So How's That Surge Working?

Five years ago, the now-defunct "Group News Blog" put together this helpful video explaining the American military strategy of temporarily adding more troops to Iraq while at the same time bribing the people who were shooting at us to shoot at other people until we could make it out the door known "The Surge".

Five years and thousands of uncontrollable public Neoconservative erections later, this is what post-Surge Iraq now looks like:

Attacks in Iraq kill over 40, sectarian tensions high

By Kareem Raheem

BAGHDAD, Iraq (Reuters) - A series of bomb and gun attacks across Iraq killed more than 40 people on Tuesday, a day after over 70 died in violence targeting majority Shi'ites that has stoked fears of all-out sectarian war with minority Sunnis.

Nearly 300 people have been killed in the past week as sectarian tensions, fuelled by the civil war in neighboring Syria, threaten to plunge Iraq back into communal bloodletting.

Ten years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, Iraq's Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds have yet to find a stable power-sharing deal and violence is again on the upswing.

In the biggest single incident on Tuesday, a car bomb exploded near a Sunni mosque in the Abu Ghraib area of western Baghdad killing 11 people and wounding 21, police and medics said.
...

No word on whether the horrific violence and ongoing failure of basic civil institutions has once again delayed completion of the President George W. Bush Some Grand Square in downtown Baghdad.

We Join Professor David Brooks' Humility Class Already In Progress...

So America's Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual decided to use Teh Googles to pad out his Yale class on Humility:

What Our Words Tell Us

By DAVID BROOKS

About two years ago, the folks at Google released a database of 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008. You can type a search word into the database and find out how frequently different words were used at different epochs.

The database doesn’t tell you how the words were used; it just tells you how frequently they were used...

...

The Kesebirs identified 50 words associated with moral virtue and found that 74 percent were used less frequently as the century progressed. Certain types of virtues were especially hard hit. Usage of courage words like “bravery” and “fortitude” fell by 66 percent. Usage of gratitude words like “thankfulness” and “appreciation” dropped by 49 percent.

Usage of humility words like “modesty” and “humbleness” dropped by 52 percent. Usage of compassion words like “kindness” and “helpfulness” dropped by 56 percent. Meanwhile, usage of words associated with the ability to deliver, like “discipline” and “dependability” rose over the century, as did the usage of words associated with fairness. The Kesebirs point out that these sorts of virtues are most relevant to economic production and exchange.

...

First, we must all agree agree right now that nobody is going mess up Bobo's latest Pet Theory scam by mentioning that words like, say, "Pride" and "Prejudice", "Vanity" and "Fair", "Great" and "Expectations", "Crime" and "Punishment", and "The" and "Idiot" probably showed up a lot more in the literature after the 18th century than before 18th century for reasons that had nothing to do with humility, freedom, Benghaaaaazi or, for that matter, the relative woodiness or tinniness of the words themselves.

Also don't mention that sheer number of books being vomited out by the publishing industry in the 20th century almost certainly skewed the results beyond salvation, as does the fact that the tonnage of books being produced does not necessarily have any relationship to the number of readers or depth of influence any give book may have.

Second, for the sheer chutzpah on display in converting an afternoon farting around on the computer into a way to burn three hours of class time ("'Humility' down. 'Twerking' up.  Discuss!"), bravo, Mr. Brooks.  Bravo!

But let us not tarry, because there is so much more to see!

For example, as some of you may know, America's Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual only landed that gig teaching Humility to Elis because several years ago the Sulzberger family had the bright idea of giving him a job for life drizzling 800 words of room-temperature verbal tapioca into the op-ed page of America's Newspaper of Record twice a week.  For awhile, Mr. Brooks got by on his new job by basically doing the kind of wingnut scut-work that Bloody Bill Kristol had been paying him to do his previous job --  penning paeans to the unalloyed awesomeness of George W. Bush, bashing Liberals for being cluelessly or unpatriotically  or antisemitic or mulishly or doltishly wrong about things like economy and Iraq, etc.

But then things got bad.

Then they got very bad.

