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Thursday, October 16, 2008

MJ and JM

Well, I told you blogging would be light this week. 

Anyway, many thanks to Senator McCain for an awesome guest post yesterday—and for responding to readers in comments, too!  I’m going to see if I can get Joe the Totally Uncommitted Voter to sub for me tomorrow.

Posted by Michael on 10/16 at 04:43 PM
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Wednesday, October 15, 2008

We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog

Special guest post by Senator John McCain (R.—Arizona)

My friends, I don’t understand what’s going on.

Look, I did everything they told me to do.  Absolutely everything.  They said that the ideal “50+1” ticket combines a sociopathic liar and an inarticulate, born-again wingnut, and I went ahead and got them both in one perky attractive package, a moose-dressin’ maverick and a hockey mom to boot.  And now they’re all turning on her, like that pantywaist from the New York Times.  “Oh, she’s not prepared,” they say.  “She doesn’t know about stuff and her answers to questions don’t make any sense.” WTFing F?  Like anybody gave a shit about this with Quayle or Baby Bush?  And the economy!  God damn every goddamn thing to hell.  They told me—Christ in a chicken basket, they swore to me I wouldn’t have to know anything about the damn economy.  They assured me that I could tell “the base” anything at all, just so long as I promised to cut their taxes and say my big thing about earmarks.  You know, you will know their names.  You will know their names: sonofabitch, that was supposed to be my entire fricking economic agenda.  “If you get stuck,” that Holtz-Eakin dweeb said, “just make some shit up.  Talk about offering a tax credit for all amortized debenture stock options and getting government out of the way and letting families choose.  They’ll love it.” And now people want me to deal with this fiscal “crisis,” which means I have to look out at all those whiners every goddamn day and tell them I feel their pain or some shit.  It’s just degrading.  Don’t these people know that I served my country?

And then this crap about how I’m running a “disgraceful campaign.” Disgraceful campaign?  Negro, please.  That sniveling coward Baby Bush didn’t even bother to complete his National Guard dodge, and he still managed to get a bunch of B-list Nixon henchmen to slander John Kerry and sling the shit about his war record.  Four years ago, plenty of people called Kerry a traitor and a lying SOB because of his Winter Soldier testimony to Congress, and the media lapped it up.  Why, that Sinclair outfit actually announced it was going to order all its stations to broadcast that Swift Boat extravaganza “Stolen Honor,” and the New York Times was cool with that.  Actually, they said the damn thing “should be shown in its entirety on all the networks, cable stations and on public television.” Goddammit to hell, what would be the equivalent of that shit today?  A prime-time special devoted to the question of whether Barack Obama secretly wrote Fugitive Days and Soul On Ice?  And then there were those purple-heart band-aids at the convention in New York.  Michelle Malkin going on TV to suggest that Kerry’s wounds were self-inflicted.  Cheney going around saying that a vote for Kerry was a vote for terrorism.  Jesus’ mother, I can’t believe I’m getting shit for a little whooping and yelling in my crowd.

Well, like I say, I don’t get it.  Apparently the world has changed somehow and nobody told me, because this stuff always worked just fine til now.  Goddamn.  I guess I have to do something dramatic tonight. Again. If you all have any ideas, whiners, now’s the time.

Oh, yeah, thanks to Michael Barude for letting me guest-google on his Internet.

Posted by Michael on 10/15 at 02:44 PM
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Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Road trip!

Last night Jamie made his debut as the equipment manager for the State College High School varsity hockey team.

Jamie’s earnest and diligent equipment managing was doubtless a key factor in State College’s 9-0 win over Central Dauphin.  Above, he’s pictured with the teacher/coach who had the idea in the first place, Andy Wilson (a pretty fearsome player himself).

Jamie has been looking forward to this eagerly for weeks, thrilled to be given some responsibility for the hockey team.  I wonder whether the anticipation about this equipment-managing gig has sparked Jamie’s recent forays into Greater Independence, such as his proposal last night that he do his French homework “on my own” and his insistence last week that he clean up after dinner while Janet and I take Lucy the Dog for a walk. (We agreed, tentatively, not sure if he would clear the table and load the dishwasher properly, and we gave him a little help with handwashing the salad bowl.  And lo! when we came back after ten minutes, the kitchen was spotless.) But yesterday afternoon, as he was putting on his jersey and helmet for the game, he asked me, “hey Michael, what does the equipment manager do?” So I said, carry the water bottles and the extra sticks and whatever else the coaches ask you to do, basically.  And he was good with that.  If all goes well, he’ll serve as equipment manager for all State College home games.  Here’s to the new season!

