We Are Amused

I think Gavin M. of Sadly, No! is one of the best writers in the blogosphere. Stuff like this is what I mean. I can't snip out enough to do it justice - but it has to do with RedState's incoherent attempts at soul-searching over Iraq, and it involves bobcat urine.

Back with weightier content tomorrow...

Labels: Sadly No

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 3:54 PM 0 comments

  The Scooter Thing

Sadly, No! has reaction from NRO, if you're curious. I'll do my own little take later.

Not a good week for the Bush administration.

UPDATE: The National Review's editors are already demanding a pardon:

There should have been no referral, no special counsel, no indictments, and no trial. The “CIA-leak case” has been a travesty. A good man has paid a very heavy price for the Left’s fevers, the media’s scandal-mongering, and President Bush’s failure to unify his own administration. Justice demands that Bush issue a pardon and lower the curtain on an embarrassing drama that shouldn’t have lasted beyond its opening act.

Another way to look at it is: the chief of staff for the most aggressive vice president in history paid a price for his operation's arrogant, vicious, and dangerous attempts to smear a political opponent. You might even say that Scooter Libby is a victim of the out-of-control dirty-tricks machine that has taken control of the conservative movement itself. Of course, he was also a cog in that machine, so.

Labels: Sadly No, Scooter Libby

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 5:29 PM 0 comments

  Tales from the Dolchstosslegende, Part XXIV

HTML Mencken over at Sadly, No! has this quote from genocidal Canadian basement-dweller Adam Yoshida:

The Knife and the Back

From the very beginning what has frightened me most about the Global War on Terrorism is this: that the United States and the West simply do not, in their present condition, have the stomach to bring this war to a successful conclusion. I have never really been given a satisfactory answer to the question, “how do you win a war against the enemy in front of you while ignoring the knife-wielding enemy behind you?”

At every step, the left – and its many allies on the rest of the political spectrum – have sought to obstruct all efforts to win this war. At every turn they’ve handcuffed our forces and circumscribed our options.

[…]

rather than join in the effort to defeat this enemy, certain treasonous elements within lurking here at home have seized the opportunity for their own petty political advantage – or, in certain cases, out of genuinely-felt but nonetheless objectively evil moral principles.

The enemy within acts as a form of heavy artillery on behalf of the wider enemy conspiracy.

[..]

When liberals betrayed us during Vietnam and stabbed our soldiers and our allies in the back, the result was millions of dead. Not that many people noticed because it happened in a far away land about which we know little. But, if we let them pull off their betrayal this time, the millions of dead will be in our own cities. They will come from our own towns and our own homes.

Which leads to the inevitable Yoshida-riffic eliminationist conclusion:

What is required today is what has been required from the very beginning: an all-out and total offensive against the enemy on all fronts and without the least shred of compassion or restraint.

The operating premise of S,N! is that the batshit loopy wingnuts of the right blogosphere tend to express, in its purest form, the murderous insanity that underlies so much right-wing thought, yet which "respectable" conservative pundits are too polite to make explicit. And it's a good premise.

But we can take it a step beyond where HTML Mencken takes it. Discussing Yoshida's ravings, he argues that "it takes Adam Yoshida to say in the plainest way what Glenn Reynolds, Rush Limbaugh, Redstate.com White Trash, Mark Steyn, Jim Pinkerton, Patrick Bateman Stephen Green, Marie Jon’, Michael Barone, and, especially, Jeff Goldstein really mean."

But why stop at the bloggers? This Dolchstoss nonsense goes all the way up to the oh-so-respectable think tanks and journals of the besuited, "intellectual" right. To Noemie Emery of the Weekly Standard. To Jonah Goldberg of the National Review (and the LA Times Op-Ed pages). To Mackubin Thomas Owens, also of the National Review. To the very architects of the "surge" themselves, Kagan & Kristol. To the Heritage Foundation. To the American Enterprise Institute.

The new Dolchstosslegende is not just a pastime of nutty right-wing bloggers. It is a careful and deliberate creation of the the best and the brightest of the conservative movement, an effort by certain of our political elites to avoid blame for their own prodigious failures and incompetencies by portraying their domestic opponents - us - as traitors to the nation. This is not a passing fad; it's a generational battle.

