"You see the world through John Malkovich's eyes.
Then after about 15 minutes, you're spit out into a ditch on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike! ."
-- Being John Malkovich
Links for this episode:
Friday, September 30, 2011
Professional Left Podcast #95
Links for this episode:
I Swear
They do this just to spite me.
The New York Times' "Room for Debate" topic this week?
"Sci Fi’s Far-Out Ideas Come True"Five writers and professors talk that ol' debbil spec-lit.
For those who may not be familiar with my professional interest in the topic, here a link, there a link, everywhere a link link.
Seriously, good on you, NYT, for taking up the subject.
But points off for being too gadget-heavy, and too light on the value of teaching people how to think fearlessly about humanity's many possible tomorrows.
Thursday, September 29, 2011
Empathy, Bitches!
You know, sometimes it's overrated. (The Limits of Empathy By DAVID BROOKS)
But maybe not.
There are a lot of books that say one thing, but there's this other book that says something else.
Let's say empathy is like, well, like a stream of piss. Sure, it feels great, but it's better to pee in a urinal or toilet and not just walk around peeing randomly on people's shoes. Because this is not good for you, or the shoes, or the person on whose shoes you are peeing.
Unless that person was on fire.
Like finding a dime in a phone booth in 1970 (I know it doesn't make any sense so just keep moving along), it would be OK to pee on them -- empathetically or not -- if (and I cannot emphasize this strongly enough [which reminds me, did you ever notice that word "empathize" and "emphasize" sorta sound alike? Anyway...]) if you are peeing on them to put the fire out.
Like in "The Adventures of Gulliver"!
Boy, was that ever a cool teevee series, even if it did come out while the country was positively infested with hippies! Let's see, there was Gulliver and Glum...and Eager and Bunko...and Flirtacia and Tagg...
...and Jesus, but doesn't that sound an awful lot like the output from a Sarah Palin Random Baby Name Generator!
Maybe I should write a bestselling book about it?
Anyhoo, I don't think the animated kid's series had anyone being peed on, even though is was produced by Hanna-Barbera, who I'm pretty sure were high all the time.
But as I understand the Wikipedia notes on the book that the cartoon was based on, Gulliver got in big trouble by peeing out a fire at the castle of the Lilliputian king. Gulliver was all bemused and mocking about it when he was peeing on the Lilliputians, but people forget that he was later picked up by the Brobdingnagians, to whom Gulliver seemed just as petty and boastful as the Lilliputians had seemed to him.
I am almost positive that there is a lesson there, and in my next bestselling book I shall explore this deeply.
After all, some Nazis cried when they killed people.
Sometimes.
Early on.
And those Milgram Experiment subjects -- while they were a little too sweaty and ethnic -- did seem to demonstrate some consternation about the people they thought they were electrocuting.
Which is why empathy sucks (or maybe not) and moral codes rule, bitches!
People who live by strong codes of conduct are awesome. Like John Carter of Mars. Or Darth Vader. Or David Koresh. They all lived by powerful codes larger than themselves.
Or so I am told.
They weren't just out there sparking up marijuana cigarettes and then not giving me any, or fucking practically every guy in the dorm except me.
No, sirree. They believed in shit, man! Big, important shit that you, Mister-always-showing-off-that-your-emotion-chip- wasn't-removed-as-part-of-a-monstrous-Faustian-bargain-you-made-with-William-Buckley could not possibly understand.
And even though no one anywhere has ever suggested that empathy could or should be seen as some kind of free-floating haint (look it up) sylphing (look it up) around the moral universe sapping our precious fluids somehow by its utter divorcedness from moral codes and/or rational policies, I am going to infer just such a thing to be true.
Because inventing imaginary controversies and then writing about the imaginary conflict's imaginary Reasonable Middle Ground gives me something to turn in to my rubber-stamping bosses at the New York Times today.
In fact, I'll go further and infer with no evidence whatsoever that there is some pandemic level of unfettered, nekkid, lusty empathy being wallowed in by unspecified groups of people, and that this rampancy of fellow-feeling is a direct, oppositional threat to....something?
Wall Street maybe?
The military?
Jesus, I'm halfway though one more of these on-the-one-hand-but-on-the-other-hand book reports and I have no idea what the fuck I'm even talking about.
I've got one of the the most important columns in the most important paper in America, and what the fuck am I even talking about? This isn't even creative typing, This is...reflex gibberish. Machine-generated mad-libs of what a David Brooks column looks like. Like one of those vacuum molded insta-sculptures of animals you usta could get at the Zoo for a quarter.
Hey, remember that plastic smell? And that fastfastfast, repeater-rifle clacking noise the machine made as it shot the goop -- black for panthers, brown for monkeys -- into the mold?
Remember that adhesive sucking noise it made as your treasure was dispensed, and you could watch the whole thing happen under the gadget's clear, Lucite dome?
That little ridge-line that ran all the way around it? And how warm it felt in your hand, especially if you were visiting the Zoo on a cold Fall or winter day?
The sun was so bright then.
The colors -- even the brown leaves and brown grass -- so damn vivid and sharp. And the scent of musk and ancient danger in the Lion House.
Hard now to believe that at the same moment an impossible plastic tiger or crocodile was being fabricated just for me and dropping into my little hand by a gleaming American-made machine, my country was napalming the hell out of some corner of Vietnam jungle.
Hard now to believe that as I was curled up with a cup of cocoa watching "The Adventures of Gulliver" my country -- the country to which I'm sure I had repeatedly pledged allegiance to earlier that week -- was feeding young men into a mindless, monstrous, futile meatgrinding machine 10,000 miles away and in my name.
Damn!
What is wrong with me?
Did one of those "Occupy Wall Street" hempathy-Nazis slip me some bad acid, and I've just been sitting here for hours? days? obsessively re-litigating the pros and cons of imaginary unicorns?
Have whole weeks slipped by and I have just forgotten it?
What else have I forgotten?
Oh my God, have I forgotten how to breathe? I mean, when was the last time I did it? And would I even be thinking about my breathing or peeing or empathy if I hadn't been dosed by some horrid little hempathy-goblin?
Am I still on deadline?
Is this some old column I wrote years ago and I just think its new?
Did I really just base a whole column on picking a fight with empathy? With fucking empathy?
Dear Lord, why didn't I just go all-in and punch a baby in the face on "Meet the Press"?
Have I just been sitting here for months? Decades? Typing meaningless strings of letters like this
Empathy makes you more aware of other people’s suffering, but it’s not clear it actually motivates you to take moral action or prevents you from taking immoral action.and this
You may feel a pang for the homeless guy on the other side of the street, but the odds are that you are not going to cross the street to give him a dollar.over and over again?
"Pang"? "Pang"? Oh God, now I can't stop thinking about it!
"Pang"?
I mean, is that even a word at all?
Is this Hell? Am I in Hell?
Maybe.
Or maybe this is just highway hypnosis. White line fever. Very, very white line fever. Zombied out from watching my fingers type out slight variations of the same damn Broderian column year after year.
Heck, maybe I'm hammered. Lubricated just enough again to get over the intense feeling of self-loathing that my contribution to humanity amounts to making crap like this up twice a week?
Which. like empathy and so many other horribly shameful bodily functions, might be necessary, but is also fundamentally embarrassing and something you really should only do in private.
In the dark.
When you are "crushing your flower".
If you know what I mean.
Also my Fall Fundraiser will begin in a day or so, but if you want to beat the rush...
Conservatism
Then...
...and now this...
...and this (From TPM):
“We are an embarrassment (in Illinois),” [Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL)] said Tuesday night at a Tea Party rally, according to The Daily Herald. “We are the last state standing when it comes to concealed carry. There’s no issue when it comes to freedom that matters like this, like the Second Amendment. The most important amendment in that Bill of Rights is the Second Amendment. It protects every other amendment. It is the last line of defense between us and our government.”
