I Don't Like You Either

Snark O' the Day: Not Your Grandma's End of the Year Review

No, it's Flying Rodent's!

And as he says, and we agree, it was a very odd year.   For example,

It was the year when it finally became apparent that the West's economy was entirely based upon the ruling class's willingness to believe in the literal existence of golden unicorns that shoot rubies out of their eyes and gold bricks out of their arses, leading to massive government investment to shore up the ruby-shooting, gold-shitting unicorn industry...

...And it was a year in which the great and the good leapt to their feet in spirited defence of lowly Georgia, finally opening their mouths to righteously denounce the mighty Russian bastards, before slowly sitting back down, opening their newspapers and pretending they'd never spoken as it emerged that the Russo-Georgian War was a bit more of a level-bastardry field than we had initially been led to believe.

Here are a few specifics (he worked backwards starting with December 2008) from Part 1:

Snark O' the Day: How Much do Conservatives HATE AMERICA? Sadly, No! (& Its Commentariat) Attempts to Answer

All during the campaign we kept hearing from Sarah Palin that Obama and his supporters didn't think about America the same way she and the morons who voted for her aspire to think of it or give it the same blind love and loyalty that the wingnuts claim to give it.  In a way, this is true.  We think it's the duty of the citizen of a democracy to place democratic ideals before blind loyalty and that "tough love" is required to keep the country on the right path. 

Joel Stein, who---at least when writing in character--- is a conservative's idea of a liberal, may or may not understand this.   Affecting to speak for all liberals, he said:

Sure, we liberals claim that our love is deeper because we seek to improve the United States by pointing out its flaws. But calling your wife fat isn’t love. True love is the blind belief that your child is the smartest, cutest, most charming person in the world, one you would gladly die for. I’m more in ‘like’ with my country.”

Conservatives had a field day with this, ingenuously taking him at his word and assuming that he is infallible on the subject of liberalism and is appointed by all liberals to speak for them.  And so Clif at Sadly, No! thoughtfully compiled a list of all the things those America-lovin' wingnuts HATE HATE HATE!!!!! about their country.

Snark O' the Day: Betty Cracker on Camille Paglia

by Damozel | I read Sexual Personae Vol. 1 in---what was it? 1992?  A LONG time ago, anyway---and I really enjoyed it.  I love reading other people's literary hallucinations, even when I don't buy into them, and Paglia's hypnotic hyper-visual prose style is exceedingly well suited to the discussion of painting and literature. 

Though I couldn't agree less with her fundamental premises, I enjoyed reading her strange and wondrous reframings of my favorite works of art and literature.  It was like looking at them...um, through a glass, and darkly. Some of her eerier interpretations (on Sade, on Blake, on Baudelaire, on Coleridge on Swinburne) are forever seared upon my memory, not necessarily in a good way or in accordance with my wishes.

So I wish she hadn't ruined it all for me by trying to get herself positioned as some sort of cultural (including popular culture) arbiter.  Not satisfied with being a critic and commentator, she wanted to be Ye Supreme Arbiter of American Popular Culture. 

Snark O' the Day: World O' Crap Reviews a Review Coulter's Latest [ Guilty]

Er, Coulter?  Ann Coulter?  Oh.  Yeah.  We remember Ann Coulter.

Ann’s wardrobe consists entirely of black cocktail dresses from ”Skanks ‘R Us.”  You know, the title of her book reminds me of that pretentious Calvin Klein perfume ad from the ’80’s with the slogan, “If obsession is a sin, let me be guilty.”  In Ann’s case, I guess the line would be, “If an obsession with demonizing half the country is a sin, let me be guilty, and then send me to Gitmo for the rest of my life.”  Ah, Coulter, the smell of it.  Smells like tobacco breath, stale gin, and desperation.

