cultural schizophrenia

Election Season

2010-10-23T06:21:00.000-07:00

In spite of the fact that I've spent as much time concocting overwrought blog droppings over the past three months as I have sucking on a crack pipe, the idea of sitting out the home stretch of the Great Rube Uprising of 2010 is kind of unfathomable. Yes, it's been difficult to stay away this long whilst the left hurled endless trial balloons of fail in their desperation to dissolve the population and create a new one. But when you're busy, lazy and, well, aware that there were more bodies in Jeffrey Dahmer's freezer than there ever are at your blog at any moment, it seems more important to bookmark everything that irritates or amuses you than to endeavor to breathlessly post about them. In sum, those bookmarks create a rather vivid collage of the folly that is leftism, but when you're standing at the intersection of laziness and ambition, every item looks like a building block for a weighty treatise or unified theory of leftards. Why suffer the indignity of routinely playing small ball when you can do nothing instead?

What's interesting is that like stagnant water draws disease-carrying insects, so too can a blog untended attract the left. In the Spring I wrote a post about race with a deliberately provocative headline and in the ensuing months of inactivity here, it has consistently received hits like no other. There are limits to what one can extrapolate from site statistics, but when the visits are overwhelmingly coming from the insular environs of leftlandia, it's pretty obvious you have pinkos desperately probing the bowels of the internet for meme support. Meme first, evidence later, - even if one has to manufacture it. I don't remember when that wasn't the left's motto. And as I noted in an update to the post a few days ago, I'm sure it must have been a disappointment to the lot of poor little leftists that the contents of my obscure little blog were in no way useful to their cause.

The Democrats got a new logo in my absence. They're never wrong, it's always the message which needs recalibrating. And I'll be damned if they didn't nail it with a blue block "D" in a circle with a thick blue frame. A jackass had obvious limitations, but a "D" can mean so gosh darn many things. I'm partial to Denouement, whereby Barney Frank gets his pecker cut off by one of Sean Bielat's robots and Nancy Pelosi packs his greasy knob in her purse for those cold, gray, lonely nights when she no longer has a gavel to rock herself with while weeping by the fire. Unfortunately for the fadwhores of teh left, the letter affords one boundless opportunities for truthy self-expression. And I'm about nothing if not that.

Two idiots on the subway.

2010-07-13T05:25:00.001-07:00

I've been way too busy with work to do any blogging lately. It's easy enough to avoid inspiration/temptation to post by shutting out the news for a spell, but real life can still intervene in the form of - in this instance - being subjected to a couple of progressive twerps loudly discussing politics on the subway. I don't suppose I really need to recreate their discussion here since there's more variety rolling along on the conveyor belt at a butt plug factory than there will ever be in the sentiments expressed by proggies. This particular conversation took about thirty seconds to devolve into a diatribe about the South.

Yes, in a city with a 38% high school graduation rate - in a subway car full of the kind of uneducated, shabbily-dressed people who are rounded up each election day to pull the lever for the Democrats who've been selected for them - these beta male sheep naturally felt no compunctions about loudly slandering an entire region of the country as being evil and stupid and blaming them for the current woes of Chocolate Jesus and the Democrats.

I don't feel like offering the South's defense, but I always feel dirty when confronted with New Yorkers caught up in mindless and irony-free bouts of provincialism. So, uh, I'm hereby encouraging a half-assed reverse boycott of the insular douchebags who scurry about Manhattan like rats. Buy some uniquely Southern shit.

Southern Culture On The Skids is one of the most fun live bands ever. They revel in their hillbillyness while plowing through songs with a melange of influences, and even though their music is as much a playful parody of the South as it is an homage, they've long transcended the label of novelty act by virtue of being so fucking awesome.

With a great selection of hand-printed, whimsical art-like posters celebrating Southern culture, Yeehaw is a must for anyone with an empty wallet and walls that need them some pictures. Just ignore the dopey Obama sign they made in '08 and anyone with an affection for country, the blues or assorted other musics of the South is bound to find a few winners for their walls.

To try Aunt Ruby's Peanuts for the first time is to want to find your way to Planter's HQ and punch Mister Peanut in the junk for having wasted your time all these years. I had no idea that every roasted peanut I'd ever had in my life sucked so hard until I experienced the crunchy goodness of these little bastards.

Bread pudding never sounded particularly appetizing to me. Bread? Who gives a shit. Pudding? Meh. Then my brother went on a grotesque shopping orgy at some online Cajun food retailer and I subsequently found myself confronted with a bowl of Blue Magnolia Pumpkin Spice Bread Pudding. They have other flavors, but I wouldn't know what they taste like because the pumpkin is so over the top in deliciousness that I see no reason for my eyes to wander. Just add some raisins, follow the sauce recipe on the package and you've got yourself a crazy good dessert that even an idiot could put together.

And finally, there's Blenheim Ginger Ale. Pretty hard, if not impossible, to find outside of the South, but there are plenty of sites where one can order it online. It's definitely not ginger ale for pussies, and popping open a cold one expecting refreshment on a hot summer day after going for a long run is likely to make your head explode. It's strong stuff and leaves a nice burn in the back of your throat. But as a mixer for booze - especially bourbon - the stuff has no equals that I know of.

So, that's it. This is a little afield of what I typically blog about. But "Fuck you very much" dweeby Manhattanites who can't let me focus on the work that pays the bills because you can't even take a subway ride without pulling the strings behind each other's backs and spouting your pre-programmed brain vomit.

Muslim exceptionalism.

2010-07-06T21:28:00.001-07:00

Progressives are just too damn hard to parody.

Happy Fourth of July.

2010-07-04T10:46:00.000-07:00

From PJ O'Rourke's Holidays in Hell:

"...Eventually he got, as the Europeans always do, to the part about
"Your country's never been invaded." ... "You don't know the horror, the suffering. You think war is..."

I snapped. "A John Wayne movie," I said. "That's what you were going to say, wasn't it? We think war is a John Wayne movie. We think life is a John Wayne movie - with good guys and bad guys, as simple as that. Well, you know something, Mister Limey Poofter? You're right. And let me tell you who the bad guys are.

They're us. WE BE BAD.

"We're the baddest-assed sons of bitches that ever jogged in Reeboks. We're three-quarters grizzly bear and two-thirds car wreck and descended from a stock-market crash on our mother's side. You take your Germany, France, Spain, roll them all together and it wouldn't give us room to park our cars.

We're the big boys, Jack, the original, giant, economy-sized, new and improved butt kickers of all time. When we snort coke in Houston, people lose their hats in the Cap d'Antibes. And we've got an American Express card credit limit higher than your piss-ant metric numbers go.

"You say our country's never been invaded? You're right, little buddy. Because I'd like to see the needle-dicked foreigners who'd have the guts to try. We drink napalm to get out hearts started in the morning. A rape and a mugging is our way of saying 'Cheerio.' Hell can't hold our sock-hops. We walk taller, talk louder, spit further, fcuk longer, and buy more things than you know the names of. I'd rather be a junkie in New York than king, queen, and jack of all you Europeans. We eat little countries like this for breakfast and siht them out before lunch."

Of course, the guy should have punched me. But this was Europe. He
just smiled his shabby, superior European smile.

God, don't these people have dentists?"

That pretty much sums up my patriotism. Quiet most of the time. More content spending holidays like the fourth getting drunk at a party on my buddy's roof than running around with a flag and musing on what the day means. He does have the best view of the fireworks in all of Manhattan, after all, and when they go off they look like they're coming right at you. It's even better if you're baked. So not much contemplation of the founders goes on. But nothing stirs me out of my soft and privileged complacency like some Eurotwat or beta male lefty badmouthing America. Then, they'll experience a different kind of fireworks going off in their face.

Stranger in a strange land.

2010-07-03T17:00:00.001-07:00

Every time Obama infuses a speech or comment with a dose of Americana he looks like he's enduring some odd mixture of an out of body experience and the physical strain of opening a pickle jar. He's like watching a bad "B" movie full of no-names where everything seems a little off until someone says "get oot of here" and you realize that rather than having been made by aliens it's just a dopey Canadian flick.

The left has certainly endeavored to destroy Palin by subjecting her cultural differences to ridicule, but most Americans can recognize the fundamental American-ness of her Alaskan lifestyle. It's just awash in regional quirks. Obama, the product of a leftist bubble, is not an American at all even if the media practices a variant of "don't ask, don't tell" with regard to his fundamental discomfort in his own country. He is, so to speak, the tip of the spear in the left's no longer glacial pace of carving out an entirely separate culture than the rest of us.

Another moonbat bites the dust.

2010-07-01T15:15:00.000-07:00

I wouldn't waste one second of my time on this did it not so perfectly dovetail into the preceding comments on Senator Byrd. Dwight Armstrong, one of four creeps who bombed a building - killing a physicist and wounding several others - on the campus of the University of Wisconsin finally kicked the bucket this week. The Washington Post's obituary headline simply characterized him as a "Vietnam War protester." The New York Times obituary headline at least characterized him as someone "who bombed a college building in 1970" and opened the piece by characterizing it as "a political protest that, gone violently wrong, endures in the national memory as an act of domestic terrorism." I like the way domestic terrorism is couched in qualifying terms. The Times then devotes much of the obit to rationalizing Armstrong and his cohort's behavior in light of the era.

So, did the "protest" go "horribly wrong" because it resulted in death and injury unlike when Armstrong and his brother previously attempted to bomb a government facility from an airplane? One must assume so - Bernardine Dohrn says "Hi" from the campus of Northwestern! Absent that untidy fact even his subsequent imprisonment for running a meth lab would likely not have precluded him from joining the throngs of violent ex-hippies making money on the moonbat lecture circuit. What a shame his short career in activism was marred by a dead guy.

But don't hold your breath expecting similar mainstream media treatment for a nut who, say, blows up an abortion clinic. The rationalizing power of the memory hole has room for only one ideology.

Senator Kleagle sheds this mortal coil.

2010-06-28T08:27:00.000-07:00

The most prominent living member of the Democrat Party's former intimidation and enforcement arm is dead. Robert Byrd's name will live on in the umpteen billion landmarks to his humility which have been erected in West Virginia, but his past has long been buried or downplayed by a party whose sole convictions are the accumulation of power and affirmations of their superior virtue.

But hey, if a party man like segregationist Jimmy Carter can assure his constituents that the new white school won't be built where they'll have to cross paths with the black kids walking to their school and one day rise to the status of revered elder statesman, then why not Byrd? It's not like he urged violent revolution and blew shit up like a certain professor and sought after left wing speaker friend of the president's. History is for bludgeoning other people. The left is all about pretending inconvenient things never happened. There's a narrative to protect, after all.

Al Gore has a penis!

2010-06-24T21:09:00.001-07:00

Poor Al Gore. One day you're running for president and seeking advice from Team Castration on how to not come across as a pussy, the next day it looks like the walls are caving in because you cast aside your only evident virtue and dragged your manmeat on board the short bus to Loopyville. The conspiracy-minded might even sense that this all comes to light by way of a cold breeze from Chicago - even a paunchy prize-winner isn't untouchable after dissing The Won, after all.

I couldn't care less if the Goracle is putting his wooden unit in Tipper Jesus or a toothless crack whore, but the mere idea of dining on Larry David's leftovers calls for 50 freakin' gallons of brain bleach. Immediately. The only thing pink in Laurie David is her political sentiments.

Better yet is Prince Albert's alleged foray into the land of the lecherous.

The woman later contacted police in January 2009 and gave a statement, saying she was called to Gore's hotel room at around 10:30 p.m. on October 24, 2006 to provide a massage. While doing requested work on his abdominals, the woman claims Gore pushed her hand to his groin area and later tried to have sex with her.

In her statement to police, the alleged victim calls Gore 'a crazed sex poodle,' She says she was intimidated by his 'rotund' shape, and that he had a 'violent temper, dictatorial, commanding attitude.'

Even if it's pure fiction this is still a masterwork of hilarity. Keep doing your thing dawg [poodle]. The women of the world must not be denied your manhood even if you must force it on them, so share your flop sweat and your bloated, rippling carcass wherever your little jet takes you. Hump some wind turbines and other inanimate objects as well. Whatever distracts you from your work as an eco-huckster is mighty fine with me.

Introducing ...

2010-06-20T19:08:00.000-07:00

The best conservative rock song ever?

2010-06-04T03:11:00.000-07:00

One doesn't anticipate that a simple act like seeking out the trailer for Cory McAbee's demented and brilliant low-budget musical space western The American Astronaut will lead to riotous laughter at the expense of an insular, dimwitted left-wing Ph.D. candidate at Michigan State. But such are the blessings of our interconnected age.

McAbee is rather unique in that his offbeat film work and his band The Billy Nayer Show are so in synch that their sensibilities make it hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Weird scarcely begins to characterize his ouevre, but to my way of thinking it has too much of a soul to ever feel like the work is straying into gratuitously oddball territory. You either embrace his alternate universe or you don't.

So, as one who happily embraces McAbeeland, what am I to make of it when my little search for The American Astronaut trailer also yields the funniest conservative rock and roll song ever?

My initial reaction to the song was as if someone had handed me a magical elixir of meat, beer, gold and Jessica Biel's naked body. I felt like a sailor coming into port and learning that today is "Free Hooker Friday." What else can compare to a song which inspires chuckles of recognition and wingnut wood with every verse?

But wait. No one makes a fool out of a too Waspy by half Irish Catholic with a Jewish-sounding fake internet name without risking the dirt nap from my roving squadron of attack bats. Before I gleefully share the song with the wingersphere, I thought, Does it mean what I think it means?

I pondered this for a bit. I thought about the list of conservative rock songs John J. Miller of National Review had compiled a ways back. That had been sort of a variation on a standard dorky conservative parlor game. Something done in fun, that we all know only matters in the way that George Washington Carver's presence in grade school history texts does. A little psychic gratification in a medium that matters to us on a personal level, yet more often than not expresses political sentiments we're inclined to disagree with.

Peanut butter didn't change the world any more than a smattering of lyrics with conservative sentiments changes the essential nature of rock - or even the politics of a particular artist. Alienation, angst, base emotionalism and adolescence are both the cornerstones of rock and of leftism itself. Conservative sentiments are bound to slip out on an intermittent basis in rock if for no other reason than some of the accumulated wisdom of a civilization is apt to reach shore even on a wave of adolescent vomit. After all, the history of rock and roll leans far more heavily on the insights of dropouts than it does scrunts who spent four years being indoctrinated beyond their intellectual competence at Oberlin College. Dogmatic leftism is a learned pattern of thought, after all, and exponents are its unwittingly servile monkeys.

The reason for even a momentary struggle with this song's meaning was that it's hard to imagine McAbee and his bandmates being right of center. Yet, my respect for his oddball craftsmanship is put to the test by how bad the song is should the perspective be anything else. Thus the conundrum. The song is hilarious on a conservative's terms. It's a failure as irony because the critique of the (California in particular) left which informs it is borne of genuine insights as opposed to anything that would enable it to successfully parody a conservative perspective. In a process which resolved itself in less time than it took for me to write about it here, I netted out at who gives a fuck? I think the song is great. Funny. And as a conservative I enjoyed it immensely.

What started as an effort to grab a movie trailer would have simply evolved into the kind of short post I prefer - featuring a funny rock video that I knew wingnuts would get a kick out of. Easy Peasy lemon squeezy. But what I hadn't anticipated was that in scanning National Review for John J. Miller's original piece I'd discover that one of the aforementioned servile monkeys - Michael T. Spencer - had just flung twenty pages worth of primate excrement in the Journal of Popular Culture on the subject of conservative expropriation of popular music. In the simian vernacular of academia, that means conservatives stand accused of “investing meaning in rock music through a dialectical process of negotiated use.” Miller's article was the focal point in this effort.

It's rather dispiriting that academia has devolved into such petty ideological short-bus-esoterica masquerading as scholarship, but the paper is awash in unintentional humor. Spencer cites comments on random left-wing blogs as authoritative and posts on right-wing ones to bolster his convoluted argument. SCIENCE! He misspells "Barak" Obama. He Doesn't know that the Georgia Satellites were a rock band. He butchers the timeline of the first Gulf War, thus rendering idiotic his criticism of Miller's suggested impetus for the lyrics in a particular Metallica song. But beyond things like that and the mountain of naked assertions which share this lumpy bed, the ultimate absurdity here is in the premise itself.

Does this ramen noodle gorging grad school chimp see no irony in his critique in light of the masturbatory zeal with which his peers attach significance to vapor trails in reinterpreting all manner of artistic expression? He mocks his own profession while typifying it. And in the bargain he accuses right wingers of failing to understand irony. It's like rain on your wedding day, Michael.

Miller made fast work of undressing him. It is worth reading in full, as is the Journal of Popular Culture submission itself.

RIP Dennis Hopper

2010-05-29T15:47:00.000-07:00

Heineken? Fuck that shit. Pabst. Blue. Ribbon.

When I was a kid Dennis Hopper was little more than a train wreck fading into obscurity. But even that is projecting a boomer perspective on it, as I'm sure I'm not alone among GenXers in having not given the guy any thought at all.

But then 1986 happened. Hollywood's no stranger to second acts, but River's Edge, Blue Velvet and Hoosiers were more like a nuclear explosion than a comeback. In a time we otherwise defined by the works of John Hughes, Frank Booth and "Shooter" were and still are two of the most vivid and memorable characters the decade had to offer. This weird, creepy washed up hippie became forever etched in our consciousness the way only actors and films from your youth can.

Rebel Without A Cause, Giant, Cool Hand Luke, Easy Rider, River's Edge, Blue Velvet, Hoosiers, Colors, Red Rock West, True Romance and Speed in addition to his photography and other artistic endeavors represent quite an oeuvre by any standard. But the fact that he emerged from the dung heap of counter-cultural jackassery to become a great American who didn't take himself at all seriously may well be his greatest accomplishment of all. Vaya con dios.

Music for lazy summer weekends

2010-05-26T20:42:00.001-07:00

Memorial Day Weekend is a bit early for a post like this, but since my friends and I chose not to get our usual summer house I'm suddenly feeling nostalgic for the endless string of lost weekends this week traditionally marks the beginning of. Swapping the ocean breeze for the subway's urine-stench-infused heat blasts fills me with dread for summer on a number of levels, but the essentials - stifling heat, a smattering of friends to idly bullshit with, ample booze and good music - are readily available wherever you are.

Not just any tunes will do though. Some music just meets the oppressive heat head on and elevates late day lounging in the sun to a glorious zen-like state of alcohol-fueled inertia. I suppose I could extol the virtues of The Allman Brothers in this regard or, conversely, mock the brain-damaged jackholes who pollute the air with aural flotsam like reggae, Jimmy Buffett or hacky sacking trustafarian monkeyboy jam bands. But this is my nostalgia trip and my fricken' blog, so I'm just gonna force feed visitors a heaping helping of relative obscurity on account of what is either my insufferable pretentiousness or my generous urge to share.

KOSTARS - Never so lonely
The Kostars' album Klassics with a K was a one-off side project by two members of Luscious Jackson. That's a band which probably merits a spot on this list in its own right, but the Kostars are more subdued in a 70's AM radio from a parallel universe sort of way. The album positively oozes summer. A little girly, but sublime.

