Sadly, No!

That’s ‘young’ as in from 2003, when our old, old friend Kitty, recently in the news again, was still able to jitterbug, to grow her own oats for hot, homemade Cheerios, and to reliably reach the second round in the annual Pie- and Hitler-Eating Contest at Our Lady of… Wait a minute, Hitler Eating Contest?

Above: “…And we hope you like frauin’ too.” ²

Kitty Werthmann, Sioux Falls Argus Leader:
Freedoms can disappear in a hurry if we aren’t careful

Those of us who sailed past the Statue of Liberty came to a country of unbelievable freedom and opportunity.

That depends upon which way they were sailing. But it’s also true that those who sailed into the Statue of Liberty would’ve come to a country of unbelievable freedom and opportunity,³ unless they could believe the freedom and opportunity.

Since as we’ve seen, Werthmann can believe any old darn thing, this is a gotcha, and she is docked two Hitlers.

I lived in Austria under Adolf Hitler’s regime for seven years. Dictatorship did not happen overnight. It was a gradual process starting with national identification cards, which we had to carry with us at all times.

You could say that the gradual process started with the March 11, 1938 seizure of the Austrian government by Nazi Party hacks, or you could take a more concrete view and say that the gradual process started with the March 12, 1938 rollout of the German military, who moved across the largely demilitarized Austria as if they owned the place, which ipso facto they did. We’ve studied the dates and times back and forth (the Wehrmacht were apparently early risers — all the more reason the Nazi juggernaut, whatever that word even freaking means — needed to be stopped). And it, um, pretty much does seem to be the case that it happened “overnight.”

But then, you could say that the gradual process was the rise of Nazi influence in Austria culminating in the March 9, 1938 announcement by Nazi opponent and right-wing dictator Kurt Schuschnigg that Austria had its own Christian Austrofascism already, thank you Mr. Grouchy McHitler, but that he would reluctantly hold a vote on the unification question just to quiet things down already, jeez, can’t a guy preside over a goddamn fascist regime⁴ around here?

And in such a case no, that dictatorship didn’t happen overnight, for on March 4, 1933, when Austrian chancellor and subsequent Vaterländische Front founder Engelbert Dollfuß dissolved the parliament and became the regime’s first dictator, it was daytime.

We could not board a bus or train without our ID card. Gun registration followed, with a lot of talk about gun safety and hunting accidents. Since the government already knew who owned firearms, confiscation followed under threat of capital punishment.

Ah, it’s the German Weapons Act of 1938, in which rifles and shotguns were actually deregulated, among other whoopsie-doodles. And then came the confiscation. That was in 1945, and ‘the government’ was the, um, Allies.

Freedom of speech was the next target. Free speech was curtailed with the enforcement of the federal police (Gestapo). With a large network of informers, people were afraid to say anything political, even in their own homes.

This was entirely different during the so-called Austrofascist period, when only Social Democrats, Marxists, Nazis, Anarchists, and anticlericals were afraid to say anything political, for fear of being thrown into the concentration camps set up in 1933 to contain political dissidents.

The liberal mindset in America has promoted gun control for a long time and is beginning to advocate national identification cards.

I’m imagining a bulky old cathedral radio with a pulsating brain inside. “Wobble-wobble-wobble!” [boing, skreek, white noise] “You’re listening to WIWW, America’s wobbliest rock. Stay tuned for more gun contro…um, ah, national ID cards, plus a Tracy Chapman rock bloc!” [scree! static, canned radio noises]

And the pulsating brain is like, “Alright! Woo! You got a fast car… I want a ticket to any-where. Maybe we can make a deal…”

Law-abiding American citizens should not have to carry national identification cards. Aliens and non-citizens should be required to carry ID cards.

Ev’rybody scapes the Jews,
Some-time.
There’s no excep-tion to the ruse…

Even their driver’s licenses should be different than a citizen’s driver’s license.

“Wass that say, mang?”

