It’s been awhile since we’ve checked in with Ellis Washington, internet radio personality and former law clerk, so I think you’ve had plenty of time to heal.  And we’re in luck, because Clerk Washington (Ret.) is fresh from the gymnasium, flushed, dewy, and as naked as the Truth!

Symposium: Art, music and the Wagnerian dilemma

Socrates (470-399 B.C.) was a famous Greek philosopher from Athens who taught Plato, and Plato taught Aristotle, and Aristotle taught Alexander the Great.

And someone has finally taught Ellis how to use Wikipedia.

Socrates used a method of teaching by asking questions. The Greeks called this form “dialectic” – starting from a thesis or question, then discussing ideas and moving back and forth between points of view to determine how well ideas stand up to critical review, with the ultimate principle of the dialogue being Veritas– Truth.

Which, by a strange coincidence, happens to be Ellis’ gimmick too, “Veritas,” being a word he blurts with the regularity of a wacky sitcom neighbor popping in to deliver his rib-tickling catchphrase.

Characters

• Socrates
• Richard Wagner, German Romantic composer
• Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s filmmaker
• Wimsatt & Beardsley, The New Criticism School
• Ezra Pound, American expatriate poet
• Publius, Pupil of Socrates and conflicted lover of Wagner’s music

{Setting: Symposium of Socrates}

I see Ellis has found a way to recycle his Punky Brewster spec script.  (By the way, he provides a link to a YouTube of Wagner’s Lohengrin as “suggested background music.”  It’s nice — lush and epic — but after reading the following dialogue, I would have gone with “Surfin’ Bird.”)

Socrates: We are gathered here today at my Symposium to discuss the venerated discipline of aesthetics and to seek to answer this question of the ages – Can immoral art be good? Or more pointedly, can an immoral person create good art?

Sir?  Can you please sign my drop slip?

Wimsatt & Beardsley: Yes, Socrates, philosophers call this paradox the intentional fallacy…

Socrates: Oh gee, thanks for explaining philosophy to me, guys.  Maybe you can stick around after class and give me a quick tutorial on togas and pederasty, too.

Wimsatt & Beardsley: …which developed in the New Criticism School of the 1930s and was first used by us in a 1946 essay. A long-running debate in philosophy has centered around the question of whether art that is morally bad can itself be good (as art).

…then we saw An American Carol, and just decided to go get shitfaced instead.

Leni Riefenstahl: The question of the intentional fallacy has tended to focus on controversial figures like Caravaggio, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso, Andreas Serrano (“Pi– Christ” [1989]) or artists such as myself, for I was the German filmmaker for the Third Reich, the Nazi Party and for supreme chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler, whom I immortalized in such documentaries as “Triumph of the Will,” which chronicled the Nuremberg rallies, and “Olympia,” a documentary on the 1936 Berlin Olympics. I am profoundly ashamed of these movies now in light of Nazi atrocities and the human-rights genocide of the Holocaust, for my so-called art was exploited as Nazi propaganda. Nevertheless, many critics to this day consider my movies to be technically and artistically brilliant.

I had no idea playing with a Ouija board could be so dull.

Leni Riefenstahl: …but I have left the glorification of racial purity and fascist ideals behind me, and am currently developing a Porky’s-style teen comedy that I profoundly feel would be both morally and aesthetically good  for Zac Efron.

Socrates: To us, the ancient Greeks, the very idea of an intentional fallacy, the notion that one can separate art from beauty would have been readily dismissed, as for them the notions of beauty and moral goodness were inextricably linked –

Moreover, when I say “us” and “them,” I’m actually talking about “we.”  Remember, it’s philosophy, jackass, it’s supposed to be confusing!

–yet due largely to the modernist philosophy of relativism – the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity and have only relative, subjective values according to differences in perception and consideration – this question has proved more troublesome for the modern mind.

Socrates: But the verities of my time are as true today as they were in the 5th Century B.C.  Not only do the Ancient Greeks provide ethical guidance sufficient and appropriate to any conceivable dilemma, but us and them are also a good source of practical wisdom.  For instance, if you’re building an addition to your home — say, a new slave quarters — beware when you break ground for the foundation, for you may sever a subsurface gas or power line.  This can be avoided by praying to Tartarus, Erebos, or any other duly authorized chthonic god before you dig.

Much of modern art since 1900 isn’t about beauty, but has devolved into an unedifying mix of snobbishness, greed, grotesqueness and fetishism, which the intentional fallacy has only made worse. How?

Does it screw it up your Socratic method if I don’t feel like answering the question because I reject your bullshit premise?  If so, how?  And please show your work.

Because the New School Critics have legitimized the separation of God from art

Imagine how much more you would have enjoyed Too Close for Comfort had it been touched by the power of Zeus.

…goodness from beauty, art from truth, thus much of modern art has become an exaltation of evil, caricature, deception, politics and pride – rather than truth, virtue, beauty, realism and godliness.

As you may recall, Mr. Washington believes that Michael Savage is a Promethean figure, so if the pugnacious author and radio host is willing to recline on a rock for eternity while an eagle pecks at his liver, I think it would do much to reverse the trend toward snobbishness and greed by providing art that is not only morally good, but pretty damn entertaining.  Although it might make the grotesqueness and fetishism worse, especially if the Franklin Mint opts to immortalize the scene on a collectible plate.  Still, as Socrates himself would say, “Here, take a sip of this.  Does this taste funny to you?”

