I am thoroughly convinced that the New York Times is engaging in a long-running trolling of modern conservatives. Ensuring that no matter what year it is, there is always a prominent reminder that any conservative who talks about a meritocracy or complains about “affirmative action” has a ready example proving them completely full of shit.
The current sacrificial example is of course the Chunky Witherspoon fearing, poor man’s Jonah Goldberg that is Ross Douthat.
Today he is whining because after 30 years of surviving on bullshit and scare-mongering in the suburbs, real people are starting to notice that all the government scare-mongering has just left them with a shitty economy, no safety net, and collapsing cities.
I’ll let him explain.
When liberals are in a philosophical mood, they like to cast debates over the role of government not as a clash between the individual and the state, but as a conflict between the individual and the community. Liberals are for cooperation and joint effort; conservatives are for self-interest and selfishness. Liberals build the Hoover Dam and the interstate highways; conservatives sit home and dog-ear copies of “The Fountainhead.” Liberals know that it takes a village; conservatives pretend that all it takes is John Wayne.
Yes, when liberals aren’t pounding their heads against the table at the prospect of having to argue with a simple-minded toadie who sleep-walked his way to a 6-7 figure salary, they sometimes like to point out that government isn’t actually a nickname for a gigantic troll monster that eats children, but rather that it’s a word we use to describe a creation of the people, by the people, and for the people to keep everything running so the rest of us can get back to our day jobs of looking up strange new forms of erotica and sampling bubble wrap.
In this worldview, the government is just the natural expression of our national community, and the place where we all join hands to pursue the common good. Or to borrow a line attributed to Representative Barney Frank, “Government is simply the name we give to the things we choose to do together.”
Yes, this fantasical, strange “worldview” and its zany crazy views of the world working the way it does.
Many conservatives would go this far with Frank: Government is one way we choose to work together, and there are certain things we need to do collectively that only government can do.
But there are trade-offs as well, which liberal communitarians don’t always like to acknowledge. When government expands, it’s often at the expense of alternative expressions of community, alternative groups that seek to serve the common good. Unlike most communal organizations, the government has coercive power — the power to regulate, to mandate and to tax. These advantages make it all too easy for the state to gradually crowd out its rivals. The more things we “do together” as a government, in many cases, the fewer things we’re allowed to do together in other spheres.
Oh of course, I know that when I let the government keep me from dying from preventable causes, that my meetings with the local rotary club go down the crapper and my D&D group gets seized by the FBI.
See, the problem with the constant attempt by conservatives to sell the idea that government is somehow against liberty, is the constant fact that reality keeps contradicting them. When the government is allowed to keep people from starving or dying in the gutters, the Churches don’t magically cease to exist and social clubs don’t stop meeting, aren’t broken up, or infiltrated on, unlike when anti-government zealots try and seize control.
And since he’s basically doing a slow-burn to arguing that churches are being “brought down by the Man, man”, I’m going to skip ahead and note that Churches have the most “coercive power” with regards to their stations, often tying charity aid with proselytization or mandatory conversion, removing social support from anyone who becomes a “member in bad standing with the Church”, not to mention demanding political orthodoxy as a requirement for a sense of community.
But then, that’s the feature, not the bug.
Zealots like Douchehat want people to be dependent on the Church so that people like him can feel better knowing that there are a whole bunch more suckers stuck with him.
Sometimes this crowding out happens gradually, subtly, indirectly. Every tax dollar the government takes is a dollar that can’t go to charities and churches. Every program the government runs, from education to health care to the welfare office, can easily become a kind of taxpayer-backed monopoly.
Yes, every tax dollar is a dollar that doesn’t go to charity. Because you see, every dollar spent in America goes to charity, church, or taxes.
Wait, that sounds insane. Let me instead argue that it’s because tax and charity are directly related and people give a set amount no matter the situation, so when you give people a tax cut, they immediately give that money to charities and churches as we saw with the Bush tax cu-
Damnitt! Just pretend this makes sense and isn’t an obvious and poorly played three-card monte to setup a “Church good, Government bad” retread later on in the post.
But sometimes the state goes further. Not content with crowding out alternative forms of common effort, it presents its rivals an impossible choice: Play by our rules, even if it means violating the moral ideals that inspired your efforts in the first place, or get out of the community-building business entirely.
This is exactly the choice that the White House has decided to offer a host of religious institutions — hospitals, schools and charities — in the era of Obamacare. The new health care law requires that all employer-provided insurance plans cover contraception, sterilization and the morning-after (or week-after) pill known as ella, which can work as an abortifacient. A number of religious groups, led by the American Catholic bishops, had requested an exemption for plans purchased by their institutions. Instead, the White House has settled on an exemption that only covers religious institutions that primarily serve members of their own faith. A parish would be exempt from the mandate, in other words, but a Catholic hospital would not.
HOW DARE THEY!
The nerve!
Demanding that institutions which take federal dollars have to actually-I can hardly say it-actually follow the federal rule of law governing such funds.
Is it not the very founding moral character of religious institutions that they have a right, NAY a calling, to fleece the public chest without a single action binding them in anyway?