Then Reality itself reached out and slapped George Bush's dick out of Mr. Brooks' mouth, at which point America's Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual burned out his brakes and clutch frantically trying to veer away from the Mainstream Media's suddenly collapsing main story line -- "Liberals are awful and wrong about everything!" -- and onto the Mainstream Media's New!And!Improved! mother road -- "Isn't it sad how everyone on the Right and Left both get everything equally wrong every time!" -- before the paint on the "Both Sides Do It" mile markers had even dried.

And by God he did it.

He did it by dint of sheer, brute repetition -- sticking hell-or-high-water to his story that Conservatives saved America from the pot-smoking, sexytime Hippie Peril of the 1960s but also might have gotten a wee bit drunk at the V-L Day party and said a few impolitic things, but hey, don't we all? -- and by making sure that he never found himself in the presence of anyone who would ever ask him any long, tricky questions about the Bad Old Days when he made a living putting his less-than-humble boot in to the Liberals, Mr. Brooks found a second career for himself as Chief Defender of a Centrist faith which only a few years earlier he repeatedly and roundly mocked during his first career.

Which is why, to this very day, in column after column, you will find Our Mr. Brooks hewing fanatically to the strategy which bought him his mansion:  making sure every single fucking hobbyhorse he mounts comes with a Centrist Trojan crouching inside,

Including the one he rode in on today:.

This story, if true, should cause discomfort on right and left. Conservatives sometimes argue...

Liberals sometimes argue ...

After which, to avert the possibility that some future smartass might come along and add this column to the Great Big Pile Of Things David Brooks Has Gotten Terribly Wrong, Mr. Brooks used half of his final paragraph to inform his readers that he had just completely wasted their time by completely negating the premise on which the entire column was based:

Evidence from crude data sets like these are prone to confirmation bias. People see patterns they already believe in. Maybe I’ve done that here...

Because that's how you do it in the NBA!

Some of Our Disputes

Go back awhile.

As this 2006 post from the late Steve Gilliard illustrates:

Wednesday, August 02, 2006 

It matters to some people

Billmon posted this up and it bugs the shit out of me.

A "Bad" Sign............................

I used to argue that progressives in this country had no choice but to support the Democrats -- even pathetic frauds like Howard Dean and inept Thurston Howell III clones like John Kerry. I used to quote Frederick Douglas's despairing comment about what the Republican Party of his day represented for African Americans: the rock; all else is the sea.

Maybe that was true, once. But I've finally come to realize that in modern-day America there is no rock -- just a vast, featureless expanse of reactionary ocean, like something from the set of Waterworld, except without a gilled Kevin Costner.

So here's my confession: At this point I really don't give a flying fuck whether the Democrats take the House or the Senate back. No, wait, that's not true. The truth is I hope they don't. It wouldn't save us from what's coming down the road, in the Middle East and elsewhere. It wouldn't force President Psychopath to change course or seek therapy. But it would make sure that the "left" (ha ha ha) gets more than its fair share of blame for the approaching debacle.

That may well be the natural role of the Democratic Party in our one-and-a-half party system, but I don't want any part of it any more. Which means that when I say it's a bad sign (consensus opinion always being wrong) that Charlie Cook now thinks the Republicans are likely to lose their House and/or Senate majorities in November, I just mean that it's a bad sign for the Democratic Party and its professional hangers on.

For the rest of us, and for whatever is left of this country's soul, it doesn't really matter. We've already lost.

You know, if you have a good job and a nice house, you can think this way.

If you're making minimum wage, you need a Democratic Congress, if you want to be treated with stem cells, if you want to get an abortion.

It's easy to sit back and say nothing will happen to Bush, because nothing will happen to you. But if you're fighting with the VA . it fucking matters. If your kid is in Iraq, it fucking matters. Fuck the shit which comes with Bush, there are people who need the help, even minimal help, a Democratic Congress can provide.

A lot of nice, middle class progressives forget that the fight isn't for them. You think for one second I believe Ned Lamont knows what it's like to be working class, much less working class and black, living in a New Haven housing project?

