THIS MACHINE KILLS LEFTISTS
The Moon will save the human race—
Were loonies beaten off their path—
The unthrown stone remains in place—
Through orbitary aftermath.
A blast unguarded —global fire—
Here’s thirty pieces, you fucking liars—
Now go and reckon what you did
When you did nothing but blame the Yid.
What sort of manipulative bullshit is this?
The wife of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards called into MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Tuesday to confront Ann Coulter on her personal attacks on her husband and family.
Coulter, the controversial conservative commentator, appeared on an outdoor set with host Chris Matthews — and also with dozens of supporters and detractors waiting to ask questions. But there was another person waiting to pose a question to Coulter: Elizabeth Edwards.
According to an Edwards campaign aide, Elizabeth Edwards wanted to call into the show when she heard that Coulter would be taking questions, and she called a Hardball producer to get the phone number needed to dial into the show.
What’s going on here? Is this the fairness doctrine in action? I already have no respect for Matthews, but this incident is contemptible. What, is his producer Jenny Jones?
Well, the reference isn’t especially apt, but the talk show burlesque of ambush “journalism” is to be pitied.
I have to ask Silkiness, though, just how fungible his principles are that his wife should find it amenable to call up a trashy cable “news” program to defend him against a calculatedly hyper-partisan opinion writer. Free publicity? Check. Fundraising opportunity? Check. A demonstration to anyone watching that MSNBC and its on-air talent are the low-rent (and low-rated) whores of any liberal candidate willing to vilify conservative commentary? Check.
(Emphasis mine.)
UPDATE: Coulter now writes that Matthews’ people told her “minutes” before airtime that Mrs. Edwards might call in, so it wasn’t strictly ambush. But so what? We can’t and shouldn’t choose our interlocutors, but it still smells like manufactured spontaneity to me.
In other news, Harry S Truman once made the mistake of taking notice of a lowly opinion writer. Some guy wrote a review of Harry’s daughter’s singing and Truman responded to the poor bastard with the epistolary equivalent of a spring-loaded tin of his own filth. Go read it. Dad is pissed.
And notice that Truman spoke for himself and didn’t dump it off on Bess to handle.
I was watching Nancy Pelosi talk to Charlie Rose about her visit with the Ba’athist dictator of Syria and I’m thinking —again— that she accepted Assad’s invitation to come to Damascus with either the tacit approval of or by way of some agreement with George W. Bush.
There’s no downside for any of the players in this game.
For Assad, it was a propaganda coup to con the highest-ranking Democrat in the American government into coming to visit and, thereby, validate him. Assad can now claim that he has met with the leader of the domestic opposition to Bush —and spin it however he wants.
For Pelosi, the same propaganda value obtains. She may now claim that her efforts in diplomacy with one of the worst villains in the Middle East presents a true alternative to the world for the potential of Democratic control of America’s foreign policy. This is probably a comfort of some kind to the anti-war Left and liberal Democrats —even though the vast majority of them would prefer isolationism or, at most, boutique interventionism.
But it would not be a comfort if it were so that Pelosi’s visit was done at Bush’s behest. I can imagine that, with Assad’s invitation to her a known fact within the Bush White House, the President would’ve consented to let it ride (although not without the requisite partisan rancor). Bush may have figured that such a visit was as much of an overreach as he could have wanted —and may have even used Pelosi as some kind of carrier pigeon.
Admittedly, that sort of cooperation would also mean that Pelosi is not as much of a danger as I once thought. Like most of the Democratic leadership, her opposition to the War for Iraq is not really based on any principles, but on the partisan value that can be exploited with an ill-informed electorate. Opposing the war is simply good for business —so long as you can deceive the American People into believing that we have lost our purpose in Iraq.
Anyhow, it’s a dangerous game. We are fewer than 18 months away from the next Presidential election —and people like Pelosi absolutely must find a way to begin transitioning away from the seditious bullshit that they’ve been spouting since the 2000 Election and at least pretend, rhetorically, to invoke patriotism. Why? Because the Ownership Society is almost upon them. It comes as a package deal with further electoral successes.
It’s almost time to accept what comes next.
