No More Mister Nice Pantload Junior

Oh-ho, this is just too funny. Even funnier is Steve's rundown of Ginger Pantload's quixotic effort. This is the kind of funny that would get rejected from a movie script because it's just too ridiculous to be believable.

Expect Jonah to come lumbering to the rescue any year now, just as soon as he finishes up his Endless Shrimp platterlong-awaited follow-up exposé, Schmiberal Schmascism (aka Cheetohouse 5½).

Pants Afire

Looks like Doughbob broke out the industrial shovel for this one.

Breaking news! The ultimate White House insider plans a tell-all book about the Bush years. Boasting unprecedented access to the president's thinking, it will run counter to almost everything we've been told about Bush's radical presidency.

Who will be the latest to break the code of silence after former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan? George W. Bush.

At least that's what went through my mind listening to the president during a meeting with a small group of journalists in the Oval Office on Monday. The session, maddeningly and often foolishly punctuated by long, off-the-record musings and soliloquies, mostly dealt with foreign policy.

I despise smirky tropes and devices like the one above. It doesn't even qualify as "clever" or "deceptive"; it's just an empty, weird attention grabber. "Breaking news! Gas prices back to $1.00/gallon! Heh, at least that's what went through my mind the last time I used half my Cheeto per diem to fill up my hooptie." Unprecedented access to Junior's thinkamatin' sounds about as inviting as watching Tony Blankley assault a defenseless ham hock.

Seriously, from an operational standpoint, this has been the most deliberately opaque administration since Nixon. Here's the thing if you fancy yourself a "journalist": if a prominent figure -- and I don't care of it's Dubya Bush, B. Hussein Obama, or whoever -- convenes a gaggle of you and your colleagues behind closed doors and tells you everything is off the record, you are being used. You are not reporting anything, you're just a PR stooge, nothing more. It's a circle jerk.

As for why Bush's maddening foolishness (to use Goldberg's own descriptives) focused on foreign policy, what the fuck else is he going to talk about? How completely, catastrophically ineffectual he has been in having an economic policy that benefits anyone but the top of the pyramid? How we have to start drilling and perforating every square inch of federal land so's the oil can come online in six years, when gas is seven bucks a gallon? I don't know what's worse, that Goldberg knows better, or that he might actually believe what he writes.

"When I write my book," the president teased, people will understand how much behind-the-scenes diplomacy went on during this administration.

I'm sure he's right. In fact, if only a fraction of what he had to say was remotely accurate, then the conventional bleats about unilateralism, war lust and cowboyishness will go down in history as the excessive caterwauling of an imaginative and hyper-partisan opposition.

Riiiight. Look, fool, if/when he writes his book, only two things will be notable about it -- one, nothing in it will be remotely true nor accurate (nor, for that matter, controversial), and two, people may idly wonder who actually wrote the damned thing for him. We've heard about the "behind-the-scenes diplomacy" plenty, the stovepiping of bullshit information, the secret meetings to force facts into preconceived conclusions, the Iranians quietly reaching out in 2003 only to be smacked down by "diplomats", etc. If someone wants to plunk down thirty bucks for tissue-thin rationales and shopworn, self-serving homilies, they're probably not working hard enough for their money.

Indeed, President Bush's reputation is not as solidified as his detractors and fans think.

If Iraq becomes a stable and democratizing nation, his presidency will look much better than it does today. But if Iraq Balkanizes or Lebanon-izes, then Democratic rhetoric about the "worst foreign policy blunder in U.S. history" will gain descriptive heft. Only time will tell.

Ah, the old "if" gambit, tethered to the usual cheap open-ended timeline. Awesome. See, if we check in five or ten years hence, and Iraq is still a sectarian charnel house, we just haven't let the Gumbo O' Freedomocracy™ simmer quite long enough. No matter how bad it continues to get, it will never be quite long enough to know for sure. If Doughboy's aunt had balls, she'd be his uncle. Or his mama.

On the other hand, if the country has exhausted itself into some semblance of stability, it won't be because the sectarian cleansers ran out of people to slaughter, or that Baghdad has been walled into a lockdown Habitrail, or that the Iranians are puppeteering whatever passes for a central government. It'll automatically be because of Dear Cheerleader's singular vision and resolve, his patience in staying the course, no matter how many people had to get butchered in the process, and how much it cost.

Having principles is a tough gig, as you can see by all of Pantload's sacrifices. Why, he braved a trip into the Oval Office, kneepads and all, for the chance to come away with vivid descriptions of Fredo's wardrobe, and impossibly vague "impressions" of what the man actually said. Again, even celebrity journalists have higher standards than this. Jesus, I'm embarrassed for this clown at this point. He's so far in the tank he has to wear scuba gear.

The Jonanism continues on to its inevitable climax, a torrent of flop sweat and Funyun crumbs:

Many of its supposedly radical features fit neatly in the mainstream of American presidential history. Extraordinary rendition? That practice (in which we send terrorists to foreign countries to be interrogated under laxer rules) began under President Clinton. Aggressive interrogations, for good or ill, surely predate 2001. Holding prisoners indefinitely at Guantanamo without benefit of a trial? As terrorism expert Andrew C. McCarthy notes in National Review, we were doing that under the first President Bush and under Clinton to innocent Haitian refugees, who got even less due process than we give captured enemy combatants.

Yeah, I'm sure you heard about all those Haitians Clinton had holed up in Gitmo for half a decade, unable to communicate with anyone in the outside world or have representation, subjected to humiliation and aggressive interrogation tactics. You know, all those Haitians that were waterboarded and force-fed and stuck in sensory deprivation holes until they lost their minds? And as loathsome a practice as extraordinary rendition is, Clinton used it exclusively against perpetrators and suspects of the 1993 WTC attack. They weren't kidnapping German and Canadian citizens who had the wrong name and shipping them to black sites to be broken.

Indeed, this administration and its surrogates have brought a heavy-handed glee to these extralegal ops that would normally be associated with banana republics and communist dictators. They've literally pulled innocent people off the street, chained them to a dungeon ceiling, and beat their legs until they died in agony. They let the Chinese visit Gitmo to turn the screws on a Uighur prisoner. They turned Saddam's most notorious hellhole into a playground for a bunch of inbred psychopaths. And that's the shit we know about. Put that in your fuckin' memoir, son.

Already, Obama is changing his tune from his old, and irresponsibly heated, rhetoric about "immediate" withdrawal to talking about the need for policies that would adapt to the improving conditions in Iraq. Given Obama's ideological leanings and inexperience, there's clearly plenty of room for him to make costly mistakes. But odds are he too would come to realize that America needs to win the war on terror and succeed in Iraq. Hence the greatest irony. A successful Obama presidency would have the unintended consequence of making Bush's memoir a success story.

Oh, so it's Obama's "ideological leanings and inexperience" that would leave him room for mistakes. Fat fucking chance. Should Obama actually win the election (a dubious assumption considering the insatiable need for a certain portion of the citizenry to stick their thumbs in their asses and call it good), Goldberg and his ilk will be all over him the second the final vote is tallied. Any missteps, no matter how small, real or contrived, will be blown to monumental proportion to the same degree they were willing to overlook the ones their boy made every step of the way.

