Pity the Poor Millionaire

The Medfly: All hail our glorious corporate masters, who have ever done naught but shower us with the eternal blessings of heaven! If they have a failing, it is that they are simply too kind and decent for this wicked, wicked world.

If I was Michael Medved, I'm not sure if I would cite their manufacture of electronics that allow my columns to be widely read as one of the good things about corporations.

Life's little ironies, part XXVIII

The Man from Fuddles:

I walked into the mall, produced the Flip Video camera, and was soon welcomed to the modern world by a nice security officer. He directed me to the office, where I was assigned a minder. This was a buzzkill, as you can imagine, so I wasn’t able to shoot as much as I wanted – didn’t want to drag her all over the place, and there’s always that why are you taking a picture of that? Vibe I get all. The. Time. I hate that.

Gee, Jimmy. Just imagine if you were Arab.

Oh, John, let's just love each other

Someone at Butt Propulsion Laboratories never found out what "You don't want to know" means:

But it does prompt this thought: isn't it a bad thing for a political movement if its core members are, in large part, stark, raving mad? Wouldn't you expect people to notice, and react adversely? And if so, will this start to happen some time soon?

If y'all will excuse me, I'm off to submit this to the Encyclopedia of Platonic Ideals for use in their "Asking a question to which you might not like the answer" entry.

Hits from the Wrong

1. Map presented that would look rather different if it went back oh, say, 150 years.

2. Privileged young woman criticizes political leader for getting expensive haircut while getting expensive haircut, pretends to read book.

3. Hugh Hewitt features image of man who couldn't be bothered to serve in US military Photoshopped into group shot with man who did serve and got shit on for it.

Plessy vs. Kissmyass

The Bush Supreme Court's exciting new plan to end racial discrimination by allowing racial discrimination is just the beginning! Yes, with Brown v. Board of Education all but overturned, Alito and company will now turn their attention to other little mistakes that have slipped past the Constitutional gatekeepers due to activist judges of long ago. Here's what else we can look forward to!

Loving v. Virginia overturned: Court rules that anti-miscegenation statutes are no longer unconstitutional provided that at least a dozen neighbors testify that the couple is "tacky".

Gates v. Collier overturned: Reinstates racial segregation in prison, citing precedent of McDougal v. Weight Machines. Rules that black prisoners are violating the equal protection act by being stronger than Latino prisoners.

United States v. Virginia overturned: Court finds that "separate but equal" facilities are still unconstitutional, but "equal but separate" ones are okay.

Lawrence v. Texas overturned: Citation of Fourteenth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable invasion of privacy to eliminate laws against consensual homosexuality is struck down when Justice Scalia, in the majority opinion, writes "I never heard of any Fourteenth Amendment."

Roe v. Wade overturned: most restrictions on first-trimester abortions are still ruled unconstitutional, but a major exception is introduced, outlawing abortions where the woman in question is pregnant.

Washington v. Glucksberg upheld: Court rules that not only are laws against assisted suicide constitutional, they are "super-duper-constitutional" (Justice Roberts). Justice Alito declares that there is no Constitutional right to die, but there is an obligation to die.

Katzenbach v. McClung overturned: Court reasserts primacy of states' rights against the Civil Rights Act, ruling that interstate commerce regulation does not take precedent over the right of businesses to discriminate so long as the businesses are located in a state.

Miranda v. Arizona modified: Criminal suspects must still be advised of their rights, but those rights need not be communicated in spoken English. They may, for example, be explained to the suspect via written Sanskrit, interpretive dance, or telepathy.

Furman v. Georgia altered: Court seeks retroactive execution of all criminals given sentences of 20 years or more from 1967-1976.

Boy Scouts of America v. Dale expanded: Where previous ruling allowed that private organizations' right of expressive association allows them to expel members based on their sexual orientation, new language replaces "private organizations" with "everybody", "expel" with "stab in the neck", "members" with "fellow citizens", and "sexual orientation" with "swarthiness".

More Like Health UNfair!

The Human Steyn has been posting a lot at the Corner, I guess to prove that he can say asinine things in whatever venue he finds himself. Here's his latest.

So let me just say that I think socialized health care is the single biggest factor in transforming the relationship of the individual to the state. In fact, once it's introduced it becomes very hard to have genuinely conservative government - certainly, not genuinely small government.

Lousy lunchpail-toting Johnny Wannalives. Back when the working classes had the good taste to contract dreadful diseases and perish quietly after churning out the next generation of lawn-tenders, people like me could have the non-tax-invasive governments we deserve! But ever since they caught this survival bug, they've added "basic medical care" to their list of absurd demands along with "safe workplaces" and "not being beaten with horsewhips". Bah!

In a public health care system, the doctors, nurses, janitors and administrators all need to be paid every Friday so the only point at which costs can be controlled is through the patient, by restricting access.

As opposed to in a private system, where everyone will work for free. You may think that this is the most incomprehensible thing that Steyn has to say in this post, but read on!

On the former point, the unloveliness of any British city after six in the evening - the dolly birds staggering around paralytic, the pools of "pavement pizza", the baying yobboes gagging for a shag and hurling bollards through the bus shelters to impress the crumpet - is a natural consequence of what happens when the state relieves the citizen of primal responsibilities.

Yes, before socialized medicine, there were to be found nowhere in England drunken women, vomit, loudmouthed young men on the prowl, or ruffians of any sort. In the days when you had to provide for your own health care -- say, the Victorian era -- you could travel from Penwith to Peterhead and never see such a sight. O, my England! That your pristine gentlemanly nature has been corrupted by kindness!

YOU'RE Not Real, Man!

Remember how they used to say that President Reagan had a problem telling reality from fantasy?

Well...

The conservative jurist stuck up for Agent Bauer, arguing that fictional or not, federal agents require latitude in times of great crisis. "Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. ... He saved hundreds of thousands of lives," Judge Scalia said.

Yeah. See, though, that didn't happen. That was a television show.

"Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?" Judge Scalia challenged his fellow judges. "Say that criminal law is against him? 'You have the right to a jury trial?' Is any jury going to convict Jack Bauer? I don't think so.

Well, he's got a point there. No jury in this country, or any other country, is ever going to convict Jack Bauer of anything. This was proven in State of Illinois vs. Little Bo Peep, 1957.

Scalia went on to say that, while he is in favor of allowing torture in order that Jack Bauer can continue to fight terrorism, he is against repealing existing anti-vigilante legislation no matter how much it would help Batman. He says he is undecided as to whether to allow Article 2 of the Constitution to be altered so that Pepe LePew could run for President.

Tom Hanks' Neo-Zhdanovite Adventure

St. Paul at Fraters Libertas (one of the Northern Alliance muftis) brings us an exciting list of people we are no longer allowed to like because they had the temerity to donate money to Al Franken's campaign. Note especially the Alvin-Peplerish e-mail exchange at the end of the post, which manages to accomplish the unthinkable: it makes me feel sorry for Ben Stein.

Also, I cannot spell "atheist"

The D'Souzaphone: In my next book, I totally demolish atheist arguments using super cool Jesus logic that no one before me has ever thought of and which surely cannot be refuted by a dull-witted college sophomore.

Help a blogger out

I want to go to CPAC next year. I want to say something to Michelle Malkin that will make her tongue swell up. I want to get bets going on when Ann Coulter will say "faggot". I want to hear Fred Dalton Thompson talk about how he will personally execute Muslim extremists. I want to listen to a live Musclehead Revolution podcast. I want to describe to Ben Shapiro what sex is like. I basically want to liveblog the whole thing, and get drunk and rowdy with dumb-ass right-wing talking heads. And I want to do it on your dime.

Details of the exciting "SEND LEONARD TO CPAC 2007" project can be found here, and information about the exciting special premiums you will receive with your donation can be found here. If you just want to donate, click on the PayPal link below. We're already well on our way to meeting our goal of letting me mooch off you for a free hotel! GIVE GENEROUSLY! You won't regret it! Or, at least, I won't!

If the man in the moon were a Muslim-hatin' goon

Mark Steyn: I miss the old days, when immigrants were so eager to assimilate that they wrote really racist songs.

And let me tell you how ELSE you screwed up!

Oh, boy, this is going to be good! Big Boy Jammies is sponsoring a conference on the collapse of Europe. I can't wait to hear about how the dark people have ruined everything, and with seminar titles like "Are Muslims exploiting the democratic process to erode and destroy European democracy?" and "To what extent have Europeans Given Up on Their Own Civilization?", I'm sure I won't have to.

