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Saturday, June 24, 2006

The Kulturkampf Code

It must suck to be one of these pretend conservatives, these fake Randians, legacy schmucks whose connections permit them to sermonize a hapless audience on what is or is not art -- or entertainment, for that matter. Everything is relentlessly filtered through the usual laundry list of assumptions and tropes, and ultimately functions as an exercise in political water-carrying.

Exhibit A is Ben Shapiro's mewling, tiresome review of Ann Coulter's latest masterpiece of plagiarized boilerplate. Shapiro, you'll recall, is the LA law clerk who aspires to be the real-life 40-year-old virgin. He's almost two-thirds of the way there. In Los Angeles. California. A supposedly heterosexual male, in his mid-twenties, presumably with at least moderate connections and money, in the world's biggest cauldron of ungodly smokin' hot pussy, and he's voluntarily celibate. That is just so wrong.

Perhaps we're getting a picture of just how fucking stoopid this clown is. His actual words are just icing on that particular cake of suck. He's as bad of a liar as his aging tranny idol. And for someone who proudly proclaims his virginity, he sure knows how to suck up like a pro. Jenna Jameson could take lessons from this little bitch.

It’s not that the atheism of the secular left makes Coulter unhappy. It’s that they lie about their religion. Jews don’t pretend that Judaism is a scientific theory; Christians don’t pretend that Christianity is provable in a laboratory.


No, Christians don't pretend that their faith is provable in a laboratory, idiot, they just pretend that their faith oughta be law, and that we should all just take their fucking word for it. Nor is it all Christians that secular liberals have trouble with either, and Shapiro and Coulter know this perfectly well. It is the political activists, the shrill, small but well-funded organizations wasting everyone's time and energy with their pet obsessions that have liberals riled up (to the extent they can even get organized enough for such riling).

But that's part and parcel of the big lie technique the Limbaugh wing has practiced over the last couple decades. Make shit up. Lump "them" all together. Find the most reductio ad absurdum argument, insist that "they" all believe the same exact things, to the same exact degree, and are about to force poor li'l ol' you to do the same. Fags don't just want to marry each other, see -- they actually want to corrupt as many all-American folk as possible. Libruls don't just want to be left alone by political Christofascists, they want to force them to stop going to megachurches and buying Left Behind novels and such. And so forth.


“I don’t particularly care if liberals believe in God,” she writes. “In fact, I would be crestfallen to discover any liberals in heaven. So fine, rage against God, but how about being honest about it?”


Forget that it's yet another reductio ad absurdum lie, that no liberals have any beef with God or Jesus, but rather the intellectual infants who presume to speak for Them. Forget that part, what's stunning is that Coulter:
  • is a believer;

  • lives those beliefs;

  • plans on going to heaven.

Um, really, Annie? Because we've all heard about your chain-smoking and binge-drinking over the years. We can all see that you're in your late 40s, and have never been married. So what's the story about the sex life, dearie? Are we true to holy principles and remaining celibate? Or is just other people who merit having their shoulders looked over by right-thinking religious zealots?

And it goes without saying, but we'll say it anyway -- who would want to go to a heaven that would allow the likes of Ann Coulter, or any of her psychopathic readers?



Next up is noted turd burglar Marvin Olasky whose "novel" comes across as a thinly-veiled diatribe about Those People. Olasky draws from his putatively formidable knowledge of Turkish history to formulate a tale of theocratic indulgence right out of the caliphate.

Funny, last I heard Turkey was a fairly secular state, far more so than any of the various Islamic Republics that litter the Middle East. They're even pretty tight with Israel, or so the godless heathen librul media reports from time to time. Maybe if Olasky read something other than Human Events and stopped masturbating to jihad-porn, he might know these rather problematic facts.

But the real problem is the slavish tone the "reviewer" adopts, much like Shapiro's verbal toe-sucking of Coulter. Obviously, the whole point of sites like ClownHall is to find new and exciting ways to preach to the choir, and filtering their colleagues' lame stabs at popular entertainment is just another way to do that. Hopefully Roberts got paid for this little blowjob near the end, because he got monkey butter all over the place:

This review would not be complete without a few criticisms, and they will be issued without qualification. There will be moments when reading this novel that either dialogue or descriptions will seem contrived. The elaborate, imaginative world that Olasky creates in this book will be briefly disrupted by the occasionally tacky details. In addition, there are sequences of "guest cameos" by famous U.S. senators and Major League baseball players that, while identifiable to the reader, seem foreign to the storyline.

That said, this book is the most informative and educational novel ever read by this reader. [emphasis mine]


Even if Olasky's knowledge of Turkish and Islamic history happens to be incredibly profound and accurate, only someone who was completely ignorant of the subject would phrase his encomium thusly. Knowledgeable adults who are well-versed in the rigors of empiricism and critical thinking rarely use superlatives. If Roberts, throughout the course of his entire hermetic existence on this planet, has truly never read any novel as informative and educational as Marvin Olasky's The Scimitar's Edge, then I can only assume that the preponderance of his reading material has pictures -- but even then, there are plenty of fine graphic novelists out there who can whip up a Marvin Olasky soufflé with one hand tied behind their backs.