What I know is that Joe Lieberman turned his back on those people and put his foot on their necks in so many ways I've lost count. It's their kids dying in Iraq, coming home to a fucked up VA, not getting their benefits.

At least Lamont wants to listen and Lieberman stopped long ago.

You better remember that if you see a vast sea, there are some folks drowning and the question is whether you save them or leave them to their fate.

When those Coast Guard pilots and rescue swimmers flew over New Orleans, they could have said, shit, too many wires, too many unknowns, let's get some boats for them. Instead, they jumped in the water and started saving people.

Which is what we are tasked to do. We don't have time to worry about Bush, there are people who need a government not at their throats. They don't need it in theory, they don't need it in some undefined future, they need it today, and if not today, tomorrow. Those Wal Mart workers need real health insurance, and the GOP isn't going to give it to them.

There are real people who need what a Democratic Congress can provide and who need it as soon as they can get it.

Such is the nature of family fights,

Clueless Gay Tory Vows To Continue Being Obnoxiously Oblivious Because Something Something Burke Something Something Freedom

Over in University of the Internet's Alienist Phrenology Department, there are only two things more hilarious than America's Most Insufferable Privileged White Conservative Gay Catholic Tory Public Intellectual continuing to defiantly beat that Race Science thunder-drum no matter what.

One is watching the apparently eternally-patient Mr. Ta-Nahesi Coates take the role of Mr. Sullivan's extremely polite downstairs neighbor who asks his former colleague if he couldn't maybe tune his equipment up a little and maybe turn the volume down just a notch or two, to which Mr. Sullivan deafly replies over the din of this own racket, "LOUDER?  SURE, I CAN PLAY IT LOUDER!"

The other is watching Mr. Sullivan explains to us po' liberal simpletons that he is doing this all for our own good:

I do not doubt that many of those pursuing this question are doing so for ugly reasons. Probably a hefty majority. That should make one especially leery of their arguments and make one very aware of the need to use empiricism almost pathologically. But, of course, one reason why this area is so clogged with racists is that non-racists don’t want to go there. My worry is that not going there will only rebound against the case that such data should not in any way be used for public policy. If affirmative action is finally abolished, we may be able to get race as an identifier out of policy discussions altogether. But what happens if affirmative action goes and we have universities that are overwhelmingly Asian-American and Jewish? What will liberals do then?

Wish you'd stop bein' so good to us, Cap'n

Daze of Futurists Past

File under: All of this has happened before/ All of this will happen again. 

As an addenda to yesterday's post about how today's breed of Those Who Speculate About The Social Costs of The Robots of Tomorrow often seem oblivious to the serious speculating about tomorrow which yesterday's Those Who Speculate About The Social Costs of The Robots of Tomorrow were doing long before today's speculators about the social costs of the robots of tomorrow were even born (see how tricky plotting a time travel story can get!) here is a quick reminder of my favorite explanation of the origins of the word "sabotage":

...from the Netherlands in the 15th century when workers would throw their sabots (wooden shoes) into the wooden gears of the textile looms to break the cogs, feeling the automated machines would render the human workers obsolete.

Because whether you write about it in the 15th, 21th or 36th centuries, human nature never changes.

Escapist Literature My Ass, Ctd

  

It is both delightful and a little sad to find serious people in 2013 coming boldly out in favor of thinking about something -- 

It’s Time to Talk about the Burgeoning Robot Middle Class

How will a mass influx of robots affect human employment?

In the book Race Against the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT’s Sloan School of Management present a chart showing U.S. productivity, GDP, employment, and income from 1953 to 2011. The chart looks as you would expect from 1953 until the mid-1980s, with every one of the measures rising together: employees work more productively, companies make more money, and more hires occur as the middle class swells.

