Sadly, No!

Above: Yorx and awa-a-ay

Byron “Professor Wronghair” York, The So-Called Examiner:
The Van Jones (non) feeding frenzy

• Obama’s Special Adviser for Green Jobs, Enterprise, and Innovation is associated with circa-2002 demands for an investigation of 9/11, and I have in my possession a list of major news outlets who are not covering the news that we are screaming about it.

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

I read the news today, oh boy:

School speech backlash builds

School districts from Maryland to Texas are fielding angry complaints from parents opposed to President Barack Obama’s back-to-school address Tuesday – forcing districts to find ways to shield students from the speech as conservative opposition to Obama spills into the nation’s classrooms.

The White House says Obama’s address is a sort of pep talk for the nation’s schoolchildren. But conservative commentators have criticized Obama for trying to “indoctrinate” students to his liberal beliefs, and some parents call it an improper mix of politics and education.

“The gist is, ‘I want to see what the president has to say before you expose it to my child.’ Another said, ‘This is Marxist propaganda.’ They are very hostile,” said Patricia O’Neill, a Democrat who is vice president of the Montgomery County School Board, in a district that borders Washington, D.C. “I think it’s disturbing that people don’t want to hear the president, but we live in a diverse society.”

Readers from other countries often get upset when I tell them that the American right is louder and crazier than any right-wing movement in the developed world. “But we have wingnuts too!” they’ll insist as they’ll link to something crazy a Tory backbencher said eight years ago.

But sorry, no. You do not have to deal with the level of stupid bullshit that we put up with on a daily basis. I never saw conservatives in other countries organizing angry protests when Tony Blair or Jean Chrétien talked to schoolchildren. You may have your right-wing crazies but they aren’t as loud or as powerful as the right-wing crazies in this country. Full stop.

UPDATE: Now that I think about it, Obama should just go all the way next week and ask the schoolchildren to help spy on their parents and to enlist in his secret army to “fight the white devils.” But he won’t. And that’s a real missed opportunity.

UPDATE II: Oh, and because I’m this blog’s resident Red Sox fanatic, I suppose I should comment on Curt Schilling’s flirtation with running for Ted Kennedy’s senate seat. Look, as much as Schilling is beloved in this state for bringing the Sawx two championships, he’ll never ever survive under the campaign limelight. He says too much stupid bullshit and has too little of a filter to succeed in a campaign.

Now if Tom Brady were to run as a Republican, on the other hand… well, let’s just say even I might consider voting for the GOP for the first time in my life.

Tintin adds: And, of course, these are the same fuckwits who want to put prayer back in the schools. Indoctrination (even if that were what Obama was up to) is okay as long as it’s indoctrination that they like.

Below is a good argument how things totally ought to be one way and not another, and therefore actually are, once you squint at them properly.

Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit:
JIM LINDGREN: “The biggest problem with the media’s understanding of the Tea Party movement is that some on the left assume (1) that the Tea Parties are Astroturfed at least as much as some of the left’s own demonstrations and (2) that the educated right hates Obama at least as much as the educated left hates Bush and Cheney. So far, I haven’t seen much evidence of either.”

Ah, you see, the biggest problem with the media’s understanding of the Tea Party movement is that,

• Some on the left assume that,
  • BECAUSE some of the left’s demonstrations are:
    • ‘Astroturfed,’ i.e., organized by activist groups, esp. with pre-printed signs,
  • THEN the Tea Parties in general must to an equal or greater amount be:
  • ‘Astroturfed,’ i.e., organized by lobbyists pretending to be grass-roots advocates for the interests of ordinary citizens (e.g., health care reform), while actually playing these citizens like bitch pachinko for their real clients, (e.g., insurance companies).
• THEREFORE, if all on the left both:
  • Assumed or were empirically convinced that it is the left that is more Astroturfed, and,
  • Ignored the right-wing zealots who are running around mad with hatred for Obama as not relevant to the charge, ‘people hating Obama,’ because educated people in America tend to hate Bush and Cheney more than they do Obama,
• THEN the biggest problem with the media’s understanding would be solved.

We’ll get right on it — as well as on a new, more inclusively they-do-it-too definition for ‘Astroturfed’ basically to mean, ‘to be so Urfed at something as to have the Ass Trots.’

This will be tied to a character, the Astro Turfer, a metallic-skinned alien riding an astronomic Turf Board who is the herald for a great and sinister force. And he’ll do stuff and give short speeches, and it will all be very exciting as it goes along, with all the puns like ‘Turfin’ USA,’ ‘Turf’s Up!’ and who can even say what else.

ABOVE: Pat Buchanan during his salad days

Shorter Pat Buchanan, Right From the Beginning
Did Hitler Want War?

• Of course, Hitler didn’t want war, but he had absolutely no other choice after Poland refused his demand to turn a Polish town over to Germany.

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

Dana Loesch, BlogHer, The Community for Women Who Blog:
To Put It Bluntly: People Didn’t Bring Guns to Town Halls Until Thugs Started Beating People Up

• To put it bluntly, poor little valiant people didn’t do a single eeny-weeny thing until hairy-shouldered malefactors started farting maggots into their naturally curly hair.

