Cf. C. M. Kornbluth, The Marching Morons: “Dear Alma, I am fine and hope you are fine. It is a fine place here fine climate and easy living. The doctor told me today that I seem to be ten years younger. He thinks there is something in the air here keeps people young. We do not have much trouble with the greasers here they keep to theirselves it is just a question of us outnumbering them and staking out the best places for the Americans. In South Bay I know a nice little island that I have been saving for you and Sam with lots of blanket trees and ham bushes. Hoping to see you and Sam soon, your loving brother, Ed.”
Cf. No, seriously, if the Gates Foundation decided to take mankind to space!? Are these people a bunch of fourteen-year-olds building an MPC/Fundimensions model kit of Moonbase Alpha and huffing up big snorking lungfuls of fumes from a bottle of Testors liquid model cement!? No, I mean are they?
Enough. In a word, that is the message of disgusted taxpayers fed up with the confiscatory policies of both parties in Washington. George Bush pre-socialized the economy with billion-dollar bailouts of the financial and auto industries.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll probably say it again unless I think of another one first: If Michelle Malkin moves any farther to the right, her eyes will start to migrate to the side of her head, like a flounder.
Barack Obama is pouring billions more down those sinkholes. It isn’t just the camel’s back that’s broken. His neck and four legs have all snapped, too.
From this last straw. This last straw of billions poured down the sinkholes of bailouts.
It can’t just be me: Do you also sometimes picture Malkin at her desk, happily typing away angrily, with something like James Taylor or Dan Fogelberg playing through the iPod dock — and she stops and looks up at the wall for a moment, scowls as though inspired, and writes, “a wake-up call for the earmark watchdogs,” or “a pork-laden ivory tower bailout,” or another such fantastical vision, the effect of which is to promote levity and divert melancholy? This camel in the sinkhole — he is on the gravy train.
Enough. On Feb. 27, thousands of Americans turned out to protest reckless government spending in the pork-laden stimulus package, the earmark-clogged budget bill, the massive mortgage-entitlement program and taxpayer-funded corporate rescues.
Also the pork-clogged stimulus bill, the earmark-laden budget package, the taxpayer-funded mortgage-entitlement rescues, and the massive pork ear clog in the mark-laden corporate program.
Contrary to false left-wing blog smears that the hastily planned impromptu events were “Astro-turfed,”
…the crowds were packed with first-time grass-roots activists.
After all these years of watching conservatives mislead people, twists like this still bring surprise and delight. Did you see how she did that? Contrary to false smears that the events were Astroturfed, the crowds were packed with first-time activists. It’s like that William Carlos Williams poem.
This Is Just To Say
Contrary to false and malicious smears that I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox,
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast,
The icebox
had a bowl of plums in it the last time I looked
so sweet
and so cold.
Cap’n Ed Morrissey (RETD) now fancies himself not merely a blogger but a talk show personality as well with his very own program, an Internet-only YouTube thingy called, not surprisingly, the Ed Morrissey Show. You could sort of say he’s aspiring to be the new Rush Limbaugh, and if Ed put on about five more pounds and popped a couple more bottles of Vicodin, the similarities between the two hosts would be downright uncanny.
But you got to hand it to Ed, when Rush is down, as is he is now, Ed sticks out a hand to help, ignoring completely that Rush is a competitor, because helping a fellow talk show personality is just the right thing to do. Those Dems may think their campaign to label Rush as the head of the GOP is working, but Ed has proof that it’s not — he’s got himself a poll.
Poll: Who leads the Republican Party?
According to Rasmussen, most Republicans answer with a shrug. Over two-thirds of Republicans say “no one”, while only two percent agree with the Operation Rushbo attack operation out of the White House. So far, Operation Rushbo looks like a failure. &hellip All this shows the fallacy Rahm Emanuel has tried to employ in Operation Rushbo.
It’s times like this when you wonder whether Ed wouldn’t be better off if he went back to managing call centers full time, because he obviously doesn’t have even the slightest understanding of anything that he writes about. Really. I mean people whose only understanding of the political process comes from watching reruns of “The West Wing” understand more about politics than Ed does.
Operation Rushbo, as Morrissey calls it, wasn’t about convincing Republicans that Rush is their actual leader any more than Operation Scary Marxist Negro is about convincing Democrats that Obama is actually a card-carrying socialist. No, Operation Rushbo is designed to appeal to the Democratic Party base and to unaffiliated voters. If the drug addiction, serial divorces, and the sex tourism stuff didn’t loosen the GOP’s liplock on this corpulent gasbag, certainly saying that he’s the true leader of the GOP isn’t going to change any Republican minds either and it wasn’t intended to.