Get Your Ass Back in the Culture War | 21 Comments »

Well, it was The Thanksgiving That Almost Wasn’t! around here, since the oven died about three weeks ago, after a long and greasy life.  It was so old, in fact, that the company which manufactured it was no longer in business, and any replacement parts would have had to be hand-forged by Hephaestus in the boiling caldera of Mount Etna, and even then there’s a 12 to 15 day delivery, which sounds fine, but that’s business days.

Amazingly, though, they replaced it with a brand new stove-and-oven (stoven?) combo, so the Jenni-O turkey breast in the freezer will not have been severed from a dead bird countless weeks ago in vain.  It’s a Thanksgiving Miracle!

And here to deliver the invocation is Riley:

Felicitations on your Feast of Gratitude, Bipeds.  You may begin by getting down on your ungainly mid-leg joints and kissing my white socks that I haven’t killed you yet.  However, later today, after your gluttony has left you weak, bloated, and tempting, I issue no guarantees.

Okay.  Let’s move on to Moondoggie for the Benediction:

ZZZzzzzzzzzZZZzzzZZZzzzZZzzzzzzzzz…

As long time readers know, Mystery Science Theater 3000 has a special place in my heart (specifically, the place — down and to the right — where most of America has Bristol Palin clog-dancing in their vena cava), since s.z., Mary and I all initially bonded over our shared love of the show.  For which I’m thankful; because if we’d been brought together through a common interest in Hayek or Ayn Rand, then we all would have just wound up as assholes.  The hundreds of cats and dogs that s.z. has saved would instead have been turned out into the snow to make their own Galtian way — perhaps by founding a freelance snow-shoveling business (and don’t give me that crap about domestic quadrupeds lacking thumbs!  I’ve seen footage of Goofy mowing his own lawn); and Mary and I would be divorced by now, and giving you unsolicited advice on the sanctity of marriage.

Anyway, I never much cared for Thanksgiving a child, because it meant a series of dull undercard bouts amongst relatives who didn’t much interest me when they weren’t fighting, culminating with the main event when my parents would inevitably square off after the gallon jug of Italian-Swiss Colony Rosé was empty.  Worse, it meant my grandmother’s cottage cheese and lime Jell-O salad.

Any pleasant memories I have of the holiday date to the early-mid-90s, and are due entirely to the MST3K Turkey Day Marathons, which Mary and I recreate every year with a few carefully curated DVDs.  So here’s a little something to get you in the mood…

And in case I don’t say it often enough — and I don’t — I’m thankful for the many smart, funny, unbelievably kind and generous people who continue to cling to this disreputable corner of blogtopia.  On behalf on Sheri, Mary, and the cats, Happy Turkey Day everyone.

Happy Holidays, MST3k Lives!, Wild Things | 24 Comments »

As our national feast day draws nigh, Americans turn from workaday worries and obligations to reflect upon our manifold blessings; and like many of you, I am grateful for friends, family, but above all, I am thankful that Bristol Palin has survived multiple assassination attempts during her routines on Dancing With The Stars, hoofing obliviously through a hail of bullets, throwing knives, curare-tipped blowgun darts, rocket propelled grenades, crossbow bolts, and Ninja shuriken dipped in sea wasp venom like a latter day Inspector Clouseau.

Liberals who threatened Bristol Palin’s life are cowards, by Kevin Fobbs

As America prepares to spend time with family and friends over the four-day Thanksgiving holiday, it is more than tragic than during this week leading up to the holiday, there are millions of Americans who are whining and alarmed over the growing Dancing With The Stars’ success of Bristol Palin, daughter of Sarah Palin. Instead of thanksgiving there are those who are harboring terror and threats in their hearts against Bristol.

I admit it, I’ve been harboring terror in my heart, but with the holidays coming I’ve had to move threats to storage in order to make room for the Jell-O mold.

With each passing week this good natured and extremely hardworking young woman danced her way into the hearts of Americans

Which accounts for our high rates of congestive heart failure.  However, if you have any Immiticide left over from your dog’s last deworming, it may prove effective for relief of heartbristol.

in spite of liberal alarmists who blamed the Tea Party for “fixing” the results, which the ABC network has already put those buffoonish claims to rest.

In fact, she was reverse-freeped!  As said on Twitter:  ”Obviously, ACORN mobilized massive voter turnout against Bristol Palin on DWTS.”

And earlier this month, a 66-year-old man in Wisconsin who appeared to be so enraged with Bristol’s success that he fired a shotgun at his television have emboldened other equally unbalanced malcontents to send death threats to her.

Initial reports indicated that the man suffered from bi-polar disorder, but upon further investigation police determined that he was merely Elvis Presley, who had been living in quiet seclusion on a farm in Town of Vermont, Wisconsin for the past 33 years, with his wife Janice (née Joplin).

You dance challenged Liberals, two words: Grow Up!

Wait — that’s too stirring a cry for mere text.  It should be a motivational poster, or a commemorative plate from the Franklin Mint, at least a bumpersticker.  Let’s grab the masthead photo from Kevin’s “radio show” and turn this thing into the defining and inspirational motto the Tea Party has always craved and deserved!

You watch, next summer this is going to be the new Gadsden Flag.

After all, this is America. There are many of us who believe that maybe, just maybe, a young woman who was counted out, who was mocked and who was cast aside before she had even danced one step could perhaps make it to the finals, because she had the raw audacity to try to get better, week after week.