Snark O' the Day: IOZ, Larison, & TBogg Dis Camille Paglia, Raising a Question that Begs an Answer

Yeah. First IOZ, addressing Paglia's genius at connecting the dots between separate universes and wagging the dog by its tail.  IOZ:

Because he is a cruel man, Daniel Larison reminds us all that Camille Paglia . . . exists . A . . . passage:

Snark O' the Day: Obama's Birth Certificate---The Ongoing Questions

Now that Obama has a real scandal on his plate, this birth certificate one looks sort of sad and sketchy and tattered.  At the rate we're going the Right will be calling for impeachment before he's inaugurated.... But anyway, here's Gavin M. bringing the eyerolling fun. 

Snark O' the Day: Neocons Want Barry O. to Fix Everything Bush Broke

Suddenly, it's our problem and only our problem.  They'll just stand on the sidelines and jeer.  If they had any constructive ideas, or anything like a solution, we'd have heard them back when it mattered.

From Father Tyme at  BlondeSense:

Ain’t it just curious now with the NeoCon and Republican roaches braving the light of day, that all of a sudden they profess concern about, oh, food quality, health items, housing, jobs...ethics...etc.?

Snark O' the Day: Christmas Comes Early for the Constitution (The Talking Dog)

Yes, now that Bush doesn't need them anymore, the Supremes will finally take a look at the limits on the executive's powers in what The Talking Dog calls "the second most important case of our lives."

Snark O' the Day: The Supremes to Consider the Obama Birth Certificate "Controversy

Bark Bark Woof Woof woofs about this glorious waste of taxpayer dollars in the interests of settling once and for all a "worrying" "issue":

The United States Supreme Court is going to decide whether or not to hear a case claiming that Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen and therefore ineligible to serve as President of the United States...

Snark O' the Day: GM Constructs a Memory Hole (Agitprop)

If you hadn't just lived through 8 years of Bush and Cheney, you wouldn't believe this could be possible.

Since you just have, your outrage and incredulity meters shorted out a long time ago and there's nothing left of them but a few busted springs going boingy-boingy-boingy 24/7.   You'll probably just say, "Huh."   So I'm noting this for later, when we've all had our sense of moral outrage restored at least to pre-Katrina levels.

Snark O' the Day: How Dems Can Reclaim the Integrity of the Marketplace

Without presuming to argue the religious questions addressed in the post, we were very interested in the conclusion of Poputonian's post at Rumproast, which takes a sharply incised line on the GOP conception of the free market. 

Snark O' the Day: IOZ on the Secularization of the Season

by Damozel | Writing on Henniger's dog-whistling about the secularization of the season, IOZ says:

Adam Smith it ain't.

It takes no particular perspicacity to note that our holidays-without-the-holy came about not through the secularizing efforts of "Northerners and atheists," the gangs of post-doctoral post-modernists slavering to gnaw on the soft edges of Christendom, but through the commercializing efforts of the various and sundry pillars, columns, flutes, and scrolls of American state capitalism. The gradual erosion of "Merry Christmas" in favor of "Happy Holidays" doesn't mark a moral retreat in the face of religious multiculturalism or anti-Christian laïcité. It marks the commerce-driven extension of a shopping season, one that now extends from before Halloween to the post-New Year sales. "Happy Holidays" isn't culturally inclusive; it's commercially inclusive.

Which --- as the sinners of Hadleyburg remarked in a slightly different context --- has got the Hallmark on it.

Snark O' the Day: Jon Swift Advises Us to Celebrate Thanksgiving Before Barack Abolishes It

by Mr. J.Q. Public | Swift's Thanksgiving Day post is an unusually savage one.  But there is a reason for that. 

Thanksgiving celebrates the day that Pilgrims and Indians sat down to eat together before the gay secularist Indians divided this country and tried to foist their atheism and savage decadent culture on the God-fearing pilgrims.

Snark O' the Day: "Raging" "Impotent" Netroots, Eh?

by Blue Stockings |  I don't think so.  But it's a meme that's emerging since the Lieberman thing and the media are running it for all it's worth.  Here's a piece by James Kirchick in The New York Daily News to prove it, all "Obama isn't afraid of the raging, impotent netroots because Joe Lieberman blah blah netroots furious rah rah blah dee blah blee." Read it yourself. 