DANDY WARHOLS - Godless
The Dandy's have had modest commercial success over the years, but their music for the most part is more moody and evocative than straight up pop. They're so right when a hot summer day begins to slip into twilight that having the gayest band name in the history of rock seems of precious little importance.

BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB - Shuffle your feet
In August you have the really stupid idea to go on a very long road trip with your girlfriend. The air conditioner is on the fritz. The car is overheating and you're in the middle of the desert. You finally happen upon a service station and get help (like in every road movie ever). Then you head into the adjacent bar full of shady characters to cool off and pass the time. Someone hits on your girlfriend so you puff out your chest like an idiot and end up walking funny for weeks due to the pool stick Cletus rammed up your ass while "Tiny" was knocking your teeth out. This is the band that was on the jukebox. You should have just stayed home and gotten drunk on the porch.

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YO LA TENGO - Autumn sweater
Just put the song title out of your mind. It's more like the soundtrack to watching the heat rise from the street while you put a cold beer on your forehead and wish you weren't too lazy to stand up and open the umbrella on the patio table. Also doubles as good late night music for pitching woo. Or maybe I just like saying "pitching woo."

JUDE - Save me
I don't know that Jude is evocative of summer in the way others on the list are, but singer/songwriters ranging from Jim Croce to Cat Stevens to Freedy Johnston merit a place in a lazy summer rotation. And in addition to much of his music being beautiful with an airy, hypnotic vibe, he's openly conservative in the left-wing artistic cesspool that is LA. That moves him to the head of my list - especially compared to a Jihadist nutbag like (whatever name Cat Stevens currently goes by).

WHITEST BOY ALIVE - Inflation
Three cheers for Euros imitating Anglo music in English with English-language band names! Look at me! Notice me! love me! Increasingly, our little brothers across the pond who eat unthinkable animal parts and think dimly of us while desperately seeking our approval are producing fresh and interesting music. Whitest Boy Alive is a good example. Summer urban-style, evoking empty streets (like the video!) as people hide inside or frolic at their weekend getaways, leaving the streets to the young with no money for escaping and a smattering of confused Canadian tourists.

LUNA - Tiger lily
An otherwise corny term, "dreamy" is nonetheless the first word that comes to mind in describing Luna. Like a meal where every bite reveals a different flavor combination, they feel less like a cohesive unit than individuals emitting beautiful sounds which complement one another and drive a song forward. A low key sonic bombardment melded perfectly with Wareham's urbane lyrics and singing voice which eventually grows on you.

ROBERT MITCHUM - From a logical point of view
Yes, it's calypso. But it's Robert Fucking Mitchum. With a Caribbean accent! After terrifying two little kids in Night Of The Hunter, this dope smoking wingnut upped the ante with the greatest ill-considered celebrity musical venture this side of the cast of Star Trek. And you're not gonna get sand between your toes, whip up a pitcher of Rum Punch and listen? Bullshit I say.

Well, my nostalgia itch is scratched. Part II when the weather is more appropriate.

Viva Presidente Calderon!

2010-05-25T19:49:00.001-07:00

The year was 1991. The date, July 5th. It was a day all in attendance will not soon forget. They'd traveled by foot, by ramshackle bus and by burro across unforgiving terrain. They braved scorching heat, grabby federales and the constant fear that any rustling overheard in the brush might be the dreaded Chupacabra - no longer content to apply its fangs to their goats under cover of night.

It was all a small price to pay for this moment.

They'd seen the posters affixed to cantina walls. They'd heard the whispers which then escalated into a chorus of fevered excitement. For the first time, two institutions of Mexican high culture - the glorious luchadores and the regal fighting cocks - were to be as one in the fight of the century. Mexican pride in a dark rich mole of blood and brutality. A true Mexican championship.

Representing the cocks, well, it was never a question. The fierce "El Gallo Loco" had burnished quite a reputation for himself with a vicious aerial peck, slide, peck move which took all of one second to incapacitate an opponent. He would then preen in a circle around the fallen, stand fully erect with his head stretched toward the sky and commence a nose dive straight for his mark's neck.

And then he'd pause right before impact to ham it up for the crowd. Sometimes he'd do this twice. A cocky cock, this one, but the crowd ate it up. As word spread, so did the carnival atmosphere. But as always in this noble but ill-fated land, never is there glory to which tragedy doesn't soon befall. El Gallo Loco's legend was such that none dared bet against him. And what, pray tell, was the point of running a gambling enterprise if nobody bets on the inevitable loser?

El Gallo Loco thus found himself eventually banished from what was his life's calling. He was abandoned by the powers that be and left to roam the countryside scaring small children for his own amusement and savaging goats for sustenance. He grew ever more agitated and took to the drink.

Representing the Luchadores was also an easy choice. Felipe Calderon was not an ordinary luchador. He had a fighting style more refined, perhaps owing to his Spaniard oppressor blood. It was said he was a bit of a dandy, a ladyboy, and that this young stallion's mounting string of easy victories were due to his opponents' reluctance to administer beatdowns to a chica. His legion of fans rejected this view and like "El Calderon" himself when faced with such lies they would place their right hands on their hips and exclaim: "Scoreboard! Bitches!"

And that was that. He was, after all, a champion.

And so, when that day arrived they found themselves face to face in the ring. The man with panache, savoir faire and derring-do; The flamboyant and fearless fighting cock fresh off a stint in rehab. Feathers were ruffled. Flesh was pecked. The floor was covered in blood and sweat. But after six grueling rounds of back and forth, El Calderon collapsed in exhaustion.

In landing, he'd flattened the relentless El Gallo Loco like a corn tortilla. The onlooking peasants - many of whom had questioned his very gender moments earlier - were exultant. "El Presidente! El Presidente!" Their chants as spontaneous as they were vigorous. "El Presidente! El Presidente!" they persisted. Mexico had but one champion now.

Luchador. Crusher of rambunctious poultry. Why not, indeed, president? And so the crude viral campaign began. They affixed his picture to candles. Young boys whittled his likeness with wood scraps. Old men scratched his face in adobe when the blazing midday sun and rotgut Mezcal conspired to give them visions. Even drug lords in Chihuahua forbade the beheading of any man or woman who slightly bore resemblance to him.

With seasoning and the hopeful prayers of a nation, that day - his ascendance to the presidency - did finally arrive. And the people went to work. And the violence, it ended. The exodus abated. The corruption slowed to a trickle. Ignorance was vaporized. Ambition reigned supreme across the landscape. It has been a riveting Mexican story of renewal these past few years. The tale of a great man and his people, the denouement of which found Felipe Calderon in the full bloom of manhood at the house of the American Devil wagging his finger like a proud and wise luchador to the raucous applause of the enlightened. Congreass has not seen his likeness. What a moment. What a man. What a culture. What a country.

¡Arriba!

Everyone Draw Mohammed Day

2010-05-20T13:57:00.000-07:00

There was a moment after artist Molly Norris backed away from her proposed "Everyone Draw Mohammed Day" when it really seemed like all was lost in the cause of standing up to Islamic thuggery. A steady stream of cowardice ranging from the feckless Yale University Press to spineless Comedy Central made courage which spanned the life cycle of a mayfly look less like the clumsy birth of a movement than it did freedom's pathetic last gasp.

But before going further some untangling is in order.

Surely everyone is aware that conservatives are paranoid, hateful, xenophobic fear-mongers with a propensity for violence. It's been mentioned on network TV on occasion and fat-fingered former theater critic Frank Rich says so in the New York Times. Conservatives are knuckle-dragging spittle-flecked retards in last year's clothing. They're liars who lie for lucre and lead a flock of mindless sheep into the bowels of delusion. They're backwards enough to believe in God and sufficiently blank and repressed to buy into the antiquated tenets of Christianity without question. They're anti-brown people. Anti-vagina people. Pro-fatty foods. Judgmental. Bloodthirsty. And above all else they're angry because the rest of Americans have evolved.

They're too stupid to believe in evolution too.

They're mocked and reviled and taunted from the commanding heights of the mainstream media and popular culture on down. Even the president calls them Teabaggers. And while the point could have been made in far fewer words, how else do you replicate the incessant barrage which emanates from the same quarters where people still giggle over Palin jokes like special needs children entertained by their flatulence? And, more importantly, how does one reconcile the obsessive amount of taunting directed at Americans they characterize as stupid, unhinged, dangerous and consumed by irrationality with their rhetorical cowardice when dealing with Muslims?

You'd be forgiven for thinking it's a reflection of their stupidity that they freely characterize conservatives in a manner which is wholly fabrication while fearing the wrath of Islamists for merely telling the truth about them. When you have billionaire asslown cum Nannymayor Michael Bloomberg suggesting someone opposed to healthcare reform could have left the failed car bomb in Times Square and MSNBC jabbering idiot Contessa Brewer confessing in the aftermath that she rather wished it had been the case - because the fact that it was a Muslim will inspire "more" bigotry - you're faced with people so tangled in their own platitudes that they couldn't grasp reality if it was wearing a strap-on and playing sphincter hockey on their backsides.

It can seem bizarrely, brazenly incongruous - this penchant for attacking domestic opposition and appeasing Islamists all the while suggesting they're cut from the same cloth. It's hard to fathom the process that leads to orgasmic glee when the opportunity presents itself to make contrived or wholly imagined connections between a misdeed and the right - while obvious acts of Islamic terror call for exhausting all possibilities and minimizing reality. And the subtext, always, fear of some imaginary backlash against innocent muslims by the crazy right. It's all self-evidently illogical and typified by how this whole narrative emboldened the left's attacks on Bush's prosecution of the war on terror until such time as Obama kept everything in place and upped the ante with a more vigorous employment of predator drones.

But logic has nothing to do with any of this. While they flatter themselves as essentially being the forces of rationality caught in the middle of what amounts to a "religious" war, progressivism is a competing (faith-based) religion. And because they see their primary competition and enemy as being domestic conservatives, they view Islamism through the prism of their cartoon version of the American right. They must. As mentioned, it aided their domestic narrative to paint the GWOT as the mindless handiwork of paranoid, xenophobic and belligerent cowboys devoid of rationality until such time as they had the burden of leadership.

The narrative persists. But so does the threat. So however much the left is tangled in their spider web of bullshit, they're at least on board with the reality that while they can persist in their clown shoes rhetoric about paranoid and belligerent wingers, their domestic agenda is finished should Islamists strike an America where Obama and his acolytes' hollow posturing is accompanied by an anti-terror policy of proggies diddling with their vaginas. So there's a sliver of logic amidst the perverse contortions - that inconvenient rubber meets the road thing which so taunts the platitudinous lefty vomit that would otherwise emanate from the likes of Comedy Central and the Yale Press were they insulting groups less apt to kill them.

The common thread for the left in all this, however, is not reason or nuance; neither a grasp of complexity nor the living equivalent of such in the form of an elaborate chess game. Just cowardice. Plain and simple. A fear of Islamists whom they hope to wish away with asspuckered rhetoric and appeasement. A fear, domestically, of honest policy debate and where that would net out in terms of the expressed will of the American people. In that way they're more like Islamists than they are different, only in a drastically less testosterone-fueled milieu favored by bitchy women and effeminate men.

UPDATE:
Maybe Molly Norris is the William Wallace of the progressive left after all.
While progressives in the media, academia and the political class are persistent bed wetters with regard to their public utterances about Islamists, a friend's recent trek through the left-wing neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn revealed that perhaps I'm being too hard on them. There is an undercurrent of defiant blasphemy and it seems to be spreading in progressive communities across the country. Hipster infidels thumbing their noses at the Muslim world. Beta males and weepy emo girls by day. Fatwa bait by night. Maybe the nuances of leftism are just too much for my small brain to sort through after all. I mean, I would never insult the prophet and risk death by Islamists myself. But well done with the blasphemy, Williamsburg! Ditto Berkeley and San Francisco! May you be spared Allah's wrath.

Graffiti in Pinkoland

2010-05-17T20:19:00.001-07:00

I write a lot about guerilla tactics and getting in the heads of the left here because it's a subject that amuses me. I wish I had the time to do it for real, or was part of a secret society of winger ninjas that plastered lefty enclaves late at night. But, alas, the best I can do is serve as an instigator.

The posters above are just goofy. I do like the implied violence of the Reagan ones (though the writing on them reflects two minutes of thought). Who better to go all ironic on than the kind of idiots who smear hard-working tax payers as potentially violent for being concerned about the growth of government as a matter of course? If they took the posters as a threat, hilarious. If they knew they were being mocked, even better. But either way they'd be received like a urine-soaked bum with a ukelele who ambled into a formal French restaurant. They'd frantically tear them down and spread outraged cell phone pictures across the nutrootosphere. And then it would be time to do it again with different messages. over and over, like bird droppings on a statue.

So, I beseech you to form your own secret societies of wingnut mayhem purveyors and shit where they eat. It isn't like inventing the wheel since the left has been doing these things forever. They generally shit where they eat too - a rather brilliant way to render such efforts hilariously pointless. But they have perfected the arts and crafts aspects of it:

Here's a program which enables one to print out large posters in smaller sections which can then be pasted together. And this is a forum where you can learn to ply your trade as a covert artsy fartsy misbehaviorist. The web is full of resources for the taking. The accumulated wisdom of the left's dissent industry is like a rope to hang them with. And the revolution will not be televised, or something.

Courtney's Love Hole

2010-05-13T20:00:00.001-07:00

Is there a better test of someone's ability to separate art from the artist than Courtney Love? In a field riddled with fleshy headed mutants there is an extent to which weirdness is accepted - expected almost - of artistes. But then there's Courtney. She's more of a milk curdling electrical storm of creepy crackhead sociopathic doom. And that doesn't even make sense, except, well, in her case it sort of has to because anything less seems trite and woefully insufficient. I mean, there wouldn't be so many loopy theories about Kurt Cobain's "suicide" if he'd been married to a nice passive girl like Squeaky Fromme or Bernardine Dohrn.

Hole's Live Through This came out like a week after Kurt Cobain had made a brain slushie of himself, and I was in no mood to do anything but reflexively vomit at the sound of her voice. Their first single did nothing to elevate my regard. Nor did the second. Not that I tried very hard, mind you, as I'd probably given them five seconds more thought than I had to getting a tattoo of Screech from Saved by the Bell on my perineum.

But some time later I was with friends playing pool at our favorite dive - a bar which tends to play full albums rather than a steady stream of singles. It was, oddly enough, a place also frequented by Hole's guitarist and his then girlfriend Drew Barrymore - at the peak of her public boob flashing phase. And on this particular evening the bar was playing Hole's new album. About halfway through one of my friends and I looked at each other like we'd both been struck by lightning and commented on how awesome the album was. Somewhere in the sequence it had grabbed us by the balls and wouldn't let go. The sum was so much greater than the parts. And to this day it is one of my favorite albums.

With the long awaited new album Nobody's Daughter finally out, it is once again time for me to cut up my Vast Right Wing Conspiracy membership card and give the crazy junkie bitch her due. I haven't bought the new album yet, but I've heard all of the tracks and will give it an enthusiastic thumbs up. I'm partial to the more punk numbers like Skinny Little Bitch (above) and loser Dust myself, but the earnest, more classic-rock-accented Letter To God (below) would likely be closer to the average hipness-deprived winger's heart.

Her self-awareness is almost endearing, and her self-absorption at least spares us from what you can only imagine her politics are. So add in the relief that she isn't your mother, sibling, lover, friend or neighbor and maybe you too can see fit to appreciate the one thing in life she seems to get right.

Baby B

2010-05-12T19:29:00.001-07:00

He's black! He's white! He's lived in Asia! And with a trusty unicorn animal companion Baby B is saving the world with nuancy nuance, thoughtful thinking and rhetorical rhetoric. Finally, a book for progressive children of all ages. A story that needs to be told. And shared! Coming soon in serial form. And no, it will not be available at the corporate chains. Only here. Straight to the people! For free. The business model of our more humane, sustainable future.

Gangs of New York

2010-04-20T03:25:00.000-07:00

This is a fascinating old documentary about a few notorious New York City street gangs during the seventies. A time when World Series cameras at Yankee Stadium would pick up buildings burning and Travis Bickle and "Son of Sam" epitomized the dark and foreboding nature of New York life. The city was bankrupt. The middle class was largely gone. The only remaining hipsters were anarchic squatters and semi-employed CBGB habitues. And people like my parents and their friends in the near suburbs would speak of the city not with reverence or envy as New Yorkers prefer to believe, but as a gaping, gangrenous leg wound. I was just a wee tyke at the time, but aside from the delightful aroma of hot pretzels when dodging bums while going in or out of Madison Square Garden, it was obvious even to a kid that the primary smell in the city was rot.

That's all ancient history now. The Wall Street boom of the eighties and nineties coupled with Giuliani's relentless efforts to tackle crime and quality of life issues put the city on an altogether different footing. So the above documentary would for all intents and purposes be little more than an interesting historical artifact were it not for the growing left wing nostalgia for New York as an open sewer. You'll routinely hear it said that they miss the graffiti. The subway as a pit of vipers. Times Square as a human cesspool. The hookers and street crime. The grit. The anomie.

Like so much of what one hears in New York, I have little doubt that most are simply mindlessly and uncritically regurgitating sentiments they've picked up in the ether. New York is so overwhelming, such an assault on the senses, - less a place than a state of mind imbibed by a steady stream of people coming from elsewhere - that there's a persistent tendency for people to sing from a common hymn book.

But when people have such a tenuous grip on reality it seems rather pointless to accord them the benefit of the doubt. What, really, is the difference between phony posturing and an emotionally-perceived and peer-reinforced truth when they meld together so seamlessly? It makes viewing the documentary all the more eery. Like we're living less on a turned page than in an ebb. And all that's required for a resumption of flood conditions is liberals just being who they are.

Obama is half monkey (on his mother's side).

2010-04-09T12:54:00.001-07:00

Contrary to what the last few posts would suggest, I don't particularly enjoy droning on about the rather joyless subject of race. But the left renders it necessary because they have a singular obsession with it and they're relentlessly manufacturing ugly narratives as a result. So much so that it is increasingly obvious that they are emotionally ill-equipped to handle having a black president.

That they cannot see beyond race is hardly anything new. In a notably comical instance Bill Clinton suggested some years ago that racism was the only reason the grossly incompetent David Dinkins might lose his NYC mayoral re-election bid against Rudolph Giuliani. But Karma being an even bigger bitch than Hillary Clinton, we all had the pleasure of watching front row as the left subsequently played the race card on both the Clintons and her supporters during the 2008 Democrat primaries. Ready, aim, fire lefties. It's a pathology. It's a business model. It's both!

