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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 morenuggets 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.
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:
Rhiannon-Marie Volpe - the double-bagger pictured in a preceding post - actually contacted a conservative blogger when news of these shirts was spreading to suggest she was not a Democrat but a Libertarian. Clearly she was attempting to mitigate the damage. But as evidenced by the fact that divulging her identity led to a quick discovery of her subsequently scrubbed Obama page, she's as dim-witted as she is dishonest.
Democratic party hacks are probably no more dishonest than Republican ones, but progressives are fucking moonbats for whom the truth is an inconvenience easily dispensed with. Everything about the manner in which progressives conduct themselves, and, in fact, how Obama has, feels eerily like life behind the iron curtain. It brings to mind Vaclav Havel recounting his efforts to pierce the fog of bullshit which had enveloped Czechoslovakia. And while I couldn't give a fuck what a young twenty-something thinks about politics, let alone a nobody, methinks a gym membership and a little face work would help ease poor little Rhiannon's emotional torment more than electing the next president.
Not since Whoopie Goldberg asked John McCain if she'd be a slave if he were elected have I seen a more pathetic display of racially-centered stupidity. Or was New York Times columnist Bob Herbert's suggestion that a McCain ad used "obvious" phallic imagery to stoke racial fears after that? Who am I kidding? There is, at this point, a thousand-way tie for first place in the racial grievance assclown bake-off.
The irony is that I have a rather dopey liberal haze about racial matters. Just tonight I ripped the Pakistani who owns the liquor store on my block because he'd locked up the store to take a dump and made his black assistant wait outside on the sidewalk. Truth is the guy always gives work to people who look like good-natured crackheads and they've stolen from him repeatedly. So he is rightfully paranoid. Still, it was an affront to this man's dignity and I felt the need to speak up. Just as I have on the many occasions when a taxi has passed a waiting black person by to pull up beside me. That blacks are notoriously shitty tippers is hardly the world's best-kept secret, but I simply refuse to be the beneficiary of that calculus at another individual's expense.
Yet I wonder.
Is there a point at which the left's barking at race phantoms like Scooby Doo on acid will cause my generosity of spirit to dissipate? It is already a struggle to see why Obama's racist, marxist preacher of twenty years - he of the $2 million house - is off the table in a campaign featuring a man with so little track record. Ditto the ACORN stuff, his other associations and the truth about the financial crisis. For millions of Americans to be told that they are angry bigots due to convictions, sincerely held, which have nothing to do with race at all is a little hard to stomach. Race is being used both as a weapon and a shield and it is severely putting millions of peoples' sense of fair play to the test.
Where will this all lead? I can't say for sure but at a moment where up is apparently down and the sky is purple, it is hard to see how this will lead us as a nation anywhere good.
Where have we seen this before? Sprechen ze Deutsch?
Seriously, I want to vomit. And while this is simply a bunch of foolish rich people brainwashing their kinderbamas and engaging in cult-like behavior, I find myself deeply saddened that there is so much like-minded hope and cultish devotion affixed to Obama in urban neighborhoods across the country as though his election will actually make their lives any better. Hence the mass hysteria which broke out when a business-owner in heavily black Prince Georges County, Maryland put up this sign:
It is a cruel scam for people to be encouraged to invest so much hope in a man and a government.
And speaking of scams:
The Secret service, which takes such things with the utmost, almost paranoic seriousness, says that this supposed incident where a rally attendee shouted "kill him!" about Obama is a load of horse manure.
It is hardly a new tactic, but I nonetheless find myself dumbstruck by the shameless, jaw-dropping audacity of the narrative the left has pushed and the media has latched onto about unhinged, angry Republicans being fueled by attacks on Obama by McCain and Palin. The truth is that people are rightfully angry that the media is giving the Kool-Aid-toting Obama a free ride and that McCain is not putting the screws to him with ample vigor.
As to the racial component that the left suggests is involved, that's just a case of same shit, different day. A toxic mix of white liberal guilt which sees blacks as helpless infants, progressive nutroots and a demented academic left which sees everything conservative through the filter of racism and the misery-industrial complex brought forth by the victimization pimps who pass as leadership in the black community. A symbiotic parade of shitbags if ever there was one. But the idea that a black candidate, and especially one with all the troubling ties that Obama has, should be immune to scrutiny, let alone attacks is cowardly and absurd. In the long-run it is also dangerous.
Considering this is the same campaign that earlier hurled accusations of racism at Geraldine Ferraro and Bill Clinton (a.k.a. the first black president) among others, it is pretty clear what's going on.
While I'm generally reluctant to embrace conspiracy theories, I do have my suspicions about the provenance of some of the unsavory comments which have been attributed to Republican rallies. No side has a shortage of knuckleheads. But Barack is no less appealing to Republicans than he was months ago. He's no less black either. Yet suddenly there's an uptick in ugly statements? How timely. This kind of fake grassroots behavior - astroturfing - is what Obama advisor David Axelrod does for a living. And it is one of the things which Hillary Clinton supporters have pointed to and found unforgivable about the primary. It's certainly something to think about.
I have no problem with campaigns as political war. But the notion that one side should be held to Marquess of Queensberry rules while the other is free to engage in an endless parade of overt and covert slime and dishonesty is actually more frightening than the existence of a sea of energized left-wing moonbats itself. It morphs something I find rather amusing into something more dark because it serves as a glimpse into a potential future that I want no part of. And what is truly amazing is that there has not only been a never-ending stream of vile behavior from the left throughout the campaign but, actually, for the past eight years.
I actually invest a lot of energy into making fun of the left for their hysteria so I find the lack of perspective in the media to be rather amusing. But the stakes involved are such that something I ordinarily make gleeful sport of is at the moment, rage-inducing. I have yet to see a Republican speech, from the convention on, where there weren't moonbat leftists trying to disrupt it. Does Obama encounter this? Of fucking course he doesn't.
But in a dizzying array of examples ranging from Whoopie Goldberg asking McCain if he'd bring back slavery to Charlie Rangel calling Palin mentally disabled there has been a bizarre and rather troubling lack of perspective and willfull disregard of the notion of fair play at work in the media. Obama has run the dirtiest campaign I've ever seen, albeit with all manner of plausible deniability as to where much of it has originated. How often do we hear that Bush the elder won because of a "racist" commercial which portrayed Michael Dukakis as having furloughed Willie Horton who raped and murdered a woman? Somehow it is illegitimate to point out that a man who believed in weekend furloughs for criminals serving life sentences is not a meaningful insight into the idiocy inherent in liberalism?
Every four years it is the same story. Exposing what the left is about when they are feverishly trying to tack to the center in the general election is lying. Dishonest. Whatever epithet you choose. So it appears that after years of either relying on electable DLC Democrats or being unable to ultimately deceive the mass of Americans about about a candidate's liberalism, the new tack is to call the truth a lie worth fighting against and to label mainstream Americans who would be concerned about the truth as the extremists.
Michelle Malkin is not one of my political touchstones under ordinary circumstances, but sometimes you need a swift kick in the ass in the way of a reminder as to who the enemy is. And she has assembled a rather good compendium of angry moonbats to throw back in the face of this bullshit narrative the media has been running with.
Also, have fun with this, or do a google image search for McCain and any ugly word you can think of and watch how many moonbat leftist images emerge. Not to mention this small and quickly assembled Youtube cavalcade of lefty rage:
