Shorter Michael Scheuer:
The only thing that can keep this country safe from a spectacular attack by al-Qaeda would be a spectacular attack by al-Qaeda.
Alternative Shorter Scheuer:
We have to raze this country to save it. From being razed.
Seriously. His argument boils down to this: if America isn’t attacked again, we as a nation will never do what it takes to keep America safe from being…attacked again.
I know I’m repeating myself here, but the argument is just so magnificent in its self-refuting circularity that I can’t help but stand in awe. Even Orwell would have left that scene on the cutting room floor, deeming it too much of a strain on the credulity of the audience.
And yet, there is Glenn “Batshit Crazy” Beck nodding along as if these were the wisest words he’d ever heard. His retort is brilliant in its own right:
Which is why I was thinking, if I were [Osama] that is the last thing I would do right now.
So, Osama wouldn’t want to screw up his chances of setting off a WMD in America at some later date by…setting of a WMD in America now. I…but…the point is…he would…why is there blood coming out of my nose?
July 1, 2009 at 9:06 am
…And Lefties are, of course, the traitors.
July 1, 2009 at 9:28 am
These people look at the decisions that the Bush administration, the Congress, and the public made in the four years following 9/11 and see a model for effective, clear-eyed judgement.
We need to go back to thinking like THAT (USA PATRIOT Act, Iraq War, torture, rounding up random Muslims for questioning, Bush reelection, establishing Guantanamo, ribbon magnets, freedom fries), because that’s the sort of mindset that deals effectively with challenges.
July 1, 2009 at 9:29 am
Do you remember your mental state at 11:30 AM on 9/11?
Michael Scheuer and Glenn Beck think this would be a much better country if everyone was walking around like that.
July 1, 2009 at 9:39 am
And I thought that Imperial Hubris was a work of rare, hard-headed realism. It’s a fucking shame that its author is apparently bugfuck insane.
I’ll have to re-read it with a more critical eye.
July 1, 2009 at 10:49 am
We were this close to totalitarian nirvana, when those stupid, stupid voters got in the way.
July 1, 2009 at 11:12 am
Peak Wingnut has been reached!!!
So bugfucked insane that is even a thing of beauty.
July 1, 2009 at 12:24 pm
They’re talking about another another Pearl Harbor. It that doesn’t do the trick, they’ll double down for another another another Pearl Harbor.
July 1, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Another important clip from the Glen Beck show: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLe2mDqxx70&NR=1
July 1, 2009 at 2:02 pm
IIRC, my review of “Imperial Hubris” was that it was the longest Josh Trevino post ever. As usual, I was far too kind.
July 1, 2009 at 2:06 pm
It makes more sense if you realize that a nuclear attack would lead to a police state. The mystery to me is why someone would want that, but that’s what it looks like.
July 1, 2009 at 4:45 pm
It all started with this guy, didn’t it?
July 1, 2009 at 7:46 pm
Isn’t the general accepted opinion that US expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia resulted in exponential expansion of the Khmer Rouge, allowing the KR to eventually take over? But Pat is arguing that the Killing Fields tragedy would have been prevented had we stayed — and continued to stimulate exponential Khmer Rouge recruitment. Yeah, sure, I get it, Mr. Chickenhawk. We just need to surround everybody on the planet with everything we’ve got, and we’re safe.
July 2, 2009 at 4:31 pm
OH DUDE, They’ve totally re-imagined reality when it comes to post-Vietnam. Know-nothings are wily mother shutyomouth. The Republicans have proved parallel universes, they are the evidence of the multiverse. If reality were the sole product of perception, like whoa.
July 3, 2009 at 5:13 am
“Do we have any figures on how scared they are?”
July 1, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Wingnuts destroy your mind in order to save it.
July 1, 2009 at 8:53 pm
“But don’t you see officer? When I raped that young women, I was actually teaching her about the horrors of rape so that she would do more to protect herself from being raped in the future. I’m not a rapist, I’m a rape preventist who prevents rapes by raping people.”
July 1, 2009 at 9:52 pm
We have to stop letting the terrorists win in order to lose the war on terror.
I am filled with pride. Seriously. I have lived to see broadcast lunatics strive to surpass mere derangement into self-annnihilating gibberish in an attempt to hold on to their jobs.
With media revenues down across the board, we should soon see a new bevy of barking pundits, one’s that at least look at the moon when they lift their legs at its reflection in a puddle of their own making.