What changed?
Well, over the course of several decades minorities, uppity women and gays decided that they didn't want to be treated as chattel, or invisible or cultural punching bags anymore, and started using the tools provided by America's founders to change things.
A black guy from Chicago was elected President by a large margin.
And right wing billionaires and global trans-nation corporations put their collective plutocratic foot straight up Red Forman's ass, broke it off, turned his Middle Class into a dung heap and sold his America into debt bondage piece by piece.
Take a wild guess which of these groups Red loathes with all his heart and blames for his every ache and pain.
And guess which ones he worships.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Hell Hath No Fury
Like a lemming scorned.
Our Mr. Brooks of the "New York Times":
David Brooks: I take that as a personal insult against the Herminator! Herman Cain. I feel compelled to rise in his defense. Unlike the current president he at least knows that this is the perfect moment for fundamental tax reform. He’s got his 9-9-9 plan (the virtues of which he has not hid under a barrel). He may be wacky in every other respect and offensive in some, but he at least understands the scope of the problems the country faces, and so I have sympathy for him. I wish President Obama had at least some of his vision.
Mr. Brooks then reportedly ran weeping into the bathroom where he locked the door, called Tom Friedman, and the two of them spent the rest of the night making up mean nicknames for the President of the United States.
Friedman: "Barack Obama"? How about "Barack Don't-Call-Ya"!
Brooks: I smell Pulitzer!
Friedman: Well, I am on the committee!
Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Clothes Make the Mannequin
Willard M. Romney flashes that famous, steely, devil-take-the-hindmost courage that has taken to the top of the GOP heap as he reconciles his need to kiss Donald Trump's ass, with his need not to be seen kissing Donald Trump's ass.
He runs away.
The Trump-Romney Photo Op That Wasn’t
It was perhaps the least-televised meeting Donald Trump has ever had.
GOP candidate Mitt Romney managed to sneak in – and out – of a much talked-about meeting with The Donald this afternoon in midtown Manhattan, disappointing a scrum of reporters anxiously awaiting the governor’s arrival.
There was no pizza (Sarah Palin got a trip to a pizza parlor when she met with Trump in May) and there was no table at Jean-Georges, where Texas Gov. Rick Perry was treated to fancy fare at the restaurant last week.
There wasn’t much of anything, other than a Romney aide’s pacing the street in front of Trump Tower, appearing to be looking for Romney’s motorcade. There were also the hurried phone calls made by the aide, appearing to be checking on the arrival time to warn the press that Romney was close.
But his motorcade never showed, and nor did Romney, at least not in front of the glare of the media cameras, poised for action.
Then, in the blink of an eye, the aide hailed a cab, apologized to the press, and sped off.
...
Behold the Hazmitt Suit.
It is made of solid money.
Monday, September 26, 2011
GrĂma Wormtongue*
Is always full of helpful suggestions.
In fact, today he wrote a whole column's worth.
In fact, they pub-slushed it in "The New York Times".
In fact, it is the same column he has written 1,000,000 times before.
It is called the "Both sides do it" tango.
It has exactly one lyric.
Both sides do it...
Both sides do it...
Both sides do it...
Both sides do it...
The Lost Decade?Then, without so much as a hint of irony, America's Greatest Conservative Intellectual concludes his 1,000,000th robotic repetition of this same repeatedly and massively-debunked concatenation of cultural, political, historical and economic lies as follows:
By DAVID BROOKS
...
No single one of these currents prolongs the crisis. It is the product of the complex interplay between them. To put it in fancy terms, the crisis is an emergent condition — even more terrible than the sum of its parts.
Yet the ideologues who dominate the political conversation are unable to think in holistic, emergent ways. They pick out the one factor that best conforms to their preformed prejudices and, like blind men grabbing a piece of the elephant, they persuade themselves they understand the whole thing.
Many Democrats are predisposed to want more government spending...
When President Obama’s stimulus package produced insufficient results, they didn’t concede that maybe there are other factors at play, which mitigated the effects. They just called for more government spending...
Many Republicans, meanwhile, are predisposed to want lower taxes and less regulation...
Both orthodoxies take a constricted, mechanistic view of the situation. If we’re stuck with these two mentalities, we will be forever presented with proposals that are incommensurate with the problem at hand.
...
The world economy has many rigidities.
The worst ones are in people’s heads.
Because why the Hell wouldn't he?
*From Wiki:
GrĂma, called (the) Wormtongue, is a fictional character in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings...He is introduced in The Two Towers as the chief advisor to King ThĂ©oden of Rohan and henchman of Saruman. GrĂma serves as an archetypal sycophant, flatterer, liar, and manipulator.
Also, if you want to know what will get your comment removed from Mr. Brooks' comments section:
17. September 26th, 2011 11:13 pm
This comment has been removed. Comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive. For more information, please see our Comments FAQ.
Apparently this --
The worst mental rigidity of all?-- did the trick.
Obsessively repeating the same massively-debunked Centrist false-equivalence lies in column after column after column after column after column...
How Well I Remember
The last time a Texas Village Idiot lost debating points...
...to a technocrat from Massachusetts.
Here's how the late Hunter Thomson scored that last fight, between John Kerry and George W. Bush, who Hunter described at the time as "...a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oil-mongers."
Ugly, Tasteless, Terrifying and Wild... Count Me In!Damn I miss that voice.
...
Presidential politics is a vicious business, even for rich white men, and anybody who gets into it should be prepared to grapple with the meanest of the mean. The White House has never been seized by timid warriors. There are no rules, and the roadside is littered with wreckage. That is why they call it the passing lane. Just ask any candidate who ever ran against George Bush - Al Gore, Ann Richards, John McCain - all of them ambushed and vanquished by lies and dirty tricks. And all of them still whining about it.
That is why George W Bush is President of the United States, and Al Gore is not. Bush simply wanted it more, and he was willing to demolish anything that got in his way, including the US Supreme Court. It is not by accident that the Bush White House (read: Dick Cheney & Halliburton Inc) controls all three branches of our federal government today. They are powerful thugs who would far rather die than lose the election in November.
...
Republicans have never approved of democracy, and they never will. It goes back to pre-industrial America, when only white male property owners could vote.
...
Kerry came into October as a five-point underdog with almost no chance of winning three out of three rigged confrontations with a treacherous little freak like George Bush. But the debates are over now, and the victor was John Kerry every time. He steamrollered Bush and left him for roadkill.
Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful... I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President", and then I felt ashamed.
...
This year's first presidential debate was such a disaster for George Bush that his handlers had to be crazy to let him get in the ring with John Kerry again. Yet Karl Rove let it happen, and we can only wonder why. But there is no doubt that the president has lost his nerve, and his career in the White House is finished. No mas.
...
I look at elections with the cool and dispassionate gaze of a professional gambler, especially when I'm betting real money on the outcome. Contrary to most conventional wisdom, I see Kerry with five points as a recommended risk. Kerry will win this election, if it happens, by a bigger margin than Bush finally gouged out of Florida in 2000. That was about 46 per cent, plus five points for owning the US Supreme Court - which seemed to equal 51 per cent. Nobody really believed that, but George W Bush moved into the White House anyway.
...
See, there are a lot of other players on the field scattering light and commentary in all directions, but that just noise.
Like Bachmann in Iowa, Herman Cain's win in Florida might mean something if early votes in places like Iowa and Florda meant anything.
But they don't.
Which is why within 48 hours of winning Iowa, Bachmann was summarily remaindered to the used crackpot dollar-off bin, and the race was forcibly redefined by Rick Perry's press agents and Our Imperial Media into a two-man contest between the hated Mitt Romney, and a guy who had campaigned nowhere, won no preliminary contests and had only deigned to announce his intentions 11 minutes before.