The left's endless stream of racial thoughtvomit makes trying to focus on particular instances a dizzying proposition, but the impetus for this rant is a post by Jeff Goldstein about the reaction of lefties to a cartoon one of his co-bloggers created which portrays Obama as having date raped the Statue of Liberty. It's more of a bad metaphorical tantrum than an artful cartoon, really. A woman offers implied consent by letting the guy inside her place (Obama gets elected) and then he forces himself on her (pushes healthcare against the will of the American people). But rather than seeing the most powerful man in the world violating the liberty of Americans - agree or disagree - as represented by the Statue, these cretins choose to see a black man raping a white (green!) woman which harkens back to a time when Democrats in the South lynched black men as a means of keeping them away from white (not green!) women. It makes one wonder ...
Exactly what the fuck is this?

You likely know it's the handiwork of photographer Jill Greenberg who was commissioned by The Atlantic Monthly to photograph John McCain during the closing months of the 2008 campaign. The right expressed outrage over the vileness of her photoshopped images. And the magazine sort of apologized. But put on your lefty hat for a minute.

It is Barack Obama as a monkey taking a steaming dump on John McCain's shiny dome during the heat of the election. How could it not be? How in this particular moment in time could it have signified anything else? We know the historical employment of such imagery. Photographer Jill Greenberg is a racist! The deep-thinking, mind-reading left might have conjured up such an "insight" were they not all pissing themselves with moronic and juvenile laughter over the thing. Here we have a panoply of images depicting George Bush as a simian. Oh, we get that it isn't racial. They depict Bush as stupid and less evolved. Not quite human. And he isn't! So it's much different than the historical depiction of blacks as simians because the imagery in those instances was meant to exhibit them as, uh, stupid, less evolved and thus, somewhat less human. Wouldn't logic suggest that the basic imagery is what serves as an offensive and hurtful reminder to blacks? Apparently, no.Or, apparently, yes. Because, like, when a cartoonist cleverly combines a current local story about police having to shoot a pet chimp that went berserk with a national story about congress passing an idiotic stimulus bill, it isn't about chimps as representing stupidity (see Bush above) but about the old racist imagery of blacks as less evolved. It makes perfect sense when the left's only consistency is in feeding a racist narrative and using it as an all-purpose weapon and shield. Except that when lefties aren't calling conservatives racist and generically stupid, they're mocking them for supposedly not believing in evolution.

Funny, that.

[ 10/ 1 UPDATE: A Summer of choosing not to do any blogging bled into the Fall. Beautiful weather. College football. Happy hour. There's always a reason to spend time doing something other than this when you're out of the habit. But politics don't sleep. Nor do left wing memes. So it's fun to note that in spite of my inactivity, this particular post has been visited with a high degree of regularity while Democrats' approval ratings circle the drain. And overwhelmingly the visits stem from locales which would suggest progressive individuals. I can just picture all you smug douchebags typing in your little (Obama, Monkey) search terms, only to realize the subject line of the post was my way of giving you the middle finger. Thanks for stopping by. Now go fuck yourself. ]

Stand and Deliver

2010-04-06T05:45:00.000-07:00

Andrew Klavan has a post on the recent passing of teacher Jaime Escalante - of Stand and Deliver fame - which dovetails well into my comments about the documentary "The Cartel" the other day. Writes Klavan:

At the peak of Escalante’s work at Garfield, his math enrichment program involved over 400 students and produced more kids who passed Advanced Placement calculus than wealthy Beverly Hills High. He achieved this truly mind-boggling feat despite constant opposition from guess which formidable source. If you guessed evil right-wing racists, congratulations, you have the chief qualification to become a New York Times columnist: a distorted sense of reality. Because the true answer of course is: that untouchable mainstay of the Democratic Party, the teachers union.

The union opposed Escalante’s classes at the beginning when they were smaller than union rules allowed and at their peak when they became larger. There were complaints he came to work too early and left too late, and gripes about his high standards and tough discipline. “If you looked into what is going on in this school in the name of the union,” Escalante wrote the union president in 1990, “I think… you would be appalled.” Escalante was able to triumph over this opposition because his success had made him famous and because he had the support of another hero, Garfield principal Henry Gradillas.

But Gradillas had made an enemy of the union too and, in 1988, after he took a year-long sabbatical, he was reassigned to a position supervising asbestos removal. Unprotected by the administration, Escalante was harried and demoted until, disgusted, he finally left the school in 1991. A new teacher tried to continue his program but the union, backed by the new principal, chased him out with constraints and restrictions within a year. By 1996, only 11 Garfield students passed the AP exam, down from a high of 85.

Can't be having no flowers blooming on an asphalt plantation. It works out just fine for the teachers though. And for the left more generally, as there's a steady supply of campaign assistance from the union and of votes, courtesy of the poor they help keep that way out of a perverse blend of malevolence, racism and stupidity. Yet somehow, in spite of this, there are still conservatives who cower in fear when these disgusting cretins use phantom accusations of racism as an all-purpose weapon and shield.

The Cartel

2010-04-03T14:04:00.001-07:00

If your objective was to keep minorities reliably in your camp come election day, how would you go about it? You'd want to keep them clustered in particular districts, for starters. You'd want to keep a critical mass of them poor, uneducated and somewhat helpless to improve their personal circumstances. You'd scare them about the big bad racist world that awaits them outside their neighborhoods. You'd champion political correctness so it was clear that you were their designated protectors. You'd push affirmative action so that those who did escape had a clear sense of whom they were indebted to and a tinge of insecurity about their true place in the outside world. You'd vilify any members who strayed from the plantation.

Of course, it'd be made even easier if you had a reciprocal relationship with the teacher's unions and the rest of the education establishment. Showering the greedy and the incompetent with money assures that you can look minority voters in the eye and praise your own righteousness in dollar amounts while the amply compensated education establishment does their part in keeping them helpless and in the right voting column.

This isn't exactly Bob Bowdon's position in his new documentary about the education establishment in New Jersey - and by inference, everywhere else in America. From the clips and interviews I've seen, his concern is squarely on improving the situation for students, as it should be. But the documentary encompasses everything conservatives have been saying for decades about our educational system, and it is a solid gold dissertation on why whenever the left gets on their high ponies and calls the right racist - such clucking being in full bloom at the moment - the only right answer is to tell them to go fuck themselves with a chainsaw.

Selling Obamacare

2010-03-29T11:12:00.001-07:00

While polls continue to show that this gigantic shit sandwich of government that the left force-fed America is unpopular, I was somewhat impressed when I caught a glimpse of the ad campaign they're launching to improve their fortunes. Get people used to the idea of nanny government taking care of them so that by the time the vice grip renders them immobile they'll be grateful for the indignity. I like the IKEA-like names for every item on their healthcare menu. And why not honor the pillars of democracy who saw this thing through? They sure as hell weren't gonna call a government tampon the ELGÅ.

Disclaimer

2010-03-28T06:27:00.001-07:00

Given the mean-spirited nature of much of what I post here, it seems important to note that I have never studied under novelist and professor Brian Kitely. He does not endorse the content here, nor does he - as far as I can gather - condone kicking puppies or picking and eating one's scabs with a cheap glass of Yellow Tail Chardonnay. And as I'd never heard of him before last week I do not know what his visceral reaction would be to slightly effeminate forest rangers, society swells with a penchant for buggery or googie architecture in flyover states. So any concurrence on such matters is purely coincidental. Any references to liberal fascism should not be taken to imply that novelist Brian Kitely is for or against it, nor should any future recipes posted for crawfish etoufee or pomegranate sangria be meant to suggest that professor Kitely is a cowardly Frenchman by way of Louisiana or an alcoholic who indulges in fruity wine when mainlining bourbon grows boring. The frequent bestiality jokes here are not references to novelist Brian Kitely's sexual proclivities which may or may not include interludes with barnyard animals, Reubenesque women, bears, cadavers, Westslope Cutthroat Trout, asexual hippies, quadruple amputees, emotionally-vulnerable lesbians, young boys or women who can shoot ping pong balls out of their vajayjays. I hope I've cleared this up and that professor Kitely can go about the work of educating our youth in peace.

RIP Alex Chilton

2010-03-17T19:32:00.001-07:00

I'm not going to pretend I've spent a lot of time listening to Big Star over the years. Innumerable poseurs will tend to that at a moment like this. But as with the Velvet Underground, their influence on a lot of the musicians who've been the soundtrack to my post-adolescent life has been profound. So in spite of their lack of commercial success - which I contributed to by getting cassettes from friends - Alex Chilton has attained a kind of quiet immortality.

Diversity's reductio ad absurdum.

2010-03-15T15:48:00.000-07:00

I've made very little effort to publicize this blog thus far because it was never going to be a daily headlines driven undertaking. The world doesn't need another, and I have more of a monthly magazine mindset as these things go anyway. So I've built up a few months worth of posts in the hope that people will get a sense of what I'm doing and if they enjoy my mercifully short and evil missives they'll see it as a place worth dropping in on every once in a while. That means I try as best I can to make most of the sporadic posts unique. And while a quick look will make the basic thematic missions here rather obvious, I also want to dedicate the occasional post to the sort of material everyone bookmarks when they see but seldom revisit.

This 2007 Wide Angle documentary about Affirmative Action in Brazil really gets to how bizarre the concept of "diversity" is in a self-evident fashion that a domestic critique probably couldn't. Anyone who has the diminished mental capacity to embrace this nonsense in general isn't likely to allow reason to pierce their fog of emotion-driven paternalism, but seeing it play out in a nation with more color shades than a 64 box of Crayolas has to shake some of the cobwebs out of an American leftist's cerebellum.

Or not.

But I can't help thinking that like Thomas Sowell's studies of Affirmative Action around the world and Theodore Dalrymple's chronicles of the social dysfunction in the (white) British underclass, this documentary drives home the reality that declaring war on human nature under the guise of social justice is a universally stupid and counterproductive undertaking.

Vegan rights?

2010-03-09T09:30:00.001-08:00

Sometimes a link doesn't speak like a screenshot does. In the race to the bottom, thank heavens the Brits and Canadians seem rather comfortable trading off at setting the pace. Their unfettered lunacy affords us a window of opportunity to laugh at them before the left in this country inevitably and inexorably goes down the same path. It isn't that the left elsewhere in the Anglosphere is any more foolhardy, they simply have more pliable and anesthetized populations to work with. We, by contrast, have torches and pitchforks. Because you'll take away my right to mock vegans when you pry it from my cold dead fingers.

The Coffee Party. Don't laugh. It's real.

2010-03-06T15:14:00.001-08:00

It isn't easy to parody progressives. In light of the visibility of the Tea Party movement, leftivists apparently determined that a steady stream of dishonest prattle and demonization was insufficient. So they've taken to the rather transparent and unimaginative act of trying to imitate it. The Coffee Party - how clever! - is a nice little bit of astroturfing which the media immediately lapped up like the two dollar whores that they are. But as Legal insurrection and other blogs have noted, it is a complete and utter fraud which epitomizes the lack of self-awareness and insularity of leftists.

One, their organizing principle is to set themselves apart from the Tea Party by positioning themselves as different (read: civil and "inclusive"). And that is, you know, a narrative about the Tea Party which they manufactured to begin with. How very postmodern of them. And two, in spite of their phony mission statement these idiots proceed while fully embodying their characterization of the right. After spending eight years poisoning political discourse beyond repair in this country, to be posturing as wounded kittehs when faced with push back against their still unabated, overheated rhetoric is just bizarre.

As fond as I've become of making up words online, I'm at a loss for one which would boil down the left's penchant for being fascists and pussies simultaneously. Fagcists? Not one in a hundred proggies would understand that these coffeehouse flyers I made up are mocking them. They're simply creeps living in their own alternate reality.

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Finding out true love is blind.

2010-02-21T19:38:00.001-08:00

Honestly, I think that even if Louis XIV wasn't one of my favorite new bands of the last five years I'd love them for their lack of political correctness alone. It's a pity they've already broken up (or gone on an interminable hiatus). In an era of fey, castrated emo turdblossoms masquerading as rockers, what could be more punk than a heaping helping of female objectification and (equal opportunity) racial insensitivity? I'm half-joking, but there is undeniably a certain amount of pleasure to be derived from knowing they rub the right people the wrong way.

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It's art. I say so.

2010-02-18T17:35:00.001-08:00

I was looking through a web gallery of wall graffiti a few weeks ago and one image literally stopped me in my tracks. I wasn't taken by its beauty or inventiveness though. Rather, it was an image which bore an uncanny resemblance to the shrilltard freakshow of unintentional feminist comedy Amanda Marcotte! Though I suppose it could also be the round and chinless face of Mrs. Potato Head were there not an Emo Phillips hairdo involved. And when, a few images later, I happened upon a punk rocker aimlessly urinating, it seemed the least I could do was add purpose to the young lad's existence.

I'm sure there's a parallel universe where my NEA grant is in the mail. But in the here and now employing a thematically incorrect urine stream is just something the patriarchy does on its own time to keep womynses like Amynda (flat-chested, homely and) stuck baking pies when she could be honing her critical thinking skillz. Who are you to judge me or my art!

A moonbat factory tour.

2010-02-16T21:07:00.001-08:00

I don't remember why I found myself at their Wiki page, but I couldn't be happier that I did. It was like setting foot on a planet where society doesn't need any productive members but endures on rage and masturbatorial weeping. Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington is rather renowned for its overabundance of far left nut jobs. Sort of like Oberlin College on the weirdo scale I suppose, only at dear old Evergreen the quirkiness of the student body is trumped by their unambiguous stupidity. This is, after all, the college that produced failed physics student Rachel Corrie and once bestowed on Mumia Abu-Jamal the honor to be their commencement speaker.

Looking over their list of "notable" alumni* really drove home the capacity for delusions among leftists. As embarrassing as it is that a presumably school-monitored list includes criminals and activists among their notable alumni categories, even more absurd, if not atypical of the left, was choosing to include a murderer and a convicted arsonist in the activist category! Just another bread crumb on the mind trail of people who find something huggable about leftist totalitarian thugs.

I took the first screen shot below yesterday, and amusingly enough some anonymous winger person updated it today to place the criminals in their proper category. (S)he also added a few more felons to the list who'd been deprived of their rightful place among the ranks of distinguished alumni. In a sane world the arsonists would have all the meaningful work they could handle without venturing outside the campus. But in the world which actually exists Evergreen will continue to breed and let loose an army of termites into the world.

Evergreen State College. We came as morons, we left as morons. But with 50% more rage!

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* I will give the school credit for producing Matt Groening. And Sleater-Kinney:

Toddler in Chief.

2010-02-12T14:37:00.001-08:00

If there's anything more creepy than the totalitarian imagery which accompanied Obama's campaign, it's revisiting it now that people have the full measure of the baby-in-chief. The otherworldly glow of a messiah that followers projected upon him was idiotic and gross from the outset, but in hindsight it looks rather more like Mayans in the throes of ecstasy whilst virgins are offered up for the gods. It took less than a year for him to reduce his own iconography to hilarious kitsch.

Warhol screen tests II

2010-02-10T06:14:00.001-08:00

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

I couldn't help but recall the above Andy Warhol quote the first time I saw Lou Reed's screen test. It must have been nice living in a time where we all had a common identity. But the left has systematically endeavored to carve out a separate culture where every last lifestyle choice and purchasing decision bears the mark of politics.

This would be little more than an amusing sociological curiosity were there not a troubling fascist undercurrent whereby they increasingly seek to apply the force of law or the jackboot of taxation to impose their vision on others. Just a little bourgeois self-indulgence for the masses! I mean, what could be more vital to our national well-being than poor people paying double for tomatoes because they're organic and locally grown? Or paying more to wipe their asses with recycled paper? Yeah. I don't know either. But I recognize a mindless and dogmatic religion when I see one.

Warhol Screen tests

2010-02-05T16:04:00.000-08:00

During Andy Warhol's time making weird little Factory movies in the mid-sixties he also did hundreds of screen tests where he'd put visitors to his studio in front of the camera for a few minutes. Subjects ranged from people off the street to Edie Sedgwick (above) to Salvador Dali, Dennis Hopper and Bob Dylan. And as moving art they're very captivating. I don't believe they'd ever had much public exposure until a couple of years ago when the Warhol Museum commissioned Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips to put music to 13 of them.

As evidenced by his otherwise interesting memoir, Wareham is a rather boring knee-jerk leftist jackhole, but I've always been enamored with his music. A Luna producer once aptly characterized it as being like urban prairie music. And to me it complements the films rather well. I believe the shows are on hiatus at the moment, but I'd highly recommend seeing Wareham and Phillips performing with the films projected as a backdrop should the opportunity present itself.

Moonbats!

2010-01-29T18:21:00.000-08:00

Out of my ceaseless quest to find the most ridiculous way to spend a couple hours of my life, comes this. I was playing around at xtranormal, where you can write scripts to be delivered by your choice of dorky 3-d characters with computer generated voices. The script itself was really funny but the delivery was boring and torturous to watch. Evidently not content to just write the site off as a plaything for retards, I downloaded what I'd made, edited the hell out of it and added some TV Land magic. The end result is part one of a sort of mock 1950's-style instructional film of which there likely won't be a part two.

State of the Union

2010-01-28T12:53:00.000-08:00

The poor bastard still thinks he's President of Hydeparkberkeleycambridge and that the people, the political opposition, some members of his own party, the Supreme Court and reality are simply irritants in his imagined plotline of The Barack Obama Story. He has no instinct for survival, just a double dose of smug preening and delusional arrogance. This is not going to end well unless some old-school Japanese monsters save him from his taunting of Godzilla. Even a fellatic media won't be able to help once more people start to completely turn against him. Tick. Tock.

One and done.

2010-01-24T15:14:00.001-08:00

I figured that for all the time I spend disparaging this jug-eared creep the least I could do is utilize my advertising skillz to help Obama get a new job come 2012. A guerilla campaign to get him a position for which he's well-suited seemed the way to go. The only question was whether that would be building shacks with Jimmy Carter or manning the deep fryer at a moderately priced restaurant with a multicultural menu. I opted for the latter because the thought of a roof collapsing on some poor unwitting family who then has to hear this guy prattle on about how it's not his fault because he inherited the wood and nails from Home Depot just makes me physically sick.

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Obama the incompetent.

2010-01-22T17:58:00.001-08:00

It's gonna be all Obama here leading up to his teleprompter's State of the Union address. Today is more stickers with the kind of ugly-looking imagery leftard artists employ when "speaking truth to power" in their own neighborhoods. I stare and laugh at this crap every day wondering who they're speaking to exactly. One another obviously. Or me. Maybe it's a concerted effort to bug out the 10% or so of us who suffer their idiocy in silence. But, as always, I can only note that it wouldn't take a massive carpet bombing of winger responses to give such neighborhoods the vapors and set the leftosphere ablaze with hysteria. "Who are these people just like us who mock and secretly hate us?" Heh.

Somebody let the devil out

2010-01-12T20:04:00.001-08:00

Popa Chubby is a longtime fixture in the NYC blues scene, such that there is one. He wrote this song after 9/11 though I'd never heard it until stumbling upon it on Youtube the other day. A much longer live version is available here.

Fun with Youtube

2010-01-10T20:31:00.001-08:00

Imagine you're a moonbat watching a Youtube of your favorite left-wing kook, thinking you're safe in your little leftlandia bubble and a few minutes through it changes to a message from Wingerland! No clues as to what was coming.

