Throughline

I’m working on the unfinished Obama/Goldberg post below, but in the meantime, please enjoy this emerging classic of the mass-forwarded email genre.

This isn’t one of those snarky jokes we’re so often accused of making. It’s real, and it’s likely coming soon to an inbox near you (replete with nine-hundred AOL and Hotmail addresses in the ‘cc’ column).

You’ve heard of the Clinton Body Count, and now it’s time for…

Fun game: Try to determine how many of these people even exist. We’re coming up cold blank on several so far, including the ‘Sarah Berkley’ who wrote the apparently nonexistent book, The Jihad at the Ballot Box — which is, you know, supposed to have tied Obama to radical Islam at some point during his career as an Illinois state senator. The best might be Darsano Rahardjo (below). Who can say it isn’t true?

Read the rest of this entry »

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Dueling Shorters

Shorter Douglas MacKinnon:

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‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

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Shorter Pam Atlas:¹

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‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

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Bonus Pam Atlas from one day ago:

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¹ Since this is a week for such things, the meaning of Pam Atlas’s civilian maiden name, ‘Pamela Geller,’ is ‘honey yell’ (from the Greek and the German, respectively).
²J— adds: “That’s Allen West the former military officer who resigned from the Army so as to avert a court martial for assaulting an Iraqi detainee.”

Indeed it is!

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We Join This Investigative Series Already In Progress¹

Shorter Confederate Yankee:

Above: We are too lazy to Photoshop him in front
of a new Wacky Packages card today.

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‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

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¹ See here and here.
² Since this is a week for such things, Mr. Yankee’s civilian name, ‘Bob Owens,’ means ‘bright fame of the nobility’ in the original English.

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German-Language/Meaning-Of-Names Week Continues With…

Shorter Debbie “Bee Key” Schlussel:¹

Above: Foxy Lady!

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‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

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¹ Lit. from the Hebrew and the German

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Pardon our Mollom

We’re trying a new anti-spam solution… please bear with us and play nice with the captcha should you encounter it.

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Deflater Mouse Pops The Obama Balloon

A couple of days ago, Jesse Taylor got a piece of something when he associated Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism with the outraged gabbling and honking that we’ve been hearing from the right wing in regard to the popularity of Barack Obama. Obama is, we have been hearing, too popular. His Messianistic campaign of so-called ‘hope’ is nothing short of a personality cult. The closest political cognate to Barack Obama is Adolf Hitler.¹

Among other things, this explains what Goldberg’s strange, long-delayed book was about. Right-wing intellectual works don’t come from nowhere: Each new title that tips off the line at Regnery, for instance, has been hatched up and slapped together to meet a perceived policy need, with such short-term intellectual joke fodder as Mark Levin’s Men in Black (occasion: assist in the confirmation of Bush’s Supreme Court nominees) bounding up and down the bestseller lists almost in the absence of an actual book between the covers. Long-term, you have stuff like the Politically Incorrect Guides, which are designed to look like works of general history or instruction, but are in fact brazenly wrought attempts to dress up the year-to-year policy aims of movement conservatism in general, and of the Republican Party in specific, as eternal verities.²

And then there’s Goldberg. Take it away, Jesse:

I’m going to finish this post as the day goes on, so expect new text to appear here and there without warning. But let’s skip to the end and recall for a moment a phenomenon that we saw for years on the right, ending perhaps eighteen months ago. Let’s remember the unbelievably mythologizing praise of George W. Bush, the cynically concocted heroics and carrier-landings, the right wing’s gleeful, full-throated bayings about our ‘Commander in Chief’ and the treasonousness of all who opposed him. Let us recall the right’s flirtation with a Bush Personality Cult.

And let’s recall it directly, by turning to a brand new Andrew Klavan op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

[BISY BACKSON]

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¹ This coexists and freely alternates with images of Obama as (in rough order of prevalence) a Marxist, a Muslim extremist, a black-power activist, a cynical Chicago machine politician, an inexperienced naïf, a ’70s-style liberal, and a drug-addicted homosexual.

² Interesting in a context that I haven’t typed yet is the jacket copy of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History:

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TH3Y R trieiNg 2 MakE US TocK ForriN J1BBeR jaBBer

K-LO and PaTrick RUFFin1 has hAv h4d it eZackly right. BaRr4k HoozEin OBAMA aRe trieying to Make us TOCK FORR1N J1BBER J4BB3R! Andd IT iS wUrs th4n U thank!

YeS FOKES, aRE MUNNY Hasv foRin Jiber j4BBuR on It’s to:

EnD th4t iS noTtt All:

wHen 0 wen 0 WHEN w1ll teh LI3BRuLs STOP at NExt in thay’re QWIx0$Tic QWuesT 2 MAke US aLL SLAYVES 2 tEh JibbER JAvvBER e3ELete?

I $aY: END/ t3h MADDNEs! I WaNt& 2 GeT Off!!1

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Mr. Handsome Blessed Not-Straight: Obama Is Secretly Rufus Wainwright?!¹

Shorter Tom “Twin Blacksmith”² Kovach:

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‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

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¹ Lit.: ‘Reddish Wagonmaker,’ from Latin and English.
² Lit. from Aramaic and Hungarian or Slavic.

