Shorter Phil Valentine
Sacrificing your SUV, personal spending won’t help anyone
I spend therefore I am.
Valentine has much to share with us of course, including the notion that he’s doing everyone a favor by buying the least fuel efficient car he can find, or the notion that spending money in and of itself produces prosperity for everyone:
If you want to help people who are less fortunate than you, it makes sense that America should be as prosperous as possible. This may be counter-intuitive to some liberals out there [straw liberals, perhaps?], but the better off we are, the better it is for the rest of the world. Not only does our government come to the aid of millions of people around the world, but our people help out millions more with their private contributions. We’re the most generous nation on earth, but if we’re hurting, the rest of the world hurts, too. By keeping our economy strong, we continue to feed the goose that lays the golden egg.
While Phil does subsequently point out that he’s not advocating going into debt to keep the economy going (which is why we assume he’ll pay cash for his new Canyonero), there’s little he offers that differs from the old “spend yourself rich” philosophy that has never failed to work. As to why saving money is considered a (bad) liberal policy, Phil offers little. We offer this:
“The American dream begins with saving money and that should begin on the very first day of work,” Cheney told a conference here exploring how to encourage people to boost savings and be better prepared for retirement.
Thanks to a reader for the link.
Shorter Shorter Phil Valentine:
When you’re in a hole, dig faster!
You do know that you can actually out dig the soil falling over your head right? Beating the dirt to the bottom is teh new paradigm.
Phil has one Bobby McFerrin song on his iPod shuffle. Don’t like it doom & gloomers? Fuck you!
Let me guess, as much as Phil Valentine (any relation to Carol Valentine of the website(s) with the Dale Evans picture, the bizarre theories about my religion and one of the best online versions of the Talmud around?) wants us all to spend, spend, spend our way to a better economy, if some feller spends like Phil Valentine wishes and ends up in bankruptcy but this person happens to have a wee bit more melanin, shall we say, than Phil Valentine, Mr. Valentine will be joining the crowd chanting “you should have lived within your means” and “quit being irresponsible”.
BTW — am I the only one who thinks “living beyond your means” is, along with such adjectives used to describe Obama as “presumptuous” and “hubristic” and “arrogant”, the new “uppity”. What does “living beyond your means” mean anyway? Nu? If you do work amounting to providing X% of the goods and services that make up our economic pie, but the free market only sees fit to reward you with Y% of the GDP (where Y << X), are you really (in a moral sense) living beyond your means if you spend %X of the GDP instead of the merely Y% you’ve “earned”? I mean, fiscal responsibility is one thing (and quite an admirable thing too!), but the moralizing about poor people “living beyond their means” is kinda sickening when it involves people spending what really is their fair share of the economic pie rather than what the free market sees fit to give them. Since when (to mis-use a phrase from Bacon) do we encourage worship of the Idols of the Marketplace?
America is the most generous nation on earth, as long as you don’t count all those other nations that give foreign aid.
Oh, wait, I think the Iraq war was actually not a war but a really large foreign aid packet. Nevermind, we win!
Of course it was. Don’t you remember when the Iraqi people threw a parade for our glorious liberation, and our troops showered them with flowers, candy and cute puppies?
Please pardon the off topic post, but…
How Birth Control Brings Us Down
http://www.livescience.com/culture/080801-hn-happy-face.html
Named one of Talkers Magazine’s Heavy Hundred: The 100 Most Important Radio Talk Show Hosts in America
blardy har har. another talk radio clown blathering bullshit on the airwaves of america. that’s a new suv+gas affording gig right there.
pardon me while I snicker at Phil’s epiphany
ah life’s a bitch when you realize you might actually have to work for a degree. same thing happened to the President. No wonder they see eye to eye.
From Lesley’s link—
# Heard on over 50 great radio stations across the country through Westwood One
A winnar is you.
Shorter Phil Valentine: America is the grain-guzzling Clydesdale from whose copious turds all global sparrows should be happy to pick the undigested kernels!
If the only Clydesdales most Americans know about hadn’t just been sold off to the Belgians. On the other hand, that does kind of complete the metaphor, since the Valentines among us are busy selling the country to whichever foreigner has the money to bail us out of our own incompetence.
Check out Phil’s “osophy” ABCs
http://www.philvalentine.com/philosophy.htm
If I’d known it was this easy to make millions…I still could not bring myself to be this moron.
…life’s a bitch when you realize you might actually have to work for a degree.
Heh. I saw a lot of that in my college days back in the Ancient Times. As an engineering student I saw many – in fact, most – of the students who started out as electrical or mechanical engineering students switch to computer science once it became clear how hard EE and ME were. Then when they found CS wasn’t all that much easier, they switched to business. Some of them washed out even of that program – one in particular who had made a schedule for himself during Freshman Week that included more hours per week for drinking than for sleep. He stuck to it pretty well, I’ll give him that.
