Paging Dr. Freud

As a public dis-service, we advise that Parts I & II of an interview w/ Dinesh D'Souza are available at The Daily Tucker. We'd as soon not type another word (On D.D'S., for sure, other stuff ...) but this unfortunate phrasing caught our attention during a quick scan of Part I:

DD: I think Obama’s vision for America is, well, you could call it, “soft socialism at home, and impotence abroad.”

Read more

All-American Bullshit Round-Up

Bromides for the brain-dead, from a beat reporter at The NYT.

But I stayed in the church of capitalism, determined to hear what wisdom headliners Colin Powell, Rudy Giuliani, Dan Rather, Steve Forbes and Terry Bradshaw would dispense.

[...]

“I need a woman with money,” Bradshaw cackled, noting that he was a 62-year-old mama’s boy with three ex-wives. He seemed more like a man who could use some advice rather than one paid for giving it.

“I’ve never really motivated anybody,” he announced cheerfully.

The former Steelers quarterback grumbled that quarterbacks like Peyton Manning and Donovan McNabb get paid millions more than he did to follow plays dictated by coaches.

After noting that “Jesus is my savior,” he shared this life lesson with the would-be entrepreneurs: When your receiver is about to be tackled, “Keep it simple. Chuck it to him anyway.”

Are these suckers who blew $9.95 for the privilege of being pitched more seminars in inspirational horsecrap ("Then came another sales pitch from a guy who said he went from being a homeless drug dealer to the 'world’s No. 1 Internet wealth entrepreneur' with a $2.4 million estate in Texas. He offered a course at an airport Marriott valued at $11,226.90 for a bargain $29.") the small business start-ups that will get America working again, the minute deeper tax cuts are passed & the moneybags start letting their cash trickle down?

Not that the moneybags would let any of it loose, of course ("Mine!!") but seeing bible-thumping patriots applying the clap harder approach to bizniz would provide some comedy relief during the plunge to the abysswind-down of all meaningful economic activity in our future.

DJ Vickie J. or, Watching Paint Dry

Oh, holy shitHokey Smokes, we think YouTube is actually processing this! Any damn minute now.

Nope. Bald-faced lie. One more shot.

Now it may be working. Except we'll have to trim the fat again.

Context:

Live coverage of the upload: At 2348PDT, 20% uploaded, about 86 min. remaining; 19% processed, about 87 min. remaining. And it does give the appearance of success: Thumbnails of images from the recording pass before our eyes.

0008, the next day: 40% uploaded, about 66 min. remaining; 38% processed, about 68 mins. remaining.

Progress:

0110: About 5 - 10 mins. remaning.

0146: Now waiting for trimmed version to process. (Will this take the 100-odd mins. the original processing did?)

LOOK. LOOK! LOOK:If this works, we should have Burt Prelutsky doing his stand-up. Eventually.

The Never-Ending List: Why We Hate This Fucking Country & Those Who Inhabit It

A new survey of Americans' knowledge of religion found that atheists, agnostics, Jews and Mormons outperformed Protestants and Roman Catholics in answering questions about major religions, while many respondents could not correctly give the most basic tenets of their own faiths.

Forty-five per cent of Roman Catholics who participated in the study didn't know that, according to church teaching, the bread and wine used in Holy Communion is not just a symbol, but becomes the body and blood of Christ.

Yet these shitheels (Not singling out the Holy Roman Empire of Perversion here, they're all despicable.) want to shove their unexamined, uncomprehended values down our throats.

More than half of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the person who inspired the Protestant Reformation. And about four in 10 Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of the greatest rabbis and intellectuals in history, was Jewish.

The survey released Tuesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life aimed to test a broad range of religious knowledge, including understanding of the Bible, core teachings of different faiths and major figures in religious history. The U.S. is one of the most religious countries in the developed world, especially compared to largely secular Western Europe, but faith leaders and educators have long lamented that Americans still know relatively little about religion.

What do Americans know about? There's a survey we'd like to see. You can see it too, we just made it:

As filled in by an average American.