Blogging around here will be light at best for the rest of the week, because Jamie and I are hitting the road.  It’s our Swingin’ Swing State Tour ‘08!  First we’re going to Colorado, to this place, where I’ll give a talk, and thence to New Mexico, to this place, where I’m responding to a panel full of talks.  As you longtime Jamie-watchers know, Jamie loves to travel, and he’s never been to either state; I’ve never been to New Mexico.  A few years ago, Jamie would have said, “Colorado and New Mexico—brand new states, never had before!” Now he says, “Colorado and New Mexico—we haven’t been there in a long time!” which is syntactically cleaner but semantically less accurate. Oh, well.

This means we’ll miss tomorrow night’s third and final presidential debate, which will be starting right about the time we touch down in Denver.  Don’t you envy us?  I envy us.  If any game-changers happen in a game-changing kind of way, please let us know in comments.

I do, however, have an advance copy of John McCain’s groundbreaking speech on the economy, scheduled for yesterday tomorrow never knows later today.  It’s probably a definite game-changer.  The plan for America’s recovery will announce six bold initiatives:

• direct U.S. Treasurer Anna Escobedo Cabral to infuse a lot of money into the economy;

• have a plan to create great new jobs;

• reach out across the aisle to create a bipartisan commission to study the benefits of taxing employer-provided health insurance;

• dinner specials at the Ponderosa Steakhouse: order any entree, get an entree of equal or lesser value free;

• Barack Hussein al-Obama is Bill Ayers’ BFF; and

• eliminate wasteful earmarks.

OK, we’re out.  Time to go and take a walk in the woods.

Posted by Michael on 10/14 at 07:30 AM
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Monday, October 13, 2008

Thug life

Shorter Michael Barone: the Obama Campus Thugocracy will jam your phone lines!

Actually, the verbatim Michael Barone is much better:

“I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors,” Barack Obama told a crowd in Elko, Nev. “I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face.” Actually, Obama supporters are doing a lot more than getting into people’s faces. They seem determined to shut people up.

That’s what Obama supporters, alerted by campaign emails, did when conservative Stanley Kurtz appeared on Milt Rosenberg’s WGN radio program in Chicago. Kurtz had been researching Obama’s relationship with unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers in Chicago Annenberg Challenge papers in the Richard J. Daley Library in Chicago—papers that were closed off to him for some days, apparently at the behest of Obama supporters.

Obama fans jammed WGN’s phone lines and sent in hundreds of protest emails. The message was clear to anyone who would follow Rosenberg’s example. We will make trouble for you if you let anyone make the case against The One.

I’ll get back to that “in your face” moment a little bit later on.  For now, I want you all to contemplate the horror of hundreds of Obama thugs sending in protest emails and jamming WGN’s phone lines.  These jackboot tactics were apparently so effective as to shut down WGN altogether, depriving Stanley Kurtz and Milton Rosenberg of any opportunity to inform listeners that Bill Ayers secretly wrote Dreams from My Father while teaching Obama how to blow up stuff.  The message was clear: anyone who shows that Obama, like Osama, has a friend who bombed the Pentagon will receive a sternly worded email.

That odd rattling noise you hear?  That, my friends, is the sound of pearls being clutched all over the length and breadth of Wingnuttia.

Barone then churns out a series of random Drudge-generated paragraphs that go like this: members of the Barack Obama Truth Squad who point out that “Obama is a secret Muslim” is an untrue statement are shutting down free speech; the fairness doctrine is bad; “NBC and its parent, General Electric, don’t want people to hear speech that attacks liberals” (that’s a direct quote!); card check legislation is also bad.  Barone forgot to mention that someone once threw a pie at David Horowitz, but maybe he’s saving that for the next devastating installment.  Anyway, here’s the stunning climax:

Today’s liberals seem to be taking their marching orders from other quarters. Specifically, from the college and university campuses where administrators, armed with speech codes, have for years been disciplining and subjecting to sensitivity training any students who dare to utter thoughts that liberals find offensive. The campuses that used to pride themselves as zones of free expression are now the least free part of our society.