Truly this is exactly akin to having Churches banned from any form of community building of any form or having all the religious members of an institution denied a voice in government or something that would be akin to actual oppression rather than having your abusive over-reach and attempt to evade the law mildly rebuked.
Ponder that for a moment. In effect, the Department of Health and Human Services is telling religious groups that if they don’t want to pay for practices they consider immoral, they should stick to serving their own co-religionists rather than the wider public. Sectarian self-segregation is O.K., but good Samaritanism is not. The rule suggests a preposterous scenario in which a Catholic hospital avoids paying for sterilizations and the morning-after pill by closing its doors to atheists and Muslims, and hanging out a sign saying “no Protestants need apply.”
Uh yeah! If a religion can’t deal with being part of a general secular society and wants to selectively discriminate against the public, then they don’t get to be a public service receiving public money.
Your Catholic Hospital can hand out a sign saying “No Protestants need apply” and decide that medicinal drips only go to people who affirm their belief in the Trinity, but then they don’t get federal money designed for making sure everyone gets actual medical care.
You want to play in the big pond, then you have to follow the Big Pond rules. You can’t just say, I want in the Big Pond and then start pissing wildly and trying to molest all the girls. People are going to throw you out and send you back to the Fundamentalist Mormon swimming pool where you belong.
The regulations are a particularly cruel betrayal of Catholic Democrats, many of whom had defended the health care law as an admirable fulfillment of Catholicism’s emphasis on social justice. Now they find that their government’s communitarianism leaves no room for their church’s communitarianism, and threatens to regulate it out of existence.
Yes, I’m sure Catholic Democrats totally agree with your life-long crusade to try and make Chunky Reese Witherspoon’s life as miserable as possible and aren’t more concerned with that Father McWanderingHands scandal.
Critics of the administration’s policy are framing this as a religious liberty issue, and rightly so. But what’s at stake here is bigger even than religious freedom. The Obama White House’s decision is a threat to any kind of voluntary community that doesn’t share the moral sensibilities of whichever party controls the health care bureaucracy.
SEE! If you take away the religious right’s ability to selectively ignore any laws it doesn’t like while still stealing public money that could go to people who actually want to help the public good, then you take away that right for everyone.
How will your Superbowl Party be able to survive not being able to steal federal funds to discriminate against proper football fans? And your neighborhood Sewing club, how will it continue to meet without an ability to take federal money while discriminating against that damn Mrs. Thoraday and her radical cross-stitchings?
Don’t you see the community-less anarchy that would be created in that nightmare world?
Please support the Religious Right’s right to fleece non-members of its religion. It’s the right thing to do. (Paid for by an anonymous PAC that is totally not the Koch Brothers and their newly founded religion Graftism).
The Catholic Church’s position on contraception is not widely appreciated, to put it mildly
Yes, trying to force every citizen of America to do without contraception because of the precepts of a Mad Pope who has been blocking any investigation to the continued rape of children as an attempt to end-run around a decades-long settled public debate about the issue was indeed “not widely appreciated”, “to put it mildly”.
Let’s make it a game and cite other events that are “not widely appreciated, to put it mildly.”
For instance, Ross Douchehat’s hiring at the Times was “not widely appreciated, to put it mildly.”
and many liberals are inclined to see the White House’s decision as a blow for the progressive cause. They should think again. Once claimed, such powers tend to be used in ways that nobody quite anticipated, and the logic behind these regulations could be applied in equally punitive ways by administrations with very different values from this one.
The more the federal government becomes an instrument of culture war, the greater the incentive for both conservatives and liberals to expand its powers and turn them to ideological ends. It is Catholics hospitals today; it will be someone else tomorrow.
Are you fucking serious?
After 50 years of nothing but non-stop Culture War all the time by you greasy retrobates, you now want us on the abused and battered side to surrender our arms and stop because we are mildly resisting your attempt to continue a culture war you lost by other means.
The White House attack on conscience is a vindication of health care reform’s critics, who saw exactly this kind of overreach coming. But it’s also an intimation of a darker American future, in which our voluntary communities wither away and government becomes the only word we have for the things we do together.
Well, that’s fair.
I mean, not your complaint, your slippery slope horseshit, or the way your flaccid attempt to call secular community groups to your cause after you’ve spent decades trying to eliminate them off the face of the planet reminded you of how your latent homosexuality and lack of self awareness prevents you from any satisfying amorous encounters.
But why you needed to pull out this pile of weak sauce. When the Big Bad Health Care came to pass and it turned out that the sky didn’t fall and it ended up just being a naked giveaway to the Insurance companies that doesn’t really change much at all for the better, you fuckers ended up needing something, anything to grasp onto.
After all, you pinned so much of your 2012 campaign chances on your resistance to the mild attempt at a Health Care Bill, so there needs to be something catastrophic about it to get the scared grandmas and soccer moms to piss themselves and fill in the R U INSANE? box.
But hey, it’s okay that this failed, I’m sure, the community spirit of Mother Church will be there for you when the Times moves on to the next Affirmative Action hire.