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

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to True Believer Theatre. I am your ghost…heh-heh, that is, your host, Eric Hoffer (1902-1983), charter member of the Christopher Lasch (1932-1994) Supper Club of Conservative Anti-Wingnuts (Peter “Not George Sylvester Viereck” Viereck [1916-2006], President and Chancellor), and author of the classic early-postwar work on the authoritarian personality, The True Believer, available wherever once-pivotal old paperbacks are thrown.

We have a sc-a-ary story for you this evening, ladies and gentlemen. Oh yes, I’m feeling the ordeal of change just thinking about it.

The great innovation of The True Believer was something that now seems like common sense — or that did until Jonah Goldberg got his hot, jammy handprints¹ all over it a little while ago, wiping them subsequently onto his book, I Know You Are, But What Am I, a.k.a. Liberal Fascism.

It’s that totalitarian movements may have features of the left or of the right, and may variously consider themselves like Bolshevik Communism to be radically left-wing, or like the Nazis to be the restorers of conservative values and culture. But underneath these distinctions, they have much more in common with each other than they do with sociopolitical arrangements like liberal democracy. Moreover, the book argues, the personality that thrives under them seems to have little difficulty in switching from an extremist worldview to its notional opposite — from one all-white vs. all-black mode of thinking to another — but to have much greater difficulty with similar non-extremist worldviews that value ambivalence over certainty, that privilege the work of judgment over willed belief and a trust in doctrine.

Such troublesome people! So invariant over time, with their listening to angry men on the radio and at podiums, and before that probably at older podiums with bad Roman emperors animated behind them (and hissing and gossiping when it was Marcus Aurelius); with their suckerhood for flattery, their ecstatic self-congratulation when denying others what had been denied them. So easily turned against people, so radiant they are when punishing others’ trespasses, so quick to trespass when egged on, so whiny when egged.

What butyric Hell awaits the traveler whose soul exhausts its charge on splashdown like a self-inflating thing, then snags on a splintered wooden Ozymandias phalange slanting out of the water, as such an object would slant in this tableau — and there would be ravens standing on it, as well — and sinks flappingly down, down in the tannin-stained waters to the skeletal grabby-hands reaching from the basal muck? Ask Malki, The Little Girl Who Loved The Swamp Stinkers.

Above: Der Pew

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Michelle Malkin, michellemalkin.com, 8/21/2009:
The bottom line on Tom Ridge: Weasel

• Lone former DHS head Tom Ridge is without credibility in his attempt to profit from a made-up politicization of Bush administration terror alerts that he “suspected” and “wondered,” causing even The New York Times to cease fabricating news on behalf of America’s enemies to prove that Ridge “provides no evidence that politics motivated the discussion” — leaving two possibilities: Ridge’s blatant politicizing of terror alerts is either a lie, or a deliberate attempt to mislead.

[commercial: Jamie Lee Curtis for Laxtivia laxative yogurt, or Activia, or whichever. That thing she does with that mortifying peristaltic encouragement product, ProDefecia or KerPooey — or that’s why they let other people name these, I suppose. Torpedea? Infinite DiJest?]

Michelle Malkin, michellemalkin.com, 8/27/2009:
Team Obama denies politicizing homeland security. Insert laugh track.

• The distastefully obeisant AP deserves praise in refusing to whitewash the foreseen-by-us corruption of DHS strongman Jeanette Napolitano, with a story proving that small irregularities in project scheduling have the appearance of political favoritism — denied by Napolitano as a reminder of the desperate cover-up of misdeeds in which the White House is generally engaged.

[commercial: MOM: “Alex? Alex-Alex?”]

Michelle Malkin, michellemalkin.com, 8/31/2009:
Tom Ridge: Straight to the remainder bin

• Tom Ridge the despicable enemy lied twice: once in conspiring with evildoers who falsely lied that his book confirms politicized terror alerts, and again with an outrageous walkback of that baseless sham fabrication when he squirmingly admitted never making any such claim.

[Comcast commercial featuring tuneless young woman perambulating through gray, isometrically projected world full of off-license cartoon characters. Commercial repeats directly.]

Hoffer here. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome our musical guest, LaShaka DeNew Featuring Da Kuhn Squad.

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

ABOVE: Judie Brown (right)

Shorter Judie Brown, Ruhnoo Amuhriker
The Kennedy funeral: spitting on Christ

• Ted Kennedy personally and single-handedly aborted tens of millions of babies who, but for him, would be alive today.