Obama supporters who found the campuses congenial and Obama himself, who has chosen to live all his adult life in university communities, seem to find it entirely natural to suppress speech that they don’t like and seem utterly oblivious to claims that this violates the letter and spirit of the First Amendment. In this campaign, we have seen the coming of the Obama thugocracy, suppressing free speech, and we may see its flourishing in the four or eight years ahead.

OK, first, I want to point out that there’s nothing racially charged about the phrase “Obama thugocracy,” because, as Stanley Kurtz’s groundbreaking research has shown, one of Obama’s mentors did indeed openly embrace “thug life.” And I want to acknowledge that Barack Hussein Obama has, in fact, chosen to live all his adult life in university communities: Chicago, Springfield, Washington, D.C.—these are quintessential college towns, cocoons for sensitivity-training, free-speech-suppressing liberal fascists who never grow up.

But now it’s time to go back to that “in your face” moment.  Here it is, in all its chilling thugaliciousness (NSFW, and if you have kids, now’s the time to put them to bed):

At the 0:26 mark:

I need you to go out and talk to your friends and talk to your neighbors.  I want you to talk to them whether they are independent or whether they are Republican. I want you to argue with them and get in their face. If they tell you that well, we’re not sure where he stands on guns, I want you to say he believes in the Second Amendment.  If they tell you, well, he’s gonna raise your taxes, you say no he’s not, he’s gonna lower them.

My sources tell me that when Michael Barone first saw this video, he was so terrified he lost consciousness and had to be revived with smelling salts.  Apparently it reminded him of a traumatic moment from his own college days at Harvard in the mid-60s, when he said “Martin Luther King, Jr. is a dangerous radical who will force us all to become Negro,” whereupon a classmate replied, “uh, that’s actually not true,” thereby suppressing Barone’s free speech.  For here, as you can plainly see, Obama is telling his supporters to inform their neighbors that he supports the Second Amendment and will lower taxes! This, my friends, is the very essence of liberal fascism.  By telling his adoring acolytes to “knock on some doors” and “make some phone calls,” Obama is undermining the First Amendment whatchamacallit that is so essential to our democracy.  Where will it end?  Don’t bother to answer that one—you know perfectly well where it ends.

So now it’s time to give Obama his secret marching orders.  Hell, yeah!  We campus liberals haven’t trained him from his earliest days as a Muslim child in the madrassas of Upper Manchuria for nothing, you know. Senator Obama: once elected, you will proceed to enact the Stealth Agenda.  This Stealth Agenda will include, but not be limited to:

-- universal health care for all Americans;

-- the formation of workers’ collectives in all key industries;

-- punishment for plutocrats!  every corporate official involved in every corporate scandal from Enron to the financial meltdown will be put to work paving roads and rebuilding infrastructure;

-- restoration of the Caliphate!  this time with soul!

-- compulsory gay marriage, to be conducted by lottery;

-- one required lower-division course in “diverse cultures and traditions.”

You heard it here first, folks.

And why am I putting this up on a blog if it’s a “Stealth Agenda”?  Because it’s too late to stop us now! Bwah hah hah, etc.

Update: Ah, I see that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has gotten on board with the Stealth Agenda program, by awarding a Nobel Prize to Paul Krugman for his groundbreaking work on forming workers’ collectives and devising punishments for plutocrats.  The Obama thugocracy applauds this wise and timely award!

Posted by Michael on 10/13 at 08:54 AM
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Sunday, October 12, 2008

Sunday Conundrum

Could there be a pajamanian blogger so stupid and/or dishonest that other pajamanian bloggers noticed?  Or would that violate the Second Law of Pajamas?

Throughout the Intertubes, the question resounds. 

Posted by Michael on 10/12 at 12:13 PM
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Friday, October 10, 2008

Open letter to conservatives

These are tough times for everyone, but I know these are especially tough times for you.  From Iraq to Katrina to this global financial meltdown, you’ve made rather a mess of things, and now your party’s standardbearer is running a historically abysmal campaign made up of one part lies and two parts hate.  His proposal for health care is somewhere between stupid and vicious, and his response to the financial crisis is, amazingly, even worse.  Who’s his base now? Left Behind fans and people who can get hoppin’ mad at Barack Hussein Obama for spending three million dollars on an overhead projector thingy whatsis.  Yes, you have a VP candidate who got the base (and Rich Lowry) excited.  But as Hunter pointed out the other day,

The wingnut base is the easiest group of people on the planet to fire up. They get fired up when they think gays might steal their marriages. They get fired up when they have to press “one” for English. They get fired up when some black guy gets all uppity and runs for president. They get fired up when their sub-sub-sub-version of Christianity isn’t the dominant religious ideal of the nation. Holding Sarah Palin in front of them is like teasing a dog through a fence, but that’s about it.

