TOBY PETZOLD

The anti-American hippie Left is fond of euphemizing, as evidenced by this casual characterization by the New York Observer’s Steve Kornacki in his piece on Michael Dukakis, master political strategist (emphasis mine):

Since his fall collapse was made official on Nov. 8, 1988—an eight-point, 426-to-112 electoral-vote loss to George H.W. Bush—Democrats have held up Mr. Dukakis’ general election campaign as a case study in the perils of not hitting back. In 1992, Bill Clinton, with his rapid response team and pitch-perfect shaming of Mr. Bush in their first debate, showed he’d learned the lesson; in 2004, John Kerry showed that he’d forgotten it.

But while Mr. Dukakis readily indicts himself for fatally ignoring the 1988 version of Swift-Boating—the G.O.P.’s success with Willie Horton, he said, “was my own damn fault; no one else’s”—he worries that his party has oversimplified the lesson of his defeat, and of Mr. Kerry’s and Al Gore’s, too. And if Democrats don’t learn the right lesson soon, he fears they’ll be locked out of the White House for a third straight time in 2008—no matter how rosy the electoral math now looks.

“Swiftboating” is apparently now a euphemism for a Democrat being exposed by his own past. It is a verb for a Republican telling the truth and a Democrat not liking it.

One might think that it is an unfair attack —one to which those making it have no right— but that is total crap. Yeah, I remember Dukakis acting like he was better than fighting Bush the Elder. He was a smarmy, college-boy liberal. But if he “ignored” Bush on Horton, it was only because he had no defense for his furlough policies. None. Horton exposed Dukakis for just the kind of guy who would tell Bernie Shaw that he wouldn’t support the execution of the murderer and rapist of his own wife. 

Similarly, Kerry had no response to the accusations and recollections of his fellow Swiftboaters because they were right. Kerry got busted with his own words and deeds. Period. Only an asshole who doesn’t understand how American politics works would presume to call the Horton ad or the Swiftboat Veterans’ anti-Kerryism as anything but hanging a dumb bastard with the rope he gave them.

The Devil was beating his wife today while I was at work. That’s always a very strange —and somehow counterintuitive— sight to behold.

“The summer of aught-seven was the damnedest one I ever saw,” they’ll say.

“I reckon so,” I’ll say.

(Last night was a farmer’s moon, my marmoset.)

Here’s a funny thing over at Salon about John and Elizabeth Edwards (emphasis mine):

By most accounts she has always been the campaign’s leading strategist and still is. But lately she has emerged as its leading risk taker, too. At the end of June she won the nation’s attention — and the gratitude of many — for confronting right-wing provocateur Ann Coulter live on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” after Coulter called John Edwards a “faggot” at a conservative conference in January, and joked in June about wishing he’d be assassinated.

She “won the nation’s attention”? On fucking Hardball? Think about how “meta” that is. Hardball itself pulls in about three or four hundred viewers a night. Mostly shut-ins and widow-women. But the clip of that manufactured “confrontation” —as scripted as a campaign ad— has probably been seen by a million. From there, including people like myself who have never actually seen the clip, it’s merely discussed by a few million more. What a sick snowball. Out of a nation of 300 million, a tiny fraction catch wind of some media-made shit-stir of a very minor celebrity candidate and Joan Walsh says the nation’s attention was “won”? When did that happen?

Oh, just about the time that phrase entered Ms. Walsh’s mind. 

John Edwards’ recent demonstrations of the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity are truly appalling. Be it the cornpone or the luxuriant locks, he really is, after all, no different from the sickening John Kerry: a user of women or emotions and even resumes —all in the pursuit of money and renown.

These are lightweight men. Folded doilies of masculinity. Their presence in the modern Democratic Party make me nostalge for stronger minds. Roosevelt, Truman, and Johnson. Dean Rusk and Henry Jackson. Substantial Democrats in foreign policy…

No. The nation’s attention has not been won.

I fear a calamity.

Setting: Me and another semi-country boy. Earlier this evening. In the parking lot at Target. Stopping in my tracks to look up into a beautiful Texas sky and behold a fantastic storm migrating to the northwest. The whole, sobering grey and blue palette.

Pardner, passing by: Don’t look good.

Me: Purdy, though.

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’s the thing now with Zbignew Brzezinski? For us to not call what’s happening the “War on Terror”? Sounds good to me. Hell! It sounds great to me. I don’t use that term. I call this what it is: the War against Islamofascists.

A dhimmi like Brzezinski apparently believes so firmly in the incantatory powers of this generic or unfriendly or even incoherent phrase to traumatize and panic people that he admits it in public (emphases mine):

The “war on terror” has created a culture of fear in America. The Bush administration’s elevation of these three words into a national mantra since the horrific events of 9/11 has had a pernicious impact on American democracy, on America’s psyche and on U.S. standing in the world. Using this phrase has actually undermined our ability to effectively confront the real challenges we face from fanatics who may use terrorism against us.

