In an e-mail to the McCain campaign, Opinion Page Editor David Shipley said he could not accept the piece as written, but would be “pleased, though, to look at another draft.”
“Let me suggest an approach,” he wrote Friday. “The Obama piece worked for me because it offered new information (it appeared before his speech); while Senator Obama discussed Senator McCain, he also went into detail about his own plans. It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama’s piece.”
Shipley was, in fact, being quite polite, since what he probably should have said was “The Obama piece worked for me because it wasn’t a snot-covered tissue of lies.”
To make this point, [Obama] mangles the evidence. He makes it sound as if Prime Minister Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable, when all he has said is that he would like a plan for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops at some unspecified point in the future.
So we’re sitting here watching Markos debating Harold Ford (who is in fact even more a slick politician creep than you’d think), which is exciting enough, but I’m sitting here with the Rude Pundit, who just informed me of something amazing. And by amazing, I mean “makes you feel superior in ways that you could have never dreamed”. Right wing bloggers are having a convention. Here in Austin. No, really. Hundreds of people are expected, almost enough to fill a corner of this lunchroom we’re using for Netroots Nation.
Okay, on the actual lunch we’re in: Harold Ford just wasted everyone’s time by defending the DLC by name-dropping Bill Clinton and trying to impress us. It’s like humping a dead horse, but I suppose it’s all they got is saying, “Oh, Bill Clinton won! Remember that?” Except that Clinton didn’t get a clean win, but rode into office off Perot vote-splitting. And the giant losses in 1994. It’s kind of sad the way Clinton’s win is treated like a fluke, like we snuck that one in by a largely right wing country. The idea that the right is a solid majority is a persistent myth in DC circles. It’s understandable, to a degree. I think that myth persists because right wingers tend to be louder, angrier, and speak as if they have the authority of America behind them. (Look at the way that the right wing convention is littered with nonsensical references to historical patriots.) They are the squeaky wheels. This illusion is why it’s so scary, I think, for Democrats to move to the left where they belong.
Update: On noes! They’re taking audience questions.
Blogging while I got the time in these hectic Netroots Nation days. The good news: We have internet at the new place and a shocking number of Very Famous Bloggers are posting using my wifi. Which is very exciting, like having rock stars fuck on your couch.
I want to apologize up front for the weird editorials that emerge from student newspapers in Texas. (Via.) I can’t help but think that the reason for publishing this article was charity casework aimed at the writer, but of course right wing writers don’t deserve your charity, because they’re often able to ride the wingnut welfare train regurgitating the same 5 opinions about how everyone that’s not a straight white guy sucks.
That’s what I’ve come to believe. It’s obvious that he thinks that “religious freedom” means “the right to demand a) the right to completely define an entire religion for yourself and eject anyone who has different views than yours and b) the right never, ever to be mocked, criticized, or looked at funny”. But even when a number of atheists online were insisting that I was targeted by the Catholic League for harassment and economic hardship-distribution because I’m an outspoken atheist, I was skeptical. Nah, a believer could have totally made the jokes I did and get abused, I thought. I have no idea of Melissa McEwan believes in some kind of god, and she got it, too.
But watching this whole thing with PZ Myers go down (sorry I’m late to the party; been too busy to follow stuff, you know), I’m inclined increasingly to think that while the Catholic League will go after anyone—-and that they do love to spank actual Catholics for diverging from Donohue-defined doctrine, which is far to the right of even what the pope will have you believe—-they’re on the move against atheists now that atheism is getting a new heyday/publishing bonanza. Quoth Lindsay:
The Catholic League claims to be a civil rights organization. Yet it consistently targets high-profile atheists like Amanda Marcotte and PZ Myers and attempts to get them fired. Draw you own conclusions.
I was going to write a big, long take-down of this wretched article, but instead I’ll just mention how a friend of mine, every time she saw some douchebag driving a super he-man manly man vehicle on giant tires like a Hummer, would hold up her pinky finger and say, “This big.” No, it’s not the most polite thing to say. Or original, really. But it always made me wonder how it is that people who drive trucks like that—-or worse, write articles in national newspapers where they mock hippies as if the hippies don’t have the bigger dick/wetter dick trump card—-can be oblivious to the fact that people with bigger brains and healthier sexualities are mocking them. I suppose it doesn’t matter to assholes like that if they repulse the more thoughtful members of the female half of the human race, because those women are intimidating anyway. But to invite laughter strikes me as counterproductive to the goal of establishing yourself as a big man for everyone else to fear and respect.
I suppose Occam’s Razor would dictate that douchebags in Hummers really are just too dumb to be aware of what other people are thinking.
Last night at Wanted I was mercifully spared the ubiquitous Coca-Cola Refreshing Filmmaker’s Award with the guy chasing his girlfriend through the paintings of an art gallery. For my sins, however, I was treated to not one but two instances of this:
Fortunately for my faith in humanity, this was greeted with mild scornful laughter by the audience I was with, but holy shit, it’s hard to imagine anything worse than two hours in a movie theater with the Lord Hee Haw of the 21st Century.