Snark O' the Day: WSJ Blames Atheists for the Collapse of Wall Street

by Teh Puppet Mistress | Myers:  The Wall Street Journal is a Very Silly Place

The United States has some serious problems: an ugly war, a shaky economy, a bad government (on the way out, at last). It's been a rough eight years. So of course it must be someone's fault, and Daniel Henninger has a simple explanation: blame the atheists. Especially blame the atheist's successful war on Christmas. He says, "A nation whose people can't say 'Merry Christmas' is a nation capable of ruining its own economy."

Snark O' the Day: Conservatives Mull Over their Defeat Some More

  by Teh Nutroots |   This time it's Jon Henke at Pajamas Media.  I wouldn't be bothering were it not for the awesomeness of Roy Edroso's response. 

At Pajamas Media, Jon Henke looks to rightwing history for guidance:...

...the Left did not retake the executive and legislative branches by being more liberal or more moderate, or by clever political jujitsu. Democrats became the majority because they changed the story.

So true. And what a story it was: "The Republican have fucked this country up so badly that you'll even vote for a black guy to get it unfucked."

The Republicans are welcome to top it if they can. I suspect their offer will be some variation of "we hate fags."  [Narrate This]

Snark O' the Day: Burning Christmas Crosses, Anyone?

by Blue | Speaking of Christmas,  here's a new way for you to light up your yard this season.   Princess Sparkle Pony has the photo and a comment:

If you haven't seen it yet, this is a thrillingly real product offered by the American Family Association, and it officially makes them the most retarded retards in Retardistan.

Snark O' the Day: Just Put the Economy Out of Its Misery Already

by Blue Stockings | So here is IOZ, a king in the land of the disaffected, tilting back his chair and raising his eyebrow at the valiant physicians of the left trying to pump some life back into the economy while brushing a fleck of the gold standard off his velvet sleeve.  In a post called Bail. Out, he writes:

Snark O' the Day: What Makes a Jonah Goldberg a Jonah Goldberg?

by Teh Puppet Mistress | Susan of Texas answers:

Jonah Goldberg has an extraordinarily strong Authoritarian drive. It's strong enough to override an also-strong rebellious streak, embodied in his love of anti-social pop culture heroes like Homer and Bart Simpson and in South Park. It's strong enough to crush any creative streak that might have lurked in this former tv writer and producer. It's even strong enough to make him support the types of people who would be horrified by Goldberg, an East Coast elite Jewish writer; the evangelicals.

Jonah states you can't be conservative without being religious. He appeals to authority by listing several conservatives that purport to be religious. It does not occur to him that his Authorities might be lying or disbelievers ; for instance, it's well know that Karl Rove is an atheist. Jonah also seems to state that if you are religious you must also be conservative, or else you will start acting out of mercy and give away to the poor, which would make you a liberal. QED, in Jonah's snarled mind.   (More at The Hunting of the Snark)

Snark O' the Day: Women in the Military

by Blue Stockings |  Res ipsa loquitur.

From Pam's House Blend:

So, I'm elated when I read this:

First Female Four-Star General Promoted

Snark O' the Day: The Know Nothing Party

by Blue Stockings | First, Hilzoy said that she's done taking the wingtards at The Corner seriously, now that they're washed up as a force of any sort.  And added, "I wish them well, but I will not comment on them unless I see some particular reason to do so. I now have the luxury of debating only thoughtful, sane conservatives who argue in good faith, and I intend to enjoy it."

Snark O' the Day: Did Obama Crib His Acceptance Speech from Hitler?

by Teh Puppet Mistress | Wingnuts all over the blogosphere are busily whipping themselves up into pleasurable extremes of terror.  It's worrying---what do bloggers such as the one cited below intend to achieve, one asks?---but also, if  you can preserve your detachment, exceedingly funny in a horrifying kind of a way.