Because the Village decides who the front-runners are, which battlefields matter and who "wins" the televised bear-baiting contests they insist on calling "debates" for some reason.
So let "No Labels" grifter and Republican spear-carrier Mark McKinnon use his backstage pass to "The Daily Beast" to write about how awesomely prepared George Bush was...in 2000... or how two roads diverging in the wilderness made all the difference, or whatever else he wants to piddle on about.
I will use my backstage pass to my little pie shop on the far edge of town to point out that, other than Bartlet v. Ritchie
the idea that being a shallow slab of well-coiffed Confederate dumbfuck is somehow a disqualifier for the office of President -- that majority of "the Murrica people" (much less the cretins still clinging to the bottom of the cultural crasker barrel in the GOP) have suddenly gotten hip to the fact that [arrogant + stupid = disaster] -- is absurd.
Not if arrogant-stupid has enough clout with the elite media to get them to do his fighting for him.
Not if arrogant-stupid waves a big enough Bible and a big enough Flag..
Not if arrogant-stupid screams "Socialist!" loud enough.
And absolutely not if arrogant-stupid has enough money behind him him to lift a three million ton bronze graven image of "Saint Ronald Reagan Freeing the Slaves" into High Earth Orbit.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Bring Me The Mustache
of Thomas Loren Friedman
More of The Mustache of Understanding's now-daily Centrist bilge, cut up and arranged randomly for my amusement out the the long, wide brown streak he left in the New York Time yesterday:
"TO Barack Obama, John Boehner, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi and Eric Cantor, I just have two words of advice: Herbert Hoover."
TO Tom Friedman I have two words of advice: Mike Royko. And two more words: Pete Hamill. And two more words: H.L. Mencken. These names are not meant as prods to goad you into improving your craft. That is not possible: your profession is obviously "billionaire dilettante tripe-slinger" and you already tower over it. Rather it is to remind you for whom the bell tolls. The "history" you try to invoke to scold Barack Obama for not being ever more of a plowhorse for your incredibly stupid ideas is, in fact, bearing down on you as well.
Future generation will hold up the unreadable turds you extrude once a week next to an average column by Rokyo or Hamill or just any averagely-competent beat reporter for virtually any midsized paper in America and wonder if you were even members of the same species.
Your fate is sealed, Mr. Friedman.
All I know is this: If either of you had been a real leader truly committed to a Grand Bargain — which you both know is what we need — you wouldn’t have just walked away from your negotiations. You would have taken the issue to the country and not let up until the other guy came back to the table.No, Tom: you don't even know that. You don't actually "know" anything. Instead, in an effort to avoid telling the truth so naked and strenuous that it should have been an even in the original Olympic games, you make funny little word noises about a fantasy government in an America that exists only in your imagination.
Then, for reasons that passeth all understanding, the Sulzberger family prints in America's newspaper of record. Week after week. Year after year.
All I know is, there is a mysterious and fiercely guarded secret reason why staggeringly inept hacks like Tom Friedman and David Brooks and Ross Douthat continue to have greater job security doing crappier work in the public eye work than just about any other distinctly identifiable group in America.
"Instead you both mumbled publicly about a Grand Bargain and how you were prepared for it but the other guy folded — and then retreated to your bases. Boehner went back to his base, arguing that more tax cuts can get us out of this, and Obama moved back to his base, with his focus on taxing millionaires. (In my next life, I want to be a member of the “base” — any base. They seem to have so much more fun and influence.)"Fuck. You.
You are a member of the most important base of all: billionaires.
You play golf with the President of the United States.
So, again, in case I was in any way unclear...
Fuck. You.
"President Obama says that he tried to strike a Grand Bargain with Mr. Boehner on taxes and spending but that the speaker of the House backed off... Boehner says it was the president who undercut the deal..."See, one of those things you can actually check out and find out which person was telling the truth.
You know, like one of those "newspaper reporters"
Because the truth would undercut his bullshit, Tom Friedman cannot be bothered to do the work of a newspaper reporter.
Which is weird because the The New York Times -- which employs the odious and cliche-freighted Mr. Friedman at great expense to its coffers and its reputation -- advertises itself as a "newspaper".
"[Mr. Obama] is going to be held most responsible by history for what happens and therefore he needs to take the lead in getting the leaders of both parties back to the Grand Bargaining table."
Of course the first draft of that "history" is written by people like Thomas Loren Friedman, which makes one wonder why he is so dead-set on using every public venue he can lay his hands on to tell these amazing lies.
Lies that everyone knows are lies.
Have you noticed, Tom, that every time you write one of these awful awful columns, the reek of your dishonesty transmogrifies you into the story?
Every single time.
A 12-Year-Old Simpleton
Writes the worst column I have read in a month
This was printed in the "New York Times" by Ross Douthat:
...
Simply throwing up our hands and eliminating executions entirely, by contrast, could prove to be a form of moral evasion — a way to console ourselves with the knowledge that no innocents are ever executed, even as more pervasive abuses go unchecked.
...
Abolishing capital punishment in a kind of despair over its fallibility would send a very different message. It would tell the public that our laws and courts and juries are fundamentally incapable of delivering what most Americans consider genuine justice. It could encourage a more cynical and utilitarian view of why police forces and prisons exist, and what moral standards we should hold them to. And while it would put an end to wrongful executions, it might well lead to more overall injustice.
...
Young Master Douthat's conclusion?
That the ongoing execution of innocent people is justified because:
A) It sustains the necessary illusion among the masses that the American criminal justice system is not fundamentally brutal, broken and unfair, and;
B) It might one day somehow cause the same masses Young Master Douthat feels the need to lie to, to rise up and demand that we fix the fundamental brutality, brokenness and unfairness of the American criminal justice system.
Or something.
Honestly, I've heard more coherent rhetoric being grabbed as last-ditch Hail Marys by novice high school debaters desperate to throw any-damned-thing into the air to fill up their allotted minutes with noises that sound vaguely topical.
Once again, Young Master Douthat's argument positively oozes that special, bloodless infantilism of milk-fed conservative veal dimwits trotting out yet another lazy, cruel dissertation on the need for little people to suffer from within yet another Wingnut Welfare Ivory Tower.
There is, in the end, nothing whatsoever to be learned from Young Master Douthat's malignant and spectacularly malinformed column that you do not already know:
There is a Club.
We are not in it.
Or, as commenter Dean Booth summarizes:
"The exports of Libya are numerous in amount. One thing they export is corn, or as the Indians call it, "maize". Another famous Indian was "Crazy Horse." In conclusion, Libya is a land of contrast. Thank you."
Saturday, September 24, 2011
And The Winner Is...
"As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead."
-- H.P. Lovecraft to C.L. Moore, August 1936
Friday, September 23, 2011
Professional Left Podcast #94
"Anyone who is different today faces harassment, whether it is in the way he dresses, or in the position he takes on important issues. And when the price of being different is a cold fear, with good reason, then freedom as we peddle it in our international publicity releases is gone. If and when it disappears, it won't be stolen by big government, the tax collector, or the Supreme Court. Fascism will be the people's choice. It usually is. We've managed to avoid it so far only because nobody nutty enough to give the people what they want has come along. Yet."-- Mike Royko, May 28, 1968
Links for this episode:
- Scooter Libby ignored at the Tucker Carlson website launch party
- Jerry Brown dealing with a new Republican opposition in California.
F. Scott FitzBobo
Explains the Jazz Age to Squares.
Groucho Marx once remarked [when told that a swimming pool was off-limits to Jews]:
"My son is half-Jewish; can he wade in up to his waist?"Why mention that?
Bear with me.
