Thursday, August 21, 2014

HOW THE SHITTY HAVE FALLEN.

Since George F. Will got a gig as a Fox correspondent, his standards (such as they are) have certainly dropped:
In physics, a unified field theory is an attempt to explain with a single hypothesis the behavior of several fields. Its political corollary is the Cupcake Postulate, which explains everything, from Missouri to Iraq, concerning Americans’ comprehensive withdrawal of confidence from government at all levels and all areas of activity. 
Washington’s response to the menace of school bake sales illustrates progressivism’s ratchet..
[Blah blah food police Moochelle broccoli argh blargh]
What has this to do with police, from Ferguson, Mo., to your home town, toting marksman rifles, fighting knives, grenade launchers and other combat gear? Swollen government has a shriveled brain: By printing and borrowing money, government avoids thinking about its proper scope and actual competence. So it smears mine-resistant armored vehicles and other military marvels across 435 congressional districts because it can.
So, the explanation is: The connection between these two things is that they are stupid, and so is Big Gummint.
Contempt for government cannot be hermetically sealed; it seeps into everything. Which is why cupcake regulations have foreign policy consequences.
"Cupcake regulations have foreign policy consequences." Maybe he's just going senile?

114 comments:

  1. mgmonklewis12:50 PM

    I inadvertently read "postulate" as "pustulate" because I was reading George Effing Will.

    ReplyDelete
  2. redoubtagain12:50 PM

    OK, George, for the last time:
    Big Government buys the military hardware, and is the reason you live in D.C.
    Bigoted Government rolls out Panzer battalions against unarmed Black protesters.
    Got that?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Contempt for government cannot be hermetically sealed; it seeps into everything. Which is why cupcake regulations have foreign policy consequences.

    Contempt for government can be laid squarely at the feet of conservatives, as can the MIC-approved militarization of the police.

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  4. mgmonklewis12:52 PM

    George Will introduces a prim, unfunny term ("Cupcake Postulate") that would make even Victorian spinsters roll their eyes, yet he apparently can't remember to continue capitalizing it because he is the only person in the world who understands this insipid new term of art.


    His substance was always stupid and awful, but now he's even failing at Strunk & White level stuff.

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  5. "Cupcake regulations have foreign policy consequences." Maybe he's just going senile?

    The regulations state that the cupcakes must be halal.

    ReplyDelete
  6. mgmonklewis12:54 PM

    cupcake regulations

    Is this about selling baked goods to Teh Gayz again?

    ReplyDelete
  7. redoubtagain1:05 PM

    This is what happens when you substitute Black and White for Strunk and White.

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  8. Derelict1:11 PM

    If you squint hard enough after being hit in the head repeatedly by a large blunt object, Will's column makes a certain amount of sense. But, as my pre-conditions show, you have to be senseless for it to make sense.

    But, then, it's just one more "Ha-ha-ha! Isn't government teh suxxor! All you voters should be hating on government!" piece.

    And now that they're dragging it down to the local level of government sux, what's going to be left? Either Will and the GOP are complete anarchists, or we're going to be reduced to an extremely warped form of warlordism--in which case, why can't we just ship Will and his fellow travelers to Somalia and let them rule in Hell?

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  9. The pink police are conducting frosting inspections.

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  10. Derelict1:12 PM

    Hey! That's a smear!

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  11. tinheart1:17 PM

    Newt Gingrich is a dumb person's idea of a smart guy.

    George Will is a smart guy who - in his Fox gig - acts like a dumb person's idea of a smart guy. So he's smart, but pretending to be dumb, but pretending to be smart.

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  12. Dr. Hunky Jimpjorps1:26 PM

    What a mess of an article. George Will must've heard about that whole libertarian moment, and decided to smear it into incomprehensibility by bringing up NASA, school zero-tolerance policies, border policy, a Bidenism and the Federalist papers. This reads like a factloaf casserole.

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  13. Relativicus1:26 PM

    So, "bake cupcakes over there so we don't have to bake them at home?"

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  14. +1 factloaf, and i helped

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  15. Dr. Hunky Jimpjorps1:32 PM

    It's some kind of libertarian-Manichaeism: all good things that state/local government does comes from pure, honorable values, while all bad things they do were a product of evil Obama-Reidism.

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  16. Prune Danish Postulate1:35 PM

    Please forgive George Will. He hasn't taken a crap in 17 years.

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  17. bekabot1:39 PM

    "By printing and borrowing money, government avoids thinking about its proper scope and actual competence. So it smears mine-resistant armored vehicles and other military marvels across 435 congressional districts because it can."



    There is no such thing as a free tank.