Aficionados of the Founding Fathers will recognize this quote from Benjamin Franklin’s review of the proto-dance competition, So You Think You Can Minuet?, in which he praised the courage of Ariana Calvert, daughter of the Loyalist Benedict Swingate Calvert, for braving a grueling contest in which competitors were the target of jeers, airborne produce, and occasional musket volleys, and those who failed Terpsichore where branded with a scarlet M for “maladroit.”

But the cowards would rather embrace a socialist approach. Bristol’s individuality is not admired but held with contempt.

Stalin believed that by collectivizing the Arthur Murray Dance Studio franchises across Russia, he could destroy the Rumba-loving Kulaks one ballroom at a time.  Now all that’s left of the once vaunted Soviet approach to the foxtrot are those crumbling concrete footstep diagrams all over Red Square.

Catcalls and anger is given birth, and seeded by collective and yes shameful and unprincipled cold hearted talk that turns to cowardly acts.

…usually during the commercials, although if the cowards need to pee they often won’t have time to seed the collective and give birth to anger, and will instead just swing by the kitchen for some Mallowmars and a Diet Squirt.

These cowards…yes cowards with a capital C

Say, here’s a time-saving tip: you can just capitalize words, rather than, you know, footnoting them so the reader has to re-punctuate the earlier part of the sentence with their mind.

…decided it is fair play to threaten the life a 20-year-old Bristol, who is a mother, a daughter, a sister and equally important: a human being that God created in his image. She is not a terrorist or criminal, so where is the crime?

Your honor, the prosecution would like to submit People’s Exhibit A:

As Americans, all of us should call those compassionless excuses for human beings into question and ask that God’s spirit to be with them this Thanksgiving holiday to teach them how to love and not hate, to have pride in her effort and not disdain in her accomplishment, and lastly, show respect and not rejection because after all it is only a dance show.

A much needed sense of perspective.  Thanks, Kevin.

So cowards, grow up and maybe give maturity a chance and give thanks that all the other cowards who hide in shadows and cloak themselves in anonymity have not come out from those shadows to threaten your daughter or loved one with death threats because you might have done something they did not agree with.

You’re a very persuasive man, Kev.  My only concern is that with Bristol and the cowards and all the other cowards to pray for, by the time I finish grace the yams are gonna be cold.

This Thanksgiving open up your heart and eyes to God’s light so that you can see beyond the darkness and appreciate effort not political contempt for,“Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eyes are good, your whole body also is full of light. But when they are bad, your body also is full of darkness. See to it, then, that the light within you is not darkness.” Luke 11: 34–35.

You can tell the light in your body is dark if your eye lamps are rolling at Bristol’s attempts to jive.

Give true thanks and you may just surprise yourself on Thanksgiving.

…by bellowing across the table, “Grow up, dance challenged cowards!  And pass the green bean casserole.”

Oh Lord | 18 Comments »

Sorry for the light posting around here lately, but we’ve been beavering away at the sequel to Better Living Through Bad Movies — anyway, that’s our story. But just to prove we weren’t actually snorting crystal meth off of naked call girls at a Minerals Management Service mixer in the Interior Department Grotto, here’s a piece from the chapter tentatively entitled When Bad Movies Happen to Good People.

Exorcist 2: The Heretic (1977)
Directed by John Boorman
Written by William Goodhart, based on characters by William Peter Blatty

The sense of dread begins with the credits, as blood-red words appear in a black void, while our ears are haunted by the strange and sinister score.  Not quite music, and too eerie to be a human voice, it sounds as though the composer somehow persuaded an elephant to fart into a vuvuzuela.

We open inside the Haunted Shack at Knott’s Berry Farm, which has been filled with twinkly Christmas lights and Richard Burton, who is dressed as a Roman Catholic priest and looking extremely uneasy, as if he expects at any moment to be handed a subpoena.

Richard is there to exorcise a young woman, but he can’t find the right page, and the Bible doesn’t have an index, and while he’s flipping through it the girl sets herself on fire and burns to a crisp right in front of him.  As an exorcist, this represents a personal best.

Cut to Linda Blair tap-dancing as a kid with a limp Shaun Cassidy hair-do honks out “Lullaby of Broadway” on a baritone sax.  Just in case you doubted that Satan is real.

Cut to Louise Fletcher, who is sitting face to face with a teenaged girl and shouting “Debbie!  Debbie!  Debbie! Can you hear me?” into a microphone.  Louise is a distinguished pediatric psychiatrist who is famous for pioneering the technique of screaming at deaf people.  Or she got the lyrics to Tommy wrong.

Linda breezes into Louise’s office, which for some reason is on the Space: 1999 set, and stretches out on the couch.  Louise asks Linda if she has flashbacks to the earlier, better film, then shows her “a machine we can use together,” which gives me flashbacks to Requiem for a Dream.

Fortunately, it’s just an AM radio with a couple of flashbulbs on top, which will put them in synchronized hypnotic trances so doctor and patient can make each other cluck like chickens.

Cut to the Vatican, where Cardinal Victor Lazlo orders Father Richard to investigate the death of Max von Sydow in the original film.  But Dick doesn’t want to do it because his faith in God has been shaken, and he’d rather it was a cocktail.  But then Cardinal Victor says “we all have a destiny – for good, or evil,” and he lights two cigarettes and gives one to Dick, and they decide not to ask for the moon, because they have the stars.

Cut to the Moonbase Alpha set, where Father Richard is staring through a window at disabled children.  Linda notices Dick, and stops to smile at him in apple-cheeked, sparkle-eyed delight, because she’s just so gosh-darned cute and nice, or because it’s been an awful long time – maybe too long – since she’s killed a priest.