The damage these three words have done — a classic self-inflicted wound — is infinitely greater than any wild dreams entertained by the fanatical perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks when they were plotting against us in distant Afghan caves. The phrase itself is meaningless. It defines neither a geographic context nor our presumed enemies. Terrorism is not an enemy but a technique of warfare — political intimidation through the killing of unarmed non-combatants.

Brzezinski’s first sentence is a lie —and the premise of his argument declines from there. It simply isn’t true to say that America has done itself psychic harm with the fear reflected in the use of a mere phrase. Who the hell do you know who thinks one fucking thing about the terror alert level today? I don’t know anybody who says anything about it: even people who watch FOX News. So that’s a straight-up straw-man, Zbig.

And this college boy argument that the “war on terror” is a linguistic placebo ignores the fact that Presidents have been waging “war” against concepts and non-combatants for decades. Johnson declared war on poverty. Nixon declared war on drugs and cancer. There’s always some war to fight in America because that’s what we do to define ourselves and our purpose.

You’d think that a man whose fortunes have depended on the willingness of this country to fight Nazism and Communism would appreciate that, but he doesn’t.

Have I lost my damned mind or does that Rogaine ad they’re running actually spell the word “foam” as “foan”?

How many people did that ad go through who no longer write in standard longhand?

I mean, doesn’t the terminal cursive letter “m” have three humps?

*glances over at the invisible Greek chorus and shrugs*

Was I not supposed to notice that “global warming” is being forced out by the Gorebot masses and getting replaced by weird phrases like “human-induced global climate change”?

That’s no shit. Just keep this in mind the next time you read something about global warming written from the Left. What’s happening to this phrase that I just used in the previous sentence?

It’s losing its direction.

It’s no longer warming —which certainly suggests a particular direction of the thermometer— but, instead, is changing.

Why the weasel-word? Is the Left’s intellectual conscience stirring from its drunken sloth to recognize that the religious devotion to environmentalism as an ideology may be affecting Scientific truth?

Well. Here’s the news that we short-lived furry mammals don’t ever get because of how long it takes to ride the cycle: you don’t know anything. That is not the elephant’s trunk you’re pulling on, you ignorant sod. Life on Earth is a study —God’s study, if you must— in creation on a knife’s edge. We exist because of where we are and in what proportions and by what accidents we are and would not otherwise be outside that necessity. There is more damage to be done to us and our technologies in the fluctuations in the radiation and heat emanating from the heart of the Sun than there will be in whether or not the ice shelves are melting. You don’t know anything. “Human-induced” what?! If you’re going to take on the mantle of Godhood, you stupid hippies, at least stick with the word that brung you: warming. Global warming. That’s the thing you insist is happening, so use the fucking word and stop being weasels. Because, when you just call it climate change, it really doesn’t speak to me. It seems like a cop-out. And it is. Because you don’t know anything.

I called up a member of my family on my way home just then and was told that Molly Ivins has passed on.

I am sorry to hear it.

Ivins was a great wit, a distinct voice, and more informed about Texas and national politics than the next hundred bozos with a word processor combined, whatever her politics. Most importantly to me, she was a true ideological hero (do they say heroine anymore?) to my Momma.

I extend my condolences to Molly’s loved ones and to the keepers of the great liberal tradition of this greatest of American states.

I’ve been around long enough to have witnessed a few changes in the way that my fellow Americans use and abuse the English language. My [favorite] is the frequent use of the word less instead of fewer. It may be that people have always made this mistake, but I insist that it has become far more pervasive at every level of society. News personalities and print journalists will confuse them as naturally as the person who makes the “Ten Items or Less” sign at the grocery store express lane. Maybe people use less when they mean fewer because it is a linguistic example of English evolutionarily suppressing its inflectedness. I don’t know the term for that phenomenon, but isn’t the choice between less and fewer an example of changing a phoneme to suit the context? (The context being the reference to either amounts and degrees or to a number.) I don’t know. Is that akin to inflection?

But as important as making the distinction between the uses of less and fewer may be, there is a worse example that I think poses an actual problem for clarity: the loss of the comma in written forms of address. That’s the vocative mood? Maybe it’s the imperative. In any event, you simply have to use a comma when you’re addressing someone by name. If you don’t, it’s confusing. Now, I’m no great expert in punctuation. (See, for example, my probably improper use of italics above —and here— when writing the words less and fewer. That’s almost certainly not right. I should probably have written them “less” and “fewer” —or maybe I shouldn’t have used any quotation marks at all. But I have always thought that you should italicize words when you use them as terms! I really have. They’re not appearing in your sentence as what they are substantively, but nominatively —so why not write them down as you would a term you’re borrowing from a foreign language?) Whatever else, you’ve still got to keep it clear. Commas, which I know I use too often, are there for a reason. They’re supposed to break things up by lists and clauses and phrases. But they also go with people’s names. Don’t question why. Just know it.