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  18. BigHank531:39 PM

    Well, no wonder it was such a mess. Do you have any idea how hard it must be to smuggle actual facts into Fox News HQ?

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  19. carolannie1:40 PM

    What is most interesting is that Conservatives wanted the police armed up the teeth and leaped for joy with the idea of providing the LOCAL and STATE police surplus weapons, because LOCAL AND STATE gummint is not BIG BAD FED gommint. So the locals are blessed saints of the Constitution and the Feds are the jackbooted thugs who are running all over states' rights and this is why the local cops had to roll out the armored vehicles and tanks. Wait....hmmmm

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  20. bekabot1:40 PM

    We know that he knows that we know that he knows that we know that he knows he's smart.

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  21. Gromet2:05 PM

    But, but isn't a tenet of conservatism that small, local governments have all kinds of agency because they're run by Andy Griffith, who is smart enough to Just Say No? Government can't "smear" military gear across 435 congressional districts without willing smearees, George Will.

    I used to read Will every week, in the paper paper. He seemed pretty smart to a suburban kid, 25 years ago. But for at least a decade he's often just phoning in pastiches "in the tone of George Will." So much so that I wonder if the things aren't written by a squad of interns now.

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  22. Gromet2:06 PM

    Sharia cupcakes! The stupid assholes were right!

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  23. Gromet2:09 PM

    At least these Cupcake Regulations have put us on the road to fascism. Can you imagine if we did what France did and instituted Croissant Regulations? The road to socialism is so much worse!

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  24. drkrick2:17 PM

    Then what do you call all those columns?

    He's been a known dishonest hack since at least 1980 when he was part of Reagan's debate prep team while posing as a disinterested observer on coverage of the event. This seems to be up to his usual quality of work.

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  25. So that's what the hand of the market looks like when it's not invisible.

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  26. Jay B.2:32 PM

    From the Twinkie Defense to the Cupcake Postulate, the U.S. has always had a sweet tooth for killing people.

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  27. Did Will ever find the time to make these connections during the last administration's end-to-end policy disasters? Which were, I probably don't need to add, usually self-inflicted and of much graver consequence than the crises presently dogging the current administration.

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  28. Christopher Hazell2:53 PM

    Didn't George Will used to have, like, a pretense to dignity or something?



    What always drives me nuts about these articles is that what the government is regulating, in the case of school bake sales, is the spending of government money. I'm sorry, but schools are going to have to make decisions about what foods they buy and what foods they don't. You might argue that those decisions should be made on a more local level, but you can't argue they shouldn't be made at all.


    Also, isn't this pretty much the opposite of the Ferguson situation? There, the police have been buying whatever the fuck they want with little attention paid to how useful or proportionate the equipment is; in the school bake sale case, the government is working hard to ensure that schools spend money only on carefully prescribed programs that have an explicitly designed purpose.

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  29. Provider_UNE3:01 PM

    Are you siggesting that a clue-iville slugger should accompany every Will column.
    ...

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  30. Haha. I just read that G.F. Twill piece, and was about to mention it on your last post. It's the pinnacle of G.F. Twilling.
    ~

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  31. Will was always a dishonest hack and a prig.
    ~

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  32. fraser3:14 PM

    And say what you will about German desserts, at least they have an ethos.

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  33. Christopher Hazell3:16 PM

    "Will was always a dishonest hack and a prig."



    Yeah, that's why I said "pretense". But I feel like he used to have David Brooksian sense of dignity, and lately he's become much more Ann Coulterish.

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  34. dmsilev3:27 PM

    "In physics, a unified field theory is an attempt to explain with a single hypothesis the behavior of several fields."


    I suppose it's not surprising that Will is as pig-ignorant about physics as he is about just about everything else.

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  35. synykyl3:36 PM

    You nailed that. Everything about George F. Will, from the expression on his face to his priggish prose, suggests someone who desperately needs more fiber in their diet.

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  36. mortimer20003:47 PM

    Think our foreign policy is a mess now because of cupcake regulations? Wait till Obama's secret Executive Order to regulate the flapping of butterfly wings goes into effect. It'll be chaos, I tell ya, chaos!

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  37. tigrismus4:11 PM

    Washington’s response to the menace of school bake sales illustrates progressivism’s ratchet: The federal government subsidizes school lunches, so it must control the lunches’ contents, which validates regulation of what it calls “competitive foods,” such as vending machine snacks.

    So now it's bad to control what people eat if they're receiving government benefits?

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  38. TGuerrant4:22 PM

    The federal government is the Union government.

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  39. TGuerrant4:28 PM

    Yes. It's like he fears he's being ignored. I say we get him into a short skirt and make him dye his hair blond.

