didn’t even have the decency to just tell them it was in your other friend’s room, instead making a bunch of people scurry around looking for it! Why, it’s almost as if the root cause of this whole ‘atrocity’ was you and your crazy pals!
One suspects that Pastor Swank won’t be satisfied until the Maine Medical Center is torn down and rebuilt entirely out of Bibles.
Nice try, Hitler. As if you wouldn’t disguise your name.
We’ll play along because what if it isn’t Hitler?
I was reading Michael Zak’s article on Big Government and found his observations rather poignant. Moreover, he reminded me of another book that lays out the plan we are seeing unfold in America. The book, written in 1942 by Stuart Chase, is called “The Road We Are Traveling” and outlines the step by step fascist/socialist plan for America.
I have the plan right here. I’ll unfold it on this table.
Step 16,814: Check and see if we have reached fascism/socialism yet.
Checking. Nope. No, it looks like just ordinary America out there still, without the bunting and the gibbets and the starving dogs with empty eyes hanging around and sometimes fighting viciously over an old shoe sole. There are still white people, or at least that one old white lady over there. People seem clean and well-groomed, as if soap were still legal and it weren’t yet fatal to stand out, e.g. with good hair.
Step 16,815: If we have reached reached fascism/socialism, skip to the final step.
Say, what is the final step, anyway? Let’s go look.
Step 21,109: Profit!
I like that. I’m looking forward to that.
But what if, as I see from looking outside, we have not reached fascism/socialism yet?
Step 16,816: If we have not reached reached fascism/socialism yet, outline the step-by-step plan in another book.
That’ll get them. They’ll never catch onto us that way.
With people coming to terms with Barack Obama’s socialism, this book is important to note.
Heh-heh. Not to read, but definitely to note, sure. Heh-heh. Hidden in books, our plan is safe.
Whoah, what’s that diagram she’s got there? Holy crap, that’s just full of explainy stuff, with the showing-you-things and explaining-how, and yeah, look at that yellow thing there, jeez, with the rate of increase.
Above: We definitely need more ‘Q.’
Chases’s book outlines the plan for the centralization of the US government, which has been succinctly categorized by blogger Republicae:
Let’s see.
Step 16,817: Make Chase’s name plural. Decent Americans will fear him if they think he has them outnumbered.
Check.
Step 16,818: Switch certain copies of Chases’s book with copies of War and Education by Porter Sargent.
In effect. See above link.
Step 16,819: Pluralize Fabian, the 1950s teen idol. Suppress the Frankie Avalons.
And this is ordered at the very moment the Captains and Tennilles have fallen into open war with the Tonies Orlando and Dawnses?
Step 16,820: You will learn fear, ignorant whelp.
Uh, we hear and obey.
In 1942, Stuart Chase, in his book “The Road We Are Traveling” spelled out the system of planning the Fabians had in mind; the interesting thing is to look at that plan in comparison to 2008 America.
1. Strong, centralized government.
2. Powerful Executive at the expense of Congress and the Judicial.
3. Government controlled banking, credit and securities exchange.
4. Government control over employment.
5. Unemployment insurance, old age pensions.
6. Universal medical care, food and housing programs.
7. Access to unlimited government borrowing.
8. A managed monetary system.
9. Government control over foreign trade.
10. Government control over natural energy sources, transportation and agricultural production.
11. Government regulation of labor.
12. Youth camps devoted to health discipline, community service and ideological teaching consistent with those of the authorities.
13. Heavy progressive taxation.
It should be evident that while Socialists no longer use the name that the plan is Socialism at its heart.
Yeah, like your puny 13-step plan can even compete with our 21,109-step one.
You cannot deny that most of these main ideological themes has been achieved by the Left…
We denies it or them.
…as they had 40 years of congressional rule (until 1994) to build the framework for all of this. And now, Obama has, for the most part, completed the list–and the most critical points like the government takeover of health care (which we now know is to control the people).
The question is: will it take another 40 or more years to undo the socialist snookering the Left has played out on the American public?
