On the Subject of Listening to the People of the Land

In a former life, my span of responsibility was so weirdly far-flung  that when people asked me what I did for a living, I would tell them that I was in charge of saving Illinois manufacturing.  And while that's a wee bit of an exaggeration, it is entirely fair to say that working on every aspect of saving Illinois manufacturing took up most of my time and energy and the time, energy and budget of my tiny staff.

So believe me when I tell that even though I was involuntarily retired from the field of battle, my antennae is still highly attuned to items in the news about the struggles of the Rust Belt economy: outsourcing, manufacturing, skills training, the need to retool high schools and community colleges and the various federal, state and local policies and initiatives designed to get at these large and complex problems.

(Also every time the subject pops up within earshot, my darling wife pipes up with "Honey, they're talking about your stuff again!")

This is why I can tell you that this idea that "better messaging" to the white working class is somehow the royal road back to political majorities for the Democratic party is nonsense.  Sure, Democrats always need to work on speaking like mortal human beings and progressives in general suffer from an inexplicable inability to kill the fucking bunny even with all the claws and fangs at their disposal:

But messaging itself is not the problem.  The media is the problem.  And since, as the man said, the medium is the message, until we start taking on the media as Public Enemy #1, we're going to go right on losing.

This is shaping up to be a long post because sometimes I feel the need to drive a point home using a great big hammer, so if you want to scroll on down, be my guest.  But before you move along, my premise is fairly easy to summarize:

1. For a variety if reasons, white working class Americans have been taking a pounding since the late 1970s.  And for a different variety of reasons, a disturbingly high number number of white working class Americans keep voting for the people that fuck them over.


2. Judging by policy statements made, resources allocated, attention paid and political capitol spent, it's quite likely that history will judge the Obama Administration to have been the most consistently pro-manufacturing administration since Eisenhower.  In fact, outside of health care (and turkey pardons), I would wager a penny and a fiddle of gold that in the last eight years the Obama administration put more effort into promoting American manufacturing than into any other domestic policy priority.


3. If you are a member of the general public, unless you made an extra special effort to inform yourself, you are blissfully unaware of any of this.


4. If you are blissfully unaware of any of this, it is not because the Obama Administration failed to talk it up at every single opportunity, but because over the last eight years the American political media collectively decided that instead of boring-ass stories about what the Democratic party has been trying to do to improve the lives and futures of the working class Americans, what you needed to hear were lively fairy tales about Birth Certificates and Death Panels.  Email servers and Benghaaaazi.  A Republican rebranding scam called the "Tea Party".  Instead of stories about the Caucus Room Conspiracy and Republican sabotage and sedition, you needed to hear endlessly, plaintive cries from all the usual Beltway hacks about how Barack Obama was refusing to lead!

So, as the late, great Al Smith used to say, let's take a look at the record...

Yesterday They Were Just Two German Clerks

 Today they're the "Honored Dead".

-- Rick Blaine, Casablanca

This morning on the Comcastrati Network, respected Conservative thinker and Wrongest Man in America, Bill Kristol, rhapsodized with respected Conservative broadcaster and Very Big Liar, Joe Scarborough, about the Good Old Days when the Breitbart's Mausoleum For The Chronically Unemployable (h/t Charlie Pierce) was a trusted and legitimate news outlet.

Y'know, before they were overrun with haters and morons like this shitbag:

From Politico:

Kristol wryly suggests new name for Breitbart News

By NICK GASS 08/17/16 08:15 AM EDT

"Right Wing Intolerant Mean-Spirited News" does not quite roll off the tongue like Breitbart News. But that's what Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol would have the conservative organization, whose top executive temporarily stepped down Wednesday to lead Donald Trump's campaign, renamed.

During an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Kristol lamented that the conservative news organization has become something other than what its late founder Andrew Breitbart intended.

"I knew Andrew well, and he was a troublemaker. But he was a good-hearted person who would not have—I mean, I hate the fact that that it’s called Breitbart News," Kristol remarked...

"It's unfortunate that we're all sitting around talking about Breitbart. It's a disservice to Andrew's memory," Kristol said, while remarking that the website, under Bannon, has been "pretty successful" from "a business point of view."

But, Kristol added, "someone should go look at all the things they've said."...

