Friday, March 02, 2007
ARMY OF ME. Where have we heard this line of reasoning before? Ross Douthat defends David "Bobo" Brooks against the perfectly reasonable charge that Brooks uses his bullshit sociology (e.g., Park Slope moms are ridiculous because they don't dress their kids in potato sacks and feed them lard) as a stick to beat liberals. Douthat tries a couple of common tricks -- the "only kidding" dodge (implying, bizarrely, that Brooks' critics don't understand that Brooks' "Stepford Moms" reference "did not literally mean that most of the mothers in Brooklyn are stay-at-home Connecticut WASPs" -- as if cringing at an inapt analogy were the same thing as not getting a joke), accusations of librul shrillness (followed, as is the custom, by various slurs -- "mind-bogglingly idiotic" etc. -- against liberals). But his defense mainly rests on the idea that Brooks is really a centrist:The theory that Brooks' cultural writings are intended as subtle political attacks on liberalism tells us more, I think, about the need to pigeonhole writers by their political allegiances than it does about Brooks himself... Difficult as it may be to believe, when Brooks "plays up his Bobo-ness," it's because he really is a Bobo, and when he "hints at progressivism" (by, say, writing columns praising Barack Obama) it's because he really is a centrist, not a hard-right pundit cloaking his "political attacks" in culture writing.
None of this means that he isn't a Republican... I love that last bit. So you see, Osama Bin Laden is himself a Semite! Not to say that he doesn't hate Jews... Anyone who has read, oh, four or five David Brooks columns knows what he is. He's constantly beating up on liberals, constantly applauded by conservatives. But he and his claque wish him to be known as a centrist, and tell us that if we don't treat his attacks as well-meant, more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger constructive criticisms by a member of the family, we're thought policemen trying to define "liberalism" narrowly (i.e., as something that is not conservatism).
You see this all the time with other "centrist" or "moderate" or "Whig" characters, such as Ann Althouse, whose blog is about 90 percent rightwing guff parfaited with treacle -- and the rest is complaints that liberals, whom she beats up regularly, accuse her of having a political agenda.
It's a means toward having it both ways, which is increasingly the only way these guys can stand to have it. As they wanted to bomb the hell out of Iraq and be hailed as liberators, they also want to be praised by their domestic opposition as well as by themselves, and so come up with "sensible," "true" or "classical" liberals to tell them how awful liberals are, a transaction that puts me in mind of Jack Nicholson and Rita Moreno at the end of Carnal Knowledge.
It figures that, at the same time, many conservatives have devoted themselves to figuring out how they can make "wet" Republican Presidential contenders into believable social conservatives:...the nominee will likely be Giuliani or McCain or Romney. Instead of tearing them down and ruling them out, there's something to be said about making them be Right. And watching them as they are in the hot seat — with reporters following their every move — to see if they have their stories straight and know what they're talking. You'd have to be a damn good fake to fake it for the length of this process... ...and if you think these guys aren't "damn good" fakers, you haven't been paying attention.
Fake liberals, fake conservatives: That's really what it's about, I guess -- convincing others, and maybe themselves, that shit is ice cream. (Oops, I said a bad word. Disregard everything I just wrote.) Sometimes I think that whole "reality-based" thing is the only meaningful comment on American politics made in the past decade.
11:36 AM by roy edroso
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Thursday, March 01, 2007
NOT TO PUT TOO FINE A POINT ON IT BUT... Instapunk says it doesn't matter how many accusations of treason Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, The Ole Perfesser et alia level against their fellow citizens -- liberals are worse because they swear. He calls upon his co-religionists to catalogue our obscenities ("to be perfomed by those who have the software and expertise to carry it out") to prove the moral superiority of conservatism.
To this douchebag I say: what the fucking hell is wrong with you? If some stupid cunt says we're "not anti-war, just on the other side," why the fuck shouldn't we call the motherfucker out? Ditto stanky-ass cum-buckets who parlay their libels into rightwing sinecures. Fuck those twats and fuck you, too. Tony fucking Hendra built the fucking Lampoon, you twinky-ass bitch. You couldn't raise a piss-on at the Playboy Mansion. Ann Coulter couldn't find her own aching asshole with a digital shit-detector and the Ole Perfesser couldn't find his dick with Michelle Malkin's cunt. If brains were dynamite none of you fucks could blow a fart.
So go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut, asshole. Go take a flying fuck at the moon.
Shit piss fuck.
