Sadly, No!

My name is Rick Rickson, I listen to Higson.¹

Erick Erickson, RedState:
Billy Graham’s Son Is Too Christian For Barack Obama’s Army

Billy Graham’s son Franklin, a solid evangelist in his own right,

Franklin — is he the black one, or is that Shermy?

If the…no wait.

Damn it, this is not where I had envisioned this post at this point in its composition.

Graham Crackers (l-r): Graham Père, Graham Toupéere

---

Uh, my name is Orc-Orcson, I make Robert Pork Bun.²

Erick Erickson, RedState:
Billy Graham’s Son Is Too Christian For Barack Obama’s Army

Well, gosh. You have to wonder: If not Billy Graham’s son, Franklin “CandyGraham” Graham — or as he is most frequently known, “Billy Grahamson” — then who the heck would be too Christian for…wha? Let me read that again.

Erick Erickson, RedState:
Billy Graham’s Son Is Too Christian For Barack Obama’s Army

Oh, the Army. I was like, when exactly did Barack Obama get an arOH MY GOD

Billy Graham’s son Franklin, a solid evangelist in his own right, was invited to give the address at the Pentagon’s National Day of Prayer service.

“Army-Navy Drive and Fern Street, Arlington, Virginia 22202.”

“Franklin Graham, everybody!”

[applause]

Barack Obama’s administration has revoked the invitation.

“Army-Navy Drive and Fern Street, Arlington, Virginia 22202.”

“Fra[needle scratching on record]

[a far, lonely train whistle. a breeze sighs through pines. the dry rustle of a passing tumbleweed — alone and hungry, it begins to weep]

That’s sad. A speaking invitation was cancelled. It’s angry-sad, with a rising angry. A speaking invitation was cancelled!

Why? Well, it turns out Franklin Graham really believes in Christ and holds that Christ really is “they way and the truth and the life.”

This is so typical, given the epidemic of meaningless symbolic outrages perpetrated sneakily against Christians by the far-leftists who infiltrate institutions such as the Pentagon. Christ is ‘they way.’ Grrr, angry. Who is ‘them?’ Incitements ring us, and we are rung by them.

It is a outrage.³ Guess we’ll be moseying. Bobey-dope dobie-doe…

[…]

…obie-dobie-obe. Just passing through to see what was up with that revoked invitation at the Pentagon. Ah, it says that Franklin Graham really believes in Christ and holds that Christ really is “they way and the truth and the life,” so that’s the story. Welp, guess I’ll head over thataway. Bobey-doe, obie-dobie-ope, flooby-doobie…

Consequently, Franklin Graham has spoken out about Islam — the only religion to see its followers carry out violent terrorist attacks on the United States in the name of that religion — and its violent ways.

The Council on Islamic-American Relations and other Islamic groups got upset with Franklin Graham pointing out the truth.

Ooh, that always gets their dander flying, doesn’t it? I mean, they’ll try to claim that it’s nearly a perfect symbolic storm, with an anti-Muslim bigot heading a religious event at the Pentagon, bla-bla. But it’s a well-known proven fact that the verb, ‘to prove,’ in the Muslim language literally means ‘to invite possession by a passing fib demon’ — and speaking of Muslims, or rather of Muslims speaking, our friends Hassan and Abu seem to be up to something, and let’s see what it is:
Read the rest of this entry »

Not because he correctly laughs at the stupid epistemic closure dumbassery on the right. Not even because he spells his name ‘Ambinder’ to maliciously cause misspellings like the one in the title of this post. Rather because he spews crap like this:

It is absolutely a condition of the age of the triumph of conservative personality politics, where entertainers shouting slogans are taken seriously as political actors, and where the incentive structures exist to stomp on dissent and nuance, causing experimental voices to retrench and allowing a lot of people to pretend that the world around them is not changing. The obsession with ACORN, Climategate, death panels, the militarization of rhetoric, Saul Alinsky, Chicago-style politics, that TAXPAYERS will fund the bailout of banks — these aren’t meaningful or interesting or even relevant things to focus on. (The banks will fund their own bailouts.)

The bold bit is mine. All the non-bold stuff is fine and agreeable. What’s terrible about the bold part, more on that in a sec. Just ponder that Ambinder has an ally on the bolded bit in Steve Benen, who offers up his own about-to-be-bolded-clatptrap:

Making matters worse, the quality of the discourse on health care wasn’t especially unusual. We endured a mind-numbing debate over economic recovery efforts because Republicans weren’t prepared for a serious argument. We can’t discuss Wall Street reform because Republicans keep saying ‘bailout’ for no reason. We can’t discuss a climate bill because Republicans reflexively reject the science.