Make no mistake. Any successes Obama has regarding Iraq will be in spite of what these eternally damned buffoons have wrought. He is in the running because he has promised to clean up Fredo's mess, not extend it or endorse it. To the extent he actually does continue any of the current policies, chances are it will be primarily because the lame-duck termites are working furiously to lock the successor in.

It's just too bad that neither Bush, his associates, nor his florid defenders will ever face a fraction of the karma they've earned, for their smug indifference to the misery they've inflicted here and abroad. Absent actual justice, the sooner these weasels are repudiated, the sooner they can be marginalized and blessedly ignored.

A Man for All Squeezins

Just when you assume it's some standard-issue April Fool's Day column, you realize, "oh hell, it's Goldberg again", which suffices as explanation enough. It's hard even to find a salient excerpt, since it meanders in its lameness. But Goldberg starts off with the usual plaint that European politicians are too craven in the face of the rhetorical aggression as practiced by Islamic governments and fundamentalist clergy, here in the context of the outcry provoked by the short documentary Fitna, by Dutch director Geert Wilders.

Predictably, various Muslim governments have condemned the film. Half the Jordanian parliament voted to sever ties with the Netherlands. Egypt's grand imam threatened "severe" consequences if the Dutch government didn't ban the film.

This has been a particularly rich vein for the usual neoclown pundits to ply their trade and preach to their choir. It's easy pickins, and in their habitual sophistry they can double-dip with Muslim-baiting and lib-baiting. Apparently we are now required to issue pro forma declarations in every instance of official and semi-official Muslim radicalism, as if "liberals" (which, recalling Goldberg's creative redefinition of the term, are down with the fascism) have more patience with riots over cartoons than they do with the gibbering retards of Jesus Camp.

I do think that Islam is in danger of allowing itself to be defined by its most vocal and radical spokesmen, if moderate Muslims do not step up. But where are they supposed to step? Islam is too diffuse and too decentralized, and in its home countries it is too inextricably entwined with social culture and canonical law. Islam needs its own Reformation and Enlightenment, but that is much harder to accomplish without a centralized hierarchy. Even if an Islamic Martin Luther is waiting to be heard, where exactly does he nail his theses?

So I'm not sure exactly what Goldberg and his intemellectual peers wish to do about all that, but then neither are they. The European governments are treading lightly because they want the immigrants to assimilate, which is hard to do if an inflammatory issue is stoked. The Islamic governments are taking the opposite tack and making an issue out of the movie's propriety because religion is a mode of social control. This is not exactly a secret, but people like Goldberg make entire careers, secure contracts to write unreadable books with untenable premises, by regurgitating exactly such canards. People believe what they want to believe.

Which brings us to Goldberg's main point, after a useless diversion into a anecdote about drinking in Turkey that amazingly doesn't end in some lurid Midnight Express scenario.

Me? I keep thinking about Jesus fish.

....

In America, the easiest place to find this ancient symbol is on the back of cars. Recently, however, it seems as if Jesus fish have become outnumbered by Darwin fish. No doubt you've seen these too. The fish symbol is "updated" with little feet coming off the bottom, and "IXOYE" or "Jesus" is replaced with either "Darwin" or "Evolve."

I find Darwin fish offensive. First, there's the smugness. The undeniable message: Those Jesus fish people are less evolved, less sophisticated than we Darwin fishers.

Here's Goldberg's entire basis for taking offense -- it seems as if Jesus fish are outnumbered by Darwin fish. This is at least as rigorous an intellectual standard as can be found in anything else he's ever written, I suppose. It's practically a tic with him at this point, he's been doing it long enough.

But it takes a complete and utter moron to baldly assert that, in this particular dilemma, it's the people who profess not to guide their thoughts, actions, and emotions by superstition, who do not proselytize to hapless strangers, who are "smug", smug to the point where our boy actually takes offense.

Listen up, Lunchbox -- nearly all of human history has been written in blood drawn by smug motherfuckers who each thought they had a direct pipeline to the omniscient superdude in the sky. It is only in the past 150 years that the semblance of rational thought and reason-based deduction has begun to crawl out from under the holy thumb various breeds of god-botherers have kept everyone under for the previous millennia. Isn't that offensive?

I couldn't care less about the Jesus fish or the Darwin fish; I am indifferent to what people choose to broadcast on the bumpers, tailgates and windows of their rolling shitboxes. The Calvin praying window sticker means about as much to me as the Calvin-pissing-on-a-football-team-logo window sticker. Both are just cheap, pirated expressions of id and poor impulse control. But all that is another matter from the constant smug assertions from the religious that they are inherently more moral, that they would rather vote for a crook who talks a good Jesus game than an upstanding atheist. There are plenty more openly gay politicians than there are atheist ones, if one wishes to make thumbnail comparisons of stereotypically reviled minorities.

But he's all butt-hurt that a few people tweak these sacred cultural signifiers, cheap adhesive totems slapped on hickmobiles far and (especially) wide. Awwwww. Yeah, that's far more offensive than squads of goobers infesting the government at every level from the DoJ to red-state school boards with their anti-intellectual inbreeding, fools poisoning the well of science to tell people with a straight face that the Grand Canyon was created 6,000 years ago by the Noah's Ark flood. With priorities like that, it's no wonder we're falling behind.

As Christopher Caldwell once observed in the Weekly Standard, Darwin fish flout the agreed-on etiquette of identity politics. "Namely: It's acceptable to assert identity and abhorrent to attack it. A plaque with 'Shalom' written inside a Star of David would hardly attract notice; a plaque with 'Usury' written inside the same symbol would be an outrage."

But the most annoying aspect of the Darwin fish is the false bravado it represents. It's a courageous pose without consequence. Like so much other Christian-baiting in American popular culture, sporting your Darwin fish is a way to speak truth to power on the cheap.

Again with the false equivalencies, especially since Jews don't actively proselytize like that (not to mention the revolting idea that lobbing a "usurer" slur at a Jewish person is comparable to having the nerve to separate science from religious dogma). Goldberg presumes that the Jesus fish is nothing but a cultural signifier, a secret handshake to be experienced on the highways, or something. Fine, but spare us this incessant whinging every time the bubble gets poked just a little. It's expected that religion can intrude on a great many aspects of public life, but a cheap plastic sentiment making fun of another cheap plastic sentiment sends the squeamish into perpetually high dudgeon.

Religious people like to tell themselves, each other, anyone who'll listen that the godless secular heathens are picking on them, persecuting them for their belief. I hate to spoil the fun for them, but here's the secret -- we don't care enough to persecute you. Really, we don't give a shit. Go to your megachurch and clap to white-guy rhythm; festoon your car in Jesus fish and praying Calvins and Virgin Mary tire carrier covers. Knock yourselves out. Just leave the rest of us alone, and quit acting like the future of the universe depends on the Pledge of Allegiance having "under God" in it, or political speeches ending with "God bless America".

