Sunday, December 28, 2014

THE YEAR IN BULLSHIT, PART ONE.

(Here's the first installment of a year-end bottom-ten of the lowlights of 2014, culled from my archives and elsewhere. Read 'em and weep!)



10. Dunhamania! Culture war, as we call the unpleasant ruckus that ensues when political obsessives blunder among the muses, had another big year, with conservatives shaking their fists at everything from opera to comic books. Rather than survey all these cases, let’s focus on the instructive example of the one cultural artifact that seems most reliably to excite them: That marketing phenomenon known as Lena Dunham.

Conservatives first developed a hard-on for the Girls auteur during the 2012 Presidential campaign, when she made a pro-Obama ad, and they have yet to detumesce. The brethren hate other entertainment professionals, of course, but Dunham pulls so many of their triggers — she’s liberal, she’s a tattooed hipster, she has the nerve to act sexy despite not having a nice build like Ann Coulter — that she has remained their #1 groovy hate fuck, the Jane Fonda of the Obama age, at whom they rage for her sexuality as well as her politics.

This reached critical mass late in the year when Dunham released a celebrity memoir containing (as tell-all tradition demands) salacious details, including the news that, when Dunham was seven, she looked inside her one-year-old sister Grace’s vagina and found she had stuffed pebbles in there. Truth Revolt reported that Dunham was seventeen years old at the time (later correcting this “typo”) under the headline “Lena Dunham Describes Sexually Abusing Her Little Sister.”

National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson dug in -- “Grace’s satisfaction with her prank suggest that Grace was expecting her older sister to go poking around in her genitals and inserted the pebbles in expectation of it… There is no non-horrific interpretation of this episode” -- even though he found the story “especially suspicious” — which just made it worse; imagine, lying in a celebrity memoir! When Dunham complained of this rough treatment — ensuring more press — the investigators of her celebrity memoir high-fived each other. “Lena Dunham is learning the power of the right,” gurgled Don Surber while strangling a pillow.

Then Breitbart.com investigated another Dunham story about a college Republican named Barry who took advantage of her, and found that -- get this! -- some details were not verifiable (“A longtime employee at the Oberlin library could not recall working with any student with a flamboyant mustache”). A guy from Dunham’s college claimed the memoir defamed him because his name is Barry, too. “Sue the bastards,” cried professional scold Rod Dreher. “That’s the only way they will learn. Make the publisher withdraw the whole damn book…” The publisher instead agreed to add “a disclaimer that explains that the Barry described by Dunham was not really named Barry” and pay court costs, per Fox News.

There followed much popping of rightwing corks. "LENA DUNHAM WALKS BACK FABRICATED RAPE CLAIM" unh-unh-unhed John Hinderaker at Power Line. RedState called Dunham part of a “Rape Accusation-Industrial Complex” of women who habitually lie about sexual assault in order to advance a “victimization narrative.” The American Spectator’s Ross Kaminsky went further, tying the case to what he called the “lie” that Michael Brown didn’t deserve to be gunned down, and declaring that the “true motivation” of “too many” feminists is “hatred of men.” Ann Coulter added that Dunham, like all women who disclosed sexual assault after an interval, was just “trying to get attention.”

Despite their best efforts, or perhaps partly due to them, Dunham remains on the best seller list — without resorting to bulk sales to think tanks, imagine that! — and in the celebrity pantheon. Conservatives, for their part, maintain their place at the wrong side of a peephole, banging on the fence with one hand and doing God knows what with the other. Between the sexual rage, the rolling-out of big guns to prosecute a flimsy piece of pop-art crap, and the ultimate, flaccid ineffectuality of their efforts, could there be a more perfect example of culture war?



9. The right comes out for income inequality. The term is relatively new to common discourse, and in years past was mainly engaged by wingnut think-tankers to explain why such a thing didn’t exist. But Piketty’s big book and Obama’s mention of income inequality in his 2014 State of the Union led lumpen conservatives to modify their argument to: income inequality doesn’t exist, and so what if it does.

When rich guys complained the poor were giving them stink-eye, conservatives rushed to comfort them the best way they knew how: By associating their opponents with Nazis. At the Wall Street Journal, venture capitalist Tom Peters compared resentment of the rich to Kristallnacht; in the same venue, Ruth R. Wisse asked, “Two phenomena: anti-Semitism and American class conflict. Is there any connection between them?” and answered yes, because anti-Semites often complain about wealthy Jews, which makes any complaint against American oligarchs, despite the impressive number of goyim among them, a veritable Blood Libel.

