After seven years of blowing Iraqis to smithereens, you’d think that the pom poms for JDAMs crowd would at least have the courtesy to learn a thing or two about those that lack sufficient appreciation for our white man’s burden.
Actually, you wouldn’t think that at all because it’s entirely irrelevant to those that derive vicarious machismo from carpet bombing any ol wogs. Speaking of which, Gateway Pundit displays the plumage of his ignorance like a strutting gamecock:
Figure this one out. Muntadhar al-Zeidi reportedly hates Iran but speaks glowingly of Muqtada Al-Sadr, the anti-American Iranian Regime lackey who disappeared to Iran months ago.
Not that hard to figure out really. The Sadrists have traditionally had contentious relations with their Persian co-religionists, and it is not uncommon to hear nasty anti-Persian rhetoric from Sadrist spokesmen and rank and file. The Sadrists, after all, tend to come from the lower end of the economic scale and embrace a fervent brand of nationalism/xenophobia common in such social strata (we have our analogue of course).
Oddly enough, they don’t appreciate foreign meddling in Iraq – be it of a Persian or American variety. Must be an Arab thing.
Sure, Sadr retreated to Iran recently but there were some very good reasons for that: First and foremost, the US military was trying to kill or capture him, which tended to make Iran a very attractive destination. Pressure from the US is actually pushing Sadr closer to Iran, but it’s important to recognize the causality and the incentives being established.
Second, that’s where Qom is, and Qom is where Sadr needs to be to continue his religious studies. Even Catholics from nations/ethnic groups with some animosity toward Italy seek out the Vatican for religious studies.
This is all part of the game by which the neocons and their fellow travelers pretend (or are fooled into thinking as is the case with Gateway Putz) that Sadr is some “lackey” of Iran despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Some history: The Sadrists, if you recall, stayed in Iraq during Saddam’s persecution of Shiite groups during the 1980s and 1990s. This earned them massive street cred and the mantle of Iraqi nationalism. They kept it realz yo.
Maliki’s Dawa, on the other hand, fled to Iran where the Iranian regime carved out a faction of Dawa and called it SCIRI (later ISCI). ISCI actually fought with the Iranians against Iraq during that decade long war. Talk about lackeys.
But because Sadr opposes the US presence in Iraq (like a nationalist would), the neocons bundled him up with the Iranislamofascists so as to keep it simple for the stupids, while ignoring the provenance of ISCI and Dawa (our friends and White House guests!).
I suppose Gateway Pundit can take some comfort in the fact that Condi Rice doesn’t have a clue either. But then, theirs is a movement that ridicules actual knowledge of foreign places, people and, um, correct pronunciations.
So Gateway Pundit’s one-eyed analysis is mistaken for vision and insight.
Judged as a display of alertness and ninja prowess, the President’s dodge is, indeed, impressive. But George W. Bush has spent most of his life fucking things up horribly, and then escaping any consequences for his incompetence and indifference. This is who he is. What you have seen is not a moment of quick thinking, it was the man’s essence. He always escapes unharmed.
Nevertheless, the ACLU, and others, have persisted in calls for the President to be investigated, and perhaps eventually tried, for his crimes. Serious journalists have pointed out that it would be a terrible idea to dig up old business like this, which would certainly “[tear] this nation apart” by cruelly butthurting the delusional 25%ers who still play with Battle Action Bush dolls, and that we should concentrate on important, current, timely matters, such as what some ridiculous hippie the McCain campaign dug up did 40 years ago. Or to conjure dark “clouds” linking Barack Obama – indisputably the most corrupt, scandalous black President in American history – to Rod Blagojevich, on the grounds that he, like SOHNEHO, probably likes the Bears. Admittedly, this makes a nice change from automatically linking him to everything any black person has ever said, but it’s still fucking retarded. The press appears ready to make up for letting Bush get away with 95 months of criminality by holding Obama accountable for any crime committed within a 400 mile radius. Mr. al-Zaidi needs more shoes.
Apparently, those ComSymp hippies over at the Business Roundtable wish that America had lost at the Bay of PigsCastro was still aliveCuba was still a totalitarian Russian satellite and poverty-stricken hellhole that the great benefits of our half-century isolation of Cuba – which are too obvious to be worth listing here – had never happened!