This mean-spirited jokesterism can be done with video of any leftard cultural marker but I chose Chomsky because, well, no particular reason aside from what a loathsome critter he is. All you have to do is download a youtube video (there are websites which enable this), put it into a cheap video editor, say what you wanna say and then upload it back to youtube with an innocent description. The more videos that get the treatment, the better. It could be reminiscent of the old Energizer commercials where you'd be watching a typically bad TV commercial and the bunny would crash into the scene. After awhile you'd be half expecting the bunny to show up every time you watched an awful commercial.

Yes it will upset lefties. And the cleverness is doubly upsetting and confusing on account of the cartoons of righties these jackholes have in their heads. There are innumerable ways to go about it. I chose to insert a second video inside the chomsky video with scrolling type. Well I didn't actually do it. I just made a few photoshops for inspiration. I'm doing my part by just putting the idea out there for you stupid wingers to follow through on.

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Now you know.

2010-01-06T12:33:00.000-08:00

Mischief, bookstore style.

2010-01-05T15:02:00.000-08:00

Leaving surprises in leftist books. Capitalism is just so darned unseemly. The capital. The ism. Free markets, enslaved minds. Stop me before I projectile vomit. Being stripped of the profit motive is unbelievably liberating though. What could possibly be more noble than voluntarism in the form of leaving love notes to lefty book lovers who can learn the value of money by discovering after the fact that the book they purchased is soiled by wingnuttia! And wouldn't it be cute to be a fly on the wall when Johnny Moonbat returns to voice his protest to the nose-ringed, zit-faced clerktool who quietly judged you while ringing up whatever winger tome you last bought? Then again, the great thing about mischief is that you don't need to see the result. Theater of the mind is its own reward.

If putting stickers inside a few books in a store is a tad on the nutty side for a winger's stomach, you can always do the same thing by inserting the "message" on a small sheet of paper, I suppose. It's less evil and less apt to leave a mark, but it ain't like I've stuck things of either variety in books myself. The task I've assigned myself is to simply throw out every last thing that pops into my head and makes me laugh. And the thought of a lefty happening upon something like this is nothing short of hilarious.

Simple acts to spoil a progressive's day

2010-01-04T13:00:00.001-08:00

Bathrooms. One of the many places in the lefty cocoon where they like to leave their political proclamations. It's not unlike shitting in your own living room if you don't mind my waterboarding a metaphor. How edgy to speak truth to power where most people think exactly like you do! Or, even if they don't think the same way, they take the path of least resistance like I do by keeping quiet in the land of emotional infants. I can't count the number of times I've had to stare down "Bush lied, people died" or other such stickers while attempting to relieve myself. I used to be somewhere between numb and oblivious to it, but I increasingly react with a desire to punch the nearest vintage-sweater-wearing dipshit beta male in the junk.

What is difficult to understand unless you are encircled by leftists is the extent to which their brazenness, arrogance and even their self-confidence is a byproduct of their insularity and mutual reinforcement. And you simply cannot chip away at this without rattling their cages. That can mean, among other things, shitting where they eat. Big deal, bathroom stickers, you say. It's pissing in the ocean. It is. But it is only one silly, innocuous thing among many when the stated desire is to bleed them to death by paper cuts. And unlike plastering LA with Obama Joker posters or doing brilliant videos posing as a pimp and ho at ACORN, it takes minimal personal effort.

You could employ the litany of winger chucklehead bumpersticker sentiments and drop a sledgehammer in these environs, but guerilla marketing or using non-traditional media is more interesting - or in this case, more biting - when there's an element of randomness to the messages. I've heard David Horowitz suggest that he deliberately acts like a jackass to mimic the behavior of the left - and his own when he was one of them - but even with that qualification he just comes across as a jackass. No net gain. I mention it though because there is truth about the potency of mimicking them with regard to cultural markers and their self-identity. When you hit them while using their own sensibilities against them it confuses lefties because they are working with cartoons of the right in their heads.

What follows are some examples for your friendly neighborhood hipster bar, coffee house, vegan restaurant, indie bookstore or maybe the bathrooms near faculty offices at your college. With these particular ones I thought an amusing approach would be to play off of elements in the actual environment. Playing off the type of establishment can also be funny. But neither is necessary, obviously.

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Holiday slacking continues

2009-12-30T23:18:00.000-08:00

I probably despise New Year's Eve in NYC precisely because I have such a fondness for consuming alcohol and an affection [waning, thank you maturity!] for bringing in the sunrise. That's the nature of the holiday, but when every tri-state retard, teetotaler and nesting homebody is compelled to clog the streets, hog cabs and fill up every stinking establishment they're pissing in my personal oatmeal. It is amateur hour.

My best memories are of playing it by ear in the college years and immediately afterward. It usually involved us ambivalently drinking in an apartment past midnight, dragging our asses to random house parties and then hitting up our staple EV dive bars like 7B and the Village Idiot. There was a [very] old blues band from Alabama we happened upon one year and proceeded to have a blast sitting with their elderly wives while they were playing. The freezing NYE some heroin-addict-looking chick came into the Idiot and announced that she'd fuck anyone for a jacket. A nutbag who came in to eat at Kiev dragging a large tree branch. You know, the kind of golden memories that annoying $400/couple forced fun New Year's events just can't deliver.

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Among the innocuous things I remember was a smallish group of us slumming at a friend's apartment playing beer pong - the pussy Dartmouth variety as opposed to the much cooler Lehigh "Beirut" - while blasting MTV's live NYE Nirvana concert. I was a total Nirvana fantard, but I've been to so many live shows that I find TV concerts to be pretty much unwatchable. This one, however, was really mesmerizing. That less than six months later Kurt Cobain put the barrel of a shotgun in his piehole probably intensified my memory too. I loved that band like very few others.

Feliz Navidad baby!

2009-12-25T08:11:00.001-08:00

Tis' not a day for politics. Or for blogging at all for that matter. So enjoy a kooky rendition of Jingle Bells. Or download the whole album to avail yourself of the full complement of Christmas stylings by the mid-century Mexican mack daddy Juan Garcia Esquivel. The Johnny Mathis from a parallel universe.

Symbolic political Christmas gifts.

2009-12-24T12:46:00.000-08:00

For lefties. I give you F.A. Hayek's The Road To Serfdom. I know I'd stand a better chance of convincing a Hollywood starlet to "clean" chocolate frosting off of my nut sack than I do of coaxing the average lefty to read the dang book. But there is a cartoon version of it available for easy digestion. And I turned it into 3-D so you can grab your glasses (which you probably own to be ironic) and enjoy it like the children you are. Have a vegan cookie and organic fair trade coffee in a recycled paper cup on me, too! There's no excuse for not partaking, especially since I made it even more convenient by skipping to the last page.

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For wingers. I give you Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. It's not exactly a new book at this point and I suppose the dust has to settle before it can be considered canonical, but it is the most important conservative book in recent years in my opinion. It is a bit of a tease in that it is both intellectual history and a distillation of its contemporary relevance, thus leaving you hungry for more of the former. One wishes that he could hide in the bat cave of academia and make expounding on this his life's work, spitting out volume after volume of daggers to the heart of the left's willful self-deception about their own history. But its ultimate beauty as a work of popular non-fiction is that he has changed the way innumerable people look at history as well as the present and has no doubt inspired other worthies to move the ball forward. Probably the best intro is to simply watch the speech he gave to The Heritage Foundation as he was kicking off his book tour. The link is to the first segment, finding one's way to the subsequent ones should be easy enough. It's worth a watch even if you've read the book.

Merry Christmas.

Spooky.

2009-12-22T20:42:00.001-08:00

This piece by one of my favorite illustrators really cried out for a little bit of Obamafication. Community organizers from hell. The creepy and thuggish underbelly of progressivism. And Chicago. Too perfect to resist.

Apocalypse Gore.

2009-12-18T12:47:00.000-08:00

Snicker.

2009-12-17T07:35:00.000-08:00

I love the pinko public option ad that some group just released. The quote isn't from Jefferson, for starters. Then there's the creepy notion that Washington is the beating heart of America from which life is sustained. If we were dealing with normal people I'd say that someone must have been beaten into a coma with an idiot stick to think this ad is anything but vapidness defined. But it isn't about persuasion with moonbats, it's a love note to themselves. A proclamation of their moral superiority. It serves about the same purpose as chanting in papier mache masks while some douchebag bangs a drum. The image is quite arresting, so I couldn't resist immediately whipping out a quick parody ad of my own which puts it to more appropriate use. [Note: Someone else had the same basic idea. This Cthulhu critter seems even more fitting.]

Organic, free-range.

2009-12-13T21:10:00.000-08:00

Lefties are such sheep that they can be persuaded that roughly half the nation is brainwashed by FOX News - which gets a whole couple of million viewers a night. They're such sheep that when a lefty discovers that I'm, uh, not one, I could hold both ends of the subsequent conversation because I've already seen the cartoon that runs in their heads so many times I've lost count. That they have the temerity to routinely suggest that wingers are sheep can best be explained by section 8 of the above butcher's diagram, though a few others are suitable as well. That's about all I can muster about lefties at the moment, but I could go on all day about sheep. Continue reading +/-

Q: Why do Scottish men wear kilts?
A: So sheep can't hear them pulling down their zippers.

A G F G A A A G G G A C C A G F G A A A G G A G F = Mary Had A Little Lamb.

Sheep are not as inherently funny as goats, but they taste better in stew. And goat chops with mint jelly sounds like something you'd only eat on a dare.

This is the second post in a row referencing sex with barnyard animals.

You're welcome.

Thanks for the prize, bitches.

2009-12-11T11:46:00.001-08:00

someone deserves a tee shirt.

2009-12-09T21:04:00.001-08:00

It's a shame I've only seen fairly low-resolution images of Mario Teran (the Bolivian soldier who shot Che Guevara) kicking around the internet. I had to make do with applying a tiny Teran picture to the emaciated American Apparel crackheads above. He would make for a bitchin' winger tee shirt though. I ain't gonna be the guy who tears the Earth a new orifice looking for a more useful iconic image of him, but someone should. In the mean time I'll just let my imagination wander to the prospect of having some chick ask me who the guy on my shirt is in a Lower East Side dive bar. Good times. Good times.

About this so-called subversive shop.

2009-12-08T21:14:00.001-08:00

It's probably misleading to call whatever I'll end up putting on Cafepress or Zazzle a shop. At least from my perspective. It's really about making whatever people see of value here available for their personal use. I'd just as soon send people Photoshop files for nothing and let them deal with it.

When the Obama Joker poster started mysteriously cropping up around Los Angeles the reaction on the left was all I ever hoped it would be to such things. More importantly everyone else got to witness their reaction. They do not like to be made uncomfortable inside their cocoons. And what was great about this particular poster, aside from the mysterious provenance, was that it was a direct taunt at their delusional self-image as the "good guys."

Because I endure the frustration of living in leftlandia, I've often laughed to myself while thinking about how easy it would be to mess with these people. Get in their heads. For all the railing people do about the knee-jerk leftism of the New York Times, for instance, how amusing would the reaction be to stickers slyly cropping up around their headquarters with an (R-rated) image of Pinch Sulzberger fellating Teleprompter Jesus? Perhaps with a line like "All the news that fits the narrative." (Don't blame me if someone does it now, I'm just spitballing here). The whole point is to cultivate mischief. Not everything can make a dent in the left's psyche or grab a news cycle, but the more people who try their hand at giving it a shot the better. And hopefully I can inspire some people to do so.

So I'll put up tee shirts that I think look kind of cool if that is what people are into. Wearing politics on your sleeve in everyday life is a little moonbatty for me personally, but I certainly wouldn't discourage others from doing it. I'm primarily thinking in terms of simple images/messages that would be cool on stickers or poster type deals that people could slap in lefty environs. And I'll go into greater detail about this sort of stuff as time goes on - assuming anyone gives a shit - but since I put the cart before the horse by incorporating the shop into the blog design this is kind of a throwaway explanation with a few hastily put together samples based on things I'm playing around with for the blog.

The Godzilla one above probably doesn't need the words underneath and Al Gore could be replaced easily enough with any high-profile lefty. But for the purposes here it needed something in the way of a description since his head is the size of a chipmunk turd. The images below are pretty much self-explanatory.

Andi Sullivan is coo coo.

2009-12-08T18:05:00.000-08:00

Another Trigtastic day in the slow-motion train wreck life of Andrew Sullivan. It's uncanny how the right is held to account for every big-belt-buckled whack job who slithers out of a trailer park while most of the unhinged behavior on the left emanates from the cozy confines of respectable society. It really speaks to the bankruptcy of the left and renders Sullivan's slide in that direction all the more, I dunno, bizarre.

Monkeys gone to heaven.

2009-12-04T20:21:00.003-08:00

The Pixies played a few gigs in NYC last week and my head was apparently up my arse when the shows were announced and subsequently sold out, so alls I gots is some stinkin' youtube. It has been a long time since I've had them in heavy rotation. They sort of slipped out of my consciousness because the air was silly with great bands putting out albums around the time they broke up. Not the least of the bands filling the void in their aftermath were Pixies front man "Frank Black" and Kim Deal fronting The Breeders. But lately I've been atoning for the short attention span of youth by overdosing on Pixies concert videos on youtube like a full-blown fantard. The similarly inclined can also avail themselves of a free live four song EP at their website or watch a documentary about their recent reunion which is pretty entertaining.

My lovely neighborhood.

2009-12-04T20:21:00.001-08:00

Tommy Tool and the future Vicky Clueless-Tool enjoy cocktails after a fabulous dinner at home. Their kitteh Trotsky ambles across the $10,000 area rug in the living room as he makes his way toward the organic food scraps which lay beside the Viking range. Kitteh scores big on nesting nights, as the Guatemalan help won't get to the kitchen floor until morning. Vicky could grab the broom herself, but Lupe can clearly use the exercise. Her repulsive saturated fat diet has left quite the bloated figure on her stumpy frame. Being poor and oppressed - by rednecks? - is no excuse for bad taste and worse eating habits. If only she'd leaf through the back issues of Bon Apetit Vicky discreetly left on the credenza. They are in English, but the pictures are divine and surely the absence of starch and grease would have a subliminal impact on Lupe's epicurean vulgarity.

Stupidity is too simple a a characterization for the delusional notion that the high-living fairy left mid century modern furniture in their living room while moral superiority occupied their REM sleep. Eames and revolution go together like cock and a chainsaw. But they bought carbon credits for their trip to St. Barts and if it's yellow they let it mellow (unless company is there). Cognitive dissonance, Manhattan-style. Fee thinkers in a conga line of self-parody.

Band pimping

2009-12-03T05:27:00.000-08:00

Superdrag is a band I never gave a moment's thought to until seeing them live some years ago. Their few songs I was familiar with due to modest MTV rotation were just listenable, dime-a-dozen power pop and when they were scheduled to open for Guided By Voices at the Stone Pony (of Springsteen fame) they were clearly an afterthought for the assembled patchouli stink betas. But when GBV was forced to cancel at the last second due to a family tragedy, Superdrag took up the slack, played for hours and blew the doors off the place. Not only was their own material kickass live but they played assorted covers that opened my eyes to their various influences and earned a fan in me. "Aspartame" is a recent release after a long hiatus for the band, and the moronic politics aside it captures the energy of their live shows better than their past videos have.

I shall not shut up.

2009-12-01T06:08:00.001-08:00

I remember seeing this Andrew Klavan video months ago and thinking it pretty much sums up why I'd finally took to blogging last year. I went through my twenties being pleasant in political discussions and wonkish in what I'd generally choose to read. And in my insular little corner of the world I tried my best to hold up my end of high-minded discourse. But high-minded was seldom what I got in return from the clucking lefty poseur chickens who envelop my NYC existence like the stench of urine in the subway. So while I'd grown weary of the tedium of engaging lefties - and it really doesn't matter if they are well-educated or certified imbeciles, they almost all argue like the latter - the urge to lay waste to the sort of people I now suffered in silence was palpable.

Unfortunately, a few months of blogging made it obvious that I wasn't staying true to my original purpose but instead falling into the habit of mostly spitting out the same shopworn daily-events-driven flotsam as every other politically-tinted blog in the universe. Fine if you have a readership of people who turn to you for that. Fucking moronic if you have no audience, are making no effort to attract one and the whole practice is far afield of the raison d'être in the back of your head for beginning this in the first place. So I did the sensible thing and put a Glock to the temple of this pitiful enterprise.

But then I saw that Obama/Joker poster and the stir it caused. It was the sort of subversion from the belly of the beast that I'd initially wanted to contribute to here. And there's nothing like nearly a year of the hapless left being in full control of the corridors of power to inspire someone to try again and with greater effort. So here we are. Version 2.0.

Today's unintentional comedy from the Times

2008-12-07T14:55:00.000-08:00

I wish I could hate the New York Times the way most conservatives do. I certainly loathe the fact that our nation's putative "newspaper of record" is more preoccupied with the single-minded pursuit of agendas than being a good steward of its place in the pantheon of journalism, but the paper too often causes me to shoot Pepsi through my nose in fits of hysterical laughter to affix a word like "hate" to my reading experience.

It isn't the reflexive leftism per se. Nor is it the pretentiousness and elitism, as I can be guilty of both in my own way. Rather, it is the insularity and utter lack of self-awareness that makes it seem less adversarial and more akin to high comedy. Whether its an account of the "trauma" which accompanies couples as they weigh a first child versus the loss of their carefully assembled mid-century modern living spaces or a reporter who treks out to the burbs to assess the cheesy chain restaurants - all of which happen to be in NYC as well by the way - and discovers that the food wasn't as appalling as she expected, there's a pervasive sense that
their writers' antennas do not receive the full spectrum of sound waves. And more pathetically, that it is by choice.

Which brings me to Times guest columnist Timothy Egan, filling in for the hit or miss but reliably neurotic Maureen Dowd. I'm not familiar with his oeuvre, so he may be a self-important hack or someone who merely had a bad day and lacks the critical capacity to see when he's not on his game. But it doesn't matter. Because if you're going to sign your name to a pretentious diatribe about writing like this, it had better embody the inverse of what you're railing against. Instead, he provides this:

The unlicensed pipe fitter known as Joe the Plumber is out with a book this month, just as the last seconds on his 15 minutes are slipping away. I have a question for Joe: Do you want me to fix your leaky toilet?

I didn’t think so. And I don’t want you writing books. Not when too many good novelists remain unpublished. Not when too many extraordinary histories remain unread. Not when too many riveting memoirs are kicked back at authors after 10 years of toil. Not when voices in Iran, North Korea or China struggle to get past a censor’s gate.

A good general rule if you are taking up the cause of the lofty status of writers is to avoid a reference to Andy Warhol's deathly tired line in your first sentence and then slip into an equally overused reference to the old occupational switcharoo in line two. Typing either one would set off the gag reflex of someone with writing talent, but two trite lines in a row should lead to projectile vomiting and then heavy drinking to dull the pain of incompetence.

He does have a point when he references authoritarian regimes though. Since American children being told to clean their plates at dinner was an epic fail in preventing millions of starvation deaths during Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward, the least we can do is give magical thinking another try for the sake of the peasant scribes yearning to move their country into an era of postmodern irony. We owe them nothing less since the Chinese have on occasion been kind enough to loan us some of their Panda Bears.

