THE INAPPROPRIATE LAUGHS KEEP ON COMIN'! Following on the conservative War on Letterman, we have an interesting new angle from the formerly sane Jim Treacher. It seems Letterman made a joke about Palin's visit to Yankee Stadium, where "her daughter was knocked up by Alex Rodriguez." I figure he was talking about Bristol, and so, apparently, did the nice middle-American tourists who gave the joke a big laugh. And so did Jim Treacher. Because that's the only way the joke makes sense.

But then it was revealed to Treacher that Palin was actually accompanied to the Stadium by a different, 14-year-old daughter. Suddenly he was retroactively outraged! "A state governor went to a baseball game with her underage daughter," he bf's (this seems to be the new style with these guys), "and a national talk show host made a joke about the girl being sexually assaulted by one of the players."

And all the other wingnuts pile into the clowncar. Touchingly, Riehl World View shows some awareness that Letterman was talking about what everyone originally thought he was talking about, in which case he merely finds the joke "poorly researched." I don't know how Saturday Night Live has run so long without an army of fact-checkers.

The next move for them will be either 1.) to denounce the audience members who laughed at the joke and demand they mail Palin their apologies, or (more likely) 2.) to find some anonymous correspondent who says he was there and nobody laughed, but NBC added the laughter later as part of a Ra^thergate-style conspiracy.

This would be a good place to add a disclaimer decrying child rape etc., but I'm done engaging the Star Trek chess bullshit maneuvers of these freaks. Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.

UPDATE: OneNewsNow: "So why won't Megan Fox be criticized by the mainstream media? " Because she's hot as fuck, dumbass. Oh, and hey, show this one to Treacher, in case he's looking for a new crusade.

UPDATE 2. Jim Treacher is actually in the comments section, ladies and gentlemen, doing the "audience challenge" bit. Thanks and try the veal!

UPDATE 3. Dan Collins has threatened to tell my editors at the Voice about me. Hopefully he won't come bursting in, clutching a copy of alicublog, during one of the editorial department's child-rape parties -- that would be awkward for us all.

BUSH (AND BUTT) LIES. Another playful little entry at Instapundit about that fabled "Bush hatred":

UPDATE: Jim Treacher demolishes another alleged example of the same phenomenon, in this case an article blaming George Bush for low-hanging pants on women... Note to fashion writers: If you want to see Bush cement his hold on the male vote, just keep "blaming" him for skimpy women's fashions.

Idle curiosity led me to the link to Jim Treacher, whose money quote from the Slate thumbsucker in question is "Our economy is bad; we're entrenched in an occupation abroad; we mistrust our government at home." That article also mentions Chinese foot-binding, meralgia paresthetica, and Natural Born Killers.

All very silly and a typical example of overdetermined culture-watching and the need to fill pages at regular intervals. But who takes this stuff seriously? I sure don't, and I'm willing to believe nearly anything bad about Bush. I doubt even the author gave it much thought. (I hope not, for her sake.)

Treacher, though, goes ballistic: "It's George W. Bush's fault, just like everything else! WMD = Wow, Mamalicious Dimples! I mean, check it out, his name is BUSH. That's why chicks want to walk around with their BUSH sticking out. Get it?"

All told, Treacher's direct mentions of Bush (and bush) outnumber Slate's, five to zero. IP is reacting to Treacher, so by the time this bagatelle gets the major-blogger spotlight, it's perceived as another bleat of Bush hatred from the wimpified masses of liberal sheeple.

The blogosphere increasingly resembles the old gossip game "Telephone." I lament my own part in it, but I can't seem to stop myself either. Maybe it's time, in the words of the late lamented Donald O'Connor, to start suffering and write that symphony. Or, alternately, to stop suffering and write that symphony. Or anything else.

THE NEW BREED.

