After the way the media gulped down Andrew Breitbart’s recent Capricorn One-style video hoax, I was feeling a bit depressed about the state of modern journalism.  Fortunately Jonah Goldberg has devoted his latest LA Times column to setting me straight.  Turns out, things are better than ever, now that those guys like Murrow and Cronkite are dead.

The new journalism

“The high standards and wise judgments of people like Walter Cronkite once acted as a national immune system, zapping scandal mongers and quashing wild rumors,” wrote former “green jobs czar” Van Jones in the Sunday New York Times.

This may be one of the most unintentionally hilarious lines in recent memory. Jones left the White House when his background — as an alleged 9/11 “truther” and as a self-confessed “communist” and “revolutionary” — became grist for the Fox News mill. Mainstream media mostly ignored the story until after he was fired.

How amusing that this Jones fellow — the hapless victim of a vendetta by Fox News — yearns for a day when the memory of McCarthyism was fresh enough that ordinary standards of professional judgment and editorial due diligence were sufficient to prevent newscasters and commentators from pillorying minor government officials as “avowed, self-avowed radical revolutionary communist[s],” and “convicted felon[s].”  It’s almost like he thinks he didn’t deserve this kind of treatment, which is rib-tickling, because if the guy had a scrap of decency, Battered Wife Syndrome would have kicked in by now.

Now Jones, with billets at Princeton and the Center for American Progress, casts himself as yet another victim, just like Shirley Sherrod, the Department of Agriculture employee fired last week after website publisher Andrew Breitbart released a misleadingly edited video of her (Breitbart, a friend, insists to me that he did not edit the video himself).

Exactly.  Who’re you gonna believe?

This guy, who’s involved with Princeton University and the Center for American Progress, groups which are probably on the Secretary of State’s list of known communist front organizations?

Or this guy, who “released a misleadingly edited video of [Sherrod]” after releasing a series of misleadingly edited videos (with soft core inserts) about ACORN, but who gave Jonah his word that he doesn’t know how to use iMovie?  Well, if you’re a high profile pundit and author writing for one of the nation’s great newspapers, you’re faced with a profound moral and professional dilemma, unless you’re Jonah Goldberg, in which case you can just write whatever.  Besides, Breitbart looks exactly like the guy who sold us pot in high school, so it’s probably wise to stay on his good side just in case the Marijuana Legalization Initiative doesn’t pass in November.

You’ve just got to love Jones — a former member of STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement), a Mao-influenced organization with a “commitment to the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism” — giving Cronkite, the dashboard saint of bourgeois America, his props as a linchpin of American democracy. Yes, yes, Jones says he’s no longer the Red radical he says he was, say, a decade ago. But still: Come on.

That’s like David Horowitz, a self-confessed “red diaper baby” saying he’s no longer a Red radical, when clearly, beneath his sober charcoal gray suit, he still has the diaper rash.  Which is red.  But still.  Really.  Clap on.

I must say, I find such nonsense exhilarating and exasperating.

Coming from Jonah, that sounds less like a critique of modern journalism and more like a report on his experiments in auto-erotic asphyxiation.

(more…)

Revenge of the Nerds | 26 Comments »

You may know Kevin McCullough as that guy who has a talk radio show with Stephen Baldwin that’s heard around the country — mostly in places you’ve never heard of (Morehead, KY? Why yes, please. Where my Morehead-heads at?), or as the pro-machismo activist who maintained a blog called “Musclehead Revolution.” Or perhaps you more clearly remember him as the Townhall columnist who declared that gays are “broodish animals,” that “liberals prefer perversion,” and who holds the record for discharging the most “aptly named World O’Crap” retorts in a single, sputtering post.

Kevin also memorably observed that “President Barack Obama is still just a lost boy,” who is “dangerously heaping hot coals of consequence on the heads of those who know better.” But worst of all, “Obama is not a strong leader…And his unwillingness to admit that the world is facing a crossroads of strength through force now, or humiliation and pain through attack in days to come is a demonstration of his paralysis in the most important question of our time.”

That question, of course, is:

Still, for all Obama being a “lost boy” and a dangerous hot coal-heaper, things have worked out marginally better than Kevin’s 2007 prediction that eight American cities would be nuked two weeks after the 2008 election, because of the “the cowardly actions of those who refuse to answer even simple questions on talk radio shows.”

Forked-Tongue-In-Chief at West Point

The most accurate definition of one who is “forked tongue” is not someone who directly disputes himself, but rather one who says something with such cloud that two completely different things could be intended or received, said vs. heard, meant while misleading.

I freely confess, I’ve often been guilty of this myself. Back in the day, I spoke with such cloud you wouldn’t believe, but eventually saw the light, and nowadays — as I think most people who know me would agree — I talk with minimal nimbus.

Liberals have generally been forced to practice such a verbal dance because no one would elect them outright if they said what they intended, and did what they believed.

Which is ironic, when you consider that what Obama said during the campaign turned out to be considerably more liberal than what he’s done since taking office. Which is probably why he lost the election.

In modern history when it comes to forked-tongue-ness President Barack Obama excels well beyond anyone’s imagination. Like most of his foreign policy speeches on American national security, his commencement address to the cadets at West Point on Saturday proves my point.

Sit back and relax while Kevin proves the virtues of the unitary, non-tined tongue.

In a disturbing trend he chose to place absolute belief in certain global institutions in the speech, but he has consistently believed less than he should about America, her fighting men and women, and the just causes they are sent in to.

In to…do what? And just how much should you consistently believe about America? Well, according to Martha Stewart, it’s 1 1/4 cups, unless you’re using high altitude baking directions.

Somehow international leaders who are not vested in America’s well being are to be believed as gospel, yet America is to be viewed with suspicion and contempt. It is an odd paradox that he lives with within himself. Even keeping it to himself would be fine. Letting it spill into the mainstream is another matter entirely, and taking it to the West Point graduates is simply uncalled for.

That’s a paragraph so chunky you can say it with a fork-tongue — but use a spoon-tongue, because you’ll want to get every drop of bullshit.

On Saturday President Fork-Tongue spoke of his intent to shape a new “international order” as it pertained to a strategy to keep America secure. Implying in his speech that America should not claim the mantle, nor the right of self-protection or self-responsibility. He also referred to America’s minimal role in “promoting democratic values around the world.”

Except he actually didn’t, since that quote doesn’t appear in the text of Obama’s speech. I don’t want to accuse Kevin of “directly disput[ing] himself,” or speaking with cloud, but he is, at best, a bit of a spork-tongue.

Sayeth The One

I can’t believe you guys are still sayething “The One.” Hasn’t the button popped up on that particular jar of Cling peaches by now? And why is it always delivered in this faux King Jamesian locution? It’s like insisting on calling Willie Mays the Sayeth Hey Kid.

Instead of countering violent terrorists, he’s permitted them to commit attacks against U.S. citizens on American soil six times since his inauguration.