Today, fresh from his scarring breakup with that Now Very Unreasonable Cad Whose Name Will Not Be Spoken, Our Mr. Brooks hid his wounds by taking America up into his lap to tell us all a wonderful fable about why the Jazz Age was the apotheosis of American culture.
Because it encouraged amateur athletics, back when America was on the trolley, by golly!
But then, a buncha stuff happened...
(Stuff like the repeal of Prohibition, the collapse of the global economy, fascism nearly sweeping Europe into a permanent, mechanized Dark Ages, Franklin Roosevelt saving capitalism, World War II, the A-Bomb,
Harry Truman,
Doris Day,
Red China,
Johnny Ray,
South Pacific,
Walter Winchell,
Joe DiMaggio,
Joe McCarthy,
Richard Nixon,
Studebaker,
Television
North Korea,
South Korea,
Marilyn Monroe,
Rosenbergs,
H-bomb,
Sugar Ray,
Panmunjom,
Brando,
The King and I,
And The Catcher In The Rye,
Eisenhower,
Vaccine,
England's got a new queen,
Marciano,
Liberace,
Santayana goodbye,
Joseph Stalin,
Malenkov,
Nasser and Prokofiev,
Rockefeller,
Campanella,
Communist Bloc,
Roy Cohn,
Juan Peron,
Toscanini,
Dacron,
Dien Bien Phu Falls,
Rock Around the Clock,
Einstein,
James Dean,
Brooklyn's got a winning team,
Davy Crockett,
Peter Pan,
Elvis Presley,
Disneyland,
Bardot,
Budapest
Alabama,
Khrushchev,
Princess Grace,
Peyton Place,
Trouble in the Suez,
Little Rock,
Pasternak,
Mickey Mantle,
Kerouac,
Sputnik,
Chou En-Lai,
Bridge On The River Kwai,
Lebanon,
Charles de Gaulle,
California baseball,
Starkweather homicides,
Children of Thalidomide
Buddy Holly,
Ben Hur,
Space Monkey,
Mafia,
Hula Hoops,
Castro,
Edsel is a no-go,
U2,
Syngman Rhee,
payola and Kennedy,
Chubby Checker,
Psycho,
Belgians in the Congo
Hemingway,
Eichman,
Stranger in a Strange Land,
Dylan,
Berlin,
Bay of Pigs invasion...)
And so forth.
Then, after all of that, David Brooks was born.
Then, a band of insidiously anonymous "left-leaning historians" (or "pinkos", if you prefer) made fun of amateur athletics via their deviously unspecified "left-wing critique[s]".
Curse those incognito rascals and their unidentified opinions!
Then...Reagan! And the world was back to positively hitting on all sixes. with every quiff and Joe Brooks, every Reuben and high hat up to their lapels in mazuma at prosperity's own petting party, bub!
(Note: While not actually mentioned by name, Ronald Reagan was clearly the subtext of the entire article because he is Ronald Reagan, so how could he not be?)
Then, um, a buncha more stuff happened, including "Die Hard", the founding of Apple, mapping the human genome and "Die Hard II: Die Harder".
Then...David Brooks got a job-for-life at the New York Times for some reason and wrote a column about the good old days when wing-walkers and flappers and the Negro league walked the Earth.
The days when controversies over bobbed-hair could make their way into the brand new trans-Atlantic London and "Airplane" Chicago editions --
"As for rules forbidding bobbed hair, one supposed that nowhere in the vicinity of New York could there be found a firm that would employ only long-haired clerks and stenographers.-- of the New York Times, and the values of amateur culture which, according to Our Mr. Brooks, "served as a restraint on some of the more brutal forces of the day" were being carefully cultivated at various bastions of that genteel, amateur culture.
...
One well-known business woman said recently that bobbed hair and a well-made-up face increase both the happiness and efficiency of stenographers."
-- New York Times, September 24, 1926 (pdf)
Like America's elite universities and country clubs.
Which, as it happened, were at that very moment working vigorously to beef up their rules to make sure that people like Our Mr. Brooks
How Harvard, Princeton, Yale Restricted Jews, Smarties, Blacks
By Robin D. Schatz - December 30, 2005 00:10 EST
Harvard, Yale and Princeton, up until the very early 1920s, had an exam-based system of admission. If you passed you were admitted. If you failed you were turned away. If you were in the gray zone, then they might admit you on conditions but basically, if you passed, regardless of your social background, you would be admitted.
...
That was precisely why the system was judged to be no longer viable because too many of the wrong students, the ``undesirable'' students -- that is, predominantly, Jewish students of East European background -- started to pass the exams.
So an entirely new system of admissions was invented with emphasis on such things as character, leadership, personality, alumni parentage, athletic ability, geographical diversity. They started, for the first time, to do interviews. They introduced photos. A lot of things, which we take for granted today, in fact, were introduced in this period and have endured to the present.
Schatz: What happened to Jewish admissions as a result?
...
Karabel: Well, at Harvard, the Jewish proportion of the freshmen class in 1925 had reached 28 percent and shortly thereafter, after a very protracted and bitter struggle, which lasted from 1922 really to 1926, Harvard imposed a 15 percent quota. At Yale, the proportion of Jews had reached toward 14 percent and in 1924, they imposed a 10 percent quota. At Princeton where the proportion of Jews had gotten only to 3.6 percent, they decided that that was excessive and they cut the proportion of Jews to 2 percent in 1924. That's in contrast to African Americans, who were totally excluded from Princeton until 1945.
could not come in and play.
"Convenient to Churches."Ironic, no?
Epstein and Forster report, among other things, on a survey of clubs made by the A.D.L. in 1961. Out of 1,152 clubs in 46 states, plus the District of Columbia (total membership: 700,000), 555 clubs barred Jews completely, and 136 limited Jewish membership to small numbers. Of the country clubs, 72% practiced discrimination, compared with only 60% of the city clubs.
Actually, if you look around, you may notice that the Jazz Age values -- the "moral sensibility" -- Our Mr. Brooks pines for are being quietly embraced all around you.
Not everywhere, of course: the weapons of commerce and advertising that Our Mr. Brooks' brute capitalism has aimed at the heads of our children are immensely powerful and unimaginably well funded.
But in the corners and under the radar and, most importantly, outside the Villager Beltway Event Horizon, it's there...
It's there in Chicago's empty lots where immigrants from the remnants of the British Empire are hard at their cricket bats and rugby scrums.
It's there in parks and clearings and beaches of every size that are packed with people of all ages in all kinds of weather playing soccer, football and softball, cheerfully and mostly by the rules.
It's there at the Wheelchair World Series.
And it's there at "Y" every Saturday during swimming lessons, where -- among the all the splashing and laughing -- kids of every size, color and physical ability are quietly being instilled with the virtues of teamwork, fair play, tolerance, correct technique and physical activity.
Instilled, in other words, with that good ol' "moral sensibility".
And the cool thing about the YMCA in this Year of Our Lord 2011?
You no longer have to be young or male or even Christian to get in.
Meanwhile across town...
....Matt Taibbi is just giving away all of David Brooks' hard-won tradecraft to anybody who wanders past.
For free!
Having Examined All 337 Individual Cuts
in this video, I can safely report that the only cinematic detail lacking is a scene where Rick Perry cuts off Osama bin Laden's head with an America flag, just before he leaps into a time machine to travel back to 1912 to save Sweet Baby Ronald Reagan and Reagan's adorable kitten -- Small Gummint -- from a burning building.
After which the adorable Small Gummint would look soulfully at where the camera would be( if this were being filmed) and mouth the single word "Liberty?", before Rick Perry returned to the present day to kill a guy on death row.
Who shot Greedo with a .44 magnum (the most powerful handgun in the world) ?
Rick Perry did!