You stupid fucking sheep. We hate each of you w/ the standard burning white heat of a large number of stars. More proof there is neither a gawd nor intelligent life in this nation of sheep.

File under: You suck, we hate you, please die.

Marty Peretz' Party

Peretz, one of America's leading hate-mongers, quite possibly on the way to burn a cross on someone's lawn, or break a few windows at a mosque, is confronted by brain-washed libs who don't have jobs or zillionaire wives.Worth pausing to read the signs w/ Peretz quotes. Marty's not too hot on non-White Yanks, either.

Standing Athwart History W/ Its Thumb Up Your Ass

We don't know or care who this dip is, though he is linked often enough by the Usual Gang of Idiots at The Atlantic. (Gangleader Sullivan, for example, dragged this before our eyes.)

I think it is easy for some liberals to miss just how antagonising flip mockery of absurd religious beliefs can be, though it's hard to believe they don't, at some level, grasp what's at stake. To laugh at someone's views on the evils of masturbation or witchcraft or gay marriage is clearly to imply that these views, and the people who hold them, deserve to be laughed at and, thereby, diminished.

Sweet fucking blood of Jesus, what other possible reaction is there? The typist himself admits these beliefs are absurd. Does he wish to be ruled/led/manipulated (however you care to describe the dynamics of human politics) by the patently absurd?

Oh crap. We read Douthat's bullshit about liberals loving the culture war, thought it garbage but decided not to bother. Now we realize this is part & parcel of that. (W.W.: "Mr Douthat makes an excellent point.") What've we gotten ourself into? Well, fuck, good money after bad, eh? Let's break it down.

Confusion follows:

It is easy to believe that Fox News is so popular among conservatives simply because it caters to their prejudices. But another way of saying almost the same thing is to say that it treats conservatives with the respect they feel they deserve; it asserts on their behalf a claim to social status that acknowledges the efforts of liberals to weaken that claim, all the while encouraging pride in the identity-constituting affiliations and convictions liberals seem to disdain.

No, no, liberals are all identity politics & resentment of their betters by minorities the libs keep on some pseudo-metaphorical "plantation." Noble conservatives judge by individual character & reject identity-constituting affiliation. Didn't he get the memo?

One really has to wonder how such a clear summing-up of reality leads to a 180°-wrong conclusion. Again & again.

Unlike liberalism, social/moral conservatism is essentially a creed of lost causes. It is about delaying the inevitable, standing firm against the tide of progressive social change for one more decade or year or day. Vulnerability—a sense of a treasured way of life under siege—is at social conservatisms' heart, and embattled reaction to the slings and arrows of liberal reproach and condescension is intrinsic to conservatism. In contrast, liberalism is generally confident, sure that it is the vanguard of history. But the arrogance of liberals frustrated by the futile intransigence of America's morally conservative majority is fuel for the conservative grief machine. That is to say, overly blatant liberal confidence only delays the hour of liberal victory. From time to time, liberals grasp this. So they tend to prefer Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's relatively subtle (but still annoyingly supercilious) cultural politics of satire over Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck's anxious hours of direct, aggressively self-righteous defensive actions in an openly-waged culture war.

W.W. continues to admit reactionary causes are absurd & lost. Yet they must be respected. Why? What will happen if not? There is no useful reaction beyond mocking & sneering. No reasoned discourse will disabuse reactionaries of their self-proclaimed deep faith & other lost causes. Why shouldn't the eminently foolish be sneered at superciliously? While liberals "sneer" (Oh, horrors!) reactionaries literally demonize those w/ less or different religiousness. (Sometimes they just cry "Witch!" Does that fall under literal demonization?)

And how long would Mr. Wilkinson have us wait for the progress he admits is inevitable to arrive? The aged among us may remember (Youngsters, you could look it up!) as long ago as the 1960s, when certain groups advised what they would call "the coloreds" (If they were in a good mood.) just to be patient, it had only been a few hundred yrs. & they'd get some rights soon enough. Well, it's been all of human history for all of us, & some of us are damned tired of waiting for these clowns to go through their little act & then die off.

