While alicubi.com undergoes extensive elective surgery, its editors pen somber, Shackletonian missives from their lonely arctic outpost.
Sunday, February 03, 2013
NEW VOICE COLUMN UP...
about the Obama skeet-shooting controversy, which may seem dumber than most such controversies if you've forgotten how dumb most such controversies are. Enjoy.
Great column. I like it when I can laugh at wingnuts for being totally fucking ridiculous without it ending in despair over the hopeless stupidity of the human race.
And once again the evil Obama foils the rightwingers...while they were focused like a laser on proving that he's a liar about skeet shooting, they completely missed the opportunity to ooga-booga the picture of the scary black man with a gun.
As the critics say, why didn't Obama release this photograph months ago when his personal exposure to firearms was not an issue, so they could accuse him of raising irrelevant issues?
I get that Obama's trying to make a political point, but I'm not sure it came off strong enough. If it were me I'd pan the camera to the left to make sure the cardboard Rand Paul cutout full of holes made it into the picture.
I keep trying to imagine any president pandering to me the way this one does to rightwing assholes, and I just can't picture it. I mean, what's the equivalent? A Republican president getting gay married? If any Repub went this far out of his way to placate liberals, I think I'd just shut the fuck up and say "thank you".
We've gotten to a point when conservatives are writing posts than can be interpreted as pro-Nazi just to spite the Kenyan Usurper... maybe seeing pictures of him with a gun will cause them all to give up their shooting irons out of "spite".
"That goddurn commie neegruh done ruined guns for me!"
It's really all about wardrobe for them isn't it? Wear a jumpsuit and you;re a war hero. Fail to wear a baseball cap and that is proof you don't actually use firearms, overriding the photo of you using a firearm.
We had nearly a decade of almost daily manufactured scandals in the `90s, and nearly a decade of almost daily genuine scandals in the Zeroes, and after two decades to compare, it seems that the press prefers the manufactured ones.
Manufactured ones require so much less work--you know, investigative reporting and shit like that. Looks like we're back to the days when, given the choice between, say, reporting on Constitutional crises and the President's opinions on broccoli--or junk food--the Washington Post trolls the wingnut zeitgeist, goes straight for the jugular and writes on... skeet?
(Back in the old days, when the only place on campus where one could eat were dining halls, at my alma mater the breaded veal cutlets were universally described as... skeet (well, because they really closely resembled them in both shape and physical properties), and "shooting skeet" meant flinging them across the dining hall for others to bring down with the odd chunk of jello--a staple on the university menu of the time. You can see why I'm understandably confused by this story.)
I'm not sure I understand the point of the whole "we skeet shoot all the time" statement anyhoo. Isn't that pandering to the fucked up conservatoid notion that you can't have a say in something you don't do? Sorta like "you don't snort coke, so you can't say whether it should be illegal," or "you aren't a serial killer, so you can't comment on dumping mutilated bodies in sand pits."
"You don't shoot guns, so you can't have an opinion about paranoid fantasists stockpiling weapons and carrying them into public places, including schools, cinemas, and nightclubs, where you children are liable to be shot by either psychos or wannabe psycho-stoppers."
It's absolutely irrelevant whether Obama shoots skeet, or hunts, or sits at home masturbating with a glock in one hand. So, yet again, I'm bumfuzzled as to why he feels obligated to play their game.
The fucked up thing is that the proper term for the "target" is "clay pigeon". Originally, live doves were released from traps and shot as they flew away... nowadays, I think only evil Dick Cheney motherfuckers use live birds these days. I used to go trap shooting at least once a year- I'm still not entirely clear on The ifference between trap and skeet shooting.
Maybe this is just triangulation, Obama trying to cull the sport shooters from the gun-fetishist herd. Clinton did much the same thing before the 1996 election. Almost all the Clinton team's internal polling then was directed at determining the interests of swing voters, and suburban sport hunters figured prominently in the group, so, bingo, Clinton was suddenly seen being a bird hunter, which was counter-evidence that he was anti-guns because of the assault weapon ban.
If there's a real trend building to limit military weapons and oversized magazines, better to have the hunters think you're not out to get their shotguns and bolt-actions.
Bob Owens has assembled a select group of highly motivated good old boys to infiltrate the Camp David compound to determine the veracity of Pres. Obama's statement. After driving as close as one could reasonably expect, with one member spiriting a pair of high-powered binoculars into the woods on the pretense of taking a leak, the team has concluded, "There's no way we woulda found any clay shards, even if we had got in there."
Meanwhile, back at the Owens household, there is a pinging noise, and his new backyard grill topples over. Hundreds of miles away, Barack Obama, smiling slightly, disassembles his rifle.
What I thought was a real classy touch was Representative Marsha Blackburn, who chose this opportunity to demand that the President grant her the honor of an invitation to his personal vacation home, as a one-on-one social occasion, so that she would have the opportunity to prove him a liar and humiliate him.
Seriously, - here's what she said: “I think he should invite me to Camp David, and I’ll go skeet shooting with him.” Blackburn said. “I bet I’ll beat him.”
it seems that the press prefers the manufactured ones.
Look, which one is easier to cover? Look at how much time Woodward and Bernstein spent researching Watergate. That shit costs money. Those two probably spent more hours than every single reputable news organization combined spent researching Obama's birth certificate.
REPORTER: "Hello, Hawaii Department of Records? Do you really have Obama's birth certificate?"
DEPARTMENT OF RECORDS: "Yes."
REPORTER: "So he was really born in the USA?"
DEPARTMENT OF RECORDS: "Yes."
REPORTER: "Shit."
Manufactured stories are easy, and they let you get extra mileage out of your gasbag pundits that you're already paying. Best of all, you never take the risk of offending anyone whose opinion you might have to worry about. You know, a major advertiser or someone at your country club.
Same reason they're bent out of shape over homos getting married and women serving in combat roles: the practical applications of a white penis are less numerous then they imagined.
Meanwhile, back at the Owens household, there is a pinging noise, and his new backyard grill topples over. Hundreds of miles away, Barack Obama, smiling slightly, disassembles his rifle.doffs his Jedi robe.