The same is true for Islamic fundamentalists -- when movies and cartoons get significant subsets of your culture violently upset, their conduct should be repudiatd. They need to grow the hell up. All the Abrahamic religions point to God as being the judge of these matters; it would be nice if they'd just leave it to Him, and get on about their lives.

Doughovah's Witlesses

Doughy Ramone drinks our milkshake, eats our Cheetos, and impregnates our Airedale. His carefully crafted arguments have rocked our worldz, virtual and otherwise. He's the rubber to our glue, the umbrella in the fruity drink, the led in the listing conservatard zeppelin. Just ask him; he's totally pwned all us librul fashizznits and our deviously bien pensant ways.

You can just picture poor Jonah hunched at his computer, in his padded helmet, repeatedly yipping, "I know you are, but what am I?" at his monitor, until his mom finally comes down to the basement and threatens to cut off his allowance. Beats working.

Joining a Fan Club

It had to happen.

When I see people at Crooked Timber open threads asking why they should take you seriously, and spend hundreds of comments calling you an idiot, [. . .] then I want to cry. They're being dishonest and cruel and not allowing you to make a single mistake. They're setting you up to fail.

They have no understanding of how to be a genuine scholar. I work like hell to help those around me have the best arguments possible, even if I disagree with those arguments. I understand the spirit Liberal Fascism was written in. And I'm sorry you live in a nation of genuine fascists, and I mean that word in its worst sense. There's no way I would accept the attitude of Henry Farrell from anyone around me; it is something I would end friendships over.

I'm just amazed you can take this abuse and keep going strong . . .

There's a great many things someone should pound into the soft head of this weepy mezzofanuc, but who has the time? Simply stated, the facts are as follows: Goldberg set himself up to fail with poor (ahem) "scholarship" and bad-faith arguments and premises, which in turn means that the fanboy himself clearly has "no understanding of how to be a genuine scholar"; a nation of "genuine fascists,....in [the] worst sense [of the word]", would by definition mean that a tragically disempowered free-thinker such as Doughy Ramone™ would never have gotten a book contract in the first place, not to mention his long-standing sinecure at the drive-up window of Duh Corner.

Oh, and uh, asshole? He can take this abuse and keep going strong because he's getting paid. You, on the other hand, are making a chump out of yourself for free.

As for Funyun Boy's valiant attempts to engage his snarky tormentors, he finally responds more, um, substantially to Dave Neiwert. I actually got Dave's book In God's Country back when it first came out, when Neiwert and myself were denizens of the same chat fora. I can unequivocally say that Dave is everything that Goldberg is not -- an excellent writer and debater, fast on his feet, operating from good faith in his arguments, intellectually honest, and an exhaustive researcher. He's given Goldberg far more time and attention than he deserves, and painstakingly picked apart this asinine book for exactly what it is -- a thin reed for the otherwise unemployable.

Mo' Pantload, Mo' Problems

Edroso has a pretty solid fisking of Goldbleg's doorstop, just to add to the pile of circumstantial evidence building on our boy's tendentious (to put it mildly) style of argumentation.

And that's really what this book is about. Throughout Liberal Fascism Goldberg inserts complaints that liberals unfairly call conservatives fascists -- a slur that, in our age of blogospheric intemperance and extraordinary renditions, is even harder to escape than when hippies were yelling it. Well, he'll show them. Having heard the "Why do you think they called it National Socialism?" routine for decades, I have some idea of the depth of Goldberg's well of resentment. Though he has plowed up a lot of source material to stuff his magnum opus, that sense of ancient grievance permeates and dooms his book. Goldberg betrays a palpable need to get all his (and previous generations of American conservatives') grudges in, from Rousseau to John Kerry. And he's got to prove they're all fascists. Even a skilled polemicist would have collapsed under the weight of the task, but a skilled polemicist would have known enough to rein it in a little. Goldberg doesn't. Whenever he does manage to string a few points together, The Quest calls him unto a new absurdity.

That's it right there. It's not a manifesto or even a competent polemic, so much as the usual laundry list hoisted by perpetually aggrieved doofuses. Unencumbered by empirical reality or even ideological coherence, they instead forge ahead on the illusionary strengths of preferential quasi-consistency. As Roy is fond of saying, it's the "Choc-o-mut ice cream is conservative 'cause I like Choc-o-mut ice cream".

Calling Goldberg a village idiot is certainly an earned right, given his toddler-like inability to wage competent responses to his detractors. However, even that epithet, accurate as it is, fails to take into measure what is ultimately as cynical a premise as one could ask for.

The guy calls the book Liberal Fascism, and in nearly 500 pages is apparently unable to consistently or competently define either of those words. Nanny-statism is not "fascism", boyo, regardless of seemingly similar impulses; where nannyism is the sometimes tedious and obnoxious collection of bien pensant suggestions and proposals, real fascism is pure muscle and gall, backed with the blessings of corporations and/or the military. (And as the latter gets more and more subsumed operationally into the former, the distinctions will blur, and redound to the holders of power. Perhaps some future preznit will appoint some future Erik Prince to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.) Violence or the threat of violence or financial ruination, and heaps of empty hortatory rhetoric, are part of the tacit or overt enforcement mechanism in a genuinely fascist regime. None of those things apply to the more socially-oriented programs Goldberg and his ilk constantly decry (as if they are even remotely part of that magickal free market they profess to adore).

Goldberg may even actually think on some level that he's slaying a dragon here, but it's the usual lib-baiting army of strawmen set to the sophist's torch. In a truly capitalist paradise, he and his buddies would be forced to ply an honest trade outside the scope of non-profit sinecures, and in a truly fascist society he would be doing exactly what he is doing -- being a cherry-picking, scrivening factotum for the baser impulses of his political party.

Pantzkrieg Plop

By Doughy Ramone



[with apologies to the actual Ramones]

Hey ho, Pantload, hey ho, Pantload (2x)

The libruls are the fascists
I don't care what the facts says
I pull 'em out of my ass
Pantzkrieg Plop

The critics call me zero
They're jealous of what me know
Can't live without my Cheetos
Pantzkrieg Plop

Hey ho, Pantload
Cherry-pick the info
Get paid for it somehow
Don't know what you talk 'bout

[repeat ad pantloadum]

My Favorite Pantload

There are some great tags for Pudge's li'l Hitler-smiley-face crappus maximus. Some personal favorites: "cheeto-erotic asphyxiation"; "editor promised cake"; "jonah made a poopie"; "if ann coulter was circumcised".

I am also not too humble to point out that two of my own goofy little riffs are in there somehow -- "doughbob loadpants" and "cheetohouse five". Awesome.

Here's one more, based on one from the second link page: "the da vinci choad". Feel free to spread that one around.

Bonus: Check out Dave Neiwert's comprehensive refutation of our boy's tedious nonsense. Naturally Goldberg is countering by sharing fan mail on his promo blog, in between appearances on Dennis Miller and Laura Ingraham. How....convincing.

Professionamalism

Never before has a boutique blog been launched with such care and detail. Can't wait for the next illuminating post. It's been eleven days since the initial burst, so perhaps the poor boy's constipated. Still what's there ranks among the most profound he's ever written. I, for one, applaud his moxie and/or gumption.