“‘Not valid for bouncy ranflas or scrapes with less than 4″ ground clearance, or with excessive kaboom in the ka-booty, or bass in the trunk.’ That means bass in the trunk, Señor Upscale Holmes.”

“Aw, mang! If you could drive aroun’ rockin’ the treble, why not kick it to a CD such as Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica? Civilization ‘ud fall, vato.”

“Some say it has, miclo.”

Our government also needs to take strong measures against illegal aliens and tightly close our borders to protect American citizens.

Even though we are in a state of war, we have to protect our civil liberties. While some people need power to secure our freedom, we must be ever-vigilant to maintain a system of checks and balances.

I am sorely disappointed with France and Germany. If it was not for the United States, the French would be speaking German today. And if our troops had not protected Germany, Russian tanks would have rolled all the way to the Rhine River.

Well, if not for the British, who defeated Napoleon, the Germans would have been speaking French, so where does that end? Plus, the shock-horror of ‘speaking German’ seems quaint when you realize that Finland was an Axis country, and might have Finnished us once and for all.

How ungrateful those nations are. We have to stand by our country and our troops. I am grateful that our troops are protecting freedom.

America is the greatest country in the world. After America, there is no place to run.

Not with the dagger of Argentina poised at the heart of Antarctica. That’s what’s keeping the Chthitler from awakening and sounding his pale and fatal oompah tuba, may his oompah tuba soon sound.

From the “shit you can’t make up” files:

We Can’t Let Bart Stupak Go Without A Judas Like Parting Gift

We can’t Bart Stupak go without a parting gift. Judas, after all, got 30 silver coins to sell out our Lord. Stupak needs something for selling out all the children sent off to be slaughtered thanks to his “compromise” that any President can pen away to oblivion — notwithstanding the questionable legal assumptions behind it.

Let’s send him 100 silver coins. It’s only a $4.00 investment on your part.

Hey, I want some silver coins too! How many kids to I need to abort to qualify???

(Also, CNN: You picked a real winner. May I suggest Mark Noonan next?)

Above: Teabagger-embracing conservapundit, self-conception.

John “The Manliest LOLcow” Hindrocket, Esq.sez:

In large part, the current focus on threats of violence is aimed at the tea partiers, just as they were accused, apparently falsely, of racism. It is not hard to understand the Democrats’ motives; the tea parties are the most vital force, and likely the most popular force, in American politics, so smearing them is mandatory. But anyone who has attended a tea party rally will consider laughable the idea that the movement somehow tends toward violence.

The tea parties, and conservative pundits’ reaction to them, was the subject of Glenn Reynolds’ interview of Jonah Goldberg on PJTV. It’s a fun conversation between two very smart guys. Glenn posed the question, “why are so many conservative pundits wimps?” But he made clear that he wasn’t talking about web-based pundits like us. Or him.

It is important for conservative leaders to embrace the tea party movement, and it seems that nearly all do. For what it is worth, I do not consider David Brooks to be a conservative leader. To be a leader, you need to have at least a handful of followers.

Above: Teabagger-embracing conservapundit, reality.

Lulz. Now there’s too much stupid and too many lies in his post for me to bother with unpacking, but this little digression got my attention. I want Sadlynaughts to know I suffered through the entire 16 minutes of this piece of crap, and that’s not including the several second introduction/solicitation to register with PJTV by Stephen Green, aka Patrick Bateman. But I never heard Perfesser Corncob or Pantload call anyone a wimp, though you can tell Reynolds hates David Brooks. I might have missed it; whatever; I’m disappointed. Still, it’s what Hindrocket heard, which says something about him — and them. Obviously, for Hindrocket, it requires some kind of manly-man ramrod Prussian strength for a wingnut to support the Teabaggers, which he finds lacking in the Emessem wingers and Republican establishment types, but finds in abundance in 82nd Chairborne members like himself.

I have to say I’m impressed. He’s so butch. I bet he likes gladiator movies.