The conference, which is being held in Malibu, CA instead of Europe (presumably because Europe is already too collapsed), promises to be chock full of the sort of awesome intellectual rigor we have come to expect from Big Boy Jammies. Best of all, of the 28 featured speakers, a whopping 7 of them are actually from Europe! Wow, that's some super credibility! I'm sure that if liberals held a conference on the decline of America, and it was held on the French Riviera, and only a quarter of the speakers were Americans, Pajamas Media would cover it glowingly, but for now, I'll see you in Malibu!

Wise Words From Knox Pooley

Fred Dalton Thompson: "What do you think America would do if Canadian soldiers were firing dozens of missiles every day into Buffalo, N.Y.? What do you think our response would be if Mexican troops for two years had launched daily rocket attacks on San Diego -- and bragged about it?"

Gee, Fred, I don't know! What do you think America would do if Canada occupied all of New England and killed thousands of Americans every year? What do you think our response would be if Mexican troops for 57 years had kicked San Diegans out of their homes, imprisoned them, put them in camps, denied them the ability to work or get an education, forbid them to vote, and subjected them to constant martial law -- and then told anyone who complained to get bent? Just asking.

What's new in Fuddles?

Let's see:

- Jimbo is "mostly full of meat". He doesn't say what the other thing he's full of is, but I think we can guess.

- Jimbo gets a zinger over on Michael Moore; the filmmaker -- who have we mentioned is fat? -- wants to get rid of privatized health insurance, so Lileks says, oh yeah? How about we also get rid of completion bonds for motion pictures, smart guy? HO HO HO not so clever now are we. But you know what? I bet Moore would make that deal in a second.

- Jimbo once again (sort of) confronts the plague of rude teenagers that so harry our semi-urban areas. Lileks, who is to a tough guy what a squirt gun is to a Magnum, says that he knows he filled the young lout with anger and shame, because "I read him in a second". We can only hope that someday Jimbo does not have to read the writing on the knuckles of some hoodlum in even less time.

History, Schmistory!

Over at Butt Propulsion Laboratories, Chuckles Hindraker endorses an approach to immigration similar to that of the founders on slavery. Which was, essentially, to whistle a wee jolly tune and say oh look there is not the foliage in our fair capitol radiant at this time of the year. It's an attitude that produced one of our most memorable presidents, plus of course it worked out super-well in the end.

Come on, guys. Three degrees from Dartmouth and one each from Harvard, Stanford and UMinn, and this is the best you can do?

Her point, and she does have one...oh, no, wait, she doesn't

The Naughty Girl, with the kind of stunning Malkinacious point-missing that can only be rivalled by her utter hypocrisy, gives the AP what fer. Noting some of that legendary liberal media bias in a wire report claiming that the GOP candidates for president number very few women and no blacks among their advisors, Michelle hits back with a devastating one-two multimedia barrage, in which she decisively proves that the board of the Associated Press, which is not running for President, sports only four women and one black! Take that, mainstream media!

Selected readings from the crankocracy

Butt Propulsion Laboratories: When conservatives say "support the troops", what we mean is, you know, help them win the war. Not actually support them or get them medical care or wimpy stuff like that.

Fuddles, MN: The world would be a much better place if it was just like Disneyland. Unless the government ran it, in which case it would be a dystopian nightmare.

Dean Dean the Ranting Machine: If only there were a candidate who could deftly speak of his love for Dale Earnhardt and George Strat! Now there would be a man eminently suited to lead our nation.

The Human Steyn: For some reason, Americans are not doing everything possible to support the war against Iraq or Terror or whatever it is we're supposed to be fighting.

Naughty Girl: ABC News totally ripped off a story that I did a year ago and passed it off as their own scoop! Of course, I do that all the time, but when we in the "New Media" do it, it's cute!

Get a Job

Horror of horrors! The Man from Fuddles, who once hit the financial skids so hard when his wife was temporarily between high-paying corporate lawyer gigs that he was forced to dismiss the scullery maid who tended to his woodwork, has lost his job!

Well, okay, not really. What has actually happened is that Lileks, who is lucky enough to have had a cushy gig as a daily humor columnist in an age of belt-tightening for the newspaper business, has been told, basically, to shit (that is, do some actual work to justify your massive salary) or get off the pot (that is, find employment elsewhere). Is the Strib trying to get Jimbo to quit his job? Almost certainly, say people who have been in the same position; in a lean business, you have to do something to make the fattest employees earn their salaries. For most people, this would probably be a good thing -- after all, all Jimbo has to do is drop the folksy homilies and start cranking out the rag-bashing in quantity and he'll be on the Scaife gravy train for life. And it's not as if some horrible injustice has taken place; he wasn't censored, or fired for his ethnic origin, or accused unjustly of sexual harrassment, or framed for a crime he didn't commit. He's merely been shunted to a job he's too picky to do in an attempt to unload his massive salary. It happens to millions of people ever year, and you never hear boosters of our fabulous capitalist system say boo about it.

Except, of course, when it happens to one of their own. Horrified at the prospect of a fellow ideologue actually having to earn a living in a competitive job marked like the rest of the rabble, the Northern Alliance of Greater Wingnuttia has gone berserk, rallying around the fallen hero who has been tragically forced to do his job. Accusations of liberal treachery are all around; commands are being issued to Missourians and Californians to cancel their subscriptions to a newspaper based in Minnesota. As far as I know, no one has yet managed to detect the blood-soaked hand of al-Q'aeda in all of this, but over at Hooty Hoo's, there are serious accusations that the treacherous Jew Soros has conspired to buy off the free press so as to silence the brave voice of James Lileks. Without his massive salary, the terrorists will no longer have to fear the scanning of old postcards and the tut-tutting about insufficiently deferential Target clerks!

Would that all of us were lucky enough to have such friends in high places. More than once, that ol' invisible hand of the marketplace has pushed me out on the street and into the unemployment line, and never was Hugh Hewitt there to make sure I bounced back better than ever. Now that's what I call welfare! To Lileks' credit, he has the good grace to be ashamed of all this.

Well, almost.

I didn't even know vodka came in gum form

What is censorship? Some would say that censorship is when a privately owned company, responding to complaints from its customers, disallows use of its services. Others would argue that's not censorship at all. And there are those, known throughout the far reaches of the internet for their shameless hypocrisy, who decry that sort of behavior one minute and then immediately turn right around and and praise it.

But we're not here to call Michelle Malkin a base, unprincipled charlatan. At least not right now. We're here to deliver on the most unique service this blog provides: word-for-word translations of the drunken ramblings of Pamela Geller Oshry Finkel Trump McChicken, proprietrix of the "Atlas Shrugs" blog. This is a service we provide because we believe it is necessary to expose as many people as possible to the vital insights of this important thinker, and there are those who find it difficult to understand what she is saying in her video blogs due to the high concentrations of Captain Morgan's and ladyfingers she must ingest thanks to her unique metabolism. This service – which no other website, even Crazy Pammy's, can offer – is more necessary than ever, due to a concentration of evil jihadi terrorists who have conspired to have her v-logs taken off YouTube, knowing that it is only the inebriated, disjointed gibberings of a Long Island housewife that stands between civilization and chaos. Let's see what dire fate Pam warns us against today in her most explosive flatulation yet!

[Pam stands in front of a mirror, looking a bit puffy and with some gin blossoms blooming around her cheeks, a sure sign of the loveliness of encroaching spring. She holds up a digital camera and begins to impart her wisdom upon us, only slightly blunted by the huge wad of chaw she seems to have in her mouth.]

Hey! I know what you're saying – what are you doing, Atlas? I'm doing a vlog and I got nobody to film it. So this is an experiment. Are we loving it? I am! Um…going…I'm backing away from the computer tonight. You got a beautiful open thread there, with ze French girl, yah. She's not wearing the char-dor, so you know she's retro. I'm backing away from the keyboard, because I can't take it anymore.

A stream of decontextualized photos of soldiers, imams, and destruction appears on the screen, followed by the caption "FLIPPING THE BIRD TO THE PRESS".

Oh, wait a minute. Did you love Hillary saying the war on terror is not a partisan issue?

A photo of Bill Clinton with an attractive woman appears on screen, to remind us that Bill Clinton cheated on his wife and therefore nothing he or anyone associated with him ever says should be believed.

The war on terror is not a partisan issue? You made it the complete partisan issue. Pulling outta Iraq, you made a partisan issue. Not fighting the jihad, you made a partisan issue. The mainstream media, your tool.

A photo of several news magazines, including the liberally biased MacWorld, appears on screen, followed by a picture of Rosie O'Donnell making a funny face.

Your propaganda tool, made it a propa…uh…a partisan issue. Your inability to say that A is A, that…your, uh, is, Islam in America, plotting the jihad, and we're not allowed to say it. We're not allowed to names, if it's a lone jihadi. We're not allowed to say it.

A photo of Cho Seung-Hui, who no one on the planet but Crazy Pammy thinks was a Muslim, appears on screen before we return to Pam herself, still chewing her cud.