So now I’m a middle-aged programmer and having a fairly good time with it, and people like them have been my managers at some of my jobs, working fewer hours and making more money. Weird how it works out.
And Phil Valentine is a tool if he really believes what he wrote here.
“Drug legalization will cripple America.” vs. “Entrepreneurs are our economic lifeblood and deserve every penny they make.” (remember drug dealers are entrepreneurs)? “Oppression should not be fueled by American capitalism.” vs. “Reagan [who, e.g., was keen on using the fruits of the American arms industry to fund oppression in Latin America] was right.”? “You and you alone are ultimately responsible for your own destiny.” vs. “Belief in God is a cornerstone of our republic.”?
Does the cognitive dissonance of this Valentine guy make his head explode on a daily basis or does this Valentine guy believe he’s not a small mind because he, following Emerson, doesn’t worry about the hobgoblin of consistency?
Another off topic link, but I think this deserves a thorough mocking: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/385rlkfy.asp
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Geddit?! Because, it’s funny because uh… er…
This movie is going to be hilarious for none of Zucker’s intended reason.
And Phil Valentine is a tool if he really believes what he wrote here. – SamFromUtah
And I betcha he doesn’t at all get how frickin’ privileged he is. The “privilege” and “entitlement” (as we moonbats use the terms) are just oozing from the page. Unfortunately, a lot of people who don’t see their own privilege think exactly like he does. And not just right-wingnuts and faux-moderate wankers … a fair number of lefties produce some of the most cogent critiques of privilege and then decide that they, and they alone, are the anointed elect of God who have the power to decide who is privileged and who isn’t (I call these people neo-Puritans, ’cause that’s how they think … of course, they’ll deny it, ’cause they misunderstand Puritanism to be about hatin’ teh hawt sex).
But of course, nothing takes the cake of a privileged white male who has had the world handed to him on a plate whining “[y]ou and you alone are ultimately responsible for your own destiny.”
people like them have been my managers at some of my jobs, working fewer hours and making more money. Weird how it works out.
How many of them think they deserve to make more money than you because the Market is altogether just? I know a lot of people, even some who claim to be religious, who think that wealth and intelligence fit together like a hand in a glove. Which is odd for a religious person given Koheleth’s statement of “nor bread to the wise”.
Yeah, remind me who it was we fought in the Civil War? Seems like it might be relevant considering who Zucker hitched his stupid-wagon to.
Crap AJB, you made me want to wash my eyes out with that link.
Among such novelties, Hayes argues that The Naked Gun 2 1/2 had a vaguely environmental agenda, which would imply that Back to the Future had a vaguely anti-islamofascist agenda.
But it was this quote which really got to me
So wait, you admit that John Kerry was the most liberal member of the US senate and then Barack Obama now is, with Kerry still serving? Weird how that happens huh?
And the comparison to a virus is real nice.
Mr. Valentine is an entrepreneur in the parasite class, a modern day snake oil salesman.
If the answer is voting for a Republican, you’re asking the wrong question.
Looks like time to highlight, once again, “A Day in the Life of Joe Republican”:
Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards.
With his first swallow of water, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to insure their safety and that they work as advertised.
All but $10 of his medications are paid for by his employer’s medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance – now Joe gets it too.
He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Joe’s bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.
In the morning shower, Joe reaches for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained.
Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air.
He walks to the subway station for his government-subsidized ride to work. It saves him considerable money in parking and transportation fees because some fancy-pants liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.
Joe begins his workday. He has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy liberal union members fought and died for these working standards.
Joe’s employer pays these standards because Joe’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union. If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, he’ll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some stupid liberal didn’t think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune.
It’s noontime and Joe needs to make a bank deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe’s deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some godless liberal wanted to protect Joe’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression.
Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and his below-market federal student loan because some elitist liberal decided that Joe and the government would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime.
Joe is home from work. He plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive. His car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards.
He arrives at his boyhood home. His was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers’ Home Administration because bankers didn’t want to make rural loans.
The house didn’t have electricity until some big-government liberal stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification.
He is happy to see his father, who is now retired. His father lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Joe wouldn’t have to.
Joe gets back in his car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn’t mention that the beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day.
Joe agrees: “We don’t need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I’m a self-made man who believes everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have.”
Time to wheel out the ol’ “are you better off than you were 8 years ago?” “No? Well then, you think it’s going to change if you vote for the guy who promises to keep doing the same stuff? That’s the functional definition of insanity.”
