Yes. Yes, it is.
Doing the only right thing is sick, twisted; not referred to as a joke; not (at all) funny.
A note on framing, to our esteemed colleagues on the dextral side:
While I question the wisdom of rolling out a new product in August, still, I gotta tell you, I’m wholly in agreement with your impending shift from “MSM media” to “527 media.” After all, anyone outside your little clique who stumbles over such a reference and goes googling for whatever the hell it is you could possibly mean will trip over far and away the most famous 527 of all: the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. —And that, my friends, is a connection we can all support.
Shorter How to Talk to a Conservative:
What color is the sky?
“I would say that those who herald this decision simply do not understand the nature of the world in which we live,” says our president, who didn’t know the difference between Shi’ite and Sunni, who is “puzzled” that thousands of Iraqis would take to the streets to demonstrate against America.
Miserable failure.
I mean, seriously. How long was the fuze on this particular punchline? Three years? You have any idea how long that is in internet time?
Are too Redemption’s tears and not in vain—for nothing idly weeps.
It’s not just that Lindsay’s a self-hating Jew for wanting to read Günther Grass. She’s also a pædophile!
When opportunity knocks your house down.
Ah, you’ve probably seen Aasif Mandvi on the Daily Show already. Go, see it again.
No shit, Sherlock.
You know, we start seeing headlines like this, it’s time to rethink some of our fundamental assumptions.
Crow is a dish best served cold.
So I’m noting this comment from an old friend for future gustation.
This machine bugs liberals.
Say, Fred, I heard Lyndon is forming a new Federal agency.
Yeah? What’s that?
It’s going to be called the Poverty Relief Agency.
Oh, that’s nothing new, Bobby Baker’s headed that department for years.
Zing?
Down in Havana, 90 miles from our shore
Lies an army of Commies and Fidel Castro
We were going to remove them, the plans were all made
We’d help with the airplanes on invasion day
But you know the Liberals and the CIA
They agreed with Adlai, take the airplanes away
So the brave freedom fighters were destined to fall
’Cause we didn’t answer when we heard their call
—the Goldwaters, “Down in Havana”
Rick Perlstein’s always worth reading; the Design Observer’s running an essay of his that the New Republic couldn’t be bothered to put online, so go, read “What is Conservative Culture?”
Conservative culture was shaped in another era, one in which conservatives felt marginal and beleaguered. It enunciated a heady sense of defiance. In a world in which patriotic Americans were hemmed in on every side by an all-encroaching liberal hegemony, raw sex in the classrooms, and totalitarian enemies of the United States beating down our very borders, finally conservatives could get together and (as track twelve of the Goldwaters’ Folk Songs to Bug the Liberals avowed) “Row Our Own Boat.”
But now conservatism has grown into a vast and diverse chunk of the electorate. Its culture has become so dominant that one can live entirely within it. Shortly after the Republicans took over Congress in 1994, a Washington activist could, if he so chose, attend nothing but conservative parties, panels, and barbecues; a recent Pew Research Center study suggested that partisan divisions are increasing at the community level. And yet, far inside these enclaves, conservatives still rely on the cultural tropes of that earlier period: At one living room “Party for the President” in 2004, a woman told me, “We’re losing our rights as Christians. ... and being persecuted again.” The culture of conservatives still insists that it is being hemmed in on every side. In Tom DeLay’s valedictory address, as classic an expression of high conservative culture as ever was uttered, he attributed to liberalism “a voracious appetite for growth. In any place or any time on any issue, what does liberalism ever seek, Mr. Speaker? More. ... If conservatives don’t stand up to liberalism, no one will.”
How to explain these strange continuities? And what does it say about the politics of our own time? Kirk offers no answers, because what holds the movement together isn’t its intellectual history but its cultural one. Folk Songs to Bug the Liberals is this mystery’s Rosetta Stone.
Bugging liberals, you see, being bugged by liberals, is not incidental to conservative culture, but rather is constitutive of it—more so than any identifiable positive content. Seeing Republicans appropriate liberal-sounding rhetoric on immigrants and education and getting credit for it—even while their policies corrode public education and also stoke an anti-immigrant backlash—bugs the hell out of the liberals. Which is, for Karl Rove no doubt, part of the calculation. Rove knows that the pleasure of watching liberals’ heads explode is the best way to keep his team rowing in the same direction.
Two things struck me, reading this: first, of course, appropriation isn’t only done to fuck with our the other side’s heads. When you start to believe your own bullshit, that you really are beset on all sides by an implacable foe, when you’re out there fighting dragons every day, you start to ask yourself what it is they’ve got that you don’t; you start to wonder if maybe you shouldn’t become a little draconic yourself. You say things like, “They have Joan Baez, who do we have?”
It was Dr. Fred C. Schwarz of the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade (CACC) who acted as [Janet] Greene’s “Col. Parker” and molded her into his very own Anti-Baez. As reported in The Los Angeles Times, on October 13, 1964, Schwarz unveiled his new musical weapon against Communism at a press conference at the Biltmore Hotel in LA. With Greene at his side, Schwarz stated to the assembled press that he had “taken a leaf out of the Communist book” by adding a conservative folk singer to his organization. “We have decided to take advantage of this technique for our own purposes.” He then added, “You’d be amazed at how much doctrine can be taught in one song.”
