Sadly, No!

Above: “Debra J. Saunders, post-Truth-In-Advertising compliance”

Shorter Debra “J is for Justice” Saunders, Clown Hall:
All cog, no machine; all check, no balance

• What kind of a country is this where we can’t quasi-legally deport one single drug addict? Well, it turns out we can, but that didn’t stop me from calling up his wife and young child and harassing them.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

ABOVE: Robert Stacy McCain (a
dramatization)

Shorter Robert Stacy McCain, The White Supremacist McCain:
Nikki Haley Update: Jake Knotts and the ‘Raghead’ Heard Round the World

• “Raghead” is not always a racial slur because sometimes it’s really true. Even if it is a racial slur, it was infinitely worse for Jake Knotts to call Nikki Haley a “raghead” than it was to call Obama a “raghead” because Nikki is a Republican Sikh not a Democrat Muslim.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

Above: Pignut; n., a species of hickory tree; a corpulent wingnut pundit.

MRC’s Tim Graham, he of porcine visage who regularly squeals about this or that supposed media bias, thinks he’s caught the MSM using a HUGE double standard. Viz Helen Thomas’s recent inflammatory comments about Israel, for which she has come under fire from all sides and for which she has apologized, Graham thinks he’s discovered proof of the media’s tolerance of anti-Semitism as opposed to its presumably too harsh intolerance of other forms of bigotry. Jowls aquiver, he quotes Ari Fleischer, who wants Thomas fired:

“She should lose her job over this,” Fleischer said in an email. “As someone who is Jewish, and as someone who worked with her and used to like her, I find this appalling.”

“She is advocating religious cleansing. How can Hearst stand by her? If a journalist, or a columnist, said the same thing about blacks or Hispanics, they would already have lost their jobs.”

(Remembering some of the looks liARI used to give Thomas when she’d bust him on some line of Bush Co. crap he was peddling, I lolled at that “used to like her” remark.)

Then Graham manures a perfectly nice web page of immaculate electrons with this pile of crap:

Thomas knows that she could never say the blacks should go back to Africa or the Hispanics should go back to Mexico, she would ruin her over-celebrated reputation as the “dean” of the White House press corps.

Graham forgot to put “like a wingnut would” between the words “say” and “the”, but whatever. First, for Fleischer, “religious cleansing” is exactly Israeli policy when it authorizes the bulldozing of Palestinian neighborhoods and builds in their place settlements for Israeli Jews, then builds fences around said settlements. Should the Israeli government be fired for what it undoubtedly does in practice but what Thomas put in words (which also must be interpreted)? I think so, but I suspect liARI does not. Now for Graham, an education on how these sentiments are not alike. Israel invaded and colonized Palestine, and continues to do so. “The blacks”, it’s true, were part of the invasion and colonization of America but only because they were forced to by the wonderful slaveholders Graham certainly admires. “The Hispanics”, of course, are part indigenous people, part Spanish colonizers; Mexicans can live in a great many states of the American West and be on what was their property before a certain predatory country to the north and east illegally invaded it and stole the land — the type of colonial conquest that the world had seriously begun to frown upon by 1948 and now in 2010 finds absolutely intolerable, but Israel alone among all “Western” countries still practices. If Graham wants to find a double standard there it is: Israel, and the wingnuts and Sensible Liberals who breathlessly extol its righteousness, insist that it be included in the “civilized” community, an outpost of the West surrounded by Oriental “savagery.” But it can’t be. Even America, the most hypocritical nation on earth, knows better than to forcibly and explicitly annex foreign land then cleanse it ethnically or religiously, settling it with “Our Kind”; like any imperial power who’s only in it for the money, when we conquer nowadays we let the original inhabitants stay there, rig some elections, and rule it by puppetry.

The truly rotten thing in Thomas’s comments was the part about Poland and Germany: given the history of Jews in those countries the reference was nasty and intolerable. She should have said Israelis should emigrate to America and quit murdering people in order to steal shit they think a Bronze Age text has promised them. If she had, she’d have been righteous, but still the wingnuts would have blarged because they can’t stand any criticism of their pet Middle Eastern bully.

Above: Demands a fully armed and operational battle station.

Shorter William Kristol
The Weakly Standard
“Billions for Domestic Boondoggles, Not One Cent for Defense”

• All this government spending on stupid domestic crap means less money to buy my precious, precious bombs.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

MOAR: For years — since LBJ (a wingnut in foreign policy) fucked himself and the country over with Vietnam — it’s gone like so:
A wingnut Preznint explodes the deficit with military spending. A Democratic President inherits the shattered budget, feels forced to abandon social democratic agenda to get the books in order. The next wingnut Prez does it all over again. But when healthcare passed, wingnuts took it that the cycle was over. It scared them shitless, bedwetters that they are. No more bombs, zOMG! Obama’s escalation of the stupid war in Afghanistan and his cronies’ recent hints that Social Security “reform” is possible should have comforted them but then there’s no comforting freaks like Kristol for whom even the highest, Cold War levels of defense spending are insufficient.