Father Richard tells Louise he wants to question Linda, because Evil is “alive, living.  Perverted and perverting.”  That’s Linda’s cue, and she barges into the office to announce that she wants to use the machine with Louise, and she wants the priest to watch, because they can make a lot more money with a two-girl show.

The next day, Linda sits in Louise’s office, wearing a headband of electrodes and what appears to be Stevie Nicks’ wedding dress, while Father Richard stands over her looking worried about Evil and kind of hungover.  Then Louise turns on a strobe light bright enough to give Satan a headache, and he’s not even in the room yet.  Linda stares at it for three seconds, then her eyes roll back in her head; perhaps she’s having an epileptic fit due to the flashing light, or perhaps Louise has hypnotized her to be really sarcastic.

Louise slips on a headband and keeps telling Linda to “make your tone go deeper,” getting my hopes up that she’ll spend the rest of the film talking like Barry White.  Instead, director John Boorman points the strobe light at the camera while Louise murmurs, “You will remember none of this,” presumably addressing the critics.

Louise orders Linda to go “deeper…deeper,” then says, “Now I want to come down and be with you.”  She adds, “We will obey the commands that Father Richard gives us.”  This is the worst phone sex ever.

There’s a flashback to the first movie, with Linda in demonface and Max von Sydow having a coronary.  Except it’s not actually footage from The Exorcist, since it’s clearly Linda’s body double in the makeup, and Max’s ostensibly fatal heart attack seems about as serious as one of Fred Sanford’s.

After it’s all over, Linda borrows art supplies from an emotionally disturbed child so she can draw a picture of Father Richard with his head on fire.

“What does it mean?” Richard whispers, clearly worried that it means he’s going to die and go to Hell, or worse, live long enough to appear in Ghost Rider.  Then it suddenly hits him, and he realizes that the fire in his portrait means there’s a fire in the basement, because to Linda, his head symbolizes a dark, moist place filled with canned peaches and porn.  He runs downstairs, finds a flaming cardboard box in a closet, and smacks it repeatedly with a crutch.

Read the rest of this entry »

Movies, The Book | 23 Comments »

According to his Townhall bio, “Douglas MacKinnon is former White House and Pentagon official who spent three years working in a Joint Command,” although he’s perhaps better known as Bob Dole’s former press secretary.

I’m kidding, nobody knows who the hell he is — except perhaps for certain fundamentalist Christians, who got their snakes in a twist over Doug’s 2008 novel, The Apocalypse Directive, about a U.S. President who believes Jesus is telling him to start Armageddon.

The story was loosely based on Christian Embassy, an evangelical group which confused the U.S. Armed Services with the Knights Templar and went about the corridors of the Pentagon trying to recruit their own khaki-clad, mayonnaise-flavored mujahideen. Spoiler Alert:  At the end of the book we learn that Jesus did tell the President to launch a nuclear first strike, but it was just a prank for what turned out to be a failed reality show pilot (the Lord figured He could defray the cost of the Second Coming by selling it as a series to TLC).

But as Jimmy Stewart said in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, false equivalencies are the only equivalencies worth fighting for, so this week Mr. MacKinnon is going to blaspheme the “bible for the left” (The New York Times) and its new Revelations section, which offers theater and restaurant reviews, and combined listings for Movies, TV, Trump-Sounding, and Seal-Breaking (This Friday, November 19, Beast of the Sea will be at the Jones Beach Theater, with Special Guests The Jonas Brothers and Demi Lovato!  Doors open at 6.  Mouth of Hell opens at 8).

The New York Times, The Far-Left, and Their “Messiah” Obama

With the results of the mid-term election still fresh in our minds, the question needs to be asked again. That being, is Barack Obama the Messiah?

Well, if the Messiah has returned, that would make George W. Bush the Antichrist, wouldn’t it?  But since the he didn’t actually end the world, just wrapped it around a telephone pole, it would seem he screwed up the Apocalypse, too.

Or, more to the point, do a number of delusional liberals and far-left radicals still truly believe him to be a deity or their deity?

Since “a number” could mean “one,” I’m going to say yes.  I don’t personally know any people who consider Obama a god, but this is America — we’re always looking for a savior’s palm to grease, from Joseph Smith to L. Ron Hubbard to Sun Myung Moon — and if you can’t get at least one person to believe you’re a prophet, then you don’t deserve your megachurch, or cable network, or money-losing DC newspaper.

(Oh, and Rev. Moon?  If you ever get glum about the way people mock your godhead, try to remember that they were a lot more demonstrative about it in the 1st Century AD; besides, nowadays you have apostles like R. Emmett Tyrrell, who feast on the wisdom of your faith-based broadsheet every day, along with their morning roughage.)

Uber-liberal New York Times columnist Gail Collins just seemed to confirm that dangerous possibility.

I’m a little shaky on the whole liberal taxonomy, although I know it spans the gamut from Far Left Communist to Far Left Fascist, but are there any circumstances in which we can legitimately classify Gail Collins as a “uber-leftist” without the Oxford English Dictionary  just hauling off and punching us in the sack?  Or to put it another way, Doug just heaved a rock and broke the Overton Window, then stuck his hands in his pockets and sauntered off, whistling; which to my mind illustrates the shocking way our culture has declined since the early 20th Century, because in a silent film the cops would have chased him all over town for that.