From Hugo, I found this absolutely repugnant post from K-Lo defining the “good girl” and the ideal trajectory through life you need to take to achieve feminine perfection. It’s a sad story, of course, because a woman’s lot is fundamentally sad in the eyes of the patriarchy that defines the “good girl”. It’s the story of Agata Mroz, a volleyball champion (therefore thin, tall, and of course blonde and beautiful—-wouldn’t be a tragic story of How You Should Be if the heroine wasn’t blonde and beautiful) who got cancer, but got married and made her husband a baby anyway, dying in the process at the age of 26.
In other words, the ideal woman is young and beautiful, and has the good sense to check out of life before her beauty fades, but of course taking the time to make a man a baby before she goes. Women, like houseguests and fish, don’t last too long without stinking, and really we should all get the hint.
By shaking my fist in fury at the world’s biggest dip, K-Lo, I’m not judging the actual human being Mroz. From her story, I get the impression that Mroz didn’t really think she had a good chance of surviving in any direction and thought that having a baby before she died was something she had to do, probably for the same reasons most people have children—-to leave their mark, to say, “I was here.” I will grant someone dying young more right to do this than someone who has a good chance of long life ahead of them, a long life where the dramatic impact of producing a child fades as the child becomes less about her parents being here and a unique person herself. Going out on a high moment has much to recommend it. But K-Lo didn’t single out this story as an instructive story on how to keep on living even when you’re dying.
Ken Blackwell, who did his part to help get war-mongerer George Bush back in office in 2004, has a maudlin article about life up at Townhall. No, not Iraqi life, you fools. We can’t imagine that he’s started caring about the lives of people who have nerve endings to feel pain, brains to sense fear, and families that will miss them. The only life that counts, which is embryonic life, with a side hat tip to the critical importance of Republican existence.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
-Declaration of Independence
It behooves us all, especially in this pivotal election year, to reflect on the words of our nations Founders in light of medical sciences capacity to infringe upon the first human right, the right to life.
The right of women, who are citizens after all, to have lives, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? No, women, like Iraqis of both genders, seem to fall outside the category of “life” he’s laying out here.
Oh my lord, Tracy Clark-Flory linked a new low in Kathleen Parker male-hate. “But Amanda,” you might say, “How can you say Kathleen Parker hates men when she wrote a book called ‘Save the Males’?” I say that because Parker can only bring herself to defend rapists, gropers, and men that are too stupid to breathe. If you don’t belong to one of those groups, I get the impression that Parker doesn’t think you’re a man at all. If that definition of manhood—-stupid and cruel—-doesn’t seem anti-male to you, there’s not much I can do for you.
The article is basically an Americanized rehash of the Taliban’s arguments about how women’s presence needs to be controlled and covered up because men are animals who have to rape you if they see sideboob. Interestingly, while Parker lavishes attention on mini-skirts and other ho clothes, she completely misses condemning high heeled shoes, which I thought was a real shame, because it would have been cool if she’s argued that women’s footfall needs to be silenced to prevent men from becoming aroused, because we know that once a man experiences sexual arousal, he has no choice but to do something dumb and violent. Most of the first page is just standard issue ranting, some about genuinely weird trends of sexualizing pre-pubescent girls with porn culture-inspired clothing. As much as it pains me to say this, I do agree with Parker in this sense:
Why would a 21st-century mother in a post-postfeminist world enable the marketing of her daughter as a sex kitten? The explanation may in part be simple ignorance or lack of awareness. Dress-up is fun, and little girls in grown-up garb are adorable.
Picture an example of the deadly serious nature of dead white guys.
Michael Gerson decides to explain this humor thing to conservatives, which is similar to watching a dachsund try to explain quantum mechanics. Or a Southern Baptist minister explain why he knows more about biology than one of those scientists with their literacy. To be fair, he’s not explaining what makes something funny so much as what makes something not funny, and in the latter category, we can assume that if you’re too stupid to get why it’s funny, you can safely snit that it’s not funny without feeling even remotely humiliated.
The first rule of humor is that it is very serious. You can tell, because dead white guys engaged in humor and satire, and everything white guys, especially dead ones, do should be treated with the utmost respect and gravity.
Satire has been called “punishment for those who deserve it.” Writers from Erasmus to Jonathan Swift to George Orwell have used humor, irony and ridicule to expose the follies of the powerful, the failures of blind ideology and the comic weakness of human nature itself.
Sure, you haven’t read Erasmus, Swift, or Orwell, but rest assured, as they were very serious dead white men, they didn’t befoul their elegant humor by trying to get the audience to do coarse things like laugh. That’s for the hoi polloi. Occasionally they might try to get a wry smile out of the audience, but that’s pushing the envelope. The last thing you want is people to actually pull the leather-bound volumes off the shelf and read them out of the belief that they will get pleasure from the occasion. Books are for dusting; reading leads to getting ideas which leads directly towards liberalism. Next thing you know, you’re Al Franken, who this piece is about and who is officially Not Funny. Even though he’s a white guy.