Who made the war on terror a partisan issue? You made the war on terror a partisan issue. They are voting…Pelosi's meeting with Assad.

A photo of Nancy Pelosi meeting with Assad appears on screen, just as if it proved something

She wants to meet with Ahmadinahitler.

A photo of Holocaust victims appears on screen.

I'm gonna throw my head back tonight. I'm not gonna think about it! 'Cause you know what? I'm just giving you the blow-by-blow, ladies and gentlemen.

A photo of Nancy Pelosi meeting with, I dunno, Stalin or somebody appears on screen.

They're voting to withdraw to a, a specific date. Why don't you just hand the keys to the White House to Osama? Osama, who today said he was responsible for the bombing that, uh, almost knocked off Cheney? I can just see the lefty liberals, going "Yeah, yeah! Knock off our vice-president!" You dumb shits. Um…how could you not say you're not, um, on the side of terror? How could you not say you're, um, not on the side of the terrorists? You're rooting for Cheney's death. Just look at the PuffHo. Just look at all those posts on the Kos kids. You're rooting to destroy our leadership that we sent, duly elected…"No you didn't! He didn't really get, get in there! He wasn't dul…" Oh, shut up. He did so! He did! Now let's be honest, with all those registered illegals and those dead Democrats, who really is stealing elections? We won't go there, because the Republicans are so much better than that. So much stupider than that.

Um…they're firing rockets into Israel. Have you heard about that? Yeah, I didn't think so. I think…I would do this so you could see how I do a vlog. This is the machine, it's a Sony Shiber…CyberShot. Sony, I want some props! I want some checks! Yeah, send 'em my way! This does it all. This takes the pictures when I go to events, this records it, this does everything. Um, yeah, so there we are, watching the disintegration of the system…the American system…the greatest political system in the history of man; capitalism, the kindest, most humane system in the history of man; the Constitution, the greatest document ever written in the history of man; you're seeing it in your lifetime, ripped to shreds. Ripped to shreds. And do you remember those newsreels they used to show before WWII in the movie theatre, and they would show the marching Nazis and the goosestepping, and the people getting ready in Britain? Well, when they were…when they reflect back in a hundred years, if the jihad allows such technology or such in…you know, uh, when they're inside these little tunnels where they'll be sneaking, the war videos of our pre-war years will be Anna Nicole Smith, Scott Peterson, and, uh, whatever really tacky, tawdry crime of the day was. That's what we are, America.

So I'm outta here! Gonna put on…fix my lipstick, looking in a mirror as I do this vlog I see what I need to do – and, uh, I'll be back at it tomorrow. See ya.

The Constitution, whose fundamentals Pam often calls for ignoring when it is ideologically advantageous, appears on the screen.

Around the Corn

I haven't been around much lately, because I have work to do that people pay me for and the ol' Scaife checks aren't rolling in like they used to when I made my living telling people that Hugo Chavez was a gay terror commie. I note with great interest that the Naughty Girl, in between noticing that political leaders sometimes visit foreign countries, has developed an entertaining conspiracy theory involving megapowerful global dictator Harry Reid's sinister attempt to silence the military, none of whom are able to contact the outside world except with blogs. The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler has jumped all over the utterly meaningless Akon non-controversy, and in doing so, becomes only the eighty millionth person in thirty years to make the high-larious observation that it's not RAP music, it's CRAP music! Professor Poopypants is so intrigued by second-rate Harry Turtledove fanfic that he will even forgive communism, and the Flower of Christian Womanhood asks if, maybe, possibly, since he hasn't been president for seven years and all, it might conceivably be time to stop blaming Bill Clinton for everything bad that ever happens. (She arrives at the answer "no".)

But most important of all, Baron Davis over at The Darkies Are Coming has finally announced that, for only a buck fifty American, you too can wear your prejudice, racism, and mindless fear RIGHT THERE ON THE FRONT OF YOUR HAT! Or whatever! Watch for his "I'm not too sure about black people, either", "White Danish Pride 4 Ever", and "Homos make me feel icky and uncomfortable, and I'm okay with that" series, coming soon.

These Kids Today, Vol. 946

We haven't checked in with the Man From Fuddles in a while, but you don't really have to read his column to know what's going on up there. If yesterday featured him bristling at the thought that Minnesota houses an ideological gasbag more capacious than himself, today must mean it's time for those damn dirty teenagers.

THESE KIDS TODAY:

A couple of students walked past, and I silently counted to see how long it would be take before someone deployed the Effenheimer, or the dreaded Mother Effenheimer. Three seconds. I’m not in favor of having nuns patrol with nail-studded two-by-fours, but on the other hand, I am. Or least some authority figure around which the Youts would feel compelled to display a civil tongue. I was talking with one of the neighbors at the bus stop; she’d been to the school last week, and one of the students hit on her.

THINK OF THE CHILDREN:

My child is not going there.

WHY WHEN I WAS A BOY:

It made me recall my own high school experience, of course; can't rub against a particle of modernity without scurrying back to Norman Rockwell-land, where I can safely shake my fist and make hooting bluster-monkey sounds. But. It was different, and it wasn't that long ago. We had a few ruffians, but they confined their anti-social behavior to smoking between classes, talking too loudly in the cafeteria, and slumping in the back row of English class and drawing skulls on their jeans. The idea that anyone would have shouted MOTHERFARKER in the hallways was unthinkable, and I suppose this makes me sound very old. But there’s no good reason we had to concede that particle of decorum.

NOW LET ME TELL YOU WHAT I THINK:

I imagine that the school’s staff has bigger things to deal with, but I suspect that some of the larger issues of behavior could be made a tad more manageable by addressing the smaller issues. Just a thought from an amateur.

Yes, James. That would make it all better. Civility; propriety; a sternly enforced ban on cursing and problems like poverty, institutional dysfunction, violence, miseducation and bad parenting would all wither on the vine. We know. We know.

Tough Talk from Tintype Terrier

The rumors that I have been slumming around at Sadly, No! are, happily, true. But that doesn't mean I'll leave you hanging here at CCS, oh no! The monkey gas station is up and running, thanks, and that means there's plenty of stupid to share with you and more than enough dumb to go around.

Let's take, for example, the case of the Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler. Named for some variety of "white dog", this is an animal who revels in its own rabidity; but its most distinctive characteristic, which it shares with so many other right-winged birds, is its flabby, impotent passion for phony tough talk.

"Filed under: Verbal Bitch Slaps", says the liberal-chewing Chihuahua, congratulating himself because he knows no one else will do it. The internet is not usually thought of as a verbal medium, but why pick nits off a dog's fur when it's only going to bite you for your troubles?

The post is meant to be a rebuke to the idea that gun control will prevent gun violence, but it degenerates after the very first sentence into basement-borne RPG*-enthusiast machospeak:

Here’s something I’d like to tell you, even though it’ll probably make you wet your rubber sheets: If I were insane enough to want to kill you, I wouldn’t need a gun

MOMMY! THE INTERNET MAN IS SCARING ME! HE SAID HE COULD KILL ME WITH A SPORK AND A SUGAR PACKET BECAUSE OF HIS MAIL ORDER NINJA TRAINING

(even though I know for a fact, from personal experience, that I could get one no matter how many idiotic “gun control laws” you choose to enact)

He learned magic firearms acquisition skills in the same Marine Corps correspondence course where he learned to kill people using only his right thumb and a high-speed internet router.

I’m perfectly capable of murdering you with anything down to and including my own hands. It’s not all that hard, really, I can assure you of that.

Spoken like an actual murderer! Or a anonymous shitbag who reads too many Mack Bolan paperbacks.

The thing is, without gun control I don’t know if you have a gun to stop me from doing so. What that means is that everything I’ve ever learned about killing people can be canceled out by an 83-year-old grandma with a pistol. All she has to do is to point and pull the trigger, and everything I know about killing her, which is quite a lot, will be useless because I’ll be dead, and it doesn’t take much training and even less physical strength for her to do that.

Attitudes like this (it requires no training or strength to shoot a gun!) totally have nothing to do with the vast numbers of "accidental" gun deaths we have in America, but I do like how this sick puppy managed to work in yet another reference to how much he knows about killing people. He can't be bothered to follow through his own premises -- why would a psychotic murderer who can kill people in hundreds of ways be steered away from a victim just on the off chance that they might have a gun? -- but my guess is that he's actually 15 years old, so I'm probably holding him to far too high a standard.

Then again, that's, like 83 in dog years...

Ukrainiac

Hello, legions of fans! Did you miss me? I know I missed myself!