However, sometimes a conservative figure comes along who is so outrageously ridiculous that liberals just can't hide their sneering sense of superiority, their cultural politics becomes unusually overt, and conservatives emerge to correctly point out that culture war is waged by liberals too.

Not to get more playground than usual, but who the fuck started this? If perpetual candidate/grifter C.O'D. weren't so anxious to cram her absurdities down the throat of real Americans who don't wear mittens all the live-long day, no one would have heard word one about her, would they? See also: Knee-jerk accusations of "class warfare" whenever it's pointed out that the middle-class (let alone people who work for a living, or who can't work for a living) has been under attack for 30-some yrs.

Damned if one resists, damned if one doesn't.

[Also posted (in the first-person singular) at a more adult venue.]

More Witchery

The TPM link below made us realize that the person we'd mercilessly mocked further below, one Jean Houston, had been called a witch by noted grotesque John Hagee:

Pastor John Hagee, whose 2008 endorsement of John McCain sparked a major uproar, is one such leader. In his 1997 book Day of Deception he recounts witnessing demonic possession, and alleges that the state is complicit in "Rosemary's Baby"-like coverups of Satanic killings. "Female Satanists breed themselves to give birth to children for ritual offerings. Doctors in the satanic groups deliver the baby, filing no birth certificate. As far as the state is concerned, the person never existed."

Man, between them & the (imaginary) terror babies, what are we gonna do?

In the opening pages of the same book -- a chapter called "Witchcraft and the White House -- Hagee claims "Hillary Clinton has brought witchcraft into the White House." The witch in question, according to Hagee, was Clinton's one-time New Age spiritual adviser Jean Houston.

A quote from the L.A. Times link above (Worth it for the inanity.):

Houston is a scholar and philosopher who travels the world giving seminars on human potential and what she calls "social artistry," applying myth, history and spirituality to help effect social, political or personal change.

Can't tell the doofuses w/o the proverbial scorecard.

PuffHo Religion Section Wishes We Go Not W/ Bang, But Whimper

Moving Beyond the Pathology of History: Why We Need a Shift in Human Consciousness

What we need is a crowbar big enough to pop the collective human head out of its collective ass. (The obvious alternate take is "First, we need something resembling human consciousness.") Fancy it up w/ your hippie bullshit all you want, the world is interested in common-sense (if not final) solutions.

As Arnold Toynbee has well argued, many civilizations have risen and faded away, and others (like our own) have been transformed through something akin to a hybridization. But there is yet to be a civilization that undergoes that death-and-rebirth process that we have come to know to be the essence of individual transformation, as manifest through the experience of those who have completed it: the prophets, enlightened individuals and mythic heroes. In light of such a conception, it is appropriate that we hope that the decaying structure of Western Christian Civilization learns to die well, so that the regeneration of our social body may take place in the best of possible conditions.

Choices here: An affectless "What ever," or a bitterly sarcastic "Yeah, right." And whatever amorphous crap she's typing (Our emphasis. And really: What the fuck?) must be completed by "the prophets, enlightened individuals and mythic heroes." Mysticism, myth & what not: Feudalism & fascism. At least now we realize why there's a constant refrain from reactionaries that "The Left"/hippies/multiculturalists do hate everything decent & good (Xian & Western). Because of hippie-dippies in the PuffHo. Thanks, Huffer.

The reactionaries are still fooling themselves if they think any one who could or would type this paragraph, for example, is a threat to anything but rationality. (Therefore, no threat to reactionaries at all. Especially as reactionaries are all for those gypsies, tramps & thievesprophets, enlightened individuals and mythic heroes.)

You may rightly say that with so many shadows and challenges and with the avalanche of avarice accosting us, how can we ever deal with them in such a way that our higher humanity, our required human, is not compromised? We can either undergo a progressive deactivation of the conditioned and pathogenic personality wrought by present civilization, the way of the excellent therapist, or we can find the ways and means to the emergence of a more profound awareness in which the experience of being and the felt meaning of life have their foundation, and which, in spite of constituting our true nature, lies ordinarily, in our so-called civilized condition, in a darkened, or veiled condition -- as if asleep. With regard to methods, probably both are appropriate here: the release of old conditions and the discovery of ways into the light.

