Sadly, No!

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Sadly, we here at Sadly, No! know all to well the clinical manifestations of dissociative troll disorder, and so, while reading Andy Breitblart’s assessment in the Moonie Times of his own performance on Bill Maher’s Real Time, I couldn’t help but notice most of the major indicia of an advanced case of that disorder.

Pretty much everyone I respect in media and politics recommended I not go on HBO’s “Real Time With Bill Maher.” But on Friday night, I defied that wisdom and had the time of my life.

I sparred with Mr. Maher, Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson and a MoveOn.org audience from hell that booed my sentences before they were completed.

We’re only two sentences into Brietbart’s column and he’s already presenting as an 8 on the Shoelimpy-Ruppert scale (10 being maximum trollishness). It’s really a classic case. Andy enters the lion’s den of vicious liberals against everyone’s advice. Once there he is outnumbered, abused, maligned and ridiculed by moonbats. But nonetheless the troll, by sheer force of intellect, emerges victorious!

Upon walking off the stage after Friday’s show, I felt like I had gone 12 rounds with Mike Tyson and Roberto Duran. But when I got back to my dressing room, my BlackBerry was filling with messages from people I’ve never met, many of whom disagree with my politics but were compelled to praise my willingness to enter the lion’s den.

And here Breitbart goes off the Shoelimpy-Ruppert scale with his unlikely, no, flat-out-bogus tale of his being showered with liberal accolades after the show was over. Forgive me for nit-picking, but where did people who’ve never met Breitbart dig up his email address? I’ve looked for it, God knows, and I haven’t been able to find it. Nevertheless liberals who never met Breitbart went searching for his email address at 11:00 p.m. on Friday night just so that they could send him kudos for yelling “whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa” and putting scare air quotes around “black studies intelligentsia” on HBO. Uh huh. And on Friday night at the same time, I got a booty calls from Brad Pitt and Stephen Moyer Ryan Kwanten.

Of course, the alleged plaudits continued the following day:

The next morning, the Starbucks barista recognized me and said he was a liberal. Go figure! Yet he also said my critique of Professor Dyson’s knee-jerk use of the race card struck a chord. He also complimented my on-air demeanor.

The barista also said that Andy’s haircut was awesome.

Andy wraps up with a final classic troll flourish: the “I used to be a liberal before . . . ” schtick:

My trajectory from left to right began with a similar seed of doubt. Coincidentally, it was the race issue and how the media mistreated Clarence Thomas during his confirmation hearings. It’s no coincidence I made that a central argument on the show, too.

That has to be the lamest and most improbable excuse for an alleged personal conversion since Mark Foley said that sex with a priest turned him gay.

*Cf.

The Commercial Republic

• I can’t wait until this financial crisis is over so we can all go back to being greedy, short-sighted pricks again.

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

With all of the tea parties and the going Galt* and the Jon Stewart and, really, the snowballing unemployment rate, it’s astonishing that there still exists to collect paychecks a tinfoil branch of the wingnut party. Well thank Hebrews 12 for Marvin Olasky:

Some evangelicals are responding to Obamania by heading to the hills: Y2K hysteria in 1999 was a false alarm but this new administration is a four-alarm fire. Maybe, but if you’re tempted that way, read one of the Bible’s great history chapters, Hebrews 11, and then its conclusion in chapter 12: ‘Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus. . . . Consider Him who endured from sinners such hostility against Himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.’

‘Maybe.’ Serious inquiries, e.g., ‘Is Obama the Anti-Christ?’ deserve serious answers after all. One wouldn’t want to upset the righteous with a less nuanced reply. That said, if you’re inclined to grok heap bad juju emanating from the black dude, Olasky (like any good astrologist) offers some different star charts that might distract you from such thoughts momentarily.

Unfortunately, with the shit hitting the fan at its current rate, his brand of gibberish is losing its bubble-era import, much to the detriment of ‘Religulous’ DVD sales — we have other fish to teach men to fry these days. Not that this is stopping Marvin:

Is our present situation painful? Hebrews 12 continues, ‘Do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor be weary when reproved by Him. For the Lord disciplines the one He loves, and chastises every son whom He receives. . . . For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.’

So shut up about losing your job, asshole, and be happy that Olasky’s goat entrails suggest a greater purpose for … no, you may not have any of these goat entrails! We don’t care how cold and hungry you moochers are … find your own, A equals A, man qua man, etc.

*Since none of the loudest ‘going Galt’ enthusiasts are actually and literally going Galt, can we devise a name for this group? Humble suggestion: Chickengalts.

Rut-roh:

AIG Bonus Babies

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But if capitalism is to survive, shouldn’t the Republican party, the party that defends democratic capitalism, be particularly vehement in denouncing its excesses? Isn’t this a pretty spectacular one? And isn’t this a moment for the GOP to separate itself from the Bush administration as well as the Obama administration, who together have been responsible for an incompetent and improvident bailout? Figuring out the right policy going forward with respect to toxic assets and the rest is, of course, a major intellectual task. But being on the side of a healthy populist reaction to the AIG situation is at least a good political start.