Seattle was pantloads of fun, but I'm afraid four days of exposure to hardcore music geekery left me somewhat out of the loop, current-events-wise. I did take a few moments to discover that Crazy Pammy at Atlas Shrugs deletes comments she can't think of a good response to, but beyond that, I have only word-of-mouth about what America's crazy-thinkers have been up to the last week or so. My understanding is that a lot of people said a lot of stupid things about a lot of dead people, resulting in a lot of self-serving, hypocritical nonsense.

But hey, that's in the PAST, man! VA Tech is OVER and except for lumping Koreans in with Iranians, Arabs and any Negroes not wearing a t-shirt as "People We Should Be Concerned About Having to Sit Next To", nothing has changed, or needs to change. Let's focus on the NOW. And NOW, we're...uh...still thinking up crazy crap to say about the VA Tech massacre! Yes, over at Big Boy Jammies, everyone's favorite raving paranoid post-Soviet graphic designer, Oleg Atabatshit (who previously wrote that picking John as your favorite Beatle over Paul was the reason for the decline of Western civilization), posts that the blame for the worst shooting spree in American history can be laid squarely at the feet of our old enemies: progressive liberalism, Che Guevara, and, uh, oh, let's say Michael Moore.

Look, Oleg, I was a punk rocker: I know what it's like to hate hippies. But come on, man, we've got bigger fish to fry these days. And implying that any attempt to address poverty will inevitably lead to widespread homicidal sprees makes you sound like an even dumber version of Ayn Rand. I realize you guys are having a grand old time trying to think up a reason to blame this mindless act on everything you've ever hated (I mean, come on, fellas -- we're a week out and no Bill Clinton connection yet?), but isn't there a war on or something?

Hi! Ate us!

The King of Clowns is going on a temporary hiatus. Those of you who live in the Seattle area might wish to attend the EMP Pop Conference this year, where I will be delivering a talk on two of my longtime obsessions, the Wu-Tang Clan and comic books. Details can be found here. I hope to resume regular coverage next week, and I'll update while there if at all possible.

Meanwhile, I leave you with a classic from a classic by the man from Fuddles, in which he:

- admonishes yet another incompetent sales clerk
- rattles on about his water installantion
- places another meaningless doohickey on his website
- complains about the poor selection at the crap chain stores at which he shops
- displays shock-horror at the fact that his daughter manifests possible awareness of a terror attack, despite the fact that he has spent the last six years writing fearful nonsense about how we must always be afraid of a city-obliterating Mahometan terror attack

Enjoy, and we'll see you soon!

Naughty Girl: MUSLIMS NEGROES MUSLIMS

(Thanks for tuning in to Mrs. Mortimer Week! We'll return to our regular programming formate on Monday.)

"Do you see the little narrow gallery outside the minaret? There is a man standing there. He is calling people to say their prayers. He calls so loud that all the people below will hear, and the sounds he utters are like sweet music. But would it not make you sad to hear them when you remembered what he was telling people to do? To pray to the God of Mahomet. Not to the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, but to a FALSE god: to NO god. When the Christians began to worship images, the fierce Turks came and turned the churches into mosques. This was the punishment God sent the Christians for breaking His law. How dreadful it would be if our churches should ever be turned into mosques! May God never send us this heavy punishment!"

Peter Robinson: There should be MORE movies that portray communists as relentlessly, irredeemably evil

"The ladies are very industruous, and wherever they go, they take their knitting. The number of stockings they make would surprise you. How much better to knit than to smoke! Can they do nothing but knit? Yes, they can play on the piano, and the harp, and sing very sweetly. But they are not fond of reading useful books. When they read, it is novels about people who never lived. It would be better to read nothing than such books."

Cal Thomas: I see no problem with Town Hall giving free PR to terrorist leaders

"The Irish say they are Christians, yet most of them will not read the Bible. Is not that strange? The religion they teach is caled the Roman Catholic religion. It is a kind of Christian religion, but it is a very bad kind."

In your fat beds with your multiple sexual lovers

We're taking a momentary break from Mrs. Mortimer Week to transcribe the latest video blog by Pamela "Atlas Shrugs" Oshry Geller Feldstein Bialystock Bolton, Long Island's craziest drunk according to a recent survey by Franzia Wine-in-a-Box Corporation. We are, as ever, the only blog that provides this gut-wrenching service. This week, instead of hogging the bathroom at a party, Pammy instead dismays everyone at a Dunkin Donuts by publicly yammering about her daughter's cervix. Read on, and learn all about the sinister liberal conspiracy to turn our children into sluts by keeping them from getting cancer.



Pammy gone wild

[TITLE CARD: "COFFEE TIME"]

Coffee time*! [Laughs] Okay, so it's post-lunch, we've been shopping, got the girls some stuff for the bat mitzvah, so why am I chattin' on you now? Interesting subject came up over lunch, which was, the mandatory vaccination against cervical cancer. Which I'm totally against, by the way – as a parent, I make those choices. Secondly, why this vaccine? Why now? Because girls tend to be, have multiple sexual lovers? And they need it because their, your increased multiple sexual lovers increases your chances of cervical cancer? This is…this is more of a left-tarded indoctrination. (A), we should be teaching that a girl doesn't give it away. Doesn't give it away! Unless it's love! (B), it's, it…someone validating that multiple sexual lovers is a good thing.

[TITLE CARD: "Cervical Cancer Is not even an INFECTIOUS disease."**]

You're validating that, are you not? You're validating sexual lovers, uh, many sexual lovers is a good thing, and that…not…yeah, that it's an okay thing. What…well, we'll give you a vaccine to stop you from getting cancer. Why this disease? Why now? And another thing I want to ask you. This…in my generation, the sexually liberated generation [snaps fingers and does go-go dance] where you fucked everybody, no AIDS, no nothing. Not me, the proverbial me. Because I didn't, trust me. Um, my question is, so all these women at school, everybody in town, what's the incidence of cervical cancer at now? One in one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, what?*** Is this in reason that we have to mandate every young girl to get a vaccine against cervical cancer? I'm totally against this. I don't know why this disease, why now. Part of the left-wing indoctrination. It's wrong, and that's why I'm coming to you live from the Big D's, Dunkin Donuts.

[TITLE CARD: "later that day"]

So now you have a few of the folks say 'But the Republicans went to Syria! The Republicans were there!' First of all, what Republicans? Who were they? What nameless faces were they?**** They were not the most powerful woman in the world. 'I am the most powerful woman in the world!' Remember that? 'I am the most powerful woman in the world.' And if I go to Syria – who's gonna give a rat's ass if I go to Syria? Let's be honest, okay? Um…look how they copy our, 'but the Republicans did it! Waaaah!' They can't even stand up f…can't even stand up for what they do. Can't even stand up for their own positions. So now you have Nancy Peloopsi in Syria, you have Sestak last night at the CAIR fundraiser, raising money for CAIR. Raising money for a front for terror. This is the Democratic Party. Can I ask you something? Why do we…I…'We have to engage, we have to engage with the terrorists!' Did we engage with the Nazis? And how come they're not engaging with George Bush? How come they're not…

[TITLE CARD: "Would the dhimmicrats 'engage' with the Nazis too?"]

What is George Bush guilty of, trying to keep us free? What is George Bush guilty of, trying to institute the tr…the Bush Doctrine? Trying to free a part of the world that has been living in totalitarian regimes for centuries? What is he guilty of, trying to keep the American people safe? Which, by the way, I have to say, since his election…since 9/11, he's done an outstanding job. Outstanding, my friends. That's why you're all so complacent, and you're feeling so good in your fat beds, in your feather beds with your ducks and, uh, p…p….p…mattresses! You don't even know you're at war. They're plotting and champing and chopping with their bombs and their small bombs and big bombs and polonium-210 and they're smuggling it in, and the guy died, the guy died from a $15 million dose.

[TITLE CARD: "Alexander Litvinenko"]

That wasn't an assassination attempt by Putin. Why spend fifteen to thirty million dollars on one tiny granule of polonium-210 when a bullet costs you a nickel? They were smuggling that stuff! [sings] Good morning, America, how are you?' Anyway, I'm down south with my kids, it's Spring Break, whoo whoo! Let's all dance!

[TITLE CARD: "yeah bababy"]

And I'm having a blast. I can't watch the news. You know I went from, when I started this blog I went from…it's the unreported news, I have to get the truth to the people, they have to see what's really going on, the, they…the mainstream media has abdicated its role as public servant to the, disseminating the information. I've gone from that to feeling like, frankly, I'm giving you the blow-by-blow. I'm giving you the play-by-play on the road to Armageddon. Jackie, you ready for lunch?

[Off-screen voice: "Yep."

Okay! We're going for American lunch! No problems! Don't worry, be happy! Don't worry, be happy! Nancy Pelosi's in Syria, it's all good! See ya.

"I will destroy you!"