Since it’s taken them 16 years to start that countdown, we’d have to go with ‘or more.’ Also, what happened to all the New Deal technocrats named Stuart Chases, with their books from 1942? That’s not even counting the actual New…
Step 16,821: Alert! To advance the plot to drive conservatives loopy, you will now refer to Chairman Roosevelt’s landmark social welfare plan as The Nude Eel. Workers were organized through the W.P.U., whose emblem was a skunk grinning and holding its arms out in an apologetic gesture, with a clothespin on its nose. You will tell people to respect the Tennessee Valley Authori-taaah. You are looking for a Bold Nude Erection, and are fed up with Socialism due to all the Rushin’ and Stallin’. You will prepare to mess with Texas.
Who writes these? The Bold Nude Erection keeps getting reused as if no one will notice.
Is socialist snookering when players get tired of paying a petit-bourgeois bar owner for the use of a table, and organize a players’ collective to purchase one of their own? Can we have some socialist Optima Onlining? I’m tired of paying for that shit, thx. What about poloing? Do you need ponies for that, or just in the water kind? I’m tired of seeing those shirts with the little Ralph Lauren guy on them everywhere, thx. Hi, wait — what even is pinochle, okay? Card game? Is it like bridge, and if so, why do people make fun of it? The name is a little funny, but what’s really funny is ‘golf’ if you say the word ‘golf’ a few times.
No, pinochle: Did people in the ’50s and ’60s just get a kick out of saying ‘peen?’ Is that why it was funny for those people when Don Rickles called someone a ‘hockey puck?’ Was that secret early-’60s rhyming slang for ‘cocky fuck?’
Oh, never mind.
The American voter must beware of the guise of good will that the Democrats push–it’s like a drug and is intoxicating during elections.
Stop pushing that guise, you, uh, pushy guys. Say, you know what’s annoying? Golf, golf, golf, heh-heh. No, it’s trying to fold this socialist plan back up, and it’s accordioning nicely over here, but then the folds there are going in the other direction, and then you get it mostly packed in a rectangle except there’s a section sticking out from the middle, and it’s like, Hell with this, man. What I do with these, I just throw them in the glove compartment.
Like the famous Rodin sculpture that inspires its name, the American Thinker is open to interpretation. Does it represent a loose organization of thoughtful conservatives pondering the issues of the day … or is it just a bunch of whackjobs taking a collective bowel movement on the truth for all eternity?
Roy Edroso has highlighted for us Teh Tihnker’s odd habit of regarding itself as ‘a long-distance psychotherapy practice specializing in Barack Obama’. And lo and behold, here’s American Thinker M. Catherine Evans at it again:
Shirley Sherrod’s hair trigger firing is merely the latest in a long line of dysfunctional responses by the President that may indicate that he’s out of control. How many incidents does it take to make a pattern? How many times does the President have to show his propensity for paranoia, projection, and blaming others before his team arranges for an intervention?
In 12-step recovery programs, Obama would be called an ACoA, an adult child of an alcoholic.
And in other programs, Obama would be called an ALCofMX, an adult love child of Malcolm X — but that’s not important. Pray continue, doctor.
His father, Barack Obama, Sr. was the typical garden-variety chronic alcoholic. But according to a 2008 article in the Boston Globe, as Barack Sr.’s disease progressed, he became a very dangerous man.
He began to drink more heavily and had a series of alcohol-related accidents, one of which resulted in the death of another driver.
Obama Sr. would die in a car accident at just 42, but before that he visited Obama Jr., then 10, in Hawaii for a month. Aside from Obama Jr.’s infancy, that turned out to be the only time spent between father and son in their lives. And if you think a month is a pretty short time for all of Senior’s dysfunction to seep through Junior’s pores and turn him into a monster — well, you’d be wrong, according to M. Catherine Evans:
He [Tom Vilsack] jumped the gun partly because we now live in a media culture where something goes up on Youtube or a blog and everybody scrambles.
A typical response for an ACoA is to blame others. Obama calls everybody else out, but he’s the one that ‘scrambled’.
Obama and his team certainly didn’t acquit themselves well with Sherrod’s ‘hair trigger firing’, as Doc Evans put at the very start of her diagnosis. Rash action and shifting blame is proof positive that the President is ‘out of control’ and in need of an intervention.