The National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC) and USA*Engage, along with ten other leading trade associations today sent a letter to President-elect Barack Obama, urging the incoming administration to reexamine current U.S. Cuba policy and consider new approaches that would benefit U.S. national security and economic interests and the Cuban people.
The associations, which include the American Farm Bureau Federation, Business Roundtable, and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, applauded President-elect Obama’s support for suspending restrictions on family remittances, visits, and humanitarian care packages from Cuban Americans, and noted that while “these are excellent first steps…we urge you to also commit to a more comprehensive examination of U.S. policy.”
“Your administration has a unique opportunity to take steps to end nearly 50 years of isolation from Cuba and the Cuban people. We support the complete removal of all trade and travel restrictions on Cuba. We recognize that change may not come all at once, but it must start somewhere, and it must begin soon,” they wrote.
Whatever, Trotsky Starchild. Why don’t you and Fidel smoke another Romeo y Julieta blunt FULL OF DOOBIES AND REEFERS, since you apparently like it so much? And then put it out in a human skull ashtray full of Elian Gonzalez’s tears, since that is another of your favorite activities as even a child could deduce from your current behavior? The Sixties are over when Rick Davis decides it’s convenient for them to be over, and not a second before.
On more than one occasion during his stunning press conference on Tuesday, U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald bluntly said he has found no evidence of wrongdoing by President-elect Barack Obama in the tangled, tawdry scheme that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich allegedly cooked up to sell Obama’s now vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder. But for politicians, it’s never good news when a top-notch prosecutor has to go out of his way to distance them from a front-page scandal.
Indeed.
Obama is doomed. Fitzgerald’s blunt exculpatory remarks will prove a fatal blow to the now still-born Obama administration.
It’s like the reverse of Bush-induced scandal fatigue whereby an administration can commit outrageous war crimes, shred the Constitution, out covert CIA operatives as political payback, etc. to a stubbornly disinterested media (until Katrina at least), but Obama not having done anything wrong other than be a Democrat from a state in which a Democratic governor is in trouble for trying to sell a senate seat vacated by Obama is damning evidence of serious malfeasance that demands opprobrium/non-stop coverage and faux-linkage.
[UPDATE: As Larison puts it - boredom with the lack of scandals creates the opposite reaction to boredom with too many scandals:
One reason why this is happening is that a lot of journalists and pundits have become bored with the transition. It’s been going reasonably well, and it has been run so competently and with such an obvious emphasis on establishment-friendly appointments and merit (at least as merit is conventionally defined by that establishment) that most observers have been hungry for something else to talk about, and what better than a scandal involving all of the themes of the “old” politics, complete with bribery and shakedowns? You already have the makings of an overreaching and misleading narrative: “old Illinois politics mars transition period for Obama.”
On top of all of this, there is the problem that most people, especially journalists and pundits and even more particularly pundits on the right, seem to go through extreme mood swings when they talk and think about Obama. This is the tendency to swing between treating him, in John Kass’ memorable phrase, as the Mr. Tumnus of politics to regarding him as the canny Chicago pol, the Obama David Brooks referred to as “Fast Eddie,” or in other cases going between debating ridiculously whether he is more Maoist than Stalinist and then rejoicing childishly over the “centrism” of his appointments. In the mainstream media, it has gone from early adulation over the promised reform and transformation of Washington (whence the Messiah Watch) to a desire to play up conflict between Obama and the left, and now this latter theme has been partially replaced by the “Blagojevich taint” narrative.
Yup.]
In other news, the fact that the Democrats haven’t accused Fitzgerald of conducting a partisan witch hunt is evidence that Democrats “turn on a dime on their former heroes” for partisan reasons as they’ve done with Fitzgerald. Only they haven’t done that. But still, that only reinforces the original argument.
Dick Cavett, like most sentient, hearing-enabled human beings with at least a passing familiarity with English any spoken language in the history of the known universe, hears Sarah Palin and wonders what sonic virus is breaking down his brain tissue with such a grating relentlessness. Camille Paglia, on the other hand, hears…starbursts. Starbursts and jazz:
So she doesn’t speak the King’s English — big whoop!…She uses language with the jumps, breaks and rippling momentum of a be-bop saxophonist.