Then, during Reagan’s tenure, the bad news begins to show its face. First, even though productivity and GDP continue their upward arc, median household income starts to level off. That is unsettling, since it suggests that companies can get richer and yet employees can stop benefiting from increasing GDP: what happened to trickle-down? A decade later, in the mid-1990s, more trouble crops up: employment flattens as GDP and productivity continue even faster growth.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue that these are signs of a true sea change in the dynamics of productivity and employment. Contrary to popular conceptions that all we need is more technological innovation to increase employment, they argue, technological innovation is itself among the forces behind the change.

The elephant in the room is how robotics will play out for human employment in the long term. New robots will take on advanced manufacturing, tutoring, scheduling, and customer relations. They operate equipment, manage construction, operate backhoes, and yes, even drive tomorrow’s cars.

It is time for not just economists but roboticists, like me, to ask, “How will robotic advances transform society in potentially dystopian ways?”...

-- that dozens of science fiction writers of my youth were already busy exploring from almost every imaginable angle (that did not involve genitalia) more than 60 years ago.

Learned discussions about robotics and our future are important -- even imperative -- but when I run across them it disappoints me to see them happening without any acknowledgement that people like Asimov

One source of inspiration for Asimov's robots was the Zoromes, a race of mechanical men that featured in a 1931 short story called "The Jameson Satellite", by Neil R. Jones. Asimov read this story at the age of 11, and acknowledged it as a source of inspiration in Before the Golden Age (1975), an anthology of 1930s science fiction in which Asimov told the story of the science fiction he read during his formative years. In Asimov's own words:

It is from the Zoromes, beginning with their first appearance in "The Jameson Satellite," that I got my own feeling for benevolent robots who could serve man with decency, as these had served Professor Jameson. It was the Zoromes, then, who were the spiritual ancestors of my own "positronic robots," all of them, from Robbie to R. Daneel.[3]

or Vonnegut

I was working for General Electric at the time, right after World War II , and I saw a milling machine for cutting the rotors on jet engines, gas turbines. This was a very expensive thing for a machinist to do, to cut what is essentially one of those Brancusi forms. So they had a computer-operated milling machine built to cut the blades, and I was fascinated by that. This was in 1949 and the guys who were working on it were foreseeing all sorts of machines being run by little boxes and punched cards. Player Piano was my response to the implications of having everything run by little boxes. The idea of doing that, you know, made sense, perfect sense. To have a little clicking box make all the decisions wasn't a vicious thing to do. But it was too bad for the human beings who got their dignity from their jobs.

or Williamson

In the course of the next day, the new mechanicals have appeared everywhere in town. They state that they only follow the Prime Directive: ''to serve and obey and guard men from harm". Offering their services free of charge, they replace humans as police officers, bank tellers and eventually drive Underhill out of business. Despite the Humanoids' benign appearance and mission, Underhill soon realizes that, in the name of their Prime Directive, the mechanicals have essentially taken over every aspect of human life. No humans may engage in any behavior that might endanger them, and every human action is carefully scrutinized. Suicide is prohibited. Humans who resist the Prime Directive are taken away and lobotomized, so that they may live happily under the direction of the humanoids.

ever existed.

Without any awareness that these dead writers thought and wrote seriously and deeply about this very subject long, long before the Daily Beast or Huffington Post stumbled across it

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

In which my man David Gregory's intricate, "The Producers"-inspired plan

 

to weasel out of his NBC contract by deliberately tanking "Meet the Press" with the worst guests imaginable continues to unfold in all its awful splendor.

Hey, it's Peggy Noonan!

You know, I used to think that piss-drunk and lying

was no way to go through life, but lately I think I may have been completely wrong about that.

Because these days, Peggers' job has come down to tracing maudlin, rambling, wistful Reagan prose-doodles in the shallow puddle of gluey drinkslop that constitutes her professional existence.

And yet no matter how many times that  O' Debbil Reality kerboots her teeth down her throat

Peggers pops right back up again a day or two later, peddling her sodden wares on the pages of the Wall Street Journal or into the

"Meet the Press" cameras.

Like fellow grifter Newton Leroy Gingrich, she is -- for reasons that remain journalism's darkest open secret -- completely untouchable.  It literally does not matter how low she sinks or how repeatedly, embarrassingly, knee-walking wrong she is: Peggers is beyond the reach of mere cause and effect, mere merit and accountability.