It’s been a long time since we’ve given old Sippy Cupp the spotlight here at Sadly, No! For those of you who don’t quite remember, Sippy Cupp is a botched example of the Stepford Conservative, the generically pretty, thin-lipped carbon copy usually put on conservative TV so that Fox News watchers can do their masturbating without feeling “gay”.
Unfortunately, while the Lab technicians were able to give her the slightly alien glass-eyed look, the soulless smile, and the head full of crazy, they failed to make her hair the required shade of blonde, so poor Sippy Cupp has been forced to roam the back alleys of third rate tabloids like the New York Daily News becoming ever more bitter and incoherent as her short lived processors begin to clog with dust.
It is a sad fate indeed, but not one we here at Sadly No Industries are above mocking. So let’s go! Read the rest of this entry »
Contrary to what liberals think, Mr. Potter is the real hero, and George Bailey the true villain, of “It’s A Wonderful Life.”
It’s been a standing joke for ages to claim that some free-market Randroid was so clueless that he or she would watch “It’s A Wonderful Life” and cheer for Mr. Potter while hissing at George Bailey. It would be the equivalent, say, of someone hoping that Scrooge would tell the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future to sod off or that Spielberg would leave E.T. to die alone in a ditch in Southern California or that Dorothy would be stranded in Oz for the rest of her life as the Wizard’s concubine.
But, of course, this, or so everyone thought, was all just cute and snarky hyperbole. No one, not even the High Priestess Ayn Rand herself, could possibly actually watch “It’s A Wonderful Life” and come away not sobbing like a child but instead thinking that George Bailey was a social parasite spouting vile commie propaganda against the heroic Mr. Potter, the job creator who knew what was really best for the people of Bedford Falls.
Well, meet John Wharton, if that really is his name:
There is probably no more iconic piece of cinematic Americana than Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life. Even today, families enjoy the folksy warmth of small-town America at Christmas as seen in the golly-gee world of the Bailey family, living their all-American lives in Bedford Falls, NY. And indeed, Americans should watch this timeless classic often but, I suggest, more to remind themselves of just how our modern-day financial problems were born and what cavalier habits bred them.
Uh oh. You can see this coming from miles away: because banks were forced by PBS-watching liberals infatuated with the Capra film to act like George Bailey and give home loans to shiftless, lie-about Negroes instead of acting like Mr. Potter and throwing them homeless onto the streets where they belong, the entire U.S. economy collapsed. Thanks, again, to Hollywood, of course.
Most viewers see George Bailey as naive but likeable, a bit like themselves. But American Genius Wharton naturally sees the sinister truth.
His idea of a date is to take his future wife, Mary (played in the film by the virginal Donna Reed), to an abandoned house she adores. He persuades Mary to help him vandalize it by explaining that “with deserted houses, you make a wish and then try to bust a window.” … Such is our story’s hero.
While we are on shady characters in film, let me point out that Dorothy Gale was a juvenile delinquent who ran away from home with her vicious dog only to wind up murdering a wealthy landowner in order to deprive her of her rightful inheritance of her dead sister’s estate.
When George’s father dies, the board of the Bailey Building and Loan Association (BBLA), a co-op owned by its members, meets to consider the institution’s future. … Potter argues convincingly that the BBLA should be closed because George’s father was an incompetent administrator, citing a loan given to Ernie the taxi driver after it was declined at Potter’s bank. The bank’s wisdom in rejecting Ernie is shown clearly when, in fact, he is soon unable to make payments on the mortgage he holds with the BBLA and attempts to return his home’s deed.
…
Ernie the taxi driver should have “moved back in with the missus’ folks” as he wanted to do until he could retrain to afford the nice home he wanted for his family. Ernie intrinsically knew that he was in over his head; George likely helped him drown.
And while we are in the business of rewriting classic movies and consigning Ernie to the bottom of the pond to fulfill a right-wing ideological bias, let’s not forget Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird who, by defending that no-count Negro, wound up embarrassing Scout to death, causing her to lose all her friends and, ultimately, hang herself from the back porch ceiling fan.
Obviously, old man Potter’s business sense was exactly right when he told the BBLA board: “High ideals without common sense can ruin a town” — or a nation — as easy credit creates “a discontented, lazy rabble instead of a thrifty working class. All because starry-eyed dreamers like Bailey put impossible ideas into their heads.”
…
Our current mortgage meltdown crisis shows us that, indeed, 70 years of Bailey-style undisciplined credit growth has brought us to tears as we had ignored common lending standards and let crony capitalism favor personal connections over objective analysis. A bit more cold-hearted caution in the ’40s might have helped us avoid the civil unrest and plummeting living standards we almost certainly will experience as Potter’s reality bites and the FOGs [Friends of George Bailey] adjust to a new world of painful limits, correcting for decades of living an unearned high life.
It’s apparent I must have fallen asleep when I watched “It’s A Wondeful Life.” Did I miss the part where George invents the credit default swap and resold all his bank loans as derivative instruments?