The second thing was how old the conservative schtick is. They were hating on the Clenis back in 1964.
Say I saw a new a great new play on Broadway last night, it’s called The Doll House.
Is that the Rodgers-Hammerstein show?
No, it’s a Profumo-Baker production.
Must have been quite a comedy!
Might call it a farce!
Rimshot, motherfuckers. Rimshot.
Then if any man shall say unto you, Lo, here is Christ, or there; believe it not.
PHILLIPS: Do you think they’re taking what you’re saying and incorporating it into foreign policy?
ROSENBERG: I wouldn’t go that far. But I would say—I would say that Bible prophecy is an intercept from the mind of God. It’s actually fairly remarkable intelligence, and that’s why my novels keep coming true, because mine are on this side of the Rapture, leading up to Jerry and Tim’s books, but they suggest events that the Bible does lay out that will get us closer to those events. And, in fact, one by one in The Last Jihad, my book The Last Days, The Ezekiel Option, and now The Copper Scroll, have this feeling of coming true. I think that’s why a million copies have sold. They’re New York Times best-sellers, because they’re based on Bible prophecy, and they are coming true bit by bit, day by day.
PHILLIPS: Joel, do I need to start taking care of unfinished business and telling people that I love them and I’m sorry for all the evil things I’ve done?
ROSENBERG: Well, I think that would be a good start. I mean, Jesus loves the people of the Middle East. Matthew 15—Jesus was in southern Lebanon. Why? Telling the people of Lebanon that he loved them, that God loved them.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a simper.
We do what we’re told.
Many of the abusive interrogation methods that were being used at Nama were clearly authorized by the command structure at the camp. [“Sgt.] Jeff [Perry”*] told Human Rights Watch that written authorizations were required for most abusive techniques, indicating that the use of these tactics was approved up the chain of command.
There was an authorization template on a computer, a sheet that you would print out, or actually just type it in. And it was a checklist. And it was all already typed out for you, environmental controls, hot and cold, you know, strobe lights, music, so forth. Working dogs, which, when I was there, wasn’t being used. But you would just check what you want to use off, and if you planned on using a harsh interrogation you’d just get it signed off.
I never saw a sheet that wasn’t signed. It would be signed off by the commander, whoever that was, whether it was 03 [captain] or 06 [colonel], whoever was in charge at the time. . . . When the 06 was there, yeah, he would sign off on that. . . . He would sign off on that every time it was done.
[...]
Jeff also said that the commanding officer at Nama would sometimes tell the interrogators that the White House or Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had been briefed on intelligence gathered by the team, especially intelligence about Zarqawi:
[They’d say:] “Rumsfeld was informed, such and such a report is on Rumsfeld’s desk this morning, read by Secdef . . . it’s a big morale booster for people working 14 hour days. Hey, we got to the White House!”
—No Blood, No Foul:
Soldiers’ Accounts of Detainee Abuse in Iraq
Human Rights Watch, July 2006
Volume Number 18, No. 3(G)
via Talking Points Memo
At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner. Some test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner.
If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:
- Please continue.
- The experiment requires you to continue, please go on.
- It is essential that you continue.
- You have no choice, you must continue.
If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession.
[...]
There is a little-known coda to the experiment, reported by Philip Zimbardo. None of the participants who refused to administer the final shocks insisted that the experiment itself be terminated, nor left the room to check that the victim was well without asking for permission to leave, according to Milgram’s notes and recollections when he was asked on this point by Zimbardo.
—“Milgram experiment,” Wikipedia
The meme of innocence.
I’m not much of one for tit-for-tat (oh, who am I kidding), but the boys at Sadly, No! make one hell of a point.
Cui malo?
I know, I know: mocking the intellectually crippled is the jeu du jour of the left-blog elite, but people, really: Dobson and his ilk aren’t the ones comparing the homosexually inclined to dogs that moo; the Gill Foundation is. Sherman’s just pointing up the fatal flaw in Norman’s well-meaning but breathtakingly dim-witted argument: the proper stance in the fight for basic human rights isn’t I can’t help it I was born this way but what the fuck business is it of yours who I spend my life with?
The first one’s always the hardest.
This horrible, soulless monster, meanwhile, has to decide whether she’s going to carve notches on her keyboard or paint cute little nooses on the lid of her laptop. This one gets to choose between a swastika or a stylized icon of a burning cross. —Trouble with eliminationist rhetoric is pretty soon it’s all you’ve got left, and the thing I’d like to ask those who insist on playing them to our us is this: you really want to go there? Because in the long run, we outnumber you. And history will not be kind.
There’s still a kibosh on the man-hand jokes, though.
Okay. Now you can mention her name, and her eyes will fill not with dead light, but clammy fear and greasy despair, and Jesus will toss confetti for his frolicking kittens. (All due props to the Rude Pundit.)