BONUS SPECIAL EXTRA DRUNK PAMMY V-BLOG!

[TITLE CARD: "How the Left promotes Teenage Promiscuity – Pamela – AtlasShrugs.com"]

Okay, the reason I was so upset about that vaccine, uh, for cervical cancer is because first of all, they want to give it to, uh, middle-school students. Nine-year-olds, ten-year-olds, eleven-year-olds. I'm in Florida and they're talking about making it law now. [Points to her daughter] Could you see this one with a cervical cancer vaccine*****? I'm…I mean, seriously, okay? And I say, why this…I say, why this disease, why now? Why this disease? It's not infectious. It's not typhoid, right******? Oh, she's putting on a happy face now. Okay, so earlier, I went to the store, and this guy comes up to me, and he's all like, do I know you? Ha ha ha ha. I said, New, New York? He goes, no. I say, you get any news on the net? He says, Atlas Shrugs, right? Right? Yeah, baby! Oh, oh, uhn uh uh. Okay. So anyway, on that note, um, oh! Oh! Uh, who, who, who's with me on arresting Pelosi? On, on the Logan Act? Who's with me?

[Pam's daughters, off-screen: "Me! Me! Me!"]

Okay, I got my posse with me. I got my posse, and we're gonna arrest Pelosi, and, and that other one! What was that, with the nostrils? Who's Nostril Boy?

[TITLE CARD: I don't know what the hell this thing is.]

We need some names. Nostril Boy…Waxman. Henry Waxman. Yes. And who are you? Meeting with the Muslim Brotherhood? The Muslim Brotherhood is their…oh, rrrrrrrrrrr, my ride is here, I gotta go. The Muslim Brotherhood is…okay, stop it, I'm coming. The Muslim Brotherhood are….[next sentence rendered blissfully inaudible by passing motorcycles] It's all very distressing, and, uh, okay, take your, uh, you know, I think it's too dark now. I love you.

[TITLE CARD: "WHAT WAS SAN FRAN NAN DOING IN SYRIA?" Judging from the incomprehensible image, she was being anally violated by a young Prince Charles.]

*: Actually, "cwawfee towime", but you get the picture.

**: I don't suppose it's even necessary at this point to mention that Crazy Pammy doesn't know what she's talking about.

***: One in 30,000, actually, with over four thousand fatalities a year in the United States. Much higher than your risk of death by Islamofascism!

****: Among others, Arlen Specter (R-PA), Darrell Issa (R-CA), Frank Wolf (R-VA), Bob Aderholt (R-AL), , and David Hobson (R-OH), who was actually with Pelosi on her trip. Jeez, Pam, when you sober up, ask someone what Google is.

*****: Could you see this one with a fatal case of cervical cancer because her mother was a crazy drunk who refused to let her get vaccinated to avoid left-wing indoctrination?

******: From 1996-1999, over 15,000 American women died of cervical cancer. During the same period, one person died of typhoid. Typhoid, by the way, was almost entirely eliminated in the West due to a government program to vaccinate children against it.

Dennis Prager: I weep for the lost greatness of Blighty

"What country do you love best? Your own country. I know you do. What is the character of the English? They are not very pleasant in company, because they do not like strangers, nor taking much trouble. They like best being at home, and this is right. They are too fond of money, as well as of good eating and drinking. They are often in low spirits, and are apt to grumble, and to wish they were richer than they are, and to speak against the rulers of the land. Yet they might be the happiest people in the world, for there is no country in which there are so many Bibles."

Powerline: Widespread Racial Discrimination Has Nothing to Do with Race

"There is much to make the traveller sad as he wanders about the Holy Land. That land was once fruitful, but now it is barren. It is not surprising that no one plants and sows in the fields, because the Turks would take away the harvest. Once it was a peaceful land, but now there are so many enemies that every man carries a gun to defend himself. Once it was a holy land, but now Mahomet is honored, and not the God of Israel. When shall it again be fruitful, and peaceful, and holy? When the Jews shall repent of their sins and turn to the Lord."

Big Boy Jammies: Reds in Tehran Paperwork Shocker

"By now you must have found out the character of the Russians. The rich people are unjust, and often do not pay their debts; they are fond of feasts and company, but they care little for their servants and poor neighbors. The poor people are civil, but sly, and dishonest, idle, and fond of drinking. The Russians are generally not to be trusted."

Michael Barone: They hate us because of our freedoms

"And what sort of people are the Arabs? Wild and fierce people. Travellers are afraid of passing through Arabia, lest the Arabs should rob and murder them; and no one has ever been able to conquer the Arabs. The Arabs are very proud, and will not bear the least affront. The Arabs are so unforgiving and revengeful that they will seek to kill a man year after year."

Note: I'll have a transcript of Crazy Pammy's latest vlog-spew up tonight or tomorrow.

Prof. Poopypants: Appalling, if true

"In Babylon no sound is heard but the howling of wild beasts; in Bagdad men may be heard screaming and hallooing from morning to night. The drivers of the camels and mules shout as they press through the narrow, crooked streets, and even the ladies riding on white donkeys, and attended by black slaves, scream and holla."

VDH: We Have Always Been At War With Eurasia

This week, Clown Central Station will feature links to our favorite right-wing blowhardery behind tags featuring quotes from the late Mrs. Favell Lee Mortimer. Mrs. Mortimer, whose delightful combination of high-handed piety, condescension and ignorant cultural slander educated several generations of imperialists, has proved a lasting influence on the neoconservative warblogger of today. Please enjoy Mrs. Mortimer Week here at CCS.

"The Persians are very deceitful. An old Persian was heard to say, 'We all tell lies whenever we can.' The Persians are not even ashamed when their falsehoods are found out. When they sell they ask too much; when they make promises they break them. In short, it is impossible to trust a Persian."

So, I have written before about how the warbloggers seem to think of Muslims less as evil or misguided humans (like, say, the Nazis) than they do as infectious subhuman monsters (like, say, zombies), and appear to maintain the belief that any positive reference to them, any toleration of their existence within our society, any physical contact with them will cause you to become overwhelmed by the Dhimmi Contagion, and soon you will be eating brains, throwing your daughter on a pyre, and disallowing the consumption of pork in taxicabs.

We already know that if you are kidnapped by Islamic terrorists, and upon your release, you do not immediately vilify them as demons in human shape who raped you repeatedly and tried to eat your foot, the Keyboard Kommandoes will tear into you like the last slice of pizza, accusing you of being a lunatic, a terror sympathizer, and a dirty, dirty slut.

We also already know that if you are a U.S. official and you visit an "enemy" nation while wearing a hijab, the Keyboard Kommandoes will go predictably apeshit and accuse you of being a tool of global jihadiism. (If anyone points out what a non-issue this is, they will quickly change the subject and say it was really about something else, even if that something else proves to be equally full of shit.

We further know that if British sailors follow orders like any good member of the military is trained to do, the Keyboard Kommandoes will relinquish their long-vaunted support of the troops and start calling these brave military men cowards and traitors who should be imprisoned or at the very least horsewhipped and hung.

But have we really sunk so far that there are actually creeping couch-stains who will attack sailors and marines -- professional fighting men who sacrifice all for their country so that these bloviating shitbags can sit at home and surf porn -- for the Orwellian thoughtcrime of smiling upon their release from capture, thus displaying their lack of grim hatred of the Mahometan devil and their determination to boot his face whenever the opportunity arises? Are there in this great nation of ours people so intellectually and emotionaly degraded that they actually believe that allowing an expression of happiness to cross your face at the news you will soon be reunited with your loved ones is a serious sign of treachery and villainy, when you should be frowning at your inability to throw your life away for no reason resisting a country you aren't even at war with?

Yes. Yes, there are.

Make them fight, mommy, make them fight!

John Derbyshire doesn't hang around on the Corner as much as the rest of the gang, because he knew Bruce Lee and also Kathryn Jean Lopez is totally old and has droopy knockers. However, every once in a while, he will show up to register his outrage at some particularly egregious offense to his sensibilities -- a woman over age 14 will show her breasts, for example, or someone will suggest that rapists are not driven into frenzies of sexual madness by belly shirts and sweatpants with "SASSY" written on the butt.

Today, he learned that some Marines from his beloved Blighty are being returned to Mother England -- not to be horsewhipped and tossed in the gaol until the sun sets on the British Empire, but to the joy and relief of their countrymen! Rather than celebrating the release of his fellow men -- acheived at the cost of no bloodshed -- the Derb -- who apparently didn't get the memo that if you ever criticize our men and women in uniform, you are a vile subhuman traitor -- is flipping out, calling the Marines "wimps" who displayed "cowardice" and should be court-martialed and given dishonorable discharges after a lengthy prison stay, if not actually executed: "I wouldn't shed a tear if some worse fate befell them."