Daniel Henninger (also at WSJ — these guys know their audience!) suggested that Putin was getting belligerent because he “surely noticed” that “the nations of the civilized world have decided their most pressing concern is income inequality,” and were too busy coddling paupers to trouble with the Ukraine. Ace of Spades protested the real problem was “social inequality” — that is, the alleged contempt of Democrats for rich people who are rightwing and folksy, such as the Palins or the Duck Dynasty guys.

And forget about trying to level the field with a higher minimum wage — that’s socialism. If you asked why the current minimum wage isn't already socialism, the brighter bulbs would tell you, you’re right, it is — let’s get rid of it altogether! Libertarian Virginia Postrel wept over all the folks out there with multiple jobs — not because they had the work multiple jobs, but because “employers can’t offer, and workers can’t take, lower wages in exchange for better hours. The minimum wage sets a legal floor.” The injustice of it! In fact, if you complained about getting your tiny wages ripped off by your boss, that too was socialism, or at least rather petty of you.

The simplest pro-inequality argument was advanced by Ben Domenech, who attributed any concerns over the ginormous 99%-1% gap to “jealousy… in real life, the money doesn’t stay in Scrooge McDuck’s vault, it goes into investments which pay more people to do more things.” Scrooge McDuck may someday build a condo, and you may get to clean its hallways, which along with your others job(s) may permit you to rent a hovel. Now stop complaining, anti-Richite!


8. Conservatives fall in love with Vladimir Putin. When Putin muscled Ukraine in March, very few conservatives called for the U.S. to intervene militarily. Nonetheless they blamed the Commander in Chief because, in the words of Rand Paul, he “hasn't projected enough strength and hasn't shown a priority to the national defense” — that is, he hadn’t rattled a saber that no one expected or wanted him to unsheathe.

But never mind those details -- the real issue for conservatives was less geopolitical than psychographic — rightwing pundits, however pencil-necked, worship butchness and reflexively attribute it to their heroes, such as former cheerleader George “he’s got two of ‘em” W. Bush, while portraying their opponents as sissies.

Judging from conservatives’ previous investigations of Obama’s wearing of mom jeans while pretend-shooting and bike-riding, not mention his unwillingness to punch down on the poor, clearly the President fits their definition of a sissy. But it’s hard to identify a domestic conservative with whose roughness they can creditably contrast Obama’s affect. Mike Huckabee? Newt Gingrich? Chris Christie, being a bully, might do, but he betrayed the brethren by accepting Federal help on Hurricane Sandy.

With such a weak bench, it was perhaps inevitable that conservatives would find a foreign dictator to embrace. Putin is ruthless, rugged, and hates homosexuals — really, their dream candidate if they could get the citizenship thing sorted. They’d been contrasting bare-chested manly man Putin with metrosexual Obama on flimsy pretexts for years (“IT LOOKS LIKE OBAMA IS PUTIN'S BITCH,” etc), but Ukraine really brought it out of them. They were especially fond of funny pictures, but employed wordcraft, too, e.g. “Putin Treating Obama Like Half a Fag.”

Putin received perhaps his most eminent conservative blessing from Sarah Palin, who sneered at Obama as “as one who wears Mom jeans and equivocates and bloviates” and sighed over Putin as “one who wrestles bears and drills for oil.” But the most grandiloquent paean may have been that of National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson, who found “value for us” — meaning for the American People, I guess — in “Putin’s confidence in his unabashedly thuggish means, the brutal fashion in which a modern state so unapologetically embraces the premodern mind to go after its critics… Putin speaks power to truth — an unpredictable, unapologetic brute force of nature.” Hanson did put in some mild admissions that Putin was not really a role model, in much the same way that the Shangri-Las told us their guy was good-bad, but he's not evil.

Months later, with the ruble crashing, Putin’s cowboy diplomacy doesn’t look like such a winner, and Obama’s restraint looks rather better. Since Kim Jong Un doesn’t look so hot with his shirt off, conservatives may have to wait for a coup to rekindle their dictator-love.

(More later.)


158 comments:

  1. If only a bare-chested Putin hooked up with a bare-chested Dunham, and they publicly gave all their personal wealth away to the poor. All televised exclusively on Fox news.

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  2. redoubtagain10:34 PM

    (Proving once again that they're OK with white European dictators; others not so much.)

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  3. Tehanu10:46 PM

    Eagerly awaiting the next installment, Roy -- not that I want to wallow in wingnuttia, but you write so well about it!

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  4. 3 for 3 so far. This was way better than it should have been!

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  5. randomworker11:04 PM

    2014 was the year the derp achieved critical mass.

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  6. Servpro stock would soar from all the winger brain stains needing removed from carpets.

    "Like it never even happened™"

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  7. I'ma need a cigarette after that.

    And I don't smoke.