Rumble in the Bungle

Pantload's crappus maximus has finally hit the bargain bins, and the gang at Sadly, No! are reading it so the rest of us don't have to. Money quote of the day:

Reading this book is like watching a flaming piano fall out of an airplane and land in a puppy farm.

And as long as they're mentioning the tedious Bell Curve exercises in statistical speciousness, I might modestly propose that Jonard be a case study in whether stupidity is contagious or congenital.

Or, perhaps even more likely, a hazard of the line of "work" he's in and the crowd he rolls with.

Something Really Cool

Because smiley-face Hitlers and calling people "fascists" and "totalitarians" are Teh Funnay.

This is cool -- Grace Nearing at Scriptoids has refashioned the cover to Pantload's forthcoming crappus maximus, based on some smackdown I dropped over at Roy's some time back. Sadly, No has linked it also. Good stuff. I would read a book with that title, who wouldn't?

I think Pantload's going to find this thing a tough sell, except for Richard Cougar Melloncamp Scaife lining his ex-wife's attic. The bunker mentality at Wingnut Welfare HQ is probably just about cabin-fever stage by now, and all they're left with is Jonah and Party O' Death Pornmumu short-sheeting each other in the last twin bed.

Writer's Block

No doubt the link will be de-hacked as soon as Jonah gets wind of it and rouses some increasingly disgruntled intern, but in the meantime, here's a handy screen capture:



I think the current over-under on how many dippy "from X to Y" combinations they'll come up with before finally settling on one is eight. I believe they actually have changed it three times already, seriously. Don't they have marketing weasels and ghost-writers to handle that shit?

Maybe DoughBob is the paws-on type, Funyun fragments spraying hither and yon as he squawks orders at hapless peons to "kern the font" and "man the jib". Basically the wingnut welfare editorial version of some America's Cup fop, spending way too much on a fiberglass sloop and a Captain Stubing hat, and nothing on the Filipino day laborers unlucky enough to crew the whole mess.

If all else fails, Goldberg can always retreat to his standard M.O. and bleg his readers for help with the title. I still think my earlier suggestion, Are You Gonna Finish That? The Deep-Fried Temptation from Colonel Sanders to Applebee's, has a certain insouciant je ne sais blah to it, but aside from regrettably having to excise that misbegotten chapter about the Colonel's military service, I suppose that's why our boy gets the large dollars.

It never seems to occur to these morons who prattle on about the oppression they face in the debauched institution where they ply their make-work, whether academia, intelligentsia, or punditardia. If those places truly functioned by the words they throw about as if they knew what they meant -- you know, fascism and all -- they would have been mau-maued long ago and been replaced by a chimp with a dartboard, which would have at least had the ancillary benefit of being more accurate.

Culture of Life

Shorter DoughBob LoadPants:

I don't really know what I think about this, but I'll tell you anyway. If lovin' me some Rudy is wrong, I just don't wanna be right.

Funny how they're always telling you how sacred life is, until they're haranguing the reg'lar folks about having kids they can't afford. If these people ever actually got the meritocracy they think they're entitled to, they'd be looking for work that didn't involve a familial sinecure.

I don't know what to make of the sheer incoherence of people who talk and write about the destruction and displacement of millions of innocent lives like it's somebody else's fault, and anyway it's just a tactical maneuver from Risk, and then turn on a dime to lecture everyone else on their heathen disrespect for life. I have no doubt that Pantload really thinks that Democrats are the only ones who've ever used abortion politics cynically. It's what makes him "special", in the "wears earmuffs to the food court and harasses neighboring tables by chomping and smacking his Sbarro's" kind of way.

LOLberg of the Week

I have been enjoying the LOLcats and such that the kids are all doing these days (presumably in between huffing their ecstasy and sucking each others' elbows, or whatever it is that the pantsless culture warriors are always on about). And some of your more enterprising bloggerses have extrapolated the hilarity to unfortunate conservatard icons.

I want in on this action. So, we (well, me) here at Hammer of the Blogs are proud to present a new feature called LOLberg of the Week. It will feature people other than just Señor Pantload, and may appear either more or less frequently than on a weekly basis. So much for truth in naming. The World Series only occasionally involves Canadian teams. Get over it.

Anyway, here's our first foray into phunny photo hackery. Pass it on to someone you love -- or better yet, someone you hate.



See, it could build a nice groundswell for that stupid-ass book he's been writing re-titling desperately trying to finish before his short-bus publisher punts the contract to Pornmumu. I'll take my royalties in Costco bottles of Patrón, thank you very much.

Pantload Of Conscience

Roy correctly susses the burbling hypocrisy 'neath the becrumbed corduroy cubicle uniform of Sgt. Rock Candy™, complete with the epaulets his mom made out of Klondike wrappers.

In other words: liberals like to say they care about genocide, but they obviously don't, because they want to leave Iraq, which stands poised at the brink of genocide (or maybe doesn't, he isn't sure) thanks to the efforts of Jonah Goldberg et alia.

Goldberg is a little like a hostage-taker who, when seized after a ten-hour standoff, wants everyone to know that the hostage negotiator's arguments were really intellectually inferior to his own.

And I'm sorry, but whatever you think of the Kosovo intervention, Iraq makes Kosovo look like we gave everyone in Serbia ice cream and then flew them to heaven in a private jet.

Now, I recall the "what about Kosovo, you meddling liberals" argument from as far back as fall 2002, so in this instance, aside from his usual intellectual laziness and dishonesty, DoughBob is also guilty of either recycling an old hack argument, or pulling a "new" one out of his cornhole, brushing off the cheez-doodle remnants and claiming it for his own, a good five years after better (if more anonymous) minds had already thoroughly discredited it, either by responding to the obvious logical flaws or simply having the nerve to use it.

For the record, I thought that the Kosovo intervention originated from flawed premises to begin with -- much of the rump Serbian fascism in play in that province specifically was the result of UCK (KLA) instigation. Since then, obviously Milosevic' vile designs have been thwarted, but at the expense of apparently turning the area into a distribution point for heroin and prostitution. Still, the aim of preventing more Srebrenicas, or allowing the situation to devolve into a full-fledged Rwanda was accomplished. Unlike Goldberg and his ilk, I can admit when I'm wrong.

And I can even join with the usual U.N.-bashers to a certain extent, when it comes to the subject of humanitarian interventions. Rwanda, Srebrenica, Kosovo, and now Darfur, all got out of hand because of lack of collective resolution in the matter, which is supposed to be what the U.N. is for. Darfur really picked up steam while Sudan gained infamous entry into the U.N. Human Rights Commission. How'd that work out, anyway?

What Goldberg needs to get through his thick skull is that we're not avoiding Darfur because of Iraq (well, actually it is partly because of Iraq), or even because of U.N. dithering. It's because of China, which now has lucrative oil deals signed with the Sudanese kleptocracy, and are not about to allow anything to adversely affect it. Sudan is also, as one of Roy's commenters points out, the world's largest supplier of gum arabic, which is found in all sorts of commercial goods.