The Derb, you see, believes that all soldiers should behave like G.I. Joe dolls -- that their first and only option confronted with any situation should be to unleash the fucking fury, and whip out their assault rifles, running up and down the picnic table going "Ackackackackack! Pew! Pew! KABOOOOOM" until all the other action figures are laying face down. It does not seem to have occurred to him that, when detained by Iranian forces, they might have actually been ordered by their commanding officers not to open fire on the representatives of a nation with which they were not at war. It does not seem to have crossed his mind that they would have looked to their superiors for instructions on how to behave, as every military man is trained to do. It does not appear to be in his universe of knowledge that the training manuals for soldiers in every country on earth do not read, on every page, for every situation, "KILL KILL KILL". It appears to have escaped his notice entirely that the British sailors were quite sensibly told by their commanders something along the lines of "Say, lads, rather than touching off an international incident for no good reason, what say we hang back and see what the top men have to say?", just as any soldiers, sailors, airmen, or marines in any other country might do in the same situation. Lacking this somewhat obvious knowledge -- that the armed forces of a nation are trained military operatives who exist as part of an organized command structure and are not, in fact, Viking berserkers -- he goes on to make a lot of statements that are, to put it mildly, asinine:

It is the job of a Royal Marine to fight, and if necessary suffer and die, for his country. They know that when they go in. It's what they are told!

Indeed it is, and that argument would be applicable if they were captured, say, during the course of a naval assault upon an enemy nation in which their commanders ordered them not to surrender. Unfortunately, none of the words in that clause even remotely applied here, so the whole statement is totally irrelevent. Next?

I nurse a quiet hope that if put to the test, I would stand up as well as any Marine. Whether or not I would, however, is irrelevant. Whether or not I could stand up well to torture, I expect Marines to.

The Derb can't resist a chance to imply that he, a doughy 62-year-old math nerd, is very possibly tougher than a Royal Marine. Again unfortunately for his argument, there is no evidence that the sailors were tortured, so this argument is also irrelevant and merely serves as an example of this impotent stooge playing big-dick.

The girl sailor had that headscarf on within hours. From what I've heard of torture, even weaker cases can hold out for a few days.

What the Derb has heard of torture could fill a thimble and still have enough space for what he knows of everything else. Everyone from professional interrogators to 24 says that everyone breaks under torture, and even "mild" tortures like waterboarding cause CIA spooks and U.S. Marines to beg for mercy after an average of 20 seconds. But again, since no torture took place, this is just an irrelevancy introduced by Derbyshire to paint the troops he and his Keyboard Kommandoes always claim to admire and honor as chickenshit -- and dig the barely disguised misogyny, as the chides the "girl sailor" for failing to withstand the imaginary torture for even as long as "weaker cases"!

In any case, a trained soldier will have been instructed that these Iranian fanatics are without any scruples.

Really? Is that in the standard-issue handbooks for British sailors? Is it right after the part about how to tie a sheepshank? "SECTION 1.4.3.7.A: PROPER DISPOSAL OF DRAINED OIL CANNISTERS; SECTION 1.4.3.7.B: HOW IRANIAN FANATICS ARE WITHOUT ANY SCRUPLES."

It should be assumed that everything the Iranians say is a lie. If they say: "Do this, and we won't harm your mates," and you do it, they will harm your mates anyway. Of course, this kind of truth is much harder to get across to young people who have been brainwashed from elementary school to believe that their own culture is corrupt, evil, and false, while the cultures of Third World barbarians are morally superior...

The fact that the sailors were certainly acting on -- or at least waiting for -- orders from their superiors, again, does not seem to have occurred to the Derb. So he constructs an imaginary world where the Iranians are like the sneering, buck-toothed "NO MORE SERGEANT!" Chinaman of a Jack Webb propaganda film, and the Brits are sniveling, weak-willed Neville Chamberlain types, softened up by multiculturalism and university postmodernism. In Derbworld, the soldiers are made of plastic, the rules of engagement are written on clouds of gossamer, and all claims of supporting the troops are inscribed on a big stinking British turd.

Once again, reality surpasses my ability to make things up

Sometimes, our beloved dingbats of the right will try to convince us all to hide under our desks from the evil of Islam based on the raging anti-Semitism to be found in Arab lands. Why, say the darkie-dashers, in some of these countries, the blood libel is leveled against Jews just as if it weren't total nonsense!

Luckily, that sort of nonsense never takes place here in the west, where we are entirely too rational and free of prejudice to fall for such nonsense.

(Thanks, as I say all too often around here, to Sadly, No!.)

He's been cheated, been mistreated. When will Glenn be loved?

Glenn Beck opines over the lonely life of a conservative white Christian male in America. Isolated, disenfranchised, oppressed, with no one to speak for him and no place to call his own, Glenn must somehow scrape by with only his millions of dollars, his nationally syndicated newspaper column, his popular television show, and his legions of fans.

How well he remembers -- but with such bitter bile in his throat! -- that brief and shining moment a couple of months ago, where people like him controlled big business, the culture industry, sports, entertainment, organized religion, law enforcement, the professions, academia, and all three of the branches of government. But then came the Great Disaster of '06, and now, conservative white Christian males just control two branches of government, plus all that other stuff. When will the suffering end? When will justice be done for his people? When, oh Lord, when?

Has the world gone topsy-turvy?

Bill Murchison, in the latest of his approximately sixty billion articles about how commie hippie liberals always blame America for everything, boggles at the illogic of the Left:

Pretty much everything gets a least a test run these days, including the claim that the United States, which fought a war to free the slaves, is the most racist nation on earth.

Uh...would those be the slaves of FRANCE we fought a war to free, Bill? Or the slaves of GERMANY? Were those slaves, vast in number, and flowing constantly since before the writing of the Declaration of Independence, suffering under the yoke of cruel RUSSIAN masters? I dropped out of college, so I may have missed the details. Please enlighten us, do.

Blits and blobs

Victor Davis Hanson: I am no longer capable of writing anything that does not make reference to 300.

Jules Crittendon: If only we were brave enough to ignore Congress, we could be in an awesome war with Iran by now.

Dave Hinz: Sure, President Bush's policies may result in hundreds of thousands of dead people, millions in poverty, and millions more without health care or decent educations, but he is really a compassionate man, because he helped an old guy to his chair in front of cameras.

Jennifer Roback Morse: All that remains of feminism is a willingness to murder babies and falsely accuse men of rape.

Charles Johnson: Reporting the news is anti-American treachery.

Baron Bodissey: Lest you think we're only afraid of being wiped out by the vile Mahometans, we're also terrified of genocidal Mexicans.

Glenn Reynolds: My brother's rock combo recorded a chili commercial!

They hate us for our freedom to go walkies

Despite copious and publicly available evidence that the dangerous ingredient in the current tainted pet food recall comes from China, Crazy Pammy has decided that it's all the fault of Muslims. Surprise, surprise.

By what bizarre stretch of the imagination can she make this utterly baseless claim? Well, you see, the source of some of the tainted pet food was...Mississauga, Ontario! And last year, there were a bunch of alleged terror suspects also captured in...Mississagua, Ontario! DUNH DUNH DUNH

There you have it, folks. That's her logic. Because, in this major suburb of Toronto with 800,000 people, a few Muslims have been suspected of planning terror attacks, it is now "TERROR CENTRAL", and so, since one company that made itis also based there, the tainted pet food, even though the tainted ingredient came from China, MUST BE PART OF A VILE MAHOMETAN PLOT TO MURDER OUR PETS!

I honestly don't know what to think about this. If Crazy Pammy actually believes this, she may have displaced David Horowitz, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly as the stupidest person in America. And if she doesn't, how dumb does she think WE are?

Discover the nut's work

There are conservative pundits, and then there are conservative pundits. There are the oblivious, and then there are the truly delusional. There are schmucks, and then there are giant flaming uncleansed assholes. There is the rest of the world…and there is David Horowitz.

If I were paid for this blog based on the total number of completely asinine things said in the articles I link, this piece alone would buy me a luxurious home in the Hollywood Hills, or possibly my own private island. Unfortunately, I don't get paid for this blog at all, so reading it only makes me stupider than I was before I started. While attacking one of our favorite "obscure blogs", the Dumbest Man in America does it like only he can. Only he possesses the level of pure, base-metal-to-gold shamelessness that distinguishes him from the rest of the half-wits of the punditocracy. It's really something to behold, on the level of watching Captain Queeg ranting and raving about his missing strawberries.

In the course of establishing that leftists portray their political opponents as wicked demons in human shape, Horowitz accuses leftists of being demons in human shape, "religious fanatics who believe they are going to change the world". While conservatives are "far too generous" and always willing to correct their mistakes, liberals "look on their political opponents as evil" and "think nothing of smearing and defaming them" in order to "eliminate them from any argument".