"New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor, who has gained perhaps more access than any reporter to the president and his administration, does not mention any instances of skeet shooting in her national bestseller The Obamas," said Eliana Johnson at National Review.
Did she just check the index in the back, or has she produced her own exhaustive concordance, to supplement the extensive marginalia, circled and highlighted passages, and words and phrases so heavily underlined that in some cases the Sharpie bled through the page and made the opposite side illegible? That's more work than the likes of Jonah Goldberg would put into it, but we're obviously well into the lunatic fringe here, the kind that can get obsessed over whether he's really doing regulation skeet shooting but somehow thinks that what he's wearing constitutes "mom jeans" somehow.
But aren't they getting head trauma from all the whiplash caused by first supporting "Democrats are the real socialists just like the Nazis" to "What's so bad about the Nazis anyhow?" I mean, this is taking the enemy of my enemy is my friend to new depths of confusion. I don't even know how they choose a side of the bed to get out of in the morning at the rate they are going.
"I keep trying to imagine any president pandering to me the way this one does to rightwing assholes, and I just can't picture it. I mean, what's the equivalent? "
Mitt Romney in assless chaps at the Folsom Street Fair?
Well, I'm sure my white penis could fire a gun if I ignored all warnings regarding trigger-discipline. But how does women and gay people getting married and or serving do anything to my dick? They could only enhance it.
Same here. I know I'd end up sneering, rolling my eyes and telling people to fuck off too often. And I'm not Dick Cheney, so I couldn't get away with it.
Oh, and: It goes w/out saying that, if O really did shoot skeet from Day 1 in office, and there were pix of it, and they were released, the brethren would stampede themselves into a frenzy to denounce the "obvious calculation" of it all. "He 'shoots skeet,' but he doesn't mean it," they would agree.
We HAVE TO laugh at these people. It's either that, or kill them, which I assume is still illegal in many jurisdictions.
No, see, it's actually one of their less inconsistent moves. Nazis = godless left-wing traitorous socialists, just like Democrats, by definition. Ergo, rabid jingoism, demonization of liberals and intellectuals, trumpeting "traditional family values," wearing Gott Mitt Uns belt buckles while repeatedly advocating the refusion of church and state, attacking the very legitimacy of the current government, and threatening violence against their political enemies can't be Nazism. It's just true-blue American patriotism, wrapped in an American flag and carrying a cross. And just like neocons and Stalinism, the reprehensible tyrannical leftism of the Nazis doesn't rule out drawing lessons from their methods.
Y'know, I'd never thought of it that way, but, damn, yeah, I can see the truth in that. In an odd way, I think it explains seeing the same damned faces on television every damned Sunday morning. They can't seem to get enough of chewing the superficial into unrecognizable gristle.
Bear in mind that Eliana Johnson is the NRO scholar who, last week, defended the Nazis--yes, those Nazis--from O's characterization of "senseless" as re the violence they perpetrated. You only scape the bottom of the barrel when there IS a barrel. Absent a barrel, there is no limit to the depths to which you can sink.
My Mom had a "nervous breakdown" in the 60s- one time she became very upset because a dinner partner's chair had on leg a little shorter than the others. "Don't you see what that MEANS?" she asked my Dad "He doesn't have a Leg tot Stand On!" Everything they see has a weird, ominous significance to the Nuts.
I believe Dick upgraded to shooting undead lawyers a while back when doves proved too fast for him.
Skeet v trap? The key differences are in how fast the targets are launched and in which direction.
Skeet was invented in Murica, though, which is why our Murican preznit does it, though next week he may confess to playing petanque all the time just to drive the wingers mad.
A perfect encapsulation of their world view. They could (and would) just as easily argue that he is an elitist who enjoys a sport that he would deny to other people. In other words they can't decide whether the part of Obama that is fraudulent is the part they like, or the part they don't like, but whatever--its all a provocation and a trap.
In poking around the internet on just this subject, I'm not sure how much "access" Jodi Kantor actually had. She admitted to CNN's Soledad O'brien that the only time she actually talked to the Obama's was in 2009, for about forty minutes, and she didn't talk to them for the purpose of writing her book. She says she talked to aides and staff, but the subject of the book seems to be primarily the Obama's marriage, with large portions dedicated to how Michelle and the children were adapting to life in the White House. It doesn't look like skeet shooting ever popped up on Kantor's radar screen one way or the other.
I'm so very sorry, KatWillow. That sounds horrifying. Many years ago a good friend's mother had a nervous breakdown and retreated into her house and wouldn't come out for 4 years--that's right FOUR YEARS while her daughter, my friend, gave birth to a child with huge facial deformities and needed her mother's help and emotional support. They didn't actually really notice it was a nervous breakdown because they are *&^% British, I guess? My friend didn't even think to mention it to me until years afterwards when she nonchalantly referred to the fact that she only spoke to her mother on the phone for four years although they were living within minutes of one another.
When you think how John Kerry was attacked for the liberal effaminacy of the sport of windsurfing you realize that Obama could rappel off a 100 story building with a knife in his teeth, roll to his feet shooting the heart out of Bin Laden and then ride cross country to save your favorite school teacher from a burning building surrounded by terrorists and they would still attack himfor being a "panzy."
Oh, now you just know the white house is fucking with these guys:
Responding to questions about President Obama's experience skeet shooting, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters on Monday that the President's aim has improved, but he's not an expert.
In the "All Cretans are Liars" interpretive sweepstakes which part of the bolded sentence will drive the right wing into a frothing Harcourt Fenton Mudd style breakdown? If Obama is lying--is he lying about not being an expert?
Hell, they attacked Kerry for the liberal effeminacy of going duck hunting in Ohio, the liberal effeminacy of how he held his shotgun while successfully hunting pheasant in Iowa, and for the liberal effeminacy of shooting and being shot at in a SE Asian combat zone. It's almost as if liberalism is intrinsically weak and "effeminate," presumably because of how pro-homosexual the Nazis were when they were handing out all those pink triangles.
... and then ride cross country to save your favorite school teacher from a burning building surrounded by terrorists and they would still attack himfor being a "panzy."