In her latest offering in the bible for the left entitled “Believing in Barack,” Ms. Collins seemed to be reciting her version of a prayer in support of her deific leader as she tried to excuse those horrible mid-term results. Said Ms. Collins, “I have faith in Barack Obama…even though he is testing us sorely…I believe the president will pick the right course…”

For some reason Doug doesn’t link to Ms. Collins’ piece, probably because he worked hard on those ellipses, and he doesn’t want us to ruin the effect by reading all the unnecessary words in between (it’s like getting close enough to Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte to see the dots. Respect the artist, people!).  Just for the record, here’s her opening paragraph:  ”I have faith in Barack Obama. Of course, I also have faith in the New York Mets.”

Interesting and telling choice of words.

Once you reassemble them in the right order.

As many liberals and atheists don’t go to church or religious service, they are going to have to take my word for it that when someone generally says they have “faith” in someone and that “He is testing us sorely,” that person is almost always referring to God.

Unless that person is a liberal or an atheist who doesn’t go to church, in which case he almost never is.

I find your faith in Obama disturbing…

Now, through recorded history, various Pharaohs, Emperors, Kings, dictators, and garden variety thugs have declared themselves God or a God. To my knowledge, President Obama has not granted himself this mother of all affirmative actions.

“Oops — I wish I’d hadn’t gotten halfway through this column before I realized my premise was bullshit.  I could have written a snappy thing on political correctness instead, or maybe just done recipes this week.  Oh well, I can crap out another 300 words of this standing on my head.”

Unfortunately, his followers have assigned him that title on their own. Not good.

Ellipses don’t lie.

Belief in God — much like the belief in the “brilliance” of Mr. Obama — requires no proof. None.

And since you declare later in the column that by any rational standard, Obama isn’t brilliant — in fact, he’s kind of a dunce — then, uh…Hm.  I guess Richard Dawkins thanks you for the unsolicited testimonial to atheism.

Those who believe in God will tell you it’s an act of faith. While they believe — and I agree — that they can logically explain the existence of God, they also feel it’s a waste of time to argue with the liberal and closed minds of atheists and “scientists” with an agenda.

Or a “degree.”

Yikes.

This is just my personal prejudice, but I don’t think an eminence grise should say “Yikes” (although if he’s spent three years in a Joint Command, he should be allowed to say “Whoa”).

On and on it goes. First we had the unhinged Louis Farrakhan say that when Obama was talking, “…the Messiah is absolutely speaking,” to now Gail Collins at least figuratively getting down on one knee to genuflect before the presence of Mr. Obama and reaffirm her faith in his power and glory.

Or, more specifically, the Virgin Gail reaffirmed her faith that Obama will give due consideration to the tax and entitlement policy recommendations by the “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform,” which was the original title of the novel, but the American publisher thought it was too provocative, and might needlessly antagonize the Legion of Decency.

Behind the Subtext | 29 Comments »

MOONDOGGIE: Come, take my paw, and we’ll run away to the couch — forever!

MOONDOGGIE: Well, my little Hostess Cupcake…?

RILEY: (SIGH)  I hate when he gets romantic.  How can I tell him I only hate him as a friend?

Wild Things | 5 Comments »

A big thank you to s.z. for her analgesic posts of yesterday; it did my heart (if not my head) good to learn that John (Stash LaRue) Stossel is shoplifting his material from the likes of Dr. Mike Adams.  It does come as a bit of a shock, considering that Stossel was, within living memory, a credible reporter and the co-anchor of a major network magazine show, but he’s hanging around Townhall these days, and I suppose the peer pressure finally got to him.  It’s like my old granddad used to say — “lie down with dogs, get up with cupcakes.”

But if we’re footnoting Stash’s sources, this raises the question of where Dr. Mike gets his ideas from.  My guess is, it’s Barbara Bush.  Showing a teenager a Mason jar full of miscarriage just seems like the kind of thing Dr. Mike would threaten to do; in fact, I expect that any day now we’ll hear reports of a man, naked but for a raincoat and a sports bottle full of embryos stuck in his jockstrap, leaping out of bushes at the University of North Carolina–Wilmington and exposing himself to co-eds.  The campus cops will probably give him a snappy alias, like “The Fetal Flasher,” or “The Spontaneous Abortion Bandit.”

Speaking of unsavory characters darkening the doorsteps of the right blogosphere, R. Emmett Tyrrell is editor-in-chief of the American Spectator, although he is primarily famous for the circus midway-like assortment of Siamese consonants in his name.  Today, however, he has decided to drop his daily fundament-muffin on the front page of Townhall.

Hair from the Rand Paul Collection™

Hand-Wringing

WASHINGTON — The other day, I sat down to breakfast. It was a normal day. Five daily newspapers were laid out before me. As I went over the front pages, I downed orange juice and a bowl of oatmeal powdered with brown sugar and flaxseed.

And if that doesn’t turn his bowels into a log flume, nothing will!

Then I went off to my library with the newspapers and a cup of coffee. By then, incidentally, I was revolted.

Because my careless bibliothecary had shelved the several books of the Twilight saga in non-sequential order, with Eclipse preceding New Moon, while Breaking Dawn haunts some non-contiguous netherworld, between the non-fictional Twilight: The Complete Illustrated Movie Companion, and the non-canonical Twilight and Philosophy: Vampires, Vegetarians, and the Pursuit of Immortality (The Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture Series).

The New York Times carried on its front page a perfectly disgusting story. It was not a news story, for it broke no news. It was, rather, a feature story, meant to inform and, I presume, to move me to action.

Fat chance, broadsheet-borne bleeding hearts!

