And now, another installment of TORTURE IN THE NEWS!

See, you go and post something sarcastic about how torture isn't always so bad, and along comes Jonah Goldberg to moot your whole point.

Consider killing. In every society in the world, murder is punished more harshly than non-lethal torture. If I waterboard you, or lock you in my basement with Duran Duran blasting at you 24/7, even if I beat you for hours with a rubber hose, my punishment will be less severe than if I murder you, simply because it is worse to take a life deliberately than to cause pain, even sadistically.

Well, no. As Jonah himself will point out below, we make all sorts of exceptions for killing, because we tend to believe that sometimes it must be done; whereas we never believe torture is necessary. We allow and even encourage killing during wartime; we never encourage torture of our enemies. The police killing a criminal is a tragic but sometimes unavoidable event, while the police torturing a criminal is a scandal; many people believe we should be allowed to kill prisoners, but hardly anyone believes we should be allowed to torture them. We allow for the possibility of accidental killing; there is no such thing as accidental torture. Even within the framework of murder, torture is an exacerbating factor: a woman who shoots her philandering husband will rightly be punished, but a man who tortures a woman to death is far worse. Goldberg is engaging in sophistry at its worst, pretending he doesn't know how universal an evil torture is -- even worse than killing -- in order to defend the indefensible. (Also pretty repulsive is his citing mild-sounding tortures like waterboarding -- or even comical ones like being forced to listen to Duran Duran -- to lessen the gravity of the debate. Note that he doesn't cite actual tortures used against Iraqi detainees, like being wrapped in a carpet and beaten nearly to death, or having a light stick crammed up your ass, or being raped, or having your genitals electrically shocked by car batteries.)

Would you rather take some lumps in a dungeon for a month, or take a dirt nap forever?

Well, gosh! When you put it that way, I guess torture is fine!

Yet, according to the torture prohibitionists, there must be a complete ban on anything that even looks like torture, regardless of context, even though we'd never dream of a blanket ban on killing.

Hmm. Could that be, maybe, because TORTURE IS A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THING THAN KILLING? Could it be because there's an element of moral evil in torture so indefensible that no one thinks it can be done with any moral justification whatsoever? I mean, for Christ's sake, if you pose in a Goldberg's Choice way -- "Would you rather get slobbered on for five minutes, or take a dirt nap forever?" -- then clearly, killing is far worse than rape. But you don't hear anyone going around saying that we should make exceptions for rape, or that the complete ban on rape is stifling and doesn't allow for legitimate exceptions. Because there aren't any! Good grief.

Anyway, next Jonah admits that there are reasons to kill, but not to torture -- not because there are no good reasons to torture, but because we just haven't given enough thought to finding them:

One reason for this disconnect is that we've thought a lot about killing and barely at all about torture. Almost no one opposes killing in all circumstances; wars sometimes need to be fought, the hopelessly suffering may require relief, we reserve the right to self-defense. Indeed, the law recognizes a host of nuances when it comes to homicide, and the place where everybody draws an unambiguous line on killing is at something we call "murder." But there is no equivalent word for murder when it comes to torture. It's always evil.

Clearly, we just haven't tried hard enough to find reasons to support torture! Really, when you think about it, people oppose torture because it has a bad name. If it was called 'puppy-flowerism', everyone would love it! We just need to work hard to come up with situations where sticking a flashlight up a guy's rectum and smearing shit on his face and bashing his fingers with gun butts is acceptable, and then call it 'proactive pre-terrogation', and all of the sudden it will be morally justifiable.

Yet that's not our universal reaction. In movies and on TV, good men force evil men to give up information via methods no nicer than what the CIA is allegedly employing. If torture is a categorical evil, shouldn't we boo Jack Bauer on Fox's "24"?

Well, there you go, folks. There's Jonah's hole card. There's his big reveal. There's his "AHA, GOTCHA!" moment by which he proves that torture is okay: because some people think a fictional character on a TV action show is neat. This would be a jackass argument even if you ignored the fact that lots of people do boo Jack Bauer.

There's a reason we keep hearing about the ticking time bomb scenario in the torture debate: Is abuse justified in getting a prisoner to reveal the location of a bomb that would kill many when detonated?

Actually, the reason we keep hearing about it is because people like Jonah Goldberg constantly dredge it up in order to have a tiny thread on which to hang their repulsive pro-torture agenda. We certainly don't keep hearing about it because it keeps actually taking place.

We understand that in such a situation, Americans would expect to be protected. That's why human-rights activists have tried to declare this scenario a red herring.

Another reason is that IT NEVER FUCKING HAPPENS.

I tell you, man: there's a lot of shit I can't believe I'm hearing these days. There's a lot of things going on that I honestly can't believe is taking place, that it just doesn't seem possible is allowed to happen with little to no public outcry. It's stunning to me that health care in the world's wealthiest country gets more and more inacessible instead of less and less; it's absolutely shocking that a major American city was basically allowed to vanish while the government sat on its hands. And I continue to be obsessed by the total lack of public outcry over the massive looting, fraud, misappropriation and corruption in Iraq by American corporations and government agencies. But more than anything, the fact that any day of the week I can turn on the radio, TV or computer and hear my fellow Americans, from everyday citizens to blowhard pundits all the way up to the President of the United States, demanding the right to torture people, is beyond unreal. America-hating comsymp traitors like me are constantly being accused of harboring feelings of shame over what is the freest country on earth, but it's pretty goddamn hard to be proud of your country when its leadership is bitching and moaning about how they aren't allowed to torture prisoners.