Joe, a k a Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, was no good as a citizen, having failed to pay his full share of taxes, no good as a plumber, not being fully credentialed, and not even any good as a faux American icon. Who could forget poor John McCain at his most befuddled, calling out for his working-class surrogate on a day when Joe stiffed him.

With a résumé full of failure, he now thinks he can join the profession of Mark Twain, George Orwell and Joan Didion.

My first reaction is that I'm still waiting for Timothy Egan to join the profession of the aforementioned writers. But what elevates this refrain to standard-issue idiotic liberal emotionalism, and almost mitigates the self-evident absurdity of Joe having a book, is the fact that this posturing, self-important clown knows full well that as is always the case when "celebrities" are published, someone else, a mighty professional, will do the actual writing.

Next up may be Sarah Palin, who is said to be worth nearly $7 million if she can place her thoughts between covers. Publishers: with all the grim news of layoffs and staff cuts at the venerable houses of American letters, can we set some ground rules for these hard times? Anyone who abuses the English language on such a regular basis should not be paid to put words in print.

Here’s Palin’s response, after Matt Lauer asked her when she knew the election was lost:

“I had great faith that, you know, perhaps when that voter entered that voting booth and closed that curtain that what would kick in for them was, perhaps, a bold step that would have to be taken in casting a vote for us, but having to put a lot of faith in that commitment we tried to articulate that we were the true change agent that would progress this nation.”

I have no idea what she said in that thicket of words.

I understood what she said. That's more than I could ever say when listening to Hunter S. Thompson. Then again I'm sure that Egan's nipples hardened when Joe Biden waxed eloquently about FDR's televised fireside chats during the Hoover administration. Since Timothy's singular achievement is a book about that era it does seem reasonable to assume that - whatever intellectual and literary deficiencies he displays in this piece notwithstanding - he has some level of expertise with regard to presidential chronology and the communications tools which they had at their disposal.

Even more striking than that is the fact that this man is presumably a seasoned journalist. One can thrive in the field without being a talented writer. Many do. And the lack of a high octane intellect can be easily masked with a blend of curiosity and a mindless embrace of conventional wisdom. But as fundamental to basic competence as shutting off the water before removing a toilet would be for an unlicensed plumber is a journalist's need to understand who and what is newsworthy. And you'd need a gaping hole like the one the Bolivian army put in Che Guevara's head to suggest that a middle-class, moose-hunting, former basketball star/beauty queen with an Eskimo/steelworker/fisherman/snowmachine race champion hubby who rose to governor as an outsider and drew tens of thousands of people to rallies as an unlikely VP candidate doesn't rate a huge advance and a book.

Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn their trade, to understand nuance and pace. And then, facing a sea of rejections, they hear about something like Barbara Bush’s dog getting a book deal.

Writing is hard, even for the best wordsmiths. Ernest Hemingway said the most frightening thing he ever encountered was “a blank sheet of paper.” And Winston Churchill called the act of writing a book “a horrible, exhaustive struggle, like a long bout of painful illness.”

I know lots of writers too. And everything he says is true for the ones who have no discernible talent. It certainly isn't true for everyone. There are all too many people who feel the need to express themselves through the written word, feel it is their calling, but simply don't have it. Funny, isn't it, how Egan has so little self-awareness that he can romanticize poverty in failed writers not half a page after characterizing a man who lives in a nice middle-class home in Toledo as a failure in life and as a plumber.

And in spite of Timothy's somewhat delusional penchant for conflating all manner of writing endeavors, the fact that you can find more impressive, more artistically ambitious musicianship in a dinky jazz club than in any number of commercially successful and critically lauded rock bands does not delegitimize the latter. Nor does the extreme wealth of talentless lip synchers like Britney Spears or Madonna take food out of the mouths of earnest twat folk singers who play some vegan dump cum coffeehouse in Williamsburg.

When I heard J.T.P. had a book, I thought of that Chris Farley skit from “Saturday Night Live.” He’s a motivational counselor, trying to keep some slacker youths from living in a van down by the river, just like him. One kid tells him he wants to write.

“La-di-frickin’-da!” Farley says. “We got ourselves a writer here!”

If Joe really wants to write, he should keep his day job and spend his evenings reading Rick Reilly’s sports columns, Peggy Noonan’s speeches, or Jess Walter’s fiction. He should open Dostoevsky or Norman Maclean — for osmosis, if nothing else. He should study Frank McCourt on teaching or Annie Dillard on writing.

He fucking nails it here though. Whenever I read Bob Herbert, Gail Collins, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, David Brooks, Frank Rich, the estimable Timothy Egan or even full-time wage slaves like Adam Nagourney the air is thick with "Crime and Punishment" and echoes of a litany of other monsters of the literary midway. I can't even begin to imagine what there is about Joe's life that makes it interesting enough for a book, but if his opening line were to be some variant on "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" it would scarcely be more unoriginal than how Timothy Egan started this rant. Though it would probably boost the professional writer Egan's self-esteem that he got the reference if Joe's ghost writer started the book that way.

I'd love to go on, but the full commentary itself provides ample laughter. Besides, I have a real, full-time job and writing is just too darn difficult.

Let the Iraq revisionism begin. Again.

2008-12-01T06:50:00.000-08:00

If reading or hearing Peggy Noonan is to be subjected to nauseating prose with the color palate of a five year old girl then Thomas Friedman is her stylistic little boy equivalent. Guess what? Gee whiz! And that's not all!!! The world is really flat. Guys, today you can walk your way from Bangalore to Sunnyvale in a NANOSECOND and I talked to the very people in Rangoon, Belize and Papua New Guinea who are making this happen!

Tommy was kind enough to part ways with his Tonka Trucks and run inside to be with the grown ups yesterday, and guess what!?!?!? He has something important to say!

In 2003, the United States, under President Bush, invaded Iraq to change the regime. Terrible postwar execution and unrelenting attempts by Al Qaeda to provoke a Sunni-Shiite civil war turned the Iraqi geopolitical space into a different problem — a maelstrom of violence for four years, with U.S. troops caught in the middle. A huge price was paid by Iraqis and Americans. This was the Iraq that Barack Obama ran against.

In the last year, though, the U.S. troop surge and the backlash from moderate Iraqi Sunnis against Al Qaeda and Iraqi Shiites against pro-Iranian extremists have brought a new measure of stability to Iraq. There is now, for the first time, a chance — still only a chance — that a reasonably stable democratizing government, though no doubt corrupt in places, can take root in the Iraqi political space.

Uh, nope. Obama ran against the very idea that we went there in the first place. He got his street cred from speaking at a rally when he was a nobody with no burden to vote or knowledge of the intelligence a Senator has access to. Whatever criticisms he levied were not rooted in knowledge but in ideology and political posturing. He not only opposed the surge and argued that any sectarian bloodbath which might ensue if we left was fine by him but refused to acknowledge the success of the surge, acknowledge the heavy moral component to our engagement there in the first place or so much as think in terms of victory.

The fact that Obama has talked tough re: Pakistan is merely a variant on the standard rhetorical ploys of the left. The old "the sanctions on Iraq are killing children/what's that? Depose Saddam?/The sanctions on Iraq are working" shuffle.

Like an opportunistic dillhole, Friedman is doing the little boy's work of returning to the scene of an intervention he advocated but hiding behind the skirt of someone who opposed the bad stuff which ensued, just like he did, and pretending that the two positions were borne of comparable insights.

That is the Iraq that Obama is inheriting. It is an Iraq where we have to begin drawing down our troops — because the occupation has gone on too long and because we have now committed to do so by treaty — but it is also an Iraq that has the potential to eventually tilt the Arab-Muslim world in a different direction.

I’m sure that Obama, whatever he said during the campaign, will play this smart. He has to avoid giving Iraqi leaders the feeling that Bush did — that he’ll wait forever for them to sort out their politics — while also not suggesting that he is leaving tomorrow, so they all start stockpiling weapons.

If he can pull this off, and help that decent Iraq take root, Obama and the Democrats could not only end the Iraq war but salvage something positive from it. Nothing would do more to enhance the Democratic Party’s national security credentials than that.

This is where I lose my lunch. The Iraq that Obama is inheriting is in no way to his credit. And when Friedman assures us that the Lightworker will play this smart, what he of course means is that Obama now has the burden of being a grown up. The left could blame Bush for rendition in spite of it being a practice which predated his administration. They could raise holy hell about Guantanamo and FISA when they were abstract principles rather than a function of their burden to keep Americans safe. They could call Bush a liar for faulty intelligence in spite of concurrence among our putative allies, even those who opposed our "illegal invasion" to enforce UN resolutions which were the result of a cease fire agreement when Clinton bombed the shit out of the country not long before.

Only the left could argue that this whole venture was an unholy corporate venture for oil and simultaneously rant about Iraq's massive oil revenue surplus while we foot the bill for their reconstruction. These people are a gaggle of hideous emotional infants.

Nothing which transpires from here on in will enhance the Democrats' national security credentials. They forfeited any pretense of it with eight years of bad faith and ill will. History will be the final judge for Bush, but for a weasel like Friedman who is trying to have it both ways the judgment is already in.

Black Friday (updated)

2008-11-29T18:12:00.000-08:00

I originally posted this because the developing meme on the left that Bush was to blame for the Black Friday shopping deaths was too hilarious to ignore. But it gets better, because it is colliding with arguments that Obama is responsible for the 3% Black Friday sales increase over last year.

From the New York Times:

From the Great Depression, we remember the bread lines. From the oil shocks of the 1970s, we recall lines of cars snaking from gas stations. And from our current moment, we may come to remember scenes like the one at a Long Island Wal-Mart in the dawn after Thanksgiving, when 2,000 frantic shoppers trampled to death an employee who stood between them and the bargains within. It was a tragedy, yet it did not feel like an accident.

... Wages for most Americans have fallen in real terms over the last eight years. Pensions have been turned into 401(k) plans that have just relinquished half their value to an angry market. Health benefits have been downgraded or eliminated altogether. Working hours are being slashed, and full-time workers are having to settle for jobs through temp agencies.

Indeed, this was the situation for the unfortunate man who found himself working at the Valley Stream Wal-Mart at 5 a.m. Friday, a temp at a company emblematic of low wages and weak benefits, earning his dollars by trying to police an unruly crowd worried about missing out.

In a sense, the American economy has become a kind of piñata — lots of treats in there, but no guarantee that you will get any, making people prone to frenzy and sending some home bruised.

It seemed fitting then, in a tragic way, that the holiday season began with violence fueled by desperation; with a mob making a frantic reach for things they wanted badly, knowing they might go home empty-handed.

I suppose this is the sort of smarmy melodrama one should expect when papers like the Times employ liberal tool English majors from liberal arts colleges as business reporters.

Exactly eight years ago people started living beyond their means, buying more house than they can afford and getting mortgages when they don't even have sufficient credit for a cell phone plan. And, of course, Wal-Mart, which was responsible for the lion's share of the US productivity gains during the Clinton miracle, turned stone cold buggin' evil on day one of Bushco.

One would almost forget that global energy demand has skyrocketed thanks to the cheap labor 90's. Or that the idiotic drive to convert crops to biofuels has caused food prices to shoot up. Add these to an already existing housing bubble and one is left to ponder exacly how this economic slump was anything short of inevitable.

Thankfully, things will soon be run by the party who thinks we can solve our energy problems with unicorn farts and spent years playing naked Twister with the GSE's. And that means that mobs who crush the door guy at Wal-Mart can go back to being uncouth morons responsible for their own behavior instead of being unwitting victims of Bush.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Lay a little blame at the feet of the government, for exhorting Americans to spend more money and shake off that recession gripping the nation. Lay some blame on the media, for stoking the hype surrounding one day of retailing which is, in fact, nothing more than the first of 28 shopping days left until Christmas, with cable news hawking footage of ravenous shoppers storming the doors of stores opening at 4 am.

And in Palm Desert, California, where police say an argument preceded the shooting at a Toys "R" Us, lay some blame on a gun-happy culture which encourages the resolution of simple domestic disputes with the pulling of a trigger.

...... Retailers already were calling this the worst shopping season in six years. Now it's unquestionable. If this is shopping, we might be better off with a recession.

This one is a little less pointed but still rather moronic in its effort at social commentary. One wonders, if indeed the government and advertisers worked the entire country into a Black Friday frenzy, how it is exactly that only a few people died in a couple of incidents. After all, during the same time window it appears that standing next to Plaxico Burress at a night club was almost as dangerous.

George Stephanopoulis on This Week:

President-elect Obama also said this week in a series of press conferences that he held Monday through Wednesday on the economy and laying out his economic team. You got to give him credit for one thing at least: ever since the leak of Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary at 3:00 last Friday, the Dow has gone up 17%, the S&P has gone up 19%. So at least there's been a vote of confidence in the markets for president-elect Obama…And Black Friday, that’s exactly right, sales up three percent surprisingly on Black Friday. So, is this about the Obama economic team?

But wait. Sales were up? This wasn't desperation. It was optimism about Obama! The transition between a Republican administration and a Democrat one is a confusing and challenging time for the left. So many well-worn narratives to shed and so many new ones to cultivate.

Love and hate for the Upper West Side

2008-11-25T23:30:00.001-08:00

I have pretty fond memories of the Upper West Side. We practically lived in the Dublin House Bar on 79th Street my senior year in high school. And we whiled away many a blackout night in our underage years bouncing between the Amsterdam strip and their less Jappy, more preppy, UES equivalents. But even in the midst of debauchery and drunken runs to H&H Bagels, my apolitical under 21 years found something palpably nauseating about the street vibe on the Upper West Side, even if I couldn't quite put my finger on it.

While the young bar habitues were of a markedly different stripe, the neighborhood seemed to be characterized by an overabundance of ugly people, poorly dressed - in a studied way - all effecting an air of self-importance. Parisians without style. Possessing a joyless essence, as though their souls had been sucked, not by world-weariness but by their own dirty neurotic existence. The retail aesthetics featured nary a trace of bohemia either. Its nobody's idea of a hip, let alone edgy, neighborhood. More like a repository of fourth generation red diaper baby rent-controlled gloom bunnies. And if downtown is epitomized by the inner turmoil that has art as its end result, the Upper West Side comes off as a place that welcomes or cultivates art critics and insufferable know-it-all douchebags.

So even as we flocked to the divey collegiate bars like cheap whores there was a growing sense that I wouldn't be caught dead living there. And it grew into an intense desire to spend no time there for any reason at all. And this, just from silent observation! Even if I didn't intellectualize it thusly at the time, it had none of the energy or vibrance of other predictably politicized environs like Williamsburg, the village or the Lower East Side. Places I love even if I'd sooner get my balls pierced than admit my political leanings to their inhabitants. The UWS by contrast is just grim, self-satisfied progressives in a suck hole of nothingness.

Watching this video was to have all those visceral impressions surge back into my consciousness with the hilarious recognition that yes, of course, where could all those lugubrious cretins have been headed but to confabs like this? And how, pray tell, could they possibly conduct themselves other than in this manner?

Of course, that's how they deal with each other, but how they deal with differing viewpoints is even more amusing.

More media shark jumping

2008-11-22T01:12:00.000-08:00

Sarah Palin pardons a turkey at a farm, then shows her stupidity and callous insensitivity to liberal pussies by conducting an interview with a backdrop of death.

Or something like that.

You can call this reason #8,966 why in spite of living in NYC I have more affinity for a woman who shoots her own dinner, has worked on a commercial fishing boat, played basketball, has a husband who is a steelworker and Iron Dog champion, sent her first born to Iraq, runs a state and still cleans up pretty fucking good.

Hardy people them Alaskans. Then again when you spend a good part of the year in darkness, experience unimaginably frigid weather and wolves and bears are constant reminders that a trigger shy human ain't at the top of the food chain, the idea of a turkey meeting its maker is not something you bat an eye over.

But if you're a fey, insular, neurotic liberal pussy like MSNBC's David Shuster, well, processing food is apparently something on the order of clubbing baby seals or squeezing Jews into a cattle car headed for Auschwitz. And this is most especially true if you have a visceral, over-the-top, obsessive contempt for the woman at issue. With any luck some of them will choke on their Thanksgiving tofurkey.

I'd love to say that I'm surprised by the indignation the left has expressed, but I'm not. I live among these people. I work with them. Socialize with them. I even fornicate with some of them. And the truth of the matter is that, much to my personal shame, I have one foot firmly planted in the pussy camp myself. Among other things I shop at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. I listen to indie music and have occasionally whined about a band I like selling out to a major label. I suffer through horribly self-indulgent art films. I hang out at hipster bars. I even have an ironic tee shirt or two.

This blog ain't called Cultural Schizophrenia for nothing.

But in spite of my many acoutrements of pussydom there are lines that I simply won't cross. I still refuse to separate my garbage - except to make sure nothing that would identify me goes in - because, well, fuck you eco-freaks. And even though I rarely have the opportunity these days, fishing, shooting and other outdoorsy pursuits were a huge part of my life growing up, and my apartment's decor is reflective of that.

The offensive fish in my living room.

I only wish I also had a pic of the deer antlers and steer skull in my bedroom and assorted other things to provide the full effect, but anyone who lives outside of precious liberal environs like mine would die laughing over the comments these items have elicited over the years from people - girls usually - ranging from indignation to one chick who made me remove the deer antlers - the dead animal staring at her - before we could get jiggy.

I wish I was joking.

The irony is that I'm perceived to be one of them, so to the best of their knowledge I am only nominally heretical. But to watch the obsession with Sarah Palin is to see the left's contempt for "otherness" in full flower. To your average liberal you are either one of them, a member of a pet victim class or you are some shade of enemy. And as they've made rather obvious, Palin represents about the darkest shade there is.

Tim Blair of the London Telegraph assembled a hilarious compilation of reactions on the left.

My personal favorite, the New York Times ediitorial writers' blog:

We’ve differed with Sarah Palin a great deal on substance. We don’t agree with her hardline approach to the Iraq War, her harsh anti-government rhetoric, and her style of negative campaigning.

But we also worry a bit about, how should we put it, the persona she has brought with her to national politics. We did not care at all for the swipe she took against community organizers at the Republican National Convention.

And then there’s this. You don’t have to be a huge animal lover to question why Governor Palin chose to be interviewed — while issuing a traditional seasonal pardon of a turkey — while turkeys were being executed in the background.

Governor Palin reportedly declined an invitation to hold the interview at a different spot, though some are arguing that she was unaware of the turkey carnage going on behind her.

Take a look for yourself, here: [referring to the above video]

It isn't easy for the Times to make me laugh my ass off because I simply don't take the paper seriously enough. But this did the trick.

Translation of their commentary:

Cheeseball hack-lawyer-style setup about how their dislike of her has been high-minded and substantive.

Criticism of a few of her "radical" positions in spite of having invested a few months into the notion that she is mindless and has essentially read the scripts the McCain camp put in front of her.

Then they transition to the real purpose, attacking her personally. They use as an example a line in her convention speech which playfully mocked community organizing, Obama's rather ambiguous early career choice, as a response to his camp's dismissive cracks about her being a small-town mayor.