Ironically, in a brief, fizzy moment of unintentional comedy, Peggers herself explains explicitly what will be required to scrape hacks like Peggers off our national windscreen:

NOONAN: And the only way it can stop is if, frankly, a price is paid, if people come forward and they have to tell who did it, why they did it, when it started.

And since the only master David Gregory serves is money, it will come as no surprise that nothing whatsoever will change until the day comes when it costs Greggers a whole lot more to keep putting bunco artists like Peggers on the air than not. 

La Noonan was joined on "Meet the Press" by  Mitch McConnell (tossing around wild, unsupported slanders), Donald Fucking Rumsfeld (offering career advice for the young war criminal who is just just starting out)
 
and the creaking, animatronic ruin of the Only Man Who Ever Shat Himself In Terror of Gene Sperling.

Meanwhile, down the dial we find further evidence that those who spent that long weekend getting freaky Standing with Senator Aquabuddha might want to head on down to the Free Clinic and get themselves checked out:

Sen. Rand Paul continued with his charges from earlier this week that former Sec. of State Hillary Clinton had "her fingerprints all over these talking points" on the Benghazi attack and claims that she never "really accepted culpability" because she failed to resign shortly after the tragedy. When CNN's Candy Crowley asked Paul if he was worried about appearing to politicize the controversy by making his remarks in Iowa and other presidential battleground states, Paul dismissed the notion that his remarks were based on politics.

And don't think CBS was dogging it either.  Bob Schieffer was right in their too, doing his bit for king and country (via Charlie Pierce):

...over on CBS, where former Khmer Empire beat man Bob Schieffer played host to a fine, multi-course meal of delicately seasoned innuendo from the overheated kitchens of the Republican congressional caucus. Bob himself played sous-chef with a light appetizer of slightly overripened paranoia, asking White House aide Dan Pfeiffer the following question:

You know, I-- I don't want to compare this in anyway to Watergate. I do not think this is Watergate by any stretch. But you weren't born then, I would guess, but I have to tell you that is exactly the approach that the Nixon administration took. They said these are all second-rate things. We don't have time for this. We have to devote our time to the people's business. You are taking exactly the same line that they did.    

Not that Bob is suggesting that this is in any way like Watergate. (Watergate! Watergate! Nixon! Watergate!) By this logic, of course, because of the use of knives, every chef at Benihana's is a member of the Manson family.

But the real delicacies came later, served up piping hot. First, there was John Cornyn, who would like you to know what he finds implausible.

Well, I just think it's implausible. It seems to be the answer of the administration whenever they're caught doing something they shouldn't be doing is I didn't know about it and it caused me to wonder whether they believe willful ignorance is a defense when it's your job to know. But given the trend line we're seeing here, Bob, in so many different instances, it's, unfortunately, a culture,  

Is this the same John Cornyn who once blamed "unaccountable" judges for a spate of courthouse shootings? Why, yes, it is. I find his continued presence in the U.S. Senate implausible -- and so, apparently, do the people on whose behalf he is currently serving up nonsense, the damned ingrates...

I'm Sure The Hardworking Men and Women at OFA (UPDATE)

@tinamorphis If you don't like the First Amendment, put on an OFA button and work for its repeal.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 15, 2013

Will be delighted to know that someone is thinking of them.

As will the cats and kittens at Media Matters:

Media Matters helpfully distributes talking points to those who want to defend DOJ's attack on APmediamattersaction.org/message/
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 15, 2013

Until now, the thankless job of bringing global authoritarian behemoths like Media Matters to heel has been left to single-shingle blogger heroes like Jennifer Rubin

its assinine of this Jennifer Rubin who gets all her talking points from Fox News to accuse David Schuster of getting his from Media Matters
— John Bailie (@abiguglyguy) May 19, 2013

 and Bill O’Reilly,

O’Reilly is not one to very often take the time to attack Media Matters for their work in usually monitoring the network, though he seemed to have found their latest attempt to get Orbitz to boycott Fox News particularly offensive. Calling it a “vicious far-left website"...

who have labored in obscurity for years trying to get their message out.