It was about the prevalence of suicide in Afghanistan by women who use cooking oil and matches to do themselves in, sometimes successfully, sometimes incompetently and all the more painfully. This was brought to my attention even before my matutinal coffee!

Fortunately, he was still slightly drunk from his crepuscular cocktails.

It is not the first time the Times — or, for that matter, The Washington Post — has put on its front page appalling stories that did not have to be there. Both newspapers run such feature stories on the front page rather regularly — but notThe Washington Times, not The Washington Examiner and certainly not The Wall Street Journal, my other three newspapers. They run repellent stories but usually inside. I think it tells you something about the biases of these newspapers.

For instance, the Examiner feature, “John Boehner’s Daily Ochering Ritual: Let a Smile Be Your Umber” was buried in the Lifestyle section.

The New York Times and The Washington Post share a liberal bias, and their preoccupations are increasingly morbid. The Washington Times, The Examiner and The Wall Street Journal are biased toward the conservative position. They do not shy from reality but generally keep it inside the newspaper, at least when they can. Whether they have my oatmeal in mind, they, for a certitude, have the dignity of the individuals covered in the story in mind, I hope.

One Afghan woman who attempted to immolate herself spoke these chilling last words:  ”I hope the morbid liberal media exerts enough editorial discretion that they don’t interfere with the laxative effects of their readers’ morning bowl of whole-groat porridge with slivered almonds and Goji berries.”

If the story had been breaking news, I would have expected all five newspapers to put it on the front page, but even then I would expect the conservative newspapers to desist from running pictures of corpses and mangled bodies. Certainly, the corpses would not be front and center — as they often are in the liberal newspapers — and faces would be covered.

In fact, when conservatives are in charge, the bodies are usually snuck into the country under cover of darkness, and no cameras are allowed at all.  I mean honestly — is this the kind of thing you want to see before your morning constitutional?

I don’t know how my grandparents choked down their Postum and Cream of Wheat with this crap splashed across the front page of the East Zimmerman Courier – Telegram.

As I say, liberals have become morbid. They are obsessive about the gruesome and the gloomy.

As a sign of the times, UC Berkeley School of Engineering has just endowed the Jigsaw Chair in Baroque and Ironic Deathtrap Studies.

She was rushed to the hospital with burns over 60 percent of her body, and after two weeks of excruciating pain, she died. In the course of telling us of her death, the Times talks about other suicides and their causes. It tells us of these women’s suffering. It is all quite pitiable, but what am I to do about it?

“Decline a second helping of organic corn meal breakfast pudding?  Why, this matutinal morbidity has turned my hair so gray I’m going to have to schedule an antemeridian application of Just For Men®!”

Presumably, not much. I cannot even talk about it, for what it tells us about Islamic culture is not very favorable. Life, particularly a woman’s life, is not cherished in Afghanistan. But we do not talk about it, even in America. It is not politically correct.

Sure, it’s on the front page of the New York Times, but who reads that bunch of oatmeal-spoilers?

So the Times wrings its hands about the fate of women in Afghanistan and goes on. Perhaps tomorrow the paper will be talking about the fate of women in Kenya or dogs in Indonesia or a fabulous new disease. It is all of a piece with the liberal preoccupation with the morbid.

“It disgusts me that we are so pusillanimous and politically correct that we as a nation lack the intestinal fortitude to honestly grapple with these issues that I don’t really want to talk about.”

Actually, two days later, the Times pictured on its front page a young woman lying on a floor on some kind of pallet. She is in an isolation tent, but it is not very sanitary. Supplies are piled around her. She is forlorn. The caption reads “Cholera Moves Into the Beleaguered Haitian Capital” and goes on to explain: “A woman suspected of having cholera, in an isolation tent in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. An outbreak has spread into the city.” Again, what are we to do?

Waste our Beautiful Minds?

Well, I suppose we can send money, more money. We certainly cannot help the victims in Haiti in any real way. Nor can we aid the women of Afghanistan.

There any Cinnamon Streusel muffins left?

We can share the liberals’ morbid preoccupations or do what I usually do: read the liberal newspapers last

“That’s when I make my ‘donation,’ so to speak.  Heh heh heh.”

Respect Your Betters | 30 Comments »

Okay, you know the story:

When Barbara Bush miscarried at home, she had young George drive her to the hospital. In her lap, Barbara Bush held a jar containing the remains of the fetus, George Bush said.

“She says to her teenage kid, ‘Here’s a fetus,’ ” the former president told Lauer. “No question it — that affected me — my philosophy that we should respect life.”

Um, okay. “Here’s a fetus, kid.” That taught George to respect life.

And here’s an earlier version of the incident:

Once, in the mid-1960s in Houston, when his father was out of town, he drove his mother to the hospital when she was having a miscarriage.

Halfway there, Barbara Bush told her son, “I don’t think I’ll be able to get out of the car.”

“I’ll take you to the emergency room, don’t worry,” her son assured her.

“He picked me up the next day. … He talked to me in the car and he said, ‘Don’t you think we ought to talk about this before you have more children?’ ” his mother recalled.

That’s from the same profile where we learn that his parents didn’t tell George that his little sister was dying of leukemia — they just showed up to pick him up at school one day and Robin wasn’t there. And then they told him that she had died two days earlier.

Now, ponder this bit from a NY Times story:

The image of a mother handing her teenage son a jar containing the remains of her just-miscarried fetus may be a disturbing one.

