Oh, Tucker, what is this mythical world you’ve dreamed up inside your empty little head?
Crooks and Liars: When asked about how people feel about quitter Sarah-Barracuda, Tucker pulled out the tired old McCain campaign rhetoric about how President Obama is “less experienced” than Palin even though he thinks there should be “more respect for the office” than to want to elect either one of them. Tucker added that he believes Palin is smarter than Al Gore, and just thinks its “weird” that anyone would be terrified of her and afraid that she might actually have a chance of being elected President.
Tucker, it’s amazing how you’re only just now 40 and yet you’re already a relic, a bit of unemployed cable TV detritus washed up on the polluted shores of Pox News and the less-watched spillways of C-SPAN. What last few wisps of credibility Jon Stewart was gracious enough to let you walk away with after he performed a back-alley abortion on your career, you traded in for a pumpkin-colored frilly pirate shirt, sequins, and a jerky, wooden-limbed three-episode run on “Dancing With the Stars”.
Honestly, that should have finished you off for good. And yet here you are again, like Alex P. Keaton gone soft and bitter in middle age, Granpa George Will’s lost nephew, rattling your tin cup on whatever cable shows will have you and spewing reheated talking points out of your swollen Moon Pie of a face that have the distinctly bleary, delusional aftertaste of the early second term of George W. Bush. It’s over, Tucker. Go home and lay on the deep, plushy cushions of your mother’s frozen food fortune and leave us working folks alone, okay? Thanks.
The sad irony is that every last one of these baying MORANS would adamantly tell you they’re “pro life”. It’s amazing that the cognitive dissonance doesn’t make blood come pouring out of their ears.
These are truly dark times for the conservative movement. It’s like Taibbi says:
Most normal people cannot connect on an emotional level with Rush’s meanderings on how Harry Reid is buying off Mary Landrieu with pork in the health care bill. They can, however, connect with stories about how top McCain strategist and Karl Rove acolyte Steve Schmidt told poor Sarah to shut her pie-hole on election day, or how her supposed allies in the McCain campaign stabbed her in the back by leaking gossip about her to reporters, how Schmidt used the word “fuck” in front of her daughter, or even with the strange tales about Schmidt ordering Sarah to consult with a nutritionist to improve her campaign endurance when she herself knew she just needed to get out in the fresh air and run (If there’s one thing Sarah Palin knows, it’s herself!).
Complaining about the assholes we interact with on a daily basis is the #1 eternal pastime of the human race. We all do it, and we get to do it every day, because the world is full of assholes.
And that same Brittle, Self-Righteous Substitute Teacher as Everywoman quality is what makes a certain segment of educated, not-a-Baptist-choir-director America retch and claw at our eyes and ears every time she starts serving more of her usual psycho-blathering word salad. We all know Sarah. Sarah is the woman you temped with who said the piped-in 70’s soft-rock in the break room was “full of demons” and insisted on Christian music or nothing. She’s the neighbor whose kids tore down your badminton net but who calls animal control every time your dog slips out of the fence.
She doubts your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Fortunately, she really does seem to have a knack for fucking up everything she touches. I predict that her presidential run, should it come to that, will be every bit as professional, rock-steady, and problem-free as Rudy Giuliani’s, but to like, the power of ten. I guess it’ll be entertaining, to say the least. Poor Teddy over at Firedoglake may have to invest in a sensory deprivation tank, though.
You know, every year I wait for news that Cokie Roberts has drowned Mara Liasson in some Georgetown hairdresser’s sink (or vice versa) over an invitation to the Widow Russert’s Christmas Ball and it never, ever comes.
Bosom buddy of this blog and eternally patient receiver of frantic late night TRex phone calls litbrit sent this lovely item along from Clownhall.
The Townhall interns working hard and annoying the post office
The Townhall interns get the pleasure of unpacking, stuffing, stamping and mailing the books that new subscribers get. The Sarah Palin books arrived this week and the interns have been working hard to keep up with demand all week.
I thought you’d get a kick out of seeing today’s pile of books the Townhall interns have until 4pm to pack up and get to the post office - which isn’t always happy to see us coming with 3,000 conservative books to mail.
Just in case you were wondering how wee fascist pinheads like The White Witch, Michelle MalKKKin, and the Doughy Pantload can lodge their overwrought, underthought, illiterate horse-chokers in the throat of the NY Times Bestseller List, this is it. These “books” are not “bought” by “people” in any sense that you or I would recognize, oh no.
They are bought by the flat by the folks at Clownhall and the Conservative Book of the Month Club and handed out free with other weekly or monthly steaming piles of dung that arrive in your mailbox alongside the Weekly Standard and the National Review and other money-hemorrhaging conservative bog-rolls. When people talk about “wingnut welfare”, this is exactly what they mean.
I’ve got relatives, you know, that “read” that stuff, and I’m sure I’ll see some copies of Goin’ Rogue on their bookshelves over the holidays (”Don’t you think books are so decorative?“), and I guarantee you this. When I pick them up and open them, their spines will make that “crack!” sound that means they’ve never been opened.
These books are more tribal tokens to be displayed, prompts for conversations that will go exactly like this:
A. That Sarah Palin, she’s somethin’, id’n she?
B. Yep, she’s somethin’. Ah like her. She speaks her mind.
A. Mm-hm. Stands up for what she believes.
B. This country could use a few more like her, that’s for sure.
A. Mmm-hm.
And that’ll be it.
