by Teh Nutroots | At Alicublog, Roy Edroso
comments on The Corner's descent into hysterical gibber-gibber.
It seems, children, that once upon a time, one wouldn't necessarily consider the phrase "conservative intellectual" to be an oxymoron. Nor would one have expected The National Review to regard itself as the mouthpiece of the GOP---regardless of how low the nation's conservative political party had chosen to descend. "Sic transit gloria Buckley," Edroso remarks.
The Corner right now, do a search of "Ayers" and you'll get over 100 matches. Now consider that this outburst of interest in a minor New Left character is prompted by nothing other than the McCain campaign's decision to publicize him as the key to Obama's personal corruption.
These boys and girls are writers and editors at a prestigious magazine, yet they can be dragooned into this service as easily as felons into a road gang....
Of coruse, there's plenty of undiscriminating right-wing bilge elsewhere. At The Village Voice, Edroso has done a round-up of the week in wing-nuttery: "It covers stupidity, racism, and homophobia -- sort of a conservative trifecta." (Alicublog)
Update. Hilzoy has more on the meltdown at The Corner---a great round-up of the free-flowing stupid. How I larfed! Only David Frum is still comparatively sane.
Sadly, No! makes cruel fun of the following "reasoning."
How can anyone who actually follows this stuff, who reads Freddoso, Kurtz, and scores of other reliable sources of information, conclude that Obama is not some wild-eyed radical?
Bwah ha ha ha ha hahahahahahahaha heeeeeh! But let's be fair----it must suck to see your entire belief system, and all your articles of faith, invalidated by reality. No wonder they're as erratic as the GOP candidate they all hate, but feel they have to support (because: GOP).
Or....what Kevin Drum says:
As regular readers know, I'm a fan of NRO's The Corner, which I think of as sort of a direct pipeline into the conservative id. Lately, as an Obama victory has become more and more likely, the Cornerites have started going completely around the bend, venting their frustration in lunatic conspiracy theories and manic love notes that are increasingly untethered from the real world....
But why are they going so stone batty? My theory is that Obama is driving them crazy the same way that Ali drove Foreman crazy in the Rumble in the Jungle..... Ali won by playing mind games on Foreman.....An enraged Foreman kept swinging wildly, but nothing worked. Ali took everything he could dish out, and the furnace-like heat finally did Foreman in. In the eighth round, drained and exhausted, he was knocked cold by an Ali combination that ended the fight.
The same thing is happening to McCain and his supporters. They're throwing everything they have at Obama, and he's just taking it. Nothing seems to have an effect, so they keep swinging ever more wildly. But that isn't working either, and it's driving them crazy.....And so they become ever more unhinged, making up wilder and wilder stories and becoming more and more enraged when they can't get any traction with them.... At this rate, their next stop is a padded cell at Arkham.
And finally, and most awesomely of all, Whiskey Fire , discussing
the 487,982nd hothouse paragraph at NRO this week alone, in which the author attempts, through the comical disgorgement of ridiculous detail, to prove that Barack Obama may be too much of a Nut for ordinary Americans to accept. It's like getting fashion tips from a man wearing a clown nose & fruit hat, with a live salmon down his pants: "Your tie does not match your socks. Giggle! Calm down, Mr. Wriggles!" Frap frap slap. "Eeeek!" (Exit, pursued by a bear.)
It is a very edifying spectacle. Strangely admirable, though, like the band that kept on playing as the Titanic slowly slid 'neath the frigid tide. Except in this case they're all playing kazoos. Badly. (Whiskey Fire)
Strangely, though, Kathleen Parker ("the PoFolk's Maureen Dowd") isn't comfortable with the direction McCain and Palin are taking the GOP in. "Put the gloves back on," she begs.
Neither McCain nor Palin would dare mention Obama's middle name, Hussein, but they can play up Obama's past associations and let others connect the dots. Terrorist. Muslim. Dangerous. Other.
It is legitimate to question character and dubious associations -- and Ayers is certifiably dubious. The truth is, Obama should have avoided Ayers, and his denouncement of Wright was tardy. But this is a dangerous game.
The McCain campaign knows that Obama isn't a Muslim or a terrorist, but they're willing to help a certain kind of voter think he is. Just the way certain South Carolinians in 2000 were allowed to think that McCain's adopted daughter from Bangladesh was his illegitimate black child.
But words can have more serious consequences than lost votes and we've already had a glimpse of the Palin effect.
Dana Milbank of The Washington Post reported that media representatives in Clearwater were greeted with taunts, thunder sticks and profanity. One Palin supporter shouted an epithet at an African-American soundman and said, "Sit down, boy."
McCain may want to call off his pit bull before this war escalates. (Townhall, emphasis added)
Doubtful, but thanks for bleating, little Republican sheep, even if it's too little and too late. As Brad says at Sadly, No!,
This is remarkable. I can’t remember seeing anyone inside Wingnut Nation ever give up the game like this....
Furthermore, not being an easily frightened, essentially cowardly Republican sheep who is genuinely afraid of "the other", the subtext of so many public allegations that there'll be a race war if Obama doesn't win or if the election is perceived as black folk to be unfair strikes me as abject nonsense. Keep the gloves off, Palin and McCain. Let a new generation of voters see exactly how low Republicans will go to hold on to power.