If I seem to harp on the Dolchstosslegende a little too often, it's because I think it is very, very dangerous.

Labels: Dolchstosslegende, Sadly No

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:42 AM 0 comments

  They Will Not Be Happy Until Irony is Dead

Good news from Sadly, No! Rush Limbaugh has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize:

LEESBURG, Va., Feb. 1 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Landmark Legal Foundation today nominated nationally syndicated radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Limbaugh, whose daily radio show is heard by more than 20 million people on more than 600 radio stations in the United States and around the world, was nominated for the prestigious award for his “nearly two decades of tireless efforts to promote liberty, equality and opportunity for all humankind, regardless of race, creed, economic stratum or national origin. These are the only real cornerstones of just and lasting peace throughout the world,” said Landmark President Mark R. Levin.

Of course, the "Landmark Legal Foundation" is not technically, y'know, Norweigian, so the nomination has about as much validity as if I nominated myself for the Presidency of Ghana. But it's the thought that counts, and in that spirit the boys at S,N! have a special honor for right-wing mouth breather Dan Riehl:

Allow us therefore to nominate Dan Riehl for a 2008 AVN Award in the category of Best New Starlet.

Labels: Dan Riehl, Rush Limbaugh, Sadly No

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:27 AM 0 comments

  Guess Who's Staying the Course?

Shorter George W. Bush:* "In the spirit of bipartisanship and cooperation, I invite the Democratic Congress to kiss my ass."

*Shorter concept blatantly ripped off from Sadly, No!, who blatantly ripped it off from someone else, I think.

Labels: Congress, George Bush, Sadly No

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:34 AM 0 comments

  Look on this man, this Dubya...

Brad at Sadly, No points us to David Ignatius's nauseating attempt to paint President Bush as some kind of tragic figure, straining heroically against the burden of history.

Sample quotes:

The stress of the job — so well hidden for much of the past six years — has begun to show on Bush’s face. He often looks burdened, distracted, haunted by a question that has no good answer....

Bush is not a man for introspection. That’s part of his flinty personality — the tight, clipped answers and the forced jocularity of the nicknames he gives to reporters and White House aides. That’s why this version of reality TV is so poignant: This very private man has begun to talk out loud about the emotional turmoil inside. He is letting it bleed....

Bush says he doesn’t care what happens now to his poll numbers, and I believe him. He broke through the political barriers a while ago. I sense that, as he anguishes about Iraq, he has in mind the judgment of future historians....

What makes reality TV gripping is that it’s all happening live — the contestants make their choices under pressure, win or lose.

This is Beltway douchebaggery of the highest order. I never cease to be amazed at how Washington pundits have projected onto this President - for whom mediocrity would be an improvement - so many grand and heroic narratives. There's a real need to see Bush as a towering figure, and only over the past year or so has the commentary class finally begun to give up on this affinity.

The answer, of course, is that the pundits themselves are trapped in, and probably demoralized by, their own thorough mediocrity. They are superfluous creatures of a shallow ecology, and their role in American politics is to cycle between syncophancy and a fashionable, substance-less contrarianism, all while congratulating each other on their relevance to imperial American democracy. It must be a depressing existence. So you can see why they would be desperate, now and then, to hitch themselves to some historical star, to believe that their place in the universe involves an intellectual connection to truly epoch-changing people and events. And so they'll build a mythology around the most cretinous of political stalking horses and indulge themselves in the fantasy that they really are the consiglieri to history.

Having embarassed himself with this myth-making in the days before every sentient being could see what a disaster the Iraq war was, Ignatius has passed through a brief phase of confused reflection, only to emerge stronger on the other side: he may no longer be riding along with the President's men, but, thank the gods, Ignatius can record for us commoners the great Tragedy of Bush. No, this isn't just the ugly result of cheap politics, stupid decisions, and a government run by hacks and thieves. It's not just some idiotic idea carried along on the acclaim of pundits playing make-believe.

It's epic, man.

(Paul)

Labels: Bush, David Ignatius, Iraq, pundits, Sadly No

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:54 AM 1 comments