So too, amazingly, is Obama’s penchant for moving slowly to act and accepting responsibility:
He waited six weeks after the Deepwater Horizon oil explosion to answer critics’ charges that he wasn’t doing anything. Obama stated:
I take responsibility. It is my job to make sure that everything is done to shut this thing down.
His words drip with the narcissism of adult children of alcoholics. Having been abandoned by both parents, Obama sees himself alone in the world. He doesn’t have to consult the experts; in his grandiose way of thinking, he’s the expert on everything.
Adult children of alcoholics — they just can’t win for losing!
At any rate, there’s more to the diagnosis, including some sobering words about how Obama is a raging ACoA because he noticed that Fox News doesn’t view his presidency favorably. You know, really lurid stuff that we probably ought not to repeat in a family establishment.
There is a lot more to be determined here, but the Coast Guard may not have followed its own procedures. [merry bubbling sound, throaty exhale ending in cough] Why has the White House withheld the fact that the Coast Guard did not follow its own procedures?
Hey, let’s join David Brooks on a fantastical tour where every Applebee’s has a salad bar, every tax cut creates three beeeellion jobs, and everybody, including Democrats, takes David’s advice. All you have to do is put on a magic green jacket. No, seriously.
I was a liberal Democrat when I was young.
Yeah, and I used to be Brad Pitt’s boyfriend when I was young. (Like every other pathetically insecure right-wing wanker, Brooks tries to lend extra credence to his nonsense by saying that now that he’s all smart and grown-up and stuff he has outgrown liberalism, much the way he’s outgrown sippy cups and, allegedly, bedwetting.)
I used to wear a green Army jacket with political buttons on it — for Hubert Humphrey, Birch Bayh, John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt. I even wore that jacket in my high school yearbook photo.
This guy is the worst liar ever, and if the New York Fookin’ Times had an ounce of integrity left they would make him show them that yearbook photo before printing such obvious hokum.
It’s a magic green jacket. I can put it on today and, suddenly, my mind shifts back to the left. I start thinking like a Democrat, feeling a strange accompanying hunger for brown rice.
Democrats apparently carry affirmative action so far that they won’t even eat white rice
But the magic jacket-wearing me is nervous about the next few years. I’m afraid my party is going to get stuck in the same old debates that we always lose. First, we’re going to have the same old tax debate. We’re going to not extend the Bush tax cuts on the rich. The Republicans will blast us for killing growth and raising taxes as they did in 2000 and 2004.
Apparently, the magic green jacket has made 2008 go away. Poof! The entire year never even happened. Or maybe the manteau magique created a new 2008 in David’s mind where Obama was crushed in the election because of his promise to only raise taxes on the rich. In fact, the central concern of most Americans clearly is to make sure that the rich, who are barely scraping by now, pay less taxes.
So I sit there in my magic green jacket and I wonder: What can my party do to avoid the big government tag that always leads to catastrophe?
Gee, I wonder what that would be? SPOILER ALERT
Why Democrats can only save themselves BY ACTING LIKE REPUBLICANS AND NOT LIKE DEMOCRATS! (Who could have seen that coming from Bobo, huh?)
Not much is going to get passed in the next two years anyway, but the president could lay the groundwork for a whopping second-term agenda: tax simplification, entitlement reform, a new wave of regional innovation clusters, a new wave of marriage-friendly tax policies.
Ah, yes, the Democrats, if they want to succeed, should ditch Medicare, privatize social security, enact a flat-tax, and come up with tax breaks for opposite marriage. I’m surprised Bobo didn’t throw in, while he was at it, that the Democrats should repeal health care and financial reform, remove all federal regulations on gun dealers, re-criminalize sodomy, deport all illegal immigrants, eliminate the Department of Education and the EPA, withdraw from the United Nations and evict the U.N. from its headquarters in New York City, outlaw the fluoridation of municipal water supplies, and rename Washington, D.C., as St. Reagansburg.
Then I take off the magic green jacket and return to my old center-right self.
Everybody knows by now that liberals are the real racists and Barack Obama is the racistest of them all.* But did you know that Obama ‘has divided America’ not just ‘on the basis of race’ — but on ‘class and partisanship’ too?