At Roy Edroso Breaks It Down I just did another one of my This Is Hardcore bits where I scan the emails sent by rightwing propagandists to your senile relatives and pick out some of the weirder bits like “WOKE MOB NOW DIGGING UP CONFEDERATE GRAVES!” for my readers' delectation. (No, I’m not releasing this issue to the public – get a subscription, guys, it’s cheap.)

Here’s one thing that strikes me as I do these things now: the bottom-feeders who run sites like Three Percenter Nation and Steadfast Clash are sort of like the modern equivalent of the fringier rightbloggers I used write about at the Village Voice – people like Bill Quick at Daily Pundit and Ace of Spades HQ, among others. (Those two are still around, by the way, and, as a scan of their sites will show, still absolutely raging lunatics, having updated their shtick with McAfee Did Not Kill Himself/January 6 Was a False Flag stories but having not, apparently, sought competent psychiatric help in the meantime.) 

What put me in mind of that was a 2011 column of mine I revisited, inspired by the ooga-booga around critical rce theory that's currently all the rage. That column was on the perennial rightblogger routine of declaring America's cities hellholes laid waste by crime, even when crime is actually going down, and making a strenuous effort to put a certain complexion on that criminality, if you know what I mean. Excerpt: 

Over the July 4 weekend, some black teens robbed a store and hit some white people in the Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee. The incident has been exhaustively followed up on by the Milwaukee PD, and some parents of the malefactors have even been turning their kids in. Rightbloggers didn’t notice, though, being too focused on the coming anti-white holocaust which, in their view, the crime portended. 

 “It’s really not that difficult to understand that whereas small minorities usually conform, more or less, to the behavioral patterns of the majority that outnumbers them, they cease to do so once they become the numerically dominant population,” gibbered Vox Day. “And to be fair, why on Earth should they? It’s now their territory by ancient right of conquest and modern right of self-determination"...

Coming to Day’s pre-emptive defense was Robert Stacy McCain: “Writing something like that should elicit accusations of ‘raaaaacism’ — from white liberals who wouldn’t dare set foot in Milwaukee after dark,” said McCain, who clearly thinks the post-sundown population of Brew City consists exclusively of black people and gutsy white right-wingers intent on bucking unfortunate stereotypes. (By the way, Milwaukee’s crime rate is also dropping. Soon maybe even liberals will hang out there!) 

At the Daily Caller, Jim Treacher had the brilliant idea of rewriting the story with the racial identities of the perps and victims reversed, then revealing the switch and talking about racism. Really makes you think!

Now that, in the pandemic era, crime has gone up a bit, the rightbloggers' inheritors have picked the routine up again. 

But most of the rightbloggers have scattered to the four winds, blown their brains out, or recalibrated their routines. (I was informed recently that Treacher has a Substack. Those people will take anybody!) But their work is carried on, indeed carried forward, by operatives who are much better funded and publicized. For example:

All four of these examples are worth tracking down, but the OAN guy calling for you and me to be executed for treason is must-see Nazi. 

 In the old days you might get this kind of froth from fringe figures, but now it’s coming from national TV and radio networks, high-profile columnists, presidential candidates and presidents. It’s hard to say that rightbloggers got what they wanted – particularly since the ones who are still at it continue to act the martyr, and probably even believe their act; nothing truly satisfies people like that. (Look at Trump – you think he’s ever actually experienced real contentment? And these guys don’t even have his money!) But they have lived to see their lunacy promoted from their little blogs and shouted into the homes and faces of millions of Americans, some of them dumb enough to buy it. And if the ideas with which they have infected the polity really take hold, it’s only a matter of time before their heirs, the present-day Hardcore subjects – who make the old rightbloggers look like James Madison – get their turn at bat, assuming we even have a civilization left for them to ruin. 

WHEN LAST WE LEFT OUR HEROES...

I'd like to forget about Indiana, but it keeps exponentiating stupidity like some kind of Moron Collider. Some jerks menaced an anti-gay-marriage pizzeria, and the brethren declared this the fault of the reporter who revealed they were anti-gay-marriage. PJ Media's Scott Ott claimed the reporter "fabricated" the story "out of nothing" (that is, she accurately reported what the pizza people said); then people started menacing the reporter.