Then, of course, they contrive a way to wrap the turkey incident as the ultimate manifestation of why the infinitely serious Times was troubled by her all along.

The Times falls deeper into self-parody while their ownership goes ever deeper into the red. Too bad their unintentional comedy is lost on the bulk of their declining readership.

CNN officially jumps the shark

2008-11-20T04:57:00.000-08:00

What do a drawing made by a politician with too much free time on his hands and a sheet of paper containing notes from a campaign brainstorming session have in common? Well, if you're a Rhodes Scholar, a high school dropout or a vaguely attentive tropical fish then the obvious answer is not a fucking thing. But an intrepid reporter/enterprising moron at CNN named Jeanne Moos thought the two things were so much alike that it merited analyzing what each suggested about its author.

One of these days I'll get around to a fully-formed opinion about Sarah Palin. Thus far I've been too busy feeling protective in light of the nakedly obvious malice, bad faith, dishonesty and abject buffoonery which has characterized her coverage by most of the media. And the contrast with the sycophancy that has enveloped Obama has made it all the more nauseating. Both have been the object of creepy media obsessions and this quirky and ostensibly innocuous story thus becomes a classic summation of everything vile that has transpired.

This is a doodle.

This is a page of campaign brainstorming ideas.

This is a page of campaign brainstorming ideas and doodles.

When the media chooses our president

2008-11-18T00:07:00.000-08:00

The left has long been successful at pushing bullshit narratives - that McCain supporters think Obama is a terrorist for instance - because the truth is less important to them than what is emotionally satisfying. They never lose because they were exposed and rejected, only cheating or dishonesty can lead to their demise. And the media eats it up like the two-dollar whores that they are.

It is about time that Republicans started pushing back, especially when the evidence of media bias is as overwhelming as it has been in this election cycle. This video and the documentary in the works is but a goat fart in remotest Waziristan, but it is an example of the sort of thing that's needed. Not the least of the reasons is that the left is in overdrive attempting to play this election off as a thoughtful, carefully considered move to the left by the American public.

The video and companion poll released by Zogby have yielded a rather predictable torrent of outrage among left-wingers. From racial bean counting about the interview subjects to ludicrous accusations that the questions are biased they've attacked it from every angle in their tedious playbook.

But here's a little news flash. I'm in New York City. My vote counts for nothing. Attempting to sway others here is as pointless as being frank about my opinions can be socially perilous, so I devote my efforts to fleshing out how idiotic people are. Just like fat kids make jokes as a defense mechanism and ugly teenage girls get bitchy, I play the role of the well-informed but non-political person.

I've found that when someone makes a political comment on the assumption that I'm a fellow lefty, all I have to do is respond with something to the effect that the two parties are like Pepsi and Diet Pepsi, and that none of this stuff makes any difference. It reveals you to be a thinker, but a non-threatening one. Sort of like a Red Sox fan arguing with a Yankee fan while posing as a St. Louis Cardinals fan who just knows a lot about baseball.

The above probably sounds idiotic, but if I'm forced to discuss politics with liberals I don't know very well it is the only way I've found to amuse myself. Rather than suffer their rage or defensiveness I get to see under their hood and use being better informed as a knife for gutting while also maintaining an above the fray posture so I get to enjoy their pathetic attempts at salesmanship rather than suffer their bile.

During this election all these discussions have been sobering. And I'm not talking about random dillholes in a video but people I know to be rather sophisticated who en masse have chosen to carve their initials in the idiot tree. They don't get that the New York Times has crossed the threshold from being liberal to full blown advocacy. And why would they? All the other outlets they avail themselves of were marching to an identical tune. If the media was able to render Obama supporters who possess a degree of political awareness so utterly clueless it is rather unnerving to contemplate their effect on those who do not.

The burdens of specificity

2008-11-14T15:17:00.002-08:00

Some people like to use "moonbat" as a catch-all descriptor for out to lunch left-wingers of every stripe. But I like to keep it as a loving term for people with a demented world-view and a toxic brew of anger, paranoia and alienation. I'm sure there's ample overlap, but I see the creepy Obama cultists as their own separate category. They're not as malicious as a general matter, they're simply batshit crazy.

Stone cold loopy.

Bug-eyed loons.

Before this election my closest encounter with booby hatch narcosis was when my friend Charlie - an actor, figures - coaxed me into being his plus one for the final night of a Landmark Education Forum seminar. That's evidently how they recruit new cultists. And even though I maintained a cool exterior at the event, I was in desperate need of a colostomy bag because keeping from pissing all over myself with laughter was one of the greatest challenges I've faced.

Fortunately, after being hopped up on Kool Aid my buddy's antibodies eventually kicked in and six months later he was as embarrassed as a blackout drunk waking up beside an obese toothless crack whore with an Ernest Borgnine tattoo above her vajayjay.

First up is a teacher captured by a Scandinavian documentary crew scaring the crap out of a little kid in her class who supported McCain by saying the kid's father will never come home from Iraq if he's elected. School teachers are not the sharpest pencils in the box in general but this lady's pencil has an eraser on both ends.

And this, well, it pretty much speaks for itself.

If instead of widespread buyer's remorse kicking in this sort of cultish sentiment actually spreads like the Ebola Virus, please kill me. Slowly, quickly, whatever. Carve a frozen fish into a pointy spear and stab my testicles until I bleed to death. Strap a meat vest on and leave me for the Grizzly Bears. Singe my flesh with a blow torch then lock me in a room to starve to death while Barry Manilow is piped in 24/7. I don't care how, just. fucking. kill. me.

Don't blame me, bitches

2008-11-09T16:32:00.000-08:00

Anyone would think we had just elected a hip, skinny and youthful replacement for God, with a plan to modernise Heaven and Hell – or that at the very least John Lennon had come back from the dead.

The swooning frenzy over the choice of Barack Obama as President of the United States must be one of the most absurd waves of self-deception and swirling fantasy ever to sweep through an advanced civilisation. At least Mandela-worship – its nearest equivalent – is focused on a man who actually did something.

I really don’t see how the Obama devotees can ever in future mock the Moonies, the Scientologists or people who claim to have been abducted in flying saucers. This is a cult like the one which grew up around Princess Diana, bereft of reason and hostile to facts.

Peter Hitchens, brother of everyone's favorite acerbic political gadfly, Christopher Distillery Hitchens, pretty much sums up my feelings on this election in the Daily Mail. His full column in all its dreadful truthiness

I gave magnanimity a chance

2008-11-09T10:19:00.000-08:00

Moronicosity. That's "morons engaged in bellicosity" for anyone unfamiliar with my ambivalence toward actual dictionaries.

No Way Out

2008-11-05T11:00:00.002-08:00

It was one of those weird quirks of fate that sounds like the most shameless fabrication, but last night I grabbed a movie out of a small pile while everyone else was slobbering over election returns. It was a DVD marked only with the film title (as most of mine are) and all I remembered is that I had started watching it some time ago and I hadn't finished it because I either fell asleep or was otherwise distracted.

No Way Out (1950)

It is the story of a young black doctor (Sidney Poitier) as he contends with racism, being a novelty and the high standards he has for himself. He was to tend to brothers who were shot up in an altercation with police, and one of them dies as he is attempting to administer a spinal tap. The surviving brother, played by quintessential noir scuzzball Richard Widmark, accuses the doctor of killing him.

In what could best be described as an early form of Political Correctness, the hospital's chief administrator wants to sweep it under the rug, but Poitier goes to great lengths to assure that an autopsy is performed which will vindicate his decisions as a doctor. It is an interesting and nuanced story in which there is more honesty than seems possible in a modern Hollywood drama. And in Poitier's supervisor, played by Steven McNally, conservatives will see a character that speaks to them just as the hospital administrator so embodies much of what we loathe about the left.

For some reason, the pure dumb luck of viewing this film made me at peace with the election results. Obama has not earned my respect. Thus far I find him rather loathesome and his brain-dead supporters give me the creeps. But given our nation's history with regard to race it is hard not to see this as a good day for us. He's no Jackie Robinson. He isn't even Poitier's character in No Way Out. But the election result is what it is. There is "no way out" if you will. And I find that at least in the short-run my concerns for his presidency are tempered by the fact that this is an historic moment and the hope that black kids throughout the country take this as the sign of hope and the kick in the ass that the victimology pimps have for so long deprived them.

The people have chosen their beverage

2008-11-05T11:00:00.001-08:00

The voters have spoken, and they want hopeychangeness.

The grumpy gimpy geezer and the bespectacled moose-murderess can now ride off into the sunset and ban books or whatever it is warmongers and Jesus freaks do when the sunny uplands of history beckon a messiah to lead us out of the wilderness.

Of course, now the lightworker must lead, something he has as yet shown no capacity for. He must make bold decisions and difficult choices, something which, again, he has not demonstrated a stomach for. And he must deliver. Because Kool Aid tastes better when served as a abstraction.

Probably the most perverse thing about this election is that his competence and efficacy as a president will quite literally depend upon abandoning many of his stated positions. This, of course, includes stated positions which he has then lied about when called on them, but also a great many which were at the core of his appeal to the moonbat left. This will be a simultaneously entertaining and unnerving spectacle. Gird your loins.

Schumer compares talk radio to porn

2008-11-04T12:01:00.000-08:00

As is befitting a bunch of infantile closet totalitarians, there is a growing drumbeat on the left to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. In typical idiot lawyer/political hack fashion, Chuckie Schumer compares this to the right's efforts to keep pornography off the air and suggests they're hypocrites for opposing state intervention on one and supporting the other.

But regardless of how ridiculous it is for the government to dictate political content on broadcast outlets, the truth is that Fox News and various conservative radio hosts are big because people watch and listen, not simply because they are there. So while my gut reaction is that this is stupid, a part of me chuckles at the prospect of NPR, PBS, Pacifica Radio, minority broadcast outlets, CNN, MSNBC and the networks being required to significantly increase their non-existent conservative presence.

Naturally the left isn't interested in that. Balance, after all, is just left-wing fog of bullshit-speak for stifling speech they don't like. And I really think that rather than engaging in a chorus of fear-laden outrage, conservatives need to loudly mock this and stop playing the game on the left's turf. I mean, tell us in the grand scheme - absent of ideology - what constitutes unfairness as a matter of fact?

I would have given my left nut to see McCain - just once during a debate - turn to Obama and say "I'll gladly yield my time to the freshman senator if he will explain exactly what failed economic policies of the last eight years he is referring to." He would not have been able to do so because it is oft-repeated prattle devoid of substantive truth. The Fairness Doctrine is encased in the same kind of pillow-biter douchebaggery.

There is no calculus in assessing the media as a whole in which the left's complaints can stand the light of day and any stabs at evidence gathering would reveal that a revived Fairness Doctrine meant as anything other than a fascist attempt to suppress differing viewpoints would accrue to the Republicans' benefit. Bring it on biatch.

A few fun looks at leftism

2008-11-04T08:24:00.000-08:00

Conservative cutie Mary Katherine Ham channels her inner Sarah Silverman in this cheerily sarcastic homage to Tiny Obama, the presumptive Emperor of Nannyland.

And here's some old school cartoony goodness on the dangers of socialism. I especially enjoyed that people have to drink it like a magical elixir but they spit it out after a sampling of it.

One last election video

2008-11-04T07:52:00.000-08:00

Oy vey. ay caramba. Sacre bleu. Gluteus Obamaximus.

Republican candidate sabotaged, media strangely silent.

2008-11-04T05:58:00.000-08:00

Via Ace of Spades blog:

Eddie Adams is running against incumbent Kathy Castor for FL CD-11, parts of Tampa, the Southbay, Bradeton, and a chunk of south St. Petersburg. It's a light blue district demographically and electorally, but it is in play. It went for Bush in 2000, for example.

Well, someone decided that burning effigies didn't got far enough, so (apparently) they affixed a mattress to the underside of Adams' SUV, where it caught fire, which then spread to the vehicle interior. Adams was hospitalized for the resulting burns and is continuing his campaign.

Did I mention he's black?

Yep, sure is.

And yet, no one carried this, that I'm aware of, except for local AM 820. Not the Tampa Tribune. Not the (Pulitzer-winning!) St. Pete Times. Not the local broadcast news outlets. Nada.

Let this be a lesson to persons of all races, genders, ethnicities, and religions that
violence against minorities is only outrageous when the political axis of the victim aligns correctly; anything else is a wash.

Go Vote.

Especially in FL 11 (and FL 13.)
Show these people that we can't be intimidated. Show them that you fight fire with franchise, and that we shouldn't be afraid.

The PUMAs rock

2008-11-04T05:06:00.000-08:00

During the Bush years I eventually reached the point where I couldn't so much as see his mug on the television without quickly changing the channel. I haven't suffered Bush derangement Syndrome so much as that feeling you get when a song comes on the car radio that you don't want polluting your earspace. The only reason I didn't wander completely off the Republican reservation is that however big of an idiot I think Bush is, I hate the progressive left with the burning intensity of a thousand suns. And it is a very personal kind of hatred. So I was pretty much disengaged from politics for a couple of years because I simply lost the stomach for it.

The problem with being a conservative/libertarian in New york City isn't that you're outnumbered ten to one, but rather it is the fact that for a cosmopolitan city, people are incredibly sheep-like and insular. If they want to embrace left-wing politics, fine. Have at it. But most people lead ambitious and materialistic lives which are completely at odds with their politics. And they are devoid of any self-awareness because they read the same predictable news outlets and offer the same predictibly shallow opinions that meet with everyone else's predictably uncritical approval.

Classic examples being an idiot Columbia grad who chastised me for "dissing Castro" while she herself works in banking. Another Columbia grad I used to date telling me about her parents' cat "Trotsky" arouses similar indignation ... seeing as her father is a fucking commodities trader. Then there's the Harvard MBA I know who works for a business magazine and listens to Pacifica Radio. And the socialist Yalie friend who directs commercials for a living, which means during the 200+ days a year he doesn't have to work he's sitting on his ass in his $1.5 million apartment and pestering me with emails and links trying to convert me to his progressive, global citizen bullshit.

What am I supposed to say to such people? Facts are unimportant to them. All that matters is what is emotionally-satisfying to them. And it doesn't help when the inarticulate Bush and the drunken sailors in congress made defending anything next to impossible. So I simply avoided politics.

Then the Democratic primary happened.

And there it was, plain as day. The left was split between the loons and the idiot children for Obama with the preponderance of normal everyday Americans and thoughtful, substantive liberals in the Hillary Clinton camp. The media crawled up Obama's asshole and it was absolutely bewildering to watch Hillary get the Republican treatment. They managed to completely alter my opinion of her due to the way the media and fellow Democrats treated her and the grace in which she handled it. It jolted me back into politics in a way that I doubt McCain himself could have inspired me.

Since this summer I've been reading the Hillary Clinton Forum as well as various PUMA sites pretty much every day. I never posted because I didn't feel it was my place and when they closed registration for the general election I was glad that they did. When you live somewhere like NYC where so many liberals are politically sleep-walking, it is exhilarating to watch a group of people like the PUMA's awake from their slumber. And their forum has been the first that I read every morning and the last one before I go to sleep. They're an amazing group of people.

I hope they remain aware of what Republicans face in the media after this election is over and continue to view the news with a degree of distrust. And I hope they understand that we are more like them than the progressive left is. Even if we don't agree on everything we are in the same fight for the soul of America. And the thought of them going back to the other side scares me a little because their passion and energy is probably the only reason this election is somewhat close considering all the obstacles in McCain/Palin's way.

A couple of good PUMA articles. Note the angry comments from lefties which follow them:

Sarah Palin is a brainiac
An Obama speechwriter backs McCain

Hmmmm.....

2008-11-03T12:14:00.000-08:00

IS AMERICA REALLY

ON THE VERGE OF

ELECTING THIS JACKASS?

I was seriously tempted to make this a moonbat du jour post. It was bizarre when he gave Hillary the finger some months ago but I had to leave room for the possibility that he had an itch and the finger 99.9999999% of people use for that purpose was momentarily paralyzed. But twice in the same exact context? Sorry bitches. I just tried scratching my face with my middle finger. I even tried scratching my balls. The digit is ill-suited to those tasks.

So, in addition to everything else he's a passive-aggressive emotional infant.

They cling to their guns, their religion and, oh, uh, coal

2008-11-03T10:11:00.000-08:00

Big eared jackass.

When I took intro to micro/macro economics my freshman year it was a huge struggle. Well, mainly because the lectures were at 8 am, I'm not a morning person and I went out drinking every night that I could get a permission slip from my liver. I pretty much had to cram for a week before the midterm and final and got by thanks to the miracle of short-term memorization and an even higher than Biden IQ rather than a genuine grasp of the subject matter.

Yet even as an 18-year-old drunken retard more interested in plotting my way into Sally's underpants than plotting a Phillips Curve, I could simply look across the Lehigh campus and see Bethlehem Steel in a death spiral. Call it real life 101. They were getting crushed by overseas steelmakers who had more modern facilities, far lower wage and pension burdens and they simply couldn't compete anymore. Not a problem unless you lived in a region where steel is made, like, say Pennsylvania and Ohio. After all, it is certainly better for the economy as a whole when builders and other users can purchase steel at the lowest possible price. A dynamic economy is continually evolving.

But you'd have to have been beaten unconscious with an idiot stick not to understand that increased energy costs probe every orafice of our existence. And it is the most regressive tax there is. While I temporarily welcome the middle finger this extends to any number of battleground states - especially ones already scarred by the loss of industry - it is nonetheless bewildering that someone this clueless could conceivably be our president thirty-something hours from now.

And the idea that emissions fines/fees will fund alternative energy development should make everyone's skin crawl. The government would still be plodding along trying to map the human genome if Craig Venter hadn't told the HGP to bite a pillow and gone off to do it himself. That's really what we need right now: The Department of Energy except oil, coal, nuclear and wind if it ruins the view from the Kennedy compound.

It takes a real stroke of genius to say something which is both politically foolish and foolish foolish. But there's nothing to see here. He was misunderstood.

The answer to an age old question

2008-11-03T05:59:00.000-08:00

I'd always wondered.

Can a fatass put a foot in his mouth when he can't even see his feet?

Congressman Jerrold "waddler" Nadler shows its a lot easier than it looks.

All it takes is being honest when someone in Florida's Jewish community raises the issue of Obama's relationship with Reverend Wright.

But like a good Weeble, Nadler wobbles but he doesn't fall down. Asked later what he thought about Ahmadinejad, Chavez and assorted Hamas all-stars endorsing Obama he responded that those people are evil and if they gave Obama the thumbs up it was only because they really want McCain to win.

Yesssss! And when Iran says they want to wipe Israel off the face of the earth it really means they want to invite the Likud Party over for naked Twister and Jager bombs. That's the stuff of an efficient Obama surrogate. Don't worry about defying logic, just keep the ball moving forward because nobody is keeping score on this stuff.

Left-wing radio host wants Joe the Plumber DEAD!