I remember 60s UHF B&W pro wrestling. (Hell, I remember UHF: take that, punksters!) It was deemed too absurd to last but now it has its own network.
Ere long, we’ll miss these cockatoos, a market exploration will be done, and soon will arise: Channel HOWL!
Beck, O’reilly, Hannity, and lesser morons, dressed in bow-tied Spandex, grappling with the more impossible ramificiations of their shouted distortions (“The world isn’t round, it’s a flattened circle! A 2-D globe isn’t really a sphere, it’s a deflated pundit!”) with Limbaugh announcing over the hot-air mike.
Channel HOWL! I saw the messed behinds of my generation burned into squawk stars…
Channel HOWL! tagline:mWho’s yer granny?!?
July 1, 2009 at 10:42 pm
I recall watching Mad Dog Vachon on UHF – good times.
July 2, 2009 at 7:36 am
Doesn’t UHF still exist? But still, I catch your drift. I remember Saturday night bullfights from Mexico on “Channel 17.” Good times.
July 2, 2009 at 12:18 am
I think you would be wise to not point out right-wing idiocy or they might smarten up, preventing you from pointing out right-wing idiocy in the future.
no wait, that’s not the way it works.
July 2, 2009 at 4:14 am
why is there blood coming out of my nose?
I usually have the problem of beer coming out, but your beverage-of-choice may vary.
July 2, 2009 at 5:39 pm
I have HHT:
http://www.hht.org/about-hht/
Before adequate laser ablation cautery recently became available in my region, blood out of my nose when I laughed too hard or my BP ceilinged from things like le Becque’s idiocy was all too often my beverage of unchoice.
Also, beer, decidedly my beverage of choice, dilates blood vessels, making epistaxes more likely.
I just spewed blood all over my keyboard is something I’ve actually typed.
July 3, 2009 at 10:29 pm
‘things like le Becque’s idiocy’
This is an actual medically defined syndrome, I’ll have you know.
Teenage suicide! Bark at the moon!
July 2, 2009 at 7:06 am
Which is why I was thinking, if I were [Osama] that is the last thing I would do right now.
On the other hand, Osama totally meant it when he endorsed Kerry.
July 2, 2009 at 8:41 am
In the good old days if you were hanging around intellectualizing you’d be conscripted into a hellish war scape and/or brought in front of hearing due to your alienosity or your seditionism. I don’t understand why you couldn’t just let McCarthy finish securing yourself from anti-capitalistic thoughts or why we are letting Japanese people wander around, they should be in camps, (for there own safety, of course.) Also Irish need not apply, Debs is a Kaiser sniffer, and John Birch has a lot of good ideas.
I hat librul fascism.
July 2, 2009 at 5:40 pm
“due to your alienosity ”
I have alein-nose-ity.
July 2, 2009 at 5:46 pm
Heh. u spilt fascism coreked.
July 2, 2009 at 8:42 am
The Gulf of Tonkin incident, is not.
July 2, 2009 at 8:54 am
Sure, yeah, keep laffing, libs. Meanwhile, Beck knows something you don’t: that sanity demarcates an area about a hundred yards wide, but kraziness encompasses AN UNLIMITED HORIZON AS FAR AS THE LUNATIC EYE CAN SEE.
The nuts don’t know they’re nuts. The stupid don’t know they’re stupid. They can all agree with him, and with his deranged guests, because they have no powers of discrimination. As long as it’s “patriotic” (read: indignant) they dig it.
They’ll never know if or whether they disagree with each other, because a) they don’t really know, in any coherent way, what they themselves “believe,” and b) shut up.
Beck’s audience is THEREFORE (theoretically) UNLIMITED. It’s the opposite of sectarianism. There’s your big tent. The Big Tent of Nitwits.
July 2, 2009 at 5:44 pm
“Beck’s audience is THEREFORE (theoretically) UNLIMITED. It’s the opposite of sectarianism. There’s your big tent. The Big Tent of Nitwits.”
Quite possibly so, but lately the hot air that once their Big tent aloft is insufficient to hold the enormous WMD (Words of Maniacal Derangement) weight of their circus fabric aloft, and they mutter into the darkening canvas of their once splendid gloom, and the smell of their buttholes accumulates to a degree that basic self-preservational logic is beginning to intrude upon their formerly unfettered freakishness.
July 2, 2009 at 2:19 pm
love the portuguese subtitles on the MP vid.
July 2, 2009 at 9:32 pm
I am not allowed to comment?