By the way, does anyone here approve of pizza shops getting death threats? I didn't think so. I suppose if you really did, you'd have adopted the successful gamergate model  and I'd be hearing how the threats were just satire. But the big story in rightwing circles is that you, me and Ted Kennedy have the pizzeria pinned down with Kalashnikovs.

"The left doesn’t care who gets hurt, so long as they get what they want," raved Ott. "Leftists use Gay people as blunt instruments to hammer only Christens," agreed Samuel Gonzalez at Right Wing News. "They don’t have the guts to go after Muslims who literally throw Homosexuals off roofs in the Middle East." (I don't normally bother to say this, but all rightblogger spellings/capitalizations are verbatim.) And of course the Daily Caller's resident drama queen Jim Treacher cranks it to eleven:

The social-justice bullies of the modern left got what they wanted. Gay marriage is legal in Indiana. But that’s not enough. Nothing will ever be enough, because they need to think of themselves as victims.

That last line must be some sort of inside joke.

...Exit question for gay-marriage enthusiasts: If you’re so sure you’re right, if your stance is so strong, why do you feel the need to destroy anybody who so much as dissents from it?

Why do I what? I don't remember calling in a death threat to the pizza parlor -- but Treacher's not talking to me or you, he's declaiming to the galleries as he plays the lead in The Tragedy of the Victims of Big Gay, and hams it way up. That's what all these guys are doing. If they can get enough people to buy their martyr act, they seem to hope, they might get them to think American Christians are actually being ground under the heel of homosexuals. It's win-whine!

UPDATE. Matt Welch of Reason:

The bad news, for those of us on the suddenly victorious side of the gay marriage debate, is that too many people are acting like sore winners, not merely content with the revolutionary step of removing state discrimination against same-sex couples in the legal recognition of marriage, but seeking to use state power to punish anyone who refuses to lend their business services to wedding ceremonies they find objectionable. That's not persuasion, that's force, and force tends to be the anti-persuasion among those who are on the receiving end of it.

Like Title II of the Civil Rights Act. Well, I expect they'll get rid of that soon enough. (Welch quotes Rod Dreher in support of his argument, which is just perfect.)

SHORTER GREG GUTFIELD: I'm working on as many BOOK and TELEVISION and WEB projects as I can schedule before Republicans find an even more self-loathing homosexual.

(This is my first exposure to Gutfield, and a great disappointment. I search in vain for that great contemporary right-wing satirist -- someone like P.J. O'Rourke, only good. Yet their nominees turn out stuff like "Hey!" says some guy I disagree with, "I'm a pretentious ass! Greg Gutfield was right!" Gutfield's a satirist like Mark Steyn is a sage.

Jim Treacher is about their best bet, but he chafes when I call him right-wing, so maybe we should just refer to him as "questioning.")

UPDATE. The selections currently seen at Treacher's site are not his best work, but he writes very funny emails.

UPDATE II. Many of my readers are lazy gits (frequently leaving comments to the effect of, "Jesus Christ, I actually followed the link -- I thought you were full of shit but etc"), so I guess I should reproduce a bit of Gutfield's I Can't Believe It's Not Satire:

Paris' gay Socialist Mayor Bertrand Delanoe, who was stabbed by an immigrant Muslim, is organizing the European contingency which features Limahl, Johnny Hallyday and Ciccolina. Whoopie Goldberg, along with Robin Williams will be hosting the kick off party at the Sheraton Riyadh. There will be refreshments and karaoke, hosted by David Hyde Pierce.

Surely you see the hypocrisy of Delanoe taking his stabbed-up ass to Riyadh where I bet they will stab his ass up!

I have to add a bleg, though. Where do you purchase the publication -- I assume it comes out at regular intervals, possibly daily -- cataloguing the most appropriate names to use when you want to signify "A-list" or, as Gutfield has done, Gay List? Not having had the literary advantage of a job as a gossip columnist, I cannot call these things easily to mind, and I can see where it might come in handy when you're writing "satire."