But for Pantload to indulge in this preening, ignorant broad-brush of "liberal" do-gooderism (even though it's been primarily evangelical Christian groups which have had the most direct lobbying access on the issue) tells you everything you need to know about where his head is at. Rather than engage in even a moment of self-reflection, in his show of searching for absolution, it's much easier to set up an army of straw men, and light 'em up.

We don't do humanitarian interventions, and indeed, most conservatarian commenters during Kosovo opined that that was a good thing. Kosovo was the exception to the rule because of its strategic proximity to the rest of Europe, it was doable, and Clinton, feeling guilty about Rwanda, was unwilling to take that chance again. And aside from the heroin and human trafficking, it's worked out well.

But let's cut the bullshit, shall we? Even if we had never invaded Iraq -- indeed, even if Saddam had died in the interim and been replaced by happy elves and ponies who immediately turned Iraq into a desert Switzerland -- there would have always been another excuse not to do anything about Darfur, and the larger measure of it would have revolved around the sort of sneering contempt for humanitarian politics that only a sinecured cubicle rat could conjure up.

Goldberg doesn't want to hear it anymore from libruls, if they're not going to endorse the grand anti-genocide pony plan currently in surge mode, but he didn't want to hear it in the first place. That he seems to think no one realizes this is unintentionally hilarious. He should stick to trying to find yet another snappy subtitle for his upcoming opus.

[Update: I was also recently reminded of how some folks attempt to shallowly conjure rough ratios, to find comparative valuations of American troops versus Iraqi civilians. Apparently the low-ball figure is about 1:1000 these days, possibly more since the Iraqis are evidently not interested enough in rebuilding from what all we've done for them.

But let's run that grotesque moral calculus to its natural corollary. If we use the "low-ball" figure of an American soldier being "worth" 1000 Iraqis, then conversely we can extrapolate the current American casualty count of 3,645 to roughly 13.5% of the pre-war population of Iraq. Small potatoes! Factoring in the wounded (26,558 at last count) to dead or wounded Iraqis would complicate things further by comparing severity of wounds, I suppose. But that's why they put formulas in spreadsheets.

It's a fool's errand to take something so monstrous all the way to its logical extreme, but it's still important to recognize the objective implications here. It seems also to be a necessity, not unlike blaming straw-man libruls for everything, among the would-be brute exterminators, since victory is no longer an option, and anything else is past their level of honesty.

And glib metaphors constructed primarily to highlight librul hypocrisies about the equality of life ("if your child and a stranger were both in a burning house, which would you save") illustrate very little, since they purposefully neglect to mention one's involvement in setting the house on fire, and then sanctimoniously lecturing the neighbors about fire safety with a series of sloppy lies. Even for cheap sophistry it's incompetent.]

Are You Smarter Than A Pantload?

Eventually one has to just figure that Goldberg is every bit as transparently un-self-aware as he appears to be:

HUGE NUMBERS of Americans don't know jack about their government or politics. According to a Pew Research Center survey released last week, 31% of Americans don't know who the vice president is, fewer than half are aware that Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the House, a mere 29% can identify "Scooter" Libby as the convicted former chief of staff of the vice president, and only 15% can name Harry Reid when asked who is the Senate majority leader.

Also last week, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that two-thirds of Americans believe that Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales' firing of eight U.S. attorneys was "politically motivated."

I imagine that since then, what with Abu G's punch-drunk performance after rehearsing for close to month, those numbers are even higher. Even a slow fifth-grader understands the base premise that when someone sits there and fumbles with every question, answering 70+ times that he can't remember jack shit and the dog ate his e-mails, he's nothing more than a fucking liar. He's covering for his bosses. How complicated do you think it is?

Obviously, I'm certainly not above beating my fella 'merkins for their profound collective ignorance in many important areas. It is, as the French say, my raisin det-ree. But this is positively disingenuous considering that, were it not for ignorant yahooism, everybody in this administration and every buffoon defending it -- and yes, this includes you, Jonah -- would be out looking for honest work.

More to the point, Americans — God bless 'em — are often quite ignorant about the stuff politicians and pundits think matters most. They may know piles about their own professions, hobbies and personal interests, but when it comes to basic civics, they just get their clocks cleaned on Fox's "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?"

Though examples are depressingly unnecessary, here are two of my favorites over the years. In 1987, 45% of adult respondents to one survey answered that the phrase "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" was in the Constitution (in fact, it's a quote from Karl Marx). Then, in 1991, an American Bar Assn. study reported that a third of Americans did not know what the Bill of Rights was.

I agree. It's pathetic. It's inexcusable. And it's of a piece -- Americans, more than any other industrialized country by far, love to proclaim how godly they are, how important their faith is, how much they go to church, blah blah blah.

And yet?

Half the people in the Christian nation cannot name even one of the four Gospels. (And yet, I, a godless heathen atheist sybarite, know all four, and even have some surface knowledge of each. What the hell is up with that?) 10% of Americans (these people must be mentally disabled) think that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. Then there's that asshole congresstwit from Georgia who pushed his Ten Commandments stunt legislation, but could barely name three himself (he, of course, used that as a reason why the legislation was so vital to the continuation of our free and open society).

In case you're wondering, I got 10 out of 10 on the linked quiz, pretty easily at that. I don't consider myself all that knowledgeable about religion; it's just an easy quiz. (And I note for the record that they misspelled "penance" at the end.) But anyway, I can't help but wonder what all these morally superior souls are doing at church if they're not learning anything. Merely hedging their celestial bets, maybe? I think so, and it makes sense if you view that mindset as a complementary, even symbiotic view with the typical half-witted road-rage politico. They let Rush Limbaugh turn their brains to oatmeal, and maybe a few names stick through osmosis, but that's about it.

And that's what we know as our "values voters", folks. Seriously. Only a completely ignorant, inept thinker would place non-issues such as gay marriage even in the top 100 things this country needs to address politically. It's a very sloppy, incompetent excuse for thought -- the same sort of mouth-breather who doesn't know what the Bill of Rights is. But the people who know about Abu Gonzales' little dog-and-pony show are not the brainless wretches who don't have enough goddamned pride in themselves and their country to learn even the basics of how it operates. Pantload is conflating spurious statistics and he damned well knows it.

Think it's sheer coincidence that the number of people who hadn't a clue about the Bill of Rights is roughly equal to George W. Bush's average approval rating for the last 18 months?

Save The Pantload, Save The World

So apparently DoughBob™, in a sudden burst of creativity from one of his brain-surgeon readers, has gotten around to diagnosing the constant critiques from we lefties as much the same syndrome afflicting those nasty souls who keep nitpicking the flawless judgment and stellar statesmanship of Dear Leader.

Yes, the people who pick on poor Pantload are, let's face it, "deranged". It couldn't possibly be that Goldberg, like his wampeter, is simply a sloppy, incompetent thinker punching way above his weight in a big boys' game, that since some folks actually read and pay attention instead of trading bon mots with professional doofuses like Party of Death Pornmumu, we actually know what the hell we're talking about. And we don't even get paid for it! Imagine that.

