What does any of that have to do with metrosexuals?

“It was a great plan right up until it didn’t work.”

Later on in this column:

In contrast, had the United States had a republic secure and up and running in Baghdad 3 months after the end of the three-week war, at a cost of say, 400, fatalities, missing Weapons of Mass Destruction and all other the other complaints would not have been real issues,

In other words, if the war had been a success, no one would be complaining. That’s some mighty fine punditry. The next time a coach gets fired, he should say, “In contrast, had the team gone, say, 14-2 and won the Super Bowl, this 2-14 record and all the other complaints about my competency would not have been real issues.”

Holy Crap! “Support Our Oops” is too perfect!

That should be on yellow magnets, yes. And, could someone explain what the hell it has to do with metrosexuals? Are we blaming the gays for the war or something? Is it just reflex?

Could someone tell me exactly what this guy is actually arguing? I’m trying to follow it here but something keeps my head hurting.

Point 1: Every Pundit Supported the War prior to going in

OK, I agree with that pretty much.

Point 2: After the War turned sour, many of the pundocracy have now had rather slippery memories about what they said in the run up to the war and can’t admit it.

Again, I agree. The bobble heads on the shows desperately want to escape any accountability for their assistance in getting the US into this mess

Point 3: It is thus that these people should be held accountable for their mistake and we should take a grain of salt the size of Kansas

Point 4: On the other hand, demanding accountability from the people who screwed up Iraq in the first place is implied to be bad thing, even though these were the people who claimed it would be a cakewalk and the US would be greeted as liberators.

I didn’t realize that in 2003 I was actually a metrosexual, as I opposed the naked aggression from the start.
Aha. I refer to it as naked aggression, therefore..

His last few columns appear to have been written by a software program – type in a few terms (metrosexual, strategy, Iraq, 2003), set it to “Wordy”, and hit Enter.

And, could someone explain what the hell it has to do with metrosexuals?

As far as I can tell, VDH thinks this is the new all-purpose insult to be dropped in where Red-Blooded He-Men used to use the words “pansy”, “wimp”, or “faggot”. Because in VDH’s world, if you can’t force other men to cooperate with all your wildest dreams of random aggressiveness by calling them unmanly, what’s a Great Leader going to do? It’s not like VDH’s man-crushes are going to have a whole lot of luck persuading men to fight for this week’s iteration of the Wingnut Fantasy Crusade by using their enormous powers of persuasion and subtle rhetoric, after all.

I still don’t even know what a metrosexual is.

I think it’s someone who only has sex downtown, or on the subway in Paris.

You know, I’m generally considered (even by the constantly increasing host of people who don’t like me) to be exceptionally intelligent.

And I have No. Fucking. Idea. WTF VD Hanson is blathering on about (metrosexuals???) here.

None.

One possibility: He was higher when he wrote this than I am right now (this is unlikely considering the quality of the powerful and completely legal prescription drugs to which I have access).

Another possibility: He wrote this piece of shite in Greek and then ran that sucker through Babelfish before publishing it (I’m not sure why he would do this, but then, I’m not sure why he does anything).

Mostly likely possibility: He’s a total fucking loon. I think I’m gonna go with this one. Occam’s Razor, and all that.

This guy has not stepped foot outside a campus into the real world in his life.

Never held a blue collar job. Never served in the military. Went straight from frat boy to learned loopy-loo.

Who the hell is HE to call someone a ‘metrosexual’ like it’s an insult? He’d probably break in half in a stiff breeze.

Who dumped used cat litter into my Dustbin of History?? I’m going to kick someone’s ass.

We Support Our Oops is brilliant and should be the new rallying cry for right-wingers everywhere. It has the benefit of being more honest than their “We support our troops” lip service, too.

Gee, strawman arguments are hackery, but hypothetical strawman arguments are truly pathetic hackery:

Had the Titanic sailed on to New York successfully all the complaints of bad navigation, too much ice and too few lifeboats would not have been real issues, and everyone would have pointed to the vessel’s splendid appointments, fine cuisine, and unsinkability.

Had the Titanic sailed on to New York successfully all the complaints of bad navigation, too much ice and too few lifeboats would not have been real issues, and everyone would have pointed to the vessel’s splendid appointments, fine cuisine, and unsinkability.

And if my uncle had tits, he’d be my aunt. What the fuck is this, some kind of elaborate code? Messages to the Martians?

So why is he calling bullshit on all the pundits but not on the administration that outright lied about the war, cost, duration, and most importantly the reason? I too blame the enablers but not under his false librul media inuendos but I reserve the majority of the blame for the neocons that set this travesty in motion.