MAU-MAUING THE FLAK CATCHERS. Somebody is promoting his direct-to-DVD movie via the blogosphere with an anti-Hollywood message, assisted by Michael Totten and other such like. The film's site's call to arms:

…a new band of warriors, better known as bloggers… add strength to the voice of the fans, fighting for more choice for themselves and, in the end, all of us. Now there is more new content, as well as more ways to access it and distribute it. There is no reason why you should depend on a handful of major studios to tell you when, where, and what to watch.

Fight the power, brother! And speaking of power, the guy has superstar Jim Treacher for a blog barker. Here's Treacher pulling the suckers a little closer to the tent:

Then Robert Boyd of the NY Sun wrote to me about Rosie O'Donnell appearing in Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway, after I cleverly compared her to a farm animal. Robert said that it made perfect sense for her to do such a thing, and I was all like: Yeah, but won't she need to trim her beard a bit to play Tevye?

'Cause these anti-authoritarian types, see, they love that sort of stuff.

I have no idea whether this movie, called Blowin' Smoke, is any good, but I have to say I admire the filmmaker's moxie. Show biz is a hard dollar and it seems to me that perspiring artists are well within their rights to use any dodge at their disposal to move product. And from the looks of the comments ("we need to see this gluttonous distribution/production-monopoly rumble and burn. Let's starve the bastards"), the Blogbrothers vs. Hollywood schtick seems to be working, at least among souls who find Rosie the Rugmuncher gags appealing.

'Twas ever thus; a lot of people will buy entertainment products just to show solidarity with some band of outsiders with a grievance against authority figures. Maybe a Blowing Smoke DVD will be the Che Guevara t-shirt of the suburban keyboard commando. And, who knows? This may be the beginning of something even bigger. Blowin' Smoke, the Liberty Film Festival guys, all those Regnery authors, et alia -- maybe these are the faces of the new counterculture! Perhaps, as Lenny Bernstein once feted the Black Panthers, we'll have Jason Apuzzo hosting the Minutemen. Dennis Miller could be their Lenny Bruce, Ann Coulter their Twiggy.

I'd say something about "first time tragedy, second time farce," except it was pretty funny the first time, too.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about rightblogger tsuris over Obama's busy media week, including the Bin Laden ad, the Jimmy Fallon slow jam, and the White House Correspondents Dinner. I left out anything concerning their claims that Obama's dog-eating joke at the nerdprom meant that conservatives scored a great victory, not because they aren't ridiculous, but because I'm just sick to death of Treacher.

DOES ANYONE REMEMBER LAUGHTER? It's comedy gold when someone tells you how she's going to make you laugh at someone who, for ideological purposes, she has decided must be made laughable. Ladies and germs, give it up for "Cynthia Yockey, A Conservative Lesbian":

Obama’s Kryptonite is ridicule. Especially when mixed with shame.

Fortunately, Obama has supplied conservatives with plenty of material. And we’d better get busy with the ridiculing, mocking, derision, scorn, belittling, shaming, parodying, satirizing and lampooning toot sweet like our lives, homes, families, nation and the world depend on it. (Because they do.)

I was waiting thereafter for actual gags -- other, that is, than "Cynthia Yockey, A Conservative Lesbian" (which I take as a gloss on Peter Sellers' "Nancy Lisbon"). But in an Andy Kaufmanesque twist, Yockey instead quotes at length from Eric Hoffer, cleverly evading the overtly funny bits, and then complains about how people have been encouraged to laugh (by ideological means, of course -- is there any other kind?) at the wrong side:

Somehow, thanks to the constant ridicule of the mainstream media, and their shameless falsehoods and bias -- the one that irks me the most is the “Bush-tax-cuts-for-the-rich” chant, when those tax cuts also dropped the tax rate for the poorest taxpayers by 50 percent -- we hit a tipping point where a majority of Americans stopped believing in themselves and America, which left them receptive to Obama and his brand of socialism.