TORCHA!

Everybody likes to talk about torture. All of the sudden, torture is the bad guy. Like there's no such thing as GOOD torture! Come on, you liberal hippie freaks! What happened to 'there is no such thing as a man with no good in him"? But once you talk about our old pal torture, it's like he never accomplished anything! What about the Spanish Inquisition? Torture did a good job then, saving who knows how many thousands of souls. Without torture, all those forcible conversions would now be damned to Hell instead of eating Pizza Rolls in Heaven with John Wayne and Jesus! the Bush Administration is pro-torture, and you know how big they are on moral clarity. Even when they're against it, they're for it, kinda. And torture works as an anti-terror tactic, no matter what a couple of mean-spirited dissidents say; we have no less an authority than popular TV show 24 saying it's so!

How else can we tell that torture is a good thing? Well, the United Nations says that torture is worse now in Iraq than it was under Saddam Hussein, and the administration keeps telling us that there's lots of good news in Iraq, so maybe this is it. Maybe this is one of those things-getting-better we never hear about in the biased liberal American media! Thanks, BBC, for hipping us to one of the frequent victories in the new, democratic, peaceful Iraq. Torture also creates jobs, and that's good for the economy, so that should put an end to the discussion right there, but some people just love to complain.

Not complaining are leading lights like Rep. Lynn "I Voted for Torture" Westmoreland (R-GA), Thomas "Moral Courage" Sowell, John "Nobody Hated America in the '70s" Yoo, and the always-reliable Wall Street Journal's editorial board. If those people are in favor of torture, why aren't you? The WSJ is America's paper of record, people! And speaking of America, this country is widely hailed as the advance-guard of freedom and democracy, so if we are the first nation ever to officially authorize violations of the Geneva Conventions, maybe the problem isn't us, but the stupid Conventions.

As if any more proof were needed that torture is A-OK, no less august a body than the Traditional Values Coalition has come out in favor of it, and in opposition to those who would restrict it. TRADITIONAL VALUES, folks! That's what they're all about! If torture wasn't a traditional value, they would naturally oppose it! What more do you need to know? GO GO GADGET TORTURE

As long as I'm floundering...

...it's been a while since we did a Town Hall Roundup.

Michael Medved: Television is taking over our lives! Learn more on my daily three-hour radio show. Also, don't listen to that crazy Al Gore.

Mike S. Adams: My boss is a stuck-up bitch. Also, my deranged story about raiding a crackhouse proves that liberals are racist, somehow.

Walter Williams: I am Uncle Ruckus.

Brent Bozell, Ben Shapiro, Kathleen Parker, Debra Saunders, and Cal Thomas: Boy, that Clinton sure is an angry nut! Not that we're obsessed with him or anything! It's just that he is like Charles Manson!

Andrew Tallman: You should always stand up for what you believe, unless what you believe is that the President is an asshole.

Michelle Malkin: Charlotte Church is a skanky cunt because she uses sex to sell herself. Also, don't miss my weekly video blog at hotair.com, which often features me wearing skimpy outfits and jumping on a trampoline!

At last, the truth

The man from Fuddled, MN, in defense of his claim that his is not a political blog, finally explains himself.

I have zero objections to homosexuality but balk at redefining marriage.

I don't mind homos, as long as they don't ask for the same rights as regular people.

I recycle and abjure waste and live light as possible and dislike Hummers but I’m unimpressed by environmental scaremongering.

I like environmentalism as long as nobody tries to convince me that it's important.

I believe women are the intellectual equal of men but emotionally and psychologically different.

You know, because of the "curse".

I don’t want to outweigh the firefighter who attempts to carry me down the steps, and I don’t want a 37-year old man leading my daughter’s Girl Scout troop. No Harvard jobs for me!

HA HA SNOBBY INTELLECTUALS

I would rather hang out with Iggy Pop than Frank Sinatra.

Even though both of them would call me a tweedy nerd and flick cigarettes in my face.

I love the 50s but, if I lived there as a 20-something I'd be the sort of person who annoys me now, railing against the very symbols of artifice I prize today.

I am barely capable of recognizing what a profounding irritating person I am, but that won't stop me from complaining about the kids today with their rock and roll and their hair.

I hate the 60s, but know full well I would have been a pretentious stoner antiestablishment wannabee until the pose cost me money.

I would have pretended to be a hippie until it started to interfere with my income. I am a poseur and proud of it!

I think light rail is a money pit sinkhole beloved by New Urbanists, but support public subsidies of large-scale bus systems to move inner-city people to wherever the jobs may be.

I think public transport is a great idea for the poor and other people who aren't me.