What worries me about this is that the politics of the AIG mess are so simple that even a sub-simpleton such as Kristol can accurately describe them. As I’ve said before, the Obama Treasury Department is literally giving us a rerun of Bush-Paulson policies by sending a bunch of money to insolvent financial institutions in the hopes that … ?????

If Team Obamee is smart, they’ll come out today and announce that they’re forcing AIG to renegotiate its contracts with its employees, just as the autoworkers have had to renegotiate their contracts with GM, Ford and Chrysler. Because if they don’t, they’ll be giving the GOP the opening that they’ve been so desperately seeking.

UPDATE: The good folks at MoveOn are thankfully all over this and have created an Internets petition for you to sign if’n you’re a mind to.

Billed as an “Internet News Entrepreneur,” an unkempt and clueless Big Andy Blartblart was on Bill Maher and the results were hilarious. Watch this short clip (with a few helpful annotations that I added):

Of course, Breitbart’s contention that Limbaugh has never said anything racist is almost as preposterous as saying that Limbaugh bears an uncanny resemblance to Brad Pitt.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, the folks at Blartblart’s Big Hollywood posted the entire video of Blartblart piddling on himself. Predictably the commenters there thought that it was the black man on the show who was racist.

UPDATE: Now listen to Blartblart talk about the “black studies intelligentsia crowd” complete with scare quotes and then decide who’s the racist here.

Better yet, although I thought 9/11 “made” Blartblart a conservative, he now says it was solidarity with poor conservative Negroes oppressed by the “black studies intelligentsia crowd” that made him see the light. What an odious lying sack of meretricious shit this guy is.

Are You Smarter Than Me?

• Even though there is no way to know how smart Barack Obama is, I know that I’m smarter than he is. The proof that I’m smarter than him is my membership in a group which has a name that means stupid in Spanish. And because I’m so smart I figured out that Al Gore is stupid and global warming is a hoax. It’s a hoax because the planet was warmer before there were any human beings on it. What’s your answer to that, stupid libs?

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

The Longevity Dividend

• The problem with Social Security is that people keep retiring. Hey, here’s an idea. Let’s discover a magical elixir that will reverse the aging process and then make people work until they’re ninety. Problem solved.

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

This would have been slightly more topical back in October, but it’s just too good to pass up:

Right, “Bush opts to defy his stated desire.” What was wrong “Bush was lying all along”?

ABOVE: The Sacred Heart of Douthat

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By now, you’ve no doubt heard that the replacement for Bill “Emperor Palpatine” Kristol at the New York Times is the 12-year-old blunderkind Ross “Every Sperm is Sacred” Douthat (rhymes with “Cow Butt”). So we can expect to hear a good deal of whining on the editorial page about embryos, stem cells, abortion and other Vatican talking points. Think K-Lo, minus 200 pounds, plus a face-mullet.

To let you get more acquainted with Ross, here are a few shorters (some inspired by Roy):

• I really liked the Harry Potter books until I learned that Dumbledore is GAY.
• Hey, here’s a really cool way to get rid of gay babies without having to abort them.
• It’s unfair for liberals to point out the G.K. Chesterton, a devout Catholic conservative man, was an anti-Semite because liberals, when you get down to it, spend all their time “making apologies for terror and mass murder.”
• The fact that women I am with have a hard time achieving orgasm is a feature, not a bug.
• Even though freezing embryos rather than using them for stem cell research is an “empty gesture,” that is still the reason why I am opposed to stem cell research.
• I used to think Jennifer Aniston was hot until I saw a trailer for a movie in which she played a character that got her hoo-hah waxed.
• “At the moment, I’m probably rooting harder for Sarah Palin to succeed than I have for any politician in recent memory. Just something to keep in mind while you’re reading my commentary.”*

*Not really a shorter, but an actual entire post by Douthat on his blog.

The eminently mockable Andy McCarthy is over at America’s Shittiest Website™ this morning giving a spelling lesson:

Of course when lecturing brown people about their illiteracy and their laughably ignorant spelling, it is normally a good idea, well, to be right. The British troops that were returning were members of the Royal Anglian Regiment. Yes, that’s “Anglian,” not “Anglican.” The regiment is so called because consists of regiments from the ten Counties of East Anglia and the East Midlands. And yes, Andy, there is a place in England called East Anglia.

Bonus stupidity points go to Attorney McCarthy for not knowing to put the period at the end of his first sentence inside the quotation marks. (That dig is for you, MzNicky!) And extra bonus stupidity points for the scare quotes in “British” Muslims.

I can imagine McCarthy sitting in front of his computer telling himself how stooopid teh Mooslims are and what a genius he is when the flood of email came pouring in correcting his mistake. Now he’s wondering whether the Corner crowd will believe him if he says that Muslim terrorists got his password and were posting stuff under his name to embarrass him.

This should be the funnest update ever.