Here's the video (h/t Crooks & Liars):

I'm going to have to sit with this remark by Bill Kristol -- "someone should go look at all the things they've said" -- for a long time.  

At least until my uncontrollable crazylaugh stops.

Because if the Dirty Liberal blogosphere could be said to have served one, overarching mission since the beginning of recorded blogger history, it has been to jump up and down, waving our arms, saying "Fuck!", and trying mightily and ineffectually to get members of the Beltway media to just please for fuck's sake "go look at all the things" -- the terrible, horrible, no-good, lying things -- their colleagues get away with saying every single fucking day.  (See also: Every damn thing I have ever written.)

Corollarily, if the entire Beltway media establishment could be said to obey one, all-encompassing commandment with Borg-like single-mindedness, it is to make absolutely god damn sure that no one within the Beltway media ever, ever, ever starts tugging on the "someone should go look at all the things they've said" thread.

Because the Beltway media is a confederacy of con men -- a sodality of hacks -- each dependent on all the others not to bring up the fact that this is all a puppet show being run for the profit of corporate interests at the expense of our democracy.  And if anyone with any real clout and access to a really substantial audience ever started to actually "look at all the things they've said" (See, "The Beltway Iron Rule of David Brooks") the unstoppable cataract of recriminations and mass firings that would soon follow -- starting with parasites like Bill Kristol and Joe Scarborough -- would wipe them all out.

Which is why there is safeguard after safeguard in place to make sure that never happens.

On the video you can see every single person on this panel working in frantic unison to separate themselves and their party and the Fake Tea Party the invented to get their off their party off the hook for the being hateful morons who spent eight years cheering for Bush...

...from "Trumpism", which they all swear on the lives of their children was invented out of whole cloth at the Breitbart website in 2010.

No Joe.  It's not "Trumpism".  It's good, old-fashioned, filthy, hateful, fact-averse "Republicanism" from crotch to crown.  And you damn well know it, because you and all of your depraved pals have damn well prospered by it for 20 years.  

The Blogosphere Is Dead: Long Live The Blogosphere

Nine years ago, the merest whiff of the possibility of getting icky Liberal blogger stink on them was sufficient for the Edwards campaign to humiliate and sack two liberal bloggers just days after bringing them on to do "netroots outreach".  Tossed under the bus they were, and very publicly at that, because their hiring made Bill "Cardinal Richelieu" Donohue and Michelle "Internment Camp Counselor" Malkin unhappy.

From Salon, February 2007:

Edwards campaign fires bloggers

Trying to head off a firestorm of criticism from the right, the presidential candidate dismisses two liberal bloggers his campaign hired only recently.

The right-wing blogosphere has gotten its scalps — John Edwards has fired the two controversial bloggers he recently hired to do liberal blogger outreach, Salon has learned.

The bloggers, Amanda Marcotte, formerly of Pandagon, and Melissa McEwan, of Shakespeare’s Sister, had come under fire from right-wing bloggers for statements they had previously made on their respective blogs. A statement by the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue, which called Marcotte and McEwan “anti-Catholic vulgar trash-talking bigots,” and an accompanying article on the controversy in the New York Times this morning, put extra pressure on the campaign.

Speculation from sources that the two bloggers might be rehired was bolstered by Jennifer Palmieri, a spokeswoman for the Edwards campaign, who said in an e-mail that she would “caution [Salon] against reporting that they have been fired. We will have something to say later.”...

Leading the charge against Marcotte — and to a lesser extent McEwan — have been bloggers like the National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez and Michelle Malkin. Malkin originally accused Marcotte of trying to scrub Pandagon’s archives of material that could be embarrassing to the Edwards campaign. When that proved untrue, Malkin posted a correction, but said that the fact that she had been wrong was “even worse for the Edwards campaign” because “its blogmaster left crackpot posts like that one up and hired her anyway.”

...

Mind you, they weren't sacked because they had lied or misrepresented reality in any way: they were sacked because, like most despised Liberal outcast who were the only ones pushing back against the Worst Administration in American History, they used some very blunt language to be heard over the roar of the Beltway media's craven collusion with the Bush Administration.

These were members of our ragged Liberal legions, most of whom have either given up or passed away.

These were members of our ragged Liberal legions, who one fed-up Conservative after another has been forced to admit (grudgingly and through clenched teeth, without every saying the Terrible Words out loud) were right about the Right all along.