Actually, for this last part, they'd attack him for rescuing a school teacher. Who do you think started the fire?
I admit, the first thing I thought when I saw the picture was, why isn't he pointing the gun up? Hopefully, as Roy suggests, it's come to the point where Obama is just fucking with them, hoping they continue their deranged nonsense for another week so he can release more photos, this time pointing in the air, different clothes, dates, actually hitting skeet, maybe some kind of awesome tally sheet, besting John Boehner in a match. Given the hand eye coordination he'd demonstrated on the basketball court, wingnut congress folk should probably be careful challenging him to a match. Of course skeet shooting is much less a sport than golf or bowling, though slightly more than checkers or dice. Well, I guess that actually depends on how enthusiastically one throws dice. Point is, if a drunken 600 pound guy can do it, it's not much of a sport.
Anyway, back to the question of whether he's fucking with them, I sure hope so. It would not only mean that he's grasped the bread and circuses nature of being a ruler, but that he's brought the circus into a post modern era. Bread, sadly, not so much. Nor free birth control pills for all, or no burdensome tax increases for the middle class, as it turns out.
But cirus-wise, a lot of people win. Wingnuts are constantly fed with ridiculous notions to rave about. Since being spectacularly wrong all the time doesn't bother them, it will never get old. Country club conservatives win because they can continue their spree of mass murder abroad and looting at home without much of anyone paying attention, at least not until the new circus comes to town, which will be in a matter of days, not weeks, you can rest assured. Country club liberals can point and laugh at them dumb conservatards and revel in their own moral and intellectual superiority. They tend to benefit from the status quo as well. Most people who aren't really paying attention, of course, will ultimately suffer, but fuck them, they should pay more attention, or get a better job, or go to a better school, or get born to better parents, or just go away and whine somewhere out of sight, depending on one's politics, eh.
No troupe? But if there isn't one how can you join 'em. But hell, I enjoy no theater. It's classic. .. I may be stuck on a Lou Reed song-titled orbiting wreck,
Country club liberals can point and laugh at them dumb conservatards and revel in their own moral and intellectual superiority. They tend to benefit from the status quo as well and don't really give a shit about war crimes such as torture and drone strikes on weddings.
As opposed to strenuously opposing them on a comment board, chuck? Well, you just keep on fighting so tirelessly, it's truly an inspiration to the rest of us.
Hey Roy, I guess I never mentioned it, but I took some photos of Obama shooting a rifle when he was much younger, well before he entered politics. I've always hesitated to publish them because it involves vandalizing a Republican campaign sign. But what the hell, no one will see it here.
Your biggest error is in conflating "benefiting from the status quo" with "putting time and/or money into reinforcing the status quo or actively working to tilt the table even more in their own favor," the latter of which liberals in general do not do. Likewise, as has been explained to you ad infinitum by both myself and lo many, many others, there is a vast gulf of difference between "not giving a shit" about torture and drone strikes and recognizing that your choices are one or the other - when confronting a threat with an occupying force, you get torture, because it's war and people are fucked up from the stress and all the shit they've seen, and the probability that at least one of them will flip out and commit a war crime approaches about 100%; with drone strikes you get innocent civilian deaths - though in nowhere near the numbers you get with an occupying force. And on balance, large numbers of liberals prefer the second option to the first while at the same time recognizing that we don't have control of this shit. So it becomes a matter of pretty simple math: fewer civilian deaths is preferable to more civilian deaths. We'd love to see none, but perhaps you can explain to us how we get there. In the meantime, fewer is better than more.
What bugs me about your continual harping on this theme is this, though: you aren't thick and so you can see the calculation above as easily as anyone else, but you trot it out continually because you're not willing to go all the way and state that your true complaint, which is that we shouldn't be fighting international terrorists overseas. I happen to disagree with you on that point, particularly when they are holed up in countries that can't or won't deal with them. But I'd much prefer you to make your real argument, which is to get out of the business of terrorist hunting or fighting, rather than this constantly recycled bullshit about how drone strikes prove that pretty much everyone is a hypocrite and we're all just pieces of shit.
Chuck fancies himself the above-it-all One True Truth teller and everyone else is in favor of Obamney and are hypocrites because they don't appreciate the obvious Death From Above like he does. While we mope about, comfortably superior, and get all angry at him with hate-rays and differences of opinons.
Mitt Romney pandering to me? You mean, committing seppuku by throwing himself under Rafalca in one of his car garages? That kind of pandering? It might have worked to warm me up to him, but it would have been a tad self defeating from an electoral perspective.
Oh, now you just know the white house is fucking with these guys:
WASHINGTON — The five members of Texas Christian University's national championship rifle team were already beside themselves to be on the South Lawn of the White House Monday evening at a celebration of all NCAA sports champions when President Barack Obama gave them the first shout-out. ... Obama told the TCU team that he, too, practiced shooting with a rifle. "He said he practiced with the Secret Service," said Riford, who graduated from TCU in May and now works in Fort Worth.
Well, something like that. I think it's more important to adhere to principles than to be a team player. For example, all good people were against mass murder of brown people abroad when it was the Cheney's and Rumsfelds justifying it. But now that it's our guys, it's just an unfortunate necessity, not to be spoken of by decent people. Me, I'm opposed to mass murder no matter who does it. So terribly déclassé these days, I know.
But I understand where you're coming from Jay. You live in Dallas, you love the Cowboys and hate the Redskins. You move to a parking lot in suburban Maryland, you love the Redskins and hate the Cowboys. The only principle involved is rooting for the home team. You're just a normal guy. Might as well pop a bud light and enjoy the game. That's probably for the best. Nobody will be burning any crosses on your lawn.