I dearly love the inner city but don’t care if people move to the burbs for nice houses and good schools.

I hate the symptoms, but I am not interested in the cause.

I support the public schools. I support school choice.

I make no sense.

For that matter I support the New Urbanists, except when they get high-mindedly pissy about people’s free choices.

I am in favor of progressivism, as long as it doesn't try to get people to do something they don't want to do, or point out that it might be harmful to do the things they're already doing.

I believe in God, but I’m not throwing away my Coop books because he had a hot time at a Black Mass.

I...what?

I can’t stand everything Islamicists stand for, despair of the tide that seems to swamp a religion for which I have, despite my efforts, no empathetic connection whatsoever, but I celebrate the first Muslim in space.

I hate Muslims except when they remind me of Star Trek.

I dislike most TV, most modern music, and most movies, but love the big messy hot throbbing blob of Western pop culture, partly because I connect with part of it like a dog biting on a live wire, and partly because the loud rude crass mess spells freedom, and that is the root word at the heart of the American experiment.

I am an old crank.

We can always learn from others, but they’ve much to learn from us.

America is the best.

Unless they have a 200+ year track record of expanding rights and unimaginable prosperity as well.

America is the super-best.

SNORE BOBO COLUMN SCHMUCK IN INK SHOP SHOCKER

My arch-nemesis James Lileks is on vacation at a cabin up by the Boundary Waters. He has not only updated his (free) website twice, but has done a half-hour audio blog and also redesigned the site. While on vacation. With his family. At the Boundary Waters.

SCHMUCK.

Speaking of schmucks, I can't link to the whole thing since it's NYT premium content, but uberschmuck David Brooks, who actually makes a fat living writing on political and cultural trends in America, has just written a column in which he notes that getting a tattoo isn't really very rebellious, because a lot of people have them now. WHAT A STUNNER! Only about fifteen years behind the rest of the country comes D. Brooks with that dynamite observation. Next up from the keen eyes of this trend-hawk: 'punk rock' is actually sorta reactionary and conservative! Also, ad agencies are now using images of '60s rebellion to sell products!

Banana Republican

The man from Fuddled, MN is on vacation this week, but that doesn't mean I can't still be outraged by him! Somehow, last week, I missed one of his high-larious "Screedblogs", this on the subject of Castro, the Demon in Human Shape who even today menaces Boca Raton. Lileks goes for one of his little flights of fancy and imagines Uncle Fidel being visited by 'The Angel of History'.

Eventually it will come down to this, my friend: history will note that the people in the American jails at the tip of this island ate better than the average Cuban.

Which, of course, has nothing to do with nearly 50 years of sanctions, blockades and embargos by the world power just up the street, but is entirely due to Fidel's Stalinist treachery and greed. When you think about it, those illegally held torture victims at Guantanamo are really kinda lucky!

Odd, really: in this democratic, egalitarian nation, the only man you saw fit to follow happened to be your brother. What are the chances of that, eh? Most people in America don’t know a thing about him. ‘Another Castro?’ the Americans think. ‘They had a spare?’

Hmmm. That seems so oddly familiar to me. As if something similar had happened here, recently, maybe eight years ago. Something that made leftist observers comment on the banana-republicity of it all, to the silence or scorn of conservatives. But I simply cannot remember what it was!

Eh, probably wasn't important.

If you're having war problems, I feel bad for you, son

So, how's the war going? You know, the war! The war in Afghanistan.

Oh, wait, let's not talk about that one. We won that one, and everything's fine, and shut up. What I mean is the war in Iran Syria Lebanon.

Actually, you know what? Forget that one. I know some people call it a "proxy war", but what does that mean? That word is confusing. It's just Israel, and they're cleaning house in Palestine or Lebanon or Hezbollanea or one of those dirty countries, and it's not our business, so forget it. Let's get to the important war: North Korea.

Ha ha ha! Oh, I'm kidding, of course. I mean the war in Iraq. Technically, the war in Iraq is over; what's killing our soldiers by the hundreds and their people by the thousands is an insurgency. Or a terrorism. Or something like that. Whatever it is, we have to win it, unless we don't, but the important thing to remember is, it's very difficult.

Everybody wants to say that. The president reminds us that it's hard, in that voice that isn't so much the "don't patronize me" voice of a man who's being accused not knowing something he really does know as it is the "okay already" voice of a man who did something wrong and is trying to cover. The Republicans say we can't 'cut and run', which I guess means we stay in the house we set on fire so at least we go down with it. The Democrats, who are doing a bang-up job of cleaning every last vestige of matter out of their collective nutsack, keep saying that we have a difficult job ahead of us and there's no easy answers, but at the very least we can't keep doing what we've been doing, whatever that is. (The Democrats say this because they know that actually putting forth an idea might allow the Republicans to criticize them, and they can't have that, because they might lose the five or six 'swing' or 'center' voters that we are assured exist somewhere in the Big Sky states.) What nobody wants to say, what nobody has the nerve to say, what this whole fucking country is deathly afraid of admitting before the whole war just like we were in Vietnam because, I don't know, it'll make us look like pussies in front of that girl at the Hot Dog on a Stick, is that we fucked up. We did something really wrong and stupid, and it just keeps getting worse, and maybe we ought to get the fuck out while the the-fuck-out-getting is good.