Health Care 2020

• So, OK, universal health care will lead to a healthier population and less people will die from lack of care. But it also means that medical device companies won’t have as much financial incentive to build a nanobot-powered penis enhancement system. This tyranny will not stand. Wolverines!

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

Thomas Friedman, The New York Times:
A Tea Party Without Nuts

• I’m Not A Wino, I’m A ‘Why-Yes’!

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

My definition of broken is simple. It is a system in which Republicans will be voted out for doing the right thing (raising taxes when needed) and Democrats will be voted out for doing the right thing (cutting services when needed). When your political system punishes lawmakers for the doing the right things, it is broken.

Above: “Happy Warrior” Trike Force to teh rescue.

Shorter Erick The Red Erickson
Red State White Trash
“A note from Congressman Randy Neugebauer”

• I so totally approve of Neugebauer’s “babykiller” blarg blarg, and so totally resent liberal babykillers who object to it, that I sent him some money and you should, too.

Shorter Jimdolph The Red-Nosed Pundit Geraghty
National Review: Campaign Spot
“Please, Democratic Donors, Please Give To These Hopeless Candidates”

• Dare ya to really take The Neuge on. Free-For-All HCR is gonna be put in a Stranglehold come November, babykillers.

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

Periodically, about every full moon, some wingnut will resurrect the tired old trope that liberals have no ideas while conservatives are all about ideas. Last time I bothered to deal with it, the culprit was David Frum, but I’ve also seen it lately from Dr. Kraphammer, Darth Kristol, Pantload, and much of the rest of the whole goddamn Hee Haw gang. Though you can be reasonably sure that it’s flat-out wrong, lying-lie wrong, Orwellian wrong just because of who’s saying it (not to mention the wtf? merits of the argument per se), they never, ever stop trying.

I’ve been reading and re-reading good old AJP Taylor lately, smacking around that same argument advanced by his wingnuts, a.k.a. Tories:

[E]ven in the twentieth century the Tories, despite their loyal phrases, were responsible for the only real subversion of modern times, the Ulster rebellion of 1914. If Toryism means anything, it rejects the sovereignty of parliament and the doctrine of the Social Contract… In practice, as Macaulay observed, Toryism amounts to no more than defending Whig achievements of a previous generation. In the world of ideas, the Tories have had to make do with unprincipled adventurers, like Bolingbroke and Disraeli, or to borrow from the other side. Burke, whom [Keith] Feiling calls ‘the largest mind ever given to politics in our island’ and ‘the inspiration of a second party of Tories,’ was a corrupt Whig hack. A century later, the Tories learnt their imperialism from the renegade radical, [Joe] Chamberlain. It would be unfair to blame Toryism for being short of ideas. Ideas are an affair of the mind, and Toryism distrusts the mind in politics. In essence, Toryism rests of doubt in human nature; it distrusts improvement, clings to traditional institutions, prefers the past to the future. It is a sentiment rather than a principle.

— “Tory History”, May 1950, The New Statesman

Disraeli riveted on our political life the conception that politics consist entirely in two parties fighting for office. These two parties were to represent not programmes but interests. What interests Disraeli did not much mind. Sometimes he talked of the Conservative Party as ‘the landed interest’; sometimes he appealed to all who had ‘a stake in the country’ [cf. Nixon’s “a piece of the action” – HTML]; in practice his party was an alliance between the City and the mob. None of this mattered. The important thing was the struggle for power — a tradition which the Conservative Party has faithfully observed to this day. It is true also to Disraeli’s tradition in not knowing what to do with power when it has got it. To catch the other side bathing and make off with their clothes is still its only resource.