What did he do — issue them a hall pass? “I’m sorry sir, but I’m going to have to place you under arrest for carrying a bomb onto a plane. What’s that? Oh, I see — you’ve got the piece of wood with the bathroom key attached. My mistake sir, have a good flight.”

The fact that panty-boy and the Times’ Square bomber got nothing more than smoke from their ignitions doesn’t mean that both attacks were not a severe danger to thousands of American lives.

I think Kevin’s keen interest in President Fork-Tongue and Pantyboy means that his heart isn’t really in political commentary, and his first, best destiny remains superhero slash fiction using his own made-up characters to avoid a cease-and-desist letter from DC.

Instead of stopping the spread of nuclear weapons he’s made every overture to Iran that he will do nothing to prevent them from gaining them. He’s even gone so far as attempting to muzzle other nations who will suffer an even greater direct threat from a nuclear Iran.

Instead of combating the false claims of the global warming propagandists who got caught by their own admissions in the lies, the cover ups, and the inaccuracies they had promoted, Obama went before the American people and mocked any who did not hold the lies to be truth.

Instead of sustaining global growth, his policies of propping up companies that should’ve been allowed to correct on their own or fizzle out all together have actually worsened the outlook for the average American, the American markets, and by extension the global economy.

You know what, Kevin? Fork you.

Later in his address to the West Point class of 2010 Obama said, “America has not succeeded by stepping outside the currents of international cooperation… but by steering those currents in the direction of liberty and justice.”

The President is either woefully ignorant of America’s contribution to history, or he is being purposefully misrepresentative in such a statement.

To be clear, America has more often than not primarily succeeded by stepping outside the currents of international cooperation, leading the charge to form new coalitions

Granted, leading a “coalition” of nations certainly sounds like it would entail “international cooperation,” but these were special, back-stabbing coalitions, made up of countries who hate us and look for any opportunity to frustrate and sabotage our efforts. And that, my friend, is how you primarily succeed in this world. Tell your friends. Then kick them in the balls, and tell ‘em George W. Bush sent you.

…and when necessary going it alone out of a resolve to do so because of the moral demands placed upon us as the greatest nation on this planet.

While we cooperated internationally in the Second Opium War, the Boxer Rebellion, our intervention in the Russian Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, and even Viet Nam, we did go it alone in the morally demanding Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the Philippine Insurrection, and our countless Indian wars and Latin American occupations — pretty much any conflict in which we saw an opportunity to rape and pillage another country for land and resources. And morality.

From the American Revolution to the liberation of Afghanistan and Iraq there were moments before us at every point that would tell us to “not get involved” to “let the rest of the world deal with it.”

But we’d elected a dry drunk with severe Daddy issues and a sociopathic enabler, so that wasn’t really an option.

Yet when those same nations fell at the hands of tyranny, despotism, and economic and religious enslavement – it was to the United States that they turned.

Like Iran, in 1953, or Chile in 1973. Those people were just damned lucky we picked up the phone.

Because President Obama is a liberal he cannot simply come out and say what he wishes he could, for if he did, he would be impeached. But behind the mask of attempting to sound moderate, reasonable, clean and articulate (Biden’s favorite qualities) lies a shadow of his meaning that may sound like something on the surface and to most ears who hear, but mean something completely different to the President himself.

I think there might be something wrong with my eyes who read, because I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about.

He is misguided at best, or a deceptive traitor at worst…

If only he’d drop the mask of attempting to sound clean. Then we’d have him!

Revenge of the Nerds | 18 Comments »

Katherine Jean Lopez, unmarried mother of none, is a woman of strong, yet simple desires. She wants women to stop painting, composing music, and writing books, music, and slash fiction, and henceforth confine their creativity to gestating a fetus, much like a retired sailor assembling a ship in a bottle. She wants all non-knocked up women to taste Raquel Welch (Caution: Raquel-tasting is contraindicated during pregnancy). And she really wants a turkey baster full of Mitt Romney’s semen, and she’s willing to pay top dollar on the black market for it.

Taste the Welch’s Truth

Raquel Welch just explained it all.

I hope it was good for you too. Now please stop drinking Welch’s juice, because K-Lo would like a crack at it.

If you need a quick primer on the birds and the bees and how a culture has been misled, the actress once declared “Most Desired Woman” by Playboy can help you out.

I hope you brought a standard ruled Composition Blue Book, a Number 2 pencil, and plenty of tube socks and Jergens. (This is the second in K-Lo’s series, Celibate Porn® series, following last months effort, The Ascent of Boehner.)

Welch has written a book, “Raquel: Behind the Cleavage,” which might just stand out on bookstore shelves. We need it to!

Perhaps the book could be displayed in three quarter profile, in some sort of push-up shelf.

In an article that coincided with her book’s launch, she wrote: “Margaret Sanger opened the first American family-planning clinic in 1916, and nothing would be the same again. Since then the growing proliferation of birth-control methods has had an awesome effect on both sexes and led to a sea change in moral values.”

I agree with the “awesome” part.

Go, Raquel!

Faster! Harder! Don’t stop!

Further, what she writes knocks the glimmer off the rose of so-called “sexual freedom.”

So Raquel Welch has deflowered the Sexual Revolution. That’s…kinda weird. And redundant. But awesome!

The concept, ushered in by the pill, she says, “has taken the caution and discernment out of choosing a sexual partner, which used to be the equivalent of choosing a life partner.”

Miss Welch believes human dignity would be enhanced if we mated for life, like voles, beavers, termites, and black vultures. In another helpful bit of advice, Miss Welch, who is currently on her fourth marriage, recommends using an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of your various anniversaries.

“Without a commitment, the trust and loyalty between couples of childbearing age is missing, and obviously leads to incidents of infidelity. No one seems immune.”

Perhaps one day they’ll develop a vaccine for that — hopefully in pill form, since I don’t like needles.

In an otherwise largely celebratory forum on the pill that appeared on CNN’s website, Republican strategist and book publisher Mary Matalin cleverly wrote: “(P)ackages of portable liberation ushered in a generation of women determined to break free from their inferior patriarchal oppressors. And how did they manifest their superiority? Their freedom? Thanks to the pill, by casual, drive-by sex. Whoa. That really showed those stupid boys.”

Clever’s the word. As Ms. Matalin (currently on her third marriage) points out, thanks to the Pill, women are able to enjoy sex without the fear of being shunted into a grim and Dickensian Catholic home for wayward girls, or forced into a hasty and unwise marriage at the point of a shotgun. Talk about the girls kicking an own goal.

The feminist movement has a lot to answer for when it comes its open and enthusiastic embrace of the contraceptive mentality, which interfered with a woman’s relationship with her own body, never mind her relationships with men.

I wasn’t sure what the “contraceptive mentality” is, so I looked it up. After the Civil War, when abortion was first widely banned in this country, women who feared they were pregnant, and who could not — for health, financial, or other reasons — afford a child, would consult a “contraceptive mentalist.” These practitioners, who often wore turbans and were employed by carnivals, would use telepathy to convince a zygote to commit suicide.