I was, for a while, one of those well-meaning numbnuts who said, "Well, okay, yeah, the whole thing was a goddamn disaster from Day Zero, but we can't just leave, because what will happen to those poor people?" But you know what, me? Whatever's going to happen to those poor people, it's either already happened, or it's happened, or it's going to happen, regardless or whether or not PFC Antoine Huckleberry of Young America, MN is getting his face blown off while it's happening. I'm having a hard time thinking of a worst-case scenario that will occur if we pull up stakes and go the fuck home. Civil war? Already happening. Religious fanatics in power? Already happening, and has gone on in (our enemy) Iran and (our ally) Saudi Arabia for decades without the world coming to an end. A brutal dictator taking over? Iraq, as a nation, has been to that there and done that that. A partitioning of the country? Even elements of the neoconservative right are talking about this like it's a good thing. A humanitarian crisis? We passed that road sign about seventy miles back, kid. If worse comes to worst, and we end up with a few hundred thousand people dead, well, just throw 'em on the pile, right? We can have our own citizens over there getting aced for fuckin' nothing, or we can put them to some decent use.

The Bush adminstration has sold us all on the idea that it's a very complex and difficult situation, and we can't just walk away from it. But you know what? Sure we can. History is already being written along the lines that, hey, we got into this war, and yeah, it's "controversial", being completely predicated on lies since before it even started, but it's really hard, and who knows what the right thing to do would be? I do. The right thing would be to fucking stop. It may be a complex and difficult situation to tell your son to stop beating his kids, because after all, you beat him, and he's used to it, and wouldn't that make you a hypocrite?, and besides, maybe your grandkids enjoy being beaten, or if you didn't toughen 'em up with a few slaps now and then some kid at the schoolyard would beat them up twice as hard, and who's to say if you didn't discipline those fuckers right, they would have turned into a bully themselves? But telling your son to stop beating his kids is still the right thing to do.

As far as I can tell, the worst things that will happen if we pull out of Iraq are (a) we'll look like schmucks, which, I mean, mission already fucking accomplished there; (b) we'll have to abandon our precious hard-won democracy, which, you know, hey! it's working out so well, plus, fuck that! That's nothing but fucking pride. That's the guy who completely fucked up building his house, and there's no electricity so the food is spoiling and the insulation is mislaid so it's freezing cold in the winter, and the plumbing doesn't work so his kids have to piss and shit in old coffee cans, but he won't move the family into an apartment, because goddamn it, he did a good job on the bannister, and he's not going to leave that behind; and (c) the horrible scumbags doing business over there won't be able to loot the country anymore. Which, I not-so-secretly suspect, is the real reason we're sticking around, and, hell, maybe given how fucked our economy is -- like Frank Sobotka said, we used to make things here, but now we just pick the other guy's pocket -- is a good thing. If we pull out of Iraq the whole system might collapse and someone will decide to collect on all the debt we can't pay off. So maybe it's our patriotic duty to support war profiteers, instead of stringing them up.

Anyway, how's the war going? I've been busy.

Meat the Press

The less obnoxious of the Two Bolts of Bush (chief of staff Josh Bolten, not UN excoriator John "Mustache Pete" Bolton) was on Meet the Press yesterday. He was actually pretty solid on the situation in Lebanon (even I, who am ready to bite people's throats out merely for suggesting that my views on Israel are not 104% correct, didn't find much to complain about other than his hilarious statement that America's support of Israel is nothing more than a manifestation of our support of the right of all people everywhere to be free); he was a little more at sea on Iraq, claiming to the lack of any supporting evidence that there is ample cause for optimism and dismissing in an extremely creepy fashion that hectoring statements by the (democratically elected!) Iraqi foreign minister were "just what you'd expect" from...well, he didn't say "those people", but he came as close as the law will allow. Still, it wasn't until Tim Russert started bird-dogging him on stem cell research that his little ship sailed away into the lonely empty waters of Indefensibilia. Russert showed Tony Snow's dingbat press conference where he explained that the President's position on stem cell research is that it's murder; he (Russert) then asked Bolten if, given that Bush's primary spokesment says stem cell research is murder, that means that the president in so many words is completely fucking out of his mind. Bolten, who looked like he'd been caught putting his dick in the caviar at Daddy's dinner party, did his level best to hem and haw and change the subject, but he ended up echoing Bush's "it's hard work!" claim about the Iraq war, saying stem cell researcn was a "very difficult, very complex issue", and that was why the President's policies made no goddamn sense whatsoever. The best moment was when Russert quoted Karl Rove as saying that adult stem cell research had shown more promise in medical research than embryonic tissue research -- a claim which no scientist whatsoever has made, as far as I can tell. Bolten agreed with this patently ridiculous statement, and Russert asked him how he could agree when there was no scientific research to back it up. At this point, the following hilarious exchange took place:

BOLTEN: "Well, I'm no scientist."