Of course, the U.S. spends almost as much on defense as the rest of the world’s countries combined — and that won’t change even if Gates’s recommendations are in fact institutionalized, which is the prospect that makes Kristol blarg so much. In fact, defense spending by the Obama bin Pacifist administration increased by three percent from 2009 to 2010 and Kristol’s beloved War on Terra has cost America about a trillion dollars so far. Kristol and Kristolmethodists have always been shrill about defense budgets; when in the 1990’s Clinton started talking about the Peace Dividend, neocons woke from their post-Cold War torpor and one could argue that more than any other one thing, Clinton’s (largely empty) threat to the Pentagon budget inspired the neocons’ witch hunting fervor during Lewinskygate and all that followed. It’s an old maxim that, sooner or later, if a country has a large and powerful enough army it will use it; since Kristol wants the American army used at all times, preferably to murder as many neocon boogeymen as it can get away with, it’s obvious why he obsesses on this issue, though naturally not to the point that he’d be willing to pay higher taxes for it.

That’s a headline, right? We’ll say.

What decent newspaperman wouldn’t want to sail that one past the editing desk?

Don Surber, The Chattanooga¹ (WV) Daily Mail
What pot buys

We clearly said ‘decent newspaperman,’ and in floats Surber.

‘What pot buys.’ Um, it buys less money? This doesn’t even make sense. It buys Taco Bell at 3AM with you as its faithful steed? We’re feeling that ol’ Surber vertigo already, and we’re not even out of the title.²

An estimated two-thirds of the Mexican drug trade is marijuana.

People who smoke pot illegally are like the imbibers in the Roaring Twenties funding violence on a level unseen in well, 80 years.

Arithmetic, eh? Well, 20 – 80 = -60, so there must have been a lot of funding of violence in the 1860s. As was the case, unless the History Channel has a really big correction to make.³

Yet according to Surb’s logic, it would be 60 years later, in the 1920s, when it…

Buh?

Now why does that not work? If 1840 + 80 = 1920, then how? Oooh.

People who smoke pot illegally are like the imbibers in the Roaring Twenties funding violence on a level unseen in well, 80 years.

Right, ‘imbibers.’ I almost stepped in some of their outbibings early last Sunday. I see it now: 1920 + 80 = 2000. So from 1840 to 2000 is 160 years. You divide it in half and get the year 1920. That’s what I’m talking about.

Because then you’re ready to add that imaginary 60 years, bringing you into the ferocious and imaginary drug-fueled gang violence of the ’80s and then the ’90s. Which didn’t happen because it was all too black-peopley, with the blacks and the, you know, tans.⁴ Who apparently don’t count.

Don’t mind me if I rub that in a bit hard. You encounter it whenever the ‘roaring twenties’ are celebrated. “America would never again,” the voiceover will go, “be so captivated by the gangster.” As you just sit there like, WTF?

Mexico is the new Chicago.

If so, then Chicago is New Mexico, isn’t it? This doesn’t seem right. I’m just saying there’s a catch in here somewhere.

From the Houston Chronic:

Ha ha, that was us doing a pot joke. That was funny, yes.

From the Houston Chronicle:

An alleged plot by a Mexican drug cartel to blow up a dam along the Texas border — and unleash billions of gallons of water into a region with millions of civilians — sent American police, federal agents and disaster officials secretly scrambling last month to thwart such an attack, authorities confirmed Wednesday.

Whether or not the cartel, which is known to have stolen bulk quantities of gunpowder and dynamite, could have taken down the 5-mile-long Falcon Dam may never be known since the attack never came to pass.

“It may have been derailed by a stepped-up presence by the Mexican military, which was acting in part on intelligence from the U.S. government, sources said.”

1. ‘Blow up a dam’ is new slang for puff a hoagie.
2. May be time to change water in 5-mile-long Falcon Bong.
3. “Wow man,” lights dynamite, “this stuff is dynamite.”

Federal law is not doing this. Pot was banned more than 70 years ago.

In other words, Federal law is doing this and it started a long time ago.

What drives the violence is a demand for an illegal weed, a demand that has grown over the last 40 years.

In other words, Federal law is doing this increasingly over the last 40 years, plus ‘weed.’

Either legalize it or quit.

