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Anybody else notice that the one thing missing from James Wolcott’s latest overwrought parcel of word piffle…

…is an attempt to answer any of the critics of the stimulus bill?

Sure, we get a host of labored prose, each turn of phrase meticulously delivered, no doubt, with the silent, plumpfingered stroke of a pampered ocecat purring atop a limp silk bathrobe.

— And we get the typical progressive “intellectual’s” stable of ready-made conservative cartoon characters — from intimations of their all-encompassing religiosity (always shorthand for anti-intellectualism, though why Wolcott presumed to tether me to religious dogmatism is anybody’s guess; I suspect it’s that some brownstone aristocrats can’t come across the last name Goldstein without sniffing at the obvious Jewness of such a thing) to rote pseudo-concern over the state of mind of these poor benighted souls, a hackneyed trope whose irony is meant to pack a suggestive punch against what Wolcott wants his readers to see as hysteria and hyperbole.

But what Sweet Baby James doesn’t provide us, in his self-satisfied paean to what has become his signature style — namely, a kind of verbal onanism whose happy ending is generally as quick as it is impotent — is any kind of substantive response to the concerns many of us have to a package that, by the accounting of many (and not just conservatives) is sure to expand the power and scope of the federal government, and to institutionalize programs whose very existence solidifies the progressive philosophy that birthed them.

Or, to put it another way, instead of attempting to enter into any kind of discourse in which the relative merits of an enormous and vastly underscrutinized bill are debated, Wolcott has chosen instead to gather his strawmen, dress them in the animal pelts of cavemen, then surround them with the lace and finery of his own fatted foppish prose. By their hairy chests ye shall know them!

That he would then have the audacity to intimate that the “anti-intellectualism” rests with those to whom his only answer is a lengthy and self-indulgent version of “get over it, wingnuts. My side won!” — well, much of that can be attributed to his fear of finding himself “wandering lonely and forlorn on the ragged outskirts of polite society, muttering as history passes by.”

Because let’s face it: without a doorman, it’s unlikely Wolcott would be able to find his way outside. In fact, self-appointed cultural elites such as he, delicate folk who have made an art form out of building snippy, blase-ironic defenses as justification for their manicured death grip on the status quo, embrace “change” only inasmuch as it serves to protect them from the beady-eyed proles who wander their city streets, threatening in their ordinariness, who may at any moment wise up and demand that Wolcott surrender his Cognac. For the greater good.

Wolcott is the Establishment, peering down through his [lorgnette] wondering why the peasants won’t eat cake.

But somewhere inside him, with each stroke of his exotic lap pussy, he realizes that his relevance is a facade supported by the sheer will of those whose place in history relies upon their ability to beat back individuality and create a permanent underclass, even as they pretend to stand and fight for the proles they so viscerally revile.

Me, I see through him — and not just because he has the translucent skin of a pampered shut in. And that more than anything irks our much decorated man of “liberal” letters.

Because with every sentence I write, I pose a new threat to how history will look upon those who, like Wolcott, seem to rejoice in the systematic restructuring of a democratic republic into a soft totalitarian state in which government, brimming with corruption and awash in bureaucratic ineptitude, grants itself an ever increasing say over how we live our lives.

His flaccid responses only reinforce what most of us have long understood: real anti-intellectualism comes from those who pretend toward being intellectuals, but whose primary function seems to be to cut off debate at every turn, and to demonize those who are willing to enter into substantive discussions.

Such soft totalitarianism is clear to those willing to open their eyes. And no fluffy prose iced with mannered irony can hide it, exotic cat or not.

****
update: Almost forgot: OUTLAW!

That seems to really give Jimmy a tingle in the janglies.

383 Replies to “Anybody else notice that the one thing missing from James Wolcott’s latest overwrought parcel of word piffle…”

  1. Steve B says:

    Man, I just LOVE it when you froth.

  2. apotheosis says:

    Never before has the act of stroking one’s exotic lap pussy been cast in such a decidedly negative light.

  3. Dan Collins says:

    Buried beneath the reeking rubble of overwriting at American Digest lurks the suspicion that buried beneath the tonnage of numbers and initiatives of the spending bill (“Yes, some tasty splooge for everyone bobs in this malodorous muck”–classy) is a rough beast stirring to be born

    Woody musketeers!

  4. Spies, Brigands, and Pirates says:

    I agree, Steve, although it’s a shame to waste 100% USDA Prime invective like that on an object as pathetic as Wolly.

    I mean, the guy (?) writes for a jumped-up version of People, and wouldn’t have even that gig if it weren’t for nepotism.

  5. Dan Collins says:

    Also, I would have gone with lorgnette.

  6. Steve B says:

    Oh, and did I mention…FIRST {{giggle}}.

    I’ve always wanted to say that.

  7. Spies, Brigands, and Pirates says:

    Not a monocle? He strikes me as a monocle sort of dude.

  8. Silver Whistle says:

    Or, to put it another way, instead of attempting to enter into any kind of discourse in which the relative merits of an enormous and vastly underscrutinized bill are debated, Wolcott has chosen instead to gather his strawmen, dress them in the animal pelts of cavemen, then surround them with the lace and finery of his own fatted foppish prose.

     Probably, Jeff, for the very good reason that Jabba, like the entire Congress and President, haven’t read the goddamned thing.

  9. Spiny Norman says:

    Basically anything by Walcott: the intellectual laziness of the Progressive narcissist.

    Hmmm…

    Puffed-up preening piffle-monger?

  10. Dan Collins says:

    Piffleodeon will do.

  11. Techie says:

    SecEnergy declares “I’m not the Administration” and declares that oil is an issue “not in my domain”

    [Energy Secretary Steven Chu may be a Nobel laureate Ph.D. in physics, but his first forays into energy policy suggest he’s a neophyte when it comes to the ways of Washington.

    At a forum with reporters on Thursday, the head of the department that has traditionally taken the lead on global oil-market policy, was asked what message the Obama administration had for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries at its meeting next month.

    “I’m not the administration,” the Cabinet secretary replied. “I will be speaking and learning more about this in order to figure out what the U.S. position should be and what the president’s position is.”

    Chu, who is still without a deputy, said he feels “like I’ve been dumped into the deep end of the pool” on oil policy.

    The day before, reporters asked him about OPEC output levels after a speech to a group of utility regulators. He responded that the issue was “not in my domain.”]

    http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/02/20/1803006.aspx

    Best Transition EVAR. Ready from Day One, I tells ya.

    Excuse me while I go pour a strong one.

    I’m sure Wolcott is happy with the “Hope and Change” in Washington DC. Me, I’m getting honestly terrified.

  12. TheGeezer says:

    You make me want to have proley eyes and have an urge to seize Cognac from manicured, lap-pussy-petting, plumpfingered hands. For the comrades!

  13. Spiny Norman says:

    apotheosis,

    Never before has the act of stroking one’s exotic lap pussy been cast in such a decidedly negative light.

    Kinda Dr Evil-ish, isn’t it?

  14. Sdferr says:

    Well SBP, among other things, a monocle doesn’t offer concomitant opportunity for the outstretched little finger.

  15. Canada Corner says:

    “In fact, self-appointed cultural elites such as he, delicate folk who have made an art form out of building snippy, blase-ironic defenses as justification for their manicured death grip on the status quo, embrace “change” only inasmuch as it serves to protect them from the beady-eyed proles who wonder their city streets, threatening in their ordinariness, who may at any moment wise up and demand that Wolcott surrender his Cognac. For the greater good.”

    Never trust a writer who can’t personally change the oil in his car. His oh-so carefully crafted personna is enough to justify the existence of every single NASCAR redneck.

  16. alppuccino says:

    Drop this Wolcott guy in the woods and see if he can take on nature with his wits. He’ll soon find out that he has no chance against Earth and that he barely has half a wit. He’s a soft, doughy, dead-weight on society who must be fed.

    Do it soon.

  17. Techie says:

    But, I like Cognac. It’s both a drink and an ingredient.

  18. apotheosis says:

    Kinda Dr Evil-ish, isn’t it?

    Well, sure, if you want to get all Blofeld-esque about it. But someone was eventually going to interrupt a great series of replies with juvenile snickering over that line, and I thought it best to get it out of the way early.

    Each of us contributes according to our abilities.

  19. Carin says:

    Wolcott could have been a character from Atlas Shrugged.

  20. Bob Reed says:

    Jeff G,

    Of course Wolcott doesn’t try to answer any of the spendulous bill’s critics; how can the undefendable be defended..?

    Much like many others He probably doesn’t even know what all is in this bill! Which is why he instead lines up the usual strawmen to knock down and engage in ad hominem on who he sees as his adversaries…

    His flaccid responses only reinforce what most of us have long understood: real anti-intellectualism comes from those who pretend toward being intellectuals, but whose primary function seems to be to cut off debate at every turn, and to demonize those who are willing to enter into substantive discussions.”

    Wolcott necessarily engages in this behavior because like most of the left they realize that their positions hold no merit, and therefore a merit based argument has instead gone the way of the merit based society…

    Wolcott’s drivel is preening poppycock, and he a palavering putze. He’s simply another useful idiot in the left’s media cadre…

    And I still hear, in my minds eye, the voice of Charles Laughton when reading his stuff-which is only when linked as I don’t actively read “Vanity Fair”…

  21. N. O'Brain says:

    Somebody throw me a frikkin’ boner here!

  22. Dan Collins says:

    Oh, geez, be careful, Jeff. You know what happens to outlaws. It’s in a movie.

  23. McGehee says:

    There’s a character on “Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law” that Wolcott reminds me of. I’m betting anyone who’s seen that show can probably guess which one. I suppose like everyone else on the show he’s a re-imagined former Hanna-Barbera cartoon character, though I don’t know what show he’d be from.

    “Piffle Friends”, maybe?

  24. McGehee says:

    Oh, well, that makes sense, I guess.

  25. McGehee says:

    As for why he and Wolcott seem related:

    …though he will often start talking in a normal posh voice, he soon trails off into incomprehensible gibberish.

  26. ushie says:

    James Wolcott can never decide whether he wants to be the book version of Waldo Lydecker or the movie version’s Cliffton Webb’s Lydecker with a little Shelby Carpenter thrown in so that the ladies will know he’s het.

    Son of a bitch probably wants to wear an orchid in his lapel every other day.

  27. Topsecretk9 says:

    I have to say it’s really creepy how obsessed he is with you, Jeff. It’s really creepy.

  28. Spies, Brigands, and Pirates says:

    The day before, reporters asked him about OPEC output levels after a speech to a group of utility regulators. He responded that the issue was “not in my domain.”

    Jaysus.

    What the fuck does he think is in the domain of the Secretary of Energy?

    Get a clue, Chu: oil is indeed your domain. If you can’t handle it you’re incompetent to hold your job and you need to step down.

  29. Spies, Brigands, and Pirates says:

    I have to say it’s really creepy how obsessed he is with you, Jeff. It’s really creepy.

    Let’s just hope that Jeff doesn’t come back from vacation to discover that Wolly’s been sleeping in his bed and representing himself to tradesmen as “Mrs. Jeff Goldstein”.

  30. Topsecretk9 says:

    That’s comforting about Chu – he’s a chip off the old Messiah “present” voting block, ain’t he?

  31. Sdferr says:

    If he hasn’t already thought about oil it’s too damn late for him to get a clue. Out with him. Period.

  32. U-238 says:

    I work for a hedge fund in oil. Let me just say Chu has a real fan club in our circle. We like trainwrecks.

  33. Spies, Brigands, and Pirates says:

    Maybe they should come up with a new department — the Not My Department Department.

    Stock it up with Nobel Prize winners such as Chu and AlGor, and put O! himself at the helm.

    They could print up a few thousand reams of canned press releases with useful expressions such as “No comment”, “Not my domain”, “Present”, “As I’ve said all along….”, and “President/Secretary/Mr./Obergruppenführer/ ______ is out of the office today”.

  34. dicentra says:

    Off-topic but relevant in a general blogospheric way:

    Mike Nelson from MST3K goes on an all-bacon diet, with delicious results.

  35. Mr. Pink says:

    That question is above my paygrade should go in there somewhere too. Especially considering it was only above his paygrade until a week after his inaugeration.

  36. Bob Reed says:

    SBP,

    I think you overlooked one of the necessary responses if O!s administration had a form such as you describe…

    “It’s Booooooooooosh!s fault!”…

  37. MarkD says:

    It is not in his domain. He should have said that Opec was a rapacious cartel controlled by evil men bent on extracting the last dime from the world. Wishing and hoping isn’t energy policy.

    When Teddy K kicks, maybe you can have a windmill powered car. Remember, we won. Now, we’ll get it, good and hard. Fifty two percent of us asked for this.

  38. BJTexs says:

    Wolcott has a very strange man crush on Jeff, the likes of which have not been seen since George Michael was cruising Soho loos and that which was found in Boy Georges basement.