Of course, many of the women of the “sexual revolution” generation paid the price in their own lives, later finding that their best fertility days were long gone by the time they realized they wanted to be women, not women suppressing that which makes them most creative.

Says the single, childless “editor of National Review Online,” who “writes a weekly column of conservative political and social commentary for Newspaper Enterprise Association.” But that’s because she’s a rogue womb who doesn’t play by the rules! While you, little missy, should be up at dawn, harvesting eggs from your ovaries like a chicken rancher in a henhouse.

Welch and Matalin’s message stood in contrast to the spin that was predominant this Mother’s Day, which happened to be the 50th anniversary of the birth control pill, in some ironic twist of the calendar.

Personally, I find there’s much less irony and more synchronicity when Mothers Day falls on Died in Childbirth Day. And when both coincide with Perished from Septicemia After Botched Back Alley Abortion Day (which only happens once every 76 years), well then — Whoo hoo! Break out the Cold Duck and the coat hangers!

Among the parade of pill celebrations was an item from the AFP newswire which read like a press release from the group “Catholics for a Free Choice,” known more for being successful at getting press attention than representing anyone or any principled “Catholic” position. The AFP dispatch from the pill PR agency slammed the late Pope Paul VI for his warnings, basically, about everything Raquel Welch regrets in our oversexed culture, in his searing, prescient 1968 encyclical, “Humanae Vitae.”

In another coincidence, 1968 was the year Raquel Welch made The Biggest Bundle of Them All, which certainly sounds like an uplifting film about the joys of motherhood. Actually, it’s about a kidnapping, rather than a kid in nappies, but the anti-contraception subtext in clearly there, as it was in all Miss Welch’s movies.

Janet E. Smith, editor of “Why Humanae Vitae was Right,” among other books, and a professor of life ethics at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, tells me: “I keep hoping common sense might have some force with the secular world.”

And what’s more commonsensical than sex advice in a dead language from an elderly, ostensibly celibate man who lives in the Vatican (which is basically a frat house — full of smug, entitled, condescending Greg Marmalards living on someone else’s money — except nobody ever graduates).

In the spirit of that hope, Welch’s comments are a welcome change. When the first “Sex in the City” movie came out a few years ago, I went to the most depressing opening-night showing in midnight movie history. The reactions of the young audience in their Jimmy Choo knock-offs suggested a little talking-to from Janet and Raquel might do them a world of good.

K-Lo was so eager to be depressed she went to the first midnight screening? Here’s a tip: if the title of the movie features two things you disappove of, maybe wait for the bargain matinee.

Welch echoes another pope when she talks about sexual explicitness in our culture. In an interview, she asked: “Do we really have to go so far where nothing is happening unless we’re getting graphic? Can’t we use our imagination anymore?”

“I hope you boys aren’t shooting blanks.”

Welch continued, “A woman is wonderful thing. We are a real prize to be won.”

I won a woman at the County Fair once. Had her on the grill of my truck for awhile, but she got rained on, then the stuffing started to come out.

“It’s not an easy role to play, but a beautiful and powerful one.”

No offense, Raquel, but I’ve seen your work, and judging by the results, none of your roles were easy to play. At least, not convincingly.

The late John Paul II called it the “feminine genius.”

It’s a peculiar kind of genius: smart enough to breed, but dumb enough to let your reproductive organs be remote controlled by the bishopric.

She also talks about other “traditional” ideas that have been out of style in elite culture. She embraces the “ideal” of a two-parent family, of marriage, despite her own admitted failings on these fronts. She emphasizes the different roles of the mom and dad and how they can truly make a formative difference in a child’s life.

I’m not exactly sure how the availability of oral contraception affects the way you raise the offspring you do decide to have. But Raquel left the father of her two children, and then married three more times, making for a total of two husbands per child. Pretty darn formative!

I understand why many in the media worked overtime spinning the pill as good for man- — and woman- — this Mother’s Day. But the truth is that motherhood is at the heart of what it means to be a woman

Said the — oh, forget it.

and the pill has helped deny that reality.

May I ask reality a question? What about women who got creative with their wombs, then went on the pill to prevent, or space out, subsequent pregnancies — does the Pope still want to excommunicate them from Womanhood, or is he content to just defrock them of their ovaries and let them be lay-women?

Mind you, you don’t have to have children to be in tune with that great gift to the world, but you do have to know it, acknowledge it, and not pop a pill whose purpose is to treat fertility as if it were a disease rather than a tremendous power.

Pfizer should stop meddling in the meaning of womanhood, and devote their resources to developing a cure for unctuousness.

To groups that have for decades insisted that they represented so-called “women’s issues” and interests, the truth behind Raquel Welch’s comments must be a bitter pill.

Ha, ha…ha?

So keep preaching it, Raquel!

Just not in a Catholic church.

It’s a more liberating message –about the nature of life and love and men and women — than the feminist revolution ever offered.

NOTE: I started this post last night, then had to leave to catch a (free — I emphasize free) screening of Robin Hood (ouch). But when I visited Roy’s place this morning, I saw he also has a piece tracking the Sisterhood of the Traveling Hymen, and where, in comments, Jay B. delivers probably the ultimate rebuke to the red sash-wearing members of the Junior Anti-Sex League:

I “came of age” during the Reagan/Bush, AIDS and the dreaded baggy sweater era. Sex was, literally, sold as death. I’m betting — and this is just a hunch — people will continue to run the risk of having unmarried sex despite the droning post hoc morality of a pearl-clutching cluck and a bullshit “trend” piece which directly contradicts last week’s trend of tarted up turbo-sexed teens.

And if Death didn’t stop the kids from humping, I doubt K-Lo — even backed by the awesome power of Raquel Welch! — is gonna manage it.

Revenge of the Nerds | 28 Comments »

Ben Shapiro is a remarkably versatile man, one who has more careers listed on his resume than most people have jobs. Unsuccessful lawyer. Inconsequential pundit. Philistine film critic. Wizened former wunderkind, and the Right’s persona non grata ambassador to Flaming Youth. He is, in short, a protean fuck-up. A Renaissance disappointment. A Jackoff of all Trades.

So you can imagine how thrilled American Jews must have been when Ben offered to use his awesome intellectual resources to figure out why they’re so stupid. Because if there’s one thing you can’t argue with, it’s on-the-job experience.

An Open Letter to American Jews

Dear American Jews,

I write to you as a charter member of the tribe.

Wow, congratulations on your longevity, Ben. Given your literary flair, I’m guessing you were sort of the William Ayers of the second millennium BCE, ghost writing the Pentateuch for Moses? At any rate, very impressive (although, according to the Masoretic Text, Abraham vouchesafed to Ephron the Hittite that he thought you were kind of a putz).

I’m not only Jewish, I’m religious. I’m married to an Israeli girl (she’ll receive her citizenship next year and she is a proud soon-to-be American).

“In the meantime, we’re staying out of Arizona.”

I go to synagogue regularly, keep kosher, keep the Sabbath.