Face it, folks, there’s nothing left.  You have a big bag of fail at this point.  Just the lies and the hate, which is more than enough to generate a $20 million salary for Sean Hannity but not enough to keep ordinary people from understanding that racial minorities are not to blame for the subprime crisis, and that Bill Ayers is not responsible for the Dow’s collapse.

So, what to do?  Those of you who have a shred of human decency and/or intellectual integrity are in a bit of a bind: you can cut your losses, recapitalize your institutions, and try to keep the brand alive a little bit longer.  Guys like Charles Krauthammer are offering to lead the way out for you: keep insulting Democrats and their beliefs while admitting that, well, uh, you have nothing.  Or you could take poor flailing David Brooks as a model.  One day after this humble blog suggested that high-end conservative pundits will slurp down any old slop they’re fed by the party, Brooks was slopping out this review of Sarah Palin’s debate performance:

this debate was about Sarah Palin. She held up her end of an energetic debate that gave voters a direct look at two competing philosophies. She established debating parity with Joe Biden. And in a country that is furious with Washington, she presented herself as a radical alternative.

By the end of the debate, most Republicans were not crouching behind the couch, but standing on it. The race has not been transformed, but few could have expected as vibrant and tactically clever a performance as the one Sarah Palin turned in Thursday night.

Only a week later, having realized to his horror that writing columns like this will soon deprive him of dinner-party conversation with sane people, Brooks has decided to call Palin a “fatal cancer to the Republican party.” Now that’s the way to throw someone under the couch, folks—if you want to maintain some sense of self-respect as a Serious Person.

But what about the rest of you?  What about those of you who don’t have any decency or integrity or self-respect?  What about all of you who want to spend the next eight years foaming at the mouth every time someone turns up shocking new evidence that Bill Ayers wrote Barack Obama’s autobiography, or that the secret Muslim Flight 93 memorial points to Mecca, or that Rachael Ray wore a scary scarf?

Folks, I don’t think you understand how we truly feel about you.  We mock you and tease you, I know, and you hate us for it.  But we don’t hate you back.  Really, we don’t.  We’re secular pluralists, after all, and we know we have to find ways of sharing this planet with people who can’t stand secular pluralists.  We really just want you to leave us alone.  Still, we have our limits.  The way you’ve behaved over the past decade or two leads us to believe that you’ll do whatever it takes to make the next decade or two a living hell for everyone who’s sincerely trying to clean up all the messes you’ve made.  And we just can’t be bothered with that nonsense right now.  This is too important.

Understand, I don’t want to deprive you of your pastimes and your livelihoods.  On the contrary:  I want you to enjoy them to the fullest extent imaginable—but in a way that doesn’t interfere with sane people.  So I have a proposal.

We will spend $500 trillion and create 150 million new, high-paying jobs creating an alternate reality for you.  In a state of your choosing—but preferably Utah, Oklahoma, or Alaska—we will construct a massive VR installation complete with all your favorite obsessions and catering to your every resentment.  In this separate, self-enclosed universe, President Palin and Vice-President Tancredo will run things just like you think they oughta be; crescents and croissants will be banned; An American Carol will sweep the Oscars; television will consist of two channels, Fox and Fox Sports; and the ten commandments will be proudly displayed in every classroom and courtroom, together with a Very Angry Eagle if you like.  There won’t be any elite universities or sneering college professors, of course, but there will be Mexicans, so that you can call for their deportation and then hire them to mow your lawn and work in your pork-processing plants; there will be gay people, so that your sense of sexual identity can be properly threatened at all times; and there will be a black person, played by Gloria Foster, so that you can prevent her from voting.

It’s totally a win-win.  You’ll love it, and you’ll be out of our hair.  And all you have to do is lie down in this comfy little pod of pink goo.

Posted by Michael on 10/10 at 08:19 AM
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