These guys are both tools. Look, you can argue that the Republicans are disingenuous deebers for crying ‘bailout’ on the current financial reform package when they have no alternative on offer but to do nothing to fix Wall Street. That’s fine — I’ll accept that.

What you can’t do is say that the bullshit bailout kitty that the financial sector is supposed to pay into would in any way prevent another taxpayer-funded bailout of the banks should they — when they — reach the verge of collapse.

It’s a $50 billion fund — a rounding error relative to the $14 trillion or so some economists reckon we’ve thrown the TBTF banksters’ way since the 2008 meltdown. There is NO FRIGGIN’ WAY this is going to be able to cover the next Wall Street crisis. And there is NO FRIGGIN’ WAY the federal government, no matter who is in charge, is going to let Financial Armageddon happen when the next crisis occurs — and it will, because a) there’s also no hard cap on bank size in the current reform package, meaning TBTF firms will still exist and grow bigger after it passes, and b) there’s plenty of loopholes for non-bespoke derivatives to remain completely unregulated, meaning the unconstrained TBTF pigs will continue to feed at their favorite trough of insane risk at the expense of Main Street.

The end game here is that the $50 billion bailout fund will be nowhere near enough to cover the capital infusion that will be required to manage the next bailout for the next meltdown, which will likely dwarf the 2008 crisis, because that’s how history works, and require even more than the $14 trillion this current massive wealth transfer to assholes who already own multiple Swiss chalets already cost us. Shit, $50 billion wouldn’t go anywhere near covering just the $1 trillion TARP alone has cost us, if that lower number is what you like to bandy around.

And since no government is going to want to see global finance just collapse overnight, because that would seriously fuck everything up all over the place in serious ways like civil wars and rioting and hoarding and pitchforks and torches and hobo camps under the overpass, they will likely notice that $50 billion is not enough to save us all. And so they will go to that same, stupid well that’s been there so many times in the past — us, the stupid tax-paying schmucks with the glazed-over, Reality TV eyes.

That’s just the facts, and you are a foolish fucking moron or a corporatist water-carrying piece of shit if you say otherwise. Financial reform isn’t HCR, where some painful negotiation (ditching the public option, etc.) was worth it for the comprised good of getting 30 million more people insurance coverage and outlawing the worst abuses of the health insurance industry. With financial reform, if you don’t break up the TBTF institutions and make it a law that nobody can ever get near as big, it’s all a pile of horseshit window dressing. That sort of ‘reform’ DOES guarantee future taxpayer bailouts. It IS worse than passing nothing, because it gives the patina of trustworthiness back to the very assholes that caused this whole mess in the first place, and will likely makes it easier for TBTF firms to get even bigger by sucking up the smaller players who will actually be financially impacted in a negative way by this so-called reform.

So stop being a tool, Benen — you’re better than that. I’m not so sure about you, Armbinder, but you could start to win me over by spelling your name like a normal person.

ABOVE: Carey Roberts dreams of becoming the
naked body double for Uncle Junior Soprano

Shorter Carey Roberts, Renew Muhrka:
Men lead the conservative surge to retake Congress

• Stupid bitches voted Obama and the Democrats into office. Fortunately, white men will vote them out.

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

That object coming at us through that break in the trees. It’s… It’s…

Don Surber, the Charleston (WV) Daily Mail:
Is gay a slur to Obama?

[…]

(Note the complaint of plagiarism from a White House whose vice president is Neil Kinnock, er, Joe Biden.)

Oho, right on schedule, meaning as of a few days ago. Here comes the blame that was cast at Ben Domenech, spinning back at ‘liberals’ like a boomarang of blame, or what you might call a bloo-malame. Spinning back at us it comes, spinning indeed like a blangaroo, as such a blame-boomarang might be called by putting the words ‘blame’ and ‘boomarang’ together to form a useful yet engagingly facile compound term.

…Such as was formed to describe an Arang that winged back in a flappy, screechy circle as though on wings of black velveteen such as bats have, such a thing being called a Batang.

Is that enough of this yet? I’m not sure it is. Something about a U-rang — you pull a rope and Ted Cassidy appears in zombie makeup, plus maybe it’s shaped like a ‘U,’ or it loops around but lands some distance over to the left; this one’s not finished.