Well, something like that. I think it's more important to adhere to principles than to be a team player.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I mean Jesus, chuck, get off the cross. You have no discerning principle as far as I can tell other than, "I demand that you understand you are a hypocrite" when really I think most everyone here understands the limitation of our "team". I mean seriously, just because you are a special snowflake manage to see through the matrix and understand the fix is in -- between those thieving Polacks you see everywhere and that war criminal in the White House, you and your artist friend are really the last honest people left, obviously -- it's rather shortsighted, or maybe even teeth-achingly obtuse, to assume everyone else is as shallow and unprincipled as you think they are. First, you might consider the context. I know it's really fucking hard. Roy writes things that make fun of an alien world view to ours that seems both paranoid and illogical, yet is made with an honest conviction -- this is funny and more than a little enraging. This is why we come here, to laugh and point and wonder why it is, exactly, that people feel that way. It doesn't mean, not matter how simple and facile an understanding of people you might have (and you have an self-righteous adolescent's view of the world), that we are unable to see the compromised, rotten, Democratic Party or its putative leader as anything other than preferable to the self-parody and real danger posed by the other side. But that's not really what we're joking about here, is it? Hell, when we do talk about policy -- it's something you plainly don't understand, or you question-beg and talk about how you see Polacks gaming the system. That's as stupid as any anecdotal observation about anything that someone tries to pass off as proof. And what's the principle in that anyway? If I believe that moderately progressive taxation, a bare, but essential welfare state and a basic reality-based, secular, worldview is the sole province at this point of a Democratic Party who ALSO have terrible policies regarding war and civil liberties, what's the principle I should espouse? Medicaid and Medicare, so the poor and the old don't die on the street, or being anti-drone? My connection to my "team" is a cafeteria utilitarian one, but it is equally as principled as yours, I'd say, in that principles are really only priorities in real life and priorities shift, depending on the situation.
And, yes, of course, people have affinities. Yours are just as much of a pose as anyone else's. As far as you know, there are people here who put just as much effort in their personal time fighting for the same causes they did when Bush was in the office. But your comfortable assumption is that it's everyone else who is the phony.
Finally, your sports analogy is idiotic. No one does what you describe. It might even be, in fact, a principle of fandom.
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"all the time"--considering his crowded schedule, he's lucky to do it at all. Better than clearing brush and being afraid of horses.
ReplyDeleteGreat column. I like it when I can laugh at wingnuts for being totally fucking ridiculous without it ending in despair over the hopeless stupidity of the human race.
ReplyDeleteSo mom-jeans accentuate narrow hips and draw focus to the groin-y area? Interesting.
ReplyDeleteAnd once again the evil Obama foils the rightwingers...while they were focused like a laser on proving that he's a liar about skeet shooting, they completely missed the opportunity to ooga-booga the picture of the scary black man with a gun.
ReplyDeleteIf Obama's a panzy, maybe he's actually firing a Panzyfaust.
ReplyDeleteMILF jeans?
ReplyDeleteIf this is real, where is the dog laughing at him for missing his shot?
ReplyDeleteI always thought mom jeans were supposed to hide the belly. Mom jeans = anything that aren't jean shorts, the clothing of choice for the right wing.
ReplyDeleteAs the critics say, why didn't Obama release this photograph months ago when his personal exposure to firearms was not an issue, so they could accuse him of raising irrelevant issues?
ReplyDeleteI get that Obama's trying to make a political point, but I'm not sure it came off strong enough. If it were me I'd pan the camera to the left to make sure the cardboard Rand Paul cutout full of holes made it into the picture.
ReplyDeleteYou don't need the bullet when you got the ballot.
ReplyDeleteLove the Photoshop of POTUS shooting a chain in half with the caption "Djobama Unchained." It's funny because nigger.
ReplyDeleteThat might have backfired on them, though. Scary black men with guns on the streets of Oakland were why Ronald Reagan signed gun control into law.
ReplyDeleteHow did the skeet get in the President's mom jeans?
ReplyDelete~
I keep trying to imagine any president pandering to me the way this one does to rightwing assholes, and I just can't picture it. I mean, what's the equivalent? A Republican president getting gay married? If any Repub went this far out of his way to placate liberals, I think I'd just shut the fuck up and say "thank you".
ReplyDeleteHe's just happy to see you.
ReplyDeleteWe've gotten to a point when conservatives are writing posts than can be interpreted as pro-Nazi just to spite the Kenyan Usurper... maybe seeing pictures of him with a gun will cause them all to give up their shooting irons out of "spite".
ReplyDelete"That goddurn commie neegruh done ruined guns for me!"
NRA Hipsters! Two bad tastes that taste bad together.
ReplyDelete"Buford, Ah just cain't git inta mah guns an' mah shootin' no more... Ah's gonna run off 'n' join a Noh troupe."
ReplyDeleteIt's really all about wardrobe for them isn't it? Wear a jumpsuit and you;re a war hero. Fail to wear a baseball cap and that is proof you don't actually use firearms, overriding the photo of you using a firearm.
ReplyDeleteYes, but what about THIS gun photo controversy?
ReplyDeletehttps://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/335434_10150448387063508_513052927_o.jpg
We had nearly a decade of almost daily manufactured scandals in the `90s,
ReplyDeleteand nearly a decade of almost daily genuine scandals in the Zeroes, and
after two decades to compare, it seems that the press prefers the
manufactured ones.
Manufactured ones require so much less work--you know, investigative
reporting and shit like that. Looks like we're back to the days when,
given the choice between, say, reporting on Constitutional crises and
the President's opinions on broccoli--or junk food--the Washington Post trolls the wingnut zeitgeist, goes straight for the jugular and writes on... skeet?
(Back in the old days, when the only place on campus where one could
eat were dining halls, at my alma mater the breaded veal cutlets were
universally described as... skeet (well, because they really closely resembled them in both shape and physical properties), and "shooting skeet" meant flinging them across the dining hall for others to bring down with the odd chunk of jello--a staple on the university menu of the time. You can see why I'm understandably confused by this story.)
I'm not sure I understand the point of the whole "we skeet shoot all the time" statement anyhoo. Isn't that pandering to the fucked up conservatoid notion that you can't have a say in something you don't do? Sorta like "you don't snort coke, so you can't say whether it should be illegal," or "you aren't a serial killer, so you can't comment on dumping mutilated bodies in sand pits."
