Here, let’s let Byron set the slippery scene:

Pundits and politicians alike praised President Obama’s speech at the Tucson memorial service last Wednesday. “A wonderful speech,” wrote the New York Times’ David Brooks. “A magnificent performance,” wrote National Review’s Rich Lowry. “A terrific speech,” wrote Sen. John McCain.

And those were just the voices on the right.

Oh no! ‘Mr. Hitler is a strong and energetic leader whose resurgent nation appreciates his firm hand’ — AND THOSE WERE JUST THE BRITISH! I’m inventing all this, so I’m no better than York. But I think you get my drift: ‘Black Flag is my favorite soft rock band‘ — THOSE WERE JUST THE APHIDS!

Byron obviously has taken it upon himself to prevent this cynical President from cackling while he spikes the tragedy football in America’s end zone. Someone with a modicum of genius and a teh-TINY-yum backbone might envision Obama doing backflips through victims memorials, or taking the podium to freestyle about that faggot, Boehner:

Rethinking Obama’s political performance in Tucson
Byron York | Washington Examiner | 1/15/11

. . By the time Obama spoke, there was irrefutable evidence that shooting suspect Jared Loughner was deeply mentally ill and acted out of no recognizable political agenda. Obama simply could not have made the case that Loughner’s acts were in any way the product of political rhetoric from right or left.

. . So even as he conceded that rhetoric did not cause the violence, Obama argued that it should be muted anyway. And he cloaked his appeal in so much emotionalism, in so many tear-jerking references to the recently departed, that some in his audience might not have noticed he was making the political point he wanted to make all along.

Sonuvabitch! BASTARD! Backed into a corner, Barack gave the only speech he could have ever given! There were no other speeches to give! But he used it to wangle political points! Wangle is a word!

In Tucson, Obama played good cop to their bad cop by assuring everyone that rhetoric had not motivated the violence. But he still brought up the topic because, he said, it had “been discussed in recent days.” Of course, it would not have been discussed in recent days had his supporters not made so many unfair accusations.

They fell right in his trap!

Some Democratic strategists hope Obama can capitalize on Tucson the way Bill Clinton capitalized on Oklahoma City. Perhaps he’ll be able to, and perhaps he won’t. But he’s already trying.

By pretending not to! The nuclear option!

I do not want civil discourse
Don Surber | Charleston Daily Mail | Jan 16 2010

For a decade, from the election of Bush 43 forward, the Left has lied and cheated as it tried to return to power. Al Gore made a mockery out of the American electoral system by being a spoilsport over Florida, which Bush indeed won by 537 votes. Dan Rather forged a document to try to derail Bush’s re-election. Twice Democrats stole U.S. senators from the Republicans.

What a beautiful game it would be without the spoilsports. I wonder if Don recalls Bush being President for 8 years, the constitutional maximum.

Last week, the left quickly blamed the right for the national tragedy of a shooting spree by a madman who never watched Fox News, never listened to Rush Limbaugh and likely did not know who Sarah Palin is.

Fortunately, the American public rejected out of hand that idiotic notion that the right was responsible.

Rather than apologize, the left wants to change the tone of the political debate.

The left suddenly wants civil discourse.

Bite me.

The left wants to play games of semantics.

Bite me.

The left wants us to be civil — after being so uncivil for a decade.

Bite me.

There is grown-up work to do now.

. . ?

Meet Eric Fuller
The Left finds a new icon.
by John Hayward | Jan 14 2010 | Human Events

You might be seeing a lot of Eric Fuller over the weekend. He’s one of the people injured in Jared Loughner’s shooting rampage, taking rounds in the knee and back. He’s also a vicious bigot, and because he’s elderly and a military veteran, the Left is going to fall in love with him.

Fuck that. I don’t care who shoots you, you loser.

Fuller gave an interview with the Democracy NOW radio show, in which he said of the Tucson shootings: “It looks like Palin, Beck, Sharron Angle, and the rest got their first target.” Presumably he’s not talking about Judge John Roll.

Correct! C’mon, Giffords was the target, and she took a bullet, through the head.

But Eric, the ambitious ass, took two. So now it’s “FULLER BLAH BLAH ANTI-GOVERNMENT LUNATIC HOLE IN MY LEG.” How convenient.