2:22 AM by roy edroso
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Wednesday, February 28, 2007
MAYBE IT'S JUST ME, but a Perfesserverse in which the commentary is focused on...- All the evil liberals who were insufficiently respectful of Dick Cheney's non-assassination;
- Non-stop assaults on Oscar-winning non-candidate-for-anything Al Gore and the comical idea that we should do anything about global warming except build a few more Three Mile Islands;
- "Lefty bloggers seem especially anxious to go after righty bloggers these days";
- Whistling past the stock market crash;
...sort of reminds me of the last forty minutes of L'Eclisse mixed with the TV studio scenes from Dawn of the Dead. And maybe some Junior Samples bits from "Hee Haw."
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's just me.
UPDATE. Fixed link, switched out George Romero film.
7:58 AM by roy edroso
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Monday, February 26, 2007
SHORTER TOM MAGUIRE: Michael Moore Al Gore is Fat.
I understand nearly 40 million people in the U.S. watched the Oscars last night. And from what I see on the blogs, 20 million of them were right-wing dorks looking for something to bitch about.
My favorite of these so far is an anonymous "actress and mother" who rages against Little Miss Sunshine because it reflects "modern Hollywood’s glorification of the miserable":If you are miserable, then Little Miss Sunshine is the film for you. You can wallow in your misery, while enjoying the misery of others. But if you are a happy soul, resist the hype. The chances are good you will leave this film feeling worse than ever before. Then, perhaps, you will be more apt to join them in their quest to tear down everything that is good and decent, and create a damaged society in your own image. It's too bad this review came out too late for the producers of Little Miss Sunshine to mine it for pull-quotes.
11:21 PM by roy edroso
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NOT SUITABLE FOR TREATMENT. Ace of Spades devotes a long post to yelling at women who have more sex partners than he approves of ("It's pathetic that this is what is now deemed 'progress' among the feminists... the reason they can't have what they actually want is that they're fucking guys so quickly guys hardly have a chance to catch their names...").
Then the proprietor of the site quoted by Mr. Spades explains some of his errors to him, which provides him with another opportunity to yell at excruciating length about... well, by this point it's not easy to tell what:And what should I make of this?"In any event, most college students are over 18. If they want to hook up, they’re grown people." Well, they are "grown people," but only barely so, and furthermore Strepp's book addresses this phenomenon among high school girls as well.
One thing I don't get from the sexual left. They are for sexual liberation, I know that. But they sometimes seem to also be in favor of the sexual liberation of children. Which prompts two questions:- "Sexy left?" What's wrong with being sexy?
- When you talk about the "sexy liberation of children," exactly how young are these children, and, more importantly, how sexy?
Then Mr. Spades returns to one of his less objectionable hobbies, surfing the web for porn and obsessively analyzing it.
"Denial" and "projection" are no longer sufficiently comprehensive terms to use for their mental gymnastics, which is why alicublog long ago moved on to terms like "dork," "wank," and "asshole."
9:36 PM by roy edroso
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Sunday, February 25, 2007
PRE-EMPTIVE SELF-HUMILIATION. In the past I have made Oscar predictions online -- predictions that have been, without fail, spectacularly wrong, so much so that I have been told that professionals count on them each year as a negative example.
This year I will keep it simple and just tell you my guesses at the top winners: The Departed, Scorsese, Helen Mirren, Will Smith, Alan Arkin, and whatshername that kid. There is an impeccable logic to picking Smith -- everyone in Hollywood loves him and, since he is destined to spend the next 20 years playing action heroes, this is their only chance to give a pre-menopausal Big Willie a statue. Impeccable logic, and almost certainly wrong.
That's how it goes with me and the Oscars, which is why I devote most of my writing to insignificant topics like politics.
6:53 PM by roy edroso
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ADVENTURES IN JOURNALISM. Patrick Ruffini, promoted by the Perfesser:When things don't go well in Iraq, we see the endless B-roll of chaos and carnage. When things are on the upswing, we tend to hear more about Anna Nicole Smith. As a paranoiac, I am sympathetic to crackpot conspiracy theories, but this idea that the Anna Nicole Smith coverage is motivated by treason, rather than by a desire to profit from the public's well-established thirst for celebrity crap, strains even my childlike faith.
I mean, it's not like the days when the press was covering up the Clinton scandals. Now there was message discipline! I bet most Americans never even heard of "Whitewater."
Tip to Ruffini: haven't you wondered why Hollyweird has scheduled its Oscar show right in the middle of our great victory in Iraq? Get digging, citizen!
11:05 AM by roy edroso
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LIE, RUDY, LIE! Right-wingers of all kinds seem to love Rudolph Giuliani because he's a total fucking prick, which seems to be the personality trait that most excites such people.
Yet, as we have heard repeatedly, the former Mayor's customary pro-choice position on abortion is expected to give him trouble with the Cletus wing of the Republican Party.
