Iraq was a little bit like the recent passage of the healthcare bill. Once it happened, there really is no going back. (You can admit that now, can’t you?) You make the best of what you can.
Well, let’s see. One of those things will result in more of this:
While the other one resulted in a lot of this:
I know which one I’d like to see more of.
Say what you will about the /b/tards, but they are at their absolute best when screwing with a wacko Christian militia’s forum boards (very NSFW) left unattended because all the moderators were arrested for plotting to kill a bunch of cops.
Shorter Msgr. Ross Xavier Pius Douthat, S.J., O.P., O.F.M., S.S.J., Th.D+, The New York Fucking Times Pope-Ed Page
A Time for Contrition
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
*Douthat was born in 1979 and apparently gained his deep expertise on the zeitgeist of the 70s entirely from reading a single bad review of the recent revival of Hair on Broadway.
Erick’s interview with Howie Kurtz is a very special moment in American history:
KURTZ: Erick Erickson, welcome.
ERICKSON: Thanks for having me.
KURTZ: You have been getting hammered by liberal commentators since CNN decided to bring you on as a contributor to John King’s program, and it all revolves around the things that you have written. So let’s just go through some of them.
ERICKSON: Right.
KURTZ: On the administration’s health care spokeswoman, you wrote, “Linda Douglass is really the Joseph Goebbels of the health care shop.”
You’re comparing her to a notorious Nazi?
ERICKSON: Yes, to propaganda.
Now, I have no problem with calling everyone you dislike a Nazi. It may not be factually accurate all of the time but it does offer some sense of self-righteous emotional gratification at the end of a long day.
But then again, I’m also not being invited on CNN to be the voice of Real America like Erick is. I’m not sure I’m anymore in touch with the average Real American than Erickson is, but I doubt they spend their days thinking of new and creative ways to compare everyone they dislike to Hitler. You’d like to think that most Real Americans have social lives of some kind, after all.
KURTZ: The first lady, you wrote the following — the headline was, “Is Obama shagging hookers behind the media’s back?” And you write, “I assume not. I assume that Obama’s Marxist harpy wife would go Lorena Bobbit on him should he even think about it.”
Why would you describe Michelle Obama in those terms?
ERICKSON: Well, you know, back during the campaign trail in 2008, a lifetime ago, frankly, in blogging, I was very passionate, very aggressive in defending my side.
“Way, way back in the reckless days of my youth, a.k.a., a year and a half ago…”
ERICKSON: And at the time that I wrote that, the Eliot Spitzer story was breaking, and the point was — distracted by the language, obviously — that Barack Obama was as much a creature of the media as Eliot Spitzer was. Neither have been investigated.
This is simply glorious. I love the way Erickson turns the question back on the wicked liberal media: “Oh yeah? Well you guys have no evidence that Obama ISN’T shagging hookers! Why don’t you investigate it, huh?” If only some enterprising liberal smart-ass would use a similar construction when interviewed by Kurtz in the future for their thoughts on the Kaus for Senate campaign…
KURTZ: Well, let’s deal with the David Souter comment. When Justice Souter announced his retirement, you said, you wrote, “The nation loses the only goat (EXPLETIVE) child molester ever to serve on the Supreme Court.”
Do you regret writing that?
ERICKSON: Yes, absolutely. It was about the dumbest thing I’ve done.
No. No it wasn’t. The dumbest thing you did, for my money, was threatening to privatize your own city’s police force. For the life of me, I don’t understand how that didn’t earn you a lifetime’s supply of full-body cavity searches.
ERICKSON: You know, counterintuitively, I guess, some good came out of it.
There’s always an upside to calling someone a goat (EXPLETIVE) child molester.
ERICKSON: It was the very first time I realized, Howard, how what I do for a living affects my family as well. Having my 3-year-old heckled and booed in the front yard by a neighbor, having my wife be berated at her office, you know, being a blogger, up until that moment I always considered I was just a guy chatting with friends, even on Twitter.
In other words: “The upside made me realize how much of a victim I am.”
Now the kicker, from the beginning of the segment:
KURTZ: Erick Erickson made his debut this week as a CNN contributor. He is a Georgia lawyer, a church deacon…
I would say that Erick does a lot of repenting each week, but he probably thinks that smearing his enemies without restraint is all part of the Lord’s Plan. What a maroon.
Destined to be a “No-he-di’nt” moment for the ages, Erick Ericksdotter attempts a line-by-line critique of a Josh Marshall post. Erickson’s effort at this recalls, sadly enough, the epic, if lop-sided, Zimmer-Martinez brawl in Game 3 of the 2003 ALCS, except that Marshall doesn’t even have to fight back for Erickson to fall down on his own capacious butt.