ReplyDelete"You don't shoot guns, so you can't have an opinion about paranoid fantasists stockpiling weapons and carrying them into public places, including schools, cinemas, and nightclubs, where you children are liable to be shot by either psychos or wannabe psycho-stoppers."
It's absolutely irrelevant whether Obama shoots skeet, or hunts, or sits at home masturbating with a glock in one hand. So, yet again, I'm bumfuzzled as to why he feels obligated to play their game.
I thought it was cargo shorts, cammo wife beaters, and Lynyrd Skynyrd hats...
ReplyDeleteThe funniest part of this is the outrage of his "tucked in" T-shirt. I don't think Doughbob or John Hawkins could tuck in a shirt if they tried.
ReplyDeleteWingnuts scat-shooting about president's skeet shooting.
ReplyDeleteThe fucked up thing is that the proper term for the "target" is "clay pigeon". Originally, live doves were released from traps and shot as they flew away... nowadays, I think only evil Dick Cheney motherfuckers use live birds these days. I used to go trap shooting at least once a year- I'm still not entirely clear on The ifference between trap and skeet shooting.
ReplyDeleteMaybe this is just triangulation, Obama trying to cull the sport shooters from the gun-fetishist herd. Clinton did much the same thing before the 1996 election. Almost all the Clinton team's internal polling then was directed at determining the interests of swing voters, and suburban sport hunters figured prominently in the group, so, bingo, Clinton was suddenly seen being a bird hunter, which was counter-evidence that he was anti-guns because of the assault weapon ban.
ReplyDeleteIf there's a real trend building to limit military weapons and oversized magazines, better to have the hunters think you're not out to get their shotguns and bolt-actions.
this is why I don't go into politics (well, one of the thousands of reasons)--I would suck at it.
ReplyDeleteBob Owens has assembled a select group of highly motivated good old boys to infiltrate the Camp David compound to determine the veracity of Pres. Obama's statement. After driving as close as one could reasonably expect, with one member spiriting a pair of high-powered binoculars into the woods on the pretense of taking a leak, the team has concluded, "There's no way we woulda found any clay shards, even if we had got in there."
ReplyDelete"After driving as close as one could reasonably expect..."
ReplyDeleteSo, they did their "observing" from a Dunkin Donuts shop in Hagerstown...
PILF jeans, amirite? Yowza.
ReplyDeleteHmm, eleven-dimensional chess strikes again? "OMG, if he has a gun, ban them immediately!"
ReplyDeleteWe've gotten to a point when conservatives are writing posts that can be interpreted as pro-Nazi just to spite the Kenyan Usurper...
ReplyDeleteI love you dearly, albeit Platonically, BBBB, but:
(1) we haven't just gotten to that point, as David Neiwert could tell you; and
(2) they've been doing it because they are genuine fascists in the making, not just to spite a Democratic president.
Meanwhile, back at the Owens household, there is a pinging noise, and his new backyard grill topples over. Hundreds of miles away, Barack Obama, smiling slightly, disassembles his rifle.
ReplyDeleteRemind me again: what was "Bush Derangement Syndrome"? I seem to remember the wingers laughing their asses off about that....
ReplyDeleteBeing upset at stuff the President was actually doing.
ReplyDeleteWhat I thought was a real classy touch was Representative Marsha Blackburn, who chose this opportunity to demand that the President grant her the honor of an invitation to his personal vacation home, as a one-on-one social occasion, so that she would have the opportunity to prove him a liar and humiliate him.
ReplyDeleteSeriously, - here's what she said: “I think he should invite me to Camp David, and I’ll go skeet shooting with him.” Blackburn said. “I bet I’ll beat him.”
That's real class. These people are vile.
Starting wars with falsified evidence, corrupting the justice dept., outing a CIA agent, ignoring natural disasters, legalizing torture...
ReplyDeleteWhatever. Liberals are such drama queens.
it seems that the press prefers the manufactured ones.
ReplyDeleteLook, which one is easier to cover? Look at how much time Woodward and Bernstein spent researching Watergate. That shit costs money. Those two probably spent more hours than every single reputable news organization combined spent researching Obama's birth certificate.
REPORTER: "Hello, Hawaii Department of Records? Do you really have Obama's birth certificate?"
DEPARTMENT OF RECORDS: "Yes."
REPORTER: "So he was really born in the USA?"
DEPARTMENT OF RECORDS: "Yes."
REPORTER: "Shit."
Manufactured stories are easy, and they let you get extra mileage out of your gasbag pundits that you're already paying. Best of all, you never take the risk of offending anyone whose opinion you might have to worry about. You know, a major advertiser or someone at your country club.
Why are they so insanely focused on wether or not the president can shoot a gun? What does it matter?
ReplyDeleteSame reason they're bent out of shape over homos getting married and women serving in combat roles: the practical applications of a white penis are less numerous then they imagined.
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, back at the Owens household, there is a pinging noise, and his new backyard grill topples over. Hundreds of miles away, Barack Obama, smiling slightly, disassembles his rifle.doffs his Jedi robe.
ReplyDeleteIs that Parents I'd like to F or Pater's? I'd go for FILF because its funnier.**
ReplyDeletePlus: shout out to John Kerry for announcing that he has "big heels to fill" following HRC.
Its not that they are hiding the belly its that you can't breath in your old skinny jeans after you've had a few kids.
ReplyDeleteI missed the memo about how tucking in your shirt was bad. Did he fail the "roll up your cigs in your t shirt sleeve" thing too?
ReplyDeleteI would like to run through the forest, carrying a pooper scooper, to study this comments droppings--purely for scientific purposes, of course.
ReplyDeleteI love this:
ReplyDelete"New York Times correspondent Jodi Kantor, who has gained perhaps more access than any reporter to the president and his administration, does not mention any instances of skeet shooting in her national bestseller The Obamas," said Eliana Johnson at National Review.
Did she just check the index in the back, or has she produced her own exhaustive concordance, to supplement the extensive marginalia, circled and highlighted passages, and words and phrases so heavily underlined that in some cases the Sharpie bled through the page and made the opposite side illegible? That's more work than the likes of Jonah Goldberg would put into it, but we're obviously well into the lunatic fringe here, the kind that can get obsessed over whether he's really doing regulation skeet shooting but somehow thinks that what he's wearing constitutes "mom jeans" somehow.