These were members of our ragged Liberal legions who, despite being right about the Right all along.are still conspicuously ignored by the same people who still throw big bags of money at the likes of Bill Kristol and David Brooks and Michael Gerson and Joe Scarborough and Corey Lewandowski and ....

These were members of our Liberal ragged legions, who, if the're still at their keyboards at all, are probably still barely scrapping together poverty wages by shaking their begging bowls every now and then.

And now, nine years later...

From the New York Times:

Donald Trump, in Shake-Up, Hires Breitbart Executive for Top Campaign Post

Donald J. Trump has shaken up his presidential campaign for the second time in two months, hiring a top executive from the conservative website Breitbart News and promoting a senior adviser in an effort to right his faltering campaign.

Stephen Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News LLC, will become the Republican campaign’s chief executive, and Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser and pollster for Mr. Trump and his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, will become the campaign manager.

...

More on this later after I take a long walk and think about my life decision.  

As the leader of all illegal activities in Conservatopia

Mr. Breitbart was an influential and respected man.*  +

* (By way of context, this is my entry into Tbogg's Art Contest and Caber Toss.  The quote is an upgrade to a line from "Casablanca" which, if you have never seen it, WTF is wrong with you?)


+ (Thanks for the catch, Ufansius)

Forgetting Steven Gilliard

Following the death of friendly acquaintance Andrew Brietbart, Andrew Sullivan haz a big, 'ol sad about the perils of being Andrew Sullivan:

... 

In the new 24/7 mediaverse, in a brutal, unending culture war, with the web unleashed and news and opinion flashing every few seconds, you can very easily lose yourself, and forget how and why you got here in the first place. There have been times writing and editing this blog on that kind of insane schedule for more than a decade when I have wondered who this new frantic way of life would kill first. I do not doubt that Andrew tried to keep a balance, and stay healthy, but like the rest of us, became consumed with and overwhelmed by this twittering, unending bloghorreic chatter. It takes a much bigger physical, emotional and spiritual toll than most realize, and I've spent some time over the years worrying it could destroy me. 

... 

Mr. Sullivan ends his cautionary tale with this:

 He is in that sense our first new-media culture-war fatality. I fear he won't be the last.

No, Andrew, he was not.

He may have been the first, privileged, white, male, Conservative, celebrity-personal-acquaintance-of-yours-whose-circumstances-and-age-screams-"mortality"-in-your-ear, but for the true, first "new-media culture-war fatality" you need to think "blacker".

Think "liberal".

Think "not a completely conscienceless, lying scumbag".

I know that, like all Conservatives,  you're not very good at "remembering" stuff from the "past" that makes you look "like a complete idiot", so let me give you another hint.

Steve Gilliard, 1964-2007

It is with tremendous sadness that we must convey the news that Steve Gilliard, editor and publisher of The News Blog, passed away June 2, 2007. He was 42.

To those who have come to trust The News Blog and its insightful, brash and unapologetic editorial tone, we have Steve to thank from the bottom of our hearts. Steve helped lead many discussions that mattered to all of us, and he tackled subjects and interest categories where others feared to tread.

Please keep Steve's friends and family in your thoughts and prayers.

Steve meant so much to us.

We will miss him terribly.

No surprise that Mr. Gilliard went straight down the memory hole, given how many unpardonable offenses against Villager media sensibilities he gleefully committed while he was alive and on fire. He was, after all, a Fighting Liberal. And black. And poor. And an talented, muscular writer. And a devastatingly well-read historian. And unashamedly right about everything people like Andrew Sullivan spent their lives being horribly wrong about. And he said "fuck" sometimes. And he did not respect people who used their privileged positions in the media to lie -- in fact he used his own hard-won piece of media real estate to call them out, in public and by name.

People like Andrew Sullivan and Charles Murray:

Friday, August 26, 2005 

Why I'm a racist by Andrew Sullivan

Is this the America you love, Andy?


Atrios points out this post from bareback Andy on how great the Bell Curve, which suggested, to the scorn of everyone, that niggers are stupid with big dicks and gooks are smart with small dicks and white folks in the middle. Sounds a lot like Dr. Lynn from our previous post, no?

