Malignant Twaddlism

Or: “Won’t you please stop sodomizing puppies, please!”

You know the old one about the prisoners who have told the same jokes so many times, they’re all numbered by now?

On his first night inside, the new guy hears cons yelling out numbers -- “72”, “51”, “93” and so forth -- and each time its followed by Big Laughs. His asks his cellmate, “What the hell?” and is told that the jokes are so old and often told that to save time they just assigned each one a number.

“Can I try?” he asks.

“Knock yourself out.”

“Three!” he shouts.

Dead silence.

“Three!” he shouts again, louder.

Still nothing.

His cellmate rolls his eyes, turns over and says, "You don't tell it right."

Well having a Conservative Spin Jokebook with only three, thin pages does have a distinct upside: When told properly, it is easy for stupid people to remember which slogan they are supposed to scream, and when.

The downside is that when the world is on fire and you’re standing in the spotlight you fought like hell to capture, alone, with a Jerry can of gasoline in one hand and a Zippo in the other, naked except for your “Arsonists do it In Flagrante” tee-shirt (that’s a freeble for you Latin junkies), you look increasingly ridiculous shrieking that there is no fire, and that fire isn’t so bad, and that, anyway, Ted Kennedy is sooooo fat.

Joke Number One: Deny everything. No matter how steeped in murder and ruin you are, deny that anything is wrong. Remember the more blood Conservatives spatter on their glasses, the rosier things look!

Joke Number Two: Blame the Liberals. Doesn’t matter what it is or how completely it is your own the policy that caused the disaster, when in doubt call Ted Kennedy fat and Nancy Pelosi crazy.

Joke Number Three: Run for the Imaginary Center. When your fuck-up is so total and catastrophic and clearly of your own making that myopics can see it from space, after failing to pin the blame on the very people who told you not to do what you did, sprint as fast as your little webbed feet will carry you towards the intersection of Lieberman Boulevard and Friedman Avenue in downtown Brooksylvania.

Here you will find the Magic Wingnut Haberdashery that will fit you out with that fine set of Emperor’s New Clothes of your dreams.

So if you have, say, mooshed a dozen puppies with a steamroller, Spin Number Three dictates you start immediately and violently declaiming that however objectively ridiculous your claim that puppy crushing is really just a Quick HoJo’s Drive Thru Stop on the way to a worldwide, Jeffersonian Democracy may be, that to your Right there is a tiny but slavering mob of loonies who want to torturer and kill a billion puppies just to be on the safe side (which is true), and to your Left there is a huge pack of Libertines who want to fuck those sassy puppies and maybe marry them (which isn't true)!

And that in the sad context of this terrible, titanic struggle between the Irrational, Pro-Puppy Genocide movement and the equally vile Make My Bitch My Wife movement, your little adventure in puppy-flattening is actually quite reasonable.

Of course, to give any of these Jokes the traction they need – to catapult that ol’ propaganda -- you need wide circulation, so thank God the New York Times’ enlightened editorial policies have given up on hiring from, say, a pool of many genuinely competent and gifted writers and instead simply endows certain column inches to certain breeds of writers like Cambridge endows the Lucasian Chair.

And occupying the Third-rate Hack Rightard Chair is Mr. David Brooks, who today is running gem of a riff on Joke Number Three.

And since Brooks resides behind the NYT Shield Wall, it would be inappropriate to copy the column in-toto. Also it would hurt my fingers.

However this bitter little sip from the NYT I purchased today sums up the whole of it quite adequately:

…

If we lived in a serious political culture, we’d be discussing what we’ve learned from Iraq and how to proceed. Instead, all of Washington is involved in a juvenile game of gotcha. Bill Clinton is fighting about what did or didn’t happen 10 years ago. The White House is still exaggerating the positive. Democratic senators purr like happy kittens as retired generals slam Donald Rumsfeld, and then stop up their ears when those same generals call for more troops and a longer war.

Please note: When Dems critique a Republican Administration for lying to get us into a war, treasonable behavior during the war, war profiteering, cowardice, incompetence, torture, murder, assorted other war crimes and breaches of the Constitution and the supine complicity of a Republican Congress that steadfastly refuses to investigate a single thing…it’s called “a juvenile game of gotcha.”

Please note: When Republican go after a Democratic Administration for a bad land deal and blowjobs, it demands seven years of unending hearings, tens of millions of dollars, a relentless, daily smear campaign in the MSM, and impeachment.

Of course, Bobo good and well knows this, but never let it be said that David Brooks ever let mere fact stand in the way of pandering to his tens of thousands of loyal fans on the Coward Right. Because while telling the truth saves lives, morally ugly people will always pay premium retail for their Conservative Mirror Mirror on the Wall who tells them that they are really fair, young and bee-you-tee-full.

But I digress.

...
Voters now confront a Republican Party that understands the breadth of the threat but has bungled the central campaign, and a Democratic Party that is quick to criticize but lacks an understanding of the jihadists and a strategy for confronting them.

