QUOTOMATIC SELECTOR SAY: "There are some occupations that are stereotypically gay, but mechanical engineering isn't one of them."
Saturday, October 18, 2008 MORE DESERTIONS. A Politico story reveals that people think the Republicans have fucked the country up so badly that even voters who don't like black people are thinking of voting for Barack Obama.
“I wouldn’t want a mixed marriage for my daughter, but I’m voting for Obama,” the wife of a retired Virginia coal miner, Sharon Fleming, told the Los Angeles Times recently.
One Obama volunteer told Politico after canvassing the working-class white Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown recently, "I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are … undecided. They would call him a [racial epithet] and mention how they don't know what to do because of the economy.”
This is really bad news for McCain, whose election-eve strategy, I expect, is to appear on CMT in front of a Confederate flag with "Dixie" playing in the background. As FiveThirtyEight puts it, "In this economy, racism is officially a luxury. How is John McCain going to win if he can't win those voters?"
Of course conservatives see it differently. In their view, this proves that it's Democrats (and their lying, cheating [racial epithet] friends) who are the real racists:
So refreshing to see the Democrats openly admit they're racist scumbags...
...it's OK for them to be racist, so long as they project their racism upon Republicans with their incessant cries of racism. Naturally, it's fine if 105% of blacks (with ACORN's help, naturally) vote for Obama. We can't call that racist, because we'd be racist for pointing that out.
I know we liberals are supposed to be angry and violent, but after the sword is handed over at Appomattox, let us grasp hands o'er the bloody chasm, because fellows like this are going to have a very difficult Reconstruction.
4:45 PM by roy edroso
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[Sarah] Palin didn't need Greek columns. People react to her because they believe she represents what the Greeks established.
I'll refrain from the obvious, but I will say this is the best idea I've heard yet for resuscitating Palin's popularity. Look what it did for Tristan Taormino.
UPDATE. Added word to improve setup. For more porn-related Palin laffs, see TBogg. Palin's many inadequacies have distracted us from the peculiar effect her feminine charms have on male wingnuts -- see musical-comedy enthusiast Mark Steyn's post:
Re the pantyhose'n'leeches post, an observant reader corrects me:
Palin doesn't wear pantyhose Mark. That's one of the reasons the old fems don't like her—unlike them, she actually has legs good enough to to bare.
Alas, I wouldn't know. I saw Governor Palin in Laconia*, NH yesterday and — clearly stung by the allegations that her white outfits are racist — she turned up in black pants and a blouse of brownish-beige hue. In my section of the crowd, the moderate, centrist, undecided, independent swing voters expressed a preference for skirt and cleavage.
(*Laconia is best known for its annual Bike Week, by which standards the Governor was extremely overdressed.)
I'm comfortable with all manner of kink, but really, this mix of humiliation and upskirt fantasies just doesn't do it for me. I'm now less interested in attending one of the NRO Cruises.
3:18 PM by roy edroso
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Thursday, October 16, 2008 NOT SUITABLE FOR TREATMENT. Conservatives are in a weird, anxious state. Some of them appear even worse off than that. The Anchoress:
A friend of mine, noting the Buckley endorsement of Obama on the slimmest of notions, said, “there is a strange undertow of events, lately.” Yes. Things are so strange because there is disorientation - and this disorientation is because the supernatural is in play - it’s been in play for a long time, of course, but the painless coup is almost complete and there is almost an anticipatory frenzy on the side of the presumptive victors...
No matter what happens, we are entering a new era, and I believe everyone knows it. With the prayer and fasting, I am “in training” making myself ready for whatever comes, because whatever comes is going to be very different; it will jar us from all of our complacencies.
So, yes, I feel very peaceful right now...
Surely someone over on that side of the asylum wall has taken note of this election-induced lunacy. Let's see what Rod Dreher has to say:
What if McCain manages to win this thing after all?
Seriously, what do you think would happen? I think the left would howl with rage. I'm only being slightly hyperbolic. They will be so angry and disappointed that it will be very, very hard for President McCain to get anything done... To have gotten so close to power, and to have such a good candidate, and in such a favorable Democratic year, and to lose? Really, it's hard to imagine how they'll react.
But imagine he must. Anything's got to be more pleasant than what's happening right in their own front yard.
11:47 PM by roy edroso
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THE PASSION OF JOE THE PLUMBER. McCain promotes Joe the Plumber to national punchline. So reporters look him up -- that's part of the job, you know -- and report their amusingfindings.
Given his multiple biggest mistakes, it's amazing the guy's so far ahead he has to warn supporters not to get complacent. Perhaps this, too, is his biggest mistake.
We've around this mulberry bush so many times that the Ole Perfesser forgets to leave out the really embarrassing part:
And reader Donald Gately emails: "Joe the Plumber is the new Linda Tripp, apparently... media elites... out of step with mainstream America..."
Time for Joe to give a press conference at the foot of the Linda Tripp memorial on the Mall, which commemorates the day decent Americans rode Bill Clinton out of town on a rail. Maybe this reference is meant to signal to his readership that this trick doesn't always work. Or maybe he's preparing them for the alternate universe to which they'll all repair when the Dark Time comes.
People are starting to talk again about an October surprise. But at this point I doubt anything can surprise us.