    How are we supposed to react to a bill filled with items that have nothing whatsoever to do with stimulus and manage to add, in a couple weeks, what it took George Bush and the spedulous Republicans 8 years to “accomplish?”

    Yea and our brains are miswired…

  39. BJTexs says:

    spedulous? NO! SPENDULOUS!! EXCELSIOR!!!

  40. Mikey NTH says:

    OT:

    Via Insty, a word use I hadn’t heard before: to gollum.
    http://www.wagreflex.com/2009/02/to-gollum.html

    To covet something without the ability to enjoy the thing coveted; when the item owns the owner.

  41. SarahW says:

    “gone with ‘lorgnette’ ”

    Jeweled lorgnette

  42. Mikey NTH says:

    #5 Dan:

    I agree with lorgnette; it has the proper Wodehousian air about. Like Mr. Wolcott himself seems like a character Bertie Wooster, or the Hon. Galahad Threepwood, or Uncle Fred, would have had to deal with, say in a story titled “The Affair of the Wolcott Pussy”.

  43. Sdferr says:

    This WSJ essay The Roots of Liberal Condescension by William Voegeli lays on the same land as Jeff’s, seems to me.

  44. Sdferr says:

    Sorry. Here.

  45. steveaz says:

    SBP @33,
    If i wuz Jeff, just on general principles, I’d keep away from mr. plumpfingers. He’s scaaary.

  46. steveaz says:

    “It rubs the lotion on its skin.”
    – Wilcott

  47. John Cheshire says:

    I don’t know much about this assclown. Also, I don’t know much about Vanity Fair. I always thought it was a woman’s magazine like Vogue. For shit’s sake the magazine is called Vanity Fair which automatically means that it has no credibility with me. Unless its an article about hair products or who the next Oscar winner will be. If I gave two shits about either of those things I still would not read VF.

  48. Bob Reed says:

    Here’s what Wolcott sounds like, in my mind eye while reading his stuff…

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op3zA9XaUKQ&feature=related

    Except, with less gravitas of course…

  49. happyfeet says:

    Mr. Cheshire is right I think. I’ve been sort of waiting for a comment to form in my little head, but I just can’t have any reaction to Vanity Fair things I don’t think. It’s supposed to be stupid. Like the National Enquirer or Newsweek. Also, Annie Liebovitz can choke on a Pringle for all I care. I’d like to see a picture of that.

  50. Ginger says:

    Makes me lonesome for some white-trash, chillbilly grandmaw.

  51. B Moe says:

    ….the monster-truck-rally stimulus package….

    I am a bit confused here, does he think comparing it to a monster truck “rally” is somehow complementary?

  52. Mikey NTH says:

    It’s to make you hick-a-billies think kindly on the stimulus package; after all, he deigned to use one of your crude tribal events to describe the stimulus.

    You don’t know the pain it caused him to write those words! He had to sit back and have a glass of port! And port that early in the day, the kitties know it could be one of those nights with the ‘bad touching’, especially if he gives them some sherry with their desert.

    They all know what that means. It would be illuminating if the diaries of ‘Mr. Wuzzles’ ever got published. Illuminating? Revealing, I say! The Story of a Kept Pussy. (A serial).

  53. Jeff G. says:

    The point here is not necessarily to attack Wolcott specifically — though that’s the form it takes as an occasional. Rather, I’d like it noted that his “type,” the sniffing, preening prog “intellectual,” actually epitomizes the anti-intellectualism it claims ostensibly to abhor.

    Think of it this way. In response to specific questions and / or concerns about a given topic for inquiry, their answer is to shout, reflexively, “shut up, anti-intellectuals” — and then to pass this response off as intellectualism.

    Garofalabia has taken it even further: “Shut up, you anti-intellectual defectives who should be rounded up and put into special colonies, and maybe even sterilized, because science says if you don’t believe like I do, there is something wrong with your wiring, making you a threat to the greater good that can only be met with compassionate violence.”

    Charming, but that’s where we are.

    A friend of mine — on the left, but almost circling around to anarchist — is a film producer. His new movie is a documentary called the War Against the Weak. The movie looks at the trajectory of the (left progressive) eugenics movement — and the “scientific” justifications that animated it — and its culmination in the holocaust.

    We now see frightening echoes of this type of thought emanating from “progressives” like Garofalingus. Be afraid.

  54. Mikey NTH says:

    Or it could be called ‘The Fall of the House of Wolcott: A Pussy’s View’ by Mr. Wuzzles.

    Whatever – I’m not that particular. (But he is that peculiar, if you know what I mean.)

  55. Bob Reed says:

    In response to specific questions and / or concerns about a given topic for inquiry, their answer is to shout, reflexively, ‘shut up, anti-intellectuals’…”

    Would that be along the lines of, Hick!, Rube!, Chillbilly!, Rethuglidum!, or other similar appelations?

    I seem to have heard these somewhere recently; but I really don’t recall exactly where…

  56. Jeff G. says:

    Oh. For those interested in eugenics — and we had many conversations here during the Nishi Era — you can keep up with the movie I mentioned by signing up for the facebook group.

    I got an early screener of the film and it’s quite good. It goes where even Jonah’s book didn’t — pinning much of the “scientific” impetus behind fascism on American progressives and the scientific elite.

  57. Swen Swenson says:

    So.. This puling pompustulence writes for Vanity Fair? How ghey is that?

  58. Mikey NTH says:

    Jeff:

    Picking on him is easy just because that type of over-refined narcissist full of himself, his education, his smattering of quotations, his lists of people he has met, and his supposed intellectual superiority. He has, by his own efforts, made himself into that cartoon character. No author could invent him because the public wouldn’t believe that he actually existed, and that author would be frustrated just because he had met and seen so many of that type.

    If you have never read it, there is a John Dickson Carr mystery ‘The Mad Hatter Mystery’ that has an American character, Julius Arbor, that is exactly that sort of over-refined, sensitive, esthete.

    Wodehouse, bless him, parodied many of these types. They were a punchline over eighty years ago, and despite the popular entertainment industry and its performers taking on these airs it remains (or perhaps because the popular entertainment industry and its performers take on these airs).

    I recall once reading a short story ‘The Celestial Omnibus’, in which Mr. Bons could very well be a fictional representation of Mr. Wolcott.

  59. B Moe says:

    What I find ironic is I think the monster truck analogy is actually quite apt: they are both loud, flashy, extravagant exhibitions that do nothing but entertain mostly dim-witted adults and small children.

  60. Bob Reed says:

    His new movie is a documentary called the War Against the Weak.”

    Oh that’s coming all right…

    And one of the first baby-steps in the long march through that particular institution is the new “coordinating council” codified as part of the spendulous…

    It will essentially perform cost-benefit analyses for medical procedures, and decide at what age they are no longer beneficial to society as a whole…

    So it will presumably deny treatment, at some age, for sufferers of certain, now treatable, conditions. This, along with fetal DNA screening in Britain, not just for health but for desireable characteristics, are just another bend in the road to the progressive’s brave new world…

    And, yet another parallel that can be drawn between O!&Co. and the Nazis-ideologically speaking of course…

  61. ushie says:

    I think Janeane took up spectacle-wearing because she thinks it makes her look smart. Didn’t work when Stallone tried it, either.

    James Wolcott as Gussie Fink-Nottle. How apropos.

  62. ushie says:

    And Grayson Carter declared the death of irony after 9/11, and has spent the last 8 years becoming same. How ironic.

  63. Squid says:

    Sane People: “Um, do we really wanna drive this thing off the cliff? Maybe there’s a better way to get to the bottom of this mountain.”

    Thor: “FUCK YOU! THE TIME FOR TALK IS OVER! YOU GOT US UP HERE, NOW I’LL GET US DOWN!”

  64. B Moe says:

    For the next eight years we’ll be listening to pleas….

    You could always take a swan dive off the balcony, dickhead, if it really pains you that much.

    Or you could just go away.

  65. Sdferr says:

    “I won.”

    Well that plus: “And I haven’t a clue what to do next, outside sow ruin everywhere I turn.”

    Also hard to miss. But we’ll make do once he’s gone.

  66. RR Ryan says:

    BJT makes my point. I’m the first to admit to finding Jeff attractive, but I’m not obsessing about it in print. I would say that sometimes it’s best to keep it to one’s self, but I’m pretty sure I just violated that principle. Oh, well.

  67. Jeff G. says:

    thor is free to comment over at Vanity Fair, where he can clap Mr Wolcott on the back.

    Oh, wait. No comments on that site.

    Must keep the peasants in their place, I guess.

    Incidentally, if thor believes that I have spent the last eight years unwilling to engage in debate — which his now erased comment suggested — I have no idea why he spends his time here. That is an intentionally insulting and dishonest characterization of what I’ve done on this site, and I’m not interested in that kind of bullshit appearing here anymore.

    Go find another site to troll if you can’t be honest, thor.

    Oh. And if you ever again wish ill on someone’s child, I’ll wish with every grain of my being that somebody tracks you down and beats your ass but good. I’ve been on the receiving end of such soulless filth, and I won’t countenance it.

  68. happyfeet says:

    Arlen Specter is someone’s child I suppose.

    I’m a very bad person.

  69. Mikey NTH says:

    #60 Jeff:

    Eugenics was tied to ‘science’, and I have read up on it (only in general works – there was a book I read by one of the descendants of John Adams, but devil if I can remember now the title or his name – it was all about the different races and how the lesser ones were out-breeding the higher ones). But it was tied to ‘science’ the same way economics was in Marx. That is, science proved it could work, and the advances between 1800 and 1900 were sufficient to make many worship it. A blog comment is too short to describe all of the pitfalls of the ‘science’ of breeding humans and human society. Suffice for me to say that all of that scares me as much as those who talk blithely of artificial intelligence – for they are hubristic beyond my words. And it raises my scorn for the same reason.

  70. Mikey NTH says:

    #65 ushie:

    Now, let’s be fair to Gussie – he loved Madeline Bassett and his newts – though in what order I’m not sure.

    More of a literary Sir Roderick Glossop – without the actual accomplishments of Sir Roderick. (And without his daughter Honoria, whose laugh recalled a squadron of cavalry charging across a steel bridge.)

  71. thor says:

    Comment by Jeff G. on 2/20 @ 3:56 pm #

    Oh. For those interested in eugenics — and we had many conversations here during the Nishi Era — you can keep up with the movie I mentioned by signing up for the facebook group.

    How did nishi get an era?

  72. Mikey NTH says:

    I see I missed another one of those drug and/or drunk fueled comments.
    Man, I’m lucky in something, it seems.

  73. Ginger says:

    “whose place in history relies upon their ability to beat back individuality….. even as they pretend to stand and fight for the proles they so viscerally revile.”

    Jeff is correct. Be afraid. These people are thieves of much, much more than our money and fundamentalists in their fervor. Claim your individual sovereignty. The honor is in the trying.

    I, for one, took second place in a monster truck mud race in South Dakota two summers ago. Dimwit.

  74. B Moe says:

    Sorry, I am a road racing snob now, can’t help myself.

  75. Ginger says:

    There’s skills involved buddy. And some smiles.

  76. N. O'Brain says:

    Comment by thor on 2/20 @ 4:26 pm #

    You were shown the door fuckhead.

    Leave.

  77. dicentra says:

    #65

    I was going to defend Augustus Fink-Nottle too. He wasn’t a snob; he just left his newts in other people’s bathtubs and could never figure out why that was off-putting.

    Of course, Wodehouse’s characters were mostly silly and harmless, including his Hitler-clone. Entertaining, to be sure, but they never harmed anyone but themselves, and then only comically.

    Wolcott’s snobbery, however, is toxic, because it seduces far too many into thinking that his smooth manners are the same as good character or wisdom, when in reality they are neither.

    Human society frequently falls for this fallacy, and there’s no reason to think we’re the least bit immune.

  78. Jeff G. says:

    In addition to being something of an expert on interpretation theory, I am also capable of crushing a man’s skull with my bare hands. I can also lift heavy rocks.

    I like to think that makes me a modern day Renaissance man.

  79. B Moe says:

    We have mud drag racing around here that’s pretty cool, and swamp buggy racing further south that is amazing. I think what Wally is referring to is those Ginormo-Dome pro wrestling on wheels spectacles that Speedvision seems to think is racing. While I admire the engineering involved, I don’t really see the point.

  80. B Moe says:

    I take nothing back and fear neither word nor fist. I’ve seen it all before.

    Christ you are such a fucking clown.

  81. Carin says:

    You might be willing to engage but you lost the debate by measure of the electorate.

    The electorate, by measure of the outcome, isn’t qualified to judge a debate.

    Such a brave man of taunts is the Semper Fi Daddy. What a little malignant political thing he is. We should coddle the little man’s emotions while he insults the dead and wounded, even make a party of it.

    He has NEVER insulted the dead or wounded. Liar.

    You know, I think “I” could prolly kick thor’s ass. prolly prolly prolly.

  82. Big D says:

    “We should coddle the little man’s emotions while he insults the dead and wounded, even make a party of it.”