No, I know better than to take a hack like Roberts literally; I know poorly disguised water-carrying when I see it. He knew he had to make up for his mild critiques of what sounds like Olasky's rather off-putting habit of Forrest Gump-ing the narrative, so he overcorrected the problem by strapping on the kneepads and getting to work. Shapiro must be jealous, but maybe he can use the "best book I've ever read" schtick for Coulter's next issuance of bound buttwipe.


Finally, we have professional lawn ornament Wesley Smith's slapdash review of Ramesh Ponnuru's Party of Death. If you have not heard of this tendentious piece of crap yet, consider yourself lucky. Suffice to say that Ponnuru is so intellectually dishonest, he tried to disavow the book's cheap swipe as specifically against the Democratic Party, despite the fact that the book's subtitle starts with "The Democrats". Ponnuru also was utterly humiliated by Jon Stewart last month, desperately trying to plug this foundering tripe; Stewart actually seemed to feel sorry for Ponnuru by the end, as if it had turned out that Stewart had been picking on the neighborhood retard the whole time and just not realized it.

At the same time, Ponnuru refrains from engaging in the kind of bitter vituperation and personal invective against those with whom he disagrees that fouls so much of contemporary political discourse. It is refreshing that, in a book that considers some of the most controversial and emotional issues of our time, the meanest thing about The Party of Death is its provocative title.


Yes, well, not every one is Coulter, who just never knows when to stop. But praising Ponnuru for his supposed restraint is ridiculous; just because he supposedly doesn't try to top his opening kill-shot doesn't mean that the book isn't needlessly vituperative from the get-go. It is disingenuous to say the least. At least when Michael Moore calls his book Stupid White Men, he fucking well means it, he doesn't let his fellow NRO flunkies try to soft-pedal the message.

The first third of the book effectively deconstructs most, but not all, of the arguments in favor of abortion rights. Ponnuru quotes embryology textbooks to demonstrate unequivocally that, scientifically, human biological life begins with the completion of fertilization. This refutes Mario Cuomo's nonsensical assertion that only religious belief leads to the conclusion that life begins at conception. Then Ponnuru smacks down Cuomo like a professional wrestling champion when he quotes the governor's 1984 Notre Dame speech, in which Cuomo made the stunning assertion that today's Roman Catholic Church should be as "realistic" about abortion as it was about slavery in the pre-Civil War era, an evil the Holy See apparently failed to condemn unequivocally.


What anti-abortion fanatics are never going to get is that the real pro-choice argument rests not on the scientific validity of when exactly "life" has technically commenced, but on the primacy of the fully-developed adult human's life over that of a fertilized blastocyst. There is potential in that blastocyst, sure, but there's potential in everything, if you want to go that route.

As for the "smackdown" of Cuomo, good luck with that. Has Cuomo been remotely a political force in the last fifteen-plus years, does the modern Democratic Party bear his stamp? Do Ponnuru or Smith really think that any major player in the Democratic Party has veered any further left on the issue than Clinton's "safe, legal, and rare" mission statement of the mid-'90s? (If anything, they've made a tactic of genuflecting and tacking more and more to the right.)

Maybe Cuomo was just trying to point out to the Vatican that the law of the United States of America is not decided by a celibate octogenarian in the opulence of an Italian palazzo, that the Catholic Church's official stances and pronunciamentos have been wrong more often than right, that a lot of lives have been needlessly lost throughout the centuries as a direct result of their incessant meddling, and perhaps they should pry the beam out of their eye and let democracies sort their own fucking laundry, thank you very much.

More to the point, would the fanatics like to put the issue to a national referendum? I have a feeling that "safe, legal, and rare" will win out over "over my dead body" by a landslide every time, even in South Dakota (though perhaps not in Utah). It's just that the people who are obsessed with this are disproportionately vocal and well-funded, because this is a fertile issue for distraction-and-control strategies deployed by people who have made it their life's mission to keep the herd bewildered. Also, as with the gay-marriage nuts (who are frequently the exact same people), the rest of us have lives and families and hobbies to tend to.

Perhaps it's because Ponnuru's sales have been poor from the outset that this faux-conciliatory tone has been adopted, or maybe it's just that places such as NRO and ClownHall are the Vivid Video of wingnut welfare book-pimping and log-rolling. I hear top-drawer female porn stars get around $5K per day to suck whatever cock swings in their face; I'm not sure what the kulturkampfers' fee is.

2 comments:

karmic said...

Maybe Ben Shapiro is keeping himself celibate till he gets laid with Ann Coulter?

The Kenosha Kid said...

That's some good ranting. I just want to point out that some of the things you are calling "reductio ad absurdum lies" are more accurately referred to as "straw man arguments."