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  8. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-wS6PCZHjc54/UUJ38Vm7TvI/AAAAAAAAfb0/029nmNY8mEA/s400/_00778ecig900mah.jpg

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  9. synykyl11:24 PM

    Conservatives first developed a hard-on for the Girls auteur during the 2012 Presidential campaign, when she made a pro-Obama ad, and they have yet to detumesce.

    Warning: If you have an erection that persists for more than 3 years, it's too late to seek medical assistance.

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  10. AGoodQuestion11:25 PM

    A guy from Dunham’s college claimed the memoir defamed him because his name is Barry, too.
    Any good conservative knows that This President's real name is Barry Soetoro. Obviously Dunham is shielding the real assailant for some nefarious socialist purpose.

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  11. “Lena Dunham is learning the power of the right,”

    The power to mildly annoy a minor celebrity?

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  12. AGoodQuestion11:34 PM

    Surber writes op-eds for the Charleston Daily Herald, so maybe it's the power to make a partial living from your writing, unimaginably shitty as it may be.

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  13. Conservative bloggers lie about people they like. That's not a lesson so much as a truism.

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  14. montag211:35 PM

    It's as if the Bircherites are in the midst of full-blown religious loonie paranoid schizophrenia. A woman with a tv show is destroying civilization as we know it, which is sort of standard fare for them, but a Russian strongman is held up as a role model for U.S. leadership?

    Now, I expect them to defend the crazy rich. Their origins are in that faction. I expect them to go long on the culture wars. But, never in their heyday would they have admired a Russian leader for "speaking power to truth." Used him as a foil, or as a means of ginning up a little xenophobia, manipulated his image to instill fear in the masses, certainly, But never admired. This is new for them, and very much a sign that they are no longer concerned about being labeled as fascists. Whatever is the political equivalent of anti-psychotics, I'm stocking up on it.

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  15. Ace of Spades
    protested the real problem was “social inequality” — that is, the
    alleged contempt of Democrats for rich people who are rightwing and
    folksy, such as the Palins or the Duck Dynasty guys.


    No, it's contempt for people who are rich and fauxsy.

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  16. Months later, with the ruble crashing,
    Putin’s cowboy diplomacy doesn’t look like such a winner, and Obama’s
    restraint looks rather better. Since Kim Jong Un doesn’t look so hot
    with his shirt off, conservatives may have to wait for a coup to
    rekindle their dictator-love.


    The ruble only crashed because the cruel Russian winter forced Putin to put his shirt back on.

    ReplyDelete
  17. There were cool with Pinochet... they were cool with Suharto. It's not that they're ok with white dictators, it's that they're cool with right dictators.

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  18. montag211:44 PM

    Oh, they seem to get along splendidly with Arab dictators (with the exception of those such as Assad that the other Arab dictators don't like), Latin American right-wing dictators, and Southeast Asian military dictators, too. It's those Cuban leftist dictators that really get their panties in knots.

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  19. M. Krebs12:03 AM

    So, is naked ping-pong a regular feature on Girls?

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  20. montag212:04 AM

    Ah, yes, who else but Don Surber, the Barney Fife of stormtroopers?

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  21. No, but it is in Putin's Russia.

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  22. The jackass-booted thugs...

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  23. PersonaAuGratin12:12 AM

    And Barry Soetoro's mother was named Dunham, so it was incestuous socialist mooslim rape.

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  24. mortimer200012:22 AM

    Actually, to its much belated credit, the Charleston Daily Herald fired Surber a few months back for writing this:

    This summer I had an epiphany as I watched packs of racists riot in Ferguson, Missouri, in support of a gigantic thug who was higher than a kite when he attacked Ferguson Police Department Officer Darren Wilson, who unfortunately had to put this animal down.

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  25. mortimer200012:33 AM

    I'm glad you started your countdown at 10, Roy, because there must have been at least a dozen similar lowlights per day in 2014, and you'd be writing forever otherwise. Many thanks for another year of risking your mental health right-wing dumpster diving, and providing us a safe haven of wit amidst the darkness.

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  26. AGoodQuestion12:34 AM

    You're right. I had forgotten whether Surber was fired or just suspended for that... that. Whatever his next job is, maybe don't type anything after downing those cocktails of gin and hate.

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  27. Giant Monster Gamera12:48 AM

    2015 sees that and raises you a neutron.

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  28. Megalon1:06 AM

    Those aren't ping pongs, they're the testicles of his enemies!

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  29. I can't think of a funny answer, but the actual answer is: no, that happened one time in an episode where Dunham's character had a weekend fling with a guy who had a ping-pong table at home. But there's a fair amount of nudity on the show, mostly in scenes where people are in bed or taking a bath or whatever.