    You mean like this?

    #

    Comment by thor on 2/18 @ 2:34 am #

    This is the price you pay, Mel, for hanging around pin-headed flag-pin-wearing girly boys and sucking up to them for a cheap stroke.

    Fuck off thor

  83. JHoward says:

    You might be willing to engage but you lost the debate by measure of the electorate.

    See what I did there? I saw your comment, B Moe, and raised you an assininity. Ha.

    thorisha –acting alone, by herself, and without aid of another — courageously invokes the mob, squelching all debate. She fears neither sunburn nor Doritos shortages; Cheers reruns nor near-missing the beige window trim in the second bedroom. She’s seen it all before.

    She is thor. Hear her roam.

  84. Topsecretk9 says:

    thor is free to comment over at Vanity Fair, where he can clap Mr Wolcott on the back.

    Oh, wait. No comments on that site.

    Must keep the peasants in their place, I guess.

    So true. Most all the nutroot wacks won’t allow comments. Tightly controlled echo chambers, like Firedoglake.

  85. Carin says:

    Wolcott’s snobbery, however, is toxic, because it seduces far too many into thinking that his smooth manners are the same as good character or wisdom, when in reality they are neither.

    It is also toxic because it encourages people to imagine what he uses are “good” arguments. No wonder the left is so clueless. Their are not being tutored/lead/informed by individuals qualified for the task.

  86. Techie says:

    Super-genius.

  87. Jeff G. says:

    The thing is, thor, I can erase the last 500 of your comments without fear of erasing anything germane to a substantive debate.

    That should tell you something.

  88. ushie says:

    MikeyNTH and dicentra, yes, I fear I insulted Gussie gravely. I was comparing newts to peculiar cats in my head. But Gussie was never mean, nor petty.

    Perhaps Wolcott is Aunt Agatha, still to get his comeuppance in regard to a type of pearl necklace. Shudder.

    Thor, take a hint and get the fuck outta here. The host doesn’t want you here, and insulting him and his other guests is no way to get your (dumbass pointless) way.

  89. Jeff G. says:

    What I won’t do, though, is waste my day policing the comments section of a blog. Act responsibly or for Christ’s sake take off.

  90. happyfeet says:

    oh. Here is your heading into the weekend AP propaganda from AP propagandist Tom Raum what Drudge found.

    “All Americans have a stake in making this work,” says Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

    But you wouldn’t know it from the reaction.

    Rather than the bipartisan support Obama first sought, Republicans remain in near unanimous opposition.

    Me I have no stake in making this dirty socialist anti-American scheme work. I really don’t. That’s Janeane Garofalo’s job. Bless her skanky little heart she’s got her work cut out for her.

  91. Techie says:

    I’d like to compare Wolcott to Spode, but it would lead to a jokes about woman’s undergarments……

    Then again, he does write for Vanity Fair, so I’ll just fall back to comparing him to Lord Hate-good.

  92. Carin says:

    The thing is, thor, I can erase the last 500 of your comments without fear of erasing anything germane to a substantive debate.

    HEY NOW … that’s hitting a bit to close to home. It says “Say it” down there, not “say something germane to the debate.”

  93. PCachu says:

    How did nishi get an era?

    Same way anyone does — once you’ve pitched a few games it’s not too hard to calculate.

  94. thor says:

    Mel isn’t real, BigDee. He’s a fraud. He’s a phony. He’s a nutter.

    Oh Mel, you’re shark fishing at Panama Beach, posting from your Blackberry?

    I’m in Florida. Mel, what do you say you and I meet up?

    Ain’t gonna happen, BigDee. Crazy Mel Iwo Jima hero doesn’t exist as advertised. Which is just a little insulting to WWII vets, ya think?

  95. dicentra says:

    #48 Sdferr

    Just got back from that WSJ article on prog snobbery. It’s spot-on. A taste:

    if patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, snobbery is the last refuge of the liberal-arts major. The striver may wind up with the bigger house, better car and nicer vacations, but the very meretriciousness of these aspirations confirms the liberal arts major’s belief in the striver’s inferior taste and barren inner life. Conspicuous consumption advertises not the wealth but the cluelessness of the consumer who acquires to flaunt. It has been supplanted by conspicuous disdain for conspicuous consumption. The Toyota Prius is a testament to its driver’s virtue, not a mark of his prosperity. Its distinctive homeliness has made it a hit, at a time when Honda has canceled production of the hybrid version of the Accord: it turned out nobody wanted to buy a hybrid that was indistinguishable from an iceberg-melting V-6.

    Also,

    In “Nation of Rebels” (2004), Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter argue that taste is a “positional good.” By “reproducing status hierarchies,” good taste “confers a sense of almost unassailable superiority upon its possessor.” Furthermore, they argue, good taste is mostly a matter of good distaste: the positional value of denigrating the wrong things is more important, and more reliable, than appreciating the right things.

    Which is where the blog Stuff White People Like comes in. It’s a catalog of all the things you have to like to be kewl.

  96. Techie says:

    Off the meds again, I take it?

  97. happyfeet says:

    Let’s not be boring unless it’s the world-weary jaded ennui kind what can pass in comfortable silence.

  98. thor says:

    #

    Comment by Jeff G. on 2/20 @ 5:01 pm #

    The thing is, thor, I can erase the last 500 of your comments without fear of erasing anything germane to a substantive debate.

    That should tell you something.

    Not true. Bob and I often quarrel politely before we regress to trading nut punches.

    Congrats, btw, for once again your name appears in a major publication of merit. This thing with Walcott is major p.r. bling, and a good bit of fun too.

  99. Jeff G. says:

    It is no fun being trashed by a limp fish.

  100. Big D says:

    Once again. Fuck off thor. You denigrate others service even as you demand honor for your father. Truth be told, most here do honor his service. It’s you we have a problem with.

    Next time I talk to Mel I’ll ask if he’s interested in meeting you. As he’s now an octagenarian, you could probably take him.

  101. happyfeet says:

    good taste is mostly a matter of good distaste … denigrating the wrong things is more important … than appreciating the right things.

    This is that bitter clingers thing again when Baracky was talking to his friends in San Francisco what gave him monies. Baracky really makes no pretense of being president of all Americans. This is why they love him so. He hates all the same people they do.

  102. Jeff G. says:

    Oh look, it’s that blazing prog irony again!

    I don’t need him to come here to discuss anything, meya. And of course, discussing anything over there is impossible, given the closed nature of the blog. But presumably his post could have offered a substantive response to our concern. Like, eg., “The stimulus package is so NOT wasteful, and it so WON’T expand the federal government. And here’s why: Because it’s patriotic and good and hopey!”

    At least that would have been a step up.

    Oh. And Velociman? A great writer and a brilliant guy. I don’t agree with everything he says, but at least he makes arguments. Wolcott seems to exist merely to sneer at the arguments others make before fanning himself and taking a nap on the fainting couch.

  103. N. O'Brain says:

    The really funny thing it that Mel, the 80 something y.o. WWII vet would kick Slimemold Skidmark’s skinny little ass across the beach and back again, if the coward would actually said to his face the insults he has vomited here.

    Of course whore is a pussy and a coward and wouldn’t have the balls.

  104. Bob Reed says:

    Bob and I often quarrel politely before we regress to trading nut punches.”

    thor,
    You are partly correct here. We do often quarrel politely, but I don’t recall sinking to any nut-punches…

    I try to be civil always, regardless of and ad hominem; To always conduct myself as both an officer and a gentleman was, ahem, instilled into my rock hard head many years ago by some extremely able, and imposing, CPO’s. These principles along with my religious beliefs are axioms I try to live by daily…

    You are an extremely bright person, articulate and capable of insightful and divergent points of view. Although we generally must agree to disagree on matters of politics and social and economic policy, I recognize you as my fellow American and respect that your opinion is at least considered…

    And I also hope that we can agree that we all want the best for our beloved nation…

    Some of us will always be flag-pin-wearing, and waving, folks. And, we have not all had the benefit of your education. Why don’t you use your knowledge and expressive nature in service to us all by articulating those opposing points of view you hold…

    I can’t guarantee that you’ll change anyone’s mind; but at least we might get some honest debate…

    And I think you’d see the animosity that often meets you here to ebb away like receding tide at the beach where you live…

    Best Wishes…

  105. Big D says:

    N’O,

    Belated good wishes on your son. After all he’s done, he could stand on his head and hold his breath for 13 weeks! Time will fly. I will hoist one in his honor this evening.

  106. Mikey NTH says:

    #81 dicentra:

    Wodehouse was doing commentary with a light touch. Of course Sir Roderick Spode and his ‘Black Shorts’ were to be laughed at. Sir Oswald Mosley wasn’t quite so funny.

    “Spode! I know all about Eulalie!”

  107. dicentra says:

    Remind me: which one was Mosely?

    One of the funniest moments in the Laurie/Fry version is when Bertie confronted Spode with “I know all about…!” and couldn’t remember the word, so he scampered off to find Jeeves with Spode in tow, who couldn’t let even an incomplete insult go by.

  108. Mikey NTH says:

    Hit enter too soon:

    dicentra, that is exactly why a self-important personage like Wolcott should be mocked in Wodehousian terms – it fits him, like a glove. Puncturing a preening popous ass like that truly needs a Wodehousian treatment, to show him that he isn’t a plate with watercress on the side.

    These types have had a long time not getting called out, on either their own field or on any. Puncture the Vanity of a Wolcott; for a Rep. Clyburne, tell him what Buckley told Vidal, to wit – ‘You call me a racist again and I’ll knock your teeth down your throat.’

    It has been too long since such have been called out for their slanders, and the time to start doing that is now.

  109. dicentra says:

    And I think you’d see the animosity that often meets you here to ebb away like receding tide at the beach where you live…

    Bob. The hostility always starts with thor himself, whose purpose for being here is to rile us up with pointed insults and ad hominems aplenty. He doesn’t want to get along with us, because, as expressed in my #99, it’s important to him that he despise us, lest he be revealed as “common.”

    Being kind to thor makes no difference because he’s not looking for kindness. Or lively debate. Or even respect. He’s a troll, and trolls live to stir up trouble.

  110. Mikey NTH says:

    I will note that Ann Althouse has had a few threads going; and the reaction of the commenters to the ‘racism’ claim shows that a pot is starting to boil hard.

    Methinks thou dost protest too much – continuously – for any man of stomach to bear the continued calumnies with good face and even humor.

  111. thor says:

    It’s in Brodsky’s A Room and a Half, I believe, wherein he describes the diabolical beauty of the Soviets erasing the soul of men.

    The Soviets didn’t just exile you. Everything attached to your name, history and family was systematically erased from the official register. The terror of having never existed according to the state was a clever horror. To have a relative knock on the door of where you once lived and to have it answered by someone who claimed you’d never lived there. No record of your name anywhere.

    Fascinating the way those Russians went at each other. None of this message board tit-for-tat stuff, they knew how to truly spook the consciousness.

  112. Bob Reed says:

    Dicentra,
    I respect your thoughts, opinions, abilities, and you’re experiental seniority to me in the blogosphere.

    I was simply being who I am, doing what now comes natural to me…

    As I was taught so long ago, and as I continue to learn daily; despite my “misspent” youth…

    Thanks for your heartfelt advice.

    Best Wishes…

  113. meya says:

    “But presumably his post could have offered a substantive response to our concern”

    meh, you want to find arguments for stimulus they’re out there. Definitely so when the discussion is at the level of repeating michelle bachman’s and other lies. You can also find the arguments for why coups are like, teh stupid.

    “Oh. And Velociman? A great writer and a brilliant guy. I”

    True this is some pretty fabo stuff:


    I cannot believe I would ever utter this thought, and I have no desire to live in 1967 Greece (or 1923 Turkey, for that matter), but my sad conclusion is a coup d’etat by the right military officer might just be the only remedy to our slide to socialism. I for one can only postulate that a tribunal headed by a David Petraeus, with a carefully selected praetorian of like-minded colonels, could do far better than the unindicted co-conspirators currently wreaking havoc with our childrens’ and grandchildrens’ birthrights (it’s always colonels and naval captains you have to empower. Too many of the flag grades are politically corrupted by the co-conspirators, and must be cashiered before they can attempt to return things to the status quo ante).”

    But brilliant? Makes arguments? And then later he talks about how ‘bloodless’ stuff can be? It’s all too much.

  114. ginger says:

    Thieves. Leftist, fundamentalist, progressives thieves.

    Diabolical. Fascinating. A beautiful thing, eh Thor?

  115. Bob Reed says:

    A tradition whose groundwork was probably laid long ago thor, by Ivan’s Oprichniks…

  116. Rob Crawford says:

    [Thor is] an extremely bright person, articulate and capable of insightful and divergent points of view.

    The evidence for this must be on other sites, because it’s sure as hell not ’round here.