2008-11-02T22:26:00.000-08:00

On a certain level this just makes me laugh. I mean, part of what makes progressives so squirrely about conservatives is that the overwhelming majority of the warrior caste leans to the right and even if they vote Democrat it is based on identity politics or Union interests or other such matters. Cops. The military. Look at the former athletes in politics. Even in the most fey, lefty vocation of all, think of who the Republicans are. From John Wayne to Charlton Heston to Arnold Scwarzenegger to Bruce Willis to "The Rock" to Clint Eastwood to Gary Sinise to Sylvester Stallone to Robert Duvall to James Woods they are overwhelmingly alpha males. Sure, there's also Kelsey Grammer and Jon Cryer who are as nebbishy as any progressive, just as there are probably a few cops and soldiers who read Mother Jones. But as a general matter it is true. Even angry alpha male progressive Henry Rollins turned to roids and rage because he was a big mouthed twerp who got his ass kicked growing up.

Progressives see in the right every guy who ever made them flinch in the locker room during gym class. Every mean, popular girl. Every fraternity or sorority who had fun without them. Every cop who ever showed insensitivity. Though, admittedly probably every gay basher too. It's why so many movies are tilted to reflect this dynamic, as it is the experience of dweeby writers and directors growing up. And its why many of the professions in which they predominate tend to be the most vicious and sexist, as these losers are replaying high school as the cool kids that they never were.

We are not in an era where tough - though misguided - leftists went to fight Franco in the Spanish Civil War. We're past the day when bare knuckle brawlers like Norman Mailer had street cred as tough guys. And we're not in a place like we were during the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam era where people who saw the wrong came from all walks of life. The only macho progressives I know of are not even men.

So when Charles Karel Bouley, KGO radio host, Huffpo writer and Obama supporter says he wants Joe the Plumber dead you have to admire the tough talk that results from having insulated oneself for so long from those who would laugh in the face of his delusions.

I guess that's one of the most frustrating things for progressives. They really ARE scared of the right. Viva la moonbats.

Weekend roundup

2008-11-01T08:31:00.000-07:00

Halloween is usually one of my favorite times of the year in NYC. But because this election has frayed my nerves in a way they usually don't and the Halloween Parade is overly political in even a normal year, I said no danke. And because I no longer have the stomach (or self-restraint) to suffer parties with a phalanx of girls thinking they're clever by dressing as Sarah Palin in lieu of the traditional french maid or hooker with bunny/pussycat ears I said no merci beaucoup to that. I could live with last year's "clever" costume of choice - a predictible Amy Winehouse every 3.6 feet - but even that is a crime because the slutty costume is Halloween's raison d'etre in my book. I hooked up with a slutty mermaid a couple years back and the glittery scales she shed all over my apartment still turn up from time to time to provoke a sly smile outta me. Ah, memories.

My rewards for hibernating were limited to watching some great college football. Pitt coming back from a 14-point halftime deficit to beat Notre Dame in four overtimes was a thing of beauty. Not only is Charlie Weis a gluttonous tool but the thought of Notre Dame's fanbase of white-haired-drunks and their dimwitted progeny getting weepy makes sadistic tears of joy flow from my eyes. SEC fans may be the epitome of creepy obsessiveness, but there is nothing as deluded and unjustifiably arrogant as your average Notre Dame fan. Unfortunately, the rest of my weekend entertainment was a snoozefest of epic proportions.

Movies:

I made a couple more random grabs from the movie collection. Two of my addictions are film noir and [the aesthetics of] late 50's/early 60's films, so I indulged in one of each.

A lady without passport

The thing about noir is that once you've burned through the classics you sort of have to love the genre or you're taking your chances. There are literally hundreds of good ones but many are as forgettable as your average Law & order episode. This film, starring John Hodiak and the beautiful Hedy Lamarr is an example of that. Hodiak plays an undercover immigration agent sent to post-WWII Havana to bust a human trafficking ring where he meets and falls for Lamarr who is desperate to get smuggled into the US. It gets off to an interesting start but sort of flounders after that. I can't really justify a serious review, except to say that if you're a noir junkie it is passable but if you aren't then life is too short and there are too many better obscure ones to bother with this.

Funny Face

Great visual style. There's something endearing about Audrey Hepburn even though I find her embarassingly campy and in many roles she exhibits all the sex appeal of Don Knotts, or, Gwynneth Paltrow. I suppose this film is a classic, sort of "The Devil Wears Prada" meets "Cinderella" with song and dance numbers. And I am totally down with any flick in which a bolshie bookworm is dragged into the world of crass commercialism. But I remembered really liking this film the first time I saw it and after a second viewing I don't remember why.

Happy Halloween

2008-10-31T17:34:00.000-07:00

Alphonzo Rachel. One more time before Tuesday.

2008-10-31T11:56:00.000-07:00

This dude has more manic energy than I thought possible without having bees in your pants. But the stingers here are straight from his pie hole and they are Grade A, Technicolor, Stereophonic, Groovalicious, Solid Gold truthiness. If he was a Dem he'd already be all over the television but I suspect we have not seen the last of him.

White man's greed runs a world in need

2008-10-31T04:40:00.000-07:00

Yes, boys and girls. It's time for a tour of Reverend Jeremiah Wright's new home! It certainly pays to preach Marxist-infused Black Liberation Theology. And now we can fully understand what the reverend meant in pushing on his largely poor congregants the idea of rejecting middle-classness. Two car garages and Pottery Barn are indeed for douchebags. Better to bide one's time in squalor and wait for the money fairy to deliver riches under your pillow.

When the good reverend speaks of rejecting middle class life I'm sure he has people like Barack's half-brother in mind. Ol' George Obama kicks it in a chill crib, um, hut, outside Nairobi, Kenya these days. He's theologically liberated [and black] on about a dollar a day in income. Also liberated from the dull sting of middle-class existence is Barack's Aunt Zeituni. She rocks a bitchin' pad in a South Boston housing project and has a choice six hour a week job.

Barack has learned well from the rev, as he's done his best to spare relatives the indignity of modest comfort. Surely the closest there is to godliness is Salvation Army furnishings and public transportation. At least until such time as the good lord bestows upon you a multitude of high end hybrid vehicles and mid-century modern furniture with assorted Nubian nicknacks and whatchamabobs to round out a stylish look.

Barack Obama's infomercial

2008-10-30T05:42:00.000-07:00

The compelling tale of a minority who spent his early childhood in Asia, came to the states and one day hit the big time in white racist America. Watch him inspire you with his promise of prosperity for everyone. Let him show you how to make it, just like he did!

Alright, so I didn't watch hopey changey's infomercial because I was busy braiding my nose hair and baking a Bundt cake last night. Though I'm sure The One talked about how George Bush eats babies and John McCain scoops out the entrails to put in his new sausage blend featuring Alaskan endangered species meat shot by Caribou Barbie. And he no doubt said that, uh, um, uh Haitian dirt pies are a Scooby Snack compared to what the poor subsisted on here for the last eight years.

What next? Oh, a little sumpthin sumpthin bout how ol' geezer slacks personally deregulated banks and told them to give mortgages to people who use pre-paid cellphones and how that shows the free-market has failed. That undoubtedly lead to more talk about his newfangled trickle-up economics where giving people who don't work more money makes bodega owners fat and sassy on Virgin Mary candle sales which they in turn will use to invent new empanada fillings that will result in the creation millions of new jobs.

Then he prolly mentioned how he'll shoot lightning bolts out of his ass and roll back the mighty oceans while he plays Jedi Mind Tricks on Mother Nature so that she'll blow so damned hard that wind farms will not only produce all our electricity but eliminate the need for fossil fuels, plastics, Fox News, suburbs, PG movies, professional bass fishermen and paranoid Israeli Jews who think Muslims are trying to kill them.

And then he's gonna invade Pakistan because, you know, he's not a pussy or a member of the international left just because he seems like one.

I like Tom Vu's infomercial much better. Tom's theme: Quit your bitching, get off your ass, work hard, make money, buy a boat and get laid.

Hunting Bill Ayers

2008-10-28T23:46:00.000-07:00

ABC News' Brian Ross confronts the former terrorist and current revolutionary marxist cuntbag on the streets of NYC. Naturally he has nothing to say.

And below, the O'Reilly factor catches up with him in front of his tony Hyde Park townhouse. Again he has nothing to say but it is rather touching to watch a marxist admonish a reporter for being on private property and then call the police - a major target of Weather Underground violence - for help.

I have yet to see a photo or video of this cretin where he is dressed like a grown-up. Even if I didn't know his backstory there is something fundamentally creepy about a man in his sixties with an earring and a steady supply of the kind of tee shirts the fat loser vegan girl in 11th grade who sits alone at lunch wears.

As an aside it is time that people stop referring to the Weather Underground as a 1960's group. They did splinter from the SDS in '69 but they perpetrated violence into the 80's and Ayers' lovely wife Bernardine herself actually went to the slammer as an accessory to one of the group's later atrocities.

Moonbats du jour

2008-10-27T19:57:00.000-07:00

I feel slight pangs of guilt for my relentless use of the term moonbat since it is not of my own invention. Maybe its petty jealousy for the genius who first uttered it. Its not like I couldn't rack my brain, scrunch my eyebrows like I'm taking a dump and squeeze out an adequate and original substitute. But - as Batman responded in the original series when Shame said "You big sissy, you couldn't drive nails through a snowbank" - why would I want to? You don't mess with perfection merely to gratify your own creative ego. I've worked for enough assholes who do that. And it is why most Hollywood films are shinola. So I'll simply buy Mr. or Ms. Moonbat originator a beer if I ever drunkenly stumble into my unknown, anonymous hero. Here's to you, genius.

Today's moonbat numero uno: Some dweeb named Jonathan Valania writing a commentary in the Philly Inquirer.

I actually had to read this twice to figure out if it was the most incompetently composed satire in the history of the written word or the most moronic serious commentary laced with intermittent and feeble stabs at humor since, well, the fuck if I know. Maybe ever. I even looked at some past writing of his quickly before diving into this and that was no help. I'll give him credit for good taste in music but I can't say that past work revealed him to be a particularly talented writer or terribly bright, insightful individual. So I suppose my ultimate verdict calls to mind P.J. O'Rourke's observation that the opposite of humor is not seriousness, but earnestness. And that earnestness is merely stupidity sent to college. If that is too abstract of an insult, then you probably find Michael Moore funny, Garrison Keillor amusing and Barack Obama a lightworker.

As a lifelong Caucasian, I am beginning to think the time has finally come to take the right to vote away from white people, at least until we come to our senses. Seriously, I just don't think we can be trusted to exercise it responsibly anymore.

I give you Exhibit A: The last eight years.

In 2000, Bush-Cheney stole the election, got us attacked, and then got us into two no-exit wars. Four years later, white people reelected them. Is not the repetition of the same behavior over and over again with the expectation of a different outcome the very definition of insanity? (It is, I looked it up.)

Exhibit B is any given Sarah Palin rally.

Exhibit C would be Ed Rendell and John Murtha, who in separate moments of on-the-record candor they would come to regret, pointing out that there are plenty of people in Pennsylvania who just cannot bring themselves to pull the lever for a black man - no matter what they tell pollsters.

These people are ruining things for the rest of us white people who are ready to move on. Sure, they have their reasons, chimerical though they may be: He's a Muslim. He's a terrorist. He's a Muslim terrorist. He's going to fire all the white people and give their jobs to blacks.

But those are just the little white lies these people allow themselves to be told, a self-induced cognitive dissonance that lets them avoid saying the unsayable: I cannot pull the lever for a black man.

Hey, some people just aren't ready yet, even the governor said so. Just like some people aren't ready yet for computers or setting the clock on the VCR.

Or, to hear Murtha tell it, some people - specifically some people in Western Pennsylvania - will never be ready. But the fact is, if you did a statewide head count of racists, you'd find just as many in eastern Pennsylvania as you would in the western part of the state.

That's why this ban on white people voting I'm proposing has got to be statewide. And I'm sorry to say, it's going to have to include all white people, even those who would vote for Obama, because you can't just let some white people vote. That would be unfair.

By this point, you either think I am joking or are calling me an elitist. I assure you I am neither. OK, maybe a little of both. But it wasn't always like this. I come from the Coal Belt, from that Alabamian hinterland between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, as per James Carville's famous formulation.
Full commentary at Philadelphia Inquirer

Reading this was as painful as watching a slow motion train wreck. But I didn't post it because I take him seriously enough as a thinker to dissect each and every instance of ludicrous monosyllabic flotsam. If anything I was drawn to his allusion to perhaps being vaguely elitist. Because this is not in the tradition of insightful, intellectual commentary but rather a written example of moron performance art.

That is, the proclamations of lightweight emotional infants who've felt marginalized by life at some point and in finding a community of like-minded souls they forge the illusion that they and their peers are the very definition of normalcy. The trade-off, of course, is that in exchange for the emotional security, snarky notions of superiority and overall insular smugness every thought and gesture is a play and appeal to the home team. Elitism isn't exactly the word for this. It is more akin to living a lie.

Because while he will get hugs and high fives from the moonbat community he is disconnected from any capacity to persuade, connect or speak honestly to the larger world. It was purely written for his own emotional needs while also bearing the potential to turn people away from his desired voting booth outcome. And there's nothing much useful brought forth in the world from an undertaking like that. Street theater of the absurd. Fucking. moonbats. God love ya.

Today's moonbat numero dos: Chad Michael Morisette, West Hollywood mutant

WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. (AP) ― A Halloween decoration showing a mannequin dressed as vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin hanging by a noose from the roof of a West Hollywood home is drawing giggles from some passers-by and gasps of outrage from others.

The mannequin is dressed in brunet wig, glasses and a red business suit. Another mannequin dressed as John McCain emerges from a flaming chimney.

Chad Michael Morisette, who lives in the house, told CBS 2 News that drivers and bus passengers have been stopping to snap pictures of the macabre scene.

Morisette says the effigy would be out of bounds at any other time of year, but it's within the spirit of Halloween.

He says "it should be seen as art, and as within the month of October. It's Halloween, it's time to be scary it's time to be spooky."

Who am I to disagree? Art indeed. I think my comments on the preceding moonbat adequately cover this cat's bag of afflictions. Though his last quote does kind of suggest he's a queen as opposed to a weepy hetero pussy. I'm ordinarily more forgiving with regard to the former because I have many gay friends and regardless of their upbringing, beliefs and values, their politics have been forced upon them by being marginalized based on their sexual orientation. But still, I'd be lying if I didn't say that I'd laugh my ass off were someone to set this guy's house on fire.

Don't ask the Obama campaign tough questions

2008-10-27T16:57:00.000-07:00

These poor, poor little budding fascists. It isn't enough that the bulk of the national media is indistinguishable from the Obama campaign. Their relationship has been sort of like that between the clownfish and sea anenome, though the analogy breaks down because I'm not sure which is the clown and which is the poisonous predator.

Nonetheless it seems pretty clear that the Obama campaign has grown so accustomed to a free ride that any interrogatories which stray from that are so jarring that they feel like attacks. Weird. Creepy. Imagine being appalled by challenging questions.

Just remember:

If you're a TV anchor in Florida, don't ask any challenging questions or your station will be banned from further access.

If you're a TV anchor in Philadelphia, don't ask any challenging questions or your station will be banned from further access.

If you are student journalists and break a story about Obama campaign workers engaged in vote fraud in Ohio, watch out for dweeby hack lawyers for the Obama campaign issuing threats to you.

From: Rosenberg, Thomas
Date: Sun, Oct 26, 2008 at 2:32 PM
Subject: At least in today’s blog you spelled my last name right
To: tiffany

In other words, I am going to read what you write and watch what you say. Hopefully you will be fair and impartial as you told me you would be.

Thomas L. Rosenberg
Roetzel & Andress, LPA

Columbus, OH 43215
trosenberg@ralaw.com
h/t: Greta wire

I believe I'll spell this lawyer's name Thomas L. Rosencock. Brave man, trying to intimidate college girls for reporting the truth. Then again maybe they'd laughed at his effeminate features and visible from outer space hairpiece. I'd be angry too if I was a fucking loser and practicing law in Columbus, Ohio.

Obama's Marxist gibberish is 'almost' funny at this point

2008-10-26T20:54:00.000-07:00

In the real world this radio interview Obama gave in '01 would send shivers down most peoples' spines. In some circles I'd picture mass projectile vomiting like the pie eating contest scene in the movie Stand By Me, though I myself merely gagged, retched and threw up in my mouth. And in the real world it would be yet another proclamation of unelectability from Obama that simply could not be ignored by the media.

But we are living in bizarro world. Yes, where unicorn farts smell like lavender, squirrels speak multiple languages, dicks can actually suck themselves and Obama is a run of the mill Democrat whose fringe nut associations and his own convictions don't matter.

Bizarro world. Where the media relentlessly attacks a plumber because he got more frankness regarding Obama's socialist bent out of him than they've wanted or been able to get themselves in however many months.

Bizarro world, where Brian Williams isn't a college dropout, Campbell Brown didn't go to a retarded rich girl's college and Charlie Gibson wasn't rejected by every law school on earth at a time when being rich and well-born made that damn nigh impossible.

Bizarro world. A place where, as I type this, Kate Beckinsale and Adriana Lima are in a fist fight in my bedroom over who'll get to lick my balls while the other one fixes me dinner.

Bizarro world, where the media obsesses over Sarah Palin - who shops at fucking second hand stores in real life - and the rest of her middle-class family because they had $150K worth of clothing and accessories bought for them to wear during the campaign by the RNC. The world where these same assholes obsessed over her meager per diems when she worked from home instead of the governor's mansion 800 miles away yet didn't bother mentioning that among other things she got rid of the governor's private jet and personal chef as extravagances unfair to the taxpayers.

Bizarro world, that magical place where the New York Times intimates on page one that McCain had an affair with a lobbyist in spite of no evidence, Palin is in a scandal for trying to get a cop fired who threatened her family and tasered his step-son and few are troubled that $100+ million in an educational foundation Obama administered went down a rathole of subversive left wing pet projects.

But I digress.

Because in bizarro world it is okay to ram a giant ceramic cock into barnyard animals' assholes, pilot commercial airliners full of small children while loopy on crack and visit senior centers in your underwear and giggle and bark like a dog to scare the old bats who are trying to watch reruns of Murder, She Wrote.

Those things must all be okay in bizarro world, and not simply a figment of my perverse and uncouth imagination. Because how else does one explain the media's lack of concern or curiosity about Obama's obvious dishonesty regarding his relationship with the leader of this extremely demented blight on humanity?

I probably should have actually commented on the Obama interview at the top of the post. But truthfully it speaks for itself. You either agree with what he says, are too batshit crazy and Kool Aid addled to care about what he's saying or you're girding your loins for the longest four years of your life.

Me? I'm just wondering aloud what exactly the trillions of dollars of social spending since the Great Society were if not reparations, or in the very least, redistribution of wealth to that end. And I'm wondering who has the gun at kids' heads to keep them from studying. I'm wondering how he got into Columbia, or Harvard, when in spite of not releasing his transcripts we know for certain he never made honors. I'm wondering why he thinks it is that he's protected from an excess of critical thinking.