I suppose Goldberg, a loyal ungulate if ever there was one, should be expected to huddle in for warmth in tough times, rather than stick his neck out and actually observe something other than his navel. And the defender he thanks has somewhat reasonable points to make, yet misses the forest for the one tree he fixates on.

The problem is not that Goldberg makes mediocre cultural arguments against universal health care. Hell, we pretty much expect that from him any given day. Americans are culturally less well-suited to big-gubmint programs than are Europeans. Well, no shit, Sherlock. But those tiresome delusions of rugged self-sufficiency, while endearing, are unsustainable. Would that it were not so, but it is, primarily because of waste and excess across the board.

But the point that the pro-argument was making was in using the Euro systems as examples of something that works, and is not in thrall to insurance companies and Big Pharma. That doesn't sound so bad, does it? With one in every six or seven Americans uninsured, and health care costs catastrophically high for no good reason, maybe it's time to hear some constructive ideas and options.

But Goldberg does not give the ideas any credence nor even consideration; he merely dismisses them with a flabby wave of predictable frog-baiting. He's got his, so the rest of you can suck on it or just go get better jobs already. Okay, so why exactly are we not supposed to pick on this shit and tear it down straightaway? It's deserving of -- begging for -- scorn and ridicule. It is a comfy exurban cubicle-rat posturing as a redneck by trashing ideas before they're even tried, on cultural grounds.

Culture changes all the time. Do I even need to say it? Apparently I do. Culture is a function of people's lifestyles and habits, just as language is, and as such, it evolves, it adapts. Wistful fantasies of middle kingdom exceptionalism aside, perhaps if people are presented a choice between: 1)paying hundreds of dollars for the simplest of treatments or a month's worth of private insurance, just so the shareholders' stock price upticks a quarter-point, or 2)getting decent health care at a reasonable price without getting hosed by rapacious HMO corporations, they might make that choice. They might trade off on what Goldberg thinks is a die-cast cultural trope. I think many won't, simply because they let people like Goldberg get their dander up with reflexive nationalist clichés. They tell themselves they're making it with their rugged individualism just hunky-dory, forgetting that chances are they count on friends and family for all sorts of shit.

But again, it's not just about this one silly frog-baiting article of Goldberg's masquerading as something useful in terms of either a culture debate or a health-care debate. It's about a well-established pattern of this type of nonsense. It's about a guy who picks fights with people who are a lot smarter than him, who are genuinely knowledgeable about complicated issues and have standing in their fields of expertise, and then retreats behind a bunch of smug weasel words when he's called on his bullshit.

It's about his bad habit of practically starting posts with the admission that he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, lamely guessing, and then blegging readers to help him out. What the hell are they paying you for, pal? There are thousands of people out there who write circles around you for free.

It's about a smartass who flogs a still-unwritten book, whose cover depicts a smiley-face with a Hitler mustache, and whose title imputes that there is a clear connection between Hillary Clinton and Benito Mussolini. And whose author smugly declares that the book, whenever he gets around to actually writing the motherfucker, will be a paragon of careful reason and thoughtful argumentation. As if you couldn't tell from the title and the cover art.

Obviously, I enjoy genuine polemic and political satire, and Goldberg might even have the pop-culture chops to pull something like that off, if he actually wanted to. He could go in a more P.J. O'Rourke direction and at least maybe find the funny somewhere (though O'Rourke is sounding more and more like Dennis Miller these days, which is just sad). But as Pornmumu found out the hard way when Jon Stewart tore him a new one, if you write one of these stupid winger welfare books and then come out preening about what a thoughtful discursion it really is, it's clear that you're nothing but a rented jerkoff. And there is no indication that Goldberg's book -- again, if he ever finishes (or even starts) the damned thing -- will be any different.

I love it. This guy constantly snipes and defames people who disagree with his clownish assessments of serious issues, and then he wonders and whines about why we get fucking bent about it. I don't like being told I'm a fascist from the party of death, Chief, not even as some sort of smirky jokey-joke; that good enough for ya? But we accept that political discourse is nothing more than Calvinball with words, so we roll with it. And we respond in kind, or maybe even up the ante if we're feeling strong. And if you don't have a thick enough hide, Chief, then either grow one or sit down and shut the fuck up.

Look, as rent-a-hacks go, Goldberg is actually one of the more benign ones. I'll take a dozen of him over a Coulter or a Limbaugh any day of the week. But ultimately that is a matter of tone and degree; Goldberg simply has enough sense to realize that there's no upside for him to call John Edwards a faggot, whereas such mouth-breathing schtick is where Coulter and Limbaugh's respective bread gets buttered (ewww). Goldberg might at worst be more passive-aggressive about it and lob a "Breck girl" scud at Edwards.

In the end, the intellectual vacuity is essentially the same though, and they are certainly all serving the same masters. But I'll at least give Goldberg credit for having some notion as to where some boundaries lie, that it's fucked up to, say, mock Michael J. Fox to make a cheap political point. Still, he's as intellectually bankrupt as the rest of this modern strain of fake conservatives.

As a final example of just how poorly-reasoned Goldberg's arguments tend to be, just read his latest column, in which he implores fellow conservaschmucks not to forget about Poor Ol' Straight Talk (aka POST), he of the infamous Baghdad mallwalk with BFF Huckleberry "Ah got fahve ruhgs for fahve buhcks!" Graham.

McCain's been a consistent pro-lifer (which distinguishes him from pretty much everyone else in the race so far). Until recently, Giuliani argued passionately for partial-birth abortion as a constitutional right. McCain has voted to confirm every conservative Supreme Court nominee, including Robert Bork. He voted "guilty" in Bill Clinton's impeachment trial. He campaigned for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, even after Bush beat him. Giuliani says he was ideologically simpatico with Clinton, and he endorsed Democrat Mario Cuomo for governor of New York.

My point isn't merely to make invidious comparisons between McCain and Giuliani (heck, to liberals they're not invidious at all). I'm actually a fan of Giuliani, and I think the GOP and the country could do worse in a president and Republican standard-bearer. But the double standard on the right seems more than a little self-indulgent.

I thought self-indulgence was the Randian conservatives' calling card....at least for themselves. When libruls are self-indulgent, they're hedonistic sybarites living beyond their means on someone else's money, mind you; when self-styled conservatives live pointless, unearned lives of waste and excess on money they either inherited or stole, it's the magic of lucky sperm shaking the invisible hand of the free marketplace. Which can be messy if you think about it.

But I digress. Forget the noisome idea that, according to Goldberg, POST's strengths are that he voted to confirm Robert Bork for SCOTUS, and to convict Bill Clinton for getting his pole smoked. Just think about how useless and anachronistic those references are in the first place. Conservatives' loathing runs deep and wide for POST; he's bucked them one too many times over the years with his showy displays of maverickness. They're not going to change their minds because he voted to confirm Robert Bork. So just as an argument, this a non-starter.

What's worse is that POST's current track record, as well as his campaign, is a complete shambles. Yet the Los Angeles Times wastes space that would have been better used for lingerie ads for this nonsense:

In response, McCain has decided to slap conservatives out of their haze. In what his campaign is billing as major speeches, the first on Wednesday at the Virginia Military Institute, McCain plans to make his candidacy a referendum on victory in Iraq. It is a truly bold and courageous gambit. At a time when the polls advise running away from the war, McCain will embrace it.