  117. thor says:

    #

    Comment by dicentra on 2/20 @ 5:50 pm #

    And I think you’d see the animosity that often meets you here to ebb away like receding tide at the beach where you live…

    Bob. The hostility always starts with thor himself, whose purpose for being here is to rile us up with pointed insults and ad hominems aplenty. He doesn’t want to get along with us, because, as expressed in my #99, it’s important to him that he despise us, lest he be revealed as “common.”

    Being kind to thor makes no difference because he’s not looking for kindness. Or lively debate. Or even respect. He’s a troll, and trolls live to stir up trouble.

    You’re a weed, Dicentra, and weeds were meant to tug, poke and pull on.

    See what I have to deal with, Bob? A few clever children in a garden of weeds.

    Let’s return to Wolcott’s truffles, pojalsta. I think the frothing keep asking to be listened to when in fact they have been. Listened to and rejected is quite different than not being listened to. Just giving my opinion, while fanning myself.

  118. happyfeet says:

    My favorite are the liberals out here in LA what are studiously trying to affect obliviousness. The whole celebratory thing is gone gone gone that’s for sure. Now a lot of them are trying to be all I’ve never really been a very political person and I just don’t know what to think about stuff. This happened really fast. I like to be all gosh I don’t know what to think either. They’re so cute without their talking points.

  119. N. O'Brain says:

    “#

    Comment by ginger on 2/20 @ 6:12 pm #

    Thieves. Leftist, fundamentalist, progressives thieves.

    Diabolical. Fascinating. A beautiful thing, eh Thor?”

    Well, Slimemold Skidpants is stealing Jeff’s bandwith.

  120. Bob Reed says:

    It must be difficult sometimes in LA happyfeet,

    I’m sure that you also run into a lot of Walcott more-insightful-than-thou types…

    All that and a tax increase too, courtesy of Ahhhhh-nuld and the spineless legislature…

    At least you have good baba-ganoush nearby…

  121. router says:

    while fanning myself.

    that’s disgusting

  122. Mikey NTH says:

    Yes, 3333, it must be alarming to have the Energy Secretary try to say – without admitting it – that the current administration has no policy on the matter, and so much no policy that the secretary of the department does not know what to answer to a common question.

    Too much campaign, not enough thought to governing.

  123. meya says:

    “Too much campaign, not enough thought to governing.”

    His answer doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that someone with campaign experience would say.

  124. Jeff G. says:

    meh, you want to find arguments for stimulus they’re out there. Definitely so when the discussion is at the level of repeating michelle bachman’s and other lies. You can also find the arguments for why coups are like, teh stupid.

    Yes. Silly to look for such arguments in posts dedicated to why those who believe the stimulus package is wrongheaded are themselves teh silly!

    I think you should pass that advice along to college students. They can turn in term papers that are nothing but ill-considered ad homs, and when given poor grades, fight the powers by arguing that, meh, you can find arguments elsewhere. So how dare you judge me!

  125. Mikey NTH says:

    meya – the Energy Secretary isn’t a campaigner. That’s the problem. He is a bureaucrat second, scientist first. He doesn’t have an answer regarding policy because he doesn’t know what it is to be, and he didn’t say that the administration response is ‘…under review at this time and will be forthcoming before…blah, blah, blah’.

  126. Mikey NTH says:

    meya – they are different things, but if you want to advocate something here, you would be best served trying to come up with more than cloaked ad-homs.

    Even I can do better just recalling the standard phrasing of the bureaucracy, and note that it is missing. And noting that rote phrasing is missing is surely not a good sign.

  127. Mikey NTH says:

    Better because it is honest. Worse because they didn’t even prep this guy with the standard answers.

    I mean really – the standard answers are not forthcoming under general questioning for a press conference? Standard drill is just that – now what happens when non-standard things occur and you don’t even have drill to fall back on?

  128. Sdferr says:

    May I just say on behalf of the new Secretary of Energy while he’s catching his breath, that burning coal to produce electrical energy is a wonderful thing and as it happens, quite economical to boot. Let’s have more of that. In addition, the United States intends to pursue a policy of easing the path to new nuclear power plant construction. This, we think, is also a good way to create plentiful and dependable electrical energy. And as to cars and trucks burning gasoline and diesel fuels for transport of people and commercial goods? Oh yes! Very good things. We will plan to have these in abundance for many years to come. To that end, we will cease to spend taxpayer dollars on the uneconomic waste of turning foodstuffs into transportation fuels and look instead to our well established oil drilling and servicing companies to pursue new sources of crude oil and natural gas as they find the efforts within their self imposed risk profiles. Thank you.

  129. Mikey NTH says:

    Look – I will be clear. Drill is done to teach the basics to any member of an organization. That is so when you are tired, or flustered, you don’t have to think about those basics, they are just there in you, and you can spare your thinking for the details of the actual problem in front of you.

    This man has had an academic career, he has spoken in front of people and taken questions, he has been to conferences, he has been part of boards – why wasn’t he prepped with the basics before this press conference?

  130. Mikey NTH says:

    #136 Sdferr;

    That would be very naughty of you to slip him that note.

    heh

  131. Jeff G. says:

    That sounds better than telling them that term papers and blog posts are different things.

    Ah, yes. Blog posts aren’t supposed to make arguments. They are just supposed to crank out ad hominems and otherwise coarsen civil discourse. I’d forgotten that Atrios and Tbogg wrote up the rules.

    Get lost, meya. You’re wasting my time with your kneejerk contrarianism. It’s gotten old.

  132. Jeff G. says:

    All —

    You are under no obligation to answer any of meya’s questions or challenges henceforth. S/he has decided that there is a time and a place for everything, and that putting together extensive or coherent and sourced arguments in blog posts is simply not done. In fact, making arguments at all should be reserved for some other kind of medium.

    S/he is really just here to kinda hangout and make friends, I guess.

  133. B Moe says:

    The Soviets didn’t just exile you. Everything attached to your name, history and family was systematically erased from the official register. The terror of having never existed according to the state was a clever horror. To have a relative knock on the door of where you once lived and to have it answered by someone who claimed you’d never lived there. No record of your name anywhere.

    Fascinating the way those Russians went at each other. None of this message board tit-for-tat stuff, they knew how to truly spook the consciousness.

    It’s like some bipolar Ignatius Reilly, viciously lashing out at the awful reality that keeps trespassing on the fringes of his hallucinations.

  134. Bob Reed says:

    Meya,
    I believe that many folks are simply disappointed that the Energy Secretary would have fairly well developed ideas about how to shape US energy policy. Especially in light of Obama’s self-professed “vision” of how to move our nation towards energy independance as well as the highly touted efficiency of his administration’s transition…

    Far from wishing that Secretary Chu spout the usual platitudes about “blue ribbon commissions” and “studies”, we would like to think that at least he and the President had spoken of energy policy; at least in broad strokes…

    Oh, and by the way, I’m no liberal arts major nor classicallt trained academic, but in my humble opinion, a scholarly term paper and a blog post are two different things…

    I’m sure that Jeff and Dan could weigh in on this subject with some authority…

    Best Wishes to you on this Friday night…

  135. Sdferr says:

    I just listened to Chris Matthews interview Rick Santelli and describe him as Ebenezer Scrooge. Santelli urgently but calmly protested, that’s not my argument. Some of these people like Matthews really ought to be pegged into the ground one of these days for the lying scum they are.

  136. Jeff G. says:

    but in my humble opinion, a scholarly term paper and a blog post are two different things…

    Out of necessity?

    No, a blog post doesn’t have to make an argument. But one bent on attacking the arguments of others should probably give it a shot — and there is no reason a blog post can’t make a sustained and sourced argument. Hell, hyperlinking is better than footnoting, so in that regard, blog posts, should they wish to, could prove better than term papers.

    None of which was the point, of course. That being that someone trying to make a compelling argument for the failure of the arguments of others would probably do best to offer something of substance, else risk being considered a buffoon.

    Or a hero to people like meya, who find that arguments get in the way of a good old fashioned dictum.

  137. happyfeet says:

    The Obama administration’s mortgage-modification plan offers the largest break to homeowners who “really stretched to buy their house and lied the most about their income,” Amherst Securities Group LP analysts said.*

    He’s so disgusting.

    oh. Also she’s kind of a fascist, Jeff. A couple days ago she was what would be great is if we let the ABA disbar and render unemployable Bush administration lawyers what had the wrong politics. Maybe she just doesn’t think these things through but it’s just not pleasant to come home and read about how great fascism is and how we should just embrace it. The food stamps = stimulus thing is on my last nerve too.

  138. Dan Collins says:

    Another white knuckler down and back on I-89. I’ve never seen a car upside down in a tree before.

    What did I miss?

  139. B Moe says:

    I’ve never seen a car upside down in a tree before.

    I wonder what my ex is doing in Vermont?

  140. Jeff G. says:

    Nothing, Dan. We don’t rate here.

    Go check Pajamas if you want to know what real conservatives are thinking.

  141. Bob Reed says:

    Oooops!

    Sorry Jeff G, I didn’t see your #140 or #141…

    And, PW is a decidedly different blog than just about all the others I’ve visited. All of the writers here do an exceptional job on the posts they create. And yours especially are like a scholarly work; It’s one of the reasons I come here regularly…

    And one of the reasons I hope that you’ll continue to keep writing about the subjects you are passionate about…

    Best Wishes…

  142. Sdferr says:

    Two homemade pizza pies with bacon, sausage, onion and sweetpepper, Dan. Tasty and gone. Strawberry shakes for dessert.

  143. Dan Collins says:

    It was parallel to the road, upside down, in the branches of a tree. I couldn’t see, I guess it would have been the driver’s side, but the lights were out and there was no exhaust, so I guess that’s good. I wouldn’t know whether to call a logger or a tow truck, first.

  144. Mel says:

    Well thor I just looked in a mirror and what a surprise, I do exist.

    I lost my temper a bit with you the other night and for that I apologize. I was in no way seeking to minimize the contributions of the Soviets. It was a group effort in that war.

    I have never sought to glorify my service. I wasn’t talking about myself but my gereration
    You should be very proud of your father and his service. It hurts my heart to hear about wounded men and their troubles later in life. That you would help him speaks highly of you. Any man that has worn the uniform is worthy of our respect.

    Yes I was fishing and reading on this gizmo my nephew gave me. I can even watch tv on it. As for catching a shark, I’m a fisherman. I can exagerate. Its allowed.

    I’m in Punta Gorda Florida now visiting my brother and his wife. I don’t think I’ll be here long as my sister in law and I have never really seen eye to eye. I can say that here as shell never read it. Her computer skills are worse than mine and that ain’t a high bar to get over.

    Thor, you and I will agree on much but I wish you well.

    Take care all. I have to go to dinner with my sister in law now. Booze isn’t the answer to all life’s problems but it sure as heck is the answer to this one.

  145. Sdferr says:

    Hey Bob, back check ACORNholed. I left a couple of extended Davies quotes for you.

  146. Dan Collins says:

    Oh, real conservatives are kind of like reading TV.

  147. router says:

    is it worth arguing with the left anymore?

  148. Sdferr says:

    Your car-tree story reminds me of that St. Patrick’s Day in ’96 I was driving east along on Poplar St in Philly and looked up to see a Ford Bronco 15′ in the air upside-down and headed my way. You really don’t expect to ever see that sort of thing out there in the world, but it does happen now and again.

  149. Jeff G. says:

    It’s the future! Roger’s fedora in hi-def, right on your computer screen!

  150. happyfeet says:

    I don’t agree with the premise. PW rates quite a lot I think. My feeling is it’s a top-notch blog and very finger on the pulse. I depend on it a lot cause I’m disaffected with mainstream purveyors of news and opinion. NPR for example, or anything on broadcast or cable. Also print. And not inconsiderable swaths of the Internet. Yup. Disaffected. That’s me.

  151. Sdferr says:

    It goes both ways I think hf. Not a few of us I’ll bet feel somewhat dependent on you as well, I mean, disaffected or no.

  152. Mel says:

    Oh, and I forgot to say that I read you all just about every day. I don’t comment much as the buttons on this gizmo are tiny. I hunt and peck with a pencil.

  153. Dan Collins says:

    In case you missed it, hf, here’s an awful NPR interview with some AP reporter over the Buffalo beheading. Woman claims that NOW were the first to advance the idea that it was an honor killing.

    Hope it doesn’t have anything to do with that car, but it’s not likely anyway, as this is Vermont.

  154. Velociman says:

    I just ejaculated three fluid ounces of irony I intend to mail James “Magnolia Thunderpussy” Wolcott in a corked pipette. Because he apparently doesn’t recognize it in its written form.

  155. Dan Collins says:

    I’d be careful of the potential paternity issues, Velociman.

  156. Sdferr says:

    That seems kinda unfair, maling Wolcott V-Man. Oh, mailing. Sorry.

  157. Bob Reed says:

    Comment by Jeff G. on 2/20 @ 7:41 pm #

    Go check Pajamas if you want to know what real conservatives are thinking.”