He goes on to say that George Soros' Campus Progress organization has a section "devoted to defamations of conservative speakers", and solemnly notes that "there is nothing comparable to this garbage on the conservative side of the spectrum". It's at this point that I blacked out from the sheer blinkered hypocrisy of it all, and was unable to read the rest of the article, where he calls Sacco & Vanzetti "justly executed terrorists".

Let me know how that turned out, won't you?

We Hate He

Well, that oughtta about do it for Jonah.

God still undefeated in minds of fans

Dennis Prager used as floor mop in debate with Sam Harris; declares victory.

This thing is pretty hilarious. I long ago stopped debating religion with people despite my hardcore atheism, because there's no percentage in it and the two sides are rarely even arguing the same question (which is evident in abundance in the article above), but Prager is the perfect punching bag this time around: he completely fails to respond to any substantial point made by Harris, exhumes the old "arrogant disbeliever" trope again and again, and makes a fool of himself to anyone who's paying attention.

At some point, Prager makes this ridiculous wager:

I bet you whatever sum we each can afford that the vast majority of murderers and rapists in this country were not religiously active during the time they committed their violent crimes. I would make a second bet that you won’t take that bet.

Harris rightly jumps all over this, saying that if you define "religiously active" as "believing in God and the basic tenets of the fath", he'd take this bet in a second and win -- as would I, and Dennis can afford a lot more than I can. Since a very substantial majority of Americans self-identify as Christian (and a tiny minority as atheist), it's a sure thing that a majority of any given subset of Americans -- say, murderers and rapists -- are also Christian. Even leaving aside the stupendous implication that without belief in the Jewish sky-god, you are far more likely to be a murdering rapist (so, then, what accounts for the lower rate of murder and rape in Japan?), this bet betrays a total ignorance of statistics and demographics.

Then there's this gem of false certainty. Dennis:

You are right that this moral clarity and courage among the predominantly religious does not prove the existence of the biblical God. Nothing can prove God’s existence. But it sure is a powerful argument. If society cannot survive without x, there is a good chance x exists.

Let's ignore the fact that all sorts of things could prove God's existence in a heartbeat, if he really existed and wasn't determined to stay as invisible as D.B. Cooper. Let's instead focus, as Sam Harris does, on the utterly botched syllogism. Harris:

No, Dennis, this moral clarity is not a “powerful argument,” or even an argument at all; please keep your x’s straight. If humanity can’t survive without a belief in God, this would only mean that a belief in God exists. It wouldn’t, even remotely, suggest that God exists.

Finally running out of ideas, Dennis resorts to yakking up his 'Jews and Christians invented every good thing that humanity has ever done' argument even though it is patent nonsense. I mean, just look at this:

Suffice it to that Judeo-Christian values alone gave humanity the notion of the sacredness of human life

No. That would be the Greeks.

linear history and therefore the idea of moral and scientific progress

No. Greeks again.

universal standards of good and evil

This is nonsense on many, many levels. Does he mean "universally applicable"? If so, why doesn't everyone adopt them? Or does he mean the Christians/Jews were the first people to come up with standards they believed should be universally applied? If so, that's obviously not true.

the scientific method

Which, of course, allowed many of them to reject Christianity.

the development of democracy

Nope. Greeks.

the greatest music ever composed and the greatest art ever drawn

Well! Nothing to argue against there.

the greatest experiment in non-ethnicity-based society (America)

Even if you argue that the founding of America had nothing to do with ethnos (a contention some black people and Indians might want to explore a bit more thoroughly), many of the Founding Fathers remain obnoxiously non-Christian.

equality of the sexes

Oh, we have equality of the sexes now?

Dennis is utterly full of shit here, deliberately conflating Westerners -- that is, products of a more or less Judeo-Christian society -- with actual believing, faithful Jews and Christians. He knows full well that the progressive developments that he cites like democracy, scientific method, feminism, plurality, etc., all tend to come from nonreligious Westerners who, while raised in Judeo-Christian cultures, are the ones who bristle most against religious teaching. And he also knows full well that in those parts of society where Judeo-Christian belief is strongest, things like women's rights, democracy, plurality and respect for science are at their lowest. Knowing these things but acting as if he doesn't makes him what? That's right: a liar. And lying is what? That's right: a sin. For which he will burn in Hell for all eternity, unless I'm right and there is no God. So there's something atheism can take credit for: saving Dennis Prager's lying ass.

Talk is cheap...

...and tough talk is the cheapest of all. That's why the Naughty Girl has it in such vast quantities: it doesn't cost her anything.

A key element of phony tough-talk is standing fiercely against paper tigers: either loudly opposing things that everyone already hates ("I am AGAINST child molestation in ALL ITS FORMS!") or taking a brave stance against things that aren't actually happening ("I will do everything in my power to prevent Hugo Chavez from invading the United States!"). That way, you get to pat yourself on the back for being a real bad-ass straight-talker while incurring no risk whatsoever, as opposed to, for example, joining the Army or hooking up with Doctors without Borders.

Having fiercely defended the Vietnam Memorial against the nonexistent threat of being defaced by rampaging legions of hippies, Michelle now turns her fierce warrior-woman instincts towards the kind of evil Muslim scumbags who might sue you for racial profiling. Because, really, the true victims here aren't the clerics, who were arrested, detained, and forced to miss their flight even though they didn't do anything wrong: it's the innocent freedom-loving Americans who patriotically flipped out when crazy mixed-up Muslims prayed in a menacing fashion. Sure, the Muslims were also Americans, and they were exercising their freedom, but they didn't do it in an acceptable way, like buying a venti double macchiato or lecturing strangers about their bad parenting: they did it in a scary foreign way, by worshiping a scary brown god.

Anytime anyone uses the word "manifesto", you just know there's a big smelly cloud of flatulence floating in the air just ahead, and Michelle Malkin loaded up on red beans and rice before writing this so we wouldn't be disappointed. There's just so many things to love about the John Doe Manifesto:

Dear Muslim Terrorist Plotter/Planner/Funder/Enabler/Apologist,

Well, that about covers all of them, doesn't it?

I am traveling on your plane. I am riding on your train. I am at your bus stop. I am on your street. I am in your subway car. I am on your lift.

I am in your base, killing your dudes.

I am your neighbor. I am your customer. I am your classmate. I am your boss.

How about your employee? HA HA, no, no, seriously.

I will challenge your attempts to indoctrinate my children in our schools.

My child will not be one of the millions who have been converted to Islam in the public schools. I'm against things that aren't actually happening!

I will combat your violent propaganda on the Internet.

Acting like a tough guy on the internet, eh, Hadji? Well, a million can play that game!

I will resist the imposition of sharia principles and sharia law in my taxi cab, my restaurant, my community pool, the halls of Congress, our national monuments, the radio and television airwaves, and all public spaces.

I will ignore people's right to behave as they choose in their private businesses and homes, and will make up fictional examples of forcible imposition of sharia in public spaces where they haven't actually taken place. (The halls of Congress? What the fuck? National monuments?)

I will not be censored in the name of tolerance.

I will make sure that you, however, can be censored in the name of security.

I am John Doe.

I am Michelle Maglalang. And if anyone were to racially profile me (say, on the basis of several most-wanted-terrorists being Filipino) and make me miss a plane, I would sue the living shit out of them.

But that's different.

ANN ALTHOUSE WILL DESTROY YOU

Do not call Ann Althouse a sexist. YOU are the sexist! Ann Althouse is a great woman who understands the truth about your monstrous Clinton. You are a liar! Ann Althouse is not angry! YOU are angry! With your breasts! Your dirty sexist breasts that make Ann Althouse SO ANGRY!


Stop making fun of Ann Althouse or Ann Althouse will BAN YOU!

Who's going to rake my leaves?

Burt "I'm Not a Racist; I Just Want to Call Black People Niggers" Brelutsky on California's first annual Cesar Chavez Day celebration: aren't Mexicans lazy enough already, without giving them a whole special day to be lazy on? This is just like that phony "Labor Day" swindle, where we celebrate working-class people who actually do things by giving them the day off. I think they should have to work twice as hard!

Rocket Fuel

Butt Propulsion Laboratories: You get to 'add your comments on the energy issues that the site addresses' (because you are 'seriously engaged' with them, just like David Copperfield was seriously engaged to Claudia Schiffer), and we get some of that sweet, sweet petrodollar ad money! It's win-win!