I'm sure J-Rub and Bill-O will be glad of the company.


UPDATE:

The alert reader will have noticed by now that in the post above I actually said nothing at all about the First Amendment implications involved.

Nothing.

At.

All.

OTOH, I do think casually slandering people Mr. Greenwald perceives of as his opponents du jour (such as characterizing OFA as a band of goons who "work for [the First Amendment's] repeal") is a fairly typical example of Mr. Greenwald's seemingly uncontrollable dickishness and worthy of calling out.

Maybe you think this is irrelevant: that the virtue of Mr. Greenwald's causes completely justifies firehosing anyone who differs with him in the slightest degree with unalloyed contempt.  Maybe, like George Bush, there is no room in your universe for any position but with us or against us.

Well, good luck with that.

The alert reader who delves into the comment sections will also have noticed, on post after post, a by-now predictable repetition of this failure of basic reading comprehension on the part of many of Mr. Greenwald's most ardent supporters, who

A) Appear to fly into their rages unhindered by actually reading what I wrote and without actually engaging with the points I actually raise, and,

B) Appear oblivious to the irony of mindlessly attacking someone with accusations of mindlessly defending Barack Obama .

But I suppose IOKIYAG (It's OK If You're A Greenwaldian.) :-)

Because he really just can't help himself:

@warrenismad @adamserwer Like many Obama progressives today, you sound like a toxic love child of Sarah Palin & Dick Cheney.
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) May 20, 2013

Former Republican Speechwriter...

...discovers the Republican Party.

From David Frum:

...

So now it's Brit Hume who is joining the editors of National Review in warning against impeachment - at least for now.

National Review warns against "talking loosely" of impeachment and adds "the overwhelming likelihood at this point is that Barack Obama will leave office on January 20, 2017." (My italics.)

Hume's phrase was that talk of impeachment is "way premature."

The warnings are prudent and right. Yet the more I hear these warnings, the less reassured I feel. What is being heard by Hume and the editors of National Review that makes their warnings necessary in the first place?

...

Because Conservatives are political terrorists, David.  Because trying to destroy all non-Conservatives  by any means necessary isn't a glitch in the Conservative software but one of its central features.

Mr. Frum appears to have chugged enough of Peggy Noonan's Special Pundit Reserve to have come down with a dangerous case of Lethe poisoning.

For his own good will someone sitting closer to Frum than me please reach across the table and keep slapping him

 

until he remembers the 1990s.

Jackie Gleason Show How To Apologize Like a Boss

Jackie Gleason : "You're in the Picture" by werquin

May be preceded by advertising.
Sadly, not "Chock-Full-O-Booze"

Alcohol Can Be Such a Cruel Bitch

After waiting impatiently for the waiter to bring her a jeroboam of Obama Scandal Popskull Special Reserve big and blackout-inducing enough to blot out in toto the long string of impeachable Republican failures and treasons which she has spent her career merrily whistling right on past, Peggy Noonan finally said "Fuck it!" and chugged a bottle of turpentine.

We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they're seeing. The Justice Department assault on the Associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the administration's credibility deeply, probably irretrievably damaged.

It seems to have escaped Peggers' notice that Barack Obama's reputation among conservatives had "gone from sketchy to sinister" about 40 seconds after it became clear that Barack Obama would be the nominee of the Democratic Party in 2008, and that "on The Young Turks" is not technically the same as "among Liberals".

Also, in case you forgot, this was Pegger's take on the revelation that the Bush Administration had secretly upgraded torture from "medieval horror" to "official policy of the United States government":

Noonan: Oh I have reservations about all this. It's hard for me to look at a great nation issuing these documents and sending them out to the world and thinking oh much good will come of that. Sometimes in life you wanna' just keep walkin'. History has changed. It does change. We have a new administration, a new way. Sometimes I think just keep walkin'. Don't always be issuing papers and reports...Some of life has to be mysterious.