We made it to "higher humanity" before our eyes glazed over & our hair began to hurt, but our case is not typical, & your results may vary. (Is there a conjunction or two missing above, or are we an idiot for thinking it should at least ... connect, for lack of a better word?)

What actually drew us to this drivel (Moth to the flame, baby!) was the first sentence (unfortunately not backed up w/ more apocalypticism but w/ the Koom-buy-yah crap in the above dose) an at least semi-precious gem in a pile of poop.

How can we not hope for such a collective death-and-rebirth when the commercial interests of the powerful devastate our environment, our values, our quality of life, our education, our culture, and even life itself? And can we not hope that the destruction of life and the mind may at least serve to stimulate awareness and thus accelerate a regenerative process, in the same way that diseases, by stimulating the organism's defenses, can become the indirect cause of their own cure? Funny as it may sound, it was not at all absurd for the Sufi E. J. Gold to write during the 1980s in a humor magazine, "As Brother Rabbit said, maybe civilization is nature's way of telling us to slow down."

No, not absurd at all. Indeed, self-described "scholar, philosopher and researcher in human capacities," please do hope in one hand & crap in the other. Then let us know which piled up faster.

While typist Houston seems to hate Western Xian Civ as much as we do, as she is on a higher spiritual plane she's unwilling to deal w/ it as righteous, justified hate, as we do every day). Admittedly, our contempt extends to humans & almost all their constructs; we got an impression that hippie-dippie crap ("the Sufi") is, like, OK, man, w/ her. Like. Look at her work w/ "cultures." All over the world. My.

Not only has my experience working with individuals, groups and cultures over the last four decades and in over 100 countries nurtured my trust in the intrinsic goodness of humans and in the individual's possibility of leaving behind destructiveness, but it has also nurtured my hope in collective transformation ...

Sweet blood of Juses, what planet has she been visiting? Not one w/ which we have any familiarity.

Enough, let's let The Dictators sum up, w/ hippies, higher spiritual planes, vomit, & fear of aging, all in one number. Don't forget to wipe your ass!

State-Of-Virginia-Sanctioned Murder

Annals of Hypocrisy:

Why the discrepancy? The answer is obvious: Like other pro-lifers, McDonnell doesn't really believe that fetuses have the same right to life as the rest of us. If he did, he'd hold women responsible for contract hits on their fetuses. Instead, he forbids prosecution of these women and insults our intelligence by calling their non-prosecutable offenses "infanticide." Any legislator, attorney general, or governor who prohibited prosecution of infanticide procurers would promptly be thrown out of office. But in the context of abortion, politicians do this routinely. And pro-lifers applaud them.

If you seriously believe that killing a late-term fetus is infanticide, you should be outraged at the legal immunity guaranteed to purchasers of this crime under "pro-life" legislation. But regardless of your views on abortion, Virginia's double standard is plainly unjust. A state can't criminalize late-term abortion as infanticide, systematically prosecute the doctor but not the woman, and then execute a woman but not her triggermen for an arranged murder. It doesn't add up.

Ordinarily, this kind of inconsistency can be addressed in the course of time. But Lewis has no time. Is killing by proxy a noncrime or a capital offense? Gov. McDonnell, you have three days to sort this out.

A foolish consistency, yada.

Breeder Scum

Do you think Christine O'Donnell made this no wanking shit from whole cloth all by her lonesome? Hah! It was made from whole cloth by her Church. We quote from the Book Of Slate:

Under "Offenses against chastity," the church's Catechism says this:

By masturbation is to be understood the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure. "Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action." "The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose." For here sexual pleasure is sought outside of "the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved."

The church's Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics adds that

masturbation is an intrinsically and seriously disordered act. The main reason is that, whatever the motive for acting this way, the deliberate use of the sexual faculty outside normal conjugal relations essentially contradicts the finality of the faculty. For it lacks the sexual relationship called for by the moral order, namely the relationship which realizes "the full sense of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love." All deliberate exercise of sexuality must be reserved to this regular relationship.