Who saved Sarah Connor from the Nazis?
Rick Perry did!
Who built the pyramids all by himself out of beer cans and Jesus?
Rick Fucking Perry did!
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Tweets for the Tweet
A list of remarks make by yours truly during the Florida GOP shoutycrackers hootenanny. They have been prettied up a little.
For, uh, posterity.
Yeah.
Posterity.
Newt's opening remarks "It's alright Lisa I've been called a Greasy thug before too. So here's what we'll do..."
Great echo! Sounds like the fifth circle of Hell.
Perry: My jobs program? Plan 9 from El Paso.
Mitt: Hey everybody! We're all gonna get laid!
Bachmann: comes out for ZERO taxes.
Santorum: Public sector employees are just fucking lucky I don't stab them in the eye with a sharp stick.
Newt: I am strongly pro-indentured servitude. Except for mistresses who should be paid in beautiful, beautiful diamonds.
Big ups for Emperor Crazybread.
Emperor Crazybread: I have walked in Dave's shoes. Dave has very large, manly feet.
Mitt: Won't someone think of the children of large corporations?
Ron Paul: I will veto everything.
Ron Paul: The American government has no authority to govern America.
Gary Newguy: I will veto more shit that you could possibly believe. I will veto the Sun!
Dear Howard Kurtz: Someday worry about something real.
Analysts: Based on these numbers, there a lot of people masturbating out there, Mandy! A lot!
Analysts: Gamers wanna know the cheats to Level 27 of "Dawn Overthreatz 3: BloodThreatz Warz"
Perry: Shoot the hostage! Wait? What was the question?
(In response to the short, terrifying video by Governor Scott) Thank you, Governor Skeletor von Skullfuck!
Perry: Don't worry old people, we're only gonna fuck over your kids.
You know,this doesn't feel like a "Google" debate. More like Altavista. Or Dogpile. Or Jughead.
Perry: I have read two books. Two!
Newt: Oh! Oh! Call on me! I wrote a crappy book too!
Patton: Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!
Mitt: Insert joke here.
Huntsman: Back when Utah invaded two countries at once we didn't need to raise taxes!
Emperor Crazybread: I would eliminate the Environmental Pizza Agency. Damn those jackbooted bastards!
Emperor Crazybread: Free Chilean Plan with your crazybread.
Newt: Next week in Maui. Wait...what? Not Maui? Des Moines? Des Fucking Moines, Iowa? OK. Fine. Next week in "Des Moines" I will fundamentally, basically, irrevocably ... something something.
Newt: I remember back when I gave birth to Ronald Reagan.
Newt: Profoundly...dramatically...aduterally
Ron Paul: The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead when the skies of November turn gloomy. Pudding!
Mitt: Beaner kids want my money!
Mitt, you are one belly-scraping reptile.
Santorum: Perry's stand on "illegals" totally froths my ass!
Ron Paul: Logan's Run is Real people! Run for your fucking lives!
Analysts: People online are searching for SUVs, guns and....handjobs. Back to you Bob!
Analysts from Google doing everything...except fact-checking these liars...using Google. Ironic, no?
Ron Paul: No more yankie my wankie. The Ronster need food. Go bimetallism!
FYI, Mitt is absolutely lying right now.
Emperor Crazybread: Israel is our 51st state! And the sexiest!
Perry: Cowboys and India.
Santorum: We should listen to our enemies on the ground.
We shouldn't send money to people who hate us. Like to Alabama.
Newt: Notice how I pronounce "Dra-MAT-ically". It's like onomatopoetic or some shit!
Bachmann: Cuba is south of where we are now.
Santorum: Huntsman wants to cut-and-run like a cheese Liberal eating surrender monkey. GO JESUS!
Love it when Bachmann quotes Abraham Benjamin Jefferson.
Santorum: People in the military do not have sex. Especially faggy sex.
Santorum: I would also re-segregate the Army because doing social stuff in the military if always terrible
Santorum: Penises terrify me, especially sweaty, military penises.
Perry: The federal gummint made me do turrible, turrible things to Texas. Made me! See, I ran out of gas. I... I had a flat tire. I didn't have enough money for cab fare. My tux didn't come back from the cleaners. An old friend came in from out of town. Someone stole my car. There was an earthquake. A terrible flood. Locusts! IT WASN'T MY FAULT, I SWEAR TO GOD!
Mitt: I'm not a lifetime politician. Instead I've spent my life shipping American jobs overseas.
Next on CSPAN Book Talk for Wingnuts...
At home, Dubya is screaming at the teevee: "Where is Mars, bitches? Where are my switchgrasses?"
Thanks God the reps from the most powerful search engine in history aren't wasting time fact checking. Hey! A coupon for Pampers!
Emperor Crazybread: I will create leaders. Out of pizza.
Mitt: A lot of people are sitting around a table, balancing their checkbooks and pledging allegiance which is why I had to quadruple the size of my house bigger.
Ron Paul: God Damn Trilateral Commission.
Newt: Reagan! Reagan! Fucking Reagan!
Santorum: I see your Reagan and raise you nine Reagans!
Gary Newguy: Cut everything. Now. It's what my neighbor's dog would do. His name is the Son of Sam--antha. Yeah. Son of Samantha.
Santorum: Freedom's just another word for nothing left to Gay.
Huntsman: I would choose Emperor Crazybread as veep. Two words: Free Pizza. It's like I'm Hutch, and he's my Huggy Bear.
Mitt: Everyone's a winner!
In conclusion, I would love to see the Bachmanns and the Santori playing an evening of tense, repressed bridge.
A lot of martinis, Pall Malls, and a loud, slow, ticking clock.
After three hours of drinking and complete silence, Marcus Bachmann and Rick Santorum both leap to their feet, shouting simultaneously and tearfully, "Fine! Fine! I'll suck his dick since that's what you want!"
Best. John. Waters. Movie. Ever.
Perfumed From an Unseen Censer
File under: "With friends like these."
Cross-reference under: "There is a Club..."
From, God help us, the "Wall Street Journal":
The Five Million Dollar Man
How government unions rip off the taxpayer.
The Chicago Tribune reports that an investigation it conducted with WGN-TV found "23 retired union officials from Chicago stand to collect about $56 million from two ailing city pension funds."
That's an average of $2.4 million each, and some will rake in even more. Dennis Gannon, a former president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, stands to collect some $5 million. In line for $4 million apiece are Liberato "Al" Naimoli, president of the Cement Workers Union Local 76, and James McNally, vice president of the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150.
"Since the 1950s," the Trib explains, "city workers who take leaves of absence to work full time for unions have been able to remain in city pension funds if they choose. The time they spend at their union jobs counts toward their city pensions."
Union jobs, however, are far more lucrative than city jobs. Gannon's city salary was $56,000 a year; his union salary, $200,000. But he retired from his city job in 2004--at age 50, and 13 years after beginning a leave of absence. Between then and 2010, when he retired from the union, he collected both the $200,000 union salary and a $150,000 city pension.
How did the city end up paying him a pension nearly three times his salary? That's where things get interesting.
...
Thanks, Mr. Gannon!
For a minute there I was worried that the fuel tanks full of endlessly recycled "union thug", "Chicago-way corruption" and "Tony Rezko" nonsense that have powered the Right's relentlessly venomous rhetoric for the last couple of years were juuuust about down to fumes.
And just maybe that the brutal, hostage-taking anti-labor, anti-middle class, anti-American agenda the GOP rolled out over the last 12-months might actually be sufficient to, y’know, get enough people to stop voting to cut their own economic throats to turn back that dark tide.
But you, sir, have now managed to almost singlehandedly top those tanks right off.
And with jet fuel no less!
