Muslim exceptionalism.

Progressives are just too damn hard to parody.

The best conservative rock song ever?

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.

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

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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Warhol screen tests II

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.

Snicker.

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.]

Andi Sullivan is coo coo.

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.

I shall not shut up.

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

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.

Love and hate for the Upper West Side

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

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.

Schumer compares talk radio to porn

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.

Another window into Obama's soul

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.

Leftist academics do the predictible: Rally around unrepentant terrorist Ayers

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?

William Ayers: Just some guy from my neighborhood

While I was very familiar with the Weather Underground and the other violent leftist groups that were spawned in the late sixties (but lived on into the 80's), it wasn't until 9/11/2001 that William Ayers in particular was to be forever seared into my consciousness.

You'd think the memory of watching the towers collapse and all the chaos and hell it unleashed here in NYC would wipe out everything else about that day. But we don't choose our memories, and what is also etched in my brain from 9/11 is what an uncommonly beautiful day it was - in juxtaposition with the fear, confusion and rage we all felt - and an interview I'd read in the New York Times that morning with Ayers - promoting a memoir - who expressed no regret for anything he'd done. And wished he'd done more.

It is emblematic of the cultural sickness and depravity among mainstream liberals that radical leftist degenerates such as Billy - more fitting than "William" since he thinks and dresses like an adolescent - and his whack job wife Bernardine Dohrn even have a place at the table in polite society. Yet both are college professors now. And in spite of a dearth of wisdom, no discernible personal growth and no alterations in their belief systems whatsoever, normal people are supposed to be accepting of them as anything other than nutbags and terrorists? Fuck that. They are not ex-radicals. They're still revolutionary marxists devoted to the destruction of the capitalist system and America as we know it even if their weapon of choice is fucking with our education system rather than physically blowing things up.

And fuck the notion that tying Obama to them is guilt by association. Nobody worthy of being President of the United States would have a relationship with people like this. When this issue was briefly raised in the Democratic primary he brushed it aside as just a guy from his neighborhood and while Hillary Clinton wasn't buying it the media let it go like the boot-licking fanboys they are. But Obama and his campaign have lied a dozen different ways since in minimizing their relationship and it is because they know damn well that while this may be no big deal in liberal circles or a Democratic primary, normal Americans will be deeply troubled by it.

It is part of a pattern with this messianic ass clown. I've never been one to get all hot and bothered about conspiracies and political intrigue, but when you have a politician with no accomplishments, a vague history which allies of his have gone to great pains to hide or scrub, a comatose media which is too enthralled to call him on his dishonesty and an army of creepy left-wing moonbats willing to do his bidding with a win at all costs ethos then bringing to the fore his associations like Ayers becomes pretty goddamn relevant.

In August Stanley Kurtz inquired with the University of Illinois-Chicago library about looking at the files from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The $100 million+ educational foundation which Obama and Ayers served on. He was initially granted permission and then an Obama ally got wind of it and the library was pressured to deny Kurtz access. After outside pressure was brought to bear they relented. The drama caught the attention of radio host Milt Rosenberg of WGN's extension 720 and he invited Kurtz and an Obama campaign official on to discuss Ayers and their work together.

The Obama campaign refused, but not before unleashing a hornet's nest of moonbats to try and intimidate the station out of airing Kurtz and semi-literate callers reading off robotic talking points to sabotage the program. It is a very creepy hour of radio

Kurtz has not been alone in pursuing this story. On this for as long or longer has been left-wing law professor Steve Diamond who has somewhat different concerns about the Obama-Ayers relationship but is equally dogged in fleshing it out. His Global Labor blog is a treasure trove of information on their troubling relationship.

Some of Kurtz's articles:

Obama's selection to head Annenberg

Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools

More on what ayers and obama promoted

Stanley Kurtz on Fox:



Obama spokesman lies about Obama not knowing he was a terrorist:



CNN (of all places) calls Obama on his bullshit.:



Rudy Giuliani on FOX:



McCain ad just released:




More on the peace and love that was the Weather Underground:


Ayers documentary footage juxtaposed with other elements:




Connie Chung interviews unrepentant Ayers and Dohrn in '98:



Part one of a documentary:

What passes for introspection among feminists

There's something almost adorable about how insular liberal academics are. Here's a woman, Jane Marcellus, who is a professor at a third or fourth-tier directional Tennessee school, has the look of someone who utterly depends on being perceived as intelligent for any semblance of self-esteem and is so enmeshed in a masturbatory ideological struggle that even when she displays a modicum of independent thought she lacks the security to couch it in anything other than the snark of conformity.