RUSSERT: "Neither is Karl Rove."

BOLTEN: "Oh, he knows a lot of things."

Anyone in the mood for further rumblings about politics is advised to check out James Wolcott's posts of the last few days. He's been on a roll lately, both with links and original thoughts, and for the most part, his views of the Israel/Lebanon crisis are my own.

Oh, also, this.

Here's something about good political humor:

Most of it basically writes itself. Like, for instance, this transcript of an obviously drunk-off-her-nut Crazy Pammy recording her latest video blog. I really don't have to add anything to it to make it high-larious; just reading it, with her dynamite threesome of alcoholism, insanity and the biggest persecution complex on earth, is enough.

I THINK THEY CHANGE HATS

Hey! How you doin’? Um…but first I have a spec…special message for Nash…Nasfrallah…Nasrallah of Hezbollah, or Hamas, or Islamic Jihad, or the Revolu…the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, or al-Q’aeda, whatever hat they’re wearing today. This is special, man. This one’s for you.

YOU'RE LUCKY YOU'RE JUST READING THE TRANSCRIPT, I HAD TO WATCH IT

[lip-synchs to “Don’t You Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me” while dancing and alternating making orgasmic faces, holding up an empty cocktail glass, and waving around a picture of a veiled Islamic woman.]

WORST WAR CRIMINALS ARE THOSE WHO DON'T WANT WAR

Nostril Man! Okay, enough of that. A couple quick things, quick quick things, because, uh, we’re being…it’s an onslaught. It’s an onslaught of media, and, uh, we have to hit the biggest criminals first. Uh…the peace conspirators. You know who the peace conspirators are? [Sings] “All we are saying is let’s kill the Jews.” I mean, really. Who wants war? Nobody wants war, okay? But war was declared on us, and I like the media’s attention to each individual: “three civilians were killed, four civilians were killed.” Oh, that’s nice. Are these the same innocent civilians that strap suicide belts to their babies? Are these the same, uh, suicide, uh, uh, are…innocent civilians that, uh, photograph their children with these, uh, big strapping guns? And, and teach them to k…to die? How…is this the innocent life? The culture of death?

HE DIDN'T EVEN GO TO AN IVY

You know, I notice this Syr…you ever notice this Syrian ambassador, this Assad the chinless, you know, optometrist? Did he make it to ophthalmology? Nah. No, he’s not even an ophthalmologist. Never got to medical school. I’ll bet you he’s an optometrist. Um…they only come out from under their rock when they’re killing the Jews. [Adopts a faux-Arab accent] “Oh, why is a Jew life better than our life?” First of all, who even said that? What are you, hung up on that? [Holds up empty cocktail glass] Oh, that’s right, you’re not allowed. Um, why are you hung up on that? Nobody said that. Don’t teach your children death and maybe you’ll feel better about life.

NO, YOU'RE DRUNK

You like my fish tank? 350-gallon saltwater tank. Everything in here is alive. Live and uncensored.

FEMINISTS EERILY SILENT ON ISSUES OF GENITAL MUTILATION, OVERDRESSING

So, we have the peace…peace conspirators in America, and, and the feminazis, who, who say nothing about clitorectomies, say nothing about wrapping girls up from head to toe [shows photo of veiled woman again; begins dancing and singing to “Don’t You Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me”].

THESE CRAZY MILITANTS! WHAT'S UP WITH THEM?

Also, what’s with the militants? The Palestinian militants?

ISRAELI TOENAILLESS IN GAZA

There’s nobody in Gaza. Nobody. ‘Cause…there’s not an Israeli toenail in Gaza, okay? It’s…it’s not militants. They are soldiers, okay? When you hear “humanitarian crisis”, it’s called, it, it is, it…it is the buzzword for “it’s okay to kill the Jews”, okay? Um…it is unbelievable.

A SINISTER CABAL OF CONSPIRATORIAL JEWS MUSLIMS CONTROL OUR MEDIA

And the funny thing is, about the media, is that al-Q’aeda and Islamic Jihad and, and Islam, right? Let’s call it Islam, has the, you know, entire Arab media, wh…that doesn’t say that is what it’s told. And they have our media. And let me tell you something, ladies and gentlemen, if you don’t think that is a powerful tool in the arsenal of war, you’ve got to be crazy in 2006.

PRESIDENT ACCUSED OF HAVING SPINE

For Bush, I, I, I tip my hat [bows], I say thank you very much for having a spine, thank you very much for standing behind, uh, in the struggle, uh, between good and evil, for standing for good. Because that’s what we’re talking about. We’re talking about a value system. And, um, and the culture of life. And that’s another interesting thing: I don’t know if you noticed, but, uh, they’re, uh, I get…what they want to do, “Oh, they’re just for two soldiers”. First of all, they keep bringing up the two soldiers. What happened to jihad? They keep bringing up the two soldiers. What happen to the eight they killed when they took the two? Nobody talks about them. And they want the…the, the Jews to day “All right, it’s just two soldiers.”