Right, let’s just start over with Surber, then:

Don Surber, the Charleston (WV) Daily Mail:
Is gay a slur to Obama?

[…]

(Note the complaint of plagiarism from a White House whose vice president is Neil Kinnock, er, Joe Biden.)

Wankerang.

Imagine how the world would work if tu quoque were an ethical principle, as Surber thinks it is, rather than a fallacy, as might be an adjective to describe the kind of ambiance a rubber penis factory has.

That is, once someone is tagged with an accusation — I was going to say jaywalking, but let’s honor the seriousness of Biden’s first brush with plagiarism by making it an accusation of mowing anarchy signs into someone’s lawn — then even after that individual has been cleared of such mowing, any common-sense grouping of other people around them (e.g. the White House) may ethically be barred from complaining about anarchy symbols mowed into lawns, and shall be given no protection against this practice (e.g. the White House lawn, rose garden, First Lady’s vegetable patch), which we used to call @-scaping, or ‘Atscaping,’ and which was surprisingly easy to perpetrate on summer afternoons, a time of ghostly invisibility for casually dressed young men operating lawnmowers, even in periods when culprits were known to be afield.

(The Biden/Kinnock accusation was that in a couple of speeches in 1987, Biden didn’t attribute a passage to the British Labour Party head, after having properly attributed it on multiple prior occasions — that is, the accusation equals slide whistle fail-sound going ee-yoop with muffled crash and soda can bouncing. On the other hand, in his first year of law school, in 1965, Biden copied a considerable amount of legal prose from a law review article into various spots in into a paper, citing the source only once. This is at least a single razz on a tuba. Biden was exonerated.)

Now let parse this. 1. Someone calls Kagan gay. 2. The White House complains that it is a lie. So far so good.

Yay, we agree with Surb for once. Whoever said that reasonable people can’t…Wait, I think he’s trying to trick us. I think this is a setup.

There’s a Number Three coming; I can totally tell that’s the trick he’s using.

But then 3., the White House acts as if being gay is a bad thing.

I knew it! Surber, you bastard!!!

It is that third thing that is amusing.

Sure, after I worked on it a bit. It didn’t start out with much, but I added a narrative element and a video and it shaped right up.

Once again, liberals show their true colors. This White House unwittingly showed the liberal streak of anti-gay feelings, which are usually restricted only to gay Republicans.

Blatterang.

Dear God, and I haven’t even gotten to this yet:

Bryan Fischer, Focal Point:
Homosexual Supreme Court Justice? Not under any circumstances

Sen. John Cornyn has regrettably opened the door to the possibility of an openly gay Supreme Court justice, saying he’d “have to think about” it, and adding, “As long as it doesn’t interfere with their job, it’s not a particular issue.”

The problem with Cornyn’s position is that a gay judge’s sexual preference will, without any question whatsoever, “interfere with their job.” It’s not possible for it to be otherwise.

If we elevate an open homosexual to the Supreme Court, we will be elevating someone who freely admits that he (generic use) engages routinely in behavior that was still a felony in every state in the Union as recently as 1962 and a felony in the other 49 states until 1972.

‘Routinely’ is assuming a lot there, Fischer — and you know what happens when you assume. We make an ass out of ume, the Japanese pickled apricot made with shiso, or perilla leaf, by putting two together so that there’s a cleft in the middle. Then we put this up a horse’s bum and everyone is wearing spacesuits. Is that ‘routinely,’ Fischer? So there you go.

Seriously now, I think Fischer just came out in favor of barring blacks from the Supreme Court due to Jim Crow.

Sodomy is still a felony in the criminal code of about a dozen states. The Lawrence decision of 2003, an egregious act of judicial activism, prohibited enforcement of these laws, but the fact remains that 25% of the states in the Union still regard it as criminal behavior.

But what should we call it?

Bruce Crow
Adam and/or Steve Crow
Nancy Crow
Siegfried and/or Roy Crow
The Crow that Dare Not Speak Its Name

A fundamental requirement of a judge is impartiality. He is to be as impartial as an umpire or a referee. His responsibility is to take rules written by others (including and above all the Constitution) and faithfully and neutrally apply them without bias or favoritism, and without changing the rules in the middle of the game to give the advantage to the team he happens to like best.

So, judges shouldn’t “bat for the other side.” But can one not be a Fischer from the opposite bank? I’ll come back to this one; pure, elemental dumb stays fresh a long time.