Patrick H. Caddell and Douglas E. Schoen lay it all out in today’s Wall Street Journal:
Our Divisive President
… Rather than being a unifier, Mr. Obama has divided America on the basis of race, class and partisanship. Moreover, his cynical approach to governance has encouraged his allies to pursue a similar strategy of racially divisive politics on his behalf.
Messrs. Caddell and Schoen ‘say this with a heavy heart’, but the evidence they present is irrefutable. For example, did you know:
- That this one time, Obama said this one white cop ‘acted stupidly’ for arresting this one black guy for no good reason? And what’s more, that our ‘president’ had the nerve to say that there was a ‘long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately’?
- That this other guy said Obama told him in private that he hoped all the white people in Arizona would have their throats slit by migrant workers or that there should be comprehensive immigration reform or something?
- That Obama’s Justice Department hasn’t prosecuted some big, scary black men for standing near a polling place this one time, which is totally against the law?
- That Obama’s favoritism towards black people has resulted in a whopping 23.2 percent unemployment rate amongst young white people while just 39.9 percent of young black people are unemployed?
What’s more, ‘Mr. Obama has also cynically divided the country on class lines.’ Feast your brains on this smoking gun:
- Wall Street fat cats and insurance bigwigs keep giving Obama money even though he sometimes says bad stuff in public about their industries because the public totally hates those guys, but then doesn’t really do all that much to curb their worst excesses.
Finally, Obama is a partisan.** Horrifyingly, Obama and Democrats are probably going to try to appeal to certain voting constituencies in the run-up to this November’s elections, predict Caddell and Schoen.
We would all be wise to heed their warnings and drum this race-class-and-political hustler out of office before he mildly rebukes someone or something again (and then politely backs down and/or uses said rhetoric to mask the fact he isn’t really doing shit to change much of anything socially, economically or politically).
*It’s actually worse than this — Obama simultaneously picks the cotton, serves mint juleps in the big house and whips the slaves on the Democrat Plantation. Also, he runs a high-tech Underground Railroad on the Internets and is a Grand High Imperial Trouser Snake in the Ku Klux Klan.
**He is also the brains behind the birther movement. Think about it, have you ever seen Obama and Orly Taitz in a room together?
I’m back from Netroots Nation at the Rio in Las Vegas, where I didn’t have a laptop due to recent difficulties (and dropping $5 a minute to get online at the Rio business center or whatever it cost was less appealing than losing twice that much in half the time on the blackjack tables).
So I wound up spending most of my time by the pool, drunk courtesy of the cheap, shitty vodka in my ‘suite’ that I managed to transport via suitcase without breaking the bottle and ruining my inappropriately master class ensemble. Roy’s got some poignant takes on the NN10 happenings, starting here.
My impressions:
- Brad Reed is tall! He would have kicked my ass in basketball if we could have ever got that theoretical pickup game organized. Of course, it was supposed to happen in 115-degree Vegas weather, so probably a good thing it never happened.
- I am shit at karaoke. Epic fail. Brad’s pretty fucking good at it, btw.
- Our panel went pretty well. Amanda Marcotte advertised it as ‘funnier than Harry Reid’ – he was speaking at the same time. Seemed like a fairly safe prediction until we learned that he was telling dick jokes in the other room. Apparently, he hit a high note with a bit about Barack Obama, David Axelrod and Timothy Geithner all mashing the heads of their penises together, because that’s the only thing they still had left to do.
- The most incisive statement of the panel came from ‘The Price of Right’ author Alicia Morgan — who wasn’t even on the panel! Sort of like the S,N comment threads. The shorter is something like, ‘Making fun of wingnuts kept lots of people sane from 2000 to 2006.’ But much better than that.
- Pamela Mays McDonald of Cultural Cross Currents and Aimee Allison of KPFA (both of many more things, besides) are hella awesome.
- Roy Edroso and Michael Bêrübæ are both charming, dapper and very, very depraved.
- The Catholic Church and other arch-conservative, misogynist forces are killing women in The Philippines (and elsewhere) with their twisted policies on abortion. This is not exactly news, but just talk to Amanda’s partner Marc Faletti and his crew to discover again just how bad it is.