And, needless to say, keep reachin’ for the stars.

American Jews, I have one request of you: please pull your heads out of your posteriors.

And American Woman, I have one request of you: Mama let me be.

I mean that in all sincerity.

“No, honestly, I’m a huge gratuitous jerk. You gotta believe me!“

Your continued support for Democrats and an administration that is openly anti-Semitic is a disgrace. Your embrace of a party that seeks to hamstring Israel in the name of a wholly fictitious Middle East peace process is contemptible. Your loyalty to a president who consistently sides with Palestinian and Iranian mass murder-supporters is disgusting.

“I’m revoking your circumcisions! Put on these latex novelty foreskins and never darken my door again!”

Rahm Emanuel’s presence in the Obama cabinet doesn’t ameliorate Obama’s anti-Semitism — it just provides it convenient cover. Al Sharpton wrongly called Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell “house negroes”

Trivializing the suffering of an historically oppressed people in order to score a cheap political point — even when you are a member of that group — is the worst sort of bigotry.

Emanuel is a kapo.

This struck me as a little hypocritical, until I realized Ben actually meant that Rahm Emanuel could be used as a device to raise the pitch of unfretted guitar strings.

Even as you continue to buttress a president who seeks the destruction of your co-religionists, you demonstrate your myopia by rejecting the tea party movement and evangelical Christian Israel-supporters.

Who ask nothing of you, except that you hurry up and get your collective asses to Israel so we can get this Armageddon started!

The tea party movement is your ally for three important reasons. First, it supports capitalism against the forces of socialism — and capitalism keeps America strong enough to provide Israel with a hand against its evil adversaries. Second, American Jews are, by far, the highest-earning religious group in the United States — the tea party fights for your right to keep your money. Third, the tea party stands against government overreach — and in an era when government overreach promotes anti-religious secularism, Jews must stand with the tea party.

Who wants to hold the Obama-is-Hitler sign?

Your rejection of evangelical Christians is even more idiotic.

Or, as evangelical Christians would put it, even more idiotic than your rejection of Jesus! Talk about compounding the felony!

Evangelical Christians are the only major voting bloc preventing President Obama from breaking ties with Israel.

Yeah, if Obama isn’t careful, crazy right wing fundamentalists might not vote for him again.

When Janet Porter, an evangelical Florida talk show host

Oh good grief, that flaming ninny!

…heard about Obama’s anti-Israel tyranny, she responded by asking her listeners to buy dozens of yellow roses to send to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office as a show of support. The price per dozen: $19.48, in honor of the year of Israel’s founding (1948). Over 14,000 flowers were delivered.

Really? Because FTD charges like 50 bucks for delivery within the U.S. If a few hundred tea partiers were able to send a dozen yellow roses to Israel for $19.48, just imagine the kind of cost savings we could achieve if we, say, collected millions of Americans into a massive risk pool and used the advantage of our numbers to bargain with drug companies and health care providers!

Nah. Better just to send Bibi a Pick Me Up® bouquet.

“But they want to convert us!” many American Jews shout. Not all Christians do.

Just the perfected ones, like Ann Coulter.

But for the rest — so what? Would you sacrifice the support of millions of good-hearted Christians because they want to discuss Jesus with you?

Casually, over a pulled pork sandwich at the Automat, or a Drawn and Quarter Pounder at the Auto-da-fé?

If your own belief system is so fragile, the weakness is yours, not theirs.

It’s wrong to blame the victim, unless of course the victim is a wuss.

While you expend energy whining about Jehovah’s Witnesses who show up at your door with a Bible, Obama supports radical Muslims who would show up at your door with a gun — or, as in the case of Daniel Pearl, a butcher’s knife.

This is why I put up a No Solicitors sign.

Now, I understand, American Jews, that most of you don’t care about Israel.

It is, after all, Shania Twain Week on American Idol.

I understand that you’re more concerned about a woman’s unconditional right to abort her unborn child (which Judaism rejects) than you are about Israel. Fine. Understand that you have removed yourself from the vast river of Jewish history in favor of a chimerical morality that values libertinism over liberty.

Uh, Ben? Moses is asking for some rewrites…

I understand that many of you — all of you above age 70 — still think FDR is alive. He isn’t, but Jimmy Carter is.

I understand that some of you — not many — are still trying to follow my argument. Fondue goiter moist grommet.

I understand that some of you still think that conservatives and Republicans are the same folks they were during the 1950s, when they banned you from country clubs. They aren’t.

Now they have guns.

The simple fact is this: There is only one mainstream political ideology in this country that asks you to check your principles and cultural history at the door in the name of the greater good — leftism, the same ideology that virtually exterminated Judaism in Russia and Europe.

Ah, the Liberal Fascism Gambit! Okay, I admit it, Ben — Hitler was a lifelong subscriber to The Masses. But he got it mostly for the recipes, and “Humor in Uniform.”

While the left exploits your adherence to bagel-and-lox Judaism by appealing to your watered-down and perverted “tikkun olam” sensibilities, you are enabling your own destruction. The same people who urge you to reach out to terrorists will be the first to sacrifice you to those terrorists’ tender mercies. The same people who urge you to worry about same-sex marriage rather than religious freedom will be the first to take your religious freedoms away.

I love you, my brothers and sisters. That’s why I’m writing to you. Time is running out; the clock is winding down. Pick a side.

Preferably the side that just spent the last ten minutes peeing on your shoelaces.

Revenge of the Nerds | 36 Comments »

I don’t know what it is with congressional Democrats, but lately it seems like those clowns wouldn’t recognize a metaphor if it was spat right in their face. Liberals are suffering from a serious trope gap; fortunately, however, I can furnish them with an illuminating, even textbook example, courtesy of American Thinker columnist and textbook salesman, Harold Witkov. As a brief glance at his archives demonstrates, Harold’s been delivering rich allegories and playful double meanings for quite some time now, with titles like Obama Music Dropping On the Pop Charts, and I Will See Your Hitler, and Raise You a Holocaust. But don’t take my word for it, let’s just take a gander at his bio:

Harold Witkov is a freelance writer in the Chicago area, and has worked in textbook publishing and sales for almost thirty years.

He began his freelance writing twelve years ago, specializing in inspirational and humorous first-person narratives. Among others, he has written for Science of Mind, Unity Magazine, Reunions Magazine and The Jewish Voice and Opinion. Harold Witkov’s articles are also widespread on the Internet. He has written for Renew America, American Thinker, Right Wing News, Intellectual Conservative, Land of the Free, Common Conservative, just to name a few.

Passing yourself off as a professional writer, and then listing all the places where you write for free is sort of like being a serial killer who takes a gruesome trophy from each of his victims — it satisfies a powerful, if somewhat obscure urge, but doesn’t really look that great on a resume.

There really was a Johnny Appleseed. John Chapman was his name, and he really did establish tree nurseries across the Midwest. Johnny Appleseed was a great American. He was great because the seeds from his satchel and the seeds of his good deeds sprouted true.