If there is one word to describe this nascent year in conservatism, it’d be batshit. If two, it’d be fucking batshit, but before this turns into a Monty Python skit, let’s skip straight ahead and note that beyond the usual doubling down of crazy, the season has been dominated by an incredible amount of dishonesty.
Now, dishonesty and wingnuts go together like Republicans and double wetsuit dildos, but even for our annually fact-challenged, there has been a noticeable increase in the usual areas. Projection has skyrocketed to accommodate their candidates realizing that the 27% are pretty much the only Republican primary voters left. And Republican candidates realizing that they no longer need to pretend to value truth to our bought-and-sold media have begun openly spinning their preferred model of reality as if the internet didn’t make it embarrassingly easy to disprove their fantasies.
Hell, one can say that we’ve gotten so used to conservatives defaulting to dishonesty as a first recourse, that it is rather shocking when they deliver some long lost honesty, much like a sickening flower blooming once every thousand years.
So it is, with this quaint post by Republican Senatorial candidate and professional tater lookalike, Adam Hasner.
I thought the interview with Anne Conlon was both impressive and instructive, and it stirred in me some thoughts about abortion in America, on this, the day of the annual March for Life in Washington.
Ah, right, the 39th anniversary of Roe v Wade has many conservatives reflective on how they always seem to be decades behind an issue they already decisively lost, but are still fighting anyways.
As a Jew, I can appreciate the evolution of Conlon’s — and others’ — thought process on the issue of abortion. And I know first hand what it’s like to disagree with family and friends on this fundamental issue.
I attended public schools growing up, and while the Jewish faith is theologically and historically a pro-life faith, the strong strain of secularism within Judaism has taken many in the religion away from its pro-life roots.
Well, he’s a conservative. He couldn’t have a post that was entirely honesty, so he sells a quick lie to keep his hand in and signal the mouth-breathers that he isn’t some traitor who acknowledges the sky is blue.
As the son of liberal Democrats, I didn’t inherit my pro-life views or have them engrained in me by schooling or my institutions of faith.
I have listened to the stories of people explaining how viewing an ultrasound for the first time or the experience of becoming a father or a mother can solidify a belief in the sanctity of life. I have not experienced this either.
And yet I still arrived at the conclusion that every life is sacred from conception until natural death. That is because we cherish life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in this country, and those rights should extend to every life, born and unborn.
Except women, of course.
But I have to hand it to him, a conservative not pretending that his “deeply held beliefs” has any connection to some sort of “profound event” often with a wink and a nod suggesting that evil liberal abortionists have never done something as profound as “seen an ultrasound”?
So Mr. Hasner, if not those things, what was it that made you such a staunch forced-birther? Will you spin some story about Planned Parenthood and Hitler? Seeing an aborted fetus reanimate itself and beg for the rescinding of established medical ethics and law? The gun currently being held against your head by a fanatical “pro-life” terrorist?
I arrived at these conclusions because, before I ever really thought of the abortion issue, I was a conservative.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you that rare and delicate thing.
Naked honesty from a conservative.
Appreciate this gem, for we will not see its like for many a day hence.
I came of age during the Reagan Revolution, steeped myself in conservatism, and registered as a Republican at age 18. Being pro-life isn’t just a moral issue for me; it’s a historical and constitutional one. Understanding the creation of Planned Parenthood and the pro-abortion movement helped shape my view. But I’m pro-life because I was conservative first. I wonder how many other people out there can say the same.
I have a much deeper faith today, and I find pride and comfort in Judaism’s historical defense of life. But I know that conservatism helped set me on the path.
He’s anti-choice because he was a conservative and being a conservative means you buy whatever half-formed insane nonsense is presented to you as the price of the tribe. And those beliefs are now dear to him, because being fanatically anti-woman is how you show membership to the tribe, to question it is to question the tribe.
If this seems suspiciously like a cult, then you should be ashamed of yourself!
…
Cults get better hats.
That’s why I recoil whenever I hear people — even those within my own party — say we need to get away from social issues.
Yeah! How dare we get away from social issues I only care about because I was told being conservative meant I had to care about those issues and conservatives are nothing if not firm believers in the practice of sunk costs?
Not changing even when reality and the will of the people say otherwise is the hallmark of a great man…or someone incapable of handling the task of dressing and feeding themselves daily. One or the other.
Or that we’re “on the losing side” of the marriage debate, or the sanctity of life argument. The defense of life just doesn’t “move voters,” I’ve heard more than one consultant say.
I hope that never becomes the majority view in our movement. If it does, we will never earn the right to be the governing majority in America, nor will we deserve to. I will continue to speak clearly and consistently on the connection between our moral values and economic prosperity.
Yeah, how would we ever manage to hold the governing majority in America if we cater to petty things like “the will of the people”? Or acknowledge that spewing archaic shit people thought settled decades ago just makes people less keen on electing us to positions of power?
The real path to power is to espouse reviled and bigoted beliefs long past their for-sale date. For instance, have you ever considered that the real path to power lies in ranting about the perfidy of the Irishman?