He’s getting lonely. So many of his former playmates at warmongering have heard their mommies calling “Dinner!” and headed home. Where once he was a (self-proclaimed) star in a field of war supporters, now he’s out in the gathering dusk with just the weirdos, the boys who set fire to anthills and blow up frogs with firecrackers. He resents those who belatedly realized that the sociopaths weren’t so cool afterall. But he can’t recant, he can’t withdraw, not yet. He’s expended so much energy, so many words promoting this failed adventure. Sad, pathetic man. Maybe Ralph Peters will want to play with him.

It amazes me that these genuine “Learned Scholars of Military History” can’t seem to get the basic point. There was never any chance that Iraq would turrn out well. It was not possible. More troops, less troops, nuclear weapons, Klingon disrupters at the squad level, cash bribes for every Iraqi – it don’t matter. They, like most every occupied population in history, were going to fight, and the Greatest Military Force in the History of the World ™ had already learned forty years ago that you cannot defeat an insurgency with popular support militarily. No amount of tanks, gunships, artillery and fighter bombers can win. When you add in a long-oppresed majority with some pretty fanatical religious leaders and unlimited support from a neighboring nation that just happens to be a major regional power, and anyone who didn’t see the outcome was blind, stupid or just wanted to go to war and knock off saddam and didn’t care about the ugly outcome.

Look, the obvious unavoidable outcome will be choppers taking people off the roof of the embassy as the insurgents are taking the suberbs of Baghdad. This is not hard to predict, EVERY military occupation will always end that way, now and forever, amen. Will they learn? Will McCain? Hillarry? Nope. More pain, horror, sorrow and bloodletting ahead, kids. If you’ve got young children, particularly sons, think hard about if you really want to stay here…

mikey

I totally want a sticker that says ‘Support Our Oops’. That is brilliant.

http://www.cafepress.com/supportouroops

I like these ones better, though

http://www.cafepress.com/massmadness/1155299

In other news, Democrats have a sleazy dirty novel writer do their radio address. Webb also guarantees a magic solution to Iraq, which looks a lot like “Cut and Run”

Also, Iranian Mullahs and Democrats agree that it’s time to get rid of the Republicans

The fact is that the Mullahs and the Democrats both benefit from a Cut and Run Democrat majority emerging in the House and Senate.

The Democrats embolden the enemy every day, and that enemy will be emboldened even more if the American people waver and allow the Democrats to win both Houses.

Ol’ V.D. looks just like the creepy assistant pastor at the church I was compelled to go to as a child, the one who used to pick up the little girls with his meaty hands and hold them up so that their little Sunday-school dresses were hiked up over their frilly underpants and everybody knew there was something very wrong with him in exactly the same way you know there’s something very wrong with Noah Cross in Chinatown . . . and I know this sounds like a digression but the only way I can figure out WTF metrosexuality would have to do with this pathetic “argument” is to consider that everything is a teeming mass of psychosexualized jealousy and aggression for this guy.

int thefactis(void)

OK, but really, introducing a sentence with the phrase “in other news” implies that you’re going to say something “new” and that you’re going to say something “other” than what you’ve been blithering aboud ad nauseam. There’s nothing worse than a boring troll.

I think the GaryBot needs refactoring – shouldn’t thefactis return a string?

*about*

or maybe *aboot* for the Canadian-speakers among us

Gary, how do you know these are sleazy, dirty novels?

Have you read one? They are best sellers about Vietnam, from someone who fought there and traveled there as a journalist.

To put matters another way, are you ever going to learn to think for yourself, Gary?

Have you read one? They are best sellers about Vietnam, from someone who fought there and traveled there as a journalist.

GaryBot would accuse Eli Wiesel of being a snuff-lit peddler if he ran for office as a Democrat…

I think the GaryBot needs refactoring – shouldn’t thefactis return a string?

That function routinely crashes. It’s reproducible.

The fact is we Republicans have really fucked up on a massive scale. It’s hard for me to get my head around the immensity of the disaster we Republi8cans have created in Iraq.

We take total responsibility for all of the fiascoes of the last six years and humbly apologize to the nation.

EDITORIAL NOTE: in a just world that’s what Gary would be telling us. Instead he’s the same spiteful, pathetic creep he always is. Well, run along, Gary, some grown ups are coming to Washington to fix the mess you infants have made.

If I recall, a metrosexual is a straight dude who acts… uhh… not macho? Like, gets manicures and has their hair styled and enjoys spas and vegetarian vietnamese food, but isn’t gay.
It was a fashion buzzword a few years back, I thought it was always prety silly.
See: David Beckham.