And now, thanks to you, for the next God-knows-how-many-months, the refutation to every reasonable Liberal argument about every issue from wage inequality to the GOP-created deficit to tax fairness is going to boil down to two words:
"Dennis. Gannon."
Oh, they're gonna to make you famous, pal.
Famous beyond your capacity to imagine, because this story has all the elements of a Frank Luntz/Karl Rove wet-dream: hog-trough-greedy Chicago union bosses and back-room Chicago political deals, all set against the backdrop of President's home town and campaign HQ, in a city that has been crying poormouth, slashes services and laying people off by the thousands.
Hey, did I mention this all happened in Chicago?
Where da brudder of da last Mare is da current White House Chief-of-Staff?
And dis Mare is da previous White House House Chief-of-Staff?
Extra-scrutiny? You're soaking in it!
From (Oh dear Lord) John Kass:
...This story has more legs than an army of Rockettes, more angles than a tesseract, ergo it has more staying power than Ron Jeremy at the top of his game.
The mayor of Chicago in 1991 was Richard M. Daley. He'd rule for years. He not only had labor peace, he could send out union muscle to elect his candidates, from judges to governors and even then-U.S. Rep. Rahm Emanuel, who has since received a promotion. In his new job, no longer the union beneficiary but the antagonist, Emanuel realizes that all the money is gone.
But during those decades of labor peace, Daley was boss and his brothers prospered, becoming wealthy in banking, insurance and zoning law.
The speaker of the Illinois House was Michael Madigan. He's still speaker. He's been speaker for most, if not all, of your lifetime, as he's built up his own fortune reducing taxes for downtown real estate barons. He wants organized labor to help his daughter become governor someday.
The governor who signed the bill was Big Jim Thompson on his last day in office. A Republican, Thompson has always gotten along splendidly with Democrats. So who says there's no bipartisan Combine?
...
Shit, all that's really missing is a dead hooker and a vial of coke.
Or an inconveniently stained blue dress.
As a matter of background and strictly FYI, the people I know who work at the city are mostly of the non-clout-protected variety, and they are positively punch-drunk these days.
Like dogs that have been beaten with no rhyme or reason for years.
They are mostly still plugging away below decks, doing their job in windowless cubicles, trying to hang onto some ghost of the call to public service that originally put their feet on the path they now walk. But after years of continuous and arbitrary layoffs, reorganizations, mandatory, weeks-long unpaid furloughs, months of "Fuck you, I don't care if your kid is in daycare"-style implicitly mandatory unpaid overtime, they're just barely hanging in there.
And by all accounts, the Emanuel Administration has done little in the way of changing the day-to-day management style of the Hall beyond adopting the Daley Method ("You're One Microscopic Cog in His Catastrophic Plan"):
"...investing his own band of perky Janissaries – 12-year-old interns fresh from the Harris School and loyal only to Hizzonner -- with imperial authority and cycling them through the system every year or so, ...giving his department heads conflicting mandates and then pitting them against each other, ...picking aldermen like Bozo the Clown picking out a pair of floppy shoes and a bright, red nose… Da Mare’s entire Administration has been a brilliant study in preemptively obliterating anything that even vaguely resembles a power-base outside of the 5th floor of City Hall."and cranking the asshole factor up to 11.
Most of the people I know who toil in the vineyards of public service work hard at their jobs -- jobs they believe in that serve causes larger than themselves.
Jobs that are made harder than they need to be every single fucking day by the relentless shrieks of contempt from every Fox News goon and Hate Radio gasbag in America.
Jobs that are made harder still under the burden of the knowledge that, however hard they work they may be kicked to the curb at any time for no particular reason at all, while members of the Clout Club still enjoy absolute protection from on high by the Prince of Darkness.
And now this. This...utterly indefensible shitwagon full of Union Goon Caricature confirmation, hand-delivered to the anti-union crew with a fucking bow around it, and which is running like a rash all over the Conservative blogs and media outlets.
And, frankly, deservedly so.
Expect to hear your name in tonight’s GOP debate, Mr. Gannon. And if not tonight then virtually every day thereafter.
They're going to picnic off you until next November, so enjoy your 30 pieces of silver, and your sweet new gig as a (God help you) hedge fund manager.
Because this one will cost the Good Guys dearly.
As for the rest of us, struggling every day just to slog one inch further through the ugly, reeking, chest-deep ordure of realpolitik towards a slightly better tomorrow, take this as one more timely and cautionary tale from Your Man in Chicago about how deeply political culture here remains in the thrall of clout and dirty money:
There is still a Club.
You are still not in it.
The Revolution is Being Televised
As everyone on the Left knows, The Palinite Right is lost to us, probably for the rest of their lives.
As a Party, as a Movement and as a cultural force, they are now nothing but these creatures;
We are the hollow mentop to bottom, through-and-through, regurgitating all day long and as gospel whatever idiocy Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity shat into their skulls the night before.
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
...
It doesn’t matter what you throw at them, these Hollow Men will just keep lumbering along that gently-downsloping road towards peonage and fascism.
And because of that -- because they are nothing but blind, electoral kamikaze-citizens acting at the command of larger forces -- they are not where the real revolution is taking place.
The real revolution –- despite Gil Scott-Heron’s beliefs to the contrary -– was, in fact, right there on my teevee this very morning.
Actually, it’s right there almost every morning and against my better judgment, during the denim-colored pre-dawn hour of morning ablutions I watched it: tugged on my tie as the central front of the war – the ritual "Morning Joe” re-enactment of the Centrist Passion Play – went on and on.
Right there in my living room.
(Which, as a brief aside, is why MSNBC give me such a splitting headache.
Like Bob Arctor -- the protagonist in "A Scanner Darkly" -- MSNBC has a malignantly schizophrenic personality: by night, it is the crusading cop, hunting down a malevolent drug lord that is laying waste to the community by purveying a particularly lethal narcotic; by day it is...the drug lord, cranking out fresh batches of fatal narcotic every single morning.
End of brief aside.)
Once again, there were Wall Street's sock puppets pining for a Third Party Plutocrat (Hey, what about billionaire media-mogul Mike Bloomberg! Hey, you’re right! He’s awesome! And he won't bring any partisan-y "agendas" with him to the
Once again there was the ritual incantation of "Both sides are wrong. Both sides are bad. Nobody will compromise."
Once again, bland, glad-handing "No Labels" liar Mark McKinnon was there to moan and wail and rend his garments.
Once again the name of Saint Thomas Friedman was reverentially intoned.
Once again the persistent, single-minded might of the instrumentality of Empire was on naked display, because while money does not necessarily buy excellence, it goddamn well buys single-minded persistence.
This particular front of the war is persistent and single-minded dedicated to one objective only: the sell fuck out of the fresh minty lie that the only way to save American is to abandon all political parties and unite behind a non-partisan Centrist movement.
A non-partisan Centrist Movement led by some civic-minded local media billionaire who happens to be on friendly terms with everyone who is engaged in lucrative business selling this minty fresh lie. A non-partisan Centrist Movement whose message is persistently and single-mindedly
One big flaw in the plan, however, is that it absolutely cannot survive any direct contact with Reality.
It falls apart like a cardboard tuxedo in a hurricane if both Parties are, in fact, not always, equally and oppositely wrong about everything. After all, if the REAL problem with America is basically that the Republican Party gone completely mad and needs to be put down like a rabid dog, what need have we poor little people for a benevolent oligarchy led by our New, Civic-Minded Billionaire Overlords?
As an reminder to the rest of oligarchies well-heeled tools, this is what it looks like when one of the King of Reasonable Centrism – Our Mr. Brooks -- foolishly let himself get too close to the agonizing touch of inconvenient Reality (from the NYT's weekly, stilted, verbal midden-pile called "The Conversation"):
...