There have been all manner of loony pronouncements from feminist academics with regard to Palin, but I find those who posture as though breaking the chains of groupthink to often be more revealing. From her commentary:

I know the V.P. debate is an old story already, given the billions more in bad financial and economic news we've had since then, topped off by a new face-off between the two ticket-toppers, Barack Obama and John McCain Tuesday night.

But I keep thinking about the Palin-Biden face-off. I watched it at a hotel bar in Seattle, where I was attending an academic conference. Some of us slipped up to the top floor where we could see Sarah Palin and Joe Biden on a big screen over good ales and margaritas.

Certainly, we felt guilty about it; we were missing a major speaker and a fundraising auction to help students. But who could resist? After all, if it was anything like the Charles Gibson and Katie Couric interviews, it promised to be funnier than a Tina Fey skit.

So yes, here is a journalism professor, a feminist no less, who apparently wasn't perceptive enough to be offended by the double-standard by which Joe Biden's career of rambling idiocy is judged in the media. Who apparently lacked the intellectual honesty to be appalled by the way Palin's Charlie Gibson interview was conducted and edited. Imagine the burden of shaping young journalists falling to someone utterly oblivious to the fact that Gibson deliberately distorted a quote of hers while addressing a church and when she called him on it he maintained that those were her exact words. Imagine not being appalled at the pomposity of his question regarding the "Bush Doctrine" (which the fever swamps of the left had so much fun with) when foreign policy experts don't even agree on what it is. And imagine being a journalism professor who finds the reaction of her and her peers so emotionally satisfying that reading the full transcript of the interview to ascertain just what a hatchet job it was had no chance of being baked into the DNA of her perception. That's hardly intellectual rigor.

Of course, we told ourselves we watched because the election is important, but get real: We watched because we wanted her to fail. We wanted to watch her fail. What better place than the Roman Colosseum of modern times--a bar with a good TV?

I admit it. I wanted her to fail.

I am a feminist researcher. I write about historical stereotypes of women in the workplace, am not usually afraid to speak up about what I think and I still have my handwritten notes from the first women's studies course I ever took, circa 1978.

Still, I wanted this woman, Sarah Palin, to fail.


... So it's pretty natural that we would be angry that Hillary was superseded on the national stage by an unknown self-proclaimed "hockey mom" who opposed abortion rights and wore her hair in a 1950s poof. ...

You simply have to love this. Hillary Clinton, while an obviously bright woman, rode her more charismatic and politically savvy husband's coattails to power. She has grown on me, but how about a little dose of truth? She benefited from pity. Yet feminists like Marcellus, no doubt, went to great pains to throw every feminist principle under the bus in rationalizing Bill Clinton's conduct. Lest anyone has forgotten he was ensnared in a web of laws on workplace harassment (and evidence gathering) which these people themselves brought to fruition. And while being unembarrassed about how Hillary launched her political career is to be expected, also down the memory hole is how her handlers hid her from the press in her first campaign while she worked on learning about a state she had never lived in as well as on properly presenting herself. And this when faced with what was hardly a hostile media like that which awaited Palin.

With regard to her characterization of Palin, one of course has to wonder if this is some kind of mea culpa about how stupid this perception was among her kind. That's not entirely clear. I certainly travel in hipper, more sophisticated circles here in NYC than Marcellus does in Tennessee or elsewhere and can assure her that she displays a remarkable lack of self-awareness in mocking Palin's physical appearance in light of her own. And an almost comical lack of perception in using the abortion issue as a cudgel. Palin has her own personal beliefs but only a reflexive lefty could fail, upon close inspection, to discern the libertarian streak in Palin's philosophical outlook.

... What's wrong with this picture? Is no one concerned with how easily we replaced the story about the powerful, brilliant woman with the safer, more familiar one about the ditzy airhead, and more important, how that happened?

Within days of Hillary's speech we had a woman on a major presidential ticket whose family life we could compare to Brittany Spears'. And we did. (You heard, right, that the baby may be her daughter's?) It's a paradox that John McCain would bring the American people this scenario, given that earlier in the summer he compared Barack Obama to Paris Hilton.

What has happened here?

I don't claim to have it figured out. I don't entirely blame "the media," because as cultural studies theorists tell us, media and culture are as interconnected as beehive 'dos and hairspray. ...