At least we believe in something WORTH destroying the planet for

Up in Fuddles, MN, Lileks saves the best for last:

I hated post-apocolypse [sic] stuff; I always did. That’s one of the miserable things about the 70s, and its lurid indulgence in these fantasies. Beneath the Planet of the Apes, for example, not only adheres to the requirement of the time that all movies must end with the hero’s death; it not only posits the existence of a nuclear weapon that still works after many centuries (and sheds huge amounts of smoke when powered up, if I remember correctly), but it kills the entire planet for its conclusion, after which an omnipotent voiceover tells us that "a green and insignificant planet is now dead." Roll credits.

I wonder now: who started it, back then? Who started the war that managed to destroy everything? Might their motivations, their morals, their ideas, be held more responsible than the instruments of destruction they used? I know this: that was the least important detail to the dystopian cynics then, and probably now as well.

Stupid dystopian cynics! Thinking it was the act of destroying an entire planet that was important, and not the reasons for doing it! As in the future, where the innumerable corpses will molder and crumble happily if they know they were all killed for a good cause, so it is today, where all the American dead in their thousands and the Iraqi dead in their hundreds of thousands rejoice from their graves because they know they died for freedom, and not at the whim of some petty dictator. IED, sniper, car bomb or ordnance dropped from miles overhead: none of this matters to the decaying cadavers. What matters to them, and to their grieving families, is that our motives are pure and just; that's what makes it all worthwhile.

Sure, Al Gore is a nut, but where's the part about Michael Moore being fat?

Town Hall's Mary Katherine Ham (of HamNation fame) hams it up for the hamera in this ham-fisted attempt at humor. Displaying all the skills required from a gifted comic actress (standing next to things, pointing, giving a thumbs-up, smiling, and shrugging), Mary Kate has finally eclipsed Ashley. Look out, Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin -- there's a new right-wing Vanna White in town!

Doughy Can'tload

In case you haven’t been following the events surrounding the any-day-now publication of Liberal Fascism, the long-delayed book by sci-fi-nerd-turned-right-wing-gasbag Jonah Goldberg, Timothy Noah at Slate has vouchsafed us the information that there’s yet another hiccup. Jonah hasn’t actually finished the book yet, which, since it’s being put out by an actual, legitimate publishing house instead of Regnery, might be causing his editor some small dismay, as well as generating a few sternly worded e-mails regarding the disposition of his advance.

Not that I am eagerly looking forward to its publication – I’m sure it will be as worth reading as everything else he’s ever written, which is to say slightly less so than the publication indicia of a desk calendar – but I must say I feel for Jonah. Obviously, he’s been under a lot of pressure to deliver a book that was supposed to have been published two years ago and that he hasn’t bothered to get around to writing yet, and that pressure is starting to get to him.

I’m here to help. As a semi-professional freelance writer who has never missed a paid deadline, I’m willing to step in with some words of advice for a man who, unlike most writers, never had to go through the learning curve experienced by those of us who don’t have rich parents who lined us up with our cushy jobs. So, Jonah, here’s some things to think about while you work on that swell book of yours.

1. In the future, think about actually completing a significant portion of the book before you take the royalty check. I know that you were made to understand that your fame as a professional blowhard would insulate you from the requirements of stuff like professionalism, quality and originality, but you do actually have to write the book at some point, and maybe two years after announcing its publication is not the best time to start.

2. Speaking of making announcements, try and clear these with your publisher beforehand. So far, you’ve made seven public announcements of the book’s imminence, which, had you checked with the people at Doubleday, you would have discovered might have been better timed if they had come after the completion of the book.

3. I am not one to judge people for their hobbies. After all, I contribute to five separate blogs and/or message boards, and only two of them pay me to do so. So I’m not one to scold you for spending approximately seventeen hours a day online exchanging speculation with John Podhoretz at the Corner about whether or not Adama is a Ceylon. Then again, I am not going around telling everyone how I can’t make deadlines on my book because I’m just too busy. Maybe, since your book is only 272 pages long, you should spend some of the time you’d usually use for ragging on Kathryn Jean Lopez for not being able to identify all of the bridge crew of the starship Enterprise by their first names on writing Liberal Fascism instead. You’d probably be able to crank it out in a week with that substitution alone.

4. Blaming your inability to complete your work on the birth of your daughter is a tiny bit chickenshit, considering that she was not even conceived at the time the book was originally scheduled for publication. Also, “work distractions” is a whole lot of chickenshit: if you accepted money to write this book, which I’m guessing you did, then it is work. It’s only a hobby if you don’t get paid for it, and saying your ‘real’ work got in the way is pretty insulting to the people who paid you to write the book.

5. Speaking of insulting your publishers, your claim that the book “isn’t what the Amazon description says” is a bit odd, considering that Amazon’s description came from the publisher, and the publisher’s description came from you. What you’re really saying is that your book is not what you say your book is, which, honestly, wouldn’t surprise me.

6. Finally, while I’m glad that unlike most writers, you have maintained the necessary objectivity to claim that your book is “a very serious, thoughtful, argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care”. However, you might wanna get that message to Doubleday, who believe that your book is on a level of serious thoughtfulness that deserves this on the cover.

Do Russians love their children too?

April Fool's Day has come early at Killing an Arab! Even though past experience teaches that the commenters at LGF can't go five seconds without hoping that we nuke Mecca, that hilarious jokester Chuckles Johnson has us on by pretending that kind of thing is an abberation. It's all part of a fun new April Fool's Day joke-meme that's sweeping the right-wing-blog nation, where they pretend that left-wing blogs are full of foul-mouthed, disgusting, bloodthirsty creeps, while the conservative blogs are peopled by gentle, loving saints who would never, for example, call for a constitutional amendment to ban Islam or imply that a teenager would prefer to die in a car crash than grow up alongside a fruity-seeming father.

Now, Chuck has always had a very subtle sense of humor, and you might not know he was kidding just by noting that, in other posts this week, he calls Islam a "death cult", mocks the death of Rachel Corrie for the ten millionth time, and uses sure-fire punchline words like "disgusting", "ominous", "obnoxious", "violently bigoted", "disgraceful", "nihilistic", "debased", and "evil" to crack hilarious jokes about people who don't agree with him. But here's how you can tell it's all just a big prank: immediately after this post, there's another post about how Elizabeth Edwards has cancer. And while no one wishes for her to die (since she's not running for anything), that "tiniest of tiny fractions" of troublemakers -- who are, of course, immediately shouted down by their higher-minded peers -- does have a few things to say about her husband:

- "disgusting"
- "a jerk"
- "an idiot" (first three posts)
- "sad"
- "continual disgust for him"
- "disgusting"
- "speaks badly of him"
- "his vanity and ego are going to rob them all of what time she has left"
- "I doubt a lot of this sincerity from the nutroots"
- "his priorities are skewed"
- "If he really cared, he would drop outta the race"
- "the libs are thinking we're just being nice to make them look bad"
- "misguided"
- "a cad"
- "it goes to show what kind of decision maker Johnny Breck is"
- "idiot"
- "a slug"
- "a black hole of greed and ambition"
- "people are mouthing platitudes that they don't really feel at all"
- "fucking tool"
- "shallow"
- "impressing very few people, I fear"
- "milking this"
- "making an attention-whoring parade out of it"
- "I still cannot stand her husband"
- "There are Two Americas: The America that stands by its family and loved ones, and the America that lusts for power"
- "She has much Class, he, however, does not"
- "i don't think it's coincidence that in every liberal marriage the wife is the dominant partner"
- "disingenuous"
- "despicable to the nth degree...a cold blooded bastard"
- "he's in some way trying to milk this for political gain"
- "condescending"
- "I have no pity or sympathy...these people are destroying the last refuge of freedom on the earth"
- "Edwards is putting himself before his wife"
- "a complete tool"
- "psychopath"
- "ludicrous"
- "pathological narcissist"
- "I don't trust him as far as I could throw him"
- "piece of shit"
- "a creep and an opportunist of the highest order"
- "the living definition of a charlatan"
- "I wouldn't call [Elizabeth Edwards] warm, caring, or particularly fair...she's no angel and a rabid leftie"
- "politically retarded...sleaze-ball"
- "such men...would sell the gold teeth out of their dead mother's mouths"
- "I cannot hope or pray for a man I despise"
- "I lost all sympathy for him when I heard his comments today"

Then there's this high-larious bit of unintentional irony:

I just had it out with my moonbat bro who tried to make a moral equivalence between conservative and liberal blogs. I told him 99.9% of gutter and hate talk comes from their side. Vicious anarchist assholes they are.

...aaaaaaaaand, just so you don't think the exterminate-the-brutes crowd can't find some way of blaming absolutely everything on the Muslims, there's these two:

"Cancer is the real enemy of mankind. I wish the muslims would learn that."

"This makes me hate the Islamofacists even more. The money we have to spend fighting their evil death cult could be available instead for research to find cures that give people life."

TAKE THAT, MOHAMMED