Oops, speaking of which, gotta go.

Hey, Look Over There! No, There! Shiny!

From the morning email load that we don't get to until half the working stiffs in North America are already heading home:

We were quite curious about Muslim inbreeding. And became curiouser when a click made around 1435 PDT led us not to an article about this latest horror of the Musselmen, but to the slightly different horror of the PAJAMASMEDIA® homepage. Cursory searching of the site revealed the most recent item containing inbreeding is dated 2 August 2010. And all these link to the PJM homepage.

Apparent typist Jamie Glazov appears on the Google, but not w/ credit for anything recent to do w/ inbreeding. Yet. Ah. He does enjoy the theme.

A story disappeared by a website which regularly features Victor David Hanson & Michael Ledeen must have been a masterpiece, especially given Jamie's record.

UPDATE (1852 PDT, 7 September 2010): Unlike Jonah Goldberg, we needn't be obvious when we're on deadline or sacktime. Internet Scotsman Substance McGravitas points us to Pp. 1 & 2 of whatever it is. (Crud, now less sleepytime.)

Catholic Junior Anti-Sex League

Delaware Republican Senate primary candidate Christine O'Donnell:

When a married person uses pornography, or is unfaithful, it compromises not just his (or her) purity, but also compromises the spouse's purity. As a church, we need to teach a higher standard than abstinence. We need to preach a righteous lifestyle.

On an MTV show about abstinence (as summarized by Huffington Post), O'Donnell explained:

The reason that you don't tell [people] that masturbation is the answer to AIDS and all these other problems that come with sex outside of marriage is because again it is not addressing the issue. ... You're just gonna create somebody who is, I was gonna say, toying with his sexuality. Pardon the pun.

In the 90s era discussion on MTV, O'Donnell said, "The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery. So you can't masturbate without lust."

Yet one can certainly lust w/o pounding/rubbing one's pud. Does candidate O'Donnell therefore want everyone's hands cut off to improve their chances of living a righteous life? It would be irresponsible not to ask.

The Roman Catholic Church: Causing human misery w/ its anti-life, anti-sex, anti-human policies for well over a thousand yrs. Including the misery that Sister O'Donnell's espousal of Catholic claptrap will cause her to suffer as she sails to defeat.

Mainstreaming Mormonicity For The Fringe Religious Right

Writing about the rally, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat noted, snidely, that “a suspicious liberal could retort that all the God-and-Christ talk and military tributes were proof enough that a sinister Christian nationalism lurked beneath the surface” of Beck’s movement. Douthat was wrong: Beck’s Christian nationalism isn’t beneath the surface at all. It’s right on top.

It’s long been obvious, at least to those of us who follow the religious right, that the ostensibly secular Tea Party movement is deeply imbued with the ideology. In my 2006 book, Kingdom Coming, The Rise of Christian Nationalism, I tried to describe the worldview of the Christian right—its belief that the United States began as a Christian nation, blessed for its piety, before sinking to unimaginable lows as secularism gained ground. In the Christian nationalist imagination, the true catastrophe started with the New Deal, which brought socialism to America and turned government, rather than churches, into guarantors of social welfare. The Christian nationalist mind-set is apocalyptic: Time is always running out, a Satanic, hideously powerful enemy is always on the verge of instituting tyranny, and only a brave band of utterly committed believers can restore the nation to its lost glory.

Beck’s rally made the connection between the Tea Party and Christian nationalism explicit, as he called for Americans to go to “God boot camp” in preparation for a coming “global storm.” He drew heavily on the work of David Barton, a revisionist Christian nationalist historian and staple of Christian right literature. Barton specializes in combing through history and stringing together out-of-context quotes to argue that the founders intended for Christianity to serve as the basis of American government. In the early ’90s, as I reported in my book, he spoke at white supremacist events, but has since climbed into the Christian right mainstream. Beck has been championing Barton all year, and Barton spoke at Beck’s Divine Destiny pre-rally event on Friday at the Kennedy Center.