    Those guys are simply mainstream conservatives…

    Guys like you, and some of the other PWers, are real conservatives…

    I could give a rats arse about PJM; and judging from their success neither do a whole lot of other people…

    Sometimes you come across like a latter day Tom Paine…

  158. router says:

    “Woman claims that NOW”

    was she ny now? b/c they to their credit were on this situation.

  159. meya says:

    “Ah, yes. Blog posts aren’t supposed to make arguments.”

    See they do. Just not what you’re thinking. There was definitely an argument made about the merits of velociman’s idea in that post of wolcotts. And it didn’t require much more than to quote a passage. You can’t quite do that with, say, quotes from Michelle Bachmann to discuss the stimulus. You have know she’s lying.

    “Far from wishing that Secretary Chu spout the usual platitudes about “blue ribbon commissions” and “studies”, we would like to think that at least he and the President had spoken of energy policy; at least in broad strokes…”

    And his answer doesn’t say they haven’t. It is politically inartful, of the sort of inartfulness that we find to be honest and therefore better, but from what we know of the guy, he doesn’t seem like the type to be slack or incompetent. Of lots of the folks in the admin, he may be the one that is most governance and least campaigning. Or there’s the OMB guy.

  160. happyfeet says:

    thank you Sdferr. I decided to embrace the disaffection even if it’s not as fun I think. Thanks, Dan. These NPR women are so very very witless. They’re peasant women at heart I think. Quite content to carry water for their village.

  161. Dan Collins says:

    Yeah, router, but to claim that they were the first to characterize it as such? What’s the date on their official statement? Seems likelier that they were responding to some of the criticism, but if I’m wrong, then I’m ready to give them due credit.

  162. Bob Reed says:

    Sdferr,
    I meant to tell you thanks for those quotes the other day. I’m going to have to put that book on the “to read” list for sure!

    Hope your leg is doing well these days…

    Best Wishes…

  163. Dan Collins says:

    meya, Baracky’s promising us that there’s not going to be wastage in that bill he didn’t read, much less write, dead chimp, because of teh oversightiness. Do you buy it?

  164. Sdferr says:

    Heh, I’m nearing the end stage of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Mein fuhrer, I can walk! Kinda looks like that too (without the stiffarm salutes), graduating from the cane to the hobble.

  165. Mikey NTH says:

    Well, heck.

    I was just trying to point out that the press conference didn’t even reach bureaucratic levels of we got nothin’. That in itself is a monumental failure – “You got nothin’ – and you don’t even have the right words down for that!”

    Dan – sounds like a trip I’m glad I didn’t do (now why do I want to go to Toledo tomorrow?). Sorry for the long e-mail – I dropped you – I’ll get back to Shapiro.

    He’s interesting (I’m only a bit in – started today) because he is giving a gazeteer-type spread of what these people were doing and why they behaved as such, with enough detail to reinforce his points.

    (The lack of a Pepys Diary for the time does hurt understanding, for there isn’t an account where you have a man giving the proper responses in public, then in private reporting what he actually thought.)

  166. router says:

    “Yeah, router, but to claim that they were the first to characterize it as such?”

    i only said that the ny now acknowledged the sit while the national now was still inspecting sarah’s uterus.

  167. Spies, Brigands, and Pirates says:

    Stupid Fascist Girl still thinks that Barky’s going to pay her student loans.

    Heh.

    She thinks that there’s gotta be a pony somewhere inside the alp-sized mound of horse shit that they’re calling a “stimulus bill”.

  168. Dan Collins says:

    Yeah, Mikey, but I wasn’t going to open your email till tomorrow. I’m glad it’s long, so don’t apologize, but the advantage is that we have this ample scope for inference, given the way that the plays allude to other plays that are extant, and whose political thrust is generally more obvious than S’s.

  169. Mikey NTH says:

    #168 meya:

    No. That sort of political inartfulness at the cabinet level is not cute. It is down-right scary. This is the big-time and there are a lot of bad guys and gals out there in the world that listen to each word from a US cabinet secretary or their appointed spokesmen, and calculate from that what they think they can get away with.

    Wake. Up.

    This isn’t a game, you can’t re-load and start over.

  170. Bob Reed says:

    Velociman,

    It sounds like your parcel will provide Wolcott an amenable nightcap!

    You know, in accordance with the style that he’s accustomed to…

    Except I get the feeling that his issue forth from, well, a whole different kind of pipette…

    Best Wishes

  171. Dan Collins says:

    I’m sure that Muslim guy just watched all the installments of Saw.

  172. Mikey NTH says:

    #177 Dan:

    It’s a bibliographical list of what I have at home. I have a little grounding of that time.

  173. Sdferr says:

    It’s all about the multiplier, ain’t it SBP? Why hope for 1.7 when even if it’s only .04, it’s still a multiplier! That’s not money down the tubes, that’s money on its way to becoming velocity in the sewer! O!

  174. router says:

    “I’m sure that Muslim guy just watched all the installments of Saw.”

    i just give positive re-enforcement to political parties who do the right thing.

  175. Tman says:

    The scariest part of this whole stimulus bill is twofold:

    1.)By the time the money gets where congress and the president thinks it needs to go, which half of the government disagrees with, we will be out of this recession.

    2.)Every single last budget item in this monstrosity will then become accepted baseline spending.

    Obama and his buddies are going to double the size of the government IN ONE FUCKING MONTH.

    Christ.

  176. Spies, Brigands, and Pirates says:

    It’s all about the multiplier, ain’t it SBP?

    Yep. Done properly, $1 in government spending can destroy several dollars in the private sector economy.

  177. Dan Collins says:

    A politicized professional responsibility review is probably about “wrong politics.”

    But Patrick Leahy would never stoop to such a thing. Never.

  178. B Moe says:

    I think the scariest part is nobody knows where the hell most of it is even going to be spent. It is like a multibillion dollar petty cash fund that will apparently doled out as the administration thinks expedient.

  179. Tman says:

    Also, this comment by Sweet Baby James- “If these blog pundits don’t learn to sink into the soft center of their breaths,” just makes me giggle.

    Or what James, that we might turn in to asshats like you?

  180. Jeff G. says:

    Did meya argue something? Meh. I’m sure it’s been answered elsewhere. Who thinks meya is a hoochie who likes to shake her tits at sailors for folded up dollar bills?

  181. Tman says:

    B Moe,

    nobody knows where the hell most of it is even going to be spent

    Not true. Every partisan pork recipient knows exactly where their money is going, they just don’t give a fuck where the rest of it goes. Even worse, most of them don’t really care. $400 million for mice-studies is going to pay the salary of quite a few people who could give a shit whether or not it helps the economy. They just want to get PAID.

  182. Dan Collins says:

    But meya has a heart as big as a whale, Jeff.

  183. Jeff G. says:

    Heart? Meh. Shake the titties, I say.

  184. Spies, Brigands, and Pirates says:

    Shorter Stupid Fascist Girl: Obama is dreamy. He’s going to come for me some day, I just know it.

    We’ll ride off together on Sparkles the Magenta Unicorn and live happily ever after!

  185. Tman says:

    Are the titties going to be in the term paper? Cause there’s a class I could dig.

  186. router says:

    Dan: you should consider “salt marsh mouse” studies. sanfrangrannan says it is a money maker.

  187. Tman says:

    I knew a hooker once named minnie mazola!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NTozy51AY0

  188. Squid says:

    Obama is dreamy. He’s going to come for^H^H^H on me some day, I just know it.

    FTFY.

  189. Spies, Brigands, and Pirates says:

    Who thinks meya is a hoochie who likes to shake her tits at sailors for folded up dollar bills?

    Hmm… you’d think she’d be in favor of increased military spending, in that case.

    Are the titties going to be in the term paper? Cause there’s a class I could dig.

    I had a friend in undergrad who kept threatening to enroll in a Women’s Studies class.

    His plan was to sit quietly for a few weeks, then raise his hand and say “Excuse me. When do we get to boobs?”

  190. meya says:

    “A politicized professional responsibility review is probably about “wrong politics.”

    But Patrick Leahy would never stoop to such a thing. Never.”

    But Pat Leahy didn’t do the review. The Office of Professional Responsibility at what is probably the largest employer of lawyers in the country did. And really, the thing that hf thinks is fascist? It’s that I want to see the damn thing.

  191. Sdferr says:

    The Market Is Shorting Obama’s ‘Stimulus’ **

    If historic U.S. budget deficits are any indication, the economy is already “stimulated.” The predicted 2009 federal deficit stood at 8.3% of GDP before Obama’s package sent it to about 12%. This is a stunning level of debt, double the previous post WWII high when Reagan’s 1983 budget deficit amounted to 6% of GDP. That time around, the 10.8% unemployment rate, the worst since the Great Depression, was soon reversed.

    Keynesians claim that the Reagan boom was an outcome of just this deficit strategy; for sake of argument, let us assume the Keynesian position. Reagan’s budget deficit, half the size of Obama’s as a fraction of GDP, was able to pull the economy out of an unemployment trough deeper than the 7.6% hole we’re in today.

    h/t Cafe Hayek

  192. Spies, Brigands, and Pirates says:

    Speaking of Obama “studies”, I see via Ace that Gitmo no longer violates the Geneva Conventions.

    Another O! promise bites the bus.

  193. happyfeet says:

    A “professional responsibility review” is now “wrong politics.”

  194. Spies, Brigands, and Pirates says:

    But meya has a heart as big as a whale

    Wasn’t that a Linda Ronstadt album? Heart like a Whale?

    Of course Linda has a veritable cornucopia of morphological commonalities with the Cetacean-American community nowadays.

  195. Dan Collins says:

    I don’t think that Attorney General Moonbeam would be harpooning her, these days.

  196. happyfeet says:

    Two sources briefed on a draft of the report said there is a strong likelihood that its findings will be shared with state legal disciplinary authorities, who could launch their own investigation into whether the lawyers who prepared the memos abided by their professional responsibilities.

    meya, that’s what you’re supporting. It’s not consonant with democratic values. It’s fascist. This is the change what your dipshit George Soros lackey president has brought. He’s a very very sick fuck.

  197. Dan Collins says:

    They took away Billy Clinton’s law license for lying to a Grand Jury, and slapped Sandy Berger’s wrist. Good thing Scooter Libby went to jail.

  198. Jeff G. says:

    Meh. Jail schmail. TITTAYS! NOW!

  199. router says:

    Good thing Scooter Libby went to jail.

    good to see a government official checking the conditions /sarc off

  200. meya says:

    “I had a friend in undergrad who kept threatening to enroll in a Women’s Studies class.

    His plan was to sit quietly for a few weeks, then raise his hand and say “Excuse me. When do we get to boobs?””

    what a coup.

    “meya, that’s what you’re supporting. It’s not consonant with democratic values. It’s fascist. ”

    If state legal authorities take a faulty report and act wrongly on it, that makes them fascist. Not me. I support us seeing the damn thing so we can figure out if it is politicized or not.
    What a coup.

  201. meya says:

    ” Good thing Scooter Libby went to jail.”

    Actually, he didn’t.

  202. happyfeet says:

    so we can figure out if it is politicized or not

    Before Baracky and all I really did have this idea that fascists were terribly clever.

  203. Dan Collins says:

    No, you’re right. But he’s only sentenced to 2 1/2 years.

  204. Timstigator says:

    Carin: don’t know if anyone mentioned it yet. Wolcott is “Ellsworth Toohey” from Atlas Shrugged. Perfect.

  205. Dan Collins says:

    A little commutation here, a little commutation there. He can get on with his life.

    Just like any other FALN terrorist.

  206. Darleen says:

    Dan

    I’m glad you got home alright. Last Tuesday a colleague of mine started out for work and never got there.

    I’m going to her funeral tomorrow.

  207. Sdferr says:

    I’m still steamed at GW Bush for leaving Libby hanging the way he did. I think Bush was just being lazy preoccupied with other things and found that agreeing with the jury was the easy way to deal with it all. I’d give him a bona fide putz rating on this one.

  208. Darleen says:

    Tim

    Toohey is from “The Fountainhead.”

  209. Dan Collins says:

    Darleen, I’m sorry.

  210. Dan Collins says:

    What’s Roland Burris going to get for lying to a couple of august assemblies, I wonder. More than a baseball player? Less?

  211. Darleen says:

    thanks, Dan…

    I think I’ve been making a nuisance of myself this week warning everyone to DRIVE SAFE and taking care to call/text my girls that mom is thinking of them.

  212. Dan Collins says:

    Oh, but we expect more honesty from baseball players than from public servants, because of teh childrens.

  213. Timstigator says:

    Darleen: thank you, I stand corrected. Here’s a question: who was the “Ellsworth Toohey” in Atlas Shrugged, if any?

  214. Dan Collins says:

    I love those “Drive Gently” signs in Kentucky, even though they’re teh racist, Darleen.

  215. Darleen says:

    I doubt much is going to happen to Burris.