But aren't they getting head trauma from all the whiplash caused by first supporting "Democrats are the real socialists just like the Nazis" to "What's so bad about the Nazis anyhow?" I mean, this is taking the enemy of my enemy is my friend to new depths of confusion. I don't even know how they choose a side of the bed to get out of in the morning at the rate they are going.
ReplyDeleteWell, when you've got a hammer, everything looks like a nail...and etc...etc...etc...
ReplyDelete"I keep trying to imagine any president pandering to me the way this one does to rightwing assholes, and I just can't picture it. I mean, what's the equivalent? "
ReplyDeleteMitt Romney in assless chaps at the Folsom Street Fair?
Ouch.
ReplyDeleteBaseball style cap. Because plain English is, as always, a huge no-no.
ReplyDeleteWell, I'm sure my white penis could fire a gun if I ignored all warnings regarding trigger-discipline. But how does women and gay people getting married and or serving do anything to my dick? They could only enhance it.
ReplyDeleteWhat's that? "How can they--time after time--be so petty?" Tut tut. Nothing is petty when you're insane.
ReplyDeleteSame here. I know I'd end up sneering, rolling my eyes and telling people to fuck off too often. And I'm not Dick Cheney, so I couldn't get away with it.
ReplyDeleteDid none of the brethren/sistren point out that the picture proves Obama's extremism? Left-handed, and left-eye dominant.
ReplyDeleteOh, and: It goes w/out saying that, if O really did shoot skeet from Day 1 in office, and there were pix of it, and they were released, the brethren would stampede themselves into a frenzy to denounce the "obvious calculation" of it all. "He 'shoots skeet,' but he doesn't mean it," they would agree.
ReplyDeleteWe HAVE TO laugh at these people. It's either that, or kill them, which I assume is still illegal in many jurisdictions.
I say "DILF."
ReplyDeleteHey, I've had actual sack-surgery. Something called hydro-cele.
ReplyDeleteNo, see, it's actually one of their less inconsistent moves. Nazis = godless left-wing traitorous socialists, just like Democrats, by definition. Ergo, rabid jingoism, demonization of liberals and intellectuals, trumpeting "traditional family values," wearing Gott Mitt Uns belt buckles while repeatedly advocating the refusion of church and state, attacking the very legitimacy of the current government, and threatening violence against their political enemies can't be Nazism. It's just true-blue American patriotism, wrapped in an American flag and carrying a cross. And just like neocons and Stalinism, the reprehensible tyrannical leftism of the Nazis doesn't rule out drawing lessons from their methods.
ReplyDeleteOT, but this is a chance for me to try to get praise for a joke I made last year (elsewhere) that the world has failed to appreciate:
ReplyDeleteThe frenemy of my frenemy is my frenemy.
Bragger.
ReplyDeleteY'know, I'd never thought of it that way, but, damn, yeah, I can see the truth in that. In an odd way, I think it explains seeing the same damned faces on television every damned Sunday morning. They can't seem to get enough of chewing the superficial into unrecognizable gristle.
ReplyDeleteThat's not bragging. It's the horrfied opposite!
ReplyDeleteBear in mind that Eliana Johnson is the NRO scholar who, last week, defended the Nazis--yes, those Nazis--from O's characterization of "senseless" as re the violence they perpetrated. You only scape the bottom of the barrel when there IS a barrel. Absent a barrel, there is no limit to the depths to which you can sink.
ReplyDeleteMy Mom had a "nervous breakdown" in the 60s- one time she became very upset because a dinner partner's chair had on leg a little shorter than the others. "Don't you see what that MEANS?" she asked my Dad "He doesn't have a Leg tot Stand On!" Everything they see has a weird, ominous significance to the Nuts.
ReplyDeleteI believe Dick upgraded to shooting undead lawyers a while back when doves proved too fast for him.
ReplyDeleteSkeet v trap? The key differences are in how fast the targets are launched and in which direction.
Skeet was invented in Murica, though, which is why our Murican preznit does it, though next week he may confess to playing petanque all the time just to drive the wingers mad.
It's pretty clear the photo is a fake. The grass is green, and the sky is probably blue, which is certainly not the case in the rightbloggers' world.
ReplyDelete(VV won't let me comment without registering! I'm not doing that. I know they hand that info over to Obama for his enemies list!)
He shoots skeet, but he doesn't mean it.
ReplyDeleteA perfect encapsulation of their world view. They could (and would) just as easily argue that he is an elitist who enjoys a sport that he would deny to other people. In other words they can't decide whether the part of Obama that is fraudulent is the part they like, or the part they don't like, but whatever--its all a provocation and a trap.
President. President. Sheesh, you people. What's next, not knowing what TANF stands for?
ReplyDeleteIn poking around the internet on just this subject, I'm not sure how much "access" Jodi Kantor actually had. She admitted to CNN's Soledad O'brien that the only time she actually talked to the Obama's was in 2009, for about forty minutes, and she didn't talk to them for the purpose of writing her book. She says she talked to aides and staff, but the subject of the book seems to be primarily the Obama's marriage, with large portions dedicated to how Michelle and the children were adapting to life in the White House. It doesn't look like skeet shooting ever popped up on Kantor's radar screen one way or the other.
ReplyDelete*shudder*
ReplyDeleteI'm so very sorry, KatWillow. That sounds horrifying. Many years ago a good friend's mother had a nervous breakdown and retreated into her house and wouldn't come out for 4 years--that's right FOUR YEARS while her daughter, my friend, gave birth to a child with huge facial deformities and needed her mother's help and emotional support. They didn't actually really notice it was a nervous breakdown because they are *&^% British, I guess? My friend didn't even think to mention it to me until years afterwards when she nonchalantly referred to the fact that she only spoke to her mother on the phone for four years although they were living within minutes of one another.
ReplyDeleteWhen you think how John Kerry was attacked for the liberal effaminacy of the sport of windsurfing you realize that Obama could rappel off a 100 story building with a knife in his teeth, roll to his feet shooting the heart out of Bin Laden and then ride cross country to save your favorite school teacher from a burning building surrounded by terrorists and they would still attack himfor being a "panzy."
