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.