Josh Marshall and the Democrats have descended into rubber and glue political commentary flat out blaming the Republicans for inciting violence, much of it fabricated and ignoring the Democrats’ own rhetoric and violence.
And, with the “rubber and glue” business, Erickson has descended into third-grade playground political commentary. All he’s missing is the obligatory “nyah, nyah, nyah.”
First of all, I would point out that it was the Democrats who just took over 1/6th of the American economy despite upwards of 56% of the American public being opposed. And they expect people to . . . what . . . clap?
No, of course not, we fully expected that opponents of health care reform would cut propane lines at the home of a Congressman’s relative and threaten to kill legislators who voted for the bill. But, er, Erick, if your point is that the notion of Republican violence is “fabricated” by the Democrats, it is probably not a good idea to lead off with an argument that the Democrats deserved it. The reason for Erickson’s short-lived career as a lawyer probably was that closing argument he made where he said that his client did not murder the victim but, if he did, it was in self-defense.
As I said earlier today, violence is unacceptable, but none of us should be surprised — especially the left, which feeds off riots, protest, and molotov cocktail parties every time they strongly oppose something. The Weather Underground was not a Republican insurgency at the Weather Channel.
Oh where, oh where, to begin? I suppose by observing that Erickson has confused a weather website with a decades old terrorist organization known as the Weathermen, later known as the Weather Underground Organization. And, of course, that the Weathermen weren’t Democrats. And that Erickson had to go back more than forty years to find an example of violence to support his argument. And that protests aren’t violence. Not to mention that Democrats didn’t have molotov cocktail parties after the GOP passed Bush’s tax cuts for the rich.
And now? Police say the bullet that hit Eric Cantor’s office was most likely random, but it is not definitive.
Right, it’s not definitive. Even though the Richmond police report said that the bullet landed on the floor a few feet from the window at 1 a.m. in the morning, there remains the definite possibility that some Democratic sniper flew by in a helicopter and fired a bullet at an empty room in the middle of the night without being noticed by anyone. There’s also a good possibility that Al Gore himself was responsible for all the car bomb explosions in Iraq.
And, now, for Erick the Redneck’s coup de “gras,” in a footnote no less:
I had intended to put in one more clear expression that perpetrators of violence should be arrested, prosecuted, and sent to jail, but no matter what I say the Democrats and left will say I am actually encouraging and excusing violence. They have a vested intereste [sic] to play up the violence and, perversely, do exactly what they are accusing the GOP of doing — incite it so that the media narrative that started building on Monday highlighting all the immediate taxes and pain while the benefits don’t show up for a few years would disappear and focus instead on the racist angry white men.
Shorter footnote: By mentioning the violence at all, Democrats have become solely responsible for inciting it, so I can say whatever the fuck I want. I am rubber, etc., etc.
At last, all the health reform craziness is winding down. It seemed like we’d never…
…oodstock …oodstock …oodstock [screeching dragster tires] [explosions, Godzilla bellowing]
…aturday …aturday …aturday [sped-up maniacal laughter] [blatting funny car engines]
With Motels & RV Parks Full, Conservatives & Tea Party Activists Turn to Houseboats & Tents for “Showdown in Searchlight”
Ach.
So wait. Are we just primed at this point by a term like “Conservatives & Tea Party Activists” to expect sort of a catalogue deraisonné of human folly, or is there something a bit unnerving about the procession of nouns in that passage? Like, if that’s the narration over the opening credits, aren’t we spoiling for an Act Two that opens upon that ur-wingnut condition of slapstick self-tragedy — in an opening montage, for instance, of Spike Jones’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy” intercut with X-ray prints of rectal foreign bodies?1
I mean, hmm:
With Motels & RV Parks Full, Conservatives & Tea Party Activists Turn into Hoseboats & Pitch Tents for “Chowder Chowdown With Both Hands And a Searchlight”
That actually seems less weird, but I guess I’ve been doing this for long enough that everything seems less weird.
Curtis Dahlgren, RenewAmerica:
You can’t tell the professor much if he thinks he’s funny (part 2)[…] WE NEVER SAID that an asteroid, or hemorrhoids, would hit the moment you signed the FedMed HELLth Bill. What we said was that the pot with the frogs in it would now be put on the front burner.
Fine, I take it back.
It’s being hailed as a “Conservative Woodstock” – a historic event in the tea party movement where thousands upon thousands of patriots will gather in Harry Reid’s hometown of Searchlight, NV and demand an end to his term in public office.