I'm wondering why it is that the principal determinants of poverty in this country aren't racial but single parenthood and the age at which one has children. Because the devastation these things have wrought on the black community are as undeniable as is the fact that they are a modern development which tracks seemlessly with the roll-out of social programs he celebrates.

And I'm wondering how he spent 20-plus years in a church that espouses Black Liberation Theology which has as a primary tenet a rejection of [white] middle-classness. I guess that means stay poor and hope to get rich but steer clear of the unsightly middle. And unless that is a grand concept my small brain is unable to fathom, it sounds a whole fucking lot like something one should be eaten alive by rats for pushing on anyone poor.

And that's about all I have to say to this rather obvious example of a white-raised-guilt-ridden pimp daddy for the Misery-Industrial Complex.

Happy happy thoughts

2008-10-26T14:26:00.000-07:00

Even though things look a little grim for those wishing to keep Obama out of the White House, I refuse to let it consume me at the expense of my mental health. You gots to keep some small sense of humor about it. So here's some happy thoughts, distractions and recommendations.

In general I prefer folk art and POP to whatever is au courant in the art world. Some jerkwad "sophisticates" might argue that I really don't get it, but I'd suggest that I do and I just don't fucking care. Something either appeals to you or it doesn't. I love this print by Gary Baseman. Especially the way it captures the expressiveness of old school animation with a modern way. I'd buy one in a heartbeat were the prints not the size of a postcard. Maybe I'll get a starving artist to duplicate it in a larger size. I don't know what the ethics of that are if you're not trying to deceive anyone into thinking it is an original. I just know it would look pretty cool in my living room.

Movie recommendations:

Shitty weather here in New York put me in the mood for old movies, so I yanked a few out of my massive collection - thanks to a brother who has bought, illegally downloaded or copied off cable practically every film ever made - and took myself back to the golden age of Hollywood. I've been doing so much of this in the past few years that I'm starting to think of people like Robert Mitchum, Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart and Gene Tierney as my contemporaries.

13 Rue Madeleine

Stars James Cagney and Richard Conte as American agents during the run up to the Allied invasion. One is actually a Nazi plant and US intelligence decides to allow him to maintain his cover in order to feed him disinformation. It is based on a true story, and like other films of this period based on actual events like The House on 92nd Street it has a dull, documentary quality for much of the film but is definitely worth watching if the subject matter interests you.

From Here to Eternity

Probably most famous for the scene in which Burt Lancaster rolls around with Deborah Kerr on the beach, this is a classic in every sense of the word. It has everything. A great cast. Adultery. Murder. The almost frivolous corruption which enveloped the military when it lacked the sense of purpose with which war fills it. Frank Sinatra as a goofball drunk. Donna Reed in all her hotness. And no happy ending.

Book recommendation:

During the week I read Parliament of Whores for like the fifth time. Whenever I find myself taking politics too seriously, find myself dispirited or otherwise need a reminder about why I care at all this hilarious book is all the comic relief and focus I need. PJ O'Rourke's schtick has maybe grown a little tired but this is him in his prime and it is brilliant and though-provoking even if you're a big government even if you're silly enough to disagree with his political point of view.

Sports:

And lest this blog's contents suggest I'm some weepy little pseudo-intellectual Manhattan dork boy, three cheers to QB Mike Teel and the Rutgers football team for coming out of their coma and opening a can of whoop-ass on #17 Pitt.

I adopted Rutgers because I'm a Jersey native, LOVE college football and I can't bring myself to give a shit about my alma mater's big games against the likes of mighty Princeton. And while it was lame having to watch this game on my laptop since ESPN 360 was the only coverage, it was still more fun than moping around a bar or tailgate after a loss. That's the funny thing about college football. Every game is precious and meaningful. And even though there is no substitute for a tailgate surrounded by hot college girls and free-flowing beer, it all dissipates into one big knot in your stomach when you lose. It was nice to finally have the happy back even if it was confined to me in my shorts in the living room.

Another window into Obama's soul

2008-10-25T11:52:00.000-07:00

If it was only this, fine. But hey, we're faced with a scumbag left which assaulted George Bush for momentarily sticking with a group of small children and displaying calm after hearing from aides that the World Trade Center was attacked. While I never fully understood what the fuck they thought was wrong about Bush's conduct there, I sure as shit understand the nature of Obama here.

It calls to mind the old story about "Pinch" Sulzberger, the publisher of the now junk bond-rated New York Times. He was fanatically opposed to the Vietnam War when he was younger and his father "Punch" asked him what would be his preferred outcome if an American soldier and a North Vietnamese soldier were shooting at each other. Without hesitation he replied that he would prefer the American soldier was killed because it was the other guy's country. I suppose I feel the same way when an invading army of leftists tries to steal our country by pushing a dishonest narrative about their preferred - and like-minded - candidate on us.

Every unscripted moment of Obama's life seems to paint a picture of someone who belongs nowhere near the White House.

Rednecks and their French lingo

2008-10-25T11:34:00.000-07:00

No merci beaucoup indeed, my toothless friends.

Moonbats du jour

2008-10-24T20:19:00.000-07:00

It is a pity I can't find a picture of the blithering idiot who tried to bomb the Republican convention. Though I doubt it requires much imagination to visualize your standard-issue progressive ball of gloom and despair.

Part deux: Wacky New Yorkers living la vie boheme.

This here ... is art! And the genius who conceived this lets you participate by picking up a gun and symbolically offing Sarah Palin and her children. Pagan Power has the whole story.

Living in New York I've seen enough shiteous art to last five lifetimes. And I don't even seek it out. As a point of example, I've been to lesbian poetry slams to support a friend. I have another friend who is a well-known (in such circles) conceptual artist or performance artist depending on her inspiration. Both are likable enough weirdos I've met through work. The poetry is always full of emotional torment laced with a surface level of faux cleverness and a heavy dose of look at me! With the artist, her work is always juvenile, moronic, irony-laden and just like the poetry, a heavy dose of look at me! And hers is better than most I have been subjected to. It isn't hard to see how this same shallow-thinking therapy masquerading as art can go the extra mile into vile, violence-inciting political speech. But it isn't to be taken literally, you see. You're just dealing with emotional infants.

If you want performance art elevated to the next level, the moron bomber above is filling the same psychological needs as the subsequent and "ingenious" Palin hunter. One of the great dividing lines between left and right is that we conservative/ libertarian types have tended to see liberals as good-hearted but goofy, emotional and deeply misguided. By contrast, the left, especially progressives see us as evil. Nothing is out of bounds in the cause of destroying us or our illegitimate views. And I have to say that I am beginning to lose whatever generosity of spirit I once possessed with regard to the left. I feel a performance art piece coming on.

Just who the hell is this Obama guy?

2008-10-24T01:04:00.000-07:00

I've wanted to give Obama the benefit of the doubt because on many levels it will be a great day when America elects a black president. But this is not like buying some fucking bargain bin used DVD where you have a feeling the movie sucks but figure it is only a buck so what the hell do you have to lose? Yet that is the fundamentally unserious manner in which the media has checked under the hood of his hope and changeness.

It would be frustrating to me, disgusting even, if the American people were to choose Obama for who he is and what he believes. But that is democracy in action.

It also isn't what has transpired thus far.

The man has no record of legislative achievement and nothing in his life matches his rhetoric. So what is a sane person supposed to think? Should one not look to his background, associations and past utterances to get the measure of the man who would be leader of the free world? It doesn't inspire much faith when he blatantly lies with impunity about the potentially harmful things in his past which are established facts. It inspires even less confidence that there have been a litany of revelations in various corners of the internet which have been scrubbed by allies of his the moment they came to light.

Which brings us to Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his pastor of 20+ years. The issue of race is a mine field for McCain. Not the least of the reasons being how shamelesly the media and Obama supporters use it to protect him from scrutiny and truthing. But in spite of the fact that Obama laughably suggests that he never heard Wright spew vitriol like the famed "God damn America" speech, it is a church which preaches black liberation theology. Its very existence is dedicated to a marxist-infused, black-centric and virulently anti-American take on Christianity.

Here is James Cone, one of the leading lights of Black Liberation Theology and a major influence on Obama's own pastor:

And here is Obama in his own words:

Obama is a bright guy, running a very slimy but effective campaign. But just as with his cozy relationship with Ayers, Rashid Khalidi, ACORN, Tony Rezko, the Democratic Socialists of America's now defunct New Party and others, this stuff clearly matters when it so obviously informs his view of America and the world. It is shameful that the media is more preoccupied with what Sarah Palin is wearing.

Leftist academics do the predictible: Rally around unrepentant terrorist Ayers

2008-10-22T22:07:00.000-07:00

It is rather touching that a bunch of far-left academics have created a petition in support of Billy Ayers. The shocking, shocking McCarthyite tactics which the McCain campaign has engaged in by sullying the good name of a man who declared war on the US, followed through with several bombings and avoided life in prison on a technicality have been beyond the pale. And linking him to Obama, how unbelievable. I'm sure it won't survive the review process but I felt compelled to sign the petition in the name of Diana Oughton. That was Ayers girlfriend who blew herself up while building bombs designed to inflict mass casualties at an army base dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey. That they spectacularly failed and killed themselves in the process may be the only comic relief they ever provided.

[click to enlarge]

That's their statement preceding the petition. No mention of what Ayers did, what he believes to this day or the fact that he regrets none of it. But that's because they are a-o-k with every last bit of it.

[click to enlarge]

Worth noting is when these scumbags actually acquired the domain name and initiated this "spontaneous" support. And who, pray tell, would have been anticipating the possible need for such a thing a year ago? Someone who was just a guy in his neighborhood?

The comprehensive argument against Barack Obama

2008-10-22T21:56:00.000-07:00

Hot Air has put together a great primer on why Barack Obama should not be our next president. It tackles all sorts of issues and is accompanied by a vast array of videos of Obama in his own words on them. Worth a look for anyone who is undecided or is trying to sway people they know.

Black Republicans. God bless all ten of them.

2008-10-22T21:45:00.000-07:00

This dude is very funny, and he has other videos worth watching as well.

And the Republicans have a moron VP candidate?

2008-10-21T12:28:00.001-07:00

This is just priceless. You almost have to wonder if all the hair transplants and Botox injections have left Joe Biden's head too toxic to perform the basic tasks asked of a lab monkey. Actually, scratch that. This guy has been engaged in buffoonish gasbaggery since before his hair fell out and his skin got all saggy. He's actually made so many idiotic and outright false statements in his career that people scarcely bat an eye anymore. If I was holding casting sessions for an old guy in a clown suit who is supposed to creep out little kids at a birthday party I'd tell everyone auditioning to study Joe Biden.

Shockingly shocking shocker: Colin Powell endorses hopey changeness!

2008-10-19T11:45:00.000-07:00

I won't get into his motivations and whether they are borne of political conviction or pigment-based pimping of the lamest order. He was never really thought of in conservative circles as anything more than a squishy opportunistic Republican. Its not even surprising that the same left and media that wanted this guy's head on a pike will now trot him around in a rickshaw. [Just googling to find a Powell pic for this post it was hard to miss old left-wing images portraying him as everything from a Nazi to a monkey]

No. What is creepy is that Colin Powell will now replace - of all people - John McCain himself as the media's favorite squishy conservative. If four years ago you had wedged your head up the ass of a barnyard animal and remained there until this summer you'd be surprised to discover that McCain is a crazed right-wing anger nut representing the forces of darkness. He was the Colin Powell of the last election cycle. The one who - because of his mavericky goodness - the giddy whispers on the left were all about. Would he switch to the Democrat Party? Would he endorse Kerry? Fuck, would he be Kerry's running mate? Ha! But of course he didn't stand in the way of the annointed back then.

I find it remarkable that Powell perceives Obama to be a transformational figure. There is only one respect in which I might concede that such a characterization is justified. The loony left and the nut fringe right have long had in common a belief that the two major parties are one and the same. It partly explains why enough moonbats voted for Nader in '00 to keep Gore from winning Florida. But even farther on the fringes you have people who simply don't bother voting at all.

There is a palpable difference, of course. Fringe nut right wingers come from the lower elements of society whereas the permanent protest class loony fringe left features innumerable people culled from the ranks of the educated. Tenured professors. Bored rich kids who can't get over their parents' divorce when they were 12. Morons in Hollywood. Sensitive rock bands. Red diaper babies. The shy, fat, ugly girl in your high school honors classes who is still mad as hell because nobody in school gave a shit about her SAT scores.

But guess what? Every last nutbag who hates America, hates middle-classness, hates our economic system and hates people who are resillient, happy and proud of those things has been inspired and energized by Obama. They see part of themselves in him. So every Socialist-Maoist-Stalinist-Wahabbist-Anarchist-Satanist-ArchVeganEcoTerrorist-Bolivarian creep and degenerate within our borders is doing the happy dance.

And if you want to ring the warning bell for the big-belt-buckled Idaho Militia kooks and angry white men who live with mom at age 50 and think brown people are the reason their lives are comical and miserable failures, well, let's just say that the Obama campaign's brand of "inclusion" has tingled their tin-foil-lined hats into believing McCain is a "left-winger" worth fighting for.

Aren't we all so lucky to have such a special being running for president.

KILL THE PLUMBER!

2008-10-17T20:16:00.000-07:00

Note to self: Never play football with your son in the front yard. And if you should choose to ignore this advice and the Democratic presidential candidate makes a random unannounced stop in your neighborhood, run inside and hide. If you choose to ignore that advice and the candidate comes up to you, don't be polite and tell him you're an undecided voter. And don't proceed to ask him a question. And if you choose to ignore all that advice, don't ask him a simple question that he will give a stupid, embarassing and revealing answer to for the whole country to see. Got that?

This has to be the funniest thing I've seen since we first learned that Sarah Palin was a secessionist tanning bed owner who banned books which hadn't been written yet. What. The. Fuck. is going on here? This video, much like the Palin secessionist scam video that the Obama campaign astroturfed, is professionally produced. Yet it almost feels like a parody.

That's not the weirdest of it though. How is it that the media has been so thorough that we know that Joe has a tax lien on him but there hasn't been a mention in the mainstream press that the same is true of Obama's own campaign treasurer? And could there be anything more bizarre than a moron Obama campaign person saying that McCain didn't vet Joe? The left is actually trying to give the impression that this guy moved into his home as a Republican sleeper agent on the off chance that a presidential candidate would show up in his yard. I hear what they're saying. A few years ago I bought condoms, lube and whipped cream in case Jessica Biel wanders into my apartment building next week.

A couple more nuggets about this surreal, funny if it weren't so disturbing, nonsense. All courtesy of a moment where Obama lowered his guard about the hopey changey Kool Aidey bullshit and misspoke truthfully.

moonbats du jour

2008-10-16T16:45:00.000-07:00

Towards the end of the Palin rally at Elon Univeristy, a sophomore named Andy Milne, was arrested for disorderly conduct for heckling. Palin even made a reference to his outburst. We got very good footage of him being taken out by the police, he was yelling and screaming about his right to have an Obama sign at the rally. He is yelling at our camera, and gets pushed down by cops on the police car.……

An ironic twist to this story is that Brian Wilson interviewed him yesterday on the Strategy Room during the 5 oclock hour. In the interview he said that he was undecided and a former Hillary supporter. In this footage he is a very nice looking college student, and Brian tagged out the interview, “…a bunch of nice students at Elon.”

hat tip: GretaWire

Classic moonbat. This stuff happens at Republican rallies and when conservative speakers come to college campuses every. single. day. With rare exception there simply is no equivalent behavior on the right. The idea that this is suppressing speech reminds me of my younger brother when we were kids. He'd do something to me, say, smack me in the arm. I'd do it back and then he was mentally, emotionally incapable of processing the idea that we were even. So he'd always have to hit me back. Even though I could beat the living crap out of him I would always have to be the one to put a stop to the conflict. He's all grow'd up now, but I see the same level of cognitive development in the way the left deals with "illegitimate" speech they don't like. Then, of course, there's the fact that this kid posed as an undecided voter just the day before on Fox News. So rare that that happens.

Part deux: Woman who supports McCain attacked in NYC

While the Democrat-leaning media continues to scare undecided voters with bedtime stories about some mythical angry McCain supporter whom nobody has seen, here is a real district attorney’s complaint documenting an unprovoked assault by an enraged Democrat against a McCain volunteer in midtown Manhattan: “Defendant grabbed the sign [informant] was holding, broke the wood stick that was attached to it, and then struck informant in informant’s face thereby causing informant to sustain redness, swelling, and bruising to informant’s face and further causing informant to sustain substantial pain.”

The names have been redacted out of respect for people’s privacy

The overly formal document doesn’t mention this important detail: the victim was a small, quiet, middle-aged woman wearing glasses, and the attacker was a loud, angry man who went into orbit at the mere sight of McCain campaign signs.

The attacker: shielding his face from the camera while talking to the police

On a Monday afternoon, September 15, 2008, three McCain volunteers were holding campaign signs and distributing leaflets on a busy corner of 51st Street and Lexington Avenue. As they were peacefully talking to each other, they were approached by a man who, in the words of the victim, provided the impression of “a rather benign, doughy-looking guy — not a person I would have expected to assault me.”

Full story and more pictures here.

Assault and moonbattery. God bless my fellow New Yorkers. They still haven't forgiven Giuliani for fixing a city thought to be ungovernable because he removed the peep shows and crack whores from Times Square. But at least there are still vigilantes around to go old school Bernie Goetz on middle-aged women wielding McCain signs.

Part Trois: More New Yorkers in action. Less rage-y, but extra batty.

I loves me some street theater. You don't need to be a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. And you don't need to be no stinking psychiatrist to recognize people more interested in fulfilling their own emotional needs than in persuading people through intelligent debate and engagement. A lot of things in the world piss me off but I can't say it has ever occurred to me to make a spectacle of myself over them.

Joe the plumber

2008-10-16T10:05:00.000-07:00

Not a big fan of political sideshows but the left is already calling this guy a racist for likening Obama's "tap dancing" in the debate to Sammy Davis Junior! Tap dancing is a perfectly reasonable metaphor so we'll have to see how far they push this assininity. One thing for certain is that I can hear the media snapping the gloves on already and ol' Joe's life is gonna get a more thorough proctology exam than the Democrat contender for president has. Nevermind the fact that this came about because Obama said something to him which was simultaneously stupid, revealing and unhelpful to his cause.

Update: And to think I was semi-kidding when I said this guy would be torn a new asshole by the media. Considering this is a guy who (according to the Toledo Blade) was just playing football in his yard with his son when Obama made an unscheduled stop to do some door to door campaigning in the neighborhood and Joe Wurzelbacher was captured on camera asking Obama a simple question about taxes, this is beyond fucking bizarre. The thing the left doesn't get and the average moron journalism major in the media has no capacity to understand is that peoples' income levels are not static over a lifetime. And that people do not necessarily begrudge people who make more money because they aspire to, and in many instances succeed in, ultimately making more themselves. The media and nutroots lefties have gone to absurd lengths to "destroy" him already, merely for the sin of expressing the concern that Obama's tax plan would hurt his ability to build a business he's planning. Even Obama himself has gotten in on it: