I'm a Loser, Baby, So Why Don't You Kill Me

Listening to the new Tool album (possibly a review in a couple days), strolling about on the internets, this little gem over at Balloon Juice becomes more and more interesting the more I look at the two sad sacks in the photo from Sam Bishop's Twitter feed. Definitely click on the photo to embiggen. Be thankful that at least you know these two aren't able to contribute to the gene pool, since no woman in her right mind would fuck either of them on a dare.

But they are genuinely fascinating, and not just in the you know, guys, technically 'incel' is not exactly the same as 'straight', right? sense. I mean, they took some time to get the look down and then "travel" (as opposed to drive) eight hours....to do that for several more hours. (Maybe they traveled first and then got the get-up on. Same amount of time, different sequence of events.)

It makes me think of all the simple life-changing (for them) activities they could have enjoyed on this nice holiday weekend:

• Get a cheap guitar at a pawnshop and learn a few basic chords.
• Read a book that isn't about a comic-book character.
• Do a few sit-ups. Seriously, these guys look like a massive wad of chewed bubble gum, like all they do is jerk off and eat powdered donuts.
• Go outside and toss a ball around for a while. Fresh air and sunshine works wonders.
• Put a nice steak or some chicken on the barbecue. Burgers, hot dogs, whatever. Even public parks have grills. Crack open a beer. The first sip of beer -- even cheap beer -- on a summer afternoon is glorious, life-affirming. Smell the meat sizzling on the grill. Breathe in the day and just look around. Put your damned phone away for a few minutes.
• Talk to a female -- like, a living, breathing, right-there-in-front-of-you woman. They're pretty cool in 3D. True story. Don't worry about what to say to her. Hey, how's it going? Beautiful afternoon, right? We're just cueing up a few burgers, having a beer, tossing the ball. How 'bout them [random NFL team], ready for the new season? Don't overthink it, and don't talk about your fucking Sargon of Akkad throw pillow, or the collection of stray cat skulls you have in your parents' basement.

Whether Dumb and Dumber got to the (ahem) Straight Pride Parade via Greyhound or the Mom-mobile, the fact is that all of the above would have cost the same or less, and been far more productive in being, you know, a functioning human being, rather than a hopeless loser. I don't know who the hell these weirdos think they're pwning. I mean, I kinda feel sorry for them, that their parents clearly don't care enough to point these basic things out.

More seriously, bearing in mind the "all poodles are dogs, but not all dogs are poodles" principle, this is exactly the sort of person who, given opportunity and proximity to firearms and/or pharmaceuticals, eventually snaps after realizing what his life really is one too many times. Slaps on the Kek facepaint and the rainbow wig one last time and goes all It on the nearest Walmart, only with dad's Bushmaster and a high-capacity drum.

I don't know what, if anything, can "be done" about these guys, you know, preventively. Part of it depends on how old they are, which admittedly is difficult to tell from the costumes. Maybe they're young, in high school or just out, seventeen to twenty-one, in which case, good chance they'll grow out of it the second they figure out that real live women are way better than throw pillows and porn.

If they're more like twenty-five, give or take, it may be more contingent on what their job prospects are, if they have the drive to improve their skill set and get the fuck out of whatever hick town they're festering in. If they're thirty or older, you better watch out for them, especially if you're female.

I mean, there's a solid chance guys like this snap earlier than that; the Dayton and El Paso and Gilroy shooters weren't even old enough to legally drink, none of them. But common sense should tell you everything you need to know if you encounter someone like that who is past a certain age. Anyone who's thirty years or older and doing what those guys in the photo are doing, their whole life is a fucking cry for help, guaranteed.

Seriously, it's Labor Day weekend; it's gotta be hot under a clown costume, rainbow wig, and face paint. That's dedication, well past the usual point of hurr, just kidding, ironic memes you guys! these schmucks usually troll with. There's a pathology at work there, and it's not just the surface gay-bashing nonsense that is ostensibly the focus of the gathering.

People with options and opportunities and normal modes of social interaction don't do this sort of shit, obviously. Whether a light bulb goes on for some of them, or they're able to meet someone that they trust who can lead them away from this self-immolation with like-minded weirdos, hopefully at least some of them find their way out of what must be a bewildering, exhausting way to live.

I know how it is to feel like a dork in high school, liking girls but not really knowing how to talk to them, you know, like that. It takes some work to figure it out, but once you do, it's a snap. It's not that creepy "pickup artist" shit either, where pathetic assholes trick the incel dopes into thinking you can "get" women to do "whatever you want" like life is a porn movie.

You want to know the trick? Here it is, free of charge:  listen. Converse, be engaged, let her talk, be responsive. Don't do a data dump and tell her your life story on the first date. Don't be a creep and leer at her tits. Seriously, it's not that complicated. If you listen and she likes you, she will let you know pretty quickly if she's interested. And if not, it shouldn't be a problem to just move on, since you now know the trick, which is not really a trick.

Figuring out that little basic fact of life made my late teens and early-mid twenties fun, like unbelievably fun. And no, I don't just mean getting laid, though that's certainly part of it. But the back-and-forth of interpersonal contact, with your crew of male friends, as well as with women, is something that cannot be replicated with social media. As amusing as the gadgets of the current age are, it was something of a blessing to not have all those toys to fall back on at the time, to be forced in a sense to learn real social skills, because there wasn't much else to do otherwise.

And it seems like more and more people, especially young men, are reaching the age of "maturity" without understanding that very important difference, between the snarky memes and inside jokes of the virtual world, and the consequences of deploying that stuff on real live people right in front of you. They don't know quite how to operate as comfortably in meatspace, and so they retreat further into their weird little virtual worlds, where they are always right and mighty, and no one gives them weird looks and asks them what the fuck is up with the throw pillow.

If I was to tell those guys anything, rather than sweating the intricacies of "straight pride" or whatever bullshit they're masking their insecurities with this weekend, I'd tell them that, how fun life can really be when you're that age and the whole world is still out there waiting for you to engage with it, if you have the guts to meet it halfway. I literally cannot imagine ever wasting a holiday weekend traveling eight hours to dress up like an asshole and make a fool out of yourself, and I once saw Poison in concert. Someone should let them know that it really doesn't have to be that way, not even close.

Assbeckwards

"I'm not sure you can get AIDS by burning down your house, but I get your point." -- Sen. J. Billington Bulworth, D-CA

"It's morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money." -- W.C. Fields

Sigh. The problem is not that Glenn Beck might be a "traitor" or a "racist", the problem is that getting political commentary from him is about as bright as getting medical advice from a randomly picked reality-show contestant, or financial advice from someone who sleeps under a bridge. The problem is that Beck merely ventriloquizes the ignorant rage of a certain swath of people, many of whom actually have good reason to be angry, but never seem quite able to point it in a coherent direction.

Giving voice to proudly moronic boobism is an ancient and profitable American pastime, but organizing against it whilst the coffers are being looted by government-associated goons is like sending the SWAT team to bust a stumblebum juggling lemons, while the bank down the street is getting robbed. There's a practically infinite supply of metaphors and similes for this scenario -- oh, and the health care system's still a joke and the economy still sucks, and Saint Barry ain't fixin' either one. But by gawd Geico's been put on notice.

The problem is that one side's brilliant idea of political action is to strap on an AR-15 for a health-care rally, and the other side's is to boycott Whole Foods and Glenn Beck. Might as well market Bill O'Reilly toilet paper while they're at it.

Rush to Pudgement

Now that Billy Kristol has quit wasting everyone's time at the Times, the genius move is to replace him with Rush Limbaugh. What a great idea, if you live in a bizarro world without a coherent philosophy.

To wit, the Times should pick Rush Limbaugh or a comparable full spectrum heartland conservative who defended Palin. Someone who would shock the Upper East Side, not reinforce its worldview in subtle ways. If not Rush, then Steyn or Lileks or someone with the intestinal fortitude for a fight.

It's a tad muddled whether Ruffini is implying that Limbaugh is in any way a "heartland conservative" (which, you know, would be even more ludicrous than these folks usually are) or that such a political unicorn would be an adequate substitute for Limbaugh. It's the end of that weird sentence that is truly the most puzzling. Why is "defended Palin" a criterion for the gig, why would such a thing be a qual to flash, seriously? She is well on her way to her rightful place as a footnote, a distant memory of a demagogic sideshow. This betrays a whole host of obvious issues -- lack of actual seriousness and intellectual honesty among them -- but usually these guys tend to be a little more circumspect about overloading the clown car when they are constructing Serious Proposals.

Of course, Ruffini finishes up with the obvious -- that they really just want someone who will piss libruls off, give 'em a weekly titty-twister whilst throwing red meat to the goobers. The thing is, I know my share of Limbaugh listeners (at least in the past; strangely, most of them don't seem to be bothering with him much lately), and none of them read, and they sure as hell don't read the New York Times, not even when it's Twittered and RSS'ed. I don't think the angry codger market that Limbaugh caters to from his beach mansion is up for all these nifty tech gadgets.

Nor would Limbaugh even want the gig if it were offered. Why would he? He's a shill, a carny, an obscenely well-paid lackey. His schtick is passing out affirmations to the easily fooled, not engaging in open debate. He's not a writer; he's in his comfort zone with a handful of notes and press clippings, practicing his basso profundo, riffing on whatever he pulls out of his ass. He famously works without a script, so why would he suddenly want to start writing them, so the fanboyz can feel better about their incoherence and epic failures?

Their selling point is that they think that Limpballs is on Obama's shit list, not recognizing Obama's use of Fatboy's name simply as a signifier, a shorthand to indicate that Obama rightly wasn't going to have patience with dealing with that mess right now. If the opposition has a legitimate counter-argument or proposal, they could present it without the effusive lies and loaded rhetoric Limbaugh and his ilk truck in. Simple enough.

And Limbaugh has already back-waddled from his earlier assertions that he wanted Obama to fail, lamely demurring that since the country's fortunes are tied to Obama's, of course he wants Obama to succeed, but simply believes that the policies are doomed to fail. This is a difference without much of a distinction, especially since none of these talk-show bloviators nor their minority-party counterparts in Congress have produced anything besides the usual ankle-biting routine.

What they seem blissfully ignorant of is how consistently all of the Times' columnists are regularly slapped around by liberals and centrists. Friedman and Dowd get as much abuse from us as Kristol or Bobo get. Krugman, Rich, and Bob Herbert are relatively unscathed, but that's because they manage to avoid the pundit trap of not knowing what the hell they're talking about.

Some of the commenters' suggestions are equally hilariousinteresting: Pantload, Pornmumu, Coulter, et al. It's as if they don't realize that these are names that they recognize precisely because they have been able to avoid the pratfalls of meritocracy. The current epitome of conservatard punditry would have to be Rove's gig at the Wall Street Urinal -- months of defending the abysmal, catastrophic record of the chump he helped install.

There hasn't been anything conservative about these people in a long time. They're reactionaries, antidisestablishmentarians, counter-reformationists, whatever. But there is no longer any internal logic to their laundry list of imaginary grievances, pud-pulling jeremiads for the most unqualified candidate for higher office since Dan Quayle. I honestly can't think of anybody that would please these meatheads and not turn the op-ed page into an even bigger joke. But as far as an actual not-liberal writer who can present ideas coherently, they could do worse than Niall Ferguson. Or they could just even it up with addition by subtraction and send MoDo on permanent assignment.

Chacun à Son Gout

Roy shares the sad tales of fallen-on-hard-times conservabloggers, most notably the infamous tough guy Kim du Toit, which (as Roy points out) sorta undermines du Toit's usual credo of self-reliance. What ensues is a rather sad episode of the missus blegging for financial assistance, because Kim has been unable to work or exercise for nearly a decade because of chronic gout.

So, in that spirit of self-reliance, Mrs. du Toit cashed in her IRA to take the family around the world, get lap-band surgery for their daughter, take care of some "critical" home repairs, and re-up on server fees. (Apparently getting one of them free blogs somewhere would be, um, cybersocialism or something, sponsored by The Man, who is now a black man. Uh-oh.)

I have just enough compassion to feel at least a little bad for anyone in financial desperation, even complete donut-heads who spend most of their time berating people for being lazy and/or stupid. But jeez, people, it seems that all the bleggingcyberpanhandling in the world won't help you buy a clue. I mean, I love the missus' optimism, carefully couched in perhaps subconscious phrases such as "It’s time for others to step up and allow Kim a chance to sit down" and "....but [Kim's] novel writing MIGHT yield a small return, as he passes the time pursuing gainful employment, or considers a run for public office....". Just priceless.

Shit, the man's had seven years to write that novel, perhaps about a simple gout-afflicted man with simple dreams of ridin' his Rascal out to the shootin' range, and entertaining his cyberbuddies with leers and jeers, presumably at steers and queers. You know, he's been sitting down. Whether posting (no links; they're recent posts) boudoir photos of the insanely hot Monica Bellucci, or using Obama's name (since he got voted in, what, four days ago and is apparently just moments away from mass gun confiscation and re-education camps) to allude to German compound nouns of a certain origin, du Toit has always struck me as the thinking man's Dale Gribble, though perhaps that assessment may have to be adjusted to Bill Dauterive.

As for running for public office, well, that one pretty much writes itself, don't it? One assumes the usual continuation of the "god/guns/guts" platform of self-styled self-reliant folk, but again, some self-awareness is in order. People hold down jobs with agonizing pain all the time, even worse than (rolls eyes) gout and obesity. And I expect that the du Toits, in their near-deacde of hardship, have accepted no gubmint aid whatsoever in helping them financially transcend Mister Man's travails. It's a matter of principle here, folks. He better not even have special parking card.

In all seriousness, if the du Toits really want to start getting their financial house in order, maybe they'd buy some breathing room for that (rolls eyes again) novel to get finished if they, say, compiled a semi-coherent pastiche of Kim's rants over the years, slapped a title and cover on it, got a boutique print deal, and sold marked-up autographed copies to their readers.

And, you know, stopped using their retirement funds to put their kids through college and take them to Europe, just to sit around and wonder how the bottom dropped out. That's the kind of shit that keeps people like Suze Orman in business.

Kulturkampfers Über Alles

Weekend brilliance from the short-bus crowd [link via TBogg]:

An e-mail: "My husband and I just went to see American Carol. This is a really big deal because my husband has not been to a movie in a theatre since my daughter forced him to see Lord of the Rings, before that, it was Hannah and Her Sisters... So - this was a big, big deal. We went to the 1: 30 show, there was only about 20 people in the theatre, but we all laughed and rolled our eyes.... It was funny in the same way Airplane and Naked Gun. So, I wish more people would see it."

Hey, great story, occasional movie-goer! I sympathize with the urge to avoid paying ten bucks to sit through a half-hour of commercials and two hours of retards answering their cell phones, but when the last two movies you went to the theater for were Lord of the Rings and Hannah and Her Sisters, maybe your vote of self-affirmation is not quite the big, big deal you thought it was. Self-promoting mavericks and all. I betcha hubby don't think Tina Fey's sendups of the Baked Alaskan are as much of a stitch, but it's just a hunch.

Fashion Fatwas

Not sure if this purports to be a treatise on Muslim feminism, or a Robin Givhan knock-off.

Tassled turquoise cotton and flowered peach crepe flutter as I pull out a black-and-ivory striped headscarf for the day. When I was 22 and balked at buying a $30 paisley scarf, my best friend told me, "I never scrimp on scarves. If people are going to make a big deal of it, it may as well look good."

I embraced that principle, too, even when I was a scratch-poor graduate student. Today I sort my scarves, always looking to replace the frayed ones and to find missing colors, my collection shrinking and expanding, dynamic, bright: The blue-and-yellow daisy print is good with jeans, the incandescent purple voile for a night on the town, the gray houndstooth solidly professional, the white chambray anytime.

As beautiful as veils are, they are not the best part of being a Muslim woman -- and many Muslim women in Islamic countries don't veil. The central blessing of Islam to women is that it affirms their spiritual equality with men, a principle stated over and over in the Quran, on a plane believers hold to be untouched by the social or legalistic "women in Islam" concerns raised by other parts of the Scripture, in verses parsed endlessly by patriarchal interpreters as well as Muslim feminists and used by Islamophobes to "prove" Islam's sexism. This is how most believing Muslim women experience God: as the Friend who is beyond gender, not as the Father, not as the Son, not inhabiting a male form, or any form.

Of course she is saying all this from the safety of America, not Saudi Arabia, where she would be forbidden to drive, and forbidden to leave the house without her "tent of tranquility". Does she not understand the difference between being allowed to practice her religion as she sees fit, and being treated like a third-class citizen because of her gender? She seems oblivious to the fact if she decides to go to the store sans scarf one day, nobody cares here, but if she did it in Riyadh, or was seen talking to man who was not her husband, the mutawwa would come up and beat her ass in the middle of the street.

So spare us the sermon, sister. Women are treated like animals in many -- not all, but many -- Islamic societies, kept illiterate and pregnant and economically dependent, and constantly under threat of violence, death, honor-killing, etc., usually from their own families. I've never claimed to be Phil Donahue or Alan Alda, but even I recognize the strong correlation between disempowering women and poor, regressive societies. Only a damned fool would claim that women in Pakistan or Saudi have just as much freedom to live their lives as they would in Europe or America.

I'm glad that America has provided a free and open society of laws, which allows Ms. Kahf to observe the contemplative fashionista side of her religion to her hearts' content. No doubt Christianity is a backwards religion in many ways, but in no Christian country is a man allowed to beat the fuck out of his wife or kill her because she didn't feel like wearing her tent one day. This seems to be as much about her scarf collection as anything else.

Pump Chumps

These are incredibly silly people:

A prayer group in Washington DC is claiming the credit for the recent sharp drop in the US price of petrol.

Rocky Twyman, 59, a veteran community campaigner, started Pray At The Pump meetings at petrol stations in April.

Since then, the average price of what the US calls gasoline has fallen from more than $4 a gallon to $3.80.

Usually when you hear about hardcore saps like these, they are resolutely engaged in equally useful activities, such as looking for the image of the Virgin Mary in a jelly doughnut. I suppose it's easier than, for example, understanding demand destruction, or realizing that this is a tremendously complicated process which will shortly resume course, economically and geopolitically.

They do deserve some credit for realizing that concrete measures such as carpooling and conserving gasoline are important. But the idea that beseeching your supreme being for months on end results in a whopping 20¢ drop -- to a price that's still twice what it was just a couple years ago -- and that constitutes some sort of success, well, talk about lowering the bar. Not to mention exactly how they are getting to all these gas stations all over the country; I suppose they're being miracled there by divine teleportation.

Fear and Loathing

As frustrating as emotionally needy, gang-faxing evangelicals are with their obsessive bowdlerizing of the people's airwaves, they've got nothing on self-censoring publishers, deathly (literally) terrified of antagonizing violent religious psychopaths.

This is the wrong path to take, because it legitimizes the aggression typified by, for example, the lunatic who shot and sliced up Theo van Gogh. It tells these pussy-fearing, child-raping fanatics that their tactics of intimidation work, that if they riot, cartoonists will be afraid to draw "offensive" cartoons. People should not be afraid to write books or songs, or draw cartoons. I'm surprised this even needs to be said. Yet just the shadow of their retribution becomes enough to affect behavior, which of course is just what they want.

The only way the more virulent strains are going to be housebroken is when they get that sometimes there are things in life you find deeply offensive, and that you just have to deal with it and move forward, that lashing out in psychotic fury is unacceptable. People who are willing to kill and/or die for their Imaginary Friend, regardless of which name brand of Friend, need to get over themselves, not have the rest of the planet walk around on eggshells for fear of angering them.

Better yet, if they're in such a rush to meet Allah or Jesus or whoever, what the hell are they waiting for? Go already.

Lowered Expectations

I'd say Perrin has a decent handle on the masochistic nature of the Dem die-hards accepting Obama's capitulation on the FISA immunity bill. Although the "where ya gonna go" attitude obviously pervades both parties to some extent (though the Republicans have generally given more latitude to the fundie wing because they bring in money and voters with consistency), and Obama clearly believes this to be a tactical stance.

Who knows? Given the demonstrated brainpower of the creamy center of American political life, where people only comprehend a one-dimensional energy policy and the media still wonder aloud if some inbred Appalachian rube can handle a black preznit, there's not much to dispel the notion.

Then there's stuff like this, which sorta makes you wonder if giving women the vote was such a great idea:

So close and yet so far - that is the major stream of female thought in 2008 America. And nothing shows this better than two current cultural phenomena, Hillary Rodham Clinton's run for the presidency and box office hit "Sex and the City."

As phenomena go, Hillary's 18 million Democratic primary votes were an impressive feat, but the glass ceiling remains intact. Electing Hillary Clinton president would have been the single most powerfully liberating moment for American women ever. It was not to be. And while she scored many more female voters than her rival, that rival earned a whopping 90 percent of the vote cast by his own affinity group, African Americans.

Meanwhile, more millions of women (by a factor of four) have rushed to the nation's theaters to see "Sex and the City" than the millions of women who voted for Hillary in the primaries. And yes, it's mostly women and gay men who are "Sex" fans - most straight men wouldn't admit they saw the film, if they saw it at all.

....

More realistically, or at least seemingly so, traditional feminists tend to be armed with age and experience and sturdier shoes. They've been aiming for a bigger prize of elective and executive power much of their lives. They are determined to finally smash that barrier to the nation's highest office, for all it represents. They are the ones who laid the difficult groundwork for many of the workplace and lifestyle benefits that enable the younger, nontraditional types to go for the glass slipper instead.

Many of these women were ardent Hillary supporters. They are still suffering from shellshock. One of them tells me that it may be a while before she can clearly voice the depth and shape of her feelings. She feels both a profound sadness and a hot rage at the injustices she saw Hillary endure for months from both the media and from the Democratic Party. She says she feels like she has witnessed a metaphorical witch-burning over the past months, an event from which she cannot turn her eyes away. She feels that the party coddled a less experienced man into position while simultaneously shredding Hillary's character in the public imagination.

Kee-rist. "Suffering from shellshock". "It may be a while before she can clearly voice the depth and shape of her feelings". "Metaphorical witch-burning". Oh my. It goes on like that. Somewhere in sitcom heaven, Archie Bunker is rolling his eyes with a pained, dyspeptic expression, uttering those immortal words.

"Wouldja please stifle yaself, dingbat?"

Funny how we've heard so many of these tedious plaints about how poor Hillary was mercilessly calumniated by her own party, by a feckless media, by her naïve whelp of an opponent, yet there never seem to be any specifics, just these handwringing histrionics about how unfair it all was, and how all these would be Lysistratas are going to get back at us by voting for Poor Old Straight Talk. Never mind that Hillary, a lifelong pro as we were incessantly reminded, gave as good as she got every step of the way, wielding the smarmy innuendo club with barely-concealed passion.

Bullshit. Look, you really feel all that worked up from your "shellshock" and what-not over the "witch-burning", then fucking do it already. Vote for McCain, see what that gets ya. Climb out of everyone's ass and get on with your lives already. Go watch Sex and the City again or something.

That rage is particularly acute when discussing both mainstream and "progressive" media. Traditional feminists expected sexist attacks from the right, but not alleged lefty Chris Matthews saying that Hillary would never have been elected to the Senate had her husband not cheated.

The wound is opened anew when one of the most well-known exemplars of mainstream television suddenly dies and is revered as a "colossus" of journalism. This is the same man, the late Tim Russert, who chuckled benevolently when one of his guests, Christopher Hitchens on "Meet the Press," repeatedly called Hillary Clinton a "bitch." This is the same news icon who was satirized on "Saturday Night Live" as pitching softballs to Barack Obama and double whammy corkscrew change-ups to Hillary when he moderated a nationally televised debate. Women won't forgive him, even as he's laid to rest.

Who's alleging that Chris Matthews is a "lefty"? He had Ann Coulter on for a full fucking hour the last time she pumped out another retread two-ply manifesto. And Russert, who knows? He may have voted Democrat if he was serious about his working-class roots, but there's no guarantees there. He may not have even voted; a lot of Serious Journamalists abstain to maintain that veneer of objectivity.

The nut of all these whinges that have been coming out is this -- women will forgive pretty much any transgression imaginable, but if there's a perceived insult to a perpetually aggrieved self-selecting demo, well, it's on, chump. Russert had been a faithful lackey for many a year, allowing any and all sorts of liars and miscreants to snuggle up and peddle their line. But he let a professional contrarian tosspot get away with using the b-word. Now there's a problem.

It's not nice, and it's not fair. But it's also not Obama's doing. Objectively what they're saying is that they'd rather throw the election to John McCain and let him lawn-dart the country for another four years because Tim Russert chuckled when Christopher Hitchens called Hillary Clinton a bitch. Perhaps if they said this aloud to themselves in front of a mirror while trying on the Manolos and the Vera Wang, they would understand better how stupid that is. It doesn't even qualify as a line of reasoning. Why not just break into Obama's house and boil a pet rabbit, and be done with it?

This whole internal monologue about the glass ceiling and the glass slipper or whatever would be more helpful if just one (1) of these angry bra-burners could point to any other female, from either party, who would be a viable presidential candidate. It would be even more helpful if any of them managed to ascribe any level of importance to any one of her actual policies or positions, rather than just her plumbing.

The fact is, whether or not one chooses to believe that Hillary Clinton's political career was launched by the fallout generated by her husband getting blown by the help (but, you know, spanking it out in the sink, because coming in her mouth would have been cheating), her viability as a presidential candidate was in great part fueled by who she is, and by who he is. That's not to minimize her ability as a senator; she has proven to be as intelligent and resourceful a person as one could want in government, though too establishmentarian for her own good in the end. And she was the anointed front-runner for almost all of 2007. If she had gotten the nomination, a lot of people wouldn't have liked it, but they would have voted for her nonetheless. But in the end a narrow margin of people decided they liked Obama just a little better. That's how it works. Deal with it.

I have no illusions about being in the presence of greatness; truly great people tend to avoid the mendacious world of politics like the plague. I want the person who is going to do the least amount of harm to an already grievously wounded country, and right now that person is Barack Obama. I couldn't care less about race or gender. But for those people for whom identity politics trumps common sense, you'd think that having an embarrassment of diverse riches in their party's candidates (not only Clinton and Obama, but Bill Richardson, who is Hispanic, and Dennis Kucinich, who is of either elf or halfling stock) would be enough. Nope. It's all about them.

I have no idea how this all ultimately plays out in an extraordinary American season which is testing the limits of both misogyny and racism and consumerism in our culture. But while thinking about it all, I had the most fabulous phone call from one of the listeners to my radio show.

She and her female friends, most of them Hillary supporters in their 80s, were getting dressed up to go out for cocktails, dinner and a movie. Cosmopolitans, that's what they'd drink, just like Carrie and Samantha.

These women had been friends forever and would wear their fashionable and stylish best, perhaps Chanel vintage and a plumed, bejeweled, velvet pillbox, albeit with comfortable shoes.

You see, they haven't been content, ever, in their lives. They'd always wanted to both shatter the glass ceiling and to possess the glass slipper. They don't know how they'll vote in the fall. They're still trying to figure that out, but I bet you can guess what movie they went to see.

I sure can. I bet it's that one where Brando jams that stick of butter in that broad's poop-chute (which would make her a Samantha, because Charlotte's a good girl and Miranda's too much of a ballbusting control freak and....uh, so I've heard, hey, what about them Celtics?), because of that frisson of sexual liberation it connotes.

No seriously, I can't muster up the energy to give half a fuck why I should care what some addled dowagers who still aren't sure how they plan to vote have to say as they wallow in manufactured self-pity. It is a nice statement that this country can grow up and get over itself to nominate and/or elect a woman and/or a minority as president. It really is.

So if you're so bloody concerned about your precious diversity, why would you even jokingly threaten to go for the old white guy, and a belligerent, ignorant coot at that? Anyone making such a comment, whatever their degree of, ferchrissake, "shellshock", betrays themselves as callow, unserious. Maybe even hysterical and emotional.

And is the world really clamoring for yet another of these warmed-over too-clever-by-half SatC metaphors, another stale panegryic to some post-feminist consumer-fetishist erotomanic version of womynhood? Isn't one Maureen Dowd quite more than enough?

The thing that really pisses me off about the stream of inane anecdotal profiles such as this, aside from the cheesy pop-culture analogies, is how condescending it truly is to women. It emphasizes the perception of superficiality, of vindictiveness, of petty self-aggrandizement and of retributive fantasies. Any demographic painted with such a tendentious broad brush is being unfairly maligned, because anyone conflating a serious decision-making process with a meringue rom-com would have to be a damned fool. Jesus Christ, why not just let Kung Fu Panda make your decisions for you?

Heart of Dorkness

So for no good reason at all, I'm checking out Amazon's "Guitar Gods" contributor section, and I stumble across this happy monkey-fuck of a thread. Note how seamlessly it transitions from the initial asshole "joking" about Dimebag Darrell (who, if half of what I've heard and read about him over the years is true, was a total mensch) being shot, to the other bozo lecturing everyone on how all dictatorships are "leftist". Hunh? I thought this was a guitar thread, you thumb-dick.

Anyway, fun stuff. Do check it out if you have time to kill (and, well, you're here, which means that you do). Like mouth-breathing rats stuck in a cage, some of these folks are. As always, I remember my first beer.

The Jokes Write Themselves

Okay, I've resisted the temptation all week to make jokes on variations of fucking oneself, but in all seriousness, just because you can do something doesn't mean you should:

A transgender man who is six months pregnant said in an interview aired by Oprah Winfrey on Thursday that he always wanted to have a child and considers it a miracle.

"It's not a male or female desire to have a child. It's a human desire," a thinly bearded Thomas Beatie said. "I have a very stable male identity," he added, saying that pregnancy neither defines him nor makes him feel feminine.

Beatie, 34, who lives in Oregon, was born a woman but decided to become a man 10 years ago. He began taking testosterone treatments and had breast surgery to remove glands and flatten his chest.

"I opted not to do anything with my reproductive organs because I wanted to have a child one day," he told the talk show host. Beatie's wife Nancy said she inseminated him with a syringe using sperm purchased from a bank.

Of course, the term "man" here is used verrry loosely, not the least reason which is that no man in his right mind would ever want to endure pregnancy, much less childbirth. I thought it was Rachel Maddow at first; I'm absolutely not convinced that this is a "man".

Perhaps my understanding of sex-change operations is outdated. Isn't psych testing part of the requirement just to undergo treatment? Aren't the hormone treatments administered and tracked by a physician? Isn't it supposed to be a little more complicated than just grabbing an applicator that looks like Jodie Foster's knuckle?

Yes, I'm sure all these testosterone treatments are good for the fetus. And I'm sure a presumably reputable doctor has a perfectly good rationale for letting a sex-change patient keep the original equipment with the express purpose of getting pregnant.

Well, as long as the kid doesn't come out looking like Manbearpig, vaya con dios, I suppose. But in an already overpopulated world, is it really necessary to craft new and innovative ways to have children? Do these Dr. Moreaus have nothing better to do? I had slightly more respect for them when they were turning a buck off of boner pills. Maybe this will turn out to be a hoax.

Semper Fried

Here's something the Code Pink bozos need to get through their thick-ass skulls -- your half-witted attempts at street theater are unwelcome, and indeed profoundly counterproductive. These antics are reminiscent of nothing so much as right-wing fringetards such as Operation Rescue and Fred Phelps' Caravan O' Incest. Standing outside with signs and slogans is one thing; chaining yourselves to the door is quite another. These idiots curiously seem to only hold their own rights to free speech sacred.

This is an unpopular war led by an unpopular preznit. And yes, recruiters have been known to use some fairly unscrupulous methods to make their sales quotas. Look, if you are somehow not adequately apprised of what exactly the Marines do, then maybe you deserve to get roped into action. In the meantime, a lot of serious people have made a lot of serious efforts to address this war in a coherent fashion.

I am not opposed to genuine revolutionary tactics, but this is just a sideshow that ends up minimizing serious, principled opposition to a tragically failed policy. It perpetuates useless hippie stereotypes, and further hardens the antidisestablishmentarian bent of the dead-end supporters. They don't have to support the war overtly; all they have to do is point at the Code Pink goofball chained to the door of a recruiting center, calling people "baby killers", and state their case against that. And it doesn't matter if there's only six or seven goofballs at any given moment. It might as well be a thousand, though if it actually were a thousand, someone who could actually do something might pay some attention.

Sometimes people need to think beyond their own individual antics and realize how they can galvanize the very people they're trying to oppose. I'm just saying.

Life Ain't Nothin' But Bitchez An' Money

I, for one, am shocked at the possibility that Tweety regards his little clubhouse as a place to sort chicks out by their fuckability quotient. Political considerations aside, it always seemed axiomatic that Li'l Tweety does the majority of the voting. The problem is his compulsion to talk about it, and not in a jokey, ironic way. I'm sure if he could, he'd lick his eyebrows when discussing fresh trim.

Power is money is sex, and if you talk about any one of those things, they are all automatically in the mix, especially if rather than actually being in the power/money/sex circle, you just make a living talking about the people who roll in that circle. I don't think anyone was confusing his daily tent-pitching with cogent analysis. Life really is a dick-measuring contest for a lot of people, and Tweety has always differed from, say, Andrew Dice Clay only by a matter of degree, except Dice probably got enough tail to keep a guy like Tweety busy for a dozen lifetimes.

[Update: Apparently Matthews prefaced tonight's ass-cast with a mea culpa of sorts, chock-full of homilies about how much he loves politics. Well, of course he does. He gets paid a shitload of money for empty speculation and gratuitous leering; he gets to regard politics as pure bloodsport because for him it is, he's effectively immunized from its consequences.

Why shouldn't he regard it as vaudeville, when every single person he talks to does? It's systemic, a daily binge-and-purge where he and his cohorts get use the likes of Hillary Clinton to work on their wimmin problems, and expiate their lingering daddy issues on Mitt Romney's stud shoulders or John McCain's wrinkled love sausage. No surprise that the stars of poliporn might be a tad unbalanced in their worldview. Poor cuss doesn't even know what he's sorry about.]

Maybe a Telethon Would Help

Seriously, does Savage have end-stage Tourette's or something? It's not the intemperate boobery so much as the sheer incoherence of it all. Nice to see the people's airwaves clogged with the sandwich-board brigade.

Home on the Strange

Let's conclude our spelunking of the Sunday paper with this whimsical jeremiad about "our" responsibility for the homeless.

When we see the homeless on the streets of our city, failing and vulnerable, we see our own failure and our own vulnerability, our own guilt for failing to care for them.

These are things we don't want to see. These are things that frighten and shame us. So what do we do?

We strike out at the victims.

We call them names.

We decry them for defecating in the streets and leaving needles in the park, without bothering to ask ourselves what public policies brought them to such a degraded position.

And having properly demonized them in this way, we try desperately to get rid of them, to get them out of sight.

I am not entirely unsympathetic to the broad-brush plight of the homeless, though this sort of burbling piffle certainly taxes my patience. It's the language of victimology, spun through a funhouse mirror. How the hell does someone who deals drugs, shoots up in the park, and takes a fucking dump on the sidewalk count as a "victim"?

How about the taxpayers, hm? What about the person who owns a small business, has their hands full just running that and dealing with customers, inventory, taxes, employees, slow sales cycles and such, and the drunk asshole harassing potential customers for money right outside the door? How about the person who gets up every morning, goes to a job they hate so that they can keep a roof over their head and support a family, and has to step around people fighting or sleeping near their doorstep? How about a family that wants to take their kids to a park to barbecue some burgers and play frisbee, and not watch people sleep and shoot up and have sex? Aren't those people victims?

Human rights and dignity are obviously important, indeed vital to every individual's functional stability, and thus to the people whom we affect. A variety of programs have been attempted in San Francisco, for years, with very little to show for it. I feel somewhat unencumbered by not having to belabor this "we are all perfect images of God" stuff. Some people, I'm sorry to say, are just no damned good, as the prophet John Mellencamp pointed out eons ago.

Strolling over to a 7-Eleven in her Outer Sunset neighborhood to buy a candy bar in the wee hours of the morning of Nov. 21, the 26-year-old German exchange student noticed Robert Hancock, a 23-year-old drifter from Iowa. Hancock - who "has no permanent local address," according to the police - looked pretty bedraggled. Rucker felt sorry for him and, on an impulse, decided to buy him something to eat.

Hancock reportedly accepted the food, but began to follow Rucker. He tried to talk to her, but Rucker, who is more comfortable speaking German, says she had trouble understanding him.

Unprovoked, Hancock allegedly grabbed her and tried to pull her toward Ocean Beach. Police say she screamed and fought him, which is when he allegedly pulled a knife and stabbed her in the wrist, neck, thigh, abdomen and chin - wounds that would send her to the hospital for a week.

Luckily, her screams attracted neighbors who called the police. Sgt. Fitz Wong and Officer Jarome Winesberry responded, located Hancock, and after what Taraval police Capt. Paul Chignell calls "a violent struggle," he was subdued. The officers found a bloody knife in Hancock's pocket, police say.

Now, this woman gets no points for common sense by trudging alone to an urban 7-11 "to buy a candy bar in the wee hours of the morning". That's not terribly bright. But what sort of a person bums food from someone and then tries to forcibly rape them? I suppose he now has plenty of time to think about that, but what brings this character all the way out from Iowa? The knowledge that in Frisco, they'll give you three squares and make the taxpayers feel bad about it? That there are people whose sole raisin detree is to "advocate" for your right to free shit?

We know very well what will work: more housing, more public mental health and substance abuse centers, more job training programs.

Well hell, while they're at it, they can come on over and raid my refrigerator, drink my beer, and fuck my sister. And come on, "job training" basically means teaching people how to dress and be punctual; we're not talking about enhancing skill sets for that tech career you always wanted to bounce into if the crack-head thing don't pan out.

I don't have a problem with spending tax dollars to offer these people an opportunity to get their shit together. But there are already plenty of those sorts of programs for people who really want it, and if those programs are going to be ramped up, it should come out of somewhere else in the budget. I have my own family to support, and it's hard enough as it is.

At some point, we are going to have to choose between our oil-guzzling empire and a more comprehensive social safety net; we cannot have both guns and butter. And this would be a fine use of the peace dividend, to push the homeless into something better than a life in the gutter, and returning quality of life to the people who actually live and play by the rules.

In the meantime, trying to guilt-trip people for being tired of syringes in sandboxes and doo-doo in doorways is just insulting and tiresome, and is not going to change the minds of people who work just so they can share in the bien pensant squalor. It is not "irrational" or "misdirected" for people to just be sick and goddamned tired of this sort of behavior. Perhaps the good rabbi can grant these sacred children of God sanctuary in his synagogue. Problem solved.

Hayseed Dickhead

So a Times guest blogger thinks that the sung values o' de heartland have been nigh unto ignored. If only this could be explained in the context of a Connecticut-born prep-schooled fortunate son being elected (or hell, even being nominated) on a platform of jes' plain folks pablum.

Taken together, contemporary country western music paints a picture of an America committed to hard work and traditional family values. It is deeply God fearing but can be surprisingly compassionate and open-minded, sometimes when you least expect. The songs describe regular people striving to live better lives in the midst of temptations and daily reminders of failure.

....

Yes, even with its love for the vehicular and alcoholic, country western is the best place to start to learn a little something about what it means to have a family, to struggle making ends meet, to own a gun or a pickup truck, to support our troops unquestioningly, to enlist in the military and fight our country’s wars and to generally be very proud of what America stands for — and to profess confusion over just what all this fuss is about when it comes to our foreign policy choices.

As a musician and a music-lover, this is hard to digest. I'm not at all opposed to the earthy strengths of country -- I grew up watching Hee Haw, and genuinely enjoying their performers, as well as Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, and other old-school paragons of the people's art form. Indeed, both Kurt Vonnegut and Michael Moore have sung the imperative praises of recognizing the importance of country music to its listeners.

But this fails utterly in describing the cognitive gap in which these niches overlap, where putative practitioners of heartland values are consistently and repeatedly bamboozled into voting against their own interests. On the one hand, your job is being outsourced to northern Mexico, on the other, fags are a-gittin' hitched. Is this coincidental? Studies conclusively imply, eh, not so much.

Look, the continuing plaint is that Dems disrespect or condescend to the salt o' the earth folk when they fail to genuflect appropriately to their loudly professed valyews (as if no one between New York and California is ever gay or gets an abortion). So let them make their points abundantly clear, that they do not get something for nothing, that their fuel and even their food comes at a very real price, that they need to find greater things besides Black Friday to strive toward. Write a fucking song around that shit, if you wanna get real.

It's really not that complicated. Either people want to learn and prioritize appropriately, or they don't. Politicians -- successful ones, anyway -- can ultimately only reflect those priorities.

Taking a (Wide) Stance

You can set your watch to it -- the more a person bitches about Teh Gay, the more likely it is that they're projecting their own inner struggle.

Doesn't make McClurkin -- or Obama, by association -- necessarily bad people, just ridiculous. This urge to cynically meet the "faith" niche halfway on a playing field that's rapidly changing anyway doesn't seem like the smartest thing to do. De-prioritize it, tell people to grow up and mind their own business already, and re-evaluate what's actually important to the operational ability of the country. Enough of this stupid "my invisible sky friend will immolate us all if we let the lesbians down the street get hitched" nonsense.

Big Apples and Oranges

Alicublog links to an interesting harangue over a sad, brutal street crime. Apparently the lack of prompt, forceful action by adjacent citizens indicates a resurgence in the sort of indifferent behavior made notorious in the Kitty Genovese case.