July 2, 2009 at 9:39 pm
Seriously. No I mean Really. Serious? I mean REALLY? We’re going to TALK, really.
STOP! STOP!
No really, when I see a Down’s Syndrome in control of the country however funny it is that WE voted him into power… Seriously. ManBearPig….
Kan ewe reed?
July 3, 2009 at 11:39 am
Wow, that was really, truly gob-smacking.
At one point, Scheuerer seemed like he had a brutal, but essentially coherent, and therefore analytically useful view of the GWOT, or the “Overseas Contingency Operation” or whatever the hell it is we are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran.
But now he’s taken that view, wrapped it in a bloody shirt, and run with it straight off the top of the Empire State Building. For the love of Pete, Scheuerer, get a motherfucking grip!
July 3, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Thank Goodness Palin started her Presidential Campaign today, suspending her Governorship because it’s just been two whole fiscal quarters of Nazi Socialism. If Obama can’t fix all the errors of the Bush administration in eight months only a mental wizard like Palin can rectify the situation.
It’s clear now that MSM forces have destroyed Billy Mays and Michael just to eliminate Sarah’s top two veep ideas.
July 3, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Palin’s resignation speech reads eerily like something written by Faye Grogan. I think The Editors should look into this.
July 3, 2009 at 3:10 pm
I meant Kaye, of course. I can’t be bothered keeping all these cretins’ names straight. Bah.
July 3, 2009 at 3:56 pm
Palin’s clearly jealous of the publicity all these dead people get, and, lacking the courage to off herself, she opts to off her career instead.
Either that or deep down inside she’s always known that she’s way out of her depth — and has probably wanted out the whole time.
July 4, 2009 at 12:49 pm
You have no idea do you kid? She’s going on the speaking circuit because then she won’t have to deal with the baseless ethics complaints that childish liberals file against her. She’s prepping for another run in politics. I thought you democrat types were supposed to be educated enough to deduce that with your Ivory Tower mentality?
July 6, 2009 at 8:42 am
(fat man w/cigar voice):Not a bad imitation of a batwing crazy but you gotta work on the misspellings.
July 6, 2009 at 1:32 pm
I hope she speaks every day, all day on behalf of the GOP and the minority position. Good luck with that. Even Dan Quayle is all like, “what the fuck is wrong with you people? Palin makes me look like Thomas Edison.” Seriously.
July 3, 2009 at 7:02 pm
c’mon eds! I hopped over to the inst. as soon as I saw the Palin headlines just knowing that I would find teh funny. If ever there was the giant sucking sound of the winds of scandal drawing a mighty breath and fixin to blow the house down, it is to be heard this holiday weekend, louder even than the fireworks!
July 3, 2009 at 8:40 pm
yeah, well, the commentz sexshun is keepin’ real, man. Pickin’ up da slack, as it were.
July 3, 2009 at 10:20 pm
It’s a holiday, dudesicles. Let Theeds enjoy a three-day pretension of actually having a life before (t)he(y) resume their quasiexistent mode wherein they provide social deficits like us with yuk-yuks and penetrating insights.
Here I am with my darling wife pretending (with great self-deceiving effect) that I actually have a life.
Ever notice how the lines of perspective on a plank one is about to walk don’t exactly converge into infinity but simply stop?
That’s life, or as this guy puts it: Man Plays w/Hat
July 4, 2009 at 5:03 am
Is ‘anuerysm’ the new ‘teh’?
July 4, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Seems to me the only people who are batshit crazy are the ones who sit around and do nothing while Iran funds Hezbollah and drops our pants to let N.Korea stick us up the ass. I would watch your mouth if I were you little boy, I know it’s hard to use common sense with your Ivory Tower mentality, but Glenn Beck has more spine than your entire family combined.
July 4, 2009 at 7:47 pm
If we are attacked, it will be proof that Obama is incapable of protecting us.
If we are not attacked, it’s because Obama is in league with Al-Qaeda.
See how well that works?
July 5, 2009 at 6:11 pm
I’m bored.
July 5, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Some call it a bored; but I think it’s really called a wicket? Right?
Let’s fold scarves!
July 5, 2009 at 9:23 pm
Teh nue board:
It Wiggles AND Gets the Shakes!
July 6, 2009 at 3:44 pm
but Glenn Beck has more spine than your entire family combined.
It’s extra chromosome, not an extra vertebra.
July 6, 2009 at 6:12 pm
Glenn Beck has more spine than your entire family combined
Dude, what do you think we use to build the ivory towers?