But what if Johnny Appleseed had instead been a prankster?

Then we probably would have called him Coyote Appleseed, or Kolopelli AppleLoki.

What if Johnny Appleseed’s satchel contained rotten apple seeds?

Then he’d likely have gone by the name Johnny Rottenseed, and would have been in a good position to sue John Lyden for trademark infringement.

I am not talking about rotted seeds that would not sprout, but rather, seeds that would one day become trees bearing apples that looked good on the outside but were rotten on the inside.

That’s something most people would consider a serious design flaw, but which Toyota would dismiss as “farmer error.”

If Johnny Appleseed had actually been a trickster, he would have had no trouble fooling everyone because it takes a long time for an apple tree seedling to grow into an apple-producing tree.

On the other hand, it would have made for a really dull episode of Punk’d.

Who would have known that the seeds they saw Johnny Appleseed plant would grow into young trees that would be worthless? Likewise, who would know just by looking at one of those small young trees that its future apples would look good on the outside but be rotten on the inside? Who would know before it was too late?

If I’m following Harold’s metaphor, Obama is an apple — a biracial man who’s dark-skinned, but white on the inside. Or so we were lead to believe! But when you cut him open, it turns out he’s brown! And you don’t even have to leave the halves of him out on the kitchen counter for twenty minutes — he’s already brown! He comes that way straight from the tree! He’s pre-browned!

[T]hen Johnny Appleseed would not be thought of today as a great American, and he would not be remembered as Johnny Appleseed. Instead, Johnny Appleseed would be thought of with disdain, and he would forever be remembered as Johnny Rotten-Appleseed.

There is a man today who is trying to pass himself off as a modern-day Johnny Appleseed. Only a couple of years ago, he traveled around the United States telling Americans that if they would only open their hands to him, he would place the seeds of “hope and change” in their palms.

That man is Harold, and this is the story of the years he spent wandering the highways and byways of Real America, cadging handjobs in rest stops.

This man is now the president and he has begun planting a whole satchel of his seeds.

This is what happens when your political worldview is shaped entirely by The Wealth of Nations, God And Man At Yale, and Mandingo.

He has planted bank reform seeds, auto reform seeds, and czar seeds. Once, he planted a stimulus seed and promised that unemployment would not surpass 8%, but it went to 10%. He told us not to worry because seeds take time. He said that it takes time for a seed to grow into a tree and for that tree to bear fruit. He promised that one day soon, those stimulus apples are going to really taste great.

I’m glad to see that despite the harsh political climate, it remains possible for a principled conservative like Harold to oppose Administration policies, and yet still yearn to taste Obama’s stimulus apples.

Despite all his confidence-building assurances, however, our president has forgotten one thing. Like a skilled scientist, the overwhelming majority of Americans actually know what is in his health care seed.

Okay, although I suspect the average Tea Partier would take being compared to a “skilled scientist” the same way the cowboys in that piquante sauce commercial reacted to the words “New York City.”

It has been out there for a long time and been studied with a microscope.

Your penis?

We do not need to be told what is in it because we have seen its DNA. Not only have the American people seen the DNA, but we were privy to the excremental fertilizer so generously applied behind closed doors.

A word of caution, Harold: hyperextending a metaphor can lead to swelling, osteoarthritis, and Marfan’s syndrome.

Because the American people are so well-informed…

Well, that was a spit-take of Danny Thomasian proportions.

…we do not have to wait to taste our president’s health care apples in the years to come to know what will be in them.

Why wait, when you could get down on your knees right this second and give his apples an exploratory lick.

Today’s President Johnny Rotten-Appleseed has many more seeds in his satchel for us. Soon he will be planting an amnesty seed, a cap-and-trade seed, and a fairness doctrine seed.

Will they bloom and grow? Who can say. Although we do seem to have harvested a bumper crop of morons this year.

Of course, there will be those Americans who will say no one can know how the apples will taste until the apple seeds grow into trees and the trees bear their apples. They will say that it is not fair to say that all our president’s seeds will be of the rotten apple variety; some may be sweet.

I would say to them, “Think what you want. In the future, you will be hard-pressed to find any Granny Apples.”

Yeah. I get it, Harold. Although I have to say, that was an awful long windup for a pitch that skipped twice before it reached the plate.

Revenge of the Nerds | 29 Comments »

Because I don’t have enough aggravation in my life, I followed an Instaputz link to Media Matters and watched that clip of Tom Tancredo at the Teabag Conclave, in which he basically called for restricting the franchise to those who can pass a Jim Crow-era literacy test:

And then, something really odd happened, mostly because I think that we do not have a civics literacy test before people can vote in this country. People who could not even spell the word “vote,” or say it in English, put a committed socialist idealogue in the White House, name is Barack Hussein Obama.

And while the soundbite is brazen and obnoxious, even for Tancredo, I think we owe it to posterity to note that Jonah Goldberg called for the same thing back in 2007.

Revenge of the Nerds | 6 Comments »

I’d just like to take a moment to thank our good friend Bill S. for another terrific contribution. Not only did he delight and entertain with his vivisection of Ben Shapiro’s views on cinema, but he also reminded me that Ben Shapiro exists. Frankly, I thought he’d gone the way of most child stars and retired to a public-spirited obscurity to wait out his awkward years. But no, a glance at his original playpen, Townhall, shows that despite Ben’s recent discovery of an entirely new field in which to fail, he hasn’t entirely forsaken politics for poetics.

President Obama’s State of the Union address was the greatest American rhetorical embrace of fascist trope since the days of Woodrow Wilson.

Benjy prefers fascist tripe (or Fascist Flaczki as we used to call it in the Old Country), but he’s got a good point. As we know from the HUAC hearings, the only thing worse than being a fascist was being a premature anti-fascist, and since Wilson died eight months before Mussolini founded the Partito Nazionale Fascista, he was obviously too early to be a fascist, and way too early to be an anti-Fascist, even of the premature kind, so with his options increasingly limited, he had no choice but to become, simply, a “Premature Fascist,” which makes him a collector’s item, like those Cabbage Patch Preemie dolls.

I am not suggesting Obama is a Nazi; he isn’t. I am not suggesting that he is a jackbooted thug; he isn’t…President Obama is, however, a man who embodies all the personal characteristics of a fascist leader, right down to the arrogant chin-up head tilt he utilizes when waiting for applause.

Of course, that would also describe most of the performing pinnipeds at Sea World, but given the way the word “fascist” is thrown around these days, it’s good to have a clear definition.

He sees democracy as a filthy process that can be cured only by the centralized power of bureaucrats.

Whereas I see Ben as a painful, itchy inflammation of the nether regions that can only be cured by the starchy power of Gold Bond Medicated Powder.

He sees his presidency as a Hegelian synthesis marking the end of political conflict.

Which is why he seems so eager to compromise with Republicans. What’s the point of fighting when political conflict has ended? Thanks, Hegel!

He sees himself as embodiment of the collective will. No president should speak in these terms — not in a representative republic. Obama does it habitually.