Starbursts, jazz, beat poetry, rock ’n’ roll and…hip hop?:
However, Cavett’s piece on Sarah Palin was insufferably supercilious. With dripping disdain, he sniffed at her “frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences.” He called her “the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High,” “one who seems to have no first language.” …
I was so outraged when I read Cavett’s column that I felt like taking to the air like a Valkyrie and dropping on him at his ocean retreat in Montauk in the chichi Hamptons [ed note: Montauk is not in the Hamptons. Montauk is in...Montauk oddly enough. I know because I'm ChiChi like Rodriguez and I don't fact check myself. But maybe I was right all along?]. How can it be that so many highly educated Americans have so little historical and cultural consciousness that they identify their own native patois as an eternal mark of intelligence, talent and political aptitude?
In sonorous real life, Cavett’s slow, measured, self-interrupting and clause-ridden syntax is 50 years out of date. Guess what: There has been a revolution in English — registered in the 1950s in the street slang, colloquial locutions and assertive rhythms of both Beat poetry and rock ‘n’ roll and now spread far and wide on the Web in the standard jazziness of blogspeak. Does Cavett really mean to offer himself as a linguistic gatekeeper for political achievers in this country? [...]
Yes, that is the lordly Yale that formed Dick Cavett’s linguistic and cultural assumptions and that has alarmingly resurfaced in the contempt that he showed for the self-made Sarah Palin in “The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla.” I am very sorry that he, and so many other members of the educational elite, cannot take pleasure as I do in the quick, sometimes jagged, but always exuberant way that Palin speaks — which is closer to street rapping than to the smug bourgeois cadences of the affluent professional class.
First of all, anyone looking to lecture another about being out of touch with what the hep young cats are doing these days (meaning the 1950′s on) should avoid using terms like “street rapping” and “jazziness of blogspeak” whenever possible.
There is zero jazzy about blogspeak. And what the fuck is street rapping? As opposed to…say, suburban rapping? And, really, the grimy streets of South Central Wasilla?
Watching Paglia try to cop a “with-it” pose is like watching that too-eager aunt at the family function stiffly raising the roof and pushing out a cabbage patch on the dance floor and looking around at the young folk with an in-the-know twinkle in her eye. It doesn’t impress as much as induce a feeling of embarrassment for the dancer herself. Unlike someone’s well-meaning aunt, though, Paglia gets paid do make a fool of herself aping the latest trends – if on a larger stage.
Anyway, here’s some of MC Mooseknuckle’s flow:
Sitting here in these chairs
that I’m going to be proposing
but in working with these governors
who again on the front lines
are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation
to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states
every day being held accountable
not being just one of many
just casting votes or voting present every once in a while
we don’t get away with that
we have to balance budgets
and we’re dealing with multibillion dollar budgets
and tens of thousands of employees in our organizations
Even at his most dusted out, ODB made more sense than that shit. Cause, you know, all street rap is is just a string of meaningless gibberish meant to conceal the fact that the street rapper doesn’t know shit about what he/she is talking about - or the world in general.
And Paglia chides Cavett and liberal critics of Palin for being condescending while Paglia uses be-bop and hip hop as synonyms for uneducated and stupid.
Make. Her. Go. Away.
Elswhere: IOZ looks at another graf from the same Paglia offering:
The slaughter of the Holtzbergs and other Jews at Chabad House should be a wake-up call to Western liberals who believe that jihadism can be defeated through reason and happy talk. Only other Muslims can launch the stringent internal reform necessary to stomp this barbaric extremism out. But the events in Mumbai confirmed my opinion about the looming problem of a nuclear Iran: While I oppose all American military operations and bases in the Mideast, I continue to believe that Israel, whose security is directly threatened, has every right to take preemptive military action against Iran.
So. The killing of Jews in an Indian City by Islamic Radicals from somewhere around Punjab or Kashmir “confirmed [her] opinion” about a nuclear Iran and the rightness of Israel launching a bombing campaign? Yeah, the divorce and remarriage of French President Sarkozy confirmed my opinion about the necessity of banning gay marriage in California. What? Why?
Adding: Since “only other Muslims can launch the stringent internal reform necessary to stomp this barbaric extremism out” (which is so not a liberal position), therefore we must bomb Muslims until they stomp this barbaric extremism out. That’s the only ways.
Joe Wurzelbacher lashed out Tuesday at former GOP presidential nominee John McCain, the man who made Wurzelbacher famous as “Joe the Plumber.”
Wurzelbacher told conservative radio host Glenn Beck that he felt “dirty” after “being on the campaign trail and seeing some of the things that take place.”