— “Dizzy”, January 1955, The New Statesman

Now the cf. here, as it were, is the modern repugs’ obstructionism vis-a-vis… pretty much everything. Macauley’s famous observation holds as true today as ever, except for the fact that modern wingnuts are less sincere than those of his day — or Taylor’s for that matter. Wingnuts at the time insisted that Social Security amounted to the lash of the dictator; now they claim to be for it and protectors of it — mostly disingenuously, of course, since they also want to privatize it. Wingnuts, including St. Reagan and St. Goldwater, insisted at the time that Medicare was the tool of the Marxist devil and would eventually destroy America; during the healthcare fight they cited their desire to protect Medicare as a partial reason why they opposed ObamaCare. Lastly, and most infamously, wingnuts claim to have always been for the Civil Rights victories of the 1960’s, but to the small extent that such victories owe to Republican support, it is to Liberal Republicans, a species wingnuts have driven to extinction (concomitantly, they welcomed the Dixiecrats who continued to oppose civil rights); and their arguments are usually only made in the service of some lame gotcha at the supposed expense of repentant, reformed segregationists like Robert Byrd.

To the extent that they have any “new” ideas they get them from former leftists, aka neocons, who, being what they are, like to have a bit of fun playing games with dialectics. Christopher Hitchens, for instance, and even before his complete transformation after 9/11 into a Kristolmethodist, liked to sneer that the environmentalist movement was “essentially conservative.” After 9/11, of course, he accused everyone opposed to blowing Iraq to bits of “conservative” or “reactionary” sentiment; this sort of thing was then amplified by creeps like Oliver Kamm and the gang of useless idiots at Hurry Up Harry. Anyway, whether about war or about economics, this crap is all of a piece: neocons and neoliberals are merely types of wingnuts; put another way, they are enemies of — destroyers of — social democracy, our work, us. As Taylor said, if it is about anything, it’s about the rejection of the Social Contract. Our ideological ancestors beat theirs to an admirable extent, but the children, our coevals, keep smashing at the result, the Welfare State as idea and in practice, which puts us on the defensive. This is a fact of posture, nothing more; but of course it doesn’t stop wingnuts of all stripes accusing us of embracing what is “old” at the expense of what they’re peddling, which they allege is new and fresh. Tony Judt is good on this:

In the contemporary United States, at a time of growing unemployment, a jobless man or woman is not a full member of the community. In order to receive even the exiguous welfare payments available, they must first have sought and, where applicable, accepted employment at whatever wage is on offer, however low the pay and distasteful the work. Only then are they entitled to the consideration and assistance of their fellow citizens.

Why do so few of us condemn such “reforms”—enacted under a Democratic president? Why are we so unmoved by the stigma attaching to their victims? Far from questioning this reversion to the practices of early industrial capitalism, we have adapted all too well and in consensual silence—in revealing contrast to an earlier generation. But then, as Tolstoy reminds us, there are “no conditions of life to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees them accepted by everyone around him.”

This “disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition…is…the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” Those are not my words. They were written by Adam Smith, who regarded the likelihood that we would come to admire wealth and despise poverty, admire success and scorn failure, as the greatest risk facing us in the commercial society whose advent he predicted. It is now upon us.

[…]

We must revisit the ways in which our grandparents’ generation responded to comparable challenges and threats. Social democracy in Europe, the New Deal, and the Great Society here in the US were explicit responses to the insecurities and inequities of the age. Few in the West are old enough to know just what it means to watch our world collapse.[7] We find it hard to conceive of a complete breakdown of liberal institutions, an utter disintegration of the democratic consensus. But it was just such a breakdown that elicited the Keynes–Hayek debate and from which the Keynesian consensus and the social democratic compromise were born: the consensus and the compromise in which we grew up and whose appeal has been obscured by its very success.

… Rather than seeking to restore a language of optimistic progress, we should begin by reacquainting ourselves with the recent past. The first task of radical dissenters today is to remind their audience of the achievements of the twentieth century, along with the likely consequences of our heedless rush to dismantle them.

The left, to be quite blunt about it, has something to conserve. It is the right that has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project. Social democrats, characteristically modest in style and ambition, need to speak more assertively of past gains. The rise of the social service state, the century-long construction of a public sector whose goods and services illustrate and promote our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty: these were no mean accomplishments.