This presents special problems for the makebelieve moderates and bullshit libertarians who are Giuliani's strongest spokespeople online. Like their man, they prefer an authoritarianism that is secular and stress-free -- one that preserves their upper-middle-class privileges without requiring anything of them, spiritually or civically -- and so would love to see the Manhattan Mussolini smack down the nation's squeegee men without any assistance from, or favors owed to, the style-cramping Christers.
Yet they have to deal with the fact that their fanbase includes many mouth-breathers who could be easily persuaded by a preacher to reject the marketable Rudy for some less electable Friend of Jesus in a chartreuse micro-constituency. (10-4!)
Giuliani has, naturally, shown himself agreeable to anything that might benefit Rudolph Giuliani by announcing that as President he would appoint only "constructionist" judges (meaning, in the language of our current politics, anti-Roe hitmen). While normal people would judge that a wise if cynical bargain, Giuliani's seconds find it necessary to explain that this flipflop is meaningless, that Mr. Nineeleven is still the same "anti-idiotarian" hero he was back when such glib neologisms appeared important.
Take Ann Althouse at the New York Times. Professor Althouse, who portrays herself as pro-choice, starts by minimizing Giuliani's opponents as sufferers from Your-Favorite-Republican-Name-Here Derangement Syndrome who will "hoot with derision," "smirking" with "ridicule" at Giuliani for his abortion prevarications. Then she explains why Giuliani's hedging is actually more honest than the plain-spoken anti-abortion statements of less electable Republicans -- because plain speaking is something liars do:But it is the candidate who sets out to deceive us who has the most reason to keep it simple. By contrast, complexity may signal that the candidate is actually trying to tell us something about how he thinks. He may have a sophisticated grasp of the role of the executive in relation to the courts and the legislatures. We might do well to tolerate some complexity. Some of us might think that "complexity" is a ridiculously inappropriate word for anything that comes out of the mouth of a Presidential candidate, but we must remember that Professor Althouse -- who hedge-rows her political posts with bleary-eyed, munchie-fueled appreciations of "American Idol" and "Project Runway" -- is accustomed to bestow many layers of meaning onto phenomena that are as shallow as the candy coating of an M&M. Case in point: her next paragraph --What should a candidate say about abortion? To represent what the country as a whole thinks, the president ought to take account of the deep beliefs Americans have about both reproductive freedom and the value of unborn life. To deserve the trust embodied in appointment power, the president should have a sound understanding of the judges as independent decision makers who follow an interpretive methodology that operates differently from political choice. If you do not recognize this as bullshit, I have a formless brown mass that you can use to frost your birthday cake.
Terrestrial Musings takes a more traditional but no less hilarious approach:I know that this will be hard to comprehend, but it is quite possible to believe that abortion is wonderful, that every woman should have at least one, and still believe that Roe v. Wade was a judicial travesty. Commonly, right-wingers in search of consensus posit liberals who are troubled by abortion and unconvinced by Roe v. Wade. This is the first I've heard of a fantasy lefty who finds baby-killing a real turn-on but still wants Roe overturned. Next I expect to hear of a gun nut who thinks the National Guard fulfills the Second Amendment's idea of a militia.
My very favorite citation is Eric from Classical Values:...Giuliani is a Catholic, and is personally opposed to abortion. At least one Catholic bishop has said this is a "legitimate distinction."
I've never been able to understand why it isn't a distinction. Saying that a woman shouldn't be imprisoned for aborting her fetus is not the same thing as approving of her act, much less saying it is a good thing. I think drugs should be legal, but that does not mean I approve of or advocate heroin. If God disapproved of heroin, does that mean it would be immoral to oppose imprisoning people for it? Wander the Classical Values site, and you will see much fist-shaking and finger-wagging at the moral relativism of Goddamn liberals. What then explains this who-are-we-to-judge dismissal of billions of unbaptized dead fetuses? I am not boor enough to suggest that Mr. CV's homosexuality (with which Giuliani is more cool than 99.9% of Republican Presidential candidates) has anything to do with it, so I will just credit it to his stupidity opportunism.
In general, I would say the Rudy revivalists are on, if not the right track, at least a possible one. Having lived in the City during Giuliani's crackdowns, I despise the guy, but I can still see how Americans, who hate New Yorkers almost as much as he does, would approve of him.
But I do think -- odd as it seems -- that most Americans would be more sympathetic to Giuliani's very few (and now apparently defunct) matters of conscience -- i.e., support from abortion, gay rights, etc. -- than they would be to the perceived necessity of his conversion to the Jesus position. That is to say: were Giuliani to break form and stand up for a position that could not possibly get him any closer to ther Republican nomination, they might think more of him for it.
Fortunately or unfortunately, there is no chance whatsoever of that happening.
UPDATE. Did a wash-and-rinse on some language and length, and revised judgment on CV. He certainly isn't stupid.
1:40 AM by roy edroso
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