What's interesting about this particular tirade is how quickly it devolves into some blanket indictment of New York mores. There is a strange cognitive dissonance with these people -- on the one hand, they are always the first to 9/11 their way through every argument, to excuse every incident of malfeasance, corruption, torture, indiscriminate bloodshed, what have you. Literally everything is excusable under the 9/11 banner. They Will Not Forget, nor will they ever stop humping your leg over it.

But conversely, though they still (and always) fetishize the day and the event, they long ago kicked the actual city to the curb. Now that Count Chocula Mrs. Doubtfire Giuliani has hit the rubber-chicken circuit, the city he left behind has returned to being the source and sum of all their projected fears and misplaced anxieties. Even though it seems that the vast statistical preponderance of lurid crimes tend to come out of the vaunted heartland, some of the denizens of Bobo's world wish to impute the disparity onto a city with a larger population than many states, which is just asinine.

Yes, it sucks that some crazy bastard walked up and stabbed an old woman in the face, and yes it sucks that no one apparently did much to help her initially. But giving everyone a concealed handgun, while it might have resolved that problem, would more likely create a host of others.

Spending a significant part of my childhood in the grubby underbelly of Los Angeles schooled me pretty well to what people are capable of when they're packed together like rats in a cage. But living in the sticks is not a bowl of perky tits either. I can afford (just barely) to get by, but only because I drive 1½ hours each day for a living wage.

It's not news that most of small-town America has been sucked into the low-wage sweaty scrotum of Wal-Mart, and that just as the peculiarities of city life can attract certain "undesirable" elements, so can the low cost of living in the boonies. Gang activity rolls through small towns, as do crank cooks, dope dealers, and other assorted vermin. All underpinned by anti-growth codgers who figure that their government-subsidized family ranches are their stake, and everyone else is on their own, with many business opportunities voted out from sheer intransigence.

And then you have characters like this holy diver (sorry, but it was there for the taking), self-indulgent closet-cases turning up in the strangest of places -- cruising for head in a public restroom, drunkenly offering to blow a cop at a car wash, or in this instance, a Friend of Falwell accidentally asphyxiating himself while wearing two wet-suits.

With a dildo in his ass. With a condom on the dildo. No, really.

This sort of thing actually would make more sense in the stereotypically decadent urban milieu; the fact that such weirdness and awfulness seems to occur in places of less population density and greater proclaimed moral density (heh-indeedy) ought to be food for thought, for careful eaters.

So maybe our indignant provincials should consider plucking the condom-covered dildo out of their own eye before scrawling incoherent tirades indicting millions of their fellow citizens for the reprehensible actions of a few statistical outliers. Of course, that's difficult to put in their usual cap-strewn style, but one always hopes, even when one knows better than to hope too much.

Shorter Falafel Boy

"So black people do have table manners! Well, f'shizzle, mah nizzle!"

Expect a week or so of foamy playa-hatin' in which El Falafel insists that we are the real racists, and he'll show up a half-hour late in a velvet track suit to prove it. Jesus, maybe he should just start doing football commentary with Rush Limbaugh.

(For the record, I don't really think that Falafel dislikes blacks. I'm sure he thinks everyone should own one.)

[Update: Sure enough. The guy's a predictable, tedious fuckhead. I'm not sure which is worse, that Falafel is in the habit of calling people up and screaming at them, or that the people he screams at sit there and act like it's okay, and say they can't wait to have him on to clear things up.

Fucking morons, all the way around. These are the people who are entrusted to provide you with information and commentary; is it any wonder everything's fucked? Perhaps growing a pair and simply hanging up on people who talk to you like that is the first step toward self-actualization, instead of sitting there taking shit from a fatuous blowhard who sexually harasses his co-workers.

I guarantee you, one Paulie Walnuts vocalization of "Ohhhhh! Who the fuck you think you're talkin' to, Ponyboy?", followed by the slamming of the receiver in mid-tirade, will get either an attitude adjustment, or an even more embarrasing (and thus newsworthy) apoplectic fit from Mister Man. The sooner these idiots figure out that their warped vision of objectivity and comity are wrecking their profession, the better off they'll be.]

Johnny Come Lately (Or Not At All)

Shorter Larry Craig (R-ManGravy):

Oh, like none of you have ever tried to drop a deuce and accidentally brushed feet with the guy in the adjoining stall, and then swiped the bottom of the stall divider. Heh. I mean, really. Where I come from, it happens all the time. And there's nothin' gay about it.

Really, pal, you're protesting a bit much. It's over, you're done. Quit trying to explain to people the very special way you take a dump, and just, erm, come clean. It's insulting at this point; you're a step away from parsing "is", and beyond that lies the impenetrable thicket of Abu Gonzales' jabberwockyisms. Either walk away from it, or tell your family-values critics to just go fuck themselves already.

This stuff will never ever stop being funny, especially since there seems to always be yet another "conservative" just a couple weeks away from being outed. It's only a matter of time before Huckleberry Graham or Tallulah McConnell accidentally drops his subscription copy of International Leatherman (with, you know, bent pages) out of its procedural manual hiding place during a Senate floor debate.

And curiously (or perhaps not), what few conservabloggers I can bring myself to skim occasionally all seem to taking the same tack on this, that Craig's apostasy on the immigration issue makes him ripe for replacement anyway. The current lurid revelations just make it fortuitously easier to replace him, as far as they're concerned. They save the effete gay-baiting for the dhimmicrats, y'know, the better to launder their hypocrisies with contrivances of policy.

It's the sort of half-witted rhetorical legerdelame one would ordinarily expect to find in a one-handed juggler, where any random applause or mumbles of approval are more out of pity than genuine encouragement (or in the case of the conservatwerps, like-minded trained seals ark-arking in unison, as well as balancing beach balls on their noses). As with matters of war, or indeed any truly serious issues, in their fervid rallying cries they don't get that while their base points of "Situation X sucks and something must be done" are essentially correct, none of their proposed solutions are ever coherent, much less realistic.

It might actually be more productive in the long run to encourage their foolish rambunctions. At the very least, it would keep most of them from running for office. Let them keep their pretenses of responsibility in their virtual voting districts; there's no harm in letting them be the mayor of Stupidtown, especially since it seems to be an endlessly rotating position.