Worse, more and more people are falling for the Grand Delusion — the notion that if we just leave the extremists alone, they will leave us alone. On the right, some believe that if we just stop this Wilsonian madness of trying to introduce democracy into the Arab world, we can return to an age of stability and balance. On the left, many people can’t seem to fathom an enemy the U.S. isn’t somehow responsible for. Others think the entire threat has been exaggerated by Karl Rove for the sake of political scaremongering.
...

There isn’t really any point in deconstructing this lie by lie because in this case the view of Bobo’s Majestic Mendacity Forest is much more instructive than any individual tree.

You will notice, however, that on the Right, merely “some believe” their pet fallacy, while on the Left, “Many people can’t seem to fathom…” while even more “others” think the threat is exaggerated (those “others” being putatively on the Left, since Right Wing Hateprop Minister Karl Rove is cited as the reason for the “other’s” disbelief.)

So when you math it out, using Bobo’s dissembling arithmetic, it magically turns out that there are a lots and lots and lots of people on the Left who either don’t take the threats to our nation seriously or don’t have any serious ideas on how to cope with them.

On the Right, the denial-driven are apparently a few straggling wretches who live with Pat Buchanan in a fully weaponized, "He Man/ Woman Haters" treehouse somewhere in PaleoConservative Never Never Land.

Which is kinda weird because I have never ever in all my fucking born days ever met any of these mysterious Lefties he is talking about, at least outside of a few nuts ratting around the exurbs of reality and a certain species of Veal Undergrads who don’t know anything about anything anyway.

And to give the Right some credit, I do not know many who have given up on the “Wilsonian madness of trying to introduce democracy into the Arab world”, just as long as we sitpulate that, in Wingtardian, “introduce democracy” means “bomb them to glass and then take a hammer to the glass”, and “the Arab world” means “any buncha fucking sand niggers who look at us funny and are sitting on a pot of oil”.

Because with these emendations made clear, most Bush Conservatives are totally down with that program.

The reason I bring this out is this.

Yesterday I was listening to Air America's Randi Rhodes take apart a Rightard caller piece by piece. Molecule by botched molecule. It was painful listening both because of how utterly he was being bitch slapped (Or are we calling that “Wallace Walloped” now?), and how utterly predictable the outcome turned out to be.

He came to her armed to the teeth with what he though was an arsenal of unassailable facts that bulwarked his idiotic opinions, and the charming and delightful Ms. Rhodes just flattened this fucker.

Then he started ripping into Cindy Sheehan’s life and family, except it just so happened that Ms. Rhodes had Ms. Sheehan online at that exact moment and Casey’s Mom herself was able to very gently, very firmly debunk one hateful, ludicrous lie after another.

Of course, in the end, none of it made the slightest difference to Mr. Angry White Moron. He came to the party armed with his raging ignorance and certitudes that had been pre-cooked, pre-chewed, pre-digested and then shit straight into his hollow, Sakrete head by Dear Leader’s propaganda ministers.

And thus he left: A bundle of rage and stupid and conviction that he had actually “won” and that he had never heard anything but “Bush hatred” from anyone on the other side.

He is, in a very real sense, no longer human. Dead inside, without a single thought to call his own. A mindless shaped-charge of meat and piss, wound up, turned loose and detonated by the cowards and liars who run his Party.

And being that he is a pinhead, he gets his filthy ideas elsewhere.

He, and millions like him, get them like soiled, third-hand hand-me-downs from men like David Brooks.

Because however “Aw Shucksy” and in whatever reasonable, pastel camo Bobo pens his bilious little column, what he is doing, week after week after week, is dumping toxins into the groundwater of public discourse. He is lending his ink and his incredibly influential position to the cause of polluting the public well with outright lies, half-truths and a veritable Qin Shi Huang Army


of straw men.

And however many times he shows up a’grinnin’ and a’musin’ on The News Hour or the Chris Matthews show, Bobo is a fundamentally weedy and dishonorable creature fighting a desperate and dishonest rear-guard action to protect his lucrative schtick and his despicable ideology. And however easy it is to dismiss his weak little puling in the pages of the NYT, the fact of the matter is only clarity, frank honesty and focused integrity can save us from the slaughterhouse future that Brook’s Masters have prepared for us.

As a man who makes his living ferociously bending every effort to muddy and foul the waters and fill the air with smoke and misdirection to protect himself and his dogma from the righteous judgment it has so richly earned, Bobo has chosen to use his privileged place to make himself a fountainhead for all that is wrong and sleazy in this country.

He feed the machine that is destroying us, and as Reality overtakes him, the harsh parameters imposed by the iron bindings of the Three Joke Playbook make him look increasingly unhinged and absurd.

Poor Bobo; still obediently yelling “Three!” on command, but no longer able to tell the joke well.