But this is wronglaugh, comrades! Yockey prescribes the proper guffaw-making for true patriots:

Wall-to-wall exposure of Obama to his Kryptonite: we must ridicule, mock, shame, belittle, parody, satirize and lampoon him in every way until he is the global and historic laughingstock that he deserves to be.

If you ain't busting a gut yet, Yockey refers you to yuckster Ed Kaitz of American Thinker:

Kaitz explains that thanks to “selfish elite race hustlers” American blacks have lost their individuality to their racial identity, and along with it, their belief in their ability to succeed as individuals.

Wipe the tears of laughter from your eyes, as Yockey explains the cream of the jest:

One of the most important things to understand about Obama is that he is a sociopath, in the clinical sense. People have caught on to his narcissism, but they do not understand his sociopathy... I think he is destroying America as a capitalistic, meritocratic and democratic republic ON PURPOSE because he loves and craves power (this is his sociopathy) and he is shamed by the achievements of genuinely talented people (this is his narcissism).

With such a fine grasp of politically correct rib-tickling, Yockey is a great candidate for the editorial management of a doctrinaire humor magazine. Fortunately an appropriate model already exists. And some of its jokes perfectly fit her view of the brainwashed masses who will, when confronted by her wit, appreciate the folly of their ways and flock to it.

How Treacher got this gig instead of her I'll never know.

BENEATH THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL, PART 429,467. I know nothing she does should surprise me anymore, but this Pam Geller "exclusive" repeating some comments by the New York mosque's Feisal Abdul Rauf is tendentious beyond belief.

For example, she quotes Rauf on the "genesis of conflict": "If gender is not what distinguishes us we'll look at skin colouring and say: niggers or whities, or whatever, and we create an ethnic conflict..." Here's how Geller interprets it:

Reverend Al Sharpton was unavailable for comment. Too busy endorsing the Islamic supremacist mosque. Rest assured, the tolerant Imam Rauf will not suffer as Dr. Laura did (and she was making a "word" point, Rauf is using it.)

It just goes on like that. Rauf says that when he saw in Fahrenheit 911 an Iraqi woman whose home and family had been destroyed by Coalition bombers, he understood how jihadi terrorists could be recruited, while adding, "it is true that it does not justify the acts of bombing innocent civilians, that does not solve the problem..." Geller's takeaway:

And the Imam is conspiracy theorist - 911 was an inside job:

Even if you're not interested in this conflict, but merely know how to read, you have to be appalled. It actually made me want to believe that she's cynical enough to have thus misread Rauf's statements on purpose, because if she really thinks they mean what she says they mean, I'd be forced to pity her.

UPDATE. If you feel you haven't lost enough respect for humanity yet, go over to the Hit & Run post about Ron Paul's mosque statement, scroll down to the comments and check out the libertarians arguing that liberals are keeping the mosque issue alive as a political ploy. No, serious. Bonus: Cameos by Jim Treacher!

ALWAYS LEAVE 'EM LAUGHING.

"Comedians in Cars Getting Abortions" with Alice Wetterlund and Nato Green is a mildly amusing web video (the bit where a "crisis center" counselor shows Wetterlund a picture of a 10-year-old and says it's "your baby at 536 weeks" is one of the better ones ) which probably renders its greatest sevice to comedy by turning wingnuts into Margaret Dumont. National Review's Ian Tuttle:

It’s extraordinary that this needs to be said, but: Killing a human being isn’t particularly funny. Imagine if the NRA made a sketch called “Comedians in Cars Invoking ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws,” or the Fraternal Order of Police filmed “Cops in Cars Using Lethal Force against Resisting Suspects.”

Hmm, I think I get the analogy he's making: liberals are pro-abortion, while conservatives are in favor of beating and killing black people.

The folks at NARAL probably wouldn’t be amused. And rightly so.