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  30. What is the explanation for VD Hansen? This man writes "essays" whose factual bases and logical consistency would get him a Gentleman's C, but only if his uncle endowed a library. By my standard of patriotism, and I have an undistinguished but actual military record, he preaches sedition. Even though I'll defend his right to the thoughts, the idea that treasonous musings accompanied by terrible writing somehow appears in the "respectable" press, and the fool gets paid for it, is stunning to me.

    Isn't this supposed to be the kind of stuff you read on the cheap photocopied sheet the guy hands you on the sidewalk?

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  31. Geo X1:56 AM

    Good lord--I can more or less deal with one piece of wingnuttia at a time, but when you bombard us with a concentrated stream of the stuff like this it's just about too much to take. Not that I didn't already know it, but it's ALARMING to be forcibly reminded that, yeah, they're crazed, malignant troglodytes about *absolutely everything.* SHUDDER.

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  32. The wingnut welfare media industrial complex has spent decades endowing libraries, building wings, (Hanson is a proffesor of classics) bolting thinktanks to prestigious universities (Stanford/Hoover), among others and hoovering up any media outlet they could get their hands on. Then proceeded to round up every sandwich board totin' otherwise unemployable carnival barker and for the ones that would clean up nice, put into a farm system in the written or televised media with a gig at fox or cnn, or access to the editorial pages became common place.

    The old mimeographs and photo copied ended up stuffing your crazy uncles email inbox.

    Or something like that.

    Detumesce..../kisses fingers indicative of extreme satisfaction with a thirty percent chance of tumescence.
    ...

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  33. Thankfully he is spoon feeding the stuff to us.
    ...

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  34. That bacon and playdough boy still roams the internets freely and with a jaunty gate indicates that there is something terribly wrong with all of us.
    ...

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  35. I am actually trying to wargame how one, to make a shoe with ass for soles and two what it would be like to walk around in same.
    ...

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  36. Jayson Alan Grigsby2:27 AM

    And even enjoining us with airplane and choo-choo noises.

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  37. smut clyde2:30 AM

    The simplest pro-inequality argument was advanced by Ben Domenech
    Who's going to pay to replace those perfectly good boots which Domenech has worn out with his tongue?

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  38. smut clyde2:32 AM

    A woman with a tv show is destroying civilization as we know it
    Surely you over-rate the threat posed by Sarah Palin.

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  39. smut clyde2:41 AM

    Hanson has set himself the task of being psychopomp to the newly brain-dead, but he attempts to achieve it by being pompous and psychotic.

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  40. smut clyde2:54 AM

    Putin’s confidence in his unabashedly thuggish means, the brutal fashion
    in which a modern state so unapologetically embraces the premodern mind
    to go after its critics… Putin speaks power to truth

    Hanson's love of strongmen is approximately 80 years too late.

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  41. coozledad6:45 AM

    But there's never been a better opportunity to buy rubles.

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  42. This supports my conviction that VDH is an escapee from a P.G. Wodehouse novel.

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  43. Nyet, Comrade. American conservatives have always admired the True Russian (e.g. The Romanovs, et al)--it is the Soviets they previously loved to hate as Nemesis. Putin is a throwback to the Cossacks of yore, and they loves 'em some militaristic, genocidal stormtroopers who worship demi-god strongmen.

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  44. . . . very much a sign that they are no longer concerned about being labeled as fascists.

    They're not concerned about being labeled fascists because everyone KNOWS that liberals are fascists. There's even a book about it!

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  45. There is, though, an opening at Ripley's.

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  46. Depends on the ass, I guess. I suggest you consult noted asshat Jim Hoft.

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  47. Perhaps Ed Gein's 1001 Household Projects contains some answers.

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  48. Oh, they lie about folks they like, too. I'm wondering what it is they don't lie about.


    More than truism, it's bordering on Natural Law.

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  49. I'm picturing Obama with a flamboyant mustache...he should grow it back to show his inner hipster.

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  50. Figuring one glute per sole, unless i can get my hands on baby glutes.

    Time travel harvest. Rather than go back in time to get hitler, harvest his baby glutes. Pants wont stay up, no wwi no nazi party. Win win.
    ...

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  51. One glute per sole, two glutes per soul. Let's not quibble--we'll just split it. Then your boots can be half-assed.

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  52. coozledad8:00 AM

    Putin. Rasputin minus dreads.

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  53. name-calling just creates fission.

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  54. coozledad8:19 AM

    Their only child, Lavrenty Beria Dunham Putin, went on to form his own indie label after the breakup of his band "Warm Water Port".

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  55. satch8:27 AM

    "If you have an erection that persists for more than 3 years..."


    They WISH...