. . this hilariously dubious offering of patriotism comes from, I assume, some sort of mini-skirted spirit-leader for America! over at The Heritage Foundation.

Like any other reader of that blog, simply remind yourself that you, the captain of our football team, aren’t about to edit some wobbly facts when you’re only getting a love letter:

Morning Bell: Reclaiming Our Founding Principles

Posted July 5th, 2010 at 8:45am
by Julia Shaw

Happy Birthday America! America is 234 years old. She was born on July 4, 1776, with the passage of the Declaration of Independence. Since then, America has grown from thirteen colonies on the east coast to fill a vast continent.

Actually, Canada is bigger than we are. So, they’re better at ‘filling’ the continent. We’re certainly less than half-filling the vastness.

Her economic and military power is envied around the world.

Perhaps some of her things are envied around the world? Her school system certainly isn’t. Sadly, Julia Shaw, the writer, are mocked for her incompetence.

And the American people are hardworking, churchgoing, affluent, and generous.

Shall we go any further? Many, but nowhere near all, of her people are churchgoing. Ditto for hardworking (conservative bloggers being a durable exception). And something like 14 million children live in poverty in the U.S. What is that — 20%?

The Declaration of Independence serves as a philosophical statement of America’s first principles. As Matthew Spalding describes, the Declaration affirms that all men are created equal. By nature, men have a right to liberty that is unalienable, meaning it cannot be given up or taken away.

Philosophically speaking, yes, but certainly not in reality. The Indians and the Blacks and the Mexicans and the Women and the Gays . .

And because individuals equally possess such inalienable rights, governments derive their just powers from the consent of those governed. The purpose of government is to secure these fundamental rights, and the people retain the right to alter or abolish a government that fails to do so.

HAHAHA . . hoo! You’d think so, wouldn’t you? The Negroes waited a couple centuries before invoking that casual right, by getting a few hundred thousand white folks to die for them in a breezy war.

These principles have made America the great nation it is today.

More elementally: it is the willingness of a brave few people to hold the nation to these routinely unpopular principles that has made America the great nation it is today. Huuuuge difference.

But, since the early 20th century, these principles have been under attack in the academy, the media, and popular culture. So-called progressives have rejected the existence of self-evident truths—in the Declaration of Independence and elsewhere. Instead, they embrace the notion of “Progress” that is constant change towards an unspecified end. From these faulty principles, it follows that, all men are not created equal; some people are further along in the historical process than others. There are not permanent rights with which man is endowed. Government creates rights, and these rights evolve according to the demands of the time. There is no need for consent of the governed, just experts who will tell us how to live and how to progress.

This is a serious attack on our principles, but not an insurmountable one.

No, it was the progressives — they better understood American principles and fought for poor individuals during the Great Republican Depression of the thirties, employing them with the New Deal and giving their grandparents food money with Social Security. It was the actual America-savvy people who fought for civil rights in the sixties and who opposed the slaughter of the Vietnamese. It was those same leftists that backed feminism and saw that gays would rightly demand their civil rights as well. It was those people that saw Cesar Chavez for the hero he was.

What are we up to, now — the second half of the twentieth century? It’s the liberals who square the behavior of the United States with your precious Constitution. It’s the Heritage Foundation that opposes this, repeatedly, by calling themselves more patriotic than the few people who can qualify as patriots. It takes a lot more than some pom-poms and a blog page to force America to deliver on the Founding Fathers’ promises.

Thurgood Marshall Takes Center Stage At Kagan Hearings
Christina Bellantoni | June 28, 2010, 4:27PM

Looks like Senate Judiciary Republicans have at least one unified talking point today: Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American to ever serve on the Supreme Court, was an “activist judge.” As Elena Kagan kept on her listening face, multiple senators slammed both Marshall’s judicial philosophy and her service as his clerk in the late 1980s.

These idiots have no shame. None.

Ranking member Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) criticized Kagan for having “associated herself with well-known activist judges who have used their power to redefine the meaning of our constitution and have the result of advancing that judge’s preferred social policies,” citing Marshall as his son, Thurgood Marshall Jr., sat in the audience of the Judiciary Committee hearings . .