  216. Sdferr says:

    What, they’re going to let Ozzie Guillen pinch hit for him in the Senate? Damn, I hope Ozzie’ll pull Konerko off the bench and tell him to swing, batter, swing.

  217. happyfeet says:

    I don’t agree I don’t think. About Scooter. It’s very very difficult to pardon someone convicted of what Mr. Libby was convicted of. Even as ridiculous as it was. I’ve no doubt Scooter will eventually be pardoned, but it really wasn’t Bush’s place to do it. Not with Baracky’s media in place to filter it. Not with dirty lying socialists tasting power for the first time. We’ll be glad of this one day I think.

  218. Timstigator says:

    And sorry about your colleague. I’ve got a little too much of that in my life right now.

  219. happyfeet says:

    At the very least, something somewhat close to your average news-watching guy needs to be ably to articulate the rationale for the pardon, and that’s impossible given the co-optation of news by the Democrat dirty socialist party I think. Justice is a perception. An important one.

  220. Dan Collins says:

    Aw, geez, Timstigator, I’m sorry to hear it.

  221. Darleen says:

    Tim

    Well, on one hand I think Lillian Reardon sure captures the essence of Toohey even as she wasn’t a celeb writer. Or maybe Dr. Simon Pritchett.

    Fountainhead operated with a fairly small cast, Atlas spread elements of Toohey across several characters

  222. Darleen says:

    Tim

    I’m sorry to hear of your sorrows. My thoughts and prayers.

  223. Spies, Brigands, and Pirates says:

    Here’s a question: who was the “Ellsworth Toohey” in Atlas Shrugged, if any?

    Balph Eubank?

  224. Sdferr says:

    Something really hates this post. Third try in third form:

    Jennifer, you’re close to the answer, but not completely there. This isn’t a case of bureaucrats or legislators being unable to do this because they lack skills, authority, resources. It’s a case of a a command economy being a *structural impossibility*.

    The decisions made by a central authority will never have the information available to them that lower-level economic actors have, nor will the effects of bad decision-making ever have as immediate or lasting impact as they do on the economic actors who make them– Washington is, by definition, insulated from these choices (either from the rational incentives to make them– looking after your neighbor to be a good neighbor is a defensible emotional or political decision, not a rational economic one– or the consequences of screwing them up, i.e. sure, legislators may lose their elections, but that’s a very, very diffuse theoretical consequence).

    Interestingly, this is why market economics and small-r republican federalism have such a long & happy history together: both are mechanisms for increasing local autonomy AND local responsibility for decision making in order to provide not just the most effective decisions, but also the fairest. Washington can’t efficiently make my grocery store shopping decisions anymore than they can efficiently staff my county school board or paint my road signs.

    That’s Dave at Contentions today. Link to follow.

  225. meya says:

    “What’s Roland Burris going to get for lying to a couple of august assemblies, I wonder. More than a baseball player? Less?”

    I wonder how bitter Harry Reid is now..

  226. Sdferr says:

    Oh, well, nevermind. It doesn’t like the link I guess.

  227. Sdferr says:

    Well, hf, my particular perception of what was done to Libby throughout was of an injustice. He was shafted, plain and simple.

  228. Darleen says:

    I wonder how bitter Harry Reid is now

    God lord, any more and that permanent pucker he calls a face will be a black hole.

  229. happyfeet says:

    when that happens I usually either tinyurl it or spike it with an asterisk before the .com part so people can copy and paste and then just drop the asterisk

  230. happyfeet says:

    He was shafted, plain and simple.

    Very much so he was.

  231. happyfeet says:

    oh. the second line was supposed to look like this one

  232. Techie says:

    I’m missing something, aren’t I?

  233. Sdferr says:

    Thanks hf. Well see if this one works.

    http://tinyurl.com/cuxqkk

  234. Dan Collins says:

    hf, thanks for the Matt & Kim video. It’s nice. She’s sort of a more than a mouthful is girl. Here’s a song with the same title that I like even better. It’s worth going through the commercial for. Expand it when it starts.

  235. cynn says:

    Whoa, let’s change the subject! Let’s elide the fact that nobody offered specific oppo points for this bailout! Let’s wail on Wolcott! Let’s Hop on Pop!

  236. Dan Collins says:

    I’m sorry, cynn, but can you enunciate what you think the subject is? For starters?

  237. Darleen says:

    uh cynn

    just because you didn’t see “oppo points” to the pork-o-rama doesn’t mean they didn’t/don’t exist.

  238. Pablo says:

    You know what’s really fucked up? This is really fucked up.

    Ted Rall, president of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists…

    I’m not sure I want to live in this America.

  239. Dan Collins says:

    Then, tell me what you think is elision about arguing that there’s not a lot of stimulus in the so-called Stimulus Bill, and that its predominant feature is to grow the size of government, which really produces very little. Then go to Wolly’s piece, and tell us how this is a substantive critique. THEN and only then, come back and harangue.

  240. Pablo says:

    I wish I could give a shit about what’s on Walcott’s poor excuse for a mind. Sadly, I’m far too bored.

  241. geoffb says:

    Trying Sdferr’s link.

    That sounds to me like something I remember from Discordianism.

    At every level of an organization information is lost as it flows upward because every one try’s to tell their superior not the truth but the part of it that will please them and advance your own position.

    The top levels operate in a dream world that doesn’t exist and make decisions based on fantasy not reality.

  242. JD says:

    Pablo – That is truly disgusting. Rall is a twatwaffle douchenozzle of the highest order.

    cynn – Only by ignoring all of the substantive critiques of the “stimulus” could one say that there was no specific opposition to the “stimulus”.

    Step away from the boxed wine …

  243. Dan Collins says:

    I don’t know, Pablo. I think that his primary failing is that he’s lazy. I don’t think he’s dumb.

  244. cynn says:

    Yes I can, Dan. Jeff’s germinal issue appears to be the point that
    Wolcott doesn’t address the central matter of this abhorrent bailout plan, but rather broadly demonizes the opponents as prehistoric single-cells. Fair enough. Then, the subsequent thread begins with a fusillade of fury at the left, and then ends with cutesy something about recipes or something. Pot meet kettle, snooze meet lose. And we are all so very tired right now.

  245. Dan Collins says:

    If you’re criticizing us, fair enough, cynn. I don’t like this business of “you’re retarded,” “NO, YOU’RE RETARDED,” either. But look again at the thread, because there are some substantive comments here, as well.

    Just be certain that you’re not doing the same thing, is all.

  246. happyfeet says:

    I like that too, Dan. I’ll see if I can find some of them

  247. Dan Collins says:

    Also, I saw a fucking car, upside-down, in a tree!

  248. Jeff G. says:

    Typically, cynn has her cause and effect inverted.

  249. Darleen says:

    Rall, who is liberal jihadist-loving-left-cult-moron, said it’s harder to take shots at Obama because he’s smart, charming and handsome

    FTFY

    and the last bit? Wonder how many pairs of Monica kneepads Rall has worn out?

  250. Big D says:

    “I try to be civil always, regardless of and ad hominem; To always conduct myself as both an officer and a gentleman was, ahem, instilled into my rock hard head many years ago by some extremely able, and imposing, CPO’s. These principles along with my religious beliefs are axioms I try to live by daily…”

    “I lost my temper a bit with you the other night and for that I apologize. I was in no way seeking to minimize the contributions of the Soviets. It was a group effort in that war.”

    Bob and Mel,
    You are both better men than me. I can’t forgive the slight and my statement stands to thor. BTW thor, big man to challenge an 85 year old man to “Meet” you. I would be more than happy to be his stand in for that. Jackass.

    “I have to go to dinner with my sister in law now. Booze isn’t the answer to all life’s problems but it sure as heck is the answer to this one.”

    That’s my mother you’re talking about. I agree, booze works.

  251. Patrick says:

    you use your keyboard prettier ‘n a $20 whore. meh, tongue, I mean.

  252. cynn says:

    What do you mean by that, Jeff? I simply see as in your face rejoinder here. I’m not afraid to disagree with James Wolcott; he’s an imaginary effete, like most of the other lefty punching bags.

  253. Dan Collins says:

    He’s saying, cynn, that there’s no there there in Wolcott to rejoin. So if you think that people aren’t being substantive in their rejoinders, maybe it’s because Wolly didn’t say anything.

  254. thor says:

    Comment by Spies, Brigands, and Pirates on 2/20 @ 8:36 pm #

    Who thinks meya is a hoochie who likes to shake her tits at sailors for folded up dollar bills?

    Sarah Palin flashes her Momma Grizzly tits at Russian sailors for roubles. She can also pick up an ice cube the hard way off a polar bear throw rug.

  255. Jeffersonian says:

    I see potential stimulus if the $50 mil sent to the NEA buys a Koran in a jar of piss.

  256. Dan Collins says:

    Sure, thor. She can see them from her window. On SNL.

  257. Rusty says:

    Mayas gonna show us her tits?

  258. Dan Collins says:

    At any rate, she’s a much less decent person than any of us here. And that must be hard, for a politician.

  259. JD says:

    And ocelot ignored all of the substantive criticism of the “stimulus” package in order to write that there wasn’t any other ideas out there. He is a lying douchebag, petting his ocelot, while puffing on his pipe, in his velvet bathrobe and Bugs Bunny slippers, sipping white zinfandel, through a straw.

  260. dicentra says:

    But meya has a heart as big as a whale, Jeff.

    Which reminds me of my favorite Laurie/Fry version scene, wherein Bertie enjoins Jeeves to join him in a chorus of Minnie the Moocher.

    Played to the hilt, of course.

  261. Dan Collins says:

    In ocelot, that’s how conditions are.

  262. Jeffersonian says:

    I love that show. I gotta break out my DVD set and watch it again.

  263. geoffb says:

    I thought the thread ending with recipes was the second Travis the chimp one. Must have missed one somewhere.

  264. JD says:

    I am prejudiced against ocelot petters. Just sayin’

  265. Pablo says:

    I don’t know, Pablo. I think that his primary failing is that he’s lazy. I don’t think he’s dumb.

    Which tool are you referencing, Dan?

  266. Dan Collins says:

    If it were Hitch, I’d say screwdriver. In this case, rusty nail.

  267. JD says:

    Rusty nail? I would say limp noodle.

  268. cynn says:

    So you will dismiss opposition by dismissing it. Leaves no lines.

  269. Pablo says:

    If it’s Walcott, I don’t see where it matters. Whether it’s because he’s lazy or dumb, his writing is for shit.

    In the end, it’s all about the product. If he’s not dumb, he ought to put his intellect on display, instead of pretending to such a thing. Rall, unmistakably an idiot, at least manages to evoke something. Wolcott inspires nothing but a desire to read something, anything, else.

  270. JD says:

    No, cynn. We will dismiss opposition when they intentionally and willfully lie by dismissing any opposition as simply not existing. If you do not acknowledge it, it does not exist, right?

  271. Dan Collins says:

    Oh, our spurs go jingle jangle jingle
    As we go ridin’ merrily along
    And they say, hey do you know Chris Tingle?
    And we laugh, cuz that’s very badly wrong.

    OUTLAWS!!!

  272. Pablo says:

    So you will dismiss opposition by dismissing it.

    That’s the only thing that works, cynn, aside from nuking it from orbit.

  273. Dan Collins says:

    Please, cynn, I ask in all sincerity, for a change: what is the content that we’re eliding? Please tell me. I am flummoxed. Poleaxed. Gobsmitten in my inability to see this.

  274. cynn says:

    Pavlov: It’s not Walcott; she wrote the damn book about all those doomed sisters.

  275. Dan Collins says:

    BTW, I’m probably just going ice fishing tomorrow. Just me and a 12-pack and some perch.

  276. JD says:

    It is not gobsmitten, it it gobsmacked, you stoopid mouth-breathing knuckle-dragging misogynistic xenophobic jingoistic homophobe.

  277. Spies, Brigands, and Pirates says:

    And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
    His jowly face, his thinning hair!
    His tasteless and unnatural vice,
    Shows his screeds are best unread,
    For he on SnackyCakes hath fed,
    And drunk the booze of bargain price.

  278. Dan Collins says:

    My knuckles hurt.

  279. Dan Collins says:

    I like that, SBP.

  280. Pablo says:

    That’s Alcott, cynn. And I’d rather read her again than Sweet Flabby James.

  281. Pablo says:

    Hell, I’d rather read the Windows EULA than Sweet Flabby James.

  282. cynn says:

    Dan: If you are not gobsmitten, astounded, fleabitten, or otherwise caught unaware by what is wrong with you, I am perplexed.

  283. Dan Collins says:

    I can’t say in truth that I’d rather read the entirety of Porkulus’s Progress.

  284. JD says:

    cynn – please outline for us, with specifics, what is wrong with Dan.

  285. Dan Collins says:

    cynn, the greatest thing about blogging is that people are continually telling one what is wrong with them. Generally, it is that they differ from the analyst.

  286. Dan Collins says:

    But, yes . . . you are perplexed.