So typeth Michelle Goldberg. Now we know: Beck's been channeling this Barton loon since he ran out of W. Cleon Skousen material. M.G. continues:

Evangelicals have never accepted Mormonism as a branch of Christianity. Indeed, in the early 20th century, Christian writers often compared it to Islam. After all, it was polygamous and militant, born from the vision of a prophet claiming to be the latest in the Judeo-Christian lineage. As the Baptist author of the 1911 book Mormonism: The Islam of America put it, “[T]here is no other body of people from whom we have so much to fear in proportion to their numbers.”

Indeed, Bab-tiss. Can't wait for these potential schisms to start playing out. While waiting, we'll find some ammunition in that Bab-tiss book, courtesy of Google & Hah-vad, & fully enjoy the irony of fights between adherents of varying fairy tales. "Let's you & him fight," as they say.

Just one book in a series (from 98 yrs. ago):

Plus ça change ...

Born Under A Bad Sign

Franklin Graham explains it all for you on CNN, via TPM:

"I think the president's problem is that he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. He was born a Muslim, his father gave him an Islamic name."

We're sure the President appreciates the cogent advice concerning his problem. (Just one?) If we all put our heads together & think very, very hard, we may figure out Graham's problem. First we'll have to understand all of it (Our emphases.):

"Now it's obvious that the president has renounced the prophet Mohammed and he has renounced Islam and he has accepted Jesus Christ. That's what he says he has done, I cannot say that he hasn't. So I just have to believe that the president is what he has said."

Did he just not-say what we think he did? Hold onto your hats, maybe even get the flotation devices ready, there's more.

Graham further explained: "The confusion is, is because his father was a Muslim, he was born a Muslim. The Islamic world sees the president as one of theirs. That's why Gaddafi calls him 'my son.' They see him as a Muslim. But of course the President says he is a Christian, and we just have to accept it as that."

King noted that Graham and his father have met Obama, and prayed with him. With this context, King asked, does Graham believe Obama when he says he is a Christian?

"Well, you know, you can be born a Muslim, you can be born a Jew, but you can't be born a Christian," said Graham. "The only way you can become a Christian is by confessing your sins to God, asking his forgiveness, and by receiving Jesus Christ by faith into your heart, that Christ died for your sins, shed his blood on Calvary's Cross, and that God raised him to life. If you're willing to accept that and believe that, and let Jesus Christ be the lord of your life, God will forgive your sins, he will heal your heart, and that's the only way you can become a Christian. And so if the President has done that, then I would say he's a Christian, if that's what he has done."

There he goes again.

So, Taitz-style geographic birtherism having been back-burnered for the moment (Until 2012; expect many a state to have passed Presidential show-us-your-papers laws by then.) we're now to be subjected to religio-birtherism? Much better: You just try to prove what's in the Presidential heart.

And now that we know one "can be born" a Jew or a Musselman, that whole free will thing the eggheads have been struggling w/ has cleared right up. At least as far as Christians. Too bad for other, pre-destined suckers. (May we add, not nearly enough is being done to irk & alienate Hindus. There are hundreds & hundreds of millions of them, they're swarthy, & were the usual suspects to piss them off enough that a few of them looked at these United Snakes sideways, there'd be wonderful opportunities for Graham to practice his disaster Christianity on them after the smoke cleared.)

Also, please do not piss on our leg & tell us there are no racial (Putting it mildly.) aspects to all this.

The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother.

Is Graham getting this from the New Revised Klan version of the good book? (Always loved that one: ALL OTHER BOOKS ARE BAD!)

Telebision, however, is good.
Here too.

No King But Jesus. Or The Pope. Or Maybe Hitler. (UPDATED)

Courtesy commentator Whale Chowder (Nice nym., W.C. Now we're hungry.) leaving notes at S,N!, we give you:See? Just like the rest of the universe. Nothing to worry about. If our Catholic King has been well-bred, he & all his royal descendants will likewise be virtuous. It's always worked that way before.