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  56. coozledad8:29 AM

    The best way to read that is to envision a thumbpuppet with a squeaky southern accent.

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  57. SqueakyRat8:35 AM

    Augusto Pinochet was as white as Lindsay Graham.

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  58. coozledad8:36 AM

    I'm still waiting for the SOTU where he goes full Daniel Day Lewis from Gangs of New York.

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  59. coozledad8:42 AM

    Lucius "Putter" Pourriture-Nobile

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  60. Anyone wirhin the reach of brooklyn and my pixels please run, dont walk, to get tickets to see Marloews Tamburlane (parts one and two) on the ny stage for the first time in 60 years. The blood drenched play about a cheerful scythian stalin surrounded by willing murderous followers is just fantastic. Incredible production and a fantastic play even though its marlowe not shakespear. But it really shows you what happens when people answer the will call to power with a resounding yes.

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  61. Helmut Monotreme9:06 AM

    For some people the contrast in the values we claim to embrace as Americans (Liberty, justice for all, etc) and the way we as a nation operate on the foreign and domestic policy level, is a reason to change our foreign and domestic policy to be more in line with our professed values. For VDH and his admirers that contrast is a reason to throw out our professed values and go full gonzo 'might makes right' and embrace our most destructive imperial urges.

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  62. El Manquécito9:13 AM

    Seconded.

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  63. You're gonna need a bigger shovel.
    ~

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  64. I want to berth my submarine in this comment, and then have riotous shore leave with it.

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  65. satch9:34 AM

    What would we do with them besides use them in place of styrofoam packing peanuts and old newspapers for returning gifts?

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  66. satch9:39 AM

    "If only a bare-chested Putin hooked up with a bare-chested Dunham, and
    they publicly gave all their personal wealth away to the poor."


    To the POOR?!? Fox News wouldn't touch that with a ten foot POLE *wink wink, nudge nudge*.

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  67. satch9:49 AM

    "As of this week, Mr. Surber is no longer employed by the Daily Mail. While his sometimes controversial and caustic columns were noted by many readers, few readers realize the in-depth institutional knowledge and substantial contributions he made during his 30-year career here.
    We thank him for his service and we wish Mr. Surber good luck."


    Much belated credit my ass. Apparently, there's some carrion even a buzzard can't even choke down.

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  68. Now we know the real identity of "Sandra Hill." Compare:

    Putin’s confidence in his unabashedly thuggish means, the brutal fashion in which a modern state so unapologetically embraces the
    premodern mind to go after its critics… Putin speaks power to truth — an
    unpredictable, unapologetic brute force of nature.

    And contrast:

    At hearing those beautiful words, Torolf flexed his rough-hewn abs and Hilda found herself being guided to her soft bed by the sheer force of Torolf’s undulating midsection. ...



    [NSFW NSFW NSFW]



    She walked across the room and picked up her towel, still wet with shower water. “Torolf,” she said softly, “there’s something I have to
    tell you…”

    But her bed was empty.

    Torolf was gone, escaped out the bedroom window. In the distance, Hilda heard the fading sound of galloping abs.

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  69. "But the most grandiloquent paean may have been that of National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson,
    who found “value for us” — meaning for the American People, I guess —
    in “Putin’s confidence in his unabashedly thuggish means, the brutal
    fashion in which a modern state so unapologetically embraces the
    premodern mind to go after its critics… Putin speaks power to truth — an
    unpredictable, unapologetic brute force of nature.”


    Jeezus, THAT'S what he wants to see from Obama? Does he realize that if Obama acted towards his critics the way Putin does, Hanson would be the first one to be ground under the Kenyan Usurper's tank treads? Not that it wouldn't be an improvement in the public discourse, mind you...

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  70. Halloween_Jack10:08 AM

    OT: I got to see David Bowie Is this past week while visiting relatives in Chicago. As you might expect, seeing Bowie's handwritten notes regarding my namesake and hearing him talk about Halloween Jack in the context of the album/tour/postapocalyptic-movie-that-never-was was like Clark Kent finding the tiny spaceship hidden in his adoptive parents' barn, and I would have prostrated myself before the handwritten rough draft of the lyrics to "'Heroes'" if it hadn't been so crowded. It was really quite paradise.

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  71. Halloween_Jack10:10 AM

    What is the explanation for VD Hansen?


    The boner has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

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  72. Halloween_Jack10:11 AM

    WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS SHEEPLE

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  73. Halloween_Jack10:12 AM

    Vaping seems to be a generally good idea (if someone's already hooked on nicotine, that is), but that model's resemblance to a syringe has unpleasant connotations.

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  74. Negrophobia trumps Commiephobia, so any white man who "stands up" to the uppity dusky-hued mom-panted tyrant in the White House is their hero.