But there’s a particular moral derangement that accompanies abortion. It’s been observed time and again (including by yours truly) that the days of “safe, legal, and rare” are long gone. “Rare” vanished as an aim years ago, and the dancing in the streets that accompanied last month’s Supreme Court decision striking down Texas’s abortion-clinic regulations should mark the official end of “safe” as a goal.

These bitches refuse to feel bad about it! In fact they're dancing! Quick, pass another funerals-for-fetuses law to soothe my rage!

What remains is the hope of a Cecile Richards-designed utopia in which, like Wetterlund’s character in the film, you can order an abortion like a McChicken. (“One abortion, please!”) And, just as important, enjoy it.

This is an apparent reference to the Abortions at Krispy Kreme and Chipotle Act of 2014, muscled through Congress by Hitlery Benghazi.

National Review is so outraged it gave the video two posts! "Comedians in Cars Getting Abortions video is A) not funny and B) based on a lie," claims Tuttle's comrade Alexandra DeSanctis. In fact, she insists, it's easy to get an abortion in America -- well, outside the woo-woo crazy Christianist hellholes, which DeSanctis doesn't mention; she seems to think the joke is about conscience exemptions for doctors, which suggest she didn't watch the video but instead had her preacher read a summary to her. "...procuring abortions anywhere else isn’t good enough for NARAL," she sputters. "Abortion has to be available everywhere." These guys are really working that abortion-everywhere angle; why they aren't adding WHERE MY KIDS CAN SEE IT! I can't guess.

Other wingnuts are catching the fever, some of them trotting out their film criticism chops: "This is a thing that exists. People made it. Watch what they made... They thought this video was funny and informative, apparently," cracks comedy genius Jim Treacher. "It’s terribly unfunny and riddled with misleading statements," tsks Bre Payton at The Federalist -- just like those banana peel gags; banana peels aren't actually that slippery, you know.

Then there are the deep semiotic analysts like Heather Wilhelm at Real Clear Politics. The video has a throwaway where Wetterland, after explaining why she wants an abortion, says "look at that kid" and gestures to some raging child off-screen. “That kid is slapping his dad in the face,” says a horrified Green. Got the bit? OK, attend Wilhelm's exegesis:

Hold your befuddlement, folks: It gets worse. “Also, I mean, look at that kid,” Alice says, gesturing out the window. We hear the sounds of a crying toddler, off camera. This toddler is, at least according to the latest science, a living human being with a heart and a brain and, depending on where you stand, a soul.

“That kid is slapping his dad in the face,” Nato says, in the manner of a man whose own soul has lost its batteries.

“Yeah, we don’t need more of those in the world!” declares Alice. Yeah, girlfriend! We don’t need any more pesky kids! Let’s get rid of them in a vague and unspecified fashion! Oh, but wait a second: My brain just got in the way, because it is larger than that of a stegosaurus. Why are toddlers related to your problem, Alice? You’re not incubating a person, right, so why worry?

Now that's funny! And I haven't even gotten to Wilhelm's extended denunciation of the 536-weeks bit ("For years, large segments of the pro-choice movement vehemently denied abortion involved a human child, or at least avoided that fact. Now, many no longer even try to hide it"). I suggest Greg Gutfeld snap Wilhelm up for "Comedians Raging About Abortion." That ought to give Fox ratings a bump -- at least until 2018, when the last of its viewership dies off. But I'll still be watching, because YouTube jokes come and go, but agitated wingnuts are a joy forever.

BLESSED RELIEF. It seems everywhere I look on the internet today, I find new nadirs of imbecility. To dispel the sensation of choking on my own bile, I refocused on something perceptive, well-written, and beyond politics: Terry Teachout on the Venn diagram of being a musician and being a writer. On a more childish level, this guy is hilarious (hat tip to Treacher, of all people). Give either a look if you too could use a break from the numbing fusillades.

If not, come back later and I'll be swearing at retards again.