Meanwhile, The Black Snob points out that none of the "shocking" allegations against Obama are new or freshly aired, not that it matters.
You're too late. Unless you find something new all you're doing is preaching to the Sean Hannity choir.
But don't let me stop you. Please, discuss this instead of the fact that we're all screwed because there's between $16 and $60 trillion in funny money out there according to 60 Minutes. Go ahead. Get the yokels all riled up in this "us against the world" garbage that the ruling class has been using it since early colonists used the "specialness" of whiteness to separate white indentured servants from black indentured servants who were, quite suddenly, turned into slaves.
We know why they do it. For the base, the mau-mauing just plain works.
Sybil Vane at Bitch Ph.D points out the sheer incoherence and inconsistency of the Pretend Maverick (or "Doofus") ticket.
McCain opposes drilling in ANWR, while Palin gleefully encourages supporters to chant “drill, baby, drill.” Palin packages everything that has to do with Washington as out of touch, corrupt, and wishy-washy, while McCain distinguishes himself from Obama by referring over and over to his long years in the Senate. McCain has long been a media darling, but Palin suggests that everything coming through the “filter” of mainstream media is biased and flawed. McCain wants to gov’t to buy up bad mortgages and engineer new price negotiations, Palin wants gov’t to get out of the way and stop creatin’ problems when you mean to solve ‘em. McCain says you need a record of foreign policy experience to handle the position, but Palin says her trade meetings with Russia should do the trick.
It doesn't add up, or hang together, or even make elementary sense (as in "to someone with first-grade level reasoning powers").
On the other hand, it allows the jabberers of the far right---see Edroso's piece above---to argue simultaneously that: (1) Obama is not experienced enough, and yet Palin is; (2) that Palin's ties through her husband to her state's "Alaska First" secessionist party don't prove anything about her character, patriotism, or love of America, but that Obama's acquaintance with Professor Ayers does; (3) that McCain is good because of his years of Senate experience and that Biden is bad because of his years of Senate experience; and on and on.
Speaking of people who are oblivious to both sense and tone, why is Camille Paglia still blathering away at Salon? Among so much else that is hilariously inane in comparison to her inflated, self-important prose she says:
I was admiring not only her always shapely and syncopated syllables but the innate structures of her discourse -- which did seem to fly by in fragments at times but are plainly ready to be filled with deeper policy knowledge, as she gains it (hopefully over the next eight years of the Obama presidencies). Even if she disappears from the scene forever after a McCain defeat, Palin will still have made an enormous and lasting contribution to feminism...People who can't see how smart Palin is are trapped in their own narrow parochialism -- the tedious, hackneyed forms of their upper-middle-class syntax and vocabulary.".
Scott Lemieux: "Yes, if only we could all adopt the lucid, simple syntax and vocabulary of Camille Pagilia."
Also: see TBogg's shorter Camille Paglia.
Princess Sparkle Pony must not have read Camille's drivelling. He is over Sarah Palin. In a post titled "Ugh," he writes;
There's cretinous Sarah Palin with her stupid novelty moose bag on her way to talk to her demented, imbecilic, bloodthirsty fans with her doddering, angry old running mate. Once there, they will whip their followers into a murderous, hateful frenzy. Please note the talking points tucked into her bracelet.
But he is a fair person and therefore qualifies a previous comment on the lack of diversity at Palin McCain events as follows:
I suggested yesterday that there seems to be a somewhat telling lack of diversity in the crowds attending John McCain's and Sarah Palin's rallies. The above picture, however, clearly shows that they allow both blonde AND brunette white people to attend their events, and they are said to be making inroads into the red-headed community. My apologies.(Correction)
And speaking of wingnuts in the wild, Kiss My Big Blue Butt reports:
While working my shift at the Democratic headquarters today, some dude...came blasting in the front door waving a legal pad and pen demanding in a voice that sounded like he borrowed it from the garbage disposal that I give him Barack Obama's address right now this very minute because he was going to demand, demand I tell you, that Obama tell the truth about William Ayers....
First, I told him to quit hollering because I've only got one nerve left and he was getting all over it....He continued to holler and wave around his legal pad, pronouncing "Sean Hannity" as if it was a holy word.
I going to get the truth out of Barack Obama," he yelled and pointed to his legal pad and jerked his Bic pen around in the air like it was a saber.I'm married to a lawyer. I ain't scared of no damn legal pad. I can whip the tarnation out of a legal pad....
I told him to get the dickens outta here. He said he wasn't leaving until I gave him Barack Obama's address.
I know this will come as a shock to you, but I do not have Barack Obama's address. (KMBBB)
She called the police. Afterwards, she put a sign up on the door:
If you’re here to fuss at us about Obama, minorities, lib’rals, welfare, abortion, Muslims, uppity women, social security or the tears of the baby Jesus…
CALL RUSH! Call Hannity!
Heck, call Colmes!
But if you come in here yelling, screaming, threatening, or shaking your fist in our faces, we’re going to fall down laughing.Then, we’re going to CALL THE POLICE.Don’t say we didn’t warn you .
Join in the fun at Memeorandum.
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