This Chex Party Mix on Pop Tarts sandwich that we made is being hailed as a “Junk Food Aire Helado de Parmesano con Muesli en el estilo de Ferran Adrià,” as we just hailed it. Chom-chom-chom, burp, ahh! A historic event in ourselves-made-cuisine-eating history, if we do say so chez us. We demand an end to this glass not having Dr. Pepper in it.
So many people are heading to Searchlight, NV for this historic event (which takes place this Saturday, March 27th) that the local motels and campgrounds are now totally full.
So many drunkards are staggering toward a tent in order drunkenly to insert a light bulb in their rectum that the rectums in that tent are now totally full of that light bulb. Wait, what?
Ah, never mind. Narratives, think pieces, and news stories about the event are turning up, as well as the contemporary right’s signature after-action leavings of blame-engineering, lying accusations of lying, and cowardly tattling.
Above: Needs T.P. for bunghole
“But it says it’s a Woodstock,” one might remark. “As such, are things not ultimately all about the music?” Yes they are, and that’s why we’ve collected this treasury of Searchlight ‘Conservative Woodstock’ performers, as listed in the official program!
Tonstant Weader fwowed up.2
1 In my experience with evenings, whensoever foolishness is invited in for a drinkie, regret will arrive as a montage of imagined self-embarrassments atop Maureen McGovern’s “Morning After,” from The Poseidon Adventure.
That’s a kind of literalism that I can’t stand, by the way, avoiding (e.g.) the radio and TV every New Years Day so that U2 doing “New Years Day” can fail, primarily, to happen to me; and secondarily to begin with those brief piano phrases that it begins with, and then assert that “all is quiet on New Years Day,” creating an alarming Möbius of causality when in an immediately subsequent moment my hand arrives at the switch that makes it be quiet.
It’s almost worse than those brief piano phrases that have for so long warned that Bob Seger’s voice would momentarily emit from the stereo, suggesting an appropriate remedy to the heartbreak caused by itself. “Juh stake the sold wrecker, Zoff the Chef,” Seger’s voice counsels as the switch is arrived at by my hand. “OMG Seger,” I remark as I take from the shelf a number of old records, intending to sit and listen to them by myself because of a lack of the same soul in the kind of music that day.
It’s almost worse, even, than those bars of trebly, oddly hi-hat-driven reggae that have for so long warned that Sting is nigh, and along with him a kind of literalism that I can’t stand. The instruments pause on a chord, and the overtones ring down, and into the gap he appears. “Roxanne,” he announces, for indeed the song is called that. “Hey, what’s this song called again?” I will sometimes ask in the following few seconds of vocal music before another pause comes due. “Roxanne,” he answers before resuming the lyrics, and indeed he speaks truly, for such is the song’s name. “So you say the song is called ‘Rumpity-Bumpy, O! Cucumber Lumber?'” I say as the music elapses again. “RAAAHX-anne,” he grouses, annoyed, rejoining a song that to my mind should have been called something else, because to call it “Roxanne” is to give in to the onomatopœia of the remembered sound — as if many or most death metal songs were to be titled, “CÖÖÖKIE, ÅÅRÜM-NÜM-NÜM-NÜM-NÜM,” and Black Eyed Peas songs would often be called things like “Ooby-Ooby-Ooby-Ah,” because of the ease with which will.i.am may step onto such a metrical pattern and ride it like an airport walkway all the way through a song and out the back end, onto a pile of unclaimed will.i.ams. As if the name of that perpetual Romantics song of +6 unstopping-already, which is on some new TV commercial again, were “Hey!”
2 Cf. P. Dotty.
Matt Welch of Reason dialed up the Chatroulette earlier in the week, only to land on the besotted albino non-partisan blogatrix of his dreams, Ann Althouse. As you will see, the conversation is halting at first, the flirtations clumsy, until Ann offers up the coy declaration that she loves being covered in ‘goo’. Matt, no dummy and sensing her receptiveness, piles in with some idle Obama-bashing chit-chat as a show of his male plumage before regaling his would-be conquest with anecdotal tales of HCR proponents’ lack of statistical proof for their position.
All is going smoothly and it sure looks like the Reason offices are about to get splashed with some Welch’s fruit juice if you know what I mean, and I think you do. But even as Ann reaches for that fifth glass of Merlot that usually signals it’s bow-chicka-wow-wow time for hoary old emus, Matt completely ruins his chances with, get this — an out-of-nowhere story about his recent pool party with Mickey Kaus and Eugene Volokh! Talk about killing the mood!