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  40. TGuerrant4:33 PM

    And the smearing is done to keep the manufacturers of military gear satisfied with their share of the U.S. Treasury. Let's let the boardrooms of America know that Mr. Will has become an anti-capitalist.

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  41. redoubtagain4:36 PM

    Time for a Greatest Hits of the Civil War comeback, then:
    "We are coming, Father Abraham, 100,000 strong
    Shouting the Battle Cry Of Freedom"

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  42. Stop spreading lies.

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  43. dmsilev4:48 PM

    Clue-by-fours might be more effective.

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  44. I say we get him into a short skirt and make him dye his hair blond.


    Yeah, thanks for that. No really.

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  45. So now it's bad to control what people eat if they're receiving government benefits?


    Please try and keep up dear.

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  46. Lockwood4:53 PM

    My tweeted response to this column was "George Will has his head so far up his ass, if you look close you can see his eyes peering out when he opens his mouth."

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  47. dstatton4:59 PM

    "Cupcake regulations have foreign policy consequences." Maybe he's just going senile?

    He just doesn't care anymore, because he doesn't have to, working for Fox.

    ReplyDelete
  48. tigrismus4:59 PM

    We've always been at war with eats, eh? Shya.

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  49. Galt's Gulp5:01 PM

    "Then what do you call all those columns?"


    regurgitated republican ejaculate

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  50. mortimer20005:02 PM

    It's bad to control what people eat if they are getting school lunches. It's not bad to control what people eat if they are getting food stamps, because they might use them for lottery tickets, Colt .45 and fast food. It's also good for the government to force them to take drug tests and loyalty oaths. Of course, there should be no subsidized school lunches or food stamps at all, because we're in a libertarian moment, which is kind of like a black hole of gravity that sucks even more than usual.

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  51. Adrian5:21 PM

    "Cupcake regulations have foreign policy consequences."

    ~George Wills, August 20, 2014


    This quote should be on Wills' Wikipedia page.

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  52. Halloween_Jack5:25 PM

    "Contempt for government cannot be hermetically sealed; it seeps into everything . "


    You don't say, George.

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  53. bekabot5:26 PM

    The hand of the market stole all your spoons.

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  54. David Rickard5:33 PM

    Maybe he's just going senile?
    Nah, this is just intellectual whoring; Will wants to stay on the wingnut welfare gravy train, and this is his stab at keeping up with the sloppy thinking and buzzword-stuffing of the Coulter/Breibrat milieu.

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  55. sharculese5:41 PM

    Remember that extended temper tantrum about how if your employer pays for your healthcare they get to say what it includes? George Will does not.

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  56. ken_lov5:43 PM

    Well yes, if you look at small government states like Somalia or The Philippines, they have outstandingly successful foreign policies. QED.

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  57. sharculese5:43 PM

    I've quoted this here before, but as always, I will defer to Taibbi, who nailed Will to the wall with a thoroughness that should not be possible:

    "Will uses big words and pompous literary references to dress up whatare basically the brutish and vulgar thinking patterns of a non-union meat-packing plant owner.


    He is a pig in a lace hat."



    Ten years later and that's still all that needs to be said about him.

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  58. Harry Rumbold5:48 PM

    "Ich bin ein jelly donut."

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  59. PulletSurprise6:07 PM

    Goes perfectly with word salad.

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  60. Jaime Oria6:48 PM

    "Cupcake regulations have foreign policy consequences."



    It reminds me of those synctactically correct but meaning free sentences Noam Chomsky would use to illustrate his linguistic theories.

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  61. ohsopolite6:53 PM

    The pinky is the moocher of the finger community. Hence, in this libertarian/conservative rendering, it has been eliminated.

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  62. tigrismus6:59 PM

    This could conceivably have meaning, though, if the torte tariffs and doughnut duties included cupcakes.

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  63. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person7:16 PM

    Shouldn't be too awful long before some local not-as-dim-as-the-rest-of-the-wits figures out that a Parent-Teacher or other non-school-district-affiliated neighborhood group could hold all the bake sales they wanted to and donate the proceeds to the school/district.
    Also too, this kind of thing just convinces gLibs--as if they need it--that they were right about the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad Feds all along. F Paul Wilson's Lippidleggin' will soon be--if it isn't already--looked at as a "pre-documantary"...

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  64. davdoodles7:41 PM

    To recap, this man just got paid to write the following utter, mangled-metaphorical gibberish:
    1. The "political corollary" of "unified field theory" is "the cupcake postulate".
    2. The cupcake postulate, in turn, explains "everything" about George Fwill's countrymen's "comprehensive withdrawal of confidence from government".