Again, taken at face value, this seems to contradict observable reality, until you remember that by “Obama,” Ben means “the sweat sock with the Magic Marker face that I use to put on puppet shows in my room.” Context is important, people.

It would be pointless to discuss at length the dictatorial, demagogic nature of much of Obama’s address –

But that’s never stopped you before.

the attacks on the banking system;

Ironically, his full-throated denunciations of the Federal Reserve made Ron Paul sound like Woodrow Wilson.

the unprecedented personal assault on the Supreme Court justices;

When Obama started ranting about those “nine old men,” I thought he was going to take off one of his leg braces and beat Sam Alito to death

the dictatorial demands (“I want a jobs bill on my desk without delay”);

Ben’s Wikipedia entry notes that while at UCLA he “clashed with professors,” presumably when they told him they wanted his paper on their desk by Friday, and he replied, “enough with your dictatorial demands!” Speaking of Ben’s rather wee wiki, it sums up his professional career thusly: He formerly practiced law at the Los Angeles office of Goodwin Procter LLP. He now does independent legal consulting for major media clients, including the Washington Times and BiggUns.

I tried Googling “Bigguns” and this was the first thing that popped up (so to speak):

‘Nuff said.

He is also a film critic who is writing a biography on his favorite director, Michael Bay.

Which is sort of like saying “he is also a maître fromager who is writing the definitive reference work on his favorite cheeses — Kraft American Singles, those deep-fried curds they sell at the Minnesota State Fair, and Velveeta, the most intriguing of all the cheeses, because its orange hue, owing nothing to nature, is a happy collision of corporate synergy, a shotgun marriage between spoiled milk, the bucolic produce of middle America, and the techniques of heavy industry ordinarily used to manufacture dioxin, Play-Doh and hexachlorophene, which in agriculture is used as a fungicide, and in vagiculture is used as a douche.”

Which certainly sounds like the constituent makings of a Michael Bay film, until you note that Velveeta is a wholly owned subsidiary of BiggUns, so the reader may be excused for wondering how Shapiro’s many other corporate entanglements will impact his ability to impartially critique cheese.

the scornful looks and high-handed put-downs directed at his political opponents. It would be even more pointless to discuss the incomprehensible stupidity of Obama’s policy proposals.

As noted policy wonk Barbie once observed, “Math is hard!”

It is worth examining, however, the deeper philosophy evident from Obama’s address. From the outset, his speech was an ode to himself. He opened, bizarrely, by comparing this moment in history to past American crises: “when the Union was turned back at Bull Run …” He suggested that “America prevailed because we chose to move forward as one nation, as one people.” This, of course, is unmitigated, self-serving rubbish — 620,000 Americans died in the Civil War because we didn’t move forward as one nation. But that is irrelevant to Obama — in his mind, today’s crisis is just like the Civil War. He is a modern-day Lincoln, and those who oppose him are benighted rebels. What’s more, only his powerful leadership can lead us through.

Let’s go to the video tape: “For 220 years, our leaders have fulfilled this duty. They’ve done so during periods of prosperity and tranquility, and they’ve done so in the midst of war and depression, at moments of great strife and great struggle.

It’s tempting to look back on these moments and assume that our progress was inevitable, that America was always destined to succeed.

But when the Union was turned back at Bull Run and the Allies first landed at Omaha Beach, victory was very much in doubt. When the market crashed on Black Tuesday and civil rights marchers were beaten on Bloody Sunday, the future was anything but certain.

These were the times that tested the courage of our convictions and the strength of our union. And despite all our divisions and disagreements, our hesitations and our fears, America prevailed because we chose to move forward as one nation, as one people.”

That’s the great thing about being a “critic” instead of, say, a lawyer — you don’t have to really even pay attention at work and you still get paid.

Then it was on to his critique of American politics. It should be noted at the outset that American politics is designed to produce gridlock. The governmental structure was carefully calibrated to thwart grand, ambitious programs like Obama’s socialist remolding of America; the founders deliberately shackled government by pitting interest against interest. Obama does not accept that, and so he despises the American system of republicanism.

Exactly. Let us not forget, when James Madison put himself through college working as a pimp, his street name was “Super-Majority.”

(Ron O’Neal played him in the HBO John Adams biopic.)

He acknowledged that political debate is deeply entrenched: “These disagreements, about the role of government in our lives, about our national priorities and our national security, they’ve been taking place for over 200 years. They’re the very essence of democracy.” Then he dismissed the very essence of democracy in a single stroke: “But we still need to govern.”

If “democracy” was about “governing,” they would have called it governocracy. And I believe the think tank scholars at BiggUns would back me up on this.

Revenge of the Nerds | 35 Comments »

I canceled my subscription to the New York Times shortly after they hired Bill Kristol, and yet, every time I think I’m out, they pull me back in. Case in point, today’s Ross Douthat column, Sex Ed in Washington, seems to exert some weird, subversive influence on my better judgment — although perhaps it’s just the sad spectacle of Ross spending 700 words trying to talk us all out of ever having sex again, when really, a single picture is worth a thousand:

Liberals hated almost everything about George W. Bush’s presidency, but they harbored a particular animus toward a minor domestic policy priority: abstinence-based sex education.

To be fair, if Bush had devoted the same amount of time and money to promoting phrenology, I think most liberals would have shrugged it off, if only because nobody ever contracted the clap from having their skull groped by a natural philosopher.

The abstinence effort accounted for about a hundred million dollars in a trillion-dollar budget, but in the eyes of many critics it was Bushism at its worst — contemptuous of experts, careless about public health and captive to religious conservatism.

But enough nitpicking…

So last week’s news that teenage birthrates inched upward late in the Bush era, after 15 years of steady decline, was greeted with a grim sort of satisfaction. Bloggers pounced; activists claimed vindication.

Ross wouldn’t have even felt the need to defend an increase in teen pregnancies as another Bush Administration success story, if it hadn’t been for all those snotty girl bloggers doing the end zone dance and making L’s on their foreheads and getting all smarmy about Mendel pwning Lysenko.

On CBS News, Katie Couric used the occasion to lecture viewers about the perils of telling kids only about abstinence, and ignoring contraception. The new numbers, declared the president of Planned Parenthood, make it “crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work.”

In reality, the numbers show no such thing. Abstinence financing increased under Bush, but the federal government has been funneling money to pro-chastity initiatives since early in Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Yes, Republicans greatly increased both funding and ignorance by slipping support for abstinence-only “sex education” into the Welfare Reform bill, but the federal government has been bankrolling this boondoggle since the Reagan Administration.

If you blame abstinence programs for a year’s worth of bad news, you’d also have to give them credit for more than a decade’s worth of progress.

True, assuming that you, like Ross, are incapable of distinguishing between “despite” and “because.” As Jill at Feministe points out: “When the teen pregnancy rate dropped in the 1990s, it was largely because of increased contraception use.”