NOW, I'M NO JEW-OLOGIST

But…what they don’t understand, what they’re trying to do, is they’re trying to twist. They’re trying to change the Jewish soul. Because the J…in the Talmud – and I don’t know anything about this, so you…those guys in Israel, if you wanna correct, to correct me, be my guest – is, um, you know, you save one life, you save the world entire. That’s, uh, that’s how it is.

THIS SEGUE BROUGHT TO YOU BY STOLICHNAYA VODKA

So, the, uh, if we have to change what is our essence and our soul, uh, [long pause] we can’t. We go on top of Masada and kill ourselves. I could, I can see all the Jew-haters: “Yay! Yeah! Atlas finally got the answer!” [Begins dancing to “Don’t You Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me” again] This is gonna be a short one, I can’t help it.

DON'T YOU WISH YOUR ZYGOTE WAS HOT LIKE ME

Oh, and President Bush, would you please treat the Jews the way you treat the, the, the zygotes? Those little, little, those embryos? [Begins dancing to “Don’t You Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me” again]

JUICY LEADER-ON-LEADER ACTION

Oh, the funniest! The funniest. The funniest is blame Bush for mideast. Clinton, Clinton had a terrorist! What, what foreign leader, had, uh, wha…did Clinton have at the White House more than anyone? That’s right. Yassir Arafat. Bastard. And who was making out? What two women? What Sapphic session was going on? Arafat’s wife and, uh, Cl…Hillary. [Begins dancing to “Don’t You Wish Your Girlfriend Was Hot Like Me” again] Did you see my pictures on my website?

AND I MEAN LOTS OF INFIDEL JUICE

Anyway, just wanna say, Israel, we stand with you. I want you to know that. We love you. And, um, we’re in solidarity with you. That’s it, folks! It could have been longer, but, uh, I gotta go have a drink of, uh, of, uh, infidel juice. See ya!

Now I get it

Town Hall's 'The Funnies': still not funny.

I mean, seriously: politics aside, these guys have a kind of amazing knack for telling jokes that are not only identical to one another, but not funny the first time you see it. This week's "the U.N. are sissies, HAW HAW" is mildly more amusing than last week's "Islamic terrorists are everywhere, HAW HAW I guess", but not enough to justify the same joke being repeated four times in one day. (Plus, a special repeat of the "Islamic terrorists are everywhere" joke, in case you really liked it last week!) I'll admit that liberal cartoonists are often equally simplistic and unfunny, but Christ, at least they're capable of telling more than one joke at a time. It's like these guys are getting a Theme Of The Week from some yutz over at the Mellon-Scaife Foundation.

Still, I guess it's better than this article by the inexplicable John Stossel, who uses his conservative bully pulpit to argue in defense of cousins marrying.

In which I break my own rule not to discuss this issue

Lileks today uses Toontown to illustrate to his daughter why the Palestinians are wrong.

No, really.

Polly ticks

Hey, how about those Israeli airstrikes? GOOD PLAN! Only four dozen civilians dead so far, that's acceptable. I can't believe they didn't think to bomb Lebanon before! Or, at least, recently, before, again, since the mid-'80s! This will surely make Israel safe and secure forever and ever.

James Lileks today says that he got peevish at a Krispy Kreme employee for offering him a free refill, because their stock price is too low and they can't afford to do that sort of thing. He was, please God above, joking.

Did you know that Town Hall now features a cartoon section? No, really! It's called 'The Funnies', even though, as any number of examples show, they are not, in fact, funny. Not only not funny, but not funny in a nearly identical fashion to one another. HAW DE HAW!

This is a job for...

Debbie Schlussel -- who was once in training to become Ann Coulter's understudy until everyone noticed that she wasn't pretty enough to step into the Arab-bashing hag role and it fell to the more exotic Michelle Malkin to pick up the slack -- has seen the new Superman movie. And she has used it as a springboard for her crazy, sexist anti-PC ravings. Por ejemplo:

* Lois Lane is a "slut"

* Superman is too politically correct, which inspired Debbie to craft this hilarious and incredibly skillful bit of PhotoShop humor

* Evidence of Superman's PC nature is found in the fact that Lex Luthor doesn't team up with al-Q'aeda to promote Islamofascist (no, really, she actually says this)

* Also, Hollywood's dirty commie pro-terror stance can be found in the fact that some advertising for the film doesn't feature the phrase "truth, justice & the American Way", and the fact that other advertising for the film DOES feature the phrase, plus huge American flags, just proves what hypocrites the people in showbiz are

* And to top it all off, Superman's cape is entirely too muted a shade of red, which illustrates the national malaise the media would like to convince us we are undergoing (no, really, she actually says this too)

"Where are your ca-hoonies?"

It's Crazy Pammy, the awful harridan of the Atlas Shrugs blog, doing her very first video blog!