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

Slightly Shorter Msgr. Ross Francis Pius Douthat, S.J., O.P., O.F.M., S.S.J., Th.D+, The New York Fucking Times Dope-Ed Page
A Different Kind of Liberal (Warning: full throttle asshattery ahead if you click link)

• The only reason Ted Kennedy was in favor of abortion was because he and his brothers were constantly worried about their mistresses getting pregnant. Ironically, the result of this position was that it became harder harder for Eunice to find kids to participate in her Special Olympics. Also, let me take a moment to make a hip allusion to “Mad Men” that makes no sense whatever, probably because I once watched five minutes of “Desperate Housewives” and thought I was watching “Mad Men.” Why do my editors here at the New York Times look at me oddly when I pass them in the hallway? And why was that old guy from DC, you know the one in a wheelchair with that funny name, being interviewed in their offices last week? No one will have lunch with me here anymore and they keep stealing my sandwiches from the refrigerator. Are we at 750 words yet?

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

We now rejoin Donald Douglas and the Risky Business socks-and-underpants dance that comprises his work as a public intellectual.

Donald Douglas, American Power:
Mary Jo Kopechne: For Democrats, A Footnote Better Left to Obscurity

But why Douglas, of all the people now wheel-broken against the pursuit of happiness, of all the people now dependent, instead, on the license for unrestrained spite and self-valiant storytelling granted the conservative against the liberal? Why he, of all those flattered as guardians of liberty by private tyrannies, and of those ensorcelled against government in order to remove its protections?

Because if the category, ‘wingnut,’ is made up of tops and bottoms, of pitchers and catchers — of those whose passion is to deliver the conservative message unto others, and those for whom it is to gladly receive and absorb that message — then Douglas would be the proverbial guy who had a couple of his ribs surgically removed in order better to enjoy his own company.

I’ve seen at least three articles now arguing that Mary Jo Kopechne’s death pales in comparison to the historical legacy of Edward Kennedy.

And here we go right away, because we’ve seen at least three articles arguing that Edward Kennedy’s historical legacy darkens in comparison to Mary Jo Kopechne’s death. Darkens. This ought to mean the same thing, yet it means the opposite. The opposite! We’re not leaving, Douglas, until you explain how light becomes dark under your strewn and blasted watchtower.

Our ‘at least three’ means close to a hundred, too, although it’s true that we go looking for things instead of letting the research slap footnotes on us, as it were. Plus, okay, Kopechne’s death was pale before, being death, but upon contact with Kennedy’s legacy became even more pale than it had been? At first just ghostly, it paled more, becoming paler? Honestly, we’re still only one sentence in, and already everything has gone all walleyed and fishy — like probably a walleye, if that’s a flatfish of some kind with both its eyes on the right side.

Douglas, we’re not leaving until you explain the pale whose shade whitens, this initially whitish shade of paleness, and the whiter shade of it. It is well beyond the pale.

It’s an awful, even…

Uh, fine, Douglas. Mind if we borrow this magazine on ticks but mostly mites, this Dyno-Mite magazine? We don’t really follow the mite coverage, but there’s some stuff in this one Ixodoidea column in front, not Dr. Dick Richards’s ‘Ricky’s Tickies,’ but the letters column, ‘Tick Talk.’ Thanks.

Okay, seriously: whiter? Hmm? Like Sarah Palin — white already, but palin’? Tundra bunny, heh-heh? No really, what’s the code? We’re going to grab this pencil to work on the crossword puzzle, okay? This door locks, right?

Welp, let us know; “we’ll be on the pail.”

It’s an awful, even demonic, kind of historical revisionism that relegates to a historical footnote the life and promise of that beautiful woman.

Yeah, it’s…wow, that scraping sound before was me hitting bottom. Yes, it’s almost as if the story has become all about the Kennedys, whereas historians once properly understood Kopechne as the figure that most defined the American political experience in the 1960s.

The fact that people see her name in history and think merely of Chappaquiddick, and don’t see entire chapters of history about who she was and what might have been — well, there’s revisionism, sure, but then there’s the kind of revisionism that’s associated with evil spirits!

Read the rest of this entry »

So that you won’t have to read the entire “Symposium” on the passing of Ted Kennedy over at America’s Shittiest Website™, here’s the two-minute version.

Ken Blackwell: Kennedy was an un-Christian, gay-loving, Constitution-hating baby killer.

Patrick Basham: The only nice thing I can think to say of Ted Kennedy is that, although he wasn’t very bright, at least he was committed to his stupid ideas.

John J. Miller: He never would have gotten elected but for his name which he then went and tarnished so badly that the parents of a serial killer can now say to themselves “Well, at least he didn’t grow up to be Ted Kennedy.”

Mona Charen: Even though I suppose he might have been a good father and a good uncle, he still was a lying sack of shit.

Michael G. Franc: Instead of naming the health-care bill after Kennedy, they should name a certain bridge after him.

William J. Gribbin: If Kennedy hadn’t sold his soul to the abortion lobby to run for President, the Democratic party would now be pro-life. And look what it got him: a one-way ticket straight to hell. I say good riddance to bad rubbish.

Hadley Arkes: Kennedy was just another Hitler. Judge Bork and Mary Jo Kopechne were the victims of the Ted Kennedy holocaust.

George H. Nash: At last we can now be rid of the notion that aristocratic clans should play a role in national politics. The Bush family doesn’t count.

Linda Chavez: Like Ted Kennedy I was once a liberal Democrat. Unlike Ted Kennedy, I won’t die one.