But under Bush, guidelines for federal grants “required states to provide assurance that funded programs and curricula ‘do not promote contraception and/or condom use.’” Also, the Administration urged the CDC to tell school girls they could catch chlamydia from a miasma, so at least those abstinence-only classrooms had a lot of cross-ventilation.

More likely, neither blame nor credit is appropriate.

Exactly. This is the sort of enlightened, let-bygones-be-bygones attitude that was encouraged by the parish priest whenever some medieval family called in a barber to treat their ailing child, and the subsequent surgery went a tad awry. “Look, my children, you asked Theodoric for help, and as far as I can tell, he correctly diagnosed your son as suffering from an imbalance of bodily humors and a bad pageboy, and took the only sensible course of action by bleeding him. True, he could have gone a bit easier with the lancet once you started bandying around ten-penny words like ‘hemophiliac,’ but let’s not bicker and argue about who desanguinated who.”

The evidence suggests that many abstinence-only programs have little impact on teenage sexual behavior, just as their critics long insisted. But most sex education programs of any kind have an ambiguous effect, at best, on whether and how teens have sex. The abstinence-based courses that social conservatives champion produce unimpressive results — but so do the contraceptive-oriented programs that liberals tend to favor.

Except, the teen pregnancy rate dropped in the 1990s, largely because of increased contraception use!

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s attended high school. What is taught in the classroom is vastly less important than the matrix of family, culture and economics: the values parents impart and the example that they set, the friends teenagers make and the activities they join, and the cross-cutting effects of wealth, health and self-esteem.

That’s true, man — I got nothin’ out of school. Everything I know about algebra and social studies I learned on the street.

(And, of course, the impact of entertainment: the MTV reality show “Teen Mom” is far more absorbing than the average sex-ed curriculum, and probably more influential as well.)

So in Ross’s considered opinion, the most effective form of sex education is a show called “Teen Mom.” Well, that explains why he can’t get an erection around any woman who’s on the pill, but I could have done without the glimpse into his porn preferences.

None of this renders the abstinence-versus-contraception debate pointless.

Just your column.

But we should understand it more as a battle over community values than as an argument about public policy.

Because it’s not like those two are related in any way.

Luker describes it, aptly, as a conflict between the “naturalist” and “sacralist” approaches to sex — between parents in Berkeley, say, who don’t want their kids being taught that premarital intercourse is something to feel ashamed about and parents in Alabama who don’t want their kids being lectured about the health benefits of masturbation.

You know, I took Sex Ed in California, which has never bought into the abstinence-only scheme, and I don’t recall pro-masturbation proselytizing, or, in fact, any editorializing at all. It was taught by the school nurse, whose obvious boredom with the task and poorly veiled impatience with us drained the subject of any potentially enlivening prurience or risibility, and was delivered in a series of brisk and vague bullet points: Here’s the rhythm method, and since this isn’t a Catholic school I can mention that it has a high failure rate. We’re not going to discuss your mucus. Here’s the pill, it has a low failure rate, but it doesn’t prevent venereal disease. Here’s a condom, relatively low failure rate, will help to prevent certain diseases, I’m going to sort of generally describe the right way to put it on, but I’m not going to demonstrate because then you’ll all start giggling and I hate you little bastards enough already.

Basically, it was like Drivers Ed, except Red Asphalt and Blood on the Highway were replaced with gruesome slides of patients with tertiary syphilis. I don’t know what fundamentalists imagine goes on in sex ed classes, but I’m pretty sure even people from Alabama would have found it dull.

We federalize the culture wars all the time, of course — from Roe v. Wade to the Defense of Marriage Act. But it’s a polarizing habit, and well worth kicking.

Because eliminating government interference in a woman’s right to choose is the same as empowering government to interfere in the rights of gay people to choose whom to marry. You’re right, Ross, your examples do make me want to kick something, although it’s not a habit.

If the federal government wants to invest in the fight against teenage pregnancy, the funds should be available to states and localities without any ideological strings attached.

No doubt you would have made this same argument for a neutral, high-minded, hands-off approach to sex education before your abstinence-funding peeps were kicked out of office, but you were probably held up in traffic.

Anyhow, while I disagree with Ross’s conclusions, I would never imply that he’s a sexually repressed gynophobe who resents women who’ve callously turned their wombs into a rocky place where his seed can find no purchase:

One successful foray ended on the guest bed of a high school friend’s parents, with a girl who resembled a chunkier Reese Witherspoon drunkenly masticating my neck and cheeks. It had taken some time to reach this point–”Do most Harvard guys take so long to get what they want?” she had asked, pushing her tongue into my mouth. I wasn’t sure what to say, but then I wasn’t sure this was what I wanted. My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas, threatened my ability to. I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business… and then whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered–”You know, I’m on the pill…”

In a sane world — not a perfect world, mind you, just a marginally better one — Doghouse Riley would have a weekly NYT column, and this douche-nipple would be manning the steam trays at the Old Country Buffet.

You ask me, The New York Times can’t get that pay wall up fast enough.

Revenge of the Nerds | 35 Comments »

I know we just paid a visit to Selwyn Duke the other day, but I glanced at his latest column and couldn’t help but be charmed by the fulminating contempt for his own masochistic readership.  I mean, usually it’s just us he calls stupid, but this week Selwyn is fed up with everybody’s inability to keep up with his 12th Level Coluan intelligence.

Do not blame Barack

Contrary to what my title indicates, I probably judge Barack Obama more harshly than most reading this page. I don’t think he is just a misguided ideologue or merely a creature of expediency. I believe, practically speaking, that he is an evil man. That is to say, while he is largely ignorant like so many others, he has developed an affinity for evil.

The ignorance of lesser humans is a constant source of irritation for Selwyn.  It’s probably a good thing he didn’t go into Evil himself, because you just know he’d be the kind of supervillain who would be so busy bemoaning the stupidity and incompetence of his henchmen, and bitching about how the minds of his enemies are too feeble to grasp what he has accomplished that he wouldn’t actually accomplish anything.  And frankly, unless you’re a Magyar with a thick accent and a respectably-sized atomic robot, that kind of thing just sounds lame.

Yet, to be blunt, Obama doesn’t alarm me as much as the average American.

“Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”  Meanwhile, after 233 years the United States has produced Dancing with the Stars, credit default swaps, and RenewAmerica.

Barack Obama is only one man. A bad man, yes, but he is a symptom more than a cause. Without millions of fawning Americans, he would just be a community agitator, vainly preaching Alinsky principles from a soapbox. Of course, he is a symptom that exacerbates the underlying problem, and symptomatic treatment — to ease immediate pain and hardship — is certainly in order. But it is only the worst of physicians who focuses only on symptoms while ignoring the cancer eating away at the patient’s midst.

i remember when my uncle was diagnosed with cancer of the midst.  The doctors had to remove his betwixt and part of his between.

Some of us lament the presence of self-professed communists such as Van Jones — and other assorted intellectual mutants, such as Cass Sunstein and John Holdren — in government, and how we elected a man who broke bread with self-professed communists such as Bill Ayers. But why complain now? We’ve had self-professed communists such as Bill Ayers — and other assorted intellectual mutants, such as Ward Churchill, Cass Sunstein and John Holdren — in academia for many decades.