Kagan has said Marshall, who served as the lead attorney in the Brown v. Board of Education case leading to the desegregation of schools, is one of her heroes. She honored him in her opening statement later in the afternoon: “In his life; in his great struggle for racial justice, the Supreme Court stood as the part of government that was most open to every American and that most often fulfilled our Constitution’s promise of treating all persons with equal respect, equal care and equal attention.”

Who of these fools has the talent or character to have argued Brown vs. Board of Education before the Supreme Court back in 1954? A case that had to be won? None. Zero.

How many could ever win the Presidential Medal of Freedom? Get memorials dedicated to them? Have law libraries and buildings and airports named after them? None.

These Republicans are court jesters shaking tin bells at the feet of a giant. We should be hammering them for their insults. Anybody? Senator Franken? Hullo? *sigh*

ADD: Dana Milbank found it ridiculous as well:

Kagan may get confirmed, but Thurgood Marshall can forget it
By Dana Milbank
Tuesday, June 29, 2010

. . As confirmation hearings opened Monday afternoon, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee took the unusual approach of attacking Kagan because she admired the late justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she clerked more than two decades ago.

“Justice Marshall’s judicial philosophy,” said Sen. Jon Kyl (Ariz.), the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, “is not what I would consider to be mainstream.” Kyl — the lone member of the panel in shirtsleeves for the big event — was ready for a scrap. Marshall “might be the epitome of a results-oriented judge,” he said.

It was, to say the least, a curious strategy to go after Marshall, the iconic civil rights lawyer who successfully argued Brown vs. Board of Education. Did Republicans think it would help their cause to criticize the first African American on the Supreme Court, a revered figure who has been celebrated with an airport, a postage stamp and a Broadway show? The guy is a saint — literally. Marshall this spring was added to the Episcopal Church’s list of “Holy Women and Holy Men,” which the Episcopal Diocese of New York says “is akin to being granted sainthood.”

With Kagan’s confirmation hearings expected to last most of the week, Republicans may still have time to make cases against Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa and Gandhi.

There’s Brent!

There, clickers, is the delicate flower. There tumults the soul who can’t abide bad words. Can’t go on thoroughly pointedly and publicly because bleeped or asterisked media might be worse. Wh0 d0 you th!nk yo\/’r$ f00Lin6, L|8eral%?? You are trying to hide cursing, doody-heads.

Friday, May 28, 2010

CBS: the Toilet Network
by Brent Bozell

. . CBS has ended the debate over accidents. The artists formerly known as the classy “Tiffany Network” have very deliberately introduced a new show called “$#*! My Dad Says.”

That’s right — the fecal curse word starting with an S in the title. They pronounce it “Bleep My Dad Says.” They could simply have called it “Stuff My Dad Says” and not lost a scintilla of descriptive power. All they would lose is the childish wish to offend.

This S-bomb show is a spinoff from a page on the social-media website Twitter with the same toilet-plugging name.

Perhaps someone would argue that CBS is merely trying to stay true to the spirit of the actual Twitter page by Justin Halpern, where nearly every 140-character tweet of his dad’s cranky “wisdom” is laced with profanities. Halpern already milked his cursing dad for a book deal before turning his excretory ambitions to television executives.

Critics outside the Hollywood bubble scorned CBS for its gaudy attempt to take profanity to a new level, to which CBS responds that the show will “in no way be indecent and will adhere to all CBS standards.” What is clear is that there is no such thing as “CBS standards.” There is only that which CBS can and can’t get away with.

The whole S-word debut was unveiled on the same day that CBS submitted a legal brief in a federal appeals court declaring once again that it cannot be fined for the Janet Jackson breast exposure. In a defense that would make Bill Clinton proud, CBS argued it did not have a “guilty mind” in airing the wardrobe malfunction.

Doesn’t the one hand of CBS really betray the other hand, as much as they try to play ignorant?

Our broadcast television networks are not being shy about their agenda. They clearly intend to drag the American people into the enlightenment of the “21st century,” where all that is putrid is permissible.

Friday, May 07, 2010

Death’s Progress
by Dr. Paul Kengor

. . Here’s the essence of the problem with contemporary progressives and their movement, which is a gigantic problem for America: One of the only things we really know about progressives, and that they know about themselves and their ideology, is that they favor constant “change,” “reform,” an ever-shifting, ongoing “evolution,” or, yes, progression. And therein is an inherent, significant difficulty: progressivism offers no clear, definable end.