In case there’s any doubt, this should put it to rest: Tom Coburn is a giant fucking asshole godbag who probably gets a sadistic glee thinking of people suffering. To put some perspective on this, the constant battle on earmarking HIV relief funds is between treatment and prevention. Experts generally like to see the larger chunk go to prevention, because statistically it just saves more lives. (I know; I’m wildly simplifying. This is a blog post, not a doctoral thesis.) You can buy a lot of condoms for what a day’s worth of HIV drugs costs, and prevent a whole lot of transmission. But there’s not even a need to twist into moral pretzels about these hard choices, since the bill in question is an expansion of funding that was already there.
So why has broad bipartisan legislation seeking to more than triple the program’s funding to $50 billion caused such a rancorous fight?
Coburn and six other Senators are blocking the bill until the prevention money is redirected, though. Their reason? In sum: Look over there!
The Oklahoma Republican, along with six other social conservatives, has put a hold on the bill in the Senate, unless a provision is added to direct most of the spending toward treatment for HIV/AIDS rather than toward prevention and other priorities. Otherwise, Coburn said, “the vast majority of the money is going to get consumed by those wanting to help people with HIV, rather than [by] people with HIV.”
DJW’s round-up of National Review’s Campaign Spot blog is pretty hysterical. The right wing noise machine is a fascinating thing to watch, because as hostile as some wingnuts are to the theory of evolution, they’re sure fond of natural selection when it comes to honing their campaign smears. By which I mean, they throw a bunch of shit up on the wall and see what sticks, and often it seems almost randomly generated, with the hopes that what works best will survive through, you guessed it, natural selection.
But evolution isn’t as random as it seems, and neither is the right wing noise machine. For relatively bright liberals like DJW, some of the smears against Obama being generated seem kind of pointless and empty, but I propose that we should fear them more, because what seems like ripe nonsense to us often resonates with some of the more paranoid, right wing parts of the nation. At first blush, it might seem like the immediately infamous “fist bump incident” will turn into an embarrassment for wingnuts, but I fear it’s actually going to turn into one of those legends that lives on with those in the Bircher mindset forever. After reading Nixonland and interviewing Rick Perlstein about the book (which will be on the podcast next week), I think I’ve got an even better idea about what kind of things capture the imagination of the paranoid people out there who, unfortunately, still vote, and because many of the Goldwater/Bircher types are cranky elderly people, they vote in far greater numbers than pretty much any other demographic. Plus, the post-9/11 wingnut reaping has created an entirely new generation of Birchers that are of the Boomer generation or worse, like Jeff Goldstein and are Gen Xers, and as such will be around for fucking forever.
Even on a day of great unity, where Senator Clinton made a gracious and much-needed overture towards repairing the deep rifts in a great political party, I ask that none of us forget the one overarching lesson of this seemingly endless primary season.
Mr. Penn pushed for aggressive attacks on Mr. Obama, something other advisers resisted. At one point, Mr. Penn argued that Mrs. Clinton should find subtle ways to exploit what he called Mr. Obama’s “lack of American roots,” referring to his Kenyan father and his childhood years in Indonesia and even the offshore state of Hawaii, the campaign officials said. Mr. Penn recommended that Mrs. Clinton own the word “American” — she should talk about the “American century” and her “American Strategic Energy Fund,” and so forth. She should add flag symbols to her logo, he suggested.
The wingnut version of a Zen koan: “If a woman is beaten or raped, but shuts up about it and doesn’t tell anyone, did it really happen?” I mean, no one but the abuser knows about it, right? So it’s like it didn’t happen, right? Sure, you weenie liberals might say the victim knows about it, but that’s because you’re liberals and you just love victims, to the degree that you’re willing to believe that if a woman suffers, it matters even if she doesn’t bother anyone with her bitching and moaning about it.
If you want to understand the negative impact of feminism on women (and men) and, by extension, the destructive effects of liberal teachers, Democratic politics and liberal news media on African-Americans, here is Katie Couric last week on the CBS Evening News…
Every time I hear this whine, I want to ask, what form of victimizing do wingnuts think is legitimate? Is rape the right thing to do? Is beating your wife A-OK? Because those are the primary forms of violence against women that feminists agitate against, “creating” victims that apparently wouldn’t be victims if they shut up about it.
Blogging while I got the time in these hectic Netroots Nation days. The good news: We have internet at the new place and a shocking number of Very Famous Bloggers are posting using my wifi. Which is very exciting, like having rock stars fuck on your couch. 
That’s what I’ve come to believe. It’s obvious that he thinks that “religious freedom” means “the right to demand a) the right to completely define an entire religion for yourself and 
Ken Blackwell, who did his part to help get war-mongerer George Bush back in office in 2004, 
Oh my lord, 
Picture an example of the deadly serious nature of dead white guys. 
The wingnut version of a Zen koan: “If a woman is beaten or raped, but shuts up about it and doesn’t tell anyone, did it really happen?” I mean, no one but the abuser knows about it, right? So it’s like it didn’t happen, right? Sure, you weenie liberals might say the victim knows about it, but that’s because you’re liberals and you just love victims, to the degree that you’re willing to believe that if a woman suffers, it matters even if she doesn’t bother anyone with her bitching and moaning about it.