Remember what I said about the titles? Watch how that one sits gleaming up there like a brass flagpole eagle while the post goes blop underneath, like a blop-flag or something like that. It’s happening already.

Above: Insert some kind of quip about Stomp Act of 1765.

Scott Whitlock, NewsBusters:
MSNBC Suspends Donny Deutsch for Daring to Critique Olbermann, Did Nothing After Racially Tinged ‘Coconut’ Slur

MSNBC on Wednesday suspended host Donny Deutsch in the wake of a segment on Tuesday about what role hosts such as Keith Olbermann and Ed Schultz play in making this country “America the angry.” During the piece, Deutsch played a clip of an Olbermann rant and didn’t defend Schultz when conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt attacked the “the biggest hate mongers in television.”

Now I know what it is about Hugh Hewitt’s name. All along, it was one of those names that’s a sentence. Like Will Bunch, although that’s not strictly a sentence. Um, Rob Banks, which is hypothetical, and Dave Dictor, which should end any such list due to its perfection. There are hundreds of these; I can’t think of any.

Hugh, hew it. See? That’s what it is about that name. Uh, Bob Bobbett. Jack Jacket. Rock, uh, Rocket. Okay, boring.

Ha, odd physical metaphor:

MSNBC on Wednesday suspended host Donny Deutsch in the wake of a segment on Tuesday about what…

Suspended in the wake, “Glub, glub,” okay boring.

However, in February, when Deutsch dismissed Hispanic senatorial hopeful Marco Rubio as a “coconut,” a term that the New York Times described as meaning “brown on the outside and white on the inside,” MSNBC took no action.

‘Brazil nut’ implies Portuguese-speaking, while ‘pistachio’ would be a Hispanic who falsely presents him- or herself as Native American while inside being envious or inexperienced, yet beneath that rather thin layer is actually slightly more Hispanic than he seemed initially? Hm.

This ‘however, what about the time with the coconut?’ formulation, in any case, is one of those false equivalencies that people talk about, a coconut not being generally or even in a single relevant way equivalent to Keith Olbermann. False equivalencies such as:

“Glenn Beck was criticized for screaming ‘Heil Hitler’ over and over to a picture of Hitler, while the caption flashed at the bottom of the screen, ‘I’m so serious — I utterly love me some Hitler. -Glenn Beck,’ and then it switched to the same thing, only in reverse with Hitler screaming ‘Heil’ at a picture of Beck and the exact opposite caption, and this lasted three days. However, in a March, 2006 transcript, Bill Moyers chanted the exact same thing only with Stalin, saying, “During the early reign of Stalin, uh, Stalin, the… With Stalin, industrialization in Russia was fitful,” and if you say Stalin’s name three times he comes back to life yet no Moyers was ever criticized!!1! aaah libril mediaaaaH!”

So wait though, a ‘mango’ is like a Native American who’s perhaps also an envious newcomer, who’s actually an Asian inside, yet beneath that is revealed as having hairy pits?

I can see some of these being so specialized that you might walk around with them for years until a suitable occasion came up (“yo, here comes that Asian guy with a less prickly exterior than many of his relatives, yet who is like a white person in his thinking, and a seedy one at that”), such that if you could grab the right one out in time (ol’ Yellow Pataya Dragonfruit, eh?) you would at least in theory seem far more clever than you actually are.

Apparently, incurring the wrath of Keith Olbermann is quite dangerous. (TV Newser reported the role the liberal anchor played in the punishment.)

Which wasn’t much in their telling, and was ‘vehemently denied‘ in other accounts.

But we understand about wanting to run with a good title.

MSNBC Suspends Donny Deutsch for Daring to Critique Olbermann, Did Nothing After Racially Tinged ‘Coconut’ Slur

Or sure, one of those too, I guess.

Mark Levin outs himself as a troll:

I would also encourage you to look at the petition Manzi disparages, having, I’m sure, carefully reviewed the qualifications of each and every expert listed, as he dismisses the entire lot of them. He mentions that 20,000 of the signatories don’t have doctorates. But more than 9,000 do.

Believe it.

Shorter Erick Erickson, RedState
Mark Levin and Jim Manzi

• It saddens me that National Review did not preemptively squash Jim Manzi’s heretical claim that some conservatives have formed an orthodoxy that is afraid to publicly confront its critics. Also, here is a poorly constructed reference to Trig Palin that could be interpreted as a mean joke about people with Down’s Syndrome, an intent I will later deny angrily.