You right-wingers were furious over the pull-out of Iraq because the “definable end” was . . . ? What? Hullo?

Blacks get their civil rights. BONG. *end* Latinos, Indians, GAYS get their civil rights. BONG. *end* America pulls out of Iraq. BONG. *end*

The goal-post is always moving, forever pushed further away. Ends are never ends; they always “progress,” with culture and society, banking on the ludicrous assumption that the changes are always (or largely) good.

Stupid. BONG. *end*

What’s a word for ‘beyond preposterous’? Preposterousest? Preposterousisimo?

How do I fairly describe the emerging right-wing meme that the Times Square bomber, Pakistani Faisal Shahzad, was a liberal? Correspondingly, he was goaded by the reckless left-wing media? I’m currently at a loss for appropriate language for the charges.

A Muslim terrorist sympathetic to the Pakistani Taliban, who have been attacked and killed in drone strikes? Fine, okay. But a liberal? You wingnuts have lost the remnants of what once were minds:

So if this guy seeks revenge for the killing of Pakistani Muslims, that’s not the point? What’s important is how much he hated Bush? That’s what makes him a liberal, rrrriiiiiggghht. You idiots have just thrown the 9/11 hijackers into the Democratic party.

I’m gonna go hog wild here and say he’s actually a Conservative. Why? Because it’s a safe bet he hates Barack Obama. No real reason for it, he just does.

April 13, 2010 12:00 A.M.
March Diary
John Derbyshire

The Left in power Watching the president’s strutting and preening after the passing of the health-care bill, I found myself thinking that the Left in power have a very characteristic kind of arrogant triumphalism.

“I’m in this race not just to hold an office, but to gather with you to transform a nation,” announced Obama when declaring his candidacy in 2007. That’s what they’re like, all of them, always.

Everything and everybody on the left are always exactly like that all of the time. Well, that’s simple enough, that’s settled. Don’t know why he even bothers with the quotes to make his case since he’s just established all of it totally and eternally beyond the limits of clarity.

Surprisingly, John doesn’t completely bollix this first quote. Obama invoked the memory of Abraham Lincoln: “. . that there is power in conviction. That beneath all the differences of race and region, faith and station, we are one people. He tells us that there is power in hope. That is our purpose here today. That is why I’m in this race. Not just to hold an office, but to gather with you to transform a nation.”

“We shall now create the socialist order,” Lenin is supposed to have said, following his 1917 putsch.

Quote: “We shall now proceed to construct the socialist order.” Don’t know why John is so allergic to the google.

After the British Labour Party’s 1945 electoral landslide, the new government’s attorney general declared that “We are the masters now.”

No.

(Wikipedia says this is a misquotation; but if so, it was, as misquoted, entirely in character for the socialist triumphalism of the time, as evidenced by the fact that that’s how everybody remembers it.)

Unbelievable. Now he googles. So he knows he’s made a mistake, but posts it anyways explaining that his mistake is actually right. “. . as evidenced by the fact that that’s how everybody remembers it.” Truthiness, everybody? That’s evidence, to him. Hey, as long as it’s popular, it must be true. If everybody remembered that Derbyshire were 110 years old, he’d immediately keel over and turn to dust.

The Shawcross Wiki says it was in 1946. But was it some of the give and take in the House of Commons about the usage of terms and words? Naw: it was a declarative statement of the eternally tyrannical intent of liberalism. Why? Because John Derbyshire made his memory the master of “truth.” Actually, it’s his memory of everybody else’s memory, but why bitch about it? It’s only reason number 1,398 of “Why Conservatives are Technically Even More Right When They’re Wrong.” Here’s the Humpty Dumpty passage:

Indeed. Why should any history matter, the actual events of life? The master’s perception of everything is a better indicator of truth than “truth.” Who says so? The master himself. And this post is about the way he remembers something. At least until he writes another post, that one entitled “The Evils Of Liberal Historical Revisionism.” It’s then that he’ll remember Truth is Sacred.