Not so dirty as to actually say anything that might jeopardize his gig as a high-profile campaign prop, of course, but there’s a good reason for that:
Asked why he didn’t leave McCain’s campaign if he was “appalled” by the candidate, Wurzelbacher said, “honestly, because the thought of Barack Obama as president scares me even more.”
While Wurzelbacher was critical of McCain during the interview, he had nothing but praise for his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. “Sarah Palin is absolutely the real deal,” he said.
Once again, Joe has his finger firmly on the pulse of Real America – the sort of notionally-successful, patriotic and persecuted delusionals who are, even now, fighting the good fight to stop Barack Hussein Obama from becoming President on the grounds that he is a Secret Musselman from Darkest Africa. The Republican party is doomed.
Bill Ayers, aka SOHNEHO, has an Op-Ed in the NY Times. Go on, read it. Just click the link and read it. You know you want to. I can wait.
Oh, wait, you DON’T want to read it? You DON’T care what Bill Ayers thinks about anything, even despite the thousands of mentions he has received in the NY Times over these past months, and despite the DEFINITIVE PROOF that Ayers and President-elect Obama both TOTALLY secretly supported Ryne Sandberg? And now that the stupidest fucking election since the last one is finally over, and now that even the pathetically flimsy and circular “we must talk about him because he is a campaign prop designed to give us something to talk about” justification of his presence in the public sphere is gone, you would rather go back to actually not knowing who the fuck he is, rather than just pretending not to know who the fuck he is as a way of helping others Visualize A World Less Stupid through the transcendant power of slightly exaggerated indifference? Wait, NOBODY FUCKING CARES what Bill Ayers thinks, because he’s SOME OLD HIPPIE NOBODY’S EVER HEARD OF, and he’s taking valuable column inches away from seriously addressing pantomime associations between Obama and attention whoring irrelevencies from this century, such as K-Fed:
If Joe the Plumber isn’t drinking grape soda up in Bill Keller’s desk chair by Thursday, I’ll consider it progress.
… and depressing parts of October, too. Meet Willmoore Kendall, the den Beste who was not there. In brazen disregard of ratfucking etiquette (a gentleman never tells), I will pull back the curtain on this black op so that you, Gentle Reader, might see what sorts of horrors are possible. So go on, have a look. Personal reflections:
The low point: having Jonah Goldberg not print my mostly glowing review of Liberal Fascism, despite the fact that I emailed it to him and name-checked a bunch of smarter right-wing intellectuals who I also pretended to have read. Which brings us too:
The depressing points, comprising all the other points: realizing that there is no amount of crazy crap you can say which is crazier than what your average wingnut is prepared to believe. Consider, for example, this quite wacky “story the MSM won’t tell you,” weaving together in a glorious tapestry Barack Obama’s terrorist financiers, his secret mistress, ACORN, teh ghey, Saul Alinksy, the Marxist Illuminati who run the world, and liberal media conspiracy cover-ups. (A tapestry made entirely out of the whole cloth found at the Sean Hannity message boards, if you’re wondering.) The response to this masterpiece: everybody jumps on the big scoop from 419ScamNews.myspace.com that Michelle Obama totally admitted that Barack is a pan-Africanist Manchurian candidate with a fake birth certificate and a crazy wife. Perhaps I will have more success with my new enterprise, Newcastle Coal Importation, Ltd.
Is that CAPS ROCK, man? WELL TURN IT UP, MAN!! CAPS LOCK is cruise control for credibility.
1. It is financially cheaper than running your own paid media mini-campaign, although it will cost you time and slivers of your soul. I guess it depends how you value these things; my landlady, for example, takes cash.
2. It is less soul-destroying than phone banking, in my opinion, although my own aversion to the telephone, strangers, and human contact generally must be factored in to this assessment. It’s usefulness is probably less measurable, although my suspicion is that sowing discontent and craziness in wingnuttia does more good than street demonstrations, or the other avenues of activism open to folks of limited resources. And it may yield lulz.
3. I can’t recommend the purity troll/instigator persona, as the market is flooded, but the world needs concern trolls. Also: doctors. Plans borne of desperation tend not to be the soundest, so spending time online as a cross between Jane Goodall and Lori Drew may just be a fucking stupid idea. I don’t know. Doowutchyalike.