If you require further proof of Selwyn’s non-mutant intellectual superiority, note his clever use of poetic repetition — or, as literary theorists refer to it, “losing your place in the paragraph.”

Has Christmas not become completely commercialized? How many of us say grace with our families before meals? How many of us pray every day? How many Americans subscribe to the modern perversion of the “separation of church and state” idea? How many of us say “God Bless” upon parting? Have the majority of American “Christians” not descended into moral relativism?

I believe this is the point in the show where Linus walks onto the stage of the auditorium and says, “Lights, please.”

We also have to ask how serious most Americans really are about respecting the Constitution. Here’s a little test for them: Are you willing to give up your Social Security in the name of constitutional adherence?

I thought so.

You and your retirement pension fell right into Selwyn’s trap!

Then there is our putrid popular culture. Effete Hollywood types…thuggish rappers, MTV stoner types and the rest of our decadence czars helped galvanize the youth and propel the empty vessel to victory…The reality is that we, the people, empowered them. We watched their movies; laughed at their salacious jokes; were titillated by their prurience; and tolerated their mainstreaming obscenity, homosexuality and gratuitous violence. We allowed our children to dress in their ghetto styles and imbibe pure and utter filth.

What happened to the days when the ghetto’s contribution to our popular culture was limited to uplifting Negro spirituals?

This partially explains why facts often don’t matter today. Just as correct input may not yield correct output if fed into a malfunctioning computer, all the necessary facts may not yield a correct conclusion when processed by a corrupted mind. And anyone with a properly functioning virtue file would have sensed the lack of same in Obama.

In order to debug our sinful software, Selwyn will now spam our spirits with a moral Trojan horse and infect our eternal files with the Worm of Virtue.  Ahhh…My soul feels reformatted!

Selwyn will now close by busting some mad rhymes:

it’s Alinsky this and Alinsky that, San Fran Nan, Afghanistan and the Taliban, this bill and that political shill.

Nice.  Had a bit of a Rudyard Kipling flavor to it.  Not quite sure what it means, though.  I tried asking, but unfortunately Selwyn’s brain keeps returning a 404 Error.

Revenge of the Nerds | 43 Comments »

Over at Pajamas Media, Roger Kimball makes a plea for a dignified public discourse by comparing Obama’s town hall meetings to the Two Minute Hate from Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.  Long time readers will recognize this as just the kind of fresh, but informed commentary one would expect from a serious critic and thinker, the co-editor of the New Criterion, and a man whose signature bow ties invariably evoke the gravitas of an Orville Redenbacher.

Channeling your inner Goldstein: Obama’s Renewable Two Minute Hate Fest

Readers of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four will remember the character Emmanuel Goldstein, Enemy of the People. [...]

Every day at 11:00, work would stop as people congregated around the ubiquitous two-way telescreens for the ritual two-minute hate…

In his inaugural address in January, Barack Obama promised to put “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”

I hope you’ve noticed how free from petty grievances, false promises, recriminations, and worn out dogmas public discourse has been since that glorious new dawn, 20 January 2009.

What, you haven’t noticed the promised political metanoia? Confidentially, I haven’t either. And I suspect at least part of the reason was dramatized by Orwell’s dystopian novel. The Obama administration and its PR enablers are addicted to blaming others for their own difficulties and failures.

Although Bush had eight years to fuck up the country, Roger has decided that Obama only gets eight months to straighten it all out — even though Roger has had over half a century to master that bow tie knot and hasn’t quite managed it.  I guess it’s sort of the same rule that applies with stabbings: if you shank some dude in the back, I think we can all agree that he’s morally entitled to point the finger at you.  But if he survives, and a year later he’s still holding you responsible for that lost kidney, well that’s just playing the blame game.

The President likes to refer the economic crisis as a “mess” that he inherited from George Bush. But how does explain that the deficit was some $400 billion under President Bush and is projected to be about $2 trillion — $2 trillion — this year?

He doesn’t explain it. He blames others, especially President Bush.

Exactly.  Say you’re standing at the top of a cliff, admiring the view, and George W. Bush comes by and gives you a push — that’s not fatal, people push kids on swingsets all the time, all he did was give you a little horizontal momentum.  If at some point subsequent to this incident you happen to wind up dead and broken on the rocks below, then I’m sorry pal, but your beef is with gravity.

What was unseemly in January is almost risible now. When will Obama take responsibility for failures that occur on his watch?

Well, Bush had been in office for a month longer when 9/11 happened, so presumably you think August is still well within the Presidential probationary period.

This is where Emmanuel Goldstein comes in…Orwell’s two-minute hate fests provide an uncomfortable analogue to the Obama administration’s amalgam of compulsory virtue and its inevitable concomitant: scapegoats. (Those who notice that “Goldstein” is a Jewish name might wish to ponder the Obama administration’s policies towards Israel.)

I must have missed the speech where Obama called Bush a “rootless cosmopolitan.”

For reasons I have never completely understood, George Bush is the scapegoat-in-chief, the Emmanuel Goldstein of the piece.

Maybe it’s because he traipsed around with “Commander-in-Chief” embroidered on every article of clothing?

It’s like Bush’s mom sent him to camp and didn’t want him to wind up wearing some other kid’s underpants.

I’m sure you’ve seen it in action. And no doubt you’ve noticed that it is infectious. Consider, if you will, the extraordinary reaction the very name “Sarah Palin” elicits.

I have to give Roger credit for cojones, or cluelessness, because he stops his column cold at this point to demonstrate the veracity of his political insights…by linking to a piece from last September, the bulk of which he spent gloating over McCain-Palin’s ineluctable victory:

What worries me is how the Left is going cope come the election. Their hysteria about Sarah Palin simultaneously shows that they know deep down that something has gone terribly wrong with Obama’s Children’s “Yes-we-can” Crusade and that they are unable to acknowledge the damage. Their hysteria signals both their panic and their blindness. I predict that on the morning of that fateful day in early November they are going to be like Pauline Kael the day after the 1972 election when Richard Nixon won 49 states: “How could that be?” a bewildered Kael asked. “I don’t know a single person who voted for Nixon.” The disillusionment this time will be even more bitter. I suggest that caring Republicans consider establishing emergency telephone hotlines and outpatient trauma centers in demographically susceptible areas–New York City, for example, Ann Arbor, all of the states of Massachusetts and Vermont, etc.–in order to cope with the shock that their burst bubble will undoubtedly cause.

I admit a certain curiosity about the tone of the Kimball household last November 5th.  Perhaps the residents adopted a general mood of good humored fatalism, I don’t know; but I’m pretty sure that at some point during the morning, while his eggs were cooling and his cup of cocoa developing a skin, Roger had the single most jarring revelation of his life, when he discovered that it’s nearly impossible to hang yourself with a bow tie.

Revenge of the Nerds | 23 Comments »