    3. "Washington’s response to the menace of school bake sales", meanwhile, "illustrates progressivism’s ratchet".

    4. Progressivism's ratchet, in turn, "smears" mine-resistant armored vehicles into congressional districts.
    Paid, money, to write this. Un-fucking-believable.
    .

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  65. davdoodles7:45 PM

    He blinded me with SCIENCE!
    .

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  66. vista8:10 PM

    It should be on his headstone.

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  67. Fats Durston9:19 PM

    We can definitely count out Will's column for Schroedinger's Catbox, because there's always going to be a turd in there when you look.

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  68. Tehanu10:34 PM

    Yechhhh. Not enough brain bleach in the entire world to get that image out of my head.

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  69. cleter10:41 PM

    The Cupcake Postulate sounds like some shitty late-stage Larry Niven-Jerry Pournelle right-wing space-wankery.

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  70. mgmonklewis10:49 PM

    Good heavens, Great Aunt Victoria — you're beautiful!

    Or incomprehensible. Your choice.

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  71. mgmonklewis10:50 PM

    Right under "We are richer for having lost him."

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  72. mgmonklewis10:53 PM

    Don't get me started on the Kolachi Embargo or L'Affaire Kringla.

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  73. whetstone11:04 PM

    Ssh. No one tell George F. Will that the real reason big-gummit liberals are giving DoD weapon welfare to every butthole exurb that wants it is that we're secretly hoping they'll go to war. It's all part of Agenda 21.

    "No, we're done in Iraq. Run along now and invade Steve King's district if you're bored."

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  74. AGoodQuestion11:11 PM

    Maybe he's just going senile?
    It was perhaps inevitable that George F Will's libertarian moment would also be a senior moment.

    ReplyDelete
  75. And his groupies can visit his grave once a year on his birthday and recite all his incoherent phrases.

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  76. LookWhosInTheFreezer11:15 PM

    Must be a Big Pork guy, cause don't get him started on the sin of T-bone steaks.

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  77. AGoodQuestion11:21 PM

    If this school is so broke that they have to rattle the beggar's cup in order to pay for necessities, that's the story.
    I wonder why that's not the story that the man who used to coach President Ketchup-is-a-Vegetable wants to tell. Must have slipped his mind.

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  78. AGoodQuestion11:23 PM

    I'm trying to think if a four-fingered cartoon character has ever been drawn flipping the bird. Must have been at some point. Anyway, that's the hand of the market.

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  79. AGoodQuestion11:26 PM

    By printing money, the government is fulfilling the basic purpose of its job. Fox News obviously won't have that. Their aversion to borrowing money is something of a surprise, though. Very much a recent development.

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  80. AGoodQuestion11:37 PM

    Also, even in the Wall Street Journal article, it was fairly clear that the federal law was in essence a suggested guideline. States have the option of doing what they want. As it happens a lot of states are shrugging their shoulders and going along, including some red states. Will has a vocabulary, but it hasn't been very good at depicting reality lately.

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  81. billcinsd11:47 PM

    why do you give such short shrift to Pelosi-ism?

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  82. M. Krebs12:07 AM

    There's a reason why he's known as a dyspeptic Tory.

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  83. M. Krebs12:09 AM

    I say we cut Coulter's hair and dress her in a shitty suit and a bow-tie.

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  84. PersonaAuGratin12:38 AM

    A Monsanto GMO experiment gone awry.

    Or maybe, as planned.

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  85. PersonaAuGratin12:40 AM

    Fight back by shaping the cupcakes in the form of a crescent.

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  86. George is just trying to keep up with Maureen Dowd on Robin Williams:

    So when I think of Williams, I think of Kelly. And when I think of Kelly, I think of Hillary,
    because Michael was the first American reporter to die in the Iraq
    invasion, and Hillary Clinton was one of the 29 Democratic senators who
    voted to authorize that baloney war.




    "So this incident in today's news reminds me of X, which reminds me of Y, which brings us back to my pet theory Z..."

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  87. Socialist Cubone3:39 AM

    Didn't Dowd also support that war? Is she trying to gaslight America?

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  88. BadExampleMan3:54 AM

    The Cupcake Prostitute, on the other hand, sounds like...like...um...sorry, where was I?

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  89. Derelict6:48 AM

    And here I always associated George F. Will with Shrunken White.

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  90. Derelict6:54 AM

    Yes, money is another function that should devolve to the states. Put us all back on the gold standard and let every state issue specie according to its own reserves.

    Just think how prosperous we'd all be if could cut the size of our economy by, say, 85% or so. And driving from New York to Florida would require a stop at every state line for customs inspection and currency exchange. Ah! The freedom!