If you really want to see Ol’ Phil’s marmoset eyes light up just get him on the subject of Reagan’s “supply-side” tax cuts. He still credits them — not the later tax hikes and deficit spending largely through the military — for any economic improvement and revenue increases during the 80s.
Joe’s bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.
I wouldn’t go that far, Jennifer. The meat packing industry is rife with uninspected, unmonitored grossness.
I wouldn’t go that far, Jennifer. The meat packing industry is rife with uninspected, unmonitored grossness.
But are we back to pre-Upton Sinclair practices yet?
I wouldn’t go that far, Jennifer. The meat packing industry is rife with uninspected, unmonitored grossness.
True, dat. And I’d wager that there’s more uninspected and unmonitored grossness now than there was 10 years ago, because these guys really don’t care if big agri poisons consumers. That having been said, it’s still a damn sight better than what we’d have in the Republicans’ ideal world, which would be no inspections or monitoring whatsoever, or more likely (and what’s probably happening right now), payola to officials to look the other way. After all, there’s no reason why anyone should be allowed to get away with poisoning people for free, not while there’s a Republican who can make a few bucks off it.
AJB, I didn’t read the whole article that you linked to because reading just a little was enough to cause me to wince constantly, but is there a chance Zucker is pulling one over on them? I mean they’ve got a quote from him saying that we’re in a new McCarthy era. They do have to be able to make some connection to what the original McCarthy era was about and compare it to what’s going on like that today, right?
[goes and forces self to read more of the article]
Okay, I was totally wrong. He’s as far gone as they are. It looks like 9/11 changed everything for him. Just looking over the descriptions of the commercials he made for the Club for Growth (ugh), I have to ask this question once again: what is it about converting to the conservative mindset that just destroys someone’s ability to do comedy? So if we didn’t fight the Civil War, Barack Obama would be a slave because the South was allowed to go its own way and Illinois was a Northern state and…….okay, I’m totally lost. That movie sounds awful.
Also, never let me go near the Weekly Standard again. That’s a lot of concentrated stupid.
And I’d wager that there’s more uninspected and unmonitored grossness now than there was 10 years ago, because these guys really don’t care if big agri poisons consumers.
I get enormous pleasure knowing the deregulating assholes eat the meat.
speaking of it getting worse, the Harper conservatives have done away with mad cow inspection and they’re writing legislation that will do away with independent food inspection altogether. I received this email from Jack Layton, leader of the NDP the other day:
Well, in order to have money to buy stuff, you have to earn money by making the stuff. Not just managing hedge funds or leveraging buyouts. Who’s making the stuff these days? The Chinese. And they’re making the money too. We could benefit from that.
Huh?
Have I mentioned that I love science?
How many of them think they deserve to make more money than you because the Market is altogether just?
Only one has come right out and said it. The biggest idiot of the bunch. I’ve had a few others who I’m certain thought it but had enough cunning not to say it where the peons could hear.
Happily, I now work for academics – who have their own set of problems, but are much more my kinda folks.
“I spend, therefore I am.”
A worthy motto for a minor lackey whose owners had the foresight to opt instead for “I invest, therefore I am” … & somewhere, the ghost of Rene Descartes is quietly puking.
Just say MOOOOOOOOO!
This explains why I just got some Harper junkmail crowing about how they’ve improved the product-safety standards that the big bad Liberals didn’t care enough about to improve for decades (8 years of Mulroney have, of course, gone down Ye Olde Memory Hole). Harper’s following the classic advertising formula: pretend that your worst failing is nonexistant, & that you’re in fact exactly the opposite of what you truly are … thus the beer ads featuring the lucid & witty repartee of slim sexy young folks, or SUV ads with handsome muscular dudes behind the wheel, or fast-food ads where somehow – mirabile dictu -noone is ever obese, etc. …
I’ve also found that running my taps 24/7 makes me better aware of local water shortages, and that running m heater and air conditioning at the same time lets me know when the oil has run out.
Republicans: the party of thrift and good sense.
Also, I believe that Phil Valentine is offering a prebuttal to those GOPpers who will fly out to the Twin Cities at the end of the month, and might be caught dropping a few rolls of Benjamins on strippers, hookers, tequila body shots and blow. They’re just doing their bit to support the working poor.
Ah, but it’s the job of The Market to ensure that Those People are dissuaded from rash economic decisions and encouraged to live within their means by the prospect of 38% APR on car loans or re-adjusting 11% interest-only mortgages backed up by 15% HELOCs, the fine print of which is displayed for at least 3 seconds before signing.
It’s Zombie-Keynesian economics:
No, No, you’re digging wrong! Dig Up, Guys!