Oh, and incidentally, it doesn’t matter how many smoking hot young blondes Rod Stewart marries, he’s gay. Remember that whole hospitalized-with-a-stomach-full-of-goo thing? That’s the one and only way everybody remembers it.

This is a strange one. There’s some satire, and then there’s someone who merely skims it to criticize it on its face. Strange enough. Except the purpose of the piece was to point out the hopelessness of vital satire in an environment that’s over-wrought and partisan. So Michael Barone fell right into it.

It begins with Rochelle Gurstein writing in the New Republic:

The Baby Lottery
A rational redistributive plan.
Rochelle Gurstein

As someone who has long believed that there is something morally repellant about living in a country that prides itself on being the greatest democracy in the world but where the top one-tenth of one percent of the people “earn” as much money per year collectively as the entire bottom fifty percent of working people, I would like to offer a modest proposal that might “level the playing field,” as the popular saying has it, and thus provide a foundation for a democracy worthy of the name. Instead of the old Marxist plan to redistribute property–and let’s face it, that always took a bloody revolution and even then, it didn’t always work out so well–how about redistributing babies at birth, a kind of big baby lottery?

Every child is finally given a fair shot at the ‘good life’ in the greatest country on Earth. Races caring for each others’ babies creates a colorblind society. Knowing your ‘familial’ child lives with somebody else makes sectors and strata of society genuinely interested in the well-being of the once ‘outsiders’ — you don’t know where your kid ended up, so it’s important for everybody, rich and poor, to do well. You fight for the other because that’s probably who’s raising your own.

Yeah, it’s insane, nothing is more coveted than your own flesh and blood. And your family and your heritage are the first things you are, and that’s fine. And, certainly, forcing the well-off to submit their children into perhaps poverty (there’s plenty of that) would be mind-numbingly, tyrannically cruel. But, then, no one deserves it, right? That’s how satire goes: it’s to expose essential truths by way perhaps of a wild ‘proposal’.

Michael Barone, he of the American Enterprise Institute and the Washington Examiner, took only a moment to read a few words, sniff a liberal rat and crank out a column:

She is kidding, isn’t she?
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst

I’ve been reading the New Republic for decades, even though (or perhaps because) it’s a wildly uneven publication. It can publish as thoughtful and intellectually rigorous a figure as William Galston, whose every word is worth serious attention. And it can publish some real garbage. In the second category (I think) falls what the website calls “Our New Columnist’s Rational Plan for Redistributing Babies.” The “new columnist,” Rachel Gurstein, writes, “how about redistributing babies at birth, a kind of big baby lottery?”

That’s right, not even close to her name.

It turns out (I think) that she’s kidding; her citation of Jonathan Swift’s essay “A Modest Proposal” is one tipoff. But her proposal has some roots, as she notes, with the famed and in some liberal quarters revered political philosopher John Rawls. He argued that all public policy proposals should be assessed from the perspective of one who does not know into what station of life he or she is born. It turns out that when you do this you end up opting for a cradle-to-grave welfare state (or at least Rawls did). The problem with this, I have long thought, is that we aren’t born this way, we are born into families (or some other child care situation), we are raised in a particular milieu which is only part of a larger society and at a particular point in history.

In other words, “While I recognize this proposal is a satirical one, I would pause to add this: life simply doesn’t work this way. So this is a bad idea.”

Cough. Or: “Yes, yes, it’s satire. But it’s bad politics, you know.”

Stupefying. Well, to sharpen all the 90-degree vertices of his analysis, Barone adds:

So while Rachel [sic] Gurstein isn’t really suggesting that babies should be redistributed at birth, it seems that the idea is in some way appealing to her—even while she presumably understands that it will sound appalling to the very large majority of Americans. There are clues here to why the Democrats’ health care policies are so unpopular with the American people.

Amazing. Just brilliant. But it gets better, if that’s possible: the point of Gurstein’s piece wasn’t the utopian gambit or comedy. It was that in this wholly bizarre and hyper-partisan political world, the preceding satire seems to have become pointless ( . . and perhaps Barone should have read the whole thing?).