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  75. Syringe? I'm seeing Boschian thermometer.

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  76. "Since Kim Jong Un doesn’t look so hot with his shirt off, conservatives
    may have to wait for a coup to rekindle their dictator-love.'

    There's always the NYPD.

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  77. Two wingnuts, One cop.

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  78. Tortures and political executions they can live with but that Cuban socialized medicine crosses the line into real tyranny.

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  79. Gromet10:41 AM

    "In-depth institutional knowledge" probably means "bitched pretty much nonstop about how this was a much better place to work back when Reagan was president, and regaled the slower-moving interns with tales of how back then, everyone chainsmoked manly Camels and drank double martinis at their desks, and the secretaries LIKED getting an appreciative swat on the ass."

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  80. Sedition against democratic presidents = Patriotism. See also, Liberty, tree, blood, watered.

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  81. A spoonful of sugar helps the mendacity go down.

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  82. On the plus side, that would save more styrofoam packing peanuts for the styrofoam elephants...

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  83. susanoftexas11:13 AM

    They're embracing fascism by embracing a police state and corporate control. We don't have enough problems with resources and global warming, we have to drag everyone kicking and screaming to let us try to save us all. And we're losing.

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  84. susanoftexas11:16 AM

    There used to be a sock puppet but it suffered a sticky end.

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  85. Bertha couldn't burrow through it all. And bullshit's pretty soft, mind you.

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  86. coozledad11:27 AM

    I just remember playing my punched-out copy of "The Man Who Sold the World" album over and over to try and figure out the guitar parts. Every time "After All " would come around my younger sister would start shrieking "All he ever plays is that god damn funeral music!"

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  87. Atrios gives us OPPOSITE DAY.

    http://www.eschatonblog.com/2014/12/pretty-sure-that-isnt-it.html

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  88. Halloween_Jack12:16 PM

    That... could be even worse, depending on where it's meant to be used.

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  89. glennisw12:19 PM

    Yes, right now she's curled up in a fetal position weeping over the lost sales and ratings she would have earned from the Don Surbers of the world.

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  90. Republican president creates largest Federal agency of the last 45 years for the purpose of spying on Americans and forcing doddering octogenarians to remove shoes at airport checkpoints. This is the greatest statement of freedom the world has ever seen.

    Democratic president pushes legislation to encourage people to buy health insurance while curbing some of the industry's worst abuses. This is the greatest crime against humanity in the recorded history of Earth, and an abridgement of freedom hitherto unknown in Western civilization.

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  91. conservatives may have to wait for a coup

    Don't give 'em any ideas!

    (More later.)

    God help us.

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  92. I seem to recall Spode wised up after a while, though.

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  93. mommadillo1:16 PM

    the “true motivation” of “too many” feminists is “hatred of men.”
    Which is perfectly understandable given the examples of how "men" behave they get from lowlife scumbags like Kaminsky.

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  94. There is a venn diagram among other things. Given an almost certain overlap between the two, and of course islamophobes would have to figure in with more overlap. Then throw in the pnac/strauss (only care about my benjamens) croud with adherents of rand/van mise rabbit holes....

    Fuck now we are trying to determine the area under a conic section and imma gonna have to learn the calculus.
    ...

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  95. Don't forget their love for such uplifting individuals as Mobutu Sese Seko or Samuel Doe, as well.

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  96. J Neo Marvin1:42 PM

    Or else shave his head, grow a beard, and channel Captain Sisko.

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  97. I think he should channel Malcolm X for the freaknuts who said he was El-Shabbazz's love child whom he managed to brainwash in the couple of years before he was assassinated.

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  98. I'd vote for that.

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  99. After he married Madeline "stars are God's daisy-chain".

    ReplyDelete
  100. ... but not escape velocity.

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  101. smut clyde2:42 PM

    Or the rivers Alpheus and Peneus.

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  102. smut clyde2:43 PM

    Rah rah Mas Putin.

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  103. randomworker2:45 PM

    Nor consciousness...evidently.

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  104. billcinsd2:49 PM

    c'mon everybody knows Marlowe wrote Shakespeare, so it's both Marlowe and Shakespeare

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  105. John Wesley Hardin3:03 PM

    That VDH quote is telling, and chilling. Admiration for speaking power to truth? And "embracing the pre-modern mind"? His takeaway graf seems to be this one: "[Putin] ends up existing to warn us in the West of what we are not, and to demonstrate that in a strange sort of way our loud principles without toughness are not much better than his toughness without principles. In that regard, he gives us a valuable look into ourselves — we the hollow men, the stuffed men of dry voices and whispers." So, we need to be tougher so as to simultaneously be more, and less, like the brutish thug? And something tells me it is not democratic, egalitarian principles that Hansen wants to see some "toughness" behind.