The anniversary of Roe v. Wade is a grim observance. It marks an uncorrected mistake in American history. If the conservative movement ever stops being the home of the pro-life movement, this grim observance — and its consequences — will mark many more anniversaries.
I’m not sure that sentence manages to actually successfully say anything.
But I guess you needed to demonstrate your fealty to the crazy train after basically spending a post noting that the only reason you are a “firm believer in this moral cause” is because you fear getting off this train is the fastest route to ending up on those lists “perfectly legal and not at all connected to the lone-wolf terrorist” “pro-life” organizations like to circulate with the home addresses and daily schedules of “enemies”.
It’s okay, just wink once for “he’s got a gun against my head” and I’ll totally come help you, once I’m done making a sandwich.
There is nothing left for me to read now that commie comic books are all about oil spills and shit like that.
The liberal media must be falling down on the job because the folks over at Newsbutthurters have now taken to complaining about comic books, apparently not being able to find, today at least, anything in the news to butthurt about.
First, let me get this out of the way: if you are a grown-up that eats Fruit Loops, wears a onesie to bed, or reads comic books, it’s probably best to keep that to yourself. But the Newsbutthurter in question, one D.S. Hube, admits that this is pretty much all he reads, if “read” is the correct word. At least this is all that he “read” before he decided to bring the whole comic book empire crashing down through his one-man boycott to punish the comic book publishers for trying to turn him into a communist by slipping subversive plots into their comic books.
As a big comicbook geek from waaaaay back (I have a section of my blog, The Colossus of Rhodey, dedicated to comics), and as one who continued to purchase comics up until the mid-2000s, I find this modern “progressive” trend not only disburbing, but disgusting. It’s what led me to stop purchasing contemporary comics outright, and lose some, if not friendships, associations, as a result.
So what’s an example of what D.S. finds “disgusting” and caused him to lose all his 12-year-old friends who hung out at the comic book shop with him?
You pick up a superhero comic book featuring a childhood favorite of yours, hoping to reignite some of that magic you felt way back when and you see that the opening sequence in the comic deals with an oil rig disaster. You immediately and disappointingly know what’s going to be said, either by your childhood favorite or by some other character given credibility within the story. You turn the page, and sure enough, your childhood favorite grumbles about his/her country’s dependency on oil or how inherently dangerous oil drilling is to the environment.
The disgusting idea that we should stop giving a fortune to the Saudis was enough, I imagine, that it sent D.S. Hube to go turn on all the lights in his studio apartment (all four of them) just to show Batman who is who and that he can’t keep shoving stuff down D.S.’s throat just because he’s Batman.
This cumulative effect eventually took its toll on me. I kept purchasing comics probably longer than I should have.
Yes, D.S., if you bought comics once you were older than fourteen, then that’s the smartest thing you’ve said in your entire post
Many of the stories were top notch despite my knowing the politics of the creators … but at a certain point, I had had enough. … I just asked myself “Why do I continue to support these guys? I give them my money — and they continually spit in my face.” … And, thus, all this is [partly] why I blog. I why I’ll continue to not shell out $3-4 for a comicbook any time soon.
Actually, I think I feel much better that this grown man with an overdeveloped interest in muscular men in tights has decided to start blogging instead of lurking around kids in comic book stores. So, maybe, just this one time we can honestly say that Newsbutthurters is actually performing some kind of public service.
Hollywood = Golden Globes. Golden Globes = Penis. Penis = Bad. Hollywood = Bad.
Sadly, No! all-time fave Ben Shapiro, who used to be America’s Worst Law Student™, and then America’s Worst Law Firm Associate™, and now is America’s Worst Unemployed Self-Employed Lawyer™, surfaces briefly at America’s Shittiest Website™ to complain about the Golden Globes award which, not surprisingly, is the perfect storm of everything that upsets Ben — foreigners, Hollywood, and penis jokes — all wrapped up into a 90-minute TV special that Ben hates so much that he can’t resist watching the whole thing, although he must have been on a Funyuns run when they gave an award to some Muslims, because he says nothing about that. But, for a guy whose penis is less useful to him than a basketball hoop to a Chihuahua, he is overcome by all the penis jokes on the show and dutifully reports them all to his fellow Cornerdomites.
I’ll let intrepid mango hunters analyze most of AWSEL™ Shapiro complaints about each of the Globe penis jokes, but I can’t resist bringing this mango back first:
Finally, Tina Fey and Jane Lynch explained how actors and actresses aren’t all that different from their real-life selves. “Matt LeBlanc is Matt LeBlanc,” said Fey. “And Hung’s Thomas Jane . . . really is a high-school coach,” replied Lynch. They then high-fived and shouted, “Yes! Penis joke!” Fey is widely considered the best female comedy writer on television. No wonder 30 Rock has swirled the toilet bowl for the last couple of years. As for Lynch — well, let’s just say her knowledge of the male anatomy is likely limited.