The kids were torching gas stations throughout Teheran last night by the dozens, but will that be enough to bring the mullahs’ government down? Of course not. It’s going to take something far more violent than that.
Ready for your close-up, assholes?
The American military is ready for you to quit calling them torturers, murderers, idiots, and dupes working for the Bushitler Imperial War Machine, Inc.
Over at The Left Coaster, where Steve Soto recently banned me after years of vigorous, but principled, debate, is this:
I am a minority among the center-left bloggers when I say that despite what I think of this war, and my desire for an immediate pullout, I support a residual force for several years to provide a Special Forces capability to reduce or eliminate the Al Qaeda threat inside Iraq. We owe the Iraqis many things for breaking their country, but one of the things we can do is to clean up Bush’s mess and try and reverse his dereliction of duty when he allowed Al Qaeda a new safe haven in Iraq.
Such thoughts anticipate, however retardedly, the inevitable realization among the anti-Bush Left that the purpose of our presence is to be in Iraq. To destroy dictatorship and make possible representative government. To invite trouble from across the whole of the Muslim world and whip its ass front and center. To create the potential for new markets, new security arrangements (as Soto himself goes on to suggest), and a new world where the Muslim ideology is set on a path to transformation. Not reformation, but transformation.
Islama mutanda est.
If we were to withdraw from Iraq, wouldn’t that just make it easier for Iran to hold the world hostage and to commit mass murder against the Jews of Israel? Where do the anti-war Dhimmicrats think we’re supposed to withdraw to? Their ideas on the war —beyond the merest and most sniveling sort of opposition— are either non-existent or incoherent.
Better and braver men and women than I could hope to be have sacrificed themselves in Iraq and for Iraq. So I choose to honor them here in my own small way. We have a great thing to accomplish there. Don’t dishonor them by pretending they haven’t served a great and worthy cause.
And fuck any Dhimmicrat who can’t wait to surrender to the anarchists and Islamofascist murderers. What a disgraceful party.
I can’t stand a certain old man who calls me up and wants to argue at me and pretend that I represent everything he hates about the ideological opposition. It’s a tedious fucking problem from way back —a well-known proclivity for using people around him as props in truth and then characters in his insufficiently private fictions.
The com-symps are called something else these days, but the same old totalitarian hatred for debate remains the same. This one? He ain’t never wrote a dialogue.
I will say it again: the Election of 2000 was a vastly more traumatic event in the lives of the anti-Bush Left than were the atrocities of 11 September 2001. The psychic debilitation proceeding from that perverted view of things has rendered these haters and self-loathers incapable of remembering recent historical facts or of even being coherent.
Which, of course, leads back to the aforementioned tedium.
It’s a real disgrace that a man was beaten to death in my town on Tuesday by a group of savages —and that the whole world knows about it.
Nice shit sandwich to hand our new chief of police.
The particulars are coming out in dribs and drabs. Some of it is even the truth.
The city government here is very obviously worried about the political fallout from this murder and are keeping as quiet about it as possible —which is impossible— but why won’t the local news stations describe the suspects for us? I watched KXAN’s 10 o’ clock broadcast tonight and I didn’t hear a description. They obviously know: the cops, the EMS, the witnesses, the local media. Why won’t someone in our local media describe the murderers to us? Don’t they want the public’s help in tracking these murderers down?
Here is an interesting Popular Mechanics article Professor Reynolds links to on the effects the DVR is having on our TV-watching habits:
Our Scientific Atlanta DVR is my wife’s favorite digital toy, and she has learned to postpone the start of her favorite shows by 20 minutes (a phenomenon known as “time shifting”), since that generally assures her that she can zoom through the commercials to catch up with the show exactly at its end. It’s more than just a convenience to her; she enjoys it as if avoiding commercials were a game, and chides me when I forget to fast-forward through the ads.
I actually don’t have a DVR, but I have long been very big —too big— on recording favorite programming to have to watch later and enjoy. Consequently, I am a slave to a rather large video library that probably takes up too much of my physical storage space. I no longer add to the burden, though, having given up that habit in one of those weird preoccupational shifts that sometimes come over me. Gave up smoking the same way. The bottom line is that there’s a lot of bullshit on the TV. Lots of degenerate and degrading and disgusting garbage. People must remember to not watch psychic garbage because it poisons their reason. What’s fun to do instead is to watch things that matter and which please and edify you. Rootedness and reinforcement of what we have seen and know is the surest defense against mesmerism. You know: all that “experiencing it again for the very first time” stuff.