But now for some bonus fun. Ed has a little poll asking his readers who they think is the head of the Republican Party. He wants to talk about the poll on his Internet show on Tuesday at 3:00 p.m. Well, we’re Ed’s readers too, aren’t we? So we can all vote too, can’t we? I think Rushbo needs a little Sadlynaut love in that poll, don’t you? Then Ed will have to do a lot of mumbling about how polls like this aren’t really scientific or anything, particularly when they’ve been hijacked by a bunch of flying moonbat monkeys from a comedy blog.
We were reminded of this yesterday when we heard that Jason Mattera of Young America’s Foundation was on TV mocking Asian phonetics with the utterance, “wing wang wong.”
Above: Karl Frisch of Media Matters debates Mattera
Remember when people used to be all like, “Will he or she respond to this? There is the sound of crickets. I am waiting while the sound of crickets accentuates the slow passing of time, during which no response has been made.”
We’ve all certainly grown up a bit since then, haven’t we.
Obama is just like Stalin and Mao because someone at Wikipedia is deleting from Obama’s entry any references to the true fact that Obama was born in Kenya and is ineligible to be President of the United States.
Some of SadlyNo!’s favorite people have started crowding into the Twitter-sphere after Hugh “Man Boobs” Hewitt blessed Twitter and said it was good. Most are still not quite sure what to do with the Twitter service. Pamela “The Audacity of Tits” Geller, fearing that her message that Obama plans to kill all the Jews may not have reached every possible person, simply pushes all of her full-cap posts from her blog to Twitter. But some others are using it for wingnut aperçus and touching little anecdotes about their daily lives. In short, the Fort Fricking Knox of comedy gold.
Yo! Yo!! John, he flow off from his crib hopin’ to hit skins and break it down with some conservashizzle beotches or find some new peeps. How do you think that worked out for him?
Lorie, please, please change the channel while you still can. Perhaps “Bizarre Foods” on the Travel Channel might be a better viewing choice for you this evening.
Another highlight of Twitter is that some of the Coffèemate-de-la-Coffèemate of the wingnutosphere have posted brand spanking new photos of themselves on their Twitter sites. Some will be future subjects of photoshop fun. And others can just be presented without further commentary.
If there was one place in the wingnut-o-sphere where someone might see dark and terrifying liberal machinations behind the DTV transition delay (of all things!), it would have to be The American “Thinker” website where one of the qualifications for its writers appears to be a recent traumatic head injury. It will only be a matter of time before the geniuses who write for that site (and who truly give Renew America a run for its Cheetos) will declare that the the teh infield fly rule is a liberal plot to make our children go gay.*
Donning the tin foil cap today at American Thinker is Doug Powers, whom you may remember as the WND writer who got punked by an April Fool’s story about a planned television movie on Terry Schiavo. Powers spells out the real reason for the DTV transition delay:
It’s simply pathetic how television is being presented if [sic] it’s life-or-death medication. However, it isn’t difficult to understand why the government is so incredibly prickly [sic] about making sure everybody has television reception, as television is the number-one preferred delivery method of government indoctrination, fear-mongering and demogoging [sic].
Of course, Doug has it all wrong here. The number-one preferred delivery method of government indoctrination is surreptitious transmission of high radio frequency messages to tooth fillings which then download official propaganda into your brain at night while you’re sleeping. The number-two preferred delivery is through fire hydrants, which is why you see so many of them even though hardly anything burns down any more. The few fires that happen every now and then are actually set by the government so that no one will catch on to the true function of fire hydrants.
*I mean how gay does the umpire look when he sticks his arm straight up in the air (like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever) while simultaneously yelling “batter’s out!” That’s just got to be gayer than Oscar night in Chelsea.
While it’s fun laughing at the John Galt wannabes, Obama is seriously screwing up the banking crisis. From today’s Krugman:
But among people I talk to there’s a growing sense of frustration, even panic, over Mr. Obama’s failure to match his words with deeds. The reality is that when it comes to dealing with the banks, the Obama administration is dithering. Policy is stuck in a holding pattern.
Here’s how the pattern works: first, administration officials, usually speaking off the record, float a plan for rescuing the banks in the press. This trial balloon is quickly shot down by informed commentators.
Then, a few weeks later, the administration floats a new plan. This plan is, however, just a thinly disguised version of the previous plan, a fact quickly realized by all concerned. And the cycle starts again.
Why do officials keep offering plans that nobody else finds credible? Because somehow, top officials in the Obama administration and at the Federal Reserve have convinced themselves that troubled assets, often referred to these days as “toxic waste,” are really worth much more than anyone is actually willing to pay for them — and that if these assets were properly priced, all our troubles would go away.
Essentially, Geithner is re-proposing the Hank Paulson cash-for-trash scheme again with new bows and ribbons added to make it look less completely shitty. But it is completely shitty and no serious economist thinks it’s a good idea. Ferchrissake, James Effing Baker even thinks temporarily nationalizing the banks is the only way we’re ever going to get out of this mess:
James A. Baker, the Treasury secretary under President Ronald Reagan, wrote in The Financial Times on Tuesday that temporary nationalization might be necessary to inject public funds into problem banks.