The truth is that all wingnut activity is done of the service of the only idea they have, and have always had since the beginning of time, perfectly encapsulated by J.K. Galbraith: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy: that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” Everything “new” they offer is just a different spin on this theme.

PS — This, from Judt, is good to throw in the face of the next Reasondroid glibertarian douchenozzle you encounter:

Thus Keynes sought an increased role for the social security state, including but not confined to countercyclical economic intervention. Hayek proposed the opposite. In his 1944 classic, The Road to Serfdom, he wrote:

No description in general terms can give an adequate idea of the similarity of much of current English political literature to the works which destroyed the belief in Western civilization in Germany, and created the state of mind in which naziism could become successful.

In other words, Hayek explicitly projected a fascist outcome should Labour win power in England. And indeed, Labour did win. But it went on to implement policies many of which were directly identified with Keynes.

And of course was never fascist. Incidentally, whom does Hayek remind you of here? Ahh. I said it at the time of Pantload’s book’s release and I’ll say it again: Goldberg’s thesis is nothing more than tired glibertarian reiterations of Hayek, but where they had repeatedly scribbled on their chalkboard “According to Hayek, food stamps = totalitarianism”, Pantload stupidly yet, strategically, cleverly substituted the f-bomb, so as to get his own side’s political history off the hook, as it were, and say to liberals in so many words, “I know you are but what am I?”

I’ve long found Confederate Yankee amusing, but his latest ramblings are actually starting to creep me out. Place your bets — how long before he makes headlines for crashing his John Deere rider mower into the Chigger Creek Post Office? I give him three weeks.

HTML sez: Also.

Oh Dow, why hast thou forsaken us?

Dow Finishes Up 100 as Health Care Becomes Law

The Dow advanced more than 100 points Tuesday, despite a mixed assessment on the U.S. housing market, after President Obama signed a comprehensive health care reform package into law.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 103 points, or 1%, to 10,889. The S&P 500 gained 8 points, or 0.7%, to 1174, and the Nasdaq went ahead by 20 points, or 0.8%, to 2415.

Though actually, I’d feel a wee bit better if Obamacare had sent the Dow crashing and reeling into the Earth. The fact that it’s rising during an alleged government takeover of one-sixth of the economy shows that the government isn’t doing a good job of crushing private industry into dust, comrades. Furthermore, there’s this:

Bob Auer, senior portfolio manager for Auer Growth, attributed recent bullishness to the fact that there’s nothing else competing for the money.

“There really is just one thing, and it’s been said before, but it can’t be ignored: There’s nothing competing for the money. It’s not like you can go into a bank and ask for a CD,” Auer said, adding that municipals are a dicey situation, too. “The Fed said it’s going to keep rates low for a long time. They basically turned on the spigot. Nothing is going to compete with the stock market right now.”

I understand why the Fed is keeping monetary policy extremely loose right now since, you know, plunging the economy into a depression is a bad thing. I do worry about the potential for another long period of nonexistent interest rates leading to another bubble involving some stupid bullshit or another. Snatch up those collateralized POG obligations while they’re cheap, fellas!

HTML addz: And regarding another dire wingnut threat/prediction that didn’t come true: Wall Streeters didn’t Go Galt after all.

The other day at AIPAC:

The biggest divergence came in the discussion of “smart power.” Kurtzer said we haven’t done enough. Here, to the audible gasps of some conservatives in the room, he proclaimed that we can’t aspire to promote American values when we have 30 million people without health insurance. (The woman next to me declared in a stage whisper, “And he teaches this at a university.”) And, citing the controversial CENTCOM report, he said that the U.S. military was implicitly arguing that the U.S. has been insufficiently dedicated to resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict. (More crowd murmuring.) He then bemoaned the Iraq war, which had cost so much and in which we had lost so many lives. Kristol joked that he wanted to defend “dumb power” — that is, the indispensible role of American military power. The issue, Kristol said, is what types of policies work — citing the failure of Iran engagement and the Obami’s Middle East approach.

Ya rly cuz “dumb power” worked so well in Iraq, dumbass.