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  106. Fearguth3:08 PM

    Everything I've learned about Lena Dunham and her cork-popping detractors I've learned from Roy Edroso. And where else could I encounter the word 'detumesce' in a sentence that made me laugh out loud? So help me, if someone hasn't already used the title, Edroso's Familiar Quotations, I will someday.

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  107. synykyl3:26 PM

    Hanson is not important enough to be one of the first ten thousand targets of a crackdown, let alone the first.

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  108. smut clyde3:34 PM

    I was hoping for something beta.

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  109. Fearguth3:41 PM

    Remember vaginal wands? Well, this looks like it could be the penile equivalent.

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  110. Oh yeah? Who do you think stole his chain saw/lawn mower?

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  111. we the hollow men, the stuffed men of dry voices and whispers

    I'm sure it sounded more impressive in the original German Klingon Greek.

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  112. Donalbain5:22 PM

    That is beautiful! Few readers realized he had knowledge. The backest of backhanded compliments

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  113. TGuerrant5:41 PM

    He has archives. Need to put my head down for a while. Oh, the ignominy.

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  114. GeniusLemur5:46 PM

    The power to throw a screaming tantrum anytime something they don't like happens.

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  115. satch6:08 PM

    Now that he has some some time on his hands, he can investigate those "institutions" in depth.

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  116. TGuerrant6:16 PM

    Which is constantly or they wouldn't have anything to write about.

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  117. TGuerrant6:18 PM

    Oh, gawd, so hard to get the right one on without the hee-hawing waking the missus. Must sleep in later and goosestep only in the afternoons....

    ReplyDelete
  118. TGuerrant6:23 PM

    Trugasm, brother, TRUGASM!

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  119. TGuerrant6:33 PM

    He's employed holding up the tails of John Derbyshire's tailcoat when sir needs to sit upon the loo and express new written content.

    ReplyDelete
  120. TGuerrant6:39 PM

    I want whatever yer drinking.

    ReplyDelete
  121. billcinsd6:43 PM

    wait, are you saying it's not all bacon and play-do down there. That changes everything

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  122. billcinsd7:05 PM

    I'm going with Boko Fittleworth described as

    "a cross between a comedy juggler and a parrot that has been dragged through a hedge backwards"

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  123. coozledad7:19 PM

    Or Charles Taylor.
    One day someone will write a book about how US televangelism created a unique era of child soldiers.
    Why Pat Robertson has escaped cruel and unusual punishment is beyond me.

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  124. coozledad7:27 PM

    Whiter. Much whiter.
    i'd love to see Lindsay's 23andme chart. Being from South Carolina by itself ought to give him an automatic 35% sub Saharan ancestry.
    i clocked in at 2%, which must be what my folks meant by "Cherokee".

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  125. coozledad7:39 PM

    At this point, if he just sat down at a piano like Dick Nixon and banged out a Billy Strayhorn piece, it would send them into their shelters.
    Historians would refer to it as the "cling peaches SOTU" because of the run on canned goods.

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  126. FlipYrWhig7:51 PM

    Hey now, his principles are exactly as democratic and egalitarian as those of a phalanx of Spartan hoplites.

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  127. tigrismus8:23 PM

    A guy from Dunham’s college claimed the memoir defamed him because his name is Barry, too.

    Did his flamboyant mustache also make a statement?

    “Putin Treating Obama Like Half a Fag.”

    What does that even mean? He'll blow Obama but no ass-play?

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  128. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person9:44 PM

    I dunno, but you might create a whole new species of private detective: the Bumshoe...

    ReplyDelete
  129. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person9:48 PM

    If you have an erection that persists for more than 3 years


    Someone might write a series of sci-fi alternate-world porn novels about you...

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  130. redoubtagain10:31 PM

    In Putin's Russia, pong pings you! In gulag!

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  131. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person10:44 PM

    Putin speaks power to truth

    This is what passes for trenchant intellectual wordsmithery on the Right. Take a phrase used often by the Left, and turn it around. Even if the rearranged words make no sense, the RWEC will volley it approvingly back and forth like a top quality Spaulding birdie, when it reality it's a crumpled ball of used tinfoil...

    ReplyDelete
  132. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person10:48 PM

    Just a way to use "fag" in a sentence y'ask me.

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  133. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person10:53 PM

    The whole rightwing boners-for-Putin thing just has me scratching my head. I expect them to be wrong, but to be wrong in ways that not only make no Earthly sense at all, but would seem to go against everything we thought we knew about the Conservative mind, just...say, anybody recommend a good dandruff shampoo?