- I got called out for having too big of a suitcase on BART on the way home from SFO! People were like, ‘Were you packing a prom dress?’ and I was totally going to explain that it was the only suitcase I own, but that seemed like it would take too long, so then I was all, ‘I have a lot of video equipment’ … and now in the minds of a handful of people, I’m not just an overpacker, I’m a possible creep!
How long have we been reading Erick? We spent ten minutes pronouncing ‘tiahrt’ in different ways trying to guess what word he misspelled. That’s how long we’ve been reading Erick. Why, it didn’t even make us blink more than seven or eight times to read an opening paragraph like this:
A millimeter. A centimeter. An inch. They are all measures of distance. Even the smallest of them measures some distance.
That’s a good thing, too. Because if the smallest of those three — let’s call it the millimeter for argument’s sake — didn’t measure any distance, then it wouldn’t be the smallest. Because okay, wait, if it didn’t measure any distance, then how could you know how small it was?
Yes indeed. And with the millimeter out of the way, that would free things up for the centimeter to become the smallest of the three, and then a centimeter wouldn’t measure any distance either. Anyway, these things always end with the universe blowing up or collapsing or something, so it’s best to steer clear of them right from the beginning.
Our job this year as conservatives is to…
It was with none of these things occurring to him that Erick continued typing.
Our job this year as conservatives is to put some distance between us and the left. In doing so, it is our job to push the Senate Republican to the right.
As we can see, Erick is going right, away from the left, and is also pushing the Senate Republican to the right. So basically, everything is going farther to the right except for the left, which is staying the same.
L –> : ^ | ) –> (R)
But we’re like, wouldn’t it be a lot less work just to move the left farther left?
L <--------- : ^ O ) (R)
Ah, but if we're so smart, how come we're not on CNN?
Every inch counts when dealing with 100 senators and 40 or 50 Republicans.
Uh, ew?
Every inch.
Because even the smallest inch measures some distance. Also, ew.
In Kansas, the Republican will win the general election. The question is who — Jerry Moran or Todd Tiahrt. The distance between the two men may only be inches on some issues…
Whilst on others, they boldly thrust together and apart, again and again with a hammy slappida-slappida sound, with the back of Tiahrt’s toupée coming partly aloft on the outstroke — for instance, on the ahem-hem issue.
And in each case, Todd Tiahrt is to the right of Jerry Moran.
In fact, if Jerry Moran spins in place, Todd Tiahrt gets hurled around in a frightening orbit. If Jerry Moran walks to the labboard of a koi pond, Todd Tiahrt will plop his one shoe in and go stiff-legging down to the bottom, then keep walking with his tie floating behind him like an aeronaut’s scarf in miniature, and with his toupée left floating upon the water like Sea-Star Island, if that island smelled generally of Preparation H.
…as ‘pro-life’ and ‘conservative’ to describe who he needed to become to get elected.”
That sounds like sour bananas.
Sour grapes maybe.
Yeah, whatever, sure.
But it fits with Moran who, should he lose, will be another Bob Inglis — railing against those tea party rubes. If elected, he’ll keep quiet, but he’ll spend his time in the Senate, issue after issue, undermining conservatives.
That’s another reason we should all be supporting Todd Tiahrt.
Also, his name is an anagram for ‘that hater,’ ‘hair hurt,’ and ‘traitor,’ not to mention ‘Tiamat,’ and if you add his first name, ‘odd ratty hat maker.’ Those are a miles of reasons with even the smallest of them measures some distance, also!
Shirley Sherrod is a bigger liar than Andrew Breitbart because she claimed that a relative of hers was lynched when in fact he was merely beaten to death.*
*The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which served as a model for state anti-lynching laws, defines lynching as “depriving any person of his life without authority of law.” No ropes mentioned anywhere at all.
I am NOT a coward. And as proof that I am not a coward, consider this: I regularly write things that I know will force me to read a torrent of ugly emails from my readers.
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His daddy dropped him on his head. He fried his brain on drugs and liquor. His mamma had sex with him. He has schizotypal antisocial personality disorder. He’s not smart enough to have Asperger’s Syndrome.
