The point at which I stopped reading

"The forebodings the Jews of Europe had as they were herded onto cattle cars to an unknown destination are the same feelings of helplessness I have as the Copenhagen Climate Summit reaches its conclusion."

From Musings From Sanibel Island, here.

No global warming?! Look, she’s bare armed in December. In Norway!

Via Yahoo!

Fair warning

Found somewhere.

At some point there’d be a post like this

He wouldn't bow to Hitler but American Democrats/trial lawyers expect him to bow to … his Homeowners Association! -- Town Hall

There’s a contradictory impulse in America. Okay, two contradictory impulses if you include our sex-is-sacred-everybody-lets-fuck hypocrisy. The other one is our love/hate relationship with homeowners associations.

Twice a year -- usually around Memorial Day/Fourth of July and then again around Veterans Day -- there’s the inevitable story of a war vet (or sometimes the parents of a deployed soldier) engaged in a war (obligatory metaphor) with his/her homeowners association.

Now, the whole idea of an HOA is to protect everybody from everybody else’s bad taste, lax attitudes about lawn grooming, unclaimed dog poop, overly exuberant holiday displays, and the covert installation of 2 ½-story high flagpoles.

But nobody ever reads the g-dang HOA manual, except for the HOA board members themselves. In fact, homeowner-members are shocked to discover that such a manual actually exists, usually because it was included with copies of all the legal papers they signed, dazed and confused, on closing day. Sadly, the discovery of the HOA manual usually follows the arrival of a threatening letter about some infraction or another.

The latest story involves a 90-year-old (nice touch, that) Medal of Honor recipient (really nice touch) and the 21-foot-tall flagpole (really big touch) he decided to put up in his front yard last September.

Did he double check with his HOA before the work crew arrived? Fark no. This is America. He’s a Medal of Honor recipient. Did I mention he’s 90?

And so because it involves the Most Sacred and Holy Shroud of the Nation as well as a very old and well honored veteran, the media are alerted, national politicians get involved, neighbors’ homes are threatened with being torched (because apparently there are roving gangs of arsonists-with-a-cause out there), and everyone heaps scorn on the unpatriotic, fascistic, terrorist-loving HOA.

The HOA will explain over and over that it’s not the flag that’s the problem, it’s the flagpole. But they lost this battle before it began. They will inevitably back down or offer some special one-time-only dispensation for vets in their tenth decade of life with Purple Hearts and Medals of Honor.

And then it will all stop. Until the next time.

America the dsylexic (and fritely dressed)

Farksters have fun with Buzzfeed’s 50 Best Protest Signs of 2009 and add of few of their own as well, as featured below.

Why God created politicians

Conservative columnist Warner Todd Huston grumps that for decades American schools (surely only the non-voucher ones) have been creating "citizens that mindlessly expect that politicians exist only to ‘give us stuff.’"

You, me, our families, our neighbors, we’re all gimme-gimmee-gimmee all the time. We wussified Americans have been indoctrinated into wanting stuff like, you know, untainted food, uncrashing planes, undrunk truck drivers, uncontaminated water, uncollasping economic markets, unpolluted air, unpandemic-ed communities, unexploding microwave ovens, and on and on.

Warner Todd Huston is having none of that. He wants to revive American’s independent spirit, one salmonella outbreak at a time.

But if politicians don’t exist "to give us stuff" like, you know, good government, then why do they exist at all?

Well, if we all hadn’t been so thoroughly indoctrinated by our grammar-school teachers, the answer would seem perfectly logical and obvious to us: Politicians exist to make sure that only the market determines whether we get stuff like untainted food, uncrashing planes, undrunk truck drivers, uncontaminated water, uncollasping economic markets, unpolluted air, unpandemic-ed communities, unexploding microwave ovens, and on and on.

How does the market decide? Only God knows -- and stop asking such silly questions.

That, says Warner Todd Huston, is what America’s schools should be teaching.

Cross-posted at Rattlebrained

We don’t need no stinkin’ "successful conclusions"

Conservative columnist Bill Dupray huffed deep and heavy on the talking point about the V-word missing from Obama’s West Point speech. Hissy and pissy, he mocked "the cold gruel of a Harvard politician" that offered no Dupray kind of victory -- the kind involving still-beating hearts carved out of the enemy’s chest and raised above one‘s head with great whoops -- but only wars brought to successful conclusions and responsible ends.

For some reason, the use of "milestones" ticked him off too. You can almost hear his fist pounding the table next to the mouse pad. Our guys don’t fight for frickin’ milestones, those are rocks on the side of the road, he digitally bellows -- Bush’s sliding-scale "benchmarks" and gauzy "aspirational goals" rather conveniently having been forgotten. Personally, I’m convinced the dead no longer express a preference.

Anyway, Dupray had to take to the comments thread to defend himself, and jeebus what a glass chin this guy has!



(Large view.)

Karma on the cheap, no exchanges

Oh big deal! Don’t act so surprised.

So we are going to send more troops into Afghanistan. There is no other way, karma-wise. It’s our national Lieutenant Dan fate. We think we have this honorable destiny to fulfill (droning comparatively unarmed countries into some vague idea of submission in order to achieve something TBA later) when all we’re really doing is getting our psychic legs amputated and our national treasury tapped out.

We’re an empire. That’s what empires do. Noblesse oblige -- even if you're an unemployed roofer living in a ramshackle trailer manufactured home with an adult Down syndrome child afflicted with a badly abscessed tooth. Remember: You and your adult Down syndrome child are God's chosen citizens. You are AMERICAN.

It finally came

The 2009 Bad Sex in Fiction Award has been copiously discharged to Jonathan Littell for his novel, The Kindly Ones, particularly for a passage involving sex on (in?) a guillotine and an orgasmic “jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg.”

For true devotees of Bad Sex, here are the notable excerpts for this year’s short-listed works.

Guess who said this

Two weeks ago Rush Limbaugh, citing a RedState blog post, went all asshole profondo, declaring that the "Obama administration intends to purge Republicans from the civil service retroactive to five years ago, starting in the year 2010."

It was all crap, of course, but it did remind me about someone who seriously wanted to purge (and still does) the ideologically unsuitable from government.

First, we want to remove liberal personnel from the political process. Then we want to capture those positions of power and influence for conservatives. Stalin taught the importance of this principle. He was running the personnel department, while Trotsky was fighting the White Army. When push came to shove for control of the Soviet Union, Stalin won. His people were in place and Trotsky’s were not…. With this principle in mind, conservatives must do all they can to make sure that they get jobs in Washington.*

Indeed, that is the conservative‘s conservative, Grover Norquist, the guy who absolutely adores Stalin and Lenin and absolutely detests government.
__________

*As quoted on p. 160 of Benjamin Hart’s The Third Generation: Young Conservatives Look to the Future; published by the Heritage Foundation in 1987.