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

The Jim Manzi-Mark Levin kerfluffle has yielded maybe the best quote of the year from a rightblogger:

Mark recognizes that when you are at war, while it is important to get facts right (and I think Mark did a darned fine job sourcing his book, giving you the chance to criticize it), it is also important to inspire the troops and to do so by distilling the realities of the fight into useful information. I frankly don’t know if every statistic in Goldwater’s Conscience of a Conservative was correct or not. Nor do I know if every statistic or number in Reagan’s A Time For Choosing speech in 1964 was correct. I DON’T CARE. I know the facts were in the ballpark, and more importantly, the principles were timeless and correct.

That’s pretty much teabaggery in a nutshell, courtesy of RedState blogger ‘hogan’.

‘I have neither the desire and time nor the expertise to analyze in detail Manzi’s specific criticisms of Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny,’ he admits. ‘I DON’T CARE’ about the truth because we are ‘at war’ with ‘statists’, he thunders.

And who can argue with this admitted total fucking moron? WE’RE AT WAR! An insistence on factual accuracy is a luxury we can’t afford when the nation faces an existential threat, such as the top marginal tax rate being raised back up a couple percentage points from its all-time historical low to its previous all-time historical low. It’s just like Pearl Harbor (if the Japanese had only mildly dented 5 percent of the ships in our Pacific fleet while actually performing some needed maintenance on the remaining boats)!

Meanwhile, hogan’s ‘stop-hitting-yourself’ quotient is off the charts. Manzi’s charge of ‘epistemic closure’ in his takedown of Levin really makes hogan’s blood boil because it forced him to do some minor Googling in lieu of working on his short game:

Now, I had to look that term up. Cuz I ain’t as smart as those guys who sit around in circles over at the New Republic, the New York Times, and increasingly, sadly on occasion, the National Review, and blather on endlessly about topics that would make even wonky professors’ eyes roll, much less a regular-old American like me who enjoys watching the DIY network and American Idol after getting back from the driving range and playing with my son.

A seething resentment of intellectuals is obviously at play here, but at least hogan took the trouble to research epistemic closure –a term Manzi uses to describe what he thinks is a troubling tendency on the modern Right to pretend that liberals’ best arguments simply don’t exist rather than take them on with rigor, while also excommunicating any amongst the conservative brethren who note that this might be happening.

But for hogan, looking up the term is one thing — comprehending the concept as it relates to Manzi’s charge proves for hogan to be a bridge to far:

I am sorry there Jim, no matter how much research you’ve done or no matter the extent to which I might even agree with you at times, while you are sitting in your little circle with a bunch of other self-indulgent asses that no one else in the world gives a rip about putting out posts like yesterday’s nonsense, Mark is out on the front lines inspiring a generation of Americans to fight back against statism.

Manzi concludes his heretical Corner post by saying that Levin’s chapter on global warming is ‘an almost perfect example of epistemic closure.’ He’s right. It’s only ‘almost’ perfect.

A perfect example requires that you mix in the irony of somebody actually practicing epistemic closure to defend against the charge of it.

It’s just icing on the cake, then, that hogan concludes with a reprisal of the time-honored winger Earth Day pledge to willfully burn through barrels of expensive fossil fuels just to show us enviro-weenies what’s what:

Come 2014, I will continue to use the stockpile of incandescent bulbs I plan to amass in the coming 4 years – and will gladly pay the electric bill so I can have the light I prefer to have. Forgive me for wanting the freedom to have a frigging light bulb of my choosing. I will continue to drive a gas-guzzling Jeep Wrangler if I have to hand-build an engine to replace it, because I freaking like to drive it. I will continue to flush my toilet however many times it takes to get the job done – and I will continue to take a long hot shower.

BWAHAHAHA! Who’s laughing now, Lie-bruls?

ABOVE: James Simpson

Shorter James Simpson, Washington Examiner
Is Lindsey Graham Compromised?

• The beaners and the treehuggers are blackmailing Lindsey Graham by threatening to reveal that he is an effeminate homosexual, which no one would ever have guessed otherwise. This is why Graham is sashaying about with all the Democrats who are trying to destroy the country, and it is sufficient justification to replace him with a manly teabagger.

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

… this is the most important question of all time. What is the sexiest accent if you are:

a. a straight female
b. a gay female
c. a bisexual male
d. a gay male
e. a bisexual female
f. a straight male
g. a person who likes fish

I know my vote. But I wait for yours.

PS It is not Australian