And here we have more contrived pseudo-intellectual social commentary. As I recall the Clinton family was replete with Jerry Springer Show imagery. From the spectacle of Bill Clinton playing vagina hockey with a cigar and a fat, homely 21-year-old intern, to his substance-abusing redneck brother being camped in the White House trying to sell pardons to Hillary's rise in benefiting from the madness which surrounded her, and which she enabled. With all the smears Palin was subjected to you'd think a journalism professor would note that while the mainstream media aided and abetted all manner of anonymous ugly rumors and distortions, the circus that was the Clinton era actually featured a rape charge and assorted affairs and harassment charges where the accusers at least had the courage to show their faces in public. Then again, like understanding how we arrived at our current financial crisis, that would require something on the part of Marcellus's kind which I keep hearing that Sarah Palin grossly lacks. As Barack Obama himself might put it Um, uh, um, uh,um, uh, ah, um intellectual curiosity.

Read Marcellus's full article here.

That I'm gutting a writer and thinker so inconsequential that she likely Googles herself and will find this may be harsh. But her very ordinariness - in being typical of breed - is what I found so amusing in her pained effort to overcome her ideological prism and engage in rationality. The contrast with Camille Paglia's efforts at doing likewise in a recent Salon column made it all the more stark. Paglia writes:

The mountain of rubbish poured out about Palin over the past month would rival Everest. What a disgrace for our jabbering army of liberal journalists and commentators, too many of whom behaved like snippy jackasses. The bourgeois conventionalism and rank snobbery of these alleged humanitarians stank up the place. As for Palin’s brutally edited interviews with Charlie Gibson and that viper, Katie Couric, don’t we all know that the best bits ended up on the cutting-room floor? Something has gone seriously wrong with Democratic ideology, which seems to have become a candied set of holier-than-thou bromides attached like tutti-frutti to a quivering green Jell-O mold of adolescent sentimentality.

And where is all that lurid sexual fantasy coming from? When I watch Sarah Palin, I don’t think sex — I think Amazon warrior! I admire her competitive spirit and her exuberant vitality, which borders on the supernormal. The question that keeps popping up for me is whether Palin, who was born in Idaho, could possibly be part Native American (as we know her husband is), which sometimes seems suggested by her strong facial contours. I have felt that same extraordinary energy and hyper-alertness billowing out from other women with Native American ancestry — including two overpowering celebrity icons with whom I have worked.

One of the most idiotic allegations batting around out there among urban media insiders is that Palin is “dumb.” Are they kidding? What level of stupidity is now par for the course in those musty circles? (The value of Ivy League degrees, like sub-prime mortgages, has certainly been plummeting. As a Yale Ph.D., I have a perfect right to my scorn.) People who can’t see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism — the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.

See the full Camille Paglia article here.

Sure, Paglia is the enfant terrible of feminism. She is a contrarian by nature. But still she has a quality of mind which is not held hostage to the value system which makes an effort at similar generosity on the part of Marcellus so rife with chattering class buffoonery. Paglia must have had a happy childhood. Or perhaps it is her understanding that feminist thought is cartoonishly rigid and anchored by the big lie that they hold the moral high ground on abortion. That's something most normal well-adjusted people know to be an absurdity, even if, like myself, they are pro-choice.

Sisyphus thou art a Manhattan Republican

I don't know if I'd call a pro-McCain march on the Upper West Side of Manhattan brave exactly. It is funny to watch the unbridled hostility they encounter but its hard to fear a neighborhood that probably has the largest concentration of neurotic pussies on the planet. For all the haughty pretensions their politics are a strange, angry, insular, knee-jerk kind of liberalism that is rarely challenged in their circles.

It wasn't a year ago that I was reading David Mamet's book of [phoned in] essays about the movie business Bambi vs. Godzilla and it was suffused with so many gratuitous and idiotic liberal platitudes that reading it felt like being gang-raped by a West End Avenue co-op board. Of course, it was made all the weirder when some months later he had bucked the long odds and published an essay in the Village Voice about why he was no longer a brain-dead liberal. So maybe wisdom can strike anywhere, even on line at H&H Bagels.

Hat tip: The People's Cube

Why Palin is doomed in the debate

More at: Jim Treacher

The truth about the financial crisis [must watch videos at the bottom]

It is standard operating procedure for the left to force change based on "good intentions" and then run like school girls when the bill for the consequences come due. It virtually guarantees that they never learn from history. As Jonah Goldberg has noted in discussing his very illuminating book Liberal Fascism, when Republicans are at the wheel it is for them to fully acount for misfortune, whereas when the left screws up these are um, American mistakes.