It's ungentlemanly to attack one's political foes for their appearance, so let's instead focus on:

* her horrid Lun-Guylind accent
* her inability to complete a sentence
* her attacks on George Clooney for not talking about "jee-had"
* the way her mind seems unable to focus on anything she is actually saying
* the way she has pressed her hapless children into parroting her deranged political views by ceaseless nagging

Oh, it's a real treat. And when you're done with that, why not prep yourself for the release of the Strangers With Candy movie by digging video excerpts of Florrie Fisher, another mentally unbalanced woman with a fierce Noo Yawk accent and the original model for Jerri Blank? The first excerpt, where she discusses how "I was thrown from a horse and I had to have a laminectomy, and I ended up in the San Francisco General Hospital, where I was operated on by the same doctor who operated on the late Jayne Mansfield's son Zoltan when he was mauled by the lion", is one of the most batshit things you'll ever see until Pam's next v-log.

Politics in action

1. War in Iraq is going poorly; goals ill-defined, bodies piling up, political system a mess, no clear exit strategy, recruiting down and corruption up.

2. Distraction of possible war in Iran fails to capture the imagination of public at large despite hard upselling by pundit class.

3. Marine Corps accused in massacre of unarmed civilians, including women, children, and the elderly, in Haditha; 'support the troops no matter what' mentality takes a hit.

4. Poll numbers for President Bush continue at record low.

5. But wait! Hey, remember Zarqawi? No? Well, he's Oddjob to bin-Laden's Goldfinger, or something like that! And guess what? We killed him! The war is almost won!

6. Plus, look! The president 'secretly' visited Iraq to boost everyone's confidence, and say "al-Brauni, you're doing a heck of a job" to the dipshits we picked to run the country! He didn't even wear body armor for the helicopter flight, because he is a grandstanding asshole manly tough guy!

7. And by a crazy coincidence, just one day after meeting with our manly tough guy president, Iraqi PM Nuri al-Maliki launched a violent government crackdown (called 'Operation Forward Together' HA HA HA) in Baghdad! A violent government crackdown which is sure to lead to peace, freedom, and progress, just like violent government crackdowns always do everywhere!

8. So what happened? I'll tell you what happened: President Manley T. Guy's poll numbers are up, up, up! Now, almost half of America thinks that the war in Iraq isn't completely unwinnable!

Oh, it's all too depressing. Here, watch this video of David Horowitz making a David Horowitz out of himself instead.

More Annti-Christ

I know that responding to her is pretty much identical to letting a three-year-old drive a car so he doesn't throw a tantrum, but she has reached some kind of a deranged apogee that makes William Jennings Bryan's the-sun-revolves-around-the-earth meltdown of 1925 look sane by comparison. Within the last 24 hours, she wrote this deranged column that goes off the charts of Nazi comparisons (it is liberals, of course, who are like Nazis), culminating with the claim that liberals would love Hitler if he hadn't turned against their beloved Stalin* AND gone on TV to claim that 9/11 widows are opportunistic gold-diggers who are happy their husbands died so they can ram their agenda down our throats**.

Oh, Ann, you're the worst American demagogue since the heyday of Father Coughlin you silly billy!

*: No resemblence between this claim and actual history, in which liberals opposed Hitler while conservatives were still desperately trying to keep us out of the war, should be implied or inferred.

**: Yes, Ann Coulter, who has spearheaded the right-wing offensive to use 9/11 as the final and untouchable justification for every item on the neo-conservative agenda, is accusing the widows of dead men of being opportunistic. THE END! OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION!

If we keep using this analogy, the terrorists win

Mona Charen:

No one yet knows what happened in Haditha, Iraq, last November.

Actually, a lot of people know. Most especially the soldiers involved.

There are accounts -- unconfirmed -- of a massacre perpetrated by a unit of enraged Marines against unarmed civilians.

Dig them qualifiers! The Marine Corps itself seems pretty convinced that something happened.

Consider that Abu Ghraib, which did not involve killing or torture

Actually, it included both torture and killing.

became the American and world press's favorite topic for weeks on end, though far more grotesque acts were being perpetrated daily by the jihadists in Iraq and elsewhere.

Siiiiiiiiigh.

For the bajillionth time, IT IS INHERENTLY MORE NEWSWORTHY WHEN "GOOD GUYS" COMMIT QUESTIONABLE ACTS THAN WHEN "BAD GUYS" DO IT. We trust that Americans, as the self-declared 'good guys', will not perpetrate acts that we normally associate with Islamist terrorists; that's why it's more newsworthy when they do, just as it's more newsworthy when a policeman is caught dealing drugs or robbing banks than it is when a drug dealer or bank robber is caught doing same. A fucking ten-year-old could figure out why it's idiotic to bring up how bad terrorists are when non-terrorists commit acts of terrorism, but the right just keeps dragging it out as if it means something. LEAVE IT.

In the period since then, the American press has focused almost exclusively on stories from Iraq that depict the situation as hopeless and the role of Americans as counterproductive.

Which has nothing to do with the situation being hopeless or American actions being counterproductive. The job of the press is to deliver GOOD news! Look, purple fingers! They're painting a school, and it's only costing eight million dollars!

My Lai was not evidence of the moral bankruptcy of the Vietnam War. It was exactly what America-haters here and abroad claimed it was not -- an aberration.

Whoopsie-doodle!

They always flee, teaches Osama bin Laden.