The lack of a common reality, of universal up and down, has rendered hyperbole almost impossible to detect and compass:

. . well-meaning friends have repeatedly cautioned me against it, for fear–baseless, no doubt–that my intentions will be misunderstood. The more I protest that my scheme is as clear as the night is long –the old New York lottery slogan “You gotta be in it, to win it” at last made universal; Rawls’s theoretical “veil of ignorance” finally put into practice–the more insistent and stern and dour these same friends become: “You’ll see, they will think you are trying to destroy their precious idea of the American family, the bedrock of society.” “You’ll see, they will accuse you of being a fascist, a Nazi.” . . Have we now come to the point, I wondered, that our shared sense of reality is so tenuous that something as outrageous to common sense as my big baby lottery will not immediately be recognized as political satire?

. . you are kidding, aren’t you?

. . Like Tina Fey mimicking Sarah Palin, what passes for satire today plays on our incredulity, presenting us with an exact replica of something real but at the same time so absurd that it beggars our belief. It gets a laugh, but what is missing is the wild, inspired, visionary flights of imagination that masters of satire like Jonathan Swift so excelled at. Through caustic hyperbole, Swift’s “Modest Proposal” to raise Irish babies like cattle and sell them to Englishmen for dinner in order to eliminate overpopulation and poverty in Ireland made his first readers–and us, too, almost three centuries after them–see and feel how the world appears from the standpoint of common decency.

And, for me, that’s it. When there’s no “common decency”, satire becomes hopeless, doesn’t it? There’s no one beating heart to it, no bullseye to hit. Communication becomes a crapshoot, like trying to squint and see one of those fractal space shuttles behind the multi-colored chaos. Did you get it — can you see it?

And when one side of the political world, as a matter of policy, becomes so mechanically bent on taking an axe to the other, no matter what’s said or done, the fragments are all that’s universal. As in: “Bringing down deficits is the decent thing to do, but if you proffer a pay/go rule before we do, not one of us will vote for it . .”

Nobody writes like that any more and I could not help wondering if the extinction of satire that attempts to shame people into recognizing that there are things higher and worth striving towards than what merely happens to exist was a sign of just how poverty-stricken our moral, political, and literary imaginations have become.

And there is the point. She could have paid Barone to write his post, but he did it for free.

McConnell: Obama lost support because he governed ‘hard left’

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell says that President Barack Obama would have had more support in the Senate if he just governed more towards the middle. “As I’ve said all year, if he wants to meet us in the middle of the political spectrum we’ll be there to help,” McConnell told NBC’s David Gregory Sunday.

What part of “the middle” is “NO”? Since when has McConnell even seen “the middle”?

Another Dem backs down: ‘Scale back’ our agenda

“I think the President Is going to have to scale back his agenda after we pass health care reform,” said Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) in an interview with ABC News.

Echoing a common theme among pundits and conservative Democrats, Nelson said, “I think he’s allowed the left wing pull him too much in that direction.”

And a Democrat, great. And the evidence of that left wing influence would be . . . what? It doesn’t exist. Gitmo is still open, we’re still in Iraq, we’ve escalated in Afghanistan, domestic spying still continues, Bush’s U.S. attorneys still have their jobs, the banks and banksters are as rich and dangerous as they ever were, there hasn’t been an iota of finance reform, and real healthcare reform is about get jettisoned. Do these people even know who the leftists are and what they want? Obama is the last person in the world that would appease the left, he’s defiant.

Chris Matthews and Panel Still Touting the “Obama Moved Too Far to the Left” Meme

Brooks: Yeah, what’s the biggest issue of our lifetime? It’s that people used to trust government in the New Deal and the Great Society. Now like 17% of Americans trust government. And this distrust of government has been building and building and building. And Massachusetts is a phenomenon of that. And so the question before the Democrats is do we listen to the people and say hey, we’re scaling back, or do we say we really believe in our agenda, we don’t care what you say. We believe in it so much we’re going forward. And that’s the crucial decision they have.

People learned to trust government during the New Deal because it worked. Since Reagan, government has been a punching bag for the right wing. They beat the hell out of it, make it completely ineffective, populate it with idiots like Phil Gramm, Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, then when it tanks the nation, they say “SEE?”

And then they ride a populist wave of anger back into office to do it all over again. You break the cycle by making government effective. You can’t make government effective by listening to people who promise to destroy it.