This is cheap and disingenuous, and any intellectually honest person would know it before even writing it in the first place. "Polls advise running away from the war" is a tremendously hollow translation of "a majority of American citizens, who still at least notionally run their country, have clearly and consistently voiced their disapproval for the war, both in its conceptual flaws and especially in the unspeakably incompetent planning of the postwar occupation". The electorate has been abundantly clear about this, and McCain, like Bush, has no plan to "win", nor even a definition, he simply keeps reiterating that "losing" is catastrophic, apparently not realizing that it's already lost, the rest is just triage.

And Goldberg had the nerve to criticize Juan Cole's judgment.

Sponge Logic

It's been a while since we've taken a run at DoughBob LoadPants™, who appears to more adept at making excuses for failing to complete his long-awaited opus, the serendipitously-titled Are You Gonna Finish That?, than much of anything else. And when it comes to critiquing the Democrats -- who, mind you, have been in power all of about twelve weeks -- he has his rubber-glue shields at the ready:

So here’s the ironic part. Suddenly, it looks as if the Democrats are the Republicans on fast-forward. It’s early yet, and the Democrats did finish their mini-Contract with America — the so-called first 100 hours — with mixed success on the substance but great fanfare in the media. Yet items like upping the minimum wage and shafting oil companies, although certainly not insubstantial, were primarily symbolic.

"Shafting" oil companies? Seriously? The most rapacious, profiteering club of hustlers to set hoof on the planet, and they're being shafted? Hey asshole, I'm paying forty-five bucks to fill up a fucking Honda Accord so I can get to work, you want to talk about "shafting". I got your symbolism right here, Lunchbox.

Things like "defending" marriage and taking on the growing threat of flag burning or video games are "primarily symbolic". In fact, they're totally symbolic -- they serve no practical utility whatsoever. Helping out the growing underclass just a sliver, and taking a mild run at an industry that gives its CEOs half-billion dollar golden parachutes -- they're not enough, but they're a start.

But look at how the Democrats are behaving. They’ve completely failed to stop the surge, and their latest efforts to derail the war are so convoluted — timetables on top of timetables — that even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, a co-sponsor of legislation to withdraw troops by September 2008, can’t explain them.

CNN’s John Roberts played a clip on Late Edition from a news briefing in which Obey muddled nearly every detail of the Democrats’ plan. Roberts then asked Sen. Joe Biden, “How do you pass or enforce something you can’t even explain?” It’s a good question.

Uh-huh. This is sort of like how we've been hearing about "winning" for four years going now, without much in the way of an explanation or definition, much less a plan.

He goes on like this, reciting the usual litany of "they do it too" tropes, again ignoring that the Democrats have had a congressional majority for all of twelve weeks, after twelve years of post-Trotskyite Gingrichism. The permanent revolutionaries have finally been kicked out on their snouts, and they're still trying to steam-clean the hoofprints out of the furniture, and here's Helpy Helperton smugly asking why everything's the same as it ever was.

Don't you have a book to finish, Jethro, or were they just expecting you to design the cover, and let the lower-rent hacks take it from there?

Agents Of Fortune, Part 3: Tortured Logic

So we've taken a look at the real-world issues being both reflected and perhaps inspired by the torture-porn agitprop of 24, and the clear-cut emotional problems informing both the oeuvre and the political statements of people like Joel Surnow and Pat (Young Americans) Dollard. Let's recap:

Surnow has willfully evaded criticism even from Army generals on the portrayal of the utility of "coercive interrogation", and even posits that he disagrees with professionals who have evaluated such things firsthand. He knows better, apparently, because he's tight with Rush Limbaugh, gets quoted by John Yoo and Michael Chertoff, and is ingratiating himself rather quickly with the neoclown shitterati. Good luck with all that, Chief; the reviews thus far of Surnow's lame conservatard knock-off of The Daily Show have been uniformly withering, even from fellow neoclowns.

Dollard, while not (yet) having the rightard pedigree, because even they blanch for a second at welcoming drug-addled porn monkeys to the tribe (except, of course, in the case of Fred Barnes), has certainly outdone Surnow in the "creepy sociopath" department. Whether it's sticking up a pharmacy and doing lines of coke on the side of an armored troop carrier (in Iraq, with American troops), making a film of himself smoking crank and ass-fucking his roommate's girlfriend (with the roommate himself doing the play-by-play), or turning his Iraq odyssey into a snuff-film montage (featuring lovely scenes such as a marine holding a stick with an Iraqi's head impaled on it) explicitly designed (in Dollard's own words) to desensitize Americans to the horrors of war, there is at least no mistaking whatsoever just what Dollard is all about.

See, when I read about people like that, especially at this stage of the game, when even staunch conservatives have given up on Fredo's Folly, I draw a certain conclusion about what these individuals' psychological motivations might be, that they express and project their issues in such a fashion.

Our good friend DoughBob Load Pants™, always looking for the elusive edge on the rhetorical bowling ball, draws an entirely different conclusion to the now-infamous New Yorker profile on 24 creator and Oxycontin Limbaugh BFF Joel Surnow.

THE NEW YORKER reported this week that the dean of West Point took it upon himself to help put an end to abusive — i.e. torturous — interrogation techniques. He and some of his leading interrogation experts and instructors flew to La-La Land to talk to the producers of Fox's hit show, "24." Army Brig. Gen. Patrick Finnegan told the show's creative team that his students were learning terrible lessons about the utility of brutal violence in interrogations. "The kids see it," Finnegan complained to the article's author, "and say, 'If torture is wrong, what about 24?' "

It didn't take long for the predictable mockery to start. "This controversy is perhaps the most off-the-wall example of the 'power of television' we've ever heard," chortled the editors of Broadcasting & Cable.

Ah, they "chortled", did they? The dean of the pre-eminent military academy of the United States comes to a Hollywood set, with professional associates who have first-hand knowledge of what they speak, to sit down with the writers and producers of an inexplicably popular TV show, to brief them specifically on how seriously they feel members of the armed forces are taking their breathless exhortations to extract information by any means necessary -- and the PR arm of the network owners "chortled"? Well, of course they did. Guess General Killjoy was talking out his uniform then. I, for one, am chastened by such "chortling". I think we all needed a hearty guffaw.

But of course, Jonah's real point is almost never in the logline. It becomes clear very quickly that the hilarious twist in his (to put it charitably) argument is that this is all just another example of librul hypocrisy. I know, I know. You rub your eyes, reread that, and say, "What the hell?". I sympathize.

This is a bit of a reversal from the pre-9/11 kulturkampf. Complaints about the coarsening of the culture used to come mostly from the right. Bob Dole even staked much of his 1996 presidential bid on the promise to eradicate the "nightmares of depravity" parading across the nation's screens.

In response to such criticism, Hollywood liberals threw up clouds of rhetorical fog. One retort was that movies and TV shows can't really influence people all that much. This strikes me as a bizarre position for an industry that makes so much money from advertising and product placements and whose self-described artists see themselves as "raising awareness" about everything from AIDS to the snail darter.