From Scott at World O'Crap:

I thought the news of Obama’s victory would strike wingnuts in one of two ways.  Either they’d sit, stinking and unwashed in a corner of their room, blinking rapidly and speaking in tongues to a headless Barbie doll — what we might call “the K-Lo Option” — or else they’d attach a hobby horse to their computer chairs, sort of like those Cowboy booster seats you used to sit on at the barber shop, and charge at full gallop into the World Wide Web on a suicidal crusade of blood and thunder, hacking at heretics and heathens and howling in rage and agony like a gutted Mel Gibson at the end of Braveheart.  It never dawned on me that they would arise the next day, scratch their cat under the chin, pour a nice cup of tea, sit down at the keyboard, and in a prim, dainty, ladylike fashion, go quietly batshit insane, as though we’d entered an alternate universe where Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote was the star of Dexter. But color me abashed, because RenewAmerica is proudly offering Mary Mostert’s latest:

As we’ve said before, this wasn’t an election, it was the world’s longest Usenet thread, and Godwin’s Law is no longer an observation on probability, it’s a regulation imposed by wingnuts, sort of like those Homeowner Association bylaws that require everyone to landscape solely from the pre-approved list of shrubs, and to paint all exterior trim a uniform beige.....[More]

Snark O' the Day: "Boycott Utah"

by Blue Stockings |   This comes from Ken Ashford of The Seventh Sense and relates to the heart-breaking outcome of the various actions by states to ban gay marriage:

I have nothing against Mormons per se, but since it was the Church of Latter-Day Saints that funded Prop 8 in California, which isn't even their state, I think this call for a boycott of Utah might be a good idea....

It's fine if Mormons don't believe in gays having equal rights, but.... wait, that reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from Angels in America:

Harper: I'm a Mormon.

Prior: I'm a homosexual.

Harper: Oh. [pause] In my church we don't believe in homosexuals.

Prior: In my church we don't believe in Mormons.  (More)

And therefore....you make the logical leap. 

Nice.

 

I have nothing against Mormons per se, but since it was the Church of Latter-Day Saints that funded Prop 8 in California, which isn't even their state, I think this call for a boycott of Utah might be a good idea....

It's fine if Mormons don't believe in gays having equal rights, but.... wait, that reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from Angels in America:

Harper: I'm a Mormon.

Prior: I'm a homosexual.

Harper: Oh. [pause] In my church we don't believe in homosexuals.

Prior: In my church we don't believe in Mormons.  (More)

And therefore....you make the logical leap. 

Nice.

 

Snark O' the Day: "Splitters!"

by Damozel |  I normally wouldn't draw our daily dose of snark from the same blog two days running, but TBogg is a master, and this---like yesterday's---is masterly, both in its ruthless efficiency and accuracy in identifying and lancing the latest unattractive inflammatory groundswell and its peerless use of pop culture references as the instrument of choice.  Yesterday, it was Galaxy Quest.  Today:  one of my top five all-time films, Life of Brian.

Obama got elected three days ago and the wingers are all depressed, which they consider to be proof that they are also now, and destined in the future to be, oppressed.  They're always mad, but now they're even madder---as well as in a panicky tailspin---and so the leading lights of the right are busily organizing a Republican Resistance movement.   

Sadly, their defeat has forced them to confront how much they actually hate one another.  None of them can agree even on the fundamentals of how to build a better GOP.

TBogg considers the struggle of the emergent warring sects to find some common ground, and their ensuing abject failure:

Divided we stand"...no...wait...um... "united we flail" ...no, that's not it. Crap, I think I wrote it down on a Wendy's napkin. Look in the back seat of my car.... Oh, here we go....

He's got the list, the clip, and the final word. 

Snark O' the Day: The Palinites

by Teh Nutroots | Angry wingers gird up their nuts to defend the honor of St. Palin.  Check out TBogg's response: By Joe the Plumber’s hammer, by the sons of Wasilla, you shall be avenged. 