That’s what Peter Tosh was wondering as he ended the age of commercial lighter-than-air travel, so to speak, on a nice, fat Jamaican Hindenberg, and crossed ‘Quit’ off the list of album titles, leaving ‘Legalize It,’ ‘Snork a Kazoo,’ ‘Hunk-a Hunk-a Burnin’ Bud,’ and ‘On Top of Old Smokey, All Covered In Jah.’

America and Mexico can no longer afford the violence that pot smokers help generate.

If Mexico would hand over the nachos. We’re just sayin’.

Trust Fund Boy has a new toy:

PS This is my first blog post written entirely ons an iPad.

Keep trying.

Above: Spandau Ballet knows as.. much as.. Sun-tzu.

I’m sure he’ll soon get the hang of it, though, and use it just as deftly as a normal keyboard to write his patented eleventy hundred word treatises on the Fart of War, the conclusion of which is always the same: ‘Is X liberal too pussified to threaten to blow up Y country? Yes!’

Green with an iPad is the biggest technological step forward for the shut-in von Clausewitzes of the world since Steven den Beste discovered blogging software.

With an iPad in his hands and a cheeto on his tongue
dissolves what brain wasn’t pickled in dung
Listening to Insty’s podcasts (all night long)
This is the sound of no soul,
this is the sound

C’mon, y’all, sing it.

This Times article is about the wave of foreclosures in Memphis, so the race angle is especially poignant —

Ms. Thomas and three other Wells Fargo employees have given affidavits for the city’s lawsuit against the bank, and their statements about bank practices reinforce one another.

“Your manager would say, ‘Let me see your cold-call list. I want you to concentrate on these ZIP codes,’ and you knew those were African-American neighborhoods,” she recalled. “We were told, ‘Oh, they aren’t so savvy.’ ”

She described tricks of the trade, several of dubious legality. She said supervisors had told employees to white out incomes on loan applications and substitute higher numbers. Agents went “fishing” for customers, mailing live checks to leads. When a homeowner deposited the check, it became a high-interest loan, with a rate of 20 to 29 percent. Then bank agents tried to talk the customer into refinancing, using the house as collateral.

— but AFAICT Wells and other criminal banking entities did the same sort of thing to poor and lower-middle-class people of all races across the country. Coincidentally, Daniel Foster blargs about another Times article on foreclosures and feels compelled to remind everyone just who the real moral degenerates are in these situations: the victims:

Welcome to Moral Hazard, USA. Population: Us [Daniel Foster]

The New York Times has an infuriating article this morning about the many Americans who have stopped paying their mortgages — and are loving every minute of it. In this Bailout Land, foreclosure is more abstraction than reality, and the road from delinquency to eviction and repossession passes through a grindingly slow legal process and lenders beset by both an unwieldy glut of defaulters and heavy federal regulatory pressure to keep people in their homes. As a result, many delinquent borrowers are in the driver’s seat, and living rent free[.]

He allows that, sure, it’s hard to feel sympathy for the bankers but the renters, ZOMG THOSE PPL are still living beyond their means! No doubt they drive Cadillacs and buy vodka and narcotics with food stamps! Then there’s an amusing moment when he’s confronted in e-mail by a impeccably wingnut military man whose house is being foreclosed. Mr. Sojer wants to know if Foster thinks he, too, is irresponsible. Foster gulps hard and answers in the negative. Then, later, in typical wingnut-weasel fashion (no doubt fortified by a fresh bag of Cheetos) he equivocates.

Some wingnuts have principles enough to object to all welfare in the abstract sense. But the wild fluctuations in their blargometers is the giveaway to the fact that what they might find objectionable when given to rich people (for whom, by the way, it is never a necessity) is outright intolerable and deeply offensive when given to poor people (for whom it almost always is a necessity). The truth is that despite their constant denials, wingnuts very much approve of class warfare. I think wingnuts naturally side with the predatory class — the rich — because wingnuts worship the powerful even more than they worship power itself. The average wingnut pundit is a shut-in, doughy sack of shit who probably resembles (socially, mentally, physically) John Hawkins and Jonah Goldberg. Although these idiots get paid for farting and fapping, they aren’t exactly winners at anything in life. Hence their worship of the powerful, especially those who have accrued power ruthlessly. Hence their worship of bullies in whatever form: a country, a person, an entire class. They want a hero but only a certain kind will suit them; or perhaps it’s better to say, they want a heroic mirror. This is why they feel the greatest loyalty to powerful fuck-ups (because they identify with the latter but long for the former): Presidents who steal elections, CEOs of bankrupt companies who pay themselves obscenely out of bailout money, clerics who molest their own followers, military leadership that promises cakewalk operations only to be greeted with an insurgency, interrogators who torture people to get misinformation, a wealthy criminal class that stole the poor blind but went broke in the process.