Sure, Matt and Ann do continue to drone on for another 47 minutes about how stupid liberals are, but their hearts aren’t really in it anymore. We predict with confidence — no second date. And just to prove that this really happened, below is photo intertubes evidence of Matt demonstrating to Ann some of the monkeyshines the boys got up to in the swimming pool. Unconfirmed but almost certainly true is that goats were involved.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
Above: Oh, forget it.
Steve “Stewie” Forbes, FOX News:
Could a Chavez-Style Media Crackdown Be Coming Our Way?
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all, oh forget it.
1 Oh, forget it.
Megan McArdle has been in a mathematical uproar since HCR passed, honking on about how she’s 95 percent certain that three-fourths of half of a third of Ezra Klein’s predictions about a baker’s dozen of 17-sixteenths of the cosine of future mortality rates are eleventy percent likely to be a sham. We can’t quibble, but then this:
But the biggest problem is how much we’d then be spending per year to get this added benefit. I think it’s entirely plausible that we’ll be saving 3,000 people a year. But 3,000 people a year, at a cost of $200 billion, is almost $70 million per life saved.
Well, $200 billion is indeed a big number in simoleons, material even, but we feel obliged to point out that McMegan is freaked out about a per capita yearly expenditure of $666 on the part of the American personage to achieve this, which … well, you have to wonder if she jiggered the numbers a bit to get so Satan-y with it.
At any rate, the cost and/or savings that we’ll eventually associate with health care reform is important stuff. We passed this bill (and continue to hope for much more by way of HCR) because we think it’ll lead to better overall health outcomes for the country’s citizenry.
But that’s not all that this is about. It’s also about a much-needed bit of equity in an increasingly stratified society, where wealth disparity has been accelerating like a runaway freight train in recent decades.
In short, the belief that we’re offered a fair shake despite the accidents of our assorted births is not something that anybody’s figured out a way to put a price tag on. But we do know that America has had a pretty good run of it in the past 100 to 200 years, and a big factor in that streak has been an idea amongst the people that — contra other, shittier places — any one of us can hit it big via grit and keeping our nose clean and a bit of hard work. And that even if hitting it big didn’t happen, we’d still have a solid, middle-class peg upon which to hang our hat.
It’s not clear if that communal faith in America’s willingness to give everybody a fair shake was the biggest factor in our success as a nation, or if it was trumped in its beneficence by various historical accidents — geography, resources, the convenient self-destruction of Europe just as industrialization and its fruits were on the cusp of peaking in the 20th century — but most of us Americans agree that at the very least, it’s made us who we are, that it is the very stuff of our national mythology. And we continued to believe in that story for a long, long time.
But then something happened to crush that healthy attitude — or rather, fermented over time until one day we woke up and realized that everything had gone to shit. More and more of us were fucked in a merciless system that shat buckets on you if you slipped up just a couple times, or were born with a hole in your heart or with asthma or as a woman with working ovaries and a natural desire to fuck, or otherwise didn’t hit that increasingly improbable succession of lucky streaks at the crap table of life that gave a vanishing few the run of the place. Our great middle class kept getting smaller, until it wasn’t as much of a bulwark against the general hopelessness and cynicism that’s always knocking at the door, even in the best of times.
But, as any study of probability would predict, a few people continued to hit the lucky streaks against all odds, collected those overflowing buckets of extra chits that signaled they were winners and that the rest of us chumps milling about and coughing into our sleeves were losers, and this kept getting worse and more pronounced until this great and mythological haven of opportunity, America, was in fact home to a greater gulf between the very richest and the working poor than even the most outrageous and cruel satrapies existing in exotic tales could ever purport to match.
And yet the McMegans of the world, not quite big winners in the new arrangement but rather apologists for them, still insist — perhaps out of stubbornness or pique — that the old social glue that held us together still ought to do, despite it having long been eroded. That ethics long since abandoned by those who hold all the cards should be upheld by those who are being demonstrably gamed in every possible way. That what we need isn’t a radical reappraisal of our ancient national mythology befitting our new, cruel circumstances, but a reaffirmation of its most base and exploitable tenets.
It’s true — we can’t know for sure if the health care bill just passed will eventually yield the returns its advocates hope for, in the strictest statistical measures. Probably not. It wasn’t even our first or second choice for dealing with the problem. But one thing it is, at long last, is a visible rebellion against the cruel jungle law of three-plus decades that relentlessly sought greater spoils for the few at the expense of the many.
You can’t put a price on a return to sanity. You can’t assign an exact dollar figure to a strong and encouraged middle class. You can’t measure the economic value of a citizenry’s restored faith in a livable baseline for their prosperity when emerging from an era where no floor for that basic security seemed to exist at all.
Megan can’t see that, but it’s hardly surprising. She’s fucking thick.