ReplyDeleteOh, now you just know the white house is fucking with these guys:
ReplyDeleteResponding to questions about President Obama's experience skeet shooting, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters on Monday that the President's aim has improved, but he's not an expert.
In the "All Cretans are Liars" interpretive sweepstakes which part of the bolded sentence will drive the right wing into a frothing Harcourt Fenton Mudd style breakdown? If Obama is lying--is he lying about not being an expert?
Hell, they attacked Kerry for the liberal effeminacy of going duck hunting in Ohio, the liberal effeminacy of how he held his shotgun while successfully hunting pheasant in Iowa, and for the liberal effeminacy of shooting and being shot at in a SE Asian combat zone. It's almost as if liberalism is intrinsically weak and "effeminate," presumably because of how pro-homosexual the Nazis were when they were handing out all those pink triangles.
ReplyDeleteOh, now you just know the white house is fucking with these guys:
ReplyDeleteHonestly, Plouffe & Co. running with "skeet birthers," aka "skeeters," on Twitter was already something of a tell.
... and then ride cross country to save your favorite school teacher from a
ReplyDeleteburning building surrounded by terrorists and they would still attack
himfor being a "panzy."
Actually, for this last part, they'd attack him for rescuing a school teacher. Who do you think started the fire?
My god, are you saying the crap is in free fall?
ReplyDeleteBut they were right about his ordering green tea off a menu with green tea--that's got to be the height of effeminate elitism.
ReplyDeleteWingers Shoot Load at President.
ReplyDeleteIt's just true-blue American patriotism, wrapped in an American flag and carrying a hakenkreuz
ReplyDeleteFixed.
I think for a lot of 'em it's more "IF I had a hammer, I'd... still be alone with no one to nail".
ReplyDeleteAnd as always, fall far short of the target.
ReplyDeleteI admit, the first thing I thought when I saw the picture was, why isn't he pointing the gun up? Hopefully, as Roy suggests, it's come to the point where Obama is just fucking with them, hoping they continue their deranged nonsense for another week so he can release more photos, this time pointing in the air, different clothes, dates, actually hitting skeet, maybe some kind of awesome tally sheet, besting John Boehner in a match. Given the hand eye coordination he'd demonstrated on the basketball court, wingnut congress folk should probably be careful challenging him to a match. Of course skeet shooting is much less a sport than golf or bowling, though slightly more than checkers or dice. Well, I guess that actually depends on how enthusiastically one throws dice. Point is, if a drunken 600 pound guy can do it, it's not much of a sport.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, back to the question of whether he's fucking with them, I sure hope so. It would not only mean that he's grasped the bread and circuses nature of being a ruler, but that he's brought the circus into a post modern era. Bread, sadly, not so much. Nor free birth control pills for all, or no burdensome tax increases for the middle class, as it turns out.
But cirus-wise, a lot of people win. Wingnuts are constantly fed with ridiculous notions to rave about. Since being spectacularly wrong all the time doesn't bother them, it will never get old. Country club conservatives win because they can continue their spree of mass murder abroad and looting at home without much of anyone paying attention, at least not until the new circus comes to town, which will be in a matter of days, not weeks, you can rest assured. Country club liberals can point and laugh at them dumb conservatards and revel in their own moral and intellectual superiority. They tend to benefit from the status quo as well. Most people who aren't really paying attention, of course, will ultimately suffer, but fuck them, they should pay more attention, or get a better job, or go to a better school, or get born to better parents, or just go away and whine somewhere out of sight, depending on one's politics, eh.
It's not possible for Mitt Romney to do anything assless.
ReplyDeleteThe frenulum of my frenemy is my fiduciary funeral.
ReplyDeleteHe really is an anal guy.
ReplyDeleteNo troupe? But if there isn't one how can you join 'em. But hell, I enjoy no theater. It's classic. .. I may be stuck on a Lou Reed song-titled orbiting wreck,
ReplyDelete"don't really give a shit about war crimes such as torture and drone strikes on weddings"
ReplyDeleteSure they care.
Oh, you mean care ENOUGH to do shit about it?
Nah, not even in a rational country.
I gotta admit, I have not spent much time looking at his backside. He just seems like the kind of guy whose ass is not worth looking for.
ReplyDeleteCountry club liberals can point and laugh at them dumb conservatards and revel in their own moral and intellectual superiority. They tend to benefit from the status quo as well and don't really give a shit about war crimes such as torture and drone strikes on weddings.
ReplyDeleteAs opposed to strenuously opposing them on a comment board, chuck? Well, you just keep on fighting so tirelessly, it's truly an inspiration to the rest of us.
Hey Roy, I guess I never mentioned it, but I took some photos of Obama shooting a rifle when he was much younger, well before he entered politics. I've always hesitated to publish them because it involves vandalizing a Republican campaign sign. But what the hell, no one will see it here.
ReplyDeleteI don't see what you guys are even arguing about. You're both fully shitsheels by making me read this.
ReplyDeleteAfter two edits... I still can't spell shitheels. I blame you for being coprosploding seals.
ReplyDeleteAll chaps (the attire) are assless. That's pretty much the definition. If they had an ass they'd be trousers.
ReplyDeleteI knew some assless chaps in Soho; don't know what nationality they was, though.
ReplyDeleteHey, "But he didn't mean it" is how they got Bush off the hook, so don't underestimate it.
ReplyDeleteYou know, the internet is a magic place: people who have never met each other can talk freely about their ruptured nutsacks. I feel so fulfilled!
ReplyDelete"I feel so fulfilled!".
ReplyDeleteTHAT'S WHY I NEEDED THE OPERATION IN THE FIRST PLACE!
Screw the skeet-shooting, tell us more about these mom-jeans!
ReplyDeleteThe school teacher wouldn't need rescuing, if only they'd be allowed to carry firearms to work, dammit!