The Gateway Pundit links to this disgusting news report from Iran (emphasis mine):
The news about the scheduled stoning of a man and a woman in Takistan, Ghazvin, was spread through mobile phone messages and the Internet. The office of Showraye Tameen of Ghazvin province has issued the order to stone and man and a woman in public.
The judge of Branch 1 of the Criminal Court of Takistan will be present in person to throw the first stone. This was scheduled to be done on Sunday, June 17, but the Office of Showraye Tameen of Ghazvin province postponed it to Thursday, June 21.
Mokarrameh Ebrahimi is a 43 year old woman and mother of an 11 year old who has spent the past 11 years in Choubin prison in Ghazvin after being sentenced to stoning. The father of the child has also been in prison for 11 years and is scheduled to be stoned with her.
According to the Meydaan, the official site of the Stop Stoning Forever Campaign, an informed source has verified the news and added that “the pits are dug and prepared in Behesht Zahra cemetery to implement the sentence.”
Like this couple’s child, one of my great-great-grandfathers was born out of wedlock. It was in 1847 right there in Robeson Co., North Carolina —the absolute heart of Scottish Presbyterianism in America. My ancestress was for a time kicked out of the church for this supposed indiscretion, but was allowed back in once her contrition was judged to be true. Yet, when she committed this same “crime” again a decade or so later, the church elders essentially excommunicated her.
They didn’t stone her to death. They simply washed their hands of her.
And made sure she’d gone to Texas.
I don’t know what the upside is to pre-emptively excusing the latest squeezings of the traitor Michael Moore, but that’s what sorry, sorry apologists do:
It’s true that I wish Michael Moore were a wee bit more scrupulous with the facts in his films, but I sometimes wonder if he doesn’t insert random distortions into his movies deliberately. With rare exceptions, after all, they’re small things that could just as easily have been presented correctly without damaging his narrative at all. But the end result is the kind of publicity money can’t buy, and it’s the sweetest kind of publicity of all: the kind that’s subsidized by his enemies, who helpfully boost ticket sales by furiously denouncing his films for weeks on end.
Got that? Lying is a respectable tactic. A marketing tactic used throughout a propaganda film to generate free publicity and sell tickets. Of course, there must also come a tipping point with such a scheme where the lies and manipulations become so numerous that the marketing tactic gives way to a general impression that the “filmmaker” is a lying cocksucker who hates his country.
Which brings me around to Kevin Drum.
Why are you such a partisan hack that you would try to mitigate the work of a traitor?
As one of my favorite characters from The West Wing once said, you’re not Satan —you’re the guy who runs into the 7-11 to get Satan a pack of cigarettes.
I have never heard Roger L. Simon sound this pessimistic:
I tried Zen for a while, but I didn’t have the discipline. And being inside synagogues and churches doesn’t fill me with awe the way it does others (though I admire the architecture). Being inside a mosque, of course, fills me with the desire to watch my back. But if I were a believer, I’d be thanking God right now I wasn’t born in Gaza, because I think the Palestinians there are about ready to experience a Hell the likes of which even they have never dreamed about. Because Hamas, being basically a psychopathic organization, will be unable to control themselves if they win, especially since they will be the lackeys of their overlords in Tehran. This means they will overreach quickly. This time, I am relatively certain, the Israeli response will be swift and in no way measured, as it was in Lebanon. And no one will make much of an attempt to stop them because almost no one cares much for the Gazans anymore.
Always remember this: when the Car Swarm People were free to choose their own leaders and enjoy the first steps towards sovereignty, they elected a bunch of goddamned Nazis who are at this very moment destroying Gaza.
Oh, and note this well: consider what little attention this [civil war] is getting now and know how much more “interested” the world media will become once the perfidious Jews begin their inevitable response to the dangers now mounting against them. The hypocrisy already sickens me.