David Brooks: But of course in the crush of political battle, with its polarizing pressures, they both fell in with the partisan orthodoxies. McCain did it in 2008, and Obama is doing it now.
Do you think I’m wrong in my interpretation?
Gail Collins: I think you’re wrong — although wrong in an admirable, idealistic way — for thinking that bipartisanship works. Maybe it did back in the day, but these are hot-blooded times we live in, the getting-together-and-compromising part only comes after one party is lying on its back, hemorrhaging from a thousand political wounds and desperate to do anything to end the fight and change the subject.
...
David Brooks: Back to Obama. What disappoints me is not that he wants to raise taxes on the rich. I think that’s necessary, as part of a general budget and tax reform package. What disappoints me is that he’s playing games just to get liberal mouths watering. He’s treating liberals like Pavlov’s dogs, and some on the left seem to be falling for it. He does it by putting tax increases on the rich at the center of his politics, when in any realistic world those increases can only be peripheral.
Gail Collins: Here’s what Barack Obama has learned over the last two years: you don’t lead with a moderate, sensible plan. The Republicans will just grab it and tear it to shreds and you’ll be left sitting there in the debris and trying to console yourself by the fact that you saved the Pell grants.
I think he’s being sensible. He’s giving the public the Democratic hardball vision. Let the public choose between that and the Republican hardball vision. They will prefer Obama’s and then the Republicans will have to come back with a compromise for a change.
David Brooks: He must know that in fact the rich pay more in taxes — as a percentage and as a total than the middle class. But he claims otherwise because it gets the base salivating. …
Gail Collins: At the beginning of his administration, Obama homed right in on Medicare, which he wanted to fix by reducing the overall cost of health care in this country. He risked everything — some would claim he lost everything — by being so single-minded. It was an extremely principled position, and the Republicans responded by politicizing, pandering and ruining any chance to make the plan really, really effective from the start. I haven’t forgiven them for that whole “pull the plug on grandma” episode.
David Brooks: I guess it’s going to be a grim election.
...
Notice how horribly uncomfortable Our Mr. Brooks becomes when Reality threatens to bust open the gate of his Happy Centrist Neverland, and how clear it becomes that he far, far too big a coward to ever actually answer the question that is implicit here.
The vital, terrible, utterly taboo question that is at the heart of ever critique of Our Mr. Brooks’ Centrist bullshit:
What can you do – what can any President do -- when faced by a solid wall of pure, nihilistic obstruction? When faced with a unified political opposition – political opposition from Our Mr. Brooks’ own Party -- that is literally prepared to burn down the world if doing so would deny Barack Obama a second term as President?
The honest answer to this question -- if it were ever shouted from the rooftops with half the throw-weight as the lie it annihilates -- would lay waste to Our Mr. Brooks’ ideology and leave his career in ashes, which is he never, ever permits himself to be booked into any venue where is might actually get asked.
Which is why civic-minded local media billionaires and their friends pay lots and lots of money to make damn sure not a single, contrary voice is allowed anywhere near their persistent and single-minded propagandizing.
Persistent and single-minded propagandizing which you can watch on your teevee.
For free.
Every single day.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
"How Can We Adjudge..."
"...to summary and shameful death a fellow-creature innocent before God, and whom we feel to be so?
Does that state it aright?"
-- Herman Melville, "Billy Budd"
Real art -- real civilization -- must wrestle with such things.
Must agonize over them.
And the ragged, simian mob which merely cheers the act of state sanctioned murder in sanitary abstraction is no longer fit to be counted as a member of our civilization.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
The Worst Writer in American Journalism
Once again wipes his tender, billionaire ass with the New York Times and calls it a day's work.
This time -- as always -- more infantile mouthnoise about a Glorious Third Party which will rule benevolently over the Imaginary Country that the Mustache of Understanding persists in thinking he lives in.
After they abolish Congress.
And the Supreme Court.
But that, alas, is not what we’re getting, which is why there remains an opening for an independent Third Party candidate in the 2012 campaign.
Sure the GOP is undoubtedly naughty, Barack Obama is equally naughty because he has failed in his primary Constitutional duty which Tom Friedman apparently believes is using Tom friedman's Grand Bargain to Expose Once and For All the cleverly hidden naughtiness of the GOP
I’ve argued that the only way for Obama to expose just how radical the G.O.P. has become would be for the president to put out in detail his version of a credible “Grand Bargain” and then go sell it to the country.Yay!
...
Expose the villains!
Just like on Scooby Doo!
Which leaves only this question: "Expose" to whom, you fucking shmegegge?
At the ass-end of 30 years of escalating Republican psychosis, who is there left to convince? Who remains unaware of what the GOP is up to? Who is there in the whole wide world of sports who has not noticed that the Right is hell-fucking-bent on smashing this country to bits, selling the scrap the China and selling its people into indentured servitude?
Offhand, I can think of only five distinct groups who possess that kind of fortified, adamantine cluelessness -- the dead, the long-term comatose, the criminally insane, very small children and Tom Friedman.
(Well, those five and the +50% of the American electorate who have no idea where they are or who is running their country, so fuck 'em.)
So why does this awful, awful hack have a job at the New York Times?
Because he is rich.
Because he is connected.
And because his fatuous Centrist naughtytalk
My fear is that both parties have just started their 2012 campaigns. In which case, the rest of us will just sit here, hostages to fortune, orphans of a political system gone mad, hunkering down for a bad century.gives people like fellow billionaire Mike Bloomberg and the "No Labels" grifters big happy boners.
Wingnut Fanfic
I tossed off this post last Thursday.
And Blue Gal and I spoke about it extensively on the podcast we recorded last Wednesday.
It appears there is something in the air:
He’s My Favorite Fictional Character!
...
Fundamentalists of every sect are, pretty much by definition, strongly committed to the literal truth of all of their scripture. But the garden variety “believer,” I suspect, may often be more accurately thought of as a “suspension-of-disbeliever.” (Somewhere in the back of my head is that CollegeHumor video about religion as a species of fanboyism.) When you think about the actual functions that religious narratives serve in people’s lives, literal truth or falsity is often rather beside the point, and yet suspension of disbelief is a necessary condition of immersion in the story.
...
Of course, it won't be MFA-ready until include a lot of spiffy graphics like these
The Wearing of the Costumes
The Upholding of the Shared Values
The Scolding of the N00bs Who Don't Know the Fucking Score
The End
I whipped up in preparation for a much longer treatment of the subject from a political perspective (Working title: "Hating Down the Bones".)
Also you'll need to use the word "semiotics".
A lot.
Still, nice job Julian.
The Man Who Mistook His President for a Hat
Do you really want to hurt me
Do you really want to make me cry
Precious kisses, words that burn me
Lovers never ask you why
So Our Mr. Brooks is "a sap"
Yes, I’m a sap. I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country. I always believe that Obama is on the verge of breaking out of the conventional categories and embracing one of the many bipartisan reform packages that are floating around....So the White House has moved away from the Reasonable Man approach or the centrist Clinton approach.It has gone back, as an appreciative Ezra Klein of The Washington Post conceded, to politics as usual. The president is sounding like the Al Gore for President campaign, but without the earth tones. Tax increases for the rich! Protect entitlements! People versus the powerful!...
because he wanted President Obama to stay in Centrist Neverland, playing Very Serious Moderate Pirate games with him and Tinkerbell
The president’s goal in 2012, I suggested, would be to try to paint himself as the moderate bipartisan grownup, and dismiss the Republicans as extreme, intransigent, and hyper-ideological.Based on the actual details of the deficit plan that the administration just released, though, I would like to retract that analysis. Between the size, scope and design of the tax increases and the skimpiness of the entitlement reforms (nothing on Social Security, minimal tinkering on Medicare), it seems that the president will be running for re-election as Nancy Pelosi instead....
and all the other bloated, corrupt and inexplicably still-employed
Barack Obama is careening down the wrong path towards re-election.He should be working as a president, not a candidate.He should be claiming the vital center, not abandoning it.He should be holding down taxes rather than raising them.