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  91. Derelict7:24 AM

    Will has a vocabulary, but it hasn't been very good at depicting reality lately

    Maybe because Will doesn't have much contact with reality?

    Look, the federal government does not regulate school bake sales. There are no regulations stating the cupcakes being sold to support the girl's fieldhockey team have to contain certain ingredient; there are no federal officials stopping by with scales to weigh the cupcakes.

    There ARE guidelines in place about what the school lunch program serves to the children. And those guidelines don't regulate the damn cupcakes, either.

    So Will obviously got his Cupcake Postulate while lunching with Prof, Otto Yerass at the Applebee's salad bar.

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  92. FlipYrWhig8:25 AM

    Fondant, fundament, some assembly required.

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  93. And postulated cupcakes for dessert!

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  94. I'm starting to think that they're all using Jonah's interns. Or they're close to perfecting a wingnuttian computer program that produces articles in perfect Winglish.

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  95. Upvoted because the handle combined with the comment is perfectly nast.

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  96. Helmut Monotreme10:55 AM

    Or, an obsessive hatred of government regulation makes it impossible to see any kind of nuance, and sees even the requirement that school food be healthy as one more outrage imposed by an illegitimate totalitarian regime.

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  97. XeckyGilchrist10:56 AM

    The closest I can think of is the Simpsons characters at the Spinal Tap concert throwing the goat, which is kind of an inverse flipping the bird.

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  98. In the end Mr. Will asks us to consider what would happen if we left the
    cupcake out in the rain and I don't think that I can take it cause it took so
    long to bake it and I'll never have that recipe again.

    ReplyDelete
  99. bekabot1:23 PM

    Yes, exactly. Mr. Pinkie's only useful to people who have to count on their fingers, and we know what we think of them.

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  100. bekabot1:32 PM

    But, dude, you're only thinking of freedom in terms of freedom from annoyance. How unenterprising, how dull. (Were we set down on earth just to have an easy time? I ask.) Mr. Will and his cohorts think of freedom as the freedom to do great things, like fast-talk or sweet-talk every roadside cop from here to Hoboken, and the proof that they think better of you than you think of yourself is that they're confident that you could meet that challenge if only you had to. Now, honestly, do you have that much faith in yourself? No? Then it would be best to leave things in the hands of those who share the commanding vision of Mr. Will and who are determined to put some grit into you. (Or shovel some over you; it works out the same either way in the end, doesn't it.)

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  101. bekabot1:34 PM

    It's consistent: they averse to borrowing money which isn't going to be spent on them (or on their backers).

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  102. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person4:28 PM

    R A Lafferty?

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  103. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person4:35 PM

    I say we do both and have 'em gay-married...

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  104. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person4:50 PM

    Ich bin der Chrom Essecke
    Ich bin der melamin-tasse
    Ich bin der milch

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  105. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person4:52 PM

    <Ray White>
    I can smell it now!
    </Ray White>

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  106. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person4:55 PM

    No shit. Somebody--535 somebodies, in fact, as likely to be Conservatives as anything else, became convinced the Pentagon needed all those MRAPs and bales of camo-wear, and signed the checks for all of it.

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  107. freq flag11:13 PM

    He's merely responding to Market forces...
    The Market, I say. Now, good day to you, sir!

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  108. In physics, a unified field theory is an attempt to explain with a single hypothesis the behavior of several fields.

    No. It is an attempt to describe several phenomena though a single field. Please don't pretend to be a physicist, Mr. Will. Or a journalist, for that matter.

    Its political corollary is the Cupcake Postulate, which explains everything, from Missouri to Iraq, concerning Americans’ comprehensive withdrawal of confidence from government at all levels and all areas of activity....

    Say wha?!?!? This makes even less sense. In the words of the physicist Wolfgang Pauil (a real one), it is not even wrong". It is gibberish.

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  109. Hemidemisemiquaver11:09 PM

    Maybe not the Cupcake Postulate, but that is some serious head-ass duality.

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  110. Mooser12:19 PM

    "Maybe he's just going senile?"


    Just going? George Will had senility before he even got puberty.

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  111. ChrisV821:41 PM

    What a gosh darn shame that big government is forcing small, local governments to take all these goodies!

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  112. Bitter Scribe4:01 PM

    Hey fuckface, if you want to talk about "contempt for government," try talking about the contempt that George W. Idiot and his sidekick/handler Snarlpuss engendered both at home and abroad while you sat on your hands.

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  113. brettvk12:58 PM

    I don't think that stuff on his head is actually hair. Dynel, maybe.

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  114. bekabot1:43 PM

    With the emphasis on the "Laff" part.

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