11:03 PM by roy edroso
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THE "LOST" CAUSE. I've never seen a candidate do worse than McCain did tonight. But let's see what the kids at The Corner thought:
From the beginning they were restive. Kathryn J. Lopez came in early by wishing "He so should have opposed the bailout." (Ramesh Ponnuru explains that it's more expedient to lie about that.) Jonah Goldberg also proposed an alternative response -- as usual, a nonsensical one.
They loved Joe the Plumber. John Hood called him "a new American hero." K-Lo said Joe's her hero. Stephen Spruill was reminded of Swing Vote -- given its grosses, another sign that we are among dead-enders.
They had trouble keeping the ball aloft. "What's the deal with the McCain strategy of repeating the same phrase three times?" said Michael Graham. "Freeze, scalpel, hatchet zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz," said the easily bored Jonah Goldberg, who wanted McCain to talk about gay marriage. Sorry, Jonah, wrong decade.
When McCain said he wasn't Bush, K-Lo was overjoyed, but die-harder Ponurru said, "isn't Obama right?... I prefer more of the Bush program to the Obama program myself."
Poor John Hood complained that Obama was laughing at McCain. Laugh and the world laughs with you... or, probably in this case, vice-versa.
The clearest sign of how out of touch they are is Michael Graham's "YES!!! Finally!!!" when McCain said that Obama's concern for the health of women having abortions is a joke. "It's a huge winning issue that reaches beyond the pro-life base." Maybe if Graham ever wandered outside that highly specific base, he'd rethink that.
But even the brethren had some clue that this battle can only be won in the hypothetical: Stanley Kurtz laid out a long alternate-reality McCain response having to do with ACORN and Bill Ayers. Mark Steyn let slip the deepest wish of the tribe by revealing that, as regarded the charges of negative campaigning by McCain, "if the dissatisfactions with McCain expressed to me at the Palin rally in Laconia, NH today are anything to go by, there's a 60-40 probability that any cries of 'Kill him!' at a GOP event are directed at our guy."
That's tonic for the troops right there. The war-cries and whining go on, but Ponnuru put a fitting amen to it: "I’m going to go back to watching the first season of "Lost." Probably good preparation for next year." Theirs is a Lost Cause, indeed -- and like the more famous one, only redeemable by deep feelings about black people.
12:26 AM by roy edroso
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Monday, October 13, 2008 REPUBLICAN NADIR WATCH. I just saw David Frum on Rachel Maddow, pleading for a better tone to politics (!), and actually quoting Gandhi: "Be the change you want to see in the world."
This is the same David Frum who defended Ted Haggard on the astonishing grounds that it was morally better to be a hypocrite than a homosexual; who has declared that if a rightwing comedy fails, it is less important that it fails to amuse than that it fails to "create a conservative institution with cultural power"; who didn't care whether we got Bin Laden because, he said, it wasn't as important to bring justice to the perpetrators of mass murder as to fight a "war with the ideas that animated those people," and many other such outrages against both civility and reason. The idea of this ham-handed political thug playing the meek lamb and quoting Gandhi would be infuriating if Frum were not observably swirling down a drain that was created by himself and his colleagues.
11:44 PM by roy edroso
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NEW VOICE COLUMN up, taking the pulse of rightwing bloggers, who as you will see are reverting to form in more ways than one: not only spreading smears and policing apostates, but also celebrating (out loud!) the golden era before No-Legs Rosenfeld socialized the country.
I notice also that the brethren are now so steeped in Obama rumors that they're getting insular about them, treating them more like prized collectibles than as urgent dispatches to rouse the sheeple. Ace O'Spades bats around an "Obama girlfriend" story: "Fire is being held as those who know the story try to get someone of import to break it," he informs us -- wingnut insider baseball! The subject is a "major, big-time fundraiser" who "for reasons unfathomable, suddenly shut the shop down and decamped to a little Caribbean island." Now why would a rich person do such a thing? "The story has a Fred Baron. Not The Fred Baron. But actually -- an even better Fred Baron." Who's either Fred Baron? David Horowitz' Discover the Networks (the paranoid successor to Follow the Network, now dark) has Baron I as a former president of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America and a bigshot in some Democratic Presidential campaigns. Wow, and Baron II is even better than that? Yes, he's from "the dirty Chicago political machine." And get ready for the big finish:
There's another big twist too, which I can't say anything about. I wouldn't even hint about it, really, even if permitted to, because it's so delicious it makes it nearly fantastical -- in the sense of "No one gets this lucky!" -- and actually would be used to denigrate the rest of it. But there is a chance it gets more interesting than even the Chicago Machine connection.
It's delicious, it's self-refuting, it's even more interesting than the Chicago Machine! This one goes on the top shelf right next to Barry is a Muslim and Barry is Not a Citizen, and the autographed Swift Boat -- fine objects of contemplation for when O'Spades is taking ease and hearkening back to the days when he was badgering bigger bloggers to run his stories.
9:31 AM by roy edroso
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Sunday, October 12, 2008 THE HOOVERVILLE TROLLEY.Jonah Goldberg lays out the new conservative POV on our present economic chaos:
...the tragedy is that this election year does look quite a bit like Hoover vs. Roosevelt (and given that choice, I'll take Hoover)...
Othercomrades have taken up the call. Please help them spread this around. Maybe it'll trickle up and John McCain will start denouncing FDR and the Social Security Act.
4:57 PM by roy edroso
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