  287. Dan Collins says:

    BTW, this is what is generally meant by a failure with reference to “diversity.” Because one’s critics are always enormously broad-minded.

  288. Dan Collins says:

    Especially in comparison to one.

  289. cynn says:

    I think of myself of an Anne Sullivan to a Helen Keller society. I fuckin’ make them communicate.

  290. Dan Collins says:

    In other words, speaking as one, which I’ve so far not been informed that I’m not allowed to do, I think I’ve made a satisfactory show of my knowledge that I’m imperfect. This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine. If you’d like to get particular, please ask me specifically what I ought to cop to, and I’ll cheerfully do so, if I am not so benighted as to believe it’s untrue.

  291. cynn says:

    Ambrose Bierce, right?

  292. Dan Collins says:

    Good guess. Shakespeare.

  293. thor says:


    Comment by Mel on 2/20 @ 7:43 pm #

    Well thor I just looked in a mirror and what a surprise, I do exist.

    I lost my temper a bit with you the other night and for that I apologize. I was in no way seeking to minimize the contributions of the Soviets. It was a group effort in that war.

    I have never sought to glorify my service. I wasn’t talking about myself but my gereration
    You should be very proud of your father and his service. It hurts my heart to hear about wounded men and their troubles later in life. That you would help him speaks highly of you. Any man that has worn the uniform is worthy of our respect.

    Yes I was fishing and reading on this gizmo my nephew gave me. I can even watch tv on it. As for catching a shark, I’m a fisherman. I can exagerate. Its allowed.

    I’m in Punta Gorda Florida now visiting my brother and his wife. I don’t think I’ll be here long as my sister in law and I have never really seen eye to eye. I can say that here as shell never read it. Her computer skills are worse than mine and that ain’t a high bar to get over.

    Thor, you and I will agree on much but I wish you well.

    Take care all. I have to go to dinner with my sister in law now. Booze isn’t the answer to all life’s problems but it sure as heck is the answer to this one.

    Well if you’re going to be all nice and apologetic (a PW rarity), I guess I’ll do the same. Sorry!

    Of course I know of the savage fighting in the Pacific and this country if forever in debt to soldiers who fought and died.

    I also know the depth to which the fuckin’ human skunks here will occasionally sink to to try and elevate their shitty worthless consumed by r-wingeredness selves. I’ve lived in Russia, know Russians, know of the mass death of their battlefields and will never avoid speaking the truth of the reality that they went through to win WWII. We owe them more than our piss in their eye. Our country, fortunately, wasn’t turned into a huge kill zone and millions of our men who survived didn’t end up one-eyed fuckin’ gimps from frostbite and shrapnel.

    Back in ’99 old Russian men would stand in the back of subways cars wearing their uniforms and medals. They didn’t hold their hands out. They didn’t say a word. Everyone knew why they were there. I handed ’em a rouble note every ride. No fishing in their twilight years, they were too busy begging because their state pension’s of $30-a-month wasn’t enough to feed them and their wives. And they weren’t too proud to buy and eat cat food or to wipe their asses until the end with pages from the newspaper either. They knew worse times, that’s about all you can say about that. Best-ever stories of pain and misery, though, and they’d even laugh while re-telling ’em over vodka.

    And we laugh at ’em from the comfort of a sanctimonious vantage while spewing self-serving ego-fuelled fables discounting their reality. “Fuck them, who cares” is no honest answer. They deserve better than the triple-stacked shit sandwich fate dealt them. They emptied Hitler’s army of SS by eating lead and then had/have to listen to Western propagandists make ’em out to be worth less than animals in deed and flesh.

    Shame on America. Shame on the many people and powers that were the cause for their penniless bloody misery for which they never had any control over. Good people done horribly wrong. Enough said.

  294. Jeff G. says:

    So if you think that people aren’t being substantive in their rejoinders, maybe it’s because Wolly didn’t say anything.

    Not only that, but he didn’t say anything first.

    In other words, I answered his piece — my answer being to illustrate his lack of substance. Compare that to the bit from me he quotes, which consisted of a set of observations of mine that I turned into indictments based on what I believe to be their motivations.

  295. Dan Collins says:

    Yes, thor, but where’s the criticism of the country that had them begging?

  296. JD says:

    Shame on thor

  297. Spies, Brigands, and Pirates says:

    Maybe cynn could put Ernest and Julio’s Guide for the Perplexed on her Amazon Wish List.

  298. Dan Collins says:

    I think it’s fair to say that you engaged him in a way he didn’t bother to engage you, Jeff. But, as you see, that becomes a “straw man” argument unto itself, when a leftie looks at it. Because of teh detail.

  299. cynn says:

    I reject your shame on America shit, thor, because pride is the tattered slip I got covering my thighs. I like you for your sheer assholian badditude. And I love this Mel gentleman for his service and the hope he gives me. God knows I need it.

  300. Dan Collins says:

    There you go. A meeting of the thighs.

    This is what blogging’s all about. Right?

  301. thor says:

    #

    Comment by Dan Collins on 2/20 @ 10:57 pm #

    Yes, thor, but where’s the criticism of the country that had them begging?

    Are you talking about the country that collapsed some twenty years ago? You do know that they finally had a bloodless revolution via popular vote and chose capitalism and democracy, no?

    After that Bush Sr. and Clinton gave their fledgling democracy a nice taste of the back hand of American generosity by loaning them money to buy our frozen chicken legs at inflated prices. We’ve already talked about that repulsive act of foreign relations.

    Sorry, we are perfect people in every way and our stock market isn’t in shambles and our manufacturing sector hasn’t disappeared and we don’t shop at filthy WalMarts. Good is all we are.

  302. Mark Poling says:

    meya: wolcott being a sophomoric prick=good.
    meya: jeff not playing nice with me=bad.

    meya’s realy at the bottom of the slickey-slide ladder, isn’t she?

  303. Dan Collins says:

    Really, thor? They, like everyone else, were merely victims of Amerikkkan imperialism?

  304. cynn says:

    Spies: since you’re so interested in Gallo thigh-action, you go first. We always knew, by the way.

  305. Spies, Brigands, and Pirates says:

    cynn, you voted for His Holiness.

    Own it.

  306. thor says:

    A hopey-changey outburst from cynn! Oh my eyes! Darkness! Blinded! Is this my keyboard?

    When you’re done lecturing ’em proper on the evils of Communism and the glory of capitalism maybe listen to their version of what went down, Dan. The mention of Stalin’s name in some Russian households will result in your being held by your feet from the balcony, just so you know, since many there actually have real reasons, not merely theoretical cliches, to curse Uncle Joe. And they get the petty capitalism shit, trust me, buy-low-sell-high isn’t that difficult a econ-theory.

  307. Odin says:

    Maybe it’s just the perspective offered from Bifrost, but I’ve always found it hard to make out those noble Soviet vets against the backdrop of Katyn Forest. It’s as if there’s some sort of Molotov-Ribbentrop screen blocking my view or something. Things kind of get obscured when I look from the angle of the Baltic region too.

  308. Odin says:

    From my perspective, son, those nice Soviet vets were positioned, hands on hips, behind a lot of other folks in a variety of places – Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, not to mention East Berlin….perhaps you’re looking at them from a kneeling position? Which reminds me – is there anything you’d like to tell Frigg and me? We’ll be supportive, I promise.

  309. Jeff G. says:

    Thor —

    If this place is filled with such worthless losers, why are you here? And truthfully? — the Soviet romanticism you try to disguise in gritty anecdotal realism is not cutting it. I’ve seen Gorky Park. The tropes are all familiar to me.

  310. thor says:

    Stay bent, Odin, your hot tears for those Romanian invaders deserves another hip check.

  311. Jeff G. says:

    Your tears are all sanctimony, Odin. Only thor’s concern for the communists — who after all, are just people — is real.

    He’s lived there! He’s tasted the authenticity!

    Incidentally, I’ve lived in Italy. So don’t go criticizing the Medicis or I’m liable to go POSTAL on your ass.

  312. Jeff G. says:

    Gonna go watch Falcon and the Snowman now. Just for thematic balance.

  313. Rick Smith says:

    No offense Jeff, but I too have spent a lot of time in Italy and the Borgias were the real deal, the Medicis were kinda teh artsy fartsy types IIRC.

  314. Odin says:

    When all you’ve got is Mjolnir, every problem seems like…..

    Naw, not gonna do it. Son, just accept the truth that everyone already knows about you – repeat with me: You’re here! You’re Aesir! Get used to it!

  315. dicentra says:

    The Falcon and the Snowman has an awesome soundtrack by Pat Metheny, but there’s little else to recommend it, except that there’s a real falcon in it sometimes.

    Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton. Penn plays a douchebag.

  316. dicentra says:

    And I’m sitting here gobsmacked trying to figure out why y’all keep reading thor’s spew, let alone answering it.

    It’s this, isn’t it? You’re all that guy (she said, having no room to talk).

  317. dicentra says:

    and no closing tags, either

  318. Rick Smith says:

    Odin, can’t tell you what a thrill it is for me to see you posting here. My religious sect, the Viking Orthodox branch of the Scandanavian Reformists, doesn’t really worship you, but we recognize you as a semi-prophet. Matter of fact we don’t really worship anything and only have a few tenets: You have to go out every Sunday and look for the sun, and you never, ever, turn down a free drink. I know this does not make ours a serious religion per se, but it seems to work for most of us.

  319. geoffb says:

    Penn plays a douchebag

    That isn’t acting.

    Hutton however I liked in the Nero Wolfe series.

  320. Odin says:

    Semi-prophet? Dude, c’mon, I mean, Yggdrasil. I paid my dues, y’know? Definitely dig your rites and doctrine, though.

  321. Rick Smith says:

    Odin, will pass along your comments to our Committee on Doctrine Review. They only caucus every ten years or so and I don’t know their current next scheduled meeting, but I’ll make my best effort. I have to tell you though that the current Committee Chair is Loki and we are all starting to feel a little put off by his narcisstic attitude towards the obvious purity of our beliefs. I am on the committee, however, and will put a good word in for you if the opportunity presents itself.

  322. Rick Smith says:

    As far as your propensity to invoke this Yggdrasil episode, I should tell you church lore credits you with a much sought after substance that makes LSD look like aspirin, but that kinda belittles an otherwise incredible story, albeit fairly confusing given the language differences. After all most followers of our religion are not Norse or even Scandavian, but simple folk that found their belief in a simpler quest for truth and free beer. The modern day founder of our church, whose identity I am not allowed to divulge, has told me personally and in confidence that the day is coming when non-believers will rue the day that our religion was mocked and belittled. He was extremely drunk when he told me this and had misplaced his spear and helmet with horns, but that has happened to all of us hasn’t it. Not ours to judge. Anyway this was on the night that he excommunicated thor for public masturbation so he was on a roll.

  323. Odin says:

    Hey, a fair hearing is all I ask. Drop me a rune with the results.

  324. Odin says:

    Time to feed Sleipnir, but before I go I feel I should point out that the whole quest for truth and free beer thing is – hey, it’s a noble idea, but the two often aren’t constant companions, dig? Still, SkÃ¥l!

  325. Rick Smith says:

    Free beer and the quest for truth not a constant thing? You have obviously been caught up in a cabal of Swedes or Democrats, hard to tell the difference today, might even be an offshoot group of South Carolina Rhinos. But, never fear, we recognize a cry for help no matter how subtle. I will personally call for an immediate secret meeting of the Committee on Doctrine Review to discuss the impact of your comments. Be forewarned that it is difficult to seat a quorum with this committee, especially lately with all the doom and gloom going on. Most committee members are still trying to work out storage requirements for food, ammo, beer, and other neccessities. We had a perfectly adaquate newsletter to advise everybody, but as usual thor fucked it up with his constant ravings about the positive benefits of Vodka. This in an environment of beer drinkers. Go figure.

  326. thor says:

    #

    Comment by Jeff G. on 2/21 @ 12:23 am #

    Thor –

    If this place is filled with such worthless losers, why are you here? And truthfully? — the Soviet romanticism you try to disguise in gritty anecdotal realism is not cutting it. I’ve seen Gorky Park. The tropes are all familiar to me.

    Why am I here? That’s a line of questioning best reserved and directed toward single women who wear really tight pants down at the pool hall, don’t’cha think?

    But I also think you know exactly why I’m here, Mister. I secretly want you to succeed. I want you to bring down Barack Obama and help plop Sarah Palin’s curvy ass into the throne of the White House. That’s right. One more fiercely ignorant rethuglidum President should just about do it according to my calculations.

    Once our currency finally collapses I plan on purchasing the Smoky Mountains portion of Tennessee and employing a private army of hayseeds to help me run my brothels and moonshine shacks that’ll all be operating next to my chain of indoor one-mile mule-racing tracks. Once Mulcar overtakes Nascar in popularity I’ll be sittin’ in the cat bird seat financially. The math is all there, Outlaw.