Will this startling display of pre-Enlightenment feudalism get non-Catholic religio-fascists a little nervous, as the first sentence of the title indicates? We're in favor of any & all religious warfare, as long as it's the religious killing each other.

All you can stand from this colossal ninny.

Video also posted at Whiskey Fire, w/ different typing.

UPDATE (0017, 18 August 2010): Sissy boy Michael Voris, S.T.B., can't take the heat, & has made his call to overthrow the gov't. & put a Catholic King in charge "private." Let's see how long his response to the response stays up.

AOL

Another Outraged Liberal, that is. Righteously outraged, well expressed, absolutely true & would inspire jealousy, but the outraged liberal had to read the NYT piece to type the thing. (We also serve who only copy & paste.)

The Times report, however, descends into a kind of "liberal" media known-nothingism when it comes to how this became a controversy, suggesting that "a combination of arguable naïveté, public-relations missteps and a national political climate in which perhaps no preparation could have headed off controversy." This is a remarkable formula that manages to place the blame everywhere except where it belongs -- on a right-wing smear machine that went into overdrive in an effort to portray Rauf and Khan as terrorist sympathizers, an experience no one outside of contemporary partisan politics could have possibly been prepared for. The conservative media lied about the location of the project, they lied about Rauf's background, they lied about the project's funding, they lied about when the project would be built, and they lied about Rauf's political beliefs. And it would have been one thing if it had just been a small group of people lying, but they had an entire cable news station to lie for them, and politicians who were willing to amplify their smears. This controversy isn't about the "political climate." It's the fruit of a conscious, deliberate, and sustained effort.

Damned vicious Liberal Bible & its false equivalence.

The Nanny Church

State of The Discourse: Posts. And worse, posts made of Twitterings.

The Subject: Life itself, made easier for the simpleuncomplicated.

The Shorter: How to Fuck, for Married w/ Children Jesus Freaks. (Emphasis theirs.)

Husbands, don’t waste every date night at a movie where you can’t talk. Use the time to visit with your wife, draw her out, and study her like you do the Bible.

Husbands, plan out your date nights. Ask you wife in advance what sounds good, see what your options are, and make a plan. She’ll be thankful.

[...]

Men, you don’t pursue a woman to marry her and stop pursuing her. You pursue a woman to marry her and pursue her with more passion and creativity than ever. How’s it going husbands?

Men, if you don’t date your wife, someone else may eventually volunteer for the job.

Ladies, sometimes it’s a great gift to go into your husband’s world for a date night by doing something like putting on a jersey going to a game and eating a hot dog. His love language may just be hot dog.

Men: find a shirt with buttons, try two eyebrows instead of one, find a breath mint or 20, show up with a gift, don’t ogle other women, and go to a restaurant that does not have a spork.

Sometimes the best date night is date breakfast, date lunch, or surprise pick up your spouse from work for an hour at a hotel.

Those trying to make sense of this in a context more recent than "The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet" should be advised that our source is a mega-church w/ "Biblical manhood" as one of its themes.

Below, "Pastor" Mark & the Missis. What Ricky Nelson would look like today.

Hair colored as gawd intended it.

While this sort of "men are pigs, women are teasing sluts" role play is thought to be headed in the direction of buggy whips, eight-track cartridges & printed, bound books, it's to be understood that three-card monte & other bunco schemes will always have a few willing players. No wonder the parishioners need to be reminded how & why to "date."

24 Hrs. Later ...

... Former Prison Camp Guard Jeffrey Goldberg still seems to believe that John Podhoretz edits Mother Jones.

Really, what the hell goes on (or doesn't go on) at The Atlantic?

TARGET Up-Date: Putting One's Money Where One's Mouth Is

Tip of the Bouffant chapeau to Lesley, commenting & linking chez Sadly, No!

Closeted HitlerJugend Pope In Pictures

We must admit she looks better than usual here, w/ those bags under her eyes hidden.

See the other 14, un-enhanced.

Via The Daily Dish.