If we criticize American troops for murdering innocents, the terrorists ZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz.

The lessons our liberal professors and editorialists learned was that the war was immoral. And no amount of experience -- a million boat people, genocide in neighboring Cambodia, the collapse of communism nearly everywhere -- has been sufficient to alter their view.

Um...the genocide in Cambodia almost certainly wouldn't have happened without the American installation of hugely unpopular local leaders and the massive socioeconomic disruption that resulted from our illegal bombing of the country.

In fact, the defeatism preceded the Iraq War and was evident in the early days of the Afghanistan campaign as well when The New York Times famously declared the conflict a "quagmire" after only a few days of fighting.

Whereas now, everything is great in Afghanistan!

Amir Taheri, writing in the June issue of Commentary magazine, offers a catalogue of progress in Iraq that is almost impossible to find in our principal news outlets...there have been no queues of refugees streaming out of Iraq. To the contrary, 1.2 million have returned home since Saddam's ouster.

By a crazy coincidence, many of the people 'returning' to Iraq (often from Pakistan, Syria and Iran) are doing so with the express purpose of fighting American soldiers.

The Iraqi dinar, which had been in free fall during the final period of Saddam's misrule, has risen by 17 percent against the Kuwaiti dinar and 23 percent against the Iranian rial.

This is not only a colossal misstatement, but it ignores the fact that the low worth of the dinar during the last days of Saddam was due not to his mismanagement, but military sanctions against the country imposed from without.

Yes, violence is extreme, particularly in certain areas of the country. But this does not mean that democracy is failing to take root. Seventy percent of eligible Iraqis voted in the past three years.

And still no government! Throw another whoopsie-doodle on the fire, Fred.

Radio stations, newspapers and Internet blogs have proliferated.

The blogs, of course, being overwhelmingly critical of the American occupation, something not found in the newspapers which are largely fed their articles by the US State Department.

The first free trade unions in the Arab world have begun in Iraq.

1. Nonsese; the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions has existed for fifty years, and includes free unions in Egypt, Syria, Morocco, and Algeria. There are also independent unions in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Mauritania, and Yemen, as anyone who cared to check a less biased source than Town Hall could easily discover.

2. The 'free trade unions' in Iraq are toothless and have no collective bargaining power, thanks to clauses in the US-written constitution.

But don't expect to hear about those things. Our press will doubtless be too busy luxuriating in Haditha.

Yes, that's why we're so HAPPY about the massacre of innocent children, because we just LOVE TO BE PROVEN RIGHT! Yay, dead kids, thanks for your help!

But he knew Bruce Lee, so it's okay

Hey, remember a while back when the National Review's resident pederast, John Derbyshire, wrote a column where he talked about how gross Jennifer Aniston's saggy ole titties were, and explained how only he is brave enough to tell the truth about how the only women with tits worth looking at are those of teenage girls?

Well, he's launched a defense of that column that's, uh, interesting, to say the least. Highlights are mine:

Some of the most vituperative emails I have ever got came in after I made an offhand remark, in one of my monthly NRO diaries, to the effect that very few of us are physically appealing after our salad days, which in the case of women I pegged at ages 15-20. While the storm was raging, biologist Razib Khan over at Gene Expression (forget philosophers, theologians, and even novelists: the only people with interesting things to say about human nature nowadays are the scientists) decided to look up some actual numbers. Reasoning that a rapist is inspired to his passion mainly by the physical attractiveness of his victim, Razib went for rape statistics.

He found a 1992 report (Rape in America: A Report to the Nation) from the National Victim Center showing the age distribution of female rape victims. Sixty percent of the women who reported having been raped were aged 17 or less, divided about equally between women aged 11 to 17 (32 percent) and those under eleven (29 percent). Only six percent were older than 29. When a woman gets past her mid twenties, in fact, her probability of being raped drops off like a continental shelf. If you histogram the figures, you get a peak around ages 12-14.

What's the creepiest thing about this?


-the fact that Derbyshire quotes a biologist to shore up a bizarro sociological/criminological theory

- the fact that this biologist seems to think that rape is motivated by the physical attractiveness of the victim

- the fact that Derbyshire is defending his own sexual tastes by noting that they coincide with those of rapists and pederasts

- the fact that these statistics could just as easily be used to defend the viewpoint that the most attractive females of all are those under the age of 12

- some other completely fucking creepy thing

YOU BE THE JUDGE!

Saved my soul for rock 'n' roll

If you're like me, you may ask yourself: how ridiculous can Jonah Goldberg and his National Review geek squad get in their quixotic attempt to make conservativism "hip"?

Here's your answer: NRO picks the 50 greatest conservative songs of all time. This is so stupid it's actually beyond my capacity to mock.

Lunchtime with dipshits

- Jonah Goldberg engages in transgender theory, with all the intellectual rigor one would expect from a professional nepotist/Star Trek nerd.

- James Lileks is menaced by teenagers at the Taco Bell, and he totally stands up to them...IN HIS MIND!

- Jennifer Roback Morse notes that too many men are sleeping in basements, and it's all the fault of women who don't understand how bad men want to have sex.