Snark O' the Day (Second Course): Who is Sarah Palin?

From Fables of the Reconstruction:

She's George W. Bush without the intellect.

Snark O' the Day: Who is Megan McArdle?

by Teh Nutroots | ...that is to say, the Megan McArdle employed by The Atlantic as their so-called econoblogger?

Susan of Texas provides a clue.

The first time, you think Megan has a tin ear for insulting and potentially damaging comparisons.

Barack Obama will break 90%--or do really well, with third-world dictator popularity levels.

But by the second time, you know it's deliberate.

This is not particularly urgent, since my voting "options" were New York and DC; in both places, the question is not who will carry the state, but whether Obama will get a mere 80% or so of the vote, or achieve Saddam Hussein-like vote totals*.  *Before you say it--no, not by fixing the election, by being so popular that he achieves fairly what Saddam achieved by force.

Gaaaaah.  That just might be a "subtle" enough dog-whistle to confuse the people who read her column (judging strictly by the comments). 

Snark O' the Day: Little Elmers Everywhere

by Teh Nutroots | Deb C at our sister blog some time ago compared McCain and Obama to Elmer and Bugs.   In fact she has been calling wingnuts "Elmers" for the last couple of years.  They keep doing the same thing harder, even when it's clear it ain't working.  Maybe they are all insane and it wasn't as obvious when everything was going their way.  I guess it's an analogy that's occurred to a lot of us.

Presented for your consideration:  The Corner at NRO. 

Anyway I gotcher snark o' the day right here.

Poll after poll and focus group after focus group reveal that not only have attacks on Obama's character turned off those vital on-the-fence independents, but they may be the single biggest reason that the campaign has squandered what was a close race not that many weeks ago and is not making headway in the voter-rich Philadelphia 'burbs where voters are far more concerned about the economy.

Yet there they were referring to Obama as "an old-fashioned liberal" who would be "redistributionist in chief" if elected, would "lose the war" in Iraq and, horror of horrors, is "interrupting the World Series for an infomercial."

They still don't get it.  And never will.  (Kiko's House)

Yep.  While everyone else is gritting their teeth to stiffen the upper lip against the daily assault of bad economic news, they're jumping up and down at Toon Town rallies, scarlet faced and spluttering, "You Wascally Wabbit!" or swearing incoherently while firing their tiny, ineffectual guns.  The overgrown kids constituting the 24 percenters--who are the only people who show up for McCain/Palin rallies--laugh uproariously, stomp their feet, and applaud.  They're the kids who identified with Elmer and Yosemite Sam.   

Meanwhile, Bugs has calmly wandered off the screen and is busy elsewhere.  Win, lose, or draw, he's not going anywhere.

This is how come any moderate Republicans or on-the-fence independents out there who are still on the fence and are leaning McCain-ward ought to be very, very nervous. 

We've had eight years of an administration that's exploited the anger and fear of the nation's least rational (i.e., "the base") and proved over and over again that when that doesn't work, all they know how to do is to splutter and jump up and down. 

Ask yourself this: Do we need four more years of President Elmer and VP Yosemite Sam?

Snark O' the Day: John McCain, Cocktail Weenie

Attaturk:

We've learned repeatedly during this campaign that the ever tone-deaf McCain drops certain phrases like anvils. From "my friends" to "I'm a Maverick" to "Joe the Plumber" his ability to turn quaint into quackery has been a sight to behold.

But the oft turned phrase "Georgetown Cocktail Parties" that McCain claims to rebel against and set up as a qualification for Palin is amongst the dumbest.

Who has been a bigger fixture on "the hot-barbecued sauced weenie on a toothpick and crab dip circuit" than John Sidney McCain the Third?

Besides, one thing we've learned about Palin, if she showed up at a party thrown by Sally Quinn, you know she'd bring whatever random daughter who isn't pregnant to go with her and put the whole tab on the State of Alaska.