Republicans are terrified of healthcare reform because it will benefit millions of people. That’s exactly why you PASS HEALTHCARE REFORM IN THE FACE OF GREAT OPPOSITION. Now. People will get “it” after they get it. They trust the government after it does good things for them. How the hell do you think Roosevelt got re-elected three times? Pass the bill.

And I really mean that. Because you’re not just entertaining for your foisting of dense stupidity and cat-brained propaganda, you’re also a pretty good divining rod for the next truckload of whistling ‘What the Fuck?’ careening down the pike.

First, our intrepid, psychic wingnut: Andrew Klavan. Whoever that is.

He’s obviously self-important enough to make donkey culture-critique videos to put on the net via Pajamas TV (also known as ‘I fell down on the internet and can’t get up‘). Lord knows we need more right-wingers telling us about reality, clueing us into what’s really going on in the world like Andrew does.

Because the very same people who pierced the veil of a psychotically paranoid dictatorship half a world away and found nuclear weapons, the folks who stared right through the skull of Terri Schiavo and witnessed the furiously firing synapses of Helen Keller’s cousin, these people should be listened to. Because they’re so goddamned funny. You know what I mean. These rolling buzzards are an absolute riot (and when ‘teabagging’ gets involved, very barely literally . .) (. . and who could blame them when, if someone tried to ‘teabag’ me while I was just standing in the village square, some individual ‘rioting’ would break out) (. . no, not that there’s anything wrong with it).

Yes, people who have absolutely no talent whatsoever for understanding reality around them want desperately to let you know they figured it all out. It’s kinda like the mystery of George W. Bush’s musings on the ‘Culture of Life’, but without the traumatic brain injury irony. Like pigeons telling you how to use public restrooms. Tyra Banks’ tips on acting like a decent human being — there’s no hope of actual revelation in these cases. Adam Sandler’s ‘comedies.’

So when a weird tool from the City Journal (‘ . . described by Peggy Noonan as “the best magazine in America”‘ [Et tu, Pegge? Or, alternatively: I come here not to praise City Journal, but -- DOLPHINS. *squeal*]) (btw: founded by the same William Casey that orchestrated Iran/Contra’s ‘why-bargain-with-terrorists-when-you-can-fellate-them’ arms for hostages deal) says he’s figured out what’s at the iron core of the left wing, you know this is gonna be good.

. . . 3 . . 2 . . 1 . . (for bonus points, check the ‘Net Neutrality’ gambit–beep beep) . . .

. . you didn’t get through the whole clip, did ya? I know, it’s like standing in front of a bank of klieg lights at midnight and swatting at moths.

Has there ever been a lazier argument proffered? ‘You know what you guys say — you know what you’re all about? You just want us to shut up.’ Oh no, somebody’s feelings have been hurt.

And I think I know just how it happened. We actually argued with the likes of Andrew Klavan and the other nuclear charm bombs of Pajamas TV (also known as ‘We’re so square, we give M.C. Escher nightmares‘). When we swipe at them for their squirrely wingnuttery, they interpret this as ‘they want me to shut up.’ Of course, this is just the latest mistake in a life cats-and-dogs soaked with Avogadro’s numbers of piss-poor conclusions. We want you to wise up.

After innocent Americans are attacked and killed, we don’t want you to kill thousands more by starting a war in a blameless place like Iraq. If the neurosurgeons say Terri Schiavo is brain-dead, don’t freeze the government just because you’re disappointed. And go ahead and say whatever you like about these things, that’s fine. But just because we argue back every time the bat-wings trigger another tornado in your belfry, we’re not guilty of anything you can call ‘oppression.’ In the adult world, it’s called ‘politics.’

But Andrew Klavan won’t ever understand that. I figured this out after I found a piece of his ‘opinion’ on the LA Times site:

Take the Limbaugh Challenge
Andrew Klavan | May 29, 2009

If you are reading this newspaper, the likelihood is that you agree with the Obama administration’s recent attacks on conservative radio talker Rush Limbaugh. That’s the likelihood; here’s the certainty: You’ve never listened to Rush Limbaugh.

I’ll spare you the rest. Mr. Projection here thinks that if you stopped listening to those edited Media Matters clips and started listening to the whopping asshole yourself, you’d finally understand him.

And, for that opinion, Andrew Klavan, I’ve thanked you comically.