But the scene, described by former President George W. Bush in his interview with Matt Lauer of NBC News on Monday night, has started a national conversation — both about his mother, Barbara Bush, and about the complex psychological fallout from miscarriage.

Mr. Bush called his mother’s action “straightforward,” and added that it illustrated “how my mom and I developed a relationship.” Some opponents of abortion reacted approvingly. Other commentators called Mrs. Bush’s behavior the action of a depressed and angry person.

But experts say the incident is hard to interpret half a century after the fact.

I don’t know what it says about miscarriage, but I think it does point to really twisted family dynamics. But maybe that’s just me. Maybe in upper class circles it’s considered appropriate to show your teenage kid a dead fetus (and then talk with him about family planning the next day). But it’s vulgar to tell that kid that his sister is dying – and, in fact, that she’s been dead for two days.

In other news, Robin of Berkely has done another column in which she psychoanalyzes President Obama:

Now at the helm, Obama is avenging the Sins of the Fathers, even though the fathers are long since dead and buried. Consequently, the Department of Justice drops all charges against the new generation of domestic terrorists, the New Black Panthers, who verbalize their desire to kill “cracker babies.”

The DOJ turns a blind eye toward egregious acts of injustice towards whites. The Feds will even go so far as suing Arizona and threatening other states should they not toe the party line of importing as many people of color as possible.

It all makes sense now! Obama is mad at the African father who deserted him, so he wants to “import” a whole lot of Mexicans into Arizona to get his revenge on white people!

Anyway, because of her expertise, I look forward to her interpretation of how the healthy, positive mother-son bond between little George and mother Barbara formed a man who joked about executing a woman on Texas’s death row.

Behind the Subtext | 22 Comments »

Since Scott has a splitting headache, let’s make him feel better by checking out John Stossel’s latest column. Or, rather, let’s check out John Stossel’s column and then split Stossel’s head to make Scott feel better.

I’m Politically Incorrect

Oooh, I’m so naughty and trendy, and just the kind of bad boy that the ladies all go for!

This week, I held a bake sale — a racist bake sale. I stood in midtown Manhattan shouting, “Cupcakes for sale.” My price list read:Asians — $1.50

Whites — $1.00

Blacks/Latinos — 50 cents

People stared.

I imagine they did. And I imagine they were thinking to themselves, “Man, Stossel is so 2003 with that ‘Diversity Bake Sale’ stuff. And he is SOOO 1985 with that mustache! And besides, this is midtown Manhattan, and we don’t hawk cupcakes here – for anything less than $5 a pop. ”

Anyway, if you are older than ten, you can predict where the rest of the column is going: Diversity programs are racist because everyone is equal now. College conservatives are being repressed by evil administrators who won’t let them practice cupcake discrimination. My university colleagues are stupid hippie feminist liberals, and I hate them all so much!

Wait, that last one was Dr. Mike — but you can’t blame me for being confused, since Stossel’s column sounds like it was stolen directly from Dr. Mike, including the fact that the whole thing is based on a Foundation of Irritating Republicans in Education Who Whine A Lot (FIRE) press release. And since Stossel is a big TV star (really! it’s in his bio), and Dr. Mike is just a non-promoted criminology professor at a state college, it’s kind of sad that Stossel is now poaching on Dr. Mike’s beat. (Of course, Dr. Mike has long since finished with racist cupcakes, and has moved on to the more evil gay cupcakes, thus proving that Stossel has indeed fallen on hard intellectual times.)

So, it has come to this. Dr. Mike and Mustache Face Stossel enter an arena, and only one emerges alive. And then that one has to sell cupcakes on the streets of Manhattan for the rest of his life.

Oh Lord | 13 Comments »

I’m on day two of a (so far) two-day headache, and want to apologize for not posting this week, but I just haven’t felt up to skimming through the usual wingnuts.  However, since the inside of my skull feels the way a bad bearing sounds — grinding, scraping, shrieking — I figure I might as well read Pam Geller’s column, since it produces roughly the same effect.

We Won – Now What?

The Republican win on Tuesday was far larger than the historic takeback of 1994, the stunning rebuke of Bill Clinton that subsequently forced a chastised president to enact welfare reform (a flying-pig moment).

Just as some people release doves as symbols of peace and love at the conclusion of weddings or memorials, Pam commemorates the passage of important legislation by releasing flying pigs in order to ward off Muslims.  (Genetically engineered raptor-swine made possible by a grant from the Archer Daniels Midland Company.)

Even the sparse wins the subversive left managed to pull out on Tuesday were riddled with chicanery, cheating, union payoffs, and the buying of votes with “free lunches.”

I’d been planning to vote for Meg Whitman, but as I approached the polling place (and well within the 100 foot “no electioneering” limit) I was accosted by a Jerry Brown supporter and bought off with an olive loaf on white bread and a Fun Size bag of Cheez Its.

Harry Reid’s systemic corruption garnered a win funded by millions of dollars from public-sector unions. It was all in the game. Same for California — a state from which decent, hardworking Americans (aka Republicans) have been fleeing

This is true, and as a liberal it’s partly my fault, but I’ve tried to make amends by holding the door for them.

…a state destroyed by a union choke hold.

Linda McMahon dispatched some of her employees to battle the SEIU thugs, but unfortunately, WWE wrestlers are barred from using the union choke hold, so it wasn’t really a fair fight.

The stakes could not have been higher or more serious in the triumph of the rational on Tuesday.

The Triumph of the Rational (Artist’s Conception).