Via TBOGG, here is Commentary‘s Jennifer “Bili” Rubin plainly making a such an extreme demand of loyalty to Israel there is no other word to describe it but fascist:

There is a single question that every individual, group, and nation must answer. To borrow from the most pro-Israel president since Harry Truman: if you are not with Israel, you are against her. And if you do not oppose with every fiber of your being and every instrument at your disposal that which intends the Jewish state harm, you are enabling her destroyers.

As blarg-blarg as she can be, perhaps not even Pam Geller is this extreme – and she is more or less openly an admirer of Meir Kahane! This is the most baroquely fascist thing I’ve heard in the service of Zionism since Daniel Craig’s character in Munich snarled that the only blood he cared about was Jewish blood.

Above: Commentary group photo.

The with or against formulation that Rubin borrows from Bush was of course intellectually dishonest and morally retarded in its original context, but Rubin has inflamed and expanded far beyond that: this is Barry Goldwater’s “extremism in pursuit of [___] is no vice” but, as applied to the (mostly American) Jews in Rubin’s target audience, ethnic loyalty or blood loyalty or tribalism fills in the blank, and as applied to everyone else outside of Israel, loyalty or subservience to a foreign country. By any means necessary — which is what “every instrument at your disposal” actually, you know, means. This is the talk of terrorism; of terrorists.

But then it’s been obvious since Norman Podhoretz went totally and irredeemably batshit in the mid-70’s that Commentary, the AJC, and all whom such entities and people speak for (AIPAC, Likud Governments, Israeli settlers and indeed a large swathe of the Orthodox Jewish population in Israel, American neoconartists, et al.) are hellbent on following the model of Lehi (aka, the Stern Gang), terrorists whose Zionism was so extreme they assassinated a U.N. mediator who had saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust and, for good measure, offered to work with the Nazis against the British.

This kind of loyalty, or demand of loyalty, to a country is such an extreme form of nationalism that it is a textbook component of fascism. But it’s not just nationalism, either; it’s ethnic nationalism, and, to boot, in this context is being discussed by citizens of a different country!

Wingnuts often whine about identity politics-obsessed leftists, and sometimes they even have a point (though they aren’t the ones to be making it). But the intense identification with Israel, “Jewishness”, and Judaism (and exactly in that order) among right-wing Jews is the single most flagrant and dangerously obsessive form of identity politics in America today, precisely because it so strongly influences foreign policy. Moreover, it is typical of such right-wing American Jews that they pretty much categorically have a “multiculturalism for me but not for thee” attitude, yet it is a fact that random black people (omg scary! unAmerican!) who celebrate Kwanzaa, identify with Africa, and maybe wear dashikis — exactly the antique type still haunting Podhoretz’s nightmares; younger Pod People no doubt have moved on to mosque-attending, keffiyeh-wearing Arab-Americans or baggy-pants-wearing, hip-hop-listening African-Americans — have no influence on American foreign policy; the same cannot be said for Ms. Rubin’s cronies.

A large item in the sociopathic mentality of a totalitarian is a desire for Purity Control. In both left and right forms of the disease, ideological purity is of great concern; Rubin’s paragraph, of course, has that in spades in her demand for pure loyalty to Zionism at all costs. But the religious and especially ethnic component makes her ravings — and those of so many others — explicitly fascist: the idea is the nation, the nation is the tribe, the tribe is “chosen” or exceptional or entitled just because it is and also because Yahweh or Moses or History or Mommy and Daddy says it is, anything that dilutes the tribe’s purity – of purpose or otherwise — must be destroyed. It’s no accident that Rubin’s rant was inspired by Elliott Abrams, a convicted criminal who lied to Congress, purity fetishist who wrote a book railing against the tendency of liberal American Jews to marry gentiles, and son-in-law of Commentary‘s longtime ruler, Norman Podhoretz. And it’s no accident that Abrams married into a family whose patriarch, even when a young Trotskyist in Brooklyn, was motivated like nothing else (his Rosebud, as it were) by hatred of two neighboring groups: black people and the assimilated American Jews whose tribalism he found disgustingly impure.*

*And what can be said about NPod also goes for his friend and coeval (moar like co-evil, amirite?), the late Irving Kristol.

Above: Agitprop Oompa-Loompa

Shaughn Adeleye, Big Government:
Undercover Census Fraud Investigation: Louisiana

• The training course was 20 hours, yet I was paid for 20.75 hours — and took breaks. And that’s not all to this systemic failure of government — there’s also a little more.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™