So, let’s see, at the same time Ben, who still probably refers to his own penis as his “woowoo,” is bitching about penis jokes, he makes a lame poop joke and an even lamer lesbian joke in which Ben thinks that since lesbians have never seen a penis, they can’t make penis jokes, or something. Given that the virginal Ben claims to only have any experience with his own little unused and dessicated pecker, it seems unclear where that gives him any greater experience with penises than any random woman on the streets, lesbian or not.
Weirdly enough, phallic jokes are a way for Hollywood to up its liberal street cred — by acting like third-graders fascinated with their own genitalia. Which many of them are.
In case you’re wondering why AWSEL™ had such a short tenure at a real law firm, take a careful look at that sentence quoted above. He appears to be saying that most people in Hollywood are third graders. He was trying to say that many people in Hollywood were fascinated with their own genitalia (as if that were some sort of affliction rather than the normal state for everyone else in the world but Mr. I-don’t-have-a-Penis Shapiro) but just doesn’t have the third-grade writing chops necessary to pull it off (so to speak).
Feel free to make your own penis jokes in the comments (as if you need my permission).
Conservatives have trouble enough with analysis. Trying to recognize a thing that is happening and actually process it on a real and meaningful level without massive amounts of projection and fantasy is a skillset far beyond their grasp.
So when a conservative skips that and goes straight into speculation, you know you are in for a treat. And Albin Sadar does not disappoint.
Now that the 2008 idea to “make history by voting for the first African-American president” is yesterday’s news, what will be done to spice up the current election season?
Cause that’s what it was, right? A transparent cynical attempt to capitalize on a minority like our failed ploy of Palin, right? Please say yes, my fragile mind just can’t take the truth. Read the rest of this entry »
To celebrate Martin Luther King day, here are five incompetent niggers and two worthless spicks that Obama hired just because of their skin color.
Of course, no Martin Luther King holiday would be complete without some poor oppressed white guy doing the tried and true schtick about how it’s the niggers that are the real racists, particularly the colored usurper in the White House who has spent the last four years taking America away from true Americans and giving it to his black buddies. Meet George Picard, who writes under a pseudonym at The American Genius for obvious reasons
President Obama has mocked Martin Luther King by policies and actions that judge people by the color of their skin and not by the content of their character. … Among his dreams was an America where his four children would be judged not “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”
You might be forgiven for imagining that King was expressing a desire that his children could eat at any lunch counter and sit anywhere on the bus, but only if you are a Negro-oppressed white man will you realize that King was in fact expressing a prophetic condemnation of affirmative action and that he lived in abject terror that his children might get into college with lower SATs than their white counterparts.
The man who campaigned on the theme that there was no “white America” or “black America” has used his powers as President to practice identity politics on a scale never before seen in America. Barack Obama has overtly chosen top officials on the basis of their skin color and not on the content of their character.
Because no president before Obama has ever chosen a white person of low character for public office and even if they had it was purely coincidental that they were white.
Of course, first stop on Picard’s white outrage tour is that wild-eyed, Black Panther loving Eric Holder whom
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer has called him one of the most incompetent attorney generals in American history
Both Kraphammer and Picard have apparently forgotten all about John Mitchell, which would, of course, have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Mitchell was, you know, white.
And don’t forget, while we’re being outraged, that uppity Negress at the EPA, Lisa Jackson:
She is blithely unconcerned that Congressmen have taken her to task for performance.
If she were truly competent (and white), she would immediately step down the moment someone in the opposition party criticized her.
When Obama went looking for a Supreme Court Justice is was so obvious that he had a very narrow filter of who would “qualify” that Time’s Mark Halperin wrote that “White Men Need Not Apply.”
And, of course, like Martin Luther King, George Picard and Mark Halperin, I too have a dream that I will live to see the day when there is finally a white man on the Supreme Court.
Bob Unruh might have some other reasons to hate the Kinsey scale.
Bob Unruh, Wing Nut Daily:
Exposing Kinsey Sex Atrocities Goes Global
I’m surprised that wingnuts don’t go after Alfred Kinsey more often. I mean, let’s be frank, the conservative opinion on sex is that if one puts their fingers in their ears and pretends any information about sex away, then that will also make sex and sexuality go away.
To a wingnut, as long as they don’t hear about it, then it must not ever occur, and their teenage daughter’s swelling belly must be because she has really let herself go on her exercise routine.
To be fair, that’s probably by design. A psychotic deliberately trying to ignore any evidence that gays aren’t minions of Satan (pshaw, like we don’t all know that they’re Venusian slavers come to rob us of promising conservative politicians) isn’t likely to look up exactly who did the research that proves they’ve been around forever.
“Luckily” for us, Bob Unruh is a well-read escapee of the mental asylum and wants his fellow inmates to know that there was a guy that looked into this nasty sex stuff they are all ashamed of, but its okay, because he’s really Hitler Times 12.
There is much butthurt in the wingnut universe. Their God-King come to life in George the Second was much maligned in his time in office by mean-spirited liberals daring to notice that some of the boots being given to the security state were decidedly jackbooted. Furthermore they dared to note that maybe having a uniform executive unilaterally deciding that most of the first ten amendments ceased to apply to certain people and that torture was peachy keen was a little bit fascist flavored.