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Shorter Thomas “Kidney” Sowell

Bankrupt ‘exploiters’

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It really can’t get any stupider, can it?

Oh K-Lo. K-Lo, K-Lo, K-Lo. You can’t really be this dumb can you?

Similarly, why should kids ever learn to do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division if they have calculators to do it all for them? Hell, why should we bother teaching kids to read when they can just listen to books on tape? Game, set, match, LIE-beral scum! That’ll learn ya to try to teach our kids yer elitist “knowledge!”

At this rate, I expect the Republican Party’s platform will soon degenerate into a collection of grunting sounds and vaguely menacing snorts. Anything more than that will be too much for their intellects to handle.

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Bereisen Sie Deutschland und bleiben Sie hier

The wankers have been out in force (yes, we’re looking at you, Chuckles!), so we figure there’s no better time to see what the person who broke the story in the first place, and has the added advantage of living in Berlin, has to say:

Bring out the whip:

There’s plenty more of the good stuff over at Radio Free Mike, and you are strongly encouraged to read the thing in its entirety.

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Just Imagine

I don’t really like to play the “just-imagine-the-wingnut-outrage” game, but this is, I think, a perfect opportunity to do it. John McCain went on the attack and said this about Obama:

This loathsome little effort at reading Obama’s mind, of course, elicited a round of huzzahs from the usual suspects, including the pretend pirates pirate at Pirate’s Cove

But suppose that Obama had said this:

They’d still be scraping pieces of John Hinderaker’s skull from the ceiling in his office

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Der Shocker

Patrick Ruffini, another one of those puzzlingly well-placed Republican blogger-consultant-columnist-Webmaster-operatives, as well as a general all-around cigar cutter and Kool-Aid drug mule, thinks he’s found a good one:

Get that? …For America! For America! But it’s in German!!!

Here he’s referring to the tongue spoken in Lata, and also in its former colonies in Latin America. This attempt to pander to the Latts was widely derided by fellows such as Patrick Ruffini (whose name means “Patrick, the Little Ruff” in his native dialect of Miscegenated Catholic Immigrant). When English is declared as the official language of the United States, there’ll be no more of this ‘Novus Ordo Seclorum’ and ‘Semper Fidelis,’ not to mention ‘Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc’ or what’s that other one? Oh yeah, ‘E Pluribus Unum.’ It’s a veritable Tower of Babel; it’s tearing this country apart.

Tactics like telling people where the event will be, and at what time.

And he therefore has no right to travel overseas and speak to foreigners. Has he forgotten that there are foreigners who want to kill us? This unconditional meeting-with-foreigners sends a dangerous message, emboldening those who have rejected America by choosing to back foreign regimes, etc.

Are we alone in picturing the following?

Above: Screee-eee-eee!

…As is demonstrated by the campaign saying otherwise without declaring it to be Backwards Day — because if it is Backwards Day, they must backwardsly not declare it to be; and you can see how their little scheme falls apart from there. Also noted: Whenever Germans do something, Americans are helpless not to follow. Cases in point: Klaus Nomi, Zungenwurst, der Urin-Therapie.

But the campaign is clearly attempting to make it seem as if Obama can attract an audience, using the crowds that attend Obama events as pawns in their crooked game. These cynical attempts to make the candidate look good, and thus to tell us how to vote, are beyond the bounds of acceptable discourse.

On the other hand [heh heh], do you know who else used to drum up a sea of Germans to be used as props, and who did not try to pretend otherwise? [heh heh] I’m not going to say, but he sure did cause quite a “furor.” [heh heh]

So to sum up: The sea of Germans drummed up will be used as props, and while this is breathtaking, it is par for the course. That would be a geographic metaphor, a music or sales metaphor, a stage or film metaphor, a metaphor based on a bodily sensation, and then a golf metaphor, all smashed together like the cars of a wrecked circus train.

Yes, we’ll go for the cheap shot. ‘Arrogance’ is writing a broadside like Ruffini’s, and doing it in such crappy English.

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Update: Ruffini responds via Twitter:

Anyone who thinks we’ve been making fun of Patrick Ruffini’s political utterings is a nitwit. The issue is shiny suits and ‘the wet look’:

[Hanx! Dragon-King Wangchuck]

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War, friend only to the undertaker wingnut blogger

Fareed Zakaria, while managing to make some valid points, offers a “question” so stupid it answers itself, and describes the alternate reality of the world he lives in. First things first:

Someone else can handle Clinton, but as far as 41 is concerned: maybe the reason he didn’t describe himself as a war president, or isn’t thought of as one, is that the invasion of Panama lasted a few weeks, and that the invasion [!] of Iraq in 1991 lasted 15 minutes.* Does that really seem so hard to figure out?

The best, however, is this:

No, we don’t. Zakaria does, I do, our readers do, but all it takes on the internets is 30 seconds to see that “we” don’t know that:

Say, and believe, what you want about Bush, the NR crowd, the right-wing blogs we link to, the 30% of the population that still supports Bush, etc…: The War on Terrah is a war they believe in.

* I keed, I keed. But 100 hours of ground war doesn’t amount to a whole lot. Zakaria’s formulation is especially unfortunate, to put it kindly, given that:

K-Lo link via Roy.

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Civility Claims Another Victim

Shorter Selwyn Duke:

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‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

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