“I abhor the idea of government ownership — either partial or full — even if only temporary,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, we may have no choice. But we must be very careful. The government should hold equity no longer than necessary to restructure the banks, resume normal lending and recoup at least a portion of taxpayer investment.”
Here’s the deal, dudes: if the economy is not recovering by mid-2010, you can kiss the Democrats’ hold on the House of Representatives bye-bye. If the problem persists beyond that, you can say hello to President Moose-Eater in 2012.
The point is, cleaning up the banking system has to be the Obama administration’s #1 priority. If they fail at that, then every other worthwhile initiative — from national health care to investments in green energy — will fall by the wayside and the country will be even worse off than it is right now.
Children, you really need to watch this amazing Tigerhawk video. Please, please, please watch it.
For those of you who don’t have the stomach, I’ll boil it down for you:
I, Tigerhawk, am a hard-working guy who makes a lot of money.
I and others of my kind work harder than any of you out there and we are better than you are because you’re lazy.
But despite the fact that we’re superior to all of you, you’re all being ungrateful to us… indeed, you want to raise our taxes!
Because of this, my feelings hurt.
My personal favorite quote is about small businessmen who don’t earn more than $250,000:
Most liberal bloggers are saying, ‘Well, most small-business people don’t actually earn $250,000, and they’re right in a way. But most of those small business people don’t create any jobs, or they create a few lame jobs.
Again, there is a palpable sense of resentment toward people who are not rich. Small business people who aren’t rich? Pfft, who cares? They create lame jobs. Only Randian Supermen such as myself are worthy of the public’s adoration… and yet the public is showing us disdain! Oh, heavens! I am feeling ever-so-tempted to go John Galt and then you’ll all miss me!
Lisa Schiffren at the National Review watches Tigerhawk’s hilarious sobfest and comes away misty-eyed:
Corner readers, you know he’s right. The doctors, lawyers, engineers, executives, serious small-business owners, top salespeople, and other professionals and entrepreneurs who make this country run work considerably harder than pretty much anyone else (including most of the chattering class, and all politicians). They are not robber barons, or trust-fund babies, or plutocrats, or even celebrities. They are mostly the meritocrats who worked hard in high school and got into the better colleges and grad schools, where they studied while others partied. They pushed through grueling hours and unpleasant “up or out” policies in their twenties and thirties at top law firms, banks, hospitals, and businesses to earn salaries in the solid six figures (or low seven) today — in their peak earning years.
I absolutely love shit like this.
For years, the right has worked tirelessly to portray Democratic politicians or activists as patrician elitists because they went to fancy colleges and went onto become doctors (Howard Dean), lawyers (John Edwards) or successful investors (George Soros). If anything, these figures are the very same people whom Tigerhawk is claiming to champion: they’re highly ambitious people who worked hard to make a lot of money. So what’s the problem with them?
The answer is, they don’t have a chip on their shoulder. Indeed, you could even say they feel grateful that they’ve made a shitload of money! And to make matters worse, they support raising taxes on their fellow rich people because they understand that having a society that is plagued by vast structural inequalities is in the long run detrimental to their own well-being! After all, the unwashed masses are far less likely to rise up and burn your mansion down if they have access to quality healthcare.
But for people such as Tigerghawk, political ideology trumps pragmatic considerations. In their calculus, the unwashed masses are smelly unworthies who are trying to take away the money that rich people are entitled to. Thus, we have the uniquely American phenomenon of the Angry Rich Guy who sees himself as a hard-working everyman whose life is significantly worse than someone who makes $8 an hour washing dishes for a living.
As Roy puts it, “I miss the old days when, if a rich guy wanted his ass kissed, he’d pay someone to do it instead of haranguing strangers on YouTube.”
UPDATE: In the YouTube page comments, TigerHawk writes:
I get the part about civic duty, but I *know* that a great many people have jobs because of my efforts and would prefer some recognition of that to being called greedy and unpatriotic.
See, rich people aren’t really in this for the money — rather, they’re in it for the love.
Tigerhawk, if it makes you feel better, I have nothing against rich people. If you’re a successful person who has contributed something to society, then more power to you.
But please. Do not ask me to feel sorry for you. You’re rich. Again, I repeat: you’re rich. And because you’re rich in the United States, you have to pay less taxes than rich people in every other industrialized country in the entire world. You also have an entire political party (the Republicans) and a large swathe of another political party (the Democrats) who are lining up to kiss your ass on a regular basis. Rich people in this country have it better than rich people in every other country in the world. You’d think they’d be a little more grateful for this fact instead of being perpetually resentful whiners.