Obama still doesn’t get it. Obama’s tone at his press conference on Wednesday was still contemptuous of the American people and shocking in terms of simple math. He had the audacity to say this: “We should be able to agree now that it makes no sense for China to have better rail systems than us, and Singapore having better airports than us. And we just learned that China now has the fastest supercomputer on Earth. That used to be us. They’re making investments, because they know those investments will pay off over the long term.”

His math is shockingly bad — it doesn’t even use numbers, which I’m pretty sure is a prerequisite.

Singapore and China are free-market economies — laissez-faire capitalism

Yep, China’s National Center for Supercomputing, and Ministry of Railways — Triumphs of Private Enterprise!

Higher taxes imposed on the rich (and the semi-rich) come out of their investment capital (i.e., their savings). These taxes mean less investment, i.e., less production, fewer jobs, higher prices, etc.

That’s why China’ free-market railroad magnates invented Reardon Metal, and we didn’t.

By the time the “rich” lower their standard of living, those who work in their companies or subcontract with them will be gone, along with their savings and their spouses’ jobs — and no power in the world (no economic power) will be able to revive the dead industries. There will be no such power left. (In this I am paraphrasing Ayn Rand’s words from decades ago.)

And as Rand correctly predicted, America’s great piece-goods moguls were forced to offshore their sweatshops to South-East Asia because Obama taxed Dagny Taggart.

The Concorde was going to be the future of air travel, in which we’d bop from place to place in half the time. Now the Concorde is defunct. Kaput. Much like the environment for producers and businessmen, who are the “villains” of Democrats, statists, collectivists, moochers, and looters.

This is the price of force. This is the price of coercion. This is the price of statism. This is the price of big government. The very idea of America has been subsumed by an enslavement mentality.

Democrats have killed America’s national symbol, the Concorde, which replaced the bald eagle, a statist bird that just wanted to sit on the Endangered Species List and mooch and loot, rather than going extinct as the free market decreed.

Government is not the answer — it destroys everything it touches.

On the bright side, this is how we manage to win all of our wars.  WWII, as you’ll recall, came to a swift and sure end in early 1942 when Roosevelt sent some Department of Agriculture bureaucrats over to Berlin to touch Hitler.

We must take back the culture, because politics is merely a reflection of the culture. The left has the culture in a choke hold.

We must break up this match and save the culture, before the left gets The Real Housewives of New Jersey in a three-quarter facelock, or immobilizes American Idol with a Boston crab and forces Ryan Seacrest to tap out.

We are done with lies. We are done with “It’s Bush’s fault.” We are done with “Obama inherited the second Great Depression.” No. Obama’s policies led to a great coming depression. Obama talks about Bush spending? The utter gall. Bush was Jack Benny to Obama’s profligate Mack Daddy Warbucks.

“Racism” is the new “Irony.”

The left can spin it any way they like, but the economic emergency of 2008 was a direct result of Democrat entitlement/financial policy: Carter’s Community Investment Act (CIA), Clinton’s sub-prime push, and the ensuing Barney Frank Freddie Mac/Fanny Mae plunder.

I’m disappointed that Pam has failed to connect the dots by pointing out how Johnson’s “Great Society” planted the seeds of the sub-prime mortgage crisis by making minorities think they’d be ready to buy a house in 43 years.  Oh well, at least she’s not blaming this on the Muslims…

I do not fault Bush war expenditures. We are at war with a ruthless, bloodthirsty, savage ideology that has no humanity. No expense can be spared in defeating jihad. Obama’s sniveling like a little girl falls on deaf ears when you consider the trillions he stole from us for no reason but to pad the pockets of his shadow government.

I have to agree with Pam — we should have just bombed and invaded the banks instead of bailing them out.

Our victory is the beginning of the forty years’ war — who is with me?

Sounds great!  But before we get started, I’m just curious — why a Forty Years War?  I assume because a Hundred Years sounds too long, and Thirty Years sounds too French?  Anyway, the important thing is, Pam has a manifesto, which, in honor of her twin inspirations, Hitler and Fergie, she has entitled Mein Humpfs.

We will repeal national socialist ObamaCare.

We will destroy all old propaganda media. New media is steamrolling over the dead media walking.

We will take back the college campuses.

We will get on our children’s school boards and, just like in Texas, change the whitewashed history books and review the syllabi.

Deregulate business. Piece by piece. Sector by sector. Unshackle the motor of the country. Free the producer.

Producers will now be free to sell up to 100% of Broadway musicals to multiple investors.

We will call our mortal enemy by its rightful name: Islamic jihad.

Or “Voldemort,” depending on how touchy Rowling is about her IP.

We will turn the Muslim Brotherhood into the Muslim Little-Girlhood.

We’ll teach them to vlog in their bikinis!

We will ridicule, polarize, and render irrelevant the dogmatic, evil leftists.

We will crush them with our logic and reason and concrete facts.

While ridiculing and polarizing them.  Our facts may be concrete, but they’re funny.

We will demand reasoned discourse and laugh at their ad hominem attacks.

We’re, uh, we’re gonna start with that the second one first.

We will raise the voting age to 21.  Military excluded.

Our facts are concrete, but some of our logic and reason was, admittedly, filched from Starship Troopers…

If “children” are still on their parents health insurance at 26, maybe 21 is too low.

In order to register to vote, you must show proof of having been refused treatment at a private hospital.  Preferably for something life-threatening, like a gunshot wound or acute appendicitis, so we know you’re serious.  Remember, No Suffering, No Suffrage.

Get Your Ass Back in the Culture War | 23 Comments »