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  134. David Sagneri11:01 PM

    What I love about this though is that Putin's strength was clearly nothing more than posturing from weakness. I've never understood that people don't grasp that if you are in a position of strength then the chest beating the puffing yourself up etc is not only unnecessary but often detrimental. It was clear that Putin strength was a house of cards and it didn't even last as long as I thought it would.

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  135. bekabot11:01 PM

    "Dunham pulls so many of their triggers — she’s liberal, she’s a tattooed hipster, she has the nerve to act sexy despite not having a nice build like Ann Coulter — that she has remained their #1 groovy hate fuck, the Jane Fonda of the Obama age, at whom they rage for her sexuality as well as her politics."

    Credit where credit is due — Ann Coulter has never, but never once, tried to act sexy, so far as I know. Which is wise of her.

    ReplyDelete
  136. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person11:11 PM

    “Sue the bastards,” cried professional scold Rod Dreher. “That’s the only way they will learn. Make the publisher withdraw the whole damn book…”

    Saved that one. I gayrontee I'll have a use for it within a year, when some rightblogger--maybe even ol' Crunchy* hisself--brays about someone on the Left calling for a boycott.


    *I have never understood that and probably never will...

    ReplyDelete
  137. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person11:14 PM

    They're watering that tree the same way a dog does...

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  138. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person11:21 PM

    Now if only Puttie-poot had killed him a b'ar, skinned it with his teeth, pissed on the hide to cure it, and worn it to every photo-op, why...the spooge on the Right would be a river.
    But at least they'd be quiet for a while...

    ReplyDelete
  139. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person11:49 PM

    I have decided that, for the True Believers on the Right, heaven and hell really *are* real. And not because I see any of 'em playing harp or blowing on a, ahem, flute in the Afterlife...

    ReplyDelete
  140. If only VDH would get his chest torn apart by a fox he hid under his cloak.

    ReplyDelete
  141. smut clyde12:19 AM

    He's recollecting the text but not the meaning of T.S. Eliot.

    ReplyDelete
  142. AGoodQuestion12:26 AM

    He can have that job. No way in Hell I'd take it.

    ReplyDelete
  143. AGoodQuestion12:33 AM

    Not sure he has the wardrobe to go with a flamboyant mustache.

    ReplyDelete
  144. AGoodQuestion12:36 AM

    Wait, you mean it wasn't a roomful of monkeys with typewriters?

    ReplyDelete
  145. AGoodQuestion12:41 AM

    Are you sure you're talking about Ann "my pretty girl allies" Coulter"

    http://humanevents.com/2004/07/29/banned-in-bostonbrtoo-hot-for-emusa-todayem/

    ReplyDelete
  146. fredfnord12:45 AM

    No, no... 'in-depth institutional knowledge' is more or less always code for 'knowing where all the bodies are buried, and whose skeleton is in whose closet'. This more or less reads as 'even blackmail was not enough to save him this time.'

    ReplyDelete
  147. Buford2k1111:07 AM

    wasn't that Sister Sara moaning and groaning "gimme yer dictator-love, uh huh, uh huh, hump me baby, oh ho oh oh"...?

    ReplyDelete
  148. bekabot12:25 PM

    Okay, so Ann Coulter has said a few things here and there, while impersonating Chloris Leachman as is her wont. Not the same thing at all, though that's strictly IMO. Still, good point.

    ReplyDelete
  149. agorabum3:37 PM

    I'm sure there were plenty who admired the brutality of Stalin, even if they hated his goals, at least the ones who could separate means and ends.

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  150. agorabum3:44 PM

    Well, one explanation is that on the National Review boards, they eat it up. They went rather wild for that essay of VDH...
    Don't go unless you have plenty of eye bleach, but it perfectly fits the vision of the right, that greatness lies in discarding law and human rights, torturing, invading countries under false pretense to show you are strong and militaristic, homophobia, scapegoating of the other... you know, all the elements of classic fascism. Obama went the other way and got reelected by the American people, and it made them all the more desperate to prove that fascism or fascism-lite is the way to go.

    ReplyDelete
  151. DrLearnALot9:08 AM

    Several LOL lines in here. Thanks for plucking the absurd out of the appalling for us.

    ReplyDelete
  152. Peter Castle9:27 AM

    A new exposé on Ann Coulter now available online.

    This free 245-page PDF book – Propaganda: Orwell in the Age of Ann Coulter – is available at www.coulterwatch.com/propaganda.pdf.

    ReplyDelete
  153. YNWA4051511:45 PM

    Indeed. I'm reasonably certain that no less a conservative luminary than Grover Norquist has expressed admiration for Stalin, or at least some of his tactics.

    ReplyDelete