Another response — favored by former Motion Picture Assn. of America President Jack Valenti — was populist dudgeon. "Who are you to tell America what's good for them?" they'd squeal, making fun of the prudes and scolds. We saw some of this after Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction." "You've never seen a breast before?" they'd titter.

Pretty slick, huh? Because Dole and his fellow pecksniffs tried to rope the Cletus vote with their "fambly valyews" trope, warning ominously of the dire onslaught of nudity, sex, and naughty, naughty language back in the innocent Clenis era, it is hypocritical for people to say "what the fuck" when Keifer Sutherland breaks some asshole's fingers to get him to talk, or some swarthy villain breaks out the Makita. During the "family hour", mind you. Oh, won't someone please think of the children?

I actually appreciate the existence of doofuses like DoughBob; he makes our jobs so much easier. He iterates quite clearly that a transgression on decency is a transgression on decency, across the board. Thus we can show arthroscopic cameras chasing bullet patterns, and hear graphic, excruciating detail of various bodily fluids splattered all over crime scenes on the eighty-four current CSI franchises, but the world comes apart when our impressionable chilluns catch a quarter-second glimpse of a side-shot of Janet Jackson's titty.

Or more specifically, her nipple. This is what is so arbitrarily moronic about our network broadcast code. You can show big bouncing titties, as scantily clad as you like (and believe me, I like). You can show nipples, as long as they're male nipples, which may appeal to the censorious prudes, but not me. But you cannot show the identical protuberance on a woman's chest, not even for a split second, or all hell breaks loose and Congress actually shows up to work to grandstand for six weeks. You can show Dennis Hastert with his shirt off (shudder), but not Heidi Klum, even though Hastert's tits are bigger. Great priorities.

Anyway, Pantload continues to muck up the issue with his "hypocritical libruls suddenly loves them some censorship" bullshit:

Yet the most effective response from Hollywood was to raise the specter of censorship. "Censorship" is arguably the second-most-powerful scare word in the nation today, after "racism."

But the joke's on all of us because we're all in favor of censorship; we just get clever about what we call censorship. For example, unless you think profanity, violence and hard-core sex should be legal on broadcast television during the after-school time slot, you're for censorship. We're also all for criticizing bad behavior, bad language and the rest.

Actually, despite how extensive my previous two posts are on Surnow and Dollard and their respective artistic contributions, it never even occurred to me to utter the C word, nor even to suggest boycotting such ugly drivel. I still naïvely believe that knowledge is power, that the more people know about these thugs and what they're putting out there, the more they'll come to resent it.

The odds are against that, of course; it's always easier to incrementally desenstitize people to awful things than it is to rouse them to meaningful action. I always refer to the behavioral doctrine that people will only change their habits when they understand that the cost of not changing is greater than the cost of changing. That holds true here as well, unfortunately. But I have seen no liberal blogger advocating either censorship or boycott, just facts. Silly us; if we were neoclown authoritarians, calling for such things would come as naturally as Jonah going for thirds at the Hometown Buffet.

Here's one thing Goldberg is actually spot-on about -- but again, because he's got the wrong end of the stick in the 24 debate to begin with, it's a whole 'nother discussion:

But because we don't want to think of ourselves as scolds or censors, we make ourselves feel better by calling our positions "common sense."

The problem is that the definition of "common sense" is a moving target. What was once verboten is now commonplace and vice versa.

For example, Marc Cherry, the creator of ABC's "Desperate Housewives," told an interesting story to a gathering of TV critics recently. Cherry had screened a scene for a network censor in which the character played by Eva Longoria beds her 17-year-old gardener. Afterward, she enjoys a post-coital cigarette. Cherry said the censor asked, " 'Does she have to smoke?' And I went, 'So you're good with the statutory rape thing?' "

And the answer is "yes." Hollywood is good with the statutory rape thing. But it's not good with the smoking thing. And yet if I were to criticize Hollywood for the statutory rape thing, the Hollywood crowd would whine about how I'm a prude, a scold and, ultimately, a censorious enemy of free expression. If I were to complain about the cigarette? They'd say "good for you."

I agree that this is utterly stupid, that censors are more up in arms about smoking than about predatory milfs. But again, it's a matter of degrees, and a 17-year-old is not even statutory rape in every state.

And that is still an argument about the very arbitrary nature of broadcast censorship. I've seen and read many moviemakers talk about how they deliberately loaded their first cuts with extra material that they knew would be deemed offensive, to use as bargaining chips with the censors to keep in other things that the filmmakers knew would be offensive also, but seen as comparatively less so. The South Park movie, an underrated classic, is a prime example of this; Trey Parker and Matt Stone hit every talk show relating how the censors actually ended up letting them keep quite a few bits (including Saddam Hussein's penis) in the film that they had assumed would have no chance.

Again, none of it matters. While not as dyed-in-the-wool authoritarian as some of his more strident colleagues, DoughBob is above all a herd animal, an easily led ruminant who cares no more about the overall issues of censorship than he cares about changing his underwear regularly. It's just another hobby horse, lame right from the gate, with which Our Hero can once again joust at the imaginary libruls under his bed, while the constitution of his beloved country gets rendered meaningless, and the real authoritarian goofballs compete to become the worshipful chroniclers of madness.

Credibility Dodge

Is Pantload really that stupid, or merely shameless and disingenuous? I know we ask this question pretty much every time we encounter this jerkoff, and default on the notion that no one could actually be as stupid as he comes across, and be able to tie their shoes, or even remember to breathe. So he must just be breathtakingly cynical, right?

Just in case you were interested, there's a whole email spam campaign going around the web about that Juan Cole non-bet from two years ago. I discussed it here and here, and have nothing substantive to add. But the vitriol and bullying of this crowd is something to behold. It's now become something of a little media story and since the other side knows all about it (and is now badgering folks who carry my column, etc), it seems silly to keep you folks in the dark. Here's the E&P write up.

Definitely read his links to his own defenses -- the guy seems to seriously think this is about whether or not he should pay off Juan Cole, and since Cole "sanctimoniously" declined (as Goldbleg himself excerpted, Cole simply didn't want to be part of some racetrack bet on people's lives with an unprincipled goon such as Pantload) to accept the "wager".

Someone spell out for this fuckin' clown that no one really cares whether he "honors" the "wager" or not. The original point of the Cole/Goldbleg dust-up was -- and it's been proven absolutely correct, over and over again -- that Jonah is a sniveling little douche who doesn't know what he's blathering about. And because he's a legacy simp, there's even less accountability than if he were, say, Joe Klein.

So save your money, DoughBob LoadPants. Nobody really expects you to pony up a grand to the USO in Cole's name. We're just trying to figure out what exactly it is you are being paid to do, and why anyone should bother to read your addled-chimp-with-dartboard record of prognostication.

{Update: Very cool. Big thanks to Tom in comments for the portrait of the fartist as a young pantload.]



And welcome folks from The Poor Man and Eschaton. Please do not be put off by the gratuitous references to Britney Spears' pooter and the like. Or be put off; it's all good.