Lost Boys, forever and ever...
...and then, one day, the President had to finally face the very ugly fact that the GOP -- Our Mr. Brooks' GOP -- is actually completely mad, intractably evil and deeply committed to annihilating what's left of our country and laying their fascist eggs in its still-warm corpse.
Which at long last compelled the President the leave Centrist Neverland, at least for a moment.
Which, in turn, reduced Our Mr. Brooks to weeping hysterics.
So sad.
The Right -- the same Right which the charter of Our Mr. Brooks' Centrist Neverland says must be endlessly appeased and compromised with...right up until they shit all over you...after which their psychotic intransigence should be met with ever greater acts of appeasement and compromise...forever (or "pre-compromise, followed by acquiescence to right-wing priorities") -- predictably ate Our Mr. Brooks alive.
Pajamas Media (Stephen Green)
David Brooks: Foolish Little GirlShorter Brooks: “Please just love me like I love you, Barack. I forgive you — come back!”This is an unseemly column, where Brooks attempts to prove he’s not really sap, by declaring his unending sapitude. But the truth is, “Obamaism” was never anything more than a campaign ploy to earn the trust of people like Brooks and Peggy Noonan and Chris Buckley and countless others who should have known better.Noonan has manned up. Buckley has too, sort of. Brooks, however, still sounds like a Shirelles song every time his man comes around. He’d sound more manly if he’d change his tune to that of a woman scorned.
Jennifer Rubin, the WaPo's reliably vacuous Conservative killbot:
No one in the media labored as hard to bolster Barack Obama as a candidate and defended President Obama more strenuously than New York Times columnist David Brooks.But now Obama is galloping leftward....But that was based on nothing more than wishful thinking and sharply creased pants. Now Brooks is reduced to throwing a bouquet at the feet of the Republicans, conceding that “at least Republicans respect Americans enough to tell us what they really think. The White House gives moderates little morsels of hope, and then rips them from our mouths. To be an Obama admirer is to toggle from being uplifted to feeling used.” It sounds like Brooks might need some grief counseling. He’s lost his idol and his credibility.
When you read --
"Obama didn’t rise above the petty politics we have come to expect out of Washington. Instead he elevated petty politics. It turns out, Obama wasn’t different from any other politician that tells us what we want to hear to get elected, and then does the opposite.Instead of real tax reform, Obama goes back to the same old “tax the rich” mantra. When reality shows that we already tax the rich enough, and they already more than pay their fair share.
-- do you really need to be told that the author ( the extra-perky "TexasSparkle" Kathleen McKinley) is a "conservative activist" who "blog[s] at The Houston Chronicle, RightWingNews, Newsbusters"?
"The Atlantic"'s still inexplicably extant Megs McArdle who deepens every darkness by throwing her "light" at it:
After a day, I think it's safe to say that the response to Obama's deficit reduction package has been rather hostile on the right. David Brooks sounds positively anguished:We can argue over whether he's [Obama] been forced to this by those darned intransigent Republicans, but really I'd rather not...
Of course you'd rather not, Megs.
We’ve known it for a while, David. My question: Is this a real breakthrough, or will he lapse back into rubeitude at the sight of sharply-creased pants?
Pajamas Media -- The PJ Tatler
David Brooks Admits He Is An ‘Obama Sap’Alternative headline: David Brooks has lost that lovin’ feelin’ for Obama....Read the whole thing. It was clear years ago that Brooks was a sap for placing so much faith in Obama due to the perfect crease in his pants. Punditry doesn’t get more shallow or less serious than that.As for Obama, there was much speculation that the mid-term shellacking would cause him to moderate and move to the middle to position himself for re-election. I never saw things that way; there is no evidence that either the president or his close advisers have any moderate tendencies or instincts at all.+++(Typical Comment: Brooks and his ilk, like Peggy Noonan, didn’t see Obama as a rigid left wing ideologue because they DIDN’T WANT TO SEE IT.To most of us, it was as obvious as the nose on his face. Between his past, his close associations with extremist radicals, his lack of an academic record, his voting record...)
David Brooks is a SapPoor fella, despite being smacked in the face by reality, day in and day out, David Brooks still believes in President Obama, or at least he believes in the Obama he fell in love with. Now he calls himself a “sap.”
Welcome to the real world, Mr. Brooks! Living life under liberal policies isn’t a pleasant reality, is it? Even though much is said by those on the left about how much they care about the “working class”, it isn’t genuine or sincere. It never is.
New York Times columnist David Brooks, one of the early right-of-center luminaries to fall madly in love with Barack Obama, finds that the spell has broken. It appears that the president's recent jobs plan was a crease too far...
And, finally, a depressingly representative sampling of comments from The Gateway Pundit:
(Sample Comments:Brooks is a fag, a specific kind of fag, an Obama fag.+++Liberalism IS a mental illness, based upon idealistic emotions, and for the most part, a lack of basic reasoning and analytical skills, particularly when they ignore facts inconvenient to their worldview.+++Dump obummer into the dumster, where he and his mooching family below! CAN”T WAIT until he’s evicted.+++Nope. You are an ahole with a pulpit crafting words a false god-ism. You took a radical left community organizer and his handlers and made them royalty.For this, you should resign.+++Obama can no longer move the agenda forward to establish absolute dominion of Satan’s counterfit kingdom.+++David Brooks. . you are not a sap. . .you are an idiot!A Loser like President Zero!Incompetent, Inept, Inexperienced. . . and radical too!
Yes Obama and Brooks!+++
Sigh.
Thank goodness Andrew Sullivan was on hand to give his Conservative comrade-in-arms a soothing, soulful reacharound:
He's venting at Obama today for finally absorbing the ineluctable fact that the current GOP will never, ever support increasing government revenues, and thereby cannot get to the Grand Bargain so many of us want...I agree with David that Obamaism matters; but I don't think Obama has treated us all like saps for proposing a second stimulus now and less radical ($3 trillion) debt reduction later......To blame Obama for this seems absurd to me - and is only in the column because David is leerier of saying what needs to be said: that the current Republican party is a radical, extremist, reckless force that is far more concerned with defeating this president than in reforming the country on bipartisan lines.
No, Mr. Sullivan, the word you are looking for is not "leerier". It is "liar".
Our Mr. Brooks is a liar.
Or he is suffering from a case of Wingnut Agnosia
Agnosia (a-gnosis, or loss of knowledge) is a loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes, or smells while the specific sense is not defective nor is there any significant memory loss.
so debilitating that he needs immediate medical attention.
Or perhaps it is a simply that, long ago, Our Mr. Brooks sold his soul and took the Establishmentarian King's Shillings.
His service has been dutiful and profitable: a long, craven, jellylike quiver from one conventional wisdom goalpost to the next, always within the protective biosphere of Centrist Neverland. And at each of the Station of the Broderite Cross he has paused to praise the whichever Serious Person -- John Thune, Paul Ryan, whoever -- was on special that week, and to bark at the Dirty Hippies.
This week, the President was forced to very, very reluctantly admit that the Dirty Hippies might just have actually had a point all along, which according to the terms of Our Mr. Brooks' gold-plated servitude meant he needed to be barked at.
This arrangement has evidently made the tiny coterie of Upper East Side zillionaires to whom he targets every one of his syllables happy enough with their pet scribe to permit him to keep his excellent job despite having no visible talent or conviction beyond his ability to projectile vomit Stale Beltway Homilies further than anyone else.
Which means he's all yours, Mr. Sullivan.
All yours.
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