But anyway, it’s just like I said over there a long time ago about Ann Coulter’s Godless:
I wonder if she even realizes how many people who buy her books never actually read them. Crown might as well be shipping book-shaped boxes of sawdust. Of course, if you’ve read one of Ann’s books, you realize that they aren’t actually meant for reading. The pages might as well just say, “All work and no play makes Ann a dull girl” over and over and over.
Millions of copies will be sold of a book written by someone who can’t write, intended for an audience that doesn’t read, about the thoughts of a person who doesn’t think. God is dead.
My favorite paragraph of the review is this one, though:
If you are in a hurry, here is the succinct version of this review: Going Rogue is shit. It is groundbreaking in its banality and disregard for facts. If you are sentient, it will pain you to read it. Imagine watching your parents 69 one another while John Madden sits behind you and bellows out color commentary and you will have some idea of how excruciating and profoundly scarring it is to plow through each page of this wholly fictional monument to self-aggrandized mediocrity. Going Rogue is to the art of writing what the Holocaust is to the concept of a just God; the piece of disconfirming evidence so overwhelming that we are left questioning whether it can exist at all.
Now that’s damn fine writing. I am grateful, even, to Sarah Palin for writing a book so thunderously bad as to inspire it. Up, up he goes on the blog roll! G-I-N-A-N-D-T-A-C-O-S. Saaaa-LUTE!
Hey, y’all, yes, it’s me. I’m back. Nearly two years after getting fired from FDL and a year after tapering off the political beat at the end of the ‘08 elections, I am coming up hard against the fact that I’m apparently constitutionally incapable of disconnecting completely from the media stream and tuning out the noise of the political world. It’s been backing up in my brain and as much as I may try to ignore it, I can’t. Grumble.
So, apparently the only answer is to start back on blogging, if only to provide a pressure release valve for the overwhelming feelings of “ZOMG!!” and “WTF??!!” that are the inevitable human reactions to the farcical circus that is the current political climate. Between Princess Jesus Boobies and The White Witch of the North, Nazi Doughboy Glenn Beck, and that bloated intestinal polyp Rush Limbaugh, I just can’t sit here quietly any longer.
I’m not without reservations about this, mind you. I really kind of wanted to ignore everything and try and go back to the way I was before the debacle that was the Bush Years, mostly politically agnostic, tuning in just before elections then immediately tuning out. But what has been seen cannot be unseen, I guess. Here I am. I’m going to do my best to make myself and you guys laugh because it beats the hell out of screaming and breaking windows. It’s going to be loud, it’s going to occasionally be rude, but I’ll do my best to make sure it’s funny.
There’s probably going to be some new collaborators around here. I’m going to maybe be putting up some ads in the margins. Money’s tight and I’ve almost wiped out my savings just trying to make it from A to B and back again over the last few months. Blogging can be stressful, draining, and difficult. I’m going to try my hand at using it to supplement my income. Even just a little will help.
If things go well, I may be taking all of this to a bigger site with other authors, although we’ll see how it goes. If you’d like to join up, shoot me an email at david530 at gmail dot com with a sample of your work. Also, I need to update my blog-roll, so if you want me to feature your blog, send me a link.
Spam comments have been a real problem around here. There were TWENTY PAGES of spam comments stuck in the mod filter when I signed in two days ago. An easy way for me to take care of that was to close the comments on all old posts. Comments will be closed on new posts after about 48 hours or whenever I get to it.
You guys are welcome to hang out in the threads. I’ll be around. Thanks to all of you who have already come by and said hello. You know I love comments. I *am* doing all this for attention, after all.
In personal news, I’m doing great. I’ve been a non-smoker for more than a year now. I work out and swim 5-6 days a week. The boys, Max (18 mos.) and Juan Carlos (10 yrs.) are doing great, spoiled rotten. Expect kitty photos soon.
And that’s what I’ve got right now. Welcome back to you returning friends, and to those of you who are coming around for the first time. Love you guys. Thanks for reading and thanks to all of you who have written to me over the last year encouraging me to get back on the bloggy horse. You win. Thanks for your support!
Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN) — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday — the eve of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s inauguration for a second term — that now is a “critical moment” for Afghanistan, because Karzai has a “clear window” to demonstrate what kind of government he will lead.
Speaking to staff members at the U.S. Embassy, Clinton said there is a careful and thoughtful review of U.S. policy going on “because we know this is a turning point.”
“We want to be a strong partner to people of Afghanistan,” she said, “and to the government.”
The shaky footage shows two election monitors inspecting a book of 100 ballot papers that are still stitched together, as they were intended to arrive at the polling station in rural Afghanistan. But something is wrong; instead of being pristine, ready for the voter to make his or her mark, each paper bears a large blue tick next to the name of one candidate: Hamid Karzai.
As the monitors flick through the pad, the back of the ballots clearly show the authorisation stamp of election monitors, validating them as votes ready to be put in the ballot box and counted.
So…what? That’s fine? The other guy dropped out and now everything is hunky-dory in Afghanistan, hooray? Spreading Freedumb™ by supporting democratically elected governments in the middle east becomes a whole lot easier when they don’t actually have to be democratically elected, I guess.
Just remember, we have always been at war with Eastasia.