Now, there have been many celebrated attempts to deal with this. The most famous of course being the Lord Doughboy’s famed treatise: Liberal Fascism, subtitled “Nuh uh, it’s you who are the fascist poopyheads”.
But why shouldn’t a meth-crazed designer of some of those right-winged photoshops that are 99% projection, 1% something snortable be denied their attempt to give it a shot? Read the rest of this entry »
There has been a change in the seasons. A new year dawning brings momentary lucidity. And for the pallid flaks of modern conservatism, the early year reflection has brought only one phrase to mind:
“Holy Shit, are we assholes!”
I’m sure every brief sober morning brings that reflection to their mind before booze and projection do their dirty work of protecting their fledgling synapses from the horror, so this is nothing new to them. However, this year is an election year and one they look to be losing even before they’ve picked their sacrificial lamb for the slaughter.
As such, there is the quick straightening of ties and the frantic desperate increase in projection in only the way wingnuts know how desperate to make all their post-Obama-election insanity look the fault of some other bastards far far away.
And of all the publications to be scrambling, none are scrambling quite so desperately as that stalwart of “intellectual conservativism” known as National Review. Read the rest of this entry »
Well, well, well, if it isn’t everyone’s favorite one-man minstrel show, Lloyd Marcus. One might think our buddy Lloyd having given up sense, dignity, and basic human respect to chain his star to the plummeting train-crash that was the “Tea Party Express” might be going through something akin to buyer’s remorse just about now.
Well, if you thought that, you just don’t know Lloyd. He paid too much for the mandatory lobotomy to stop now and has decided to engage in wingnut’s favorite game: Privilege Fails.
Now, you think that might be difficult for LLoyd, what with being overly melaninated and a one-man-pride parade, but Lloyd should be committed, I mean, is committed to wingnut excellence.
And so has decided to take offense that a single show starring a muslim family has come into existence and thus has erased all Christian TV families from existence and catapulted us into Sharia Law.
Although I have argued that Republican presidents have the power to crush children’s testicles in the name of national security, I am offended at Obama’s abuse of power when he chose to ignore a procedural trick implemented by the Republicans to prevent recess appointments.
Forcing everyone to use C.E. instead of A.D. is just another way that Jews oppress Christians.
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Alternate Shorter Elizabeth Lauren, The American Genius; AD 2012 or 2012 CE?
True inclusiveness would be if the Jews adopted and embraced Christianity rather than making Christians feel bad with all their complaining about Christ.
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Another Alternate Shorter Elizabeth Lauren, The American Genius; AD 2012 or 2012 CE?
It wasn’t enough for the Jews to have crucified Christ the first time; they have to keep doing it over and over again.
Today’s wingnut butthurt is an old perennial and comes from someone calling herself Elizabeth Lauren over at The American Genius. This is Ms. Lauren’s second post ever, the first being one where she waxes nostalgic for the good old days of censorship which would have forbidden any poet from publishing a poem referring to genitalia. Today she’s climbed up on the cross and nailed herself to it over the usage of C.E. and B.C.E. in place of A.D. and B.C. Her argument seems mostly to be that it’s something the Jews baked up and this:
For a number of reasons, though, not only does the new dating standard fail in its desired effect, but it may ultimately cause unintended confusion and polarization, not to mention offense to the Christian majority.
Apparently people are missing tests and appointments and saying “Oh, you meant January 7, 2012 A.D.? You should have said so.” I’m already planning to try that. Of course, I may not respond in the same way when a restaurant tells me that actually my reservation was made for 9 p.m. on January 21 about four thousand years ago.
But, of course, the whole point is the “not to mention the offense to the Christian majority,” who apparently take offense at each and every breath drawn by anyone who doesn’t subscribe to their particular flavor of Christianity. Other offenses to the Christian majority: Jews refusing to name their children after Christian saints, Jews taking shelf space in the grocery around passover from Christian food and giving it to Jewish stuff like matzoh, Jewish stores being open on Sunday, and Jews insisting on putting those mezuzah thingies on their door frames as an open affront to their Christian neighbors.
This being The American Genius website, Ms. Lauren throws out a number of additional and similarly irrefutable arguments in support of A.D. and B.C., including one that I’ll call the Thor Appeal
We all in our daily lives, in a Western society with a lengthy and complex history, use a great number of names of pagan origin. Our weekdays — for example, “Thursday,” named for the Norse god Thor — originate in decidedly non-Christian cultural history.
This would be a really excellent argument, I suppose, if the dominant culture in the U.S. practiced Norse mythology and prayed to Thor in public schools, then the maintenance of the name Thursday might actually mean something.
Finally, Lauren argues that A.D. and B.C. aren’t offensive because people are too dumb to understand what those terms mean:
“Before Christ,” if one is concerned about sensitivity towards non-Christians, may not necessarily be viewed as referring to the belief system that Jesus is the Messiah, since it is not always known in contemporary culture that “Christ” means just that.
Similarly, making the reasonable assumption that Ms. Lauren doesn’t speak French, she can’t possibly be offended when I call her a putain because she has no idea what that means.