Perhaps a relevant example vis a vis our financial crisis is Lyndon Johnson's social programs in the 1960's. Nobody can ever take away from the left the fact that they were in the vanguard of the civil rights movement. Likewise, nobody can whitewash the fact that many on the right ranged from hostile resistance to ambivalence to being overly cautious about rapid change. But shining the light on injustice is a far different animal than understanding human nature or the market and blithely setting policy based on guilt and a vain willingness to engage in bold experimentation and social-engineering without regard to the consequences.

In urban renewal and the construction of massive housing projects we witnessed a devastating impact on the sense of community and connectedness in poor neighborhoods. And what Jane Jacobs referred to as "eyes on the street" which keep a community safe. For more insights from the inestimable Jane Jacobs I recommend The Death and Life of Great American Cities among her many fine works.

In the 1960's we saw the beginnings of the destruction of the black nuclear family. A cycle of dependence on government hand-outs. We saw the left further enable emerging pathologies in black communities by embracing radical chic and rebellion against the "American Dream" in the notion that academic achievement was akin to acting white. There were those who even celebrated graffiti as the artistic expression of the oppressed rather than a sign to everyone else in the neighborhood that nobody cared.

All told it amounted to fostering a culture of victimhood which enables progressives to feel morally superior to the rest of us but is hardly a message of inspiration and hope to those who need it. And they used their benighted world-view and racial guilt as a cudgel to browbeat others into complicity.

This is not meant to be an academic dissertation. Just some quick thoughts on an issue which I've been keenly attuned to since college because the black underclass has been a matter of great concern to me. And the basic insights which underscore just how pernicious the left's efforts in this regard have been is not a black/white issue either. Anyone who needs a good primer on the impact of such policies in Britain need look no further than the psychologist Theodore Dalrymple's book Life at the Bottom or seek out his various writings online.

[A good path to understanding all of this is reading books by Thomas Sowell as well.]

But that is is neither here nor there. What is salient is the fact that while for years conservatives had railed against the pernicious effects of public housing in terms of the absence of pride of ownership, building equity and the deleterious effects of sapping individual initiative, the left was in the throes of other benighted rationalizations. Having aided in the creation of the underclass, the new grand theory was that such slums existed because, among other things, the credit markets were racially biased. This, in spite of the fact that, as economist Thomas Sowell has painstakingly documented, there were negligible differences between black and white default rates. That, in economic terms, is as pure a demonstration of even-handedness in assessing credit-worthiness as you are ever going to find.

Thus we have the current crisis. An effort to fix the damage the left itself caused by bullying the market into making irrational decisions on behalf of people who were in a precarious financial position. It morphed into so much more, but that is pretty much always the case when the left does stupid things under the guise of good intentions.

This is the key video:



Hat tip: Red State


Also damning:







What is truly frightening is that the facts about all of this are in plain sight, the Republicans - and even Bill Clinton - have been blocked in their efforts to fix this for years and there was a time when the mainstream media seemed to understand the potential problems here. Now they are engaged in a huge whitewash as cover for Barack Obama and his Democratic cohorts. Media bias is real. But I've never been one to be paranoid about it until now.

Some additional nuggets:

Boston Globe op-ed

Commentary on a 1999 NY Times article about this.

A recent editorial in Investors Business Daily

op-ed from South Florida Times

On the big guy upstairs

Maybe it was being told by an angry nun that I was evil and going to hell for being involved in a food fight before Sunday school. Or getting my ass chewed out by a priest before Confirmation because I admitted to not going to church EVERY week [except during CYO basketball season since our coach took attendance]. But at some point I stopped taking comfort in the earthly aspects of religion. Being inside a church no longer felt like a sacred, holy place but rather a venue by, for and of men. I wish it were otherwise but you can't fake it, or at least, I won't. But I know how much comfort and strength faith gives to those who let it into their hearts. And there's no question that I believe in God and that my strength of character is the result of my Catholic upbringing. Still, I am firmly in the camp of the religiously ambivalent.

Having said that, I have lost count of how many lefties in NYC I have verbally dropkicked over their lack of tolerance and abject ignorance as to the role religion plays in the lives of people who don't give a flying fuck about carbon offsets or fair trade coffee. There is something positively deranged about people who feel intellectually superior to those of deep faith. The enlightenment, by contrast, has brought forth innumerable secular lunacies and death on an epic scale that make the Crusades and Spanish Inquisition pillow fights by comparison. And there is ample research to indicate practicing Christians are far less apt to buy into supernatural phenomena, conspiracy theories, astrology, feng shui, reincarnation, karma and the rest than are atheists or agnostics. Needless to say, I found this video highly enjoyable as a rebuttal to the imbecilic prattle about Sarah Palin on the part of the, cough, reality-based community.