ReplyDeleteYour biggest error is in conflating "benefiting from the status quo" with "putting time and/or money into reinforcing the status quo or actively working to tilt the table even more in their own favor," the latter of which liberals in general do not do. Likewise, as has been explained to you ad infinitum by both myself and lo many, many others, there is a vast gulf of difference between "not giving a shit" about torture and drone strikes and recognizing that your choices are one or the other - when confronting a threat with an occupying force, you get torture, because it's war and people are fucked up from the stress and all the shit they've seen, and the probability that at least one of them will flip out and commit a war crime approaches about 100%; with drone strikes you get innocent civilian deaths - though in nowhere near the numbers you get with an occupying force. And on balance, large numbers of liberals prefer the second option to the first while at the same time recognizing that we don't have control of this shit. So it becomes a matter of pretty simple math: fewer civilian deaths is preferable to more civilian deaths. We'd love to see none, but perhaps you can explain to us how we get there. In the meantime, fewer is better than more.
ReplyDeleteWhat bugs me about your continual harping on this theme is this, though: you aren't thick and so you can see the calculation above as easily as anyone else, but you trot it out continually because you're not willing to go all the way and state that your true complaint, which is that we shouldn't be fighting international terrorists overseas. I happen to disagree with you on that point, particularly when they are holed up in countries that can't or won't deal with them. But I'd much prefer you to make your real argument, which is to get out of the business of terrorist hunting or fighting, rather than this constantly recycled bullshit about how drone strikes prove that pretty much everyone is a hypocrite and we're all just pieces of shit.
Chuck fancies himself the above-it-all One True Truth teller and everyone else is in favor of Obamney and are hypocrites because they don't appreciate the obvious Death From Above like he does. While we mope about, comfortably superior, and get all angry at him with hate-rays and differences of opinons.
ReplyDeleteThat's the shorter, if you must know.
It's a good one. But you need to work in a punchline.
ReplyDeleteMitt Romney pandering to me? You mean, committing seppuku by throwing himself under Rafalca in one of his car garages? That kind of pandering? It might have worked to warm me up to him, but it would have been a tad self defeating from an electoral perspective.
ReplyDeleteReally? And here I was, thinking I'd been slipping in my dotage.
ReplyDeleteDo what about it? Rush out and buy an assault rifle to defend yourself from the ebil government?
ReplyDeleteAs long as he doesn't say they're round.
ReplyDeleteOh, now you just know the white house is fucking with these guys:
ReplyDeleteWASHINGTON — The five members of Texas Christian University's national championship rifle team were already beside themselves to be on the South Lawn of the White House Monday evening at a celebration of all NCAA sports champions when President Barack Obama gave them the first shout-out.
...
Obama told the TCU team that he, too, practiced shooting with a rifle.
"He said he practiced with the Secret Service," said Riford, who
graduated from TCU in May and now works in Fort Worth.
McClatchey, 9/13/2010 (h/t brooklynbadboy at Daily Kos)
That time machine is good for a lot more than putting retroactive birth announcements in Hawaiian newspapers.
It's a good one. But you need to work in a punchline.
ReplyDeleteThat's what she said.
Well, something like that. I think it's more important to adhere to principles than to be a team player. For example, all good people were against mass murder of brown people abroad when it was the Cheney's and Rumsfelds justifying it. But now that it's our guys, it's just an unfortunate necessity, not to be spoken of by decent people. Me, I'm opposed to mass murder no matter who does it. So terribly déclassé these days, I know.
ReplyDeleteBut I understand where you're coming from Jay. You live in Dallas, you love the Cowboys and hate the Redskins. You move to a parking lot in suburban Maryland, you love the Redskins and hate the Cowboys. The only principle involved is rooting for the home team. You're just a normal guy. Might as well pop a bud light and enjoy the game. That's probably for the best. Nobody will be burning any crosses on your lawn.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
ReplyDeleteWell, something like that. I think it's more important to adhere to principles than to be a team player.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I mean Jesus, chuck, get off the cross. You have no discerning principle as far as I can tell other than, "I demand that you understand you are a hypocrite" when really I think most everyone here understands the limitation of our "team". I mean seriously, just because you are a special snowflake manage to see through the matrix and understand the fix is in -- between those thieving Polacks you see everywhere and that war criminal in the White House, you and your artist friend are really the last honest people left, obviously -- it's rather shortsighted, or maybe even teeth-achingly obtuse, to assume everyone else is as shallow and unprincipled as you think they are. First, you might consider the context. I know it's really fucking hard. Roy writes things that make fun of an alien world view to ours that seems both paranoid and illogical, yet is made with an honest conviction -- this is funny and more than a little enraging. This is why we come here, to laugh and point and wonder why it is, exactly, that people feel that way. It doesn't mean, not matter how simple and facile an understanding of people you might have (and you have an self-righteous adolescent's view of the world), that we are unable to see the compromised, rotten, Democratic Party or its putative leader as anything other than preferable to the self-parody and real danger posed by the other side. But that's not really what we're joking about here, is it? Hell, when we do talk about policy -- it's something you plainly don't understand, or you question-beg and talk about how you see Polacks gaming the system. That's as stupid as any anecdotal observation about anything that someone tries to pass off as proof. And what's the principle in that anyway? If I believe that moderately progressive taxation, a bare, but essential welfare state and a basic reality-based, secular, worldview is the sole province at this point of a Democratic Party who ALSO have terrible policies regarding war and civil liberties, what's the principle I should espouse? Medicaid and Medicare, so the poor and the old don't die on the street, or being anti-drone? My connection to my "team" is a cafeteria utilitarian one, but it is equally as principled as yours, I'd say, in that principles are really only priorities in real life and priorities shift, depending on the situation.
And, yes, of course, people have affinities. Yours are just as much of a pose as anyone else's. As far as you know, there are people here who put just as much effort in their personal time fighting for the same causes they did when Bush was in the office. But your comfortable assumption is that it's everyone else who is the phony.
Finally, your sports analogy is idiotic. No one does what you describe. It might even be, in fact, a principle of fandom.
I call shenanigans on the photo. A black guy from Chicago would use a glock.
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Oh good, I did think describing them as eels with the shits was a little over the top.
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