Anyway, I think that the proper solution is to get rid of A.D., B.C., C.E., and B.C.E. and replace them with A.B. and B.B. for before and after butthurt, with the index year being 2008, and I think you know why.
Although I was quite prepared to give the best headline ever award for “Santorum Surges” to the numerous headline writers that crafted this classic with, obviously, a knowing wink to what Santorum really means, that was before I stumbled across John F. Di Leo’s “The Democratic Party’s War on the Poor” over at The American Genius.
This is sometimes why I think our job here at Sadly, No! is too easy. (It’s a good thing we don’t get paid for it.) Where really is the challenge to ridiculing wingnuts when they whip up headlines that have no basis in reality at all? And again where’s the fun when the ridiculous headline is illustrated by a preposterous non sequitur? Di Leo’s proof of the Democratic Party’s war on the poor is an escalator in Medellin. As in Colombia. As in a tiny third world country about a zillion miles from the United States and partly in another fucking hemisphere and where the only Democrats there are a few tourists getting drunk in hotel bars in Bogota. Yes, that escalator in Medellin is, somehow or other, proof of a war of the Democratic party against the poor.
The escalator that precipitated Di Leo’s hissy fit was built so that poor residents of a ghetto in Medellin could go from downtown to their homes in 5 minutes, replacing a 35 minute walk up 530 steps on the side of a mountain. How could anyone object to that, you must be wondering, but, if so, you’ve clearly forgotten that these are the kind of people who get upset when they hear that an orphanage is lavishing its residents with macaroni and cheese rather than the traditional and biblically mandated fare of stale bread and thin gruel. (If you give ‘em mac and cheese, they’ll never want to leave the orphanage and will become permanent parasites stealing my tax dollars, etc., etc. You may be laughing now at the preposterous notion that anyone would actually make an argument like that, but, if so, just be patient for a few minutes and let Di Leo get there all on his own.)
Now, why do we turn to a foreign country for an example of the critical failing of the American Democratic Party?
Gee, John, you beat me to it because I was asking myself that very same question.
Because the way American conservatives and liberals react to this story of misguided social programs is the American economic debate in a microcosm.
If you’re thinking that John is going to totally make up the liberal reaction to this story, then our work is done here and you can skip to the next paragraph. According to John, silly liberals like the escalators because they help poor people while keeping them poor, particularly because the stupid beaners didn’t know to cover the escalators so that they will now be destroyed by the first rainfall and the liberals won’t really care that this happens because the rain is not their fault.
Of course, the conservatives, who are truly wise, take the real lesson from the Medellin escalator:
[W]e see that the mayor and his friendly press down there in Colombia have exactly the wrong attitude: they are spending $6.7 million to help return people to a shantytown every day. What they should be doing is trying to free these poor people from Comuna 13 — to help them earn better salaries so they can, one day, come down from that mountaintop and never, ever be compelled to return!
But wait, you ask, couldn’t this argument be made against any form of public transportation? Certainly, he’s not going to condemn public transportation as well, is he? Sadly, Yes!
We subsidize the public transportation of our cities so that the poor can ride in an air-conditioned bus or train for free or nearly free.
All this does not make it a joy to be poor, of course. It’s still a miserable life. But all these freebies, all these misguided little benefits, have warped the ability of individuals to rationally judge the delta between their current lifestyle and their potential future lifestyle in a job, their potential future lives in the middle class.
Whoomp, there it is: the mac and cheese argument. Air-conditioned public buses will make the poor want to stay poor forever because they can get on an air-conditioned bus anytime they want and luxuriate their lives away rather than working hard to buy their own air-conditioned car. If you made all poor people walk to work, every single fucking one of them would be richer than the Koch Brothers in just a few months.
So turns out that Sadly, No doesn’t really cover psychological care in its Health Plan, so I’m back on the streets after a handful of days. Fortunately (for given values of fortunate), my recent “episode” leaves me in perfect mental condition to work through some of the less…lucid of wingnut writings and bring some mangoes back for your “enjoyment”. On a completely unrelated note, Sadly No Industries disavows any responsibility for any psychological injuries caused by trying to read sense in what follows.
In Western tradition it is Hamlet’s inner being that matters, his soul. Until the mid-20th century the English language used words like “soul,” or “dear soul,” to address people in everyday conversations. You can still read it in Agatha Christie mysteries of the 1940s. Addressing other people as “souls” was a simple country habit, but one that invoked worlds of sympathy and mutual respect. The trendy Left celebrates Buddhism for similar expressions, like the respectful greeting “Namaste.” (I greet the soul in you). That is important; but it’s just as important to know that the same idea dwells at the heart of our own culture.
No, no, this is the lucid part. Part of an initial argument that since in Christian dominated cultures or in Western interpretations of Eastern concepts, the soul comes up a lot, that it must exist and be super important. That whenever someone uses short-hand to talk about humanity they are admitting the existence of a soul by its interpretation by a narrow section of Christianity. Be afraid, be very afraid.