  327. B Moe says:

    Most people here can easily distinguish between
    1) the former Soviet Union government
    2) the Russian people and culture
    3) thor

    That you seem to consider and insult or disagreement with one to be all encompassing is a reflection on your own ego and dishonesty, nothing els.

    The Russians made a hell of a goal line stand, which almost certainly made our offensive assault easier. The Allies won the war.

    Why am I here? That’s a line of questioning best reserved and directed toward single women who wear really tight pants down at the pool hall, don’t’cha think?

    Considering what those women are usually looking for, your fascination with Larry Craig becomes even more enlightening.

  328. donald says:

    I think Jeff just called Wolcott a fag, pussy, pouffe boy. But I don’t get irony, so you know…

  329. happyfeet says:

    If you have questions about irony you should just ask. Nobody’s gonna laugh at you.

  330. happyfeet says:

    because pride is the tattered slip I got covering my thighs

    I like how this day is starting.

  331. B Moe says:

    Apologies for all the typos in 342.
    Nead mor Coffy.

  332. JHoward says:

    Jeff, perhaps linking thor’s self-encrusted sermons on Russia — or are they, in a help-me-please kinda way, really on the full-throttle imbalance that orbits his defective grey matter like reviled, third world-destroying NASCAR racers; I can’t tell — in the site’s sidebar with other classic themes might placate the little sanctimonious cartooning weasel.

    I mean if the sudden, self evidence of the Only Meme That Matters Even If It’s Projected&tm; doesn’t knock the planet’s redstaters for utter reform before their morning coffee out hosing out septic tanks, then the ample evidence of the ravages of syphilis will. Either way, surely some good’s bound to come from it, whether comedic or literal.

    Cool thing is, he’ll never know the difference, you’ll be relieved of his awful, interminable white man’s burden — and us the eternal Infernoesque ravages of paying it for him — and the page views continue apace.

  333. Carin says:

    Here’s a question: who was the “Ellsworth Toohey” in Atlas Shrugged, if any?

    Balph Eubank?

    That’s what I was thinking. Wolcott is Balph. Can we can call him “Balph Wolcott” from now on?

  334. thor says:

    Italo Calvino, God rest his soul, was actually Italian. And I think we all know what that means. Jeff could be a post-modernist Commie, or worse!

    What the hell else could he have been doing in the land of arched entry ways and tile floors except reading and re-reading Italo. The man almost relishes deleting me, torturing my words. Badges, political art, lengthy forms adorned with official looking raised seals, I’m willing to wait for more evidence but I think I might on to something; Jeff as covert Red.

    I’ll make him talk.

  335. JHoward says:

    If you just say it all louder, thor, the whole world will hear you. And shall be saved.

    Think larger man, think larger. Oh, sorry.

  336. happyfeet says:

    You lost me with the Jeff postmodern commie thing. That’s very high concept at this hour I think.

  337. Rusty says:

    #324
    Russia. Now making capitalism depressing! Must be something in the vodka.

  338. N. O'Brain says:

    “Shame on America.”

    Fuck you thor.

    Eat shit and die.

  339. geoffb says:

    It is more of a gangster-capitalism. The Chinese are closer to actual free enterprise than the Russians at this point. Eastern Europe did better but by joining the EU they are now being led back under the yoke of the intellectual elite.

  340. geoffb says:

    “The Revenge of the Nomenklatura” Now playing in your own country everywhere.

  341. Bob Reed says:

    Shame on the many people and powers that were the cause for their penniless bloody misery for which they never had any control over.”

    thor,
    The story you relate about the suffering of the old veterans is heart wrenching indeed. I hate to think of brave men who put it all on the line reduced to eating cat food as well as suffering other privations and indignities. God bless them, keep them, and help them all…

    But I believe you’re wrong to say shame on America; as if we collectively caused this injustice. It’s more likely due to the disastrous economic policies that their own government implemented over the many years that followed, which led to their relative poverty. And, while the economic collapse of the former Soviet Union accompanied it’s political collapse, and the end of the Cold War as it were, is it really the Americans fault? Are we to apologize for looking after our own defense? Are we responsible for the abuses perpetratedd by the Soviet leaders?

    With all due respect I don’t think so…

    До свидания, наилучшие пожелания, не будет одиноко

  342. N. O'Brain says:

    Comment by Bob Reed on 2/21 @ 9:20 am #

    The closest whore has ever come to Russia is a bottle of Valu-Rite vodka.

  343. Mossberg500 says:

    Bob, fucking russian whores is the only true way to educate yourself regarding the former soviet union.

  344. happyfeet says:

    You used to could adopt kids but I think that’s really hard if not impossible now.

  345. happyfeet says:

    A lot of the kids were fixer-uppers anyway cause the orphanages over there are really understaffed. Like the little babies would only get any attention twice a day for feeding and once a day for changing. If they didn’t eat during their feeding time, if they were crying or whatever, then they just got skipped.

  346. Jeff G. says:

    The market, per thor, is really reacting to Republican perfidy. It’s all residue of Bushism. Tax cuts? Results in penniless Russian vets stoically stalking the rears of public transportation vehicles. Imagine where the Dow would be had Obama NOT stepped in to heal it with his Godly Hand!

    — Oh. And Bologna is Umberto Eco’s playground. Calvino is just a name American grad students drop when they got nothin’ else.

  347. N. O'Brain says:

    I’ve never realy liked bologna. And the cheeese thing, ewwwww…..

  348. Silver Whistle says:

    Calvino is just a name American grad students drop when they got nothin’ else.

    Especially if they’ve never read any military histories of WWII.

  349. Dan Collins says:

    Well, c’mon you outlaws and please heed the call
    Those RINOs in Congress do nothin’ at all
    They sold out their souls and they pawned off their balls
    Their masquerade mojo has faded
    Post-partisan just means stand back to the wall
    For the times, they are a-changin’

  350. Sdferr says:

    Is the establishment going to start calling itself the Inlaws soon, ya think? I can hope, can’t I?

  351. Jeff G. says:

    O’s in the White House
    Bangin’ on a Soul Spouse
    Arlen stole the moment
    fucking up the government

  352. Bob Reed says:

    Yeah, that market is really reacting to Obama’s ascension really well…

    In June, when the one! secured the nomination the Dow was around 12000…

    On September 20, it was around 11000…

    The day after election day it was 9200…

    Yesterday, it closed at 7365…

    That’s change all right…

    Yep, it’s all Boooooooosh!s fault…

    It’s Booooooooosh!s fault that neither Obama nor Geitner the wunderkind have a plan; outside of mortgaging our future…

  353. Darleen says:

    Once our currency finally collapses I plan on purchasing the Smoky Mountains portion of Tennessee and employing a private army

    You know, my 14 y/o stepson has had a fun running schtick he carries on with his dad for the last few years … stepson talks about “when I grow up and become Supreme Ruler of the world I will give you a country of your choice” and they dicker over which one…

    it’s creepy when an ostensible adult takes itself as seriously as Walthor Mitty.

  354. Spies, Brigands, and Pirates says:

    Moron with a trust fund
    Blows O!, gets shunned
    Voted in the Fascist Bund
    He won’t get a refund

  355. happyfeet says:

    So when you need a little stimulus
    And it’s swiss cake rolls what you miss
    I’ll give you food stamps as a way of life
    Cuz it mah house
    It mah house

  356. Revisionist Punk says:

    “The Russians made a hell of a goal line stand, which almost certainly made our offensive assault easier. The Allies won the war”

    This passes for history around here? R U seperating USSR from the Allies ? If so, the Allies won the war in the Pacific, but were hardly needed in Europe. Stalin was going to Berlin with or without Normandy or Italy or Africa. Our offensvie assault made it easier for them, not the other way around. Do you have any idea of what went on between 1942 and 1945 after the “goal line stand” ? Stalingrad. Kursk. Uranus. Berlin. Masses of firepower and steel not likely to ever be seen again; Hitler was cooked with or without us, it just would have taken a bit longer.

    I don’t understand as well the elephant in the living room of this joint: How did Zero and his crew get control of our government, to get into the position of power that he now has ? Is it possible that the distorting lens that allowed this same crew to cheer on Bush and the so called “çonservatives” while fucking up everything in sight could have been one of the reasons?

    Accountability means something. Does anyone here admit to mistakes about anything?

    Im just hoping that Zero overreaches just as hard- finds his Schaivo and Madoff and Iraq so we can finally get a decent government installed. The last decent President we had was GHWB, and you have to way fucking back before you find another….I guess back to the ’50’s.

    By the way Thor, the USA was busy fucking up on its own and did not do jack to Russia after the USSR fell. What are we, world police AND world social workers too?

  357. JHoward says:

    Not a bad comment, R. Punk. But you may have confused this place with another.

  358. happyfeet says:

    oh. Whatever with your distorting lens. Me I would like to give a shout out to Mr. Bush. GW! Yo! And also howdy! You always be my president. Love you man. Me and you. That’s right. You know it. Stay strong and don’t hate the haters, brotha.

  359. Spies, Brigands, and Pirates says:

    The campaign is done
    The vote it is cast
    The federal deficit
    Soon will be vast
    Now that the Porkulus
    Bill, it is passed
    Soon it’s your ass
    They’ll be fucking
    Crooked machine pols
    Without any class
    For the government
    Truly is sucking.

  360. Darleen says:

    R Punk

    you might like to add $11 billion of US lend-lease to the Soviets that made possible that “Masses of firepower and steel not likely to ever be seen again”

    and Reagan was far and away a better Prez than “that vision thing” GHWB.

  361. TheGeezer says:

    R Punk: Stalin screamed repeatedly for the second front on the West until Normandy with all its dead and blood and suffering and stuff occurred. Stalin somehow then got Harry Hopkins to get FDR to forget all about the price…

    GHWB was a weak geek who caved to a bullying Democrat Congress and signed a tax-increasing budget.

  362. N. O'Brain says:

    “Stalin was going to Berlin with or without Normandy or Italy or Africa.”

    Ah, well, no, he wasn’t.

  363. Bob Reed says:

    Masses of firepower and steel not likely to ever be seen again…” ”

    Yeah punk, until the tank battle in Iraq in 1991…

    Hitler was cooked with or without us, it just would have taken a bit longer.”

    I’m sorry punk, but you’re way off base. Without us Stalin would have signed whatever armistace offered in 1943, after the Russian had gotten whipped at Kursk; witout the British ULTRA deciphers or the Lucy Spy ring infor the results of that battle would have been the same as every other tank offensive they’d faced…

    I think you need to review the history a bit before you make sweeping statements like this…

  364. Revisionist Punk says:

    Reed, the whole gulf force was an afternoon’s worth of USSR losses at Kursk- maybe it looked bigger on your TeeVee, but we deployed around 595 tanks. Stalin was signing nothing after Stalingrad- not sure where your notion is coming from.

    O’brain thats very persuasive- you win a bag of poop.

    Geezer, Stalin was tired of bleeding but would keep on keeping on with or without the second front. GHWB stepped on his political dick out of courage anf foresight to go against party orthodoxy- something unheard of around here (and “weak”) when it is – and set the stage for the “clinton” boom of the 90’s by getting our fiscal house in order. Had the good guys recognized it for what it was, Clinton would not have the undeserved credit he got.

    Darleen that 11 billion was 1) accountable just in reserves alone (and not even half of them) and massive unused forces in far eastern USSR and 2) of quickly declining quality and utility after 1943 or so. Yes it helped, no it was not decisive.

    I live to pUnk revisionists, found a nice little colony here.

  365. Dan Collins says:

    It’s established consensus. GAME OVER! Civility NOW!!!

  366. Bob Reed says:

    Revisionist Punk,

    Check the DOD website and after action reports. Aproximately 1900 M1’s engaged 2400 Iraqui MBT’s from T-54 to T-72 seies’.

    Or read, “Desert Victory – The War for Kuwait”, by Norman Friedman…

    Looks like the pUNking didn’t exactly go like you planned…

  367. happyfeet says:

    I live to pUnk revisionists

    really?

  368. thor says:

    The Russians won WWII.

    Cry if you want to, flag-pinners.

  369. Mikey NTH says:

    The Allied Powers won WWII. Each of the three Great Allied Powers – USA, USSR, and UK and Commonwealth Nations & Empire – was needed to win that war in Europe.

    Could the US and the UK and CN & E have done it without the USSR? Probably not. Could the USSR have done it alone? Probably not.

    And it isn’t surprising that each Power looks upon its contribution as the keystone.

  370. donald says:

    I gotta go to Florida twice in the coming month, I’ll be glad to meet up Thor. We can talk about things…so to speak.

  371. Revisionist Punk says:

    Never heard of Wolcott but I just read his blog- he struck me as kind of entertaining. Called Jeff a dumbass- seems like he is combatitive enough. His review of Dollhouse was pretty good too. No doubt faggy, snarky, and unrealistic about the world as it really is, but I was expecting a lot worse….

  372. Random Revisionist says:

    Combative.

Comments are closed.