For all of her besotted, revisionist, meandering incompetence, La Noonan will be rewarded with yet another chance to tread the boards on "Meet the Press" along with Mitch McConnell, Donald Fucking Rumsfeld and the creaking, animatronic ruin of the Only Man Who Ever Shat Himself In Terror of Gene Sperling.

Because, by Grabthars Hammer, fuck yes is there a Club.

And you are so very much not in it.

Professional Left Podcast #180

Beatnik: You're in advertising - How do you sleep at night?
Don Draper: On a bed made of money.

-- "Mad Men" explains the existence of David Gregory

Links:

• 
  

Da' money goes here:

There is a Club

You are not in it.

Part one million.

Before he decided to commit war crimes, I knew [Donald Rumsfeld] Rummy as an acquaintance, stayed at his house in Taos, dined with him, and often argued with him. He’s fun to argue with, but when cornered, he simply shuts you down.

I remember asking him before the Iraq war why the US was firing Arab linguists just because they were gay. Didn’t we need every Arab linguist we could get? He point blank refused to admit it was happening at all. He openly asked how someone as allegedly smart as I was could be so misinformed. In front of others, he dressed me down for my ignorance.

-- Andrew Sullivan, May 17, 2013

Some places you have to pay extra for that.

Mr. Sullivan continues:

I did not give in, but I did make a mental note: this guy is dangerously out of touch with reality, even as he insists he alone grasps reality...

The longer Mr. Sullivan gazes into his hazy, receding rearview mirror of his own past, the more he uncovers retroactive confirmation of his own incisive judge of character and fearless, truth-to-power independence.

Batman Fights Dracula

In retrospect, it was inevitable.

Absent the original footage, please enjoy this clip of Filipino Batman from the same
sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-genre

Worse Than _____

Charles Pierce asks a rhetorical question:

... 

Can we stop for a moment now and recall that this whole [IRS] business is about delays in certifying groups for their eligibility to participate in what almost every election-law expert in the country regards as one of the pre-eminent scams embedded in the insane way we run our elections in this country? But, please, says The Washington Post, climb right up here and drive the nails in yourself.

The case of Alabama's Common Sense Campaign illustrates the challenges. Riehm, the group's chairman, acknowledged that his organization has had favorite candidates, but it has not endorsed anyone directly.

(coughBULLSHITcough)

The group felt strongly, for example, about Constitution Party candidate Bill Atkinson, who was defeated in a 2011 special election for a seat in the Alabama House of Representatives. Some of the group's members worked on Atkinson's campaign, Riehm said. "He was very conservative, and the right kind of guy we wanted," Riehm said. Riehm said the group's interaction with the IRS was filled with difficulties. Group officials said they first got the runaround and then were told that their file had been misplaced. "The lady I spoke with was very rude and said they would get in touch when they're ready," said Callie Goodrum, an administrator for the group. "Two or three months later I called again, and she said our file had been totally lost and we would have to refile."

Why do I believe that the IRS lady might remember the conversation with Ms. Goodrum differently? Why do I believe Ms. Goodrum's end of the conversation might well have taken place loudly, and in fluent Glennbeckistani? Why do I hate America? Perhaps because she believes the president to be a "Communist dictator wannabe"? And Common Sense Campaign fave-rave Bill Atkinson turned out to have bigger problems as a political candidate than bureaucratic dumbassery, but the wingnuttery was strong in him anyway. And Pete Riehm obviously put the Common Sense Campaign together as a social-welfare organization completely deserving of tax-exempt status. And I am the Tsar of all the Russias...

No, Cholly. We cannot stop. 

Not for a minute. Not for a second. 

Because when the only tool you have is "Obummer McHitler is worse than ______!" -- when your life has no meaning unless the windmills you are tilting at are the Biggest, Windmilliest In History -- then every headline, every tragedy, every rumor, and every legitimate failure cannot be seen in its own context but must instead be the Second Coming of Alexander Butterfield...

.
...and anyone who might see things slightly otherwise must be Part of the Conspiracy.