I agree with Gary. How DARE the Democrats let a Senatorial canidate NEAR a microphone! Or any other form of mass media! It’s disGUSTING!
*Goes back to reading my erotic fiction written by Arlen Specter*

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2bfLaF_ZXA

Gary came back strong for a bit there, but now he’s back to pablum and repeating himself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCOmKJAPyqk&mode=related&search= Republicans would never allow pornographers in their midst or wallets. Right?

In other news, Democrats have a sleazy dirty novel writer do their radio address. Webb also guarantees a magic solution to Iraq, which looks a lot like “Cut and Run�

In real world news, the Republicans are STILL following a drunkard who liked to torture animals as a child, and who has a super-secret Magical Plan to make everything right in Iraq that sounds amazingly like The Plan Of The Underpants Gnomes:

1. Keep doing the same stupid things we’ve always done
2. (to be determined)
3. Success!

I dunno. I think gary and his fellow traveler nutjobs are doing Webb a favor. I mean the guy’s positives are so big that the worst thing they can come up with is he put an odd cultural sex-type scene in a novel he wrote years ago about another culture. That’s the worst the swiftys can come up with? Against all of the ugly stuff known about Allen? Keep it coming gary, this is fun…

mikey

Coulda swore I was driving behind Mikey on Curtner when I saw this bumper sticker on a truck:

[picture of the Chimperor looking surprised] PREMATURE IRAQ

Aw fuck.

PREMATURE IRAQ ELATION

(it’s much better with the punchline)

No, no, Gory — it’s much funnier with the . . . wait for it . . . the . . .

[tick]

[tick]

[tick]

suspense.

In other news, Democrats have a sleazy dirty novel writer do their radio address.

Did you know, O slack-jawed corrupter of minors, that Webb’s novel is required reading for members of the United States Marine Corps who are in the process of being promoted from corporal to sergeant? Probably not, as the closest you’ve ever gotten to the Marine Corps is panting over a guy dressed as a Marine in some porno magazine.

That function routinely crashes. It’s reproducible.

So… would that make S,N! one big black box test for the GaryBot?

You think the part quoted was hard to understand. What about this?

“I wrote about the daily changing wisdom in Fields Without Dreams, and how fickle human nature is, rather than looking at things in a tragic sense that there are no great choices, but often just bad and worse, and that wisdom is predicated mostly on the perception of success. In 1982 I picked [grapes] early and thereby avoided a horrendous tropical storm that ruined the industry, saving thereby 200 tons of raisins that sold for over $1400 a ton; in 1983 I picked early again, the clouds blew away, and in weeks of perfect weather I produced lousy, sour, and light raisins, selling scarcely 140 tons for $400 and lost far more than I had made the year before. I was neither a genius the year before, nor a fool the next, but rather did the best I could in both years, recognizing that we are still subject to fate, despite our vaunted technology and knowledge. I am not advising helplessness, simply some recognition that the verdict is out on Iraq, and what looks bad today, might look far better very soon—and that erstwhile supporters turned vehement critics might well reinvent themselves a third time.”

So the point is . . . . we are all at the mercy of random events. Don’t even bother to determine the facts because they’re no help. A decision made by the president might look good three months out, bad at three and a half years out, and terrific at seventy-five years out. Just give up on trying to judge his decisions, because who knows how things will look in 2078 after smoking some seriously effective weed.

My problem with this analogy (please excuse my reference to facts) is that grapes have to be picked before the next growing season. There is a point at which grapes HAVE TO BE PICKED or you have lost the entire crop. The dilemma is early or late, not early, late or NEVER.

We had the NEVER option in Iraq. Presumably the president decided to reject that option. Why, Mr. President? Show your work.

Cowalker,

The other issue in the Iraq vs. grapes analogy is that Iraq was not our vineyard, nor our grapes to pick.

That’s another conveniently over-looked “minor” detail, but imagine if VHD’s neighbor decided to sneak into the vineyard and pick VHD’s grapes first. Does it matter at this point how much the raisins were worth and how many were sold: VHD is completely and non-recoverably screwed. He has no recovery of his costs for the year, and may very well lose his vineyard.

And how pissed would he be at listening to his thieving neighbor discuss the rightness or wrongess of of the “steal the grapes early” vs. “steal the grapes late” decision?

Anybody got any grapes?

“missing Weapons of Mass Destruction and all other the other complaints would not have been real issues”

He’s absolutely right about this, although he fails to understand its implications. The most egregious and despicable hoax in American history would indeed have been a successful one. But it still would have been an unconscionable and despicable hoax.

[…] there this winter.  I realize that within the conservative movement, there will always be Victor Davis Hansons, people who manage to actually get stupider as they get older.  But this widespread idiocy seems […]