CHARLES ON LARRY: A must-read from Charles Murray. One of my proudest moments in journalism was publishing an expanded extract of a chapter from "The Bell Curve" in the New Republic before anyone else dared touch it. I published it along with multiple critiques (hey, I believed magazines were supposed to open rather than close debates) - but the book held up, and still holds up as one of the most insightful and careful of the last decade. The fact of human inequality and the subtle and complex differences between various manifestations of being human - gay, straight, male, female, black, Asian - is a subject worth exploring, period. Liberalism's commitment to political and moral equality for all citizens and human beings is not and should not be threatened by empirical research into human difference and varied inequality. And the fact that so many liberals are determined instead to prevent and stigmatize free research and debate on this subject is evidence ... well, that they have ceased to be liberals in the classic sense. I'm still proud to claim that label - classical liberal. And I'm proud of those with the courage to speak truth to power, as Murray and Herrnstein so painstakingly did. Pity Summers hasn't been able to match their courage. But recalling the tidal wave of intolerance, scorn and ignorance that hit me at the time, I understand why.

- 12:52:00 PM

Andy, no, you are a racist.

If you agree with Charles Murray, you are a racist.

The Bell Curve is tripe not based in science but racial hatred and eugenics, the science of nonsense. It isn't free research, it isn't a liberal idea unless you think Julius Streicher is a liberal.

I know you have some fantasies about being taken by black men, with their large penises, but when you consider that geneticists find race a fluid concept, how can you endorse this kind of racism one step above Segregation or Mongrelization?

Easy, because you're a clueless white man. That's why. You don't have to pay for your ideas, while 1/3rd of America does. I mean, it's really a dodge in the end.

Murray is the intellectual gloss for racial hatred and cruel indifference. If niggers are born stupid, why help them? After all, you can't help them, right?

Here are the words of another eugenicst which sound familiar

Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level producesa medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one. Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life. The precondition for this does not lie in associating superior and inferior, but in the total victory of the former. The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel, but he after all is only a weak and limited man; for if this law did not prevail, any conceivable higher development of organic living beings would be unthinkable. 

The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid inNature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races,but their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc., and the difference can lie at most in the varying measure of force, strength, intelligence, dexterity, endurance,etc., of the individual specimens. But you will never find a fox who inhis inner attitude might, for example, show humanitarian tendencies towardgeese, as similarly there is no cat with a friendly inclination toward mice. 

Therefore, here, too, the struggle among themselves arises less from inner aversion than from hunger and love. In both cases, Nature looks on calmly, with satisfaction, in fact. In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a means for improving a species' health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development. 

If the process were different, all further and higher development would cease and the opposite would occur. For, since the inferior always predominates numerically over the best, if both had the same possibility of preserving life and propagating, the inferior would multiply so much more rapidly that in the end the best would inevitably be driven into the background, unless a correction of this state of affairs were undertaken. Nature does just this by subjecting the weaker part to such severe living conditions that by them alone the number is limited, and by not permitting the remainder to increase promiscuously, but making a new and ruthless choice according to strength and health. 

No more than Nature desires the mating of weaker with stronger individuals, even less does she desire the blending of a higher with a lower race, since, if she did, her whole work of higher breeding, over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, night be ruined with one blow.

It is nice to know great minds think alike.

Mr. Gilliard died young -- a year younger than Andrew Brietbart -- but he died without fancy friends in high places, which meant that he did not get to spend any of his valuable time on this Earth ass-sniffing his fellow media celebrities in Bill Maher's Green Room or Arianna Huffington's parties.  Which, in the end, only serves to further underscore the fact that Mr. Gilliard's existence was one of those horribly inconvenient rebuking realities that throws the wretchedly dishonest, ass-kissing careers people like Andrew Sullivan's own, into stark and embarrassing relief.

I promise I'll write all this up better once Tina Brown hooks me up with a Newsweek cover.

In the meantime, while you enjoy this dramatic video recreation of Andrew Sullivan defending gala blogger luncheons, why not email Mr. Sullivan at "The Daily Beast" at "andrew@thedailybeast.com" and ask him how in the world he managed to forget Steven Gilliard?

Tungsten carbide drills?

What the bloody hell is "tungsten carbide drills"?

Dead Loss

— n
1. informal a person, thing, or situation that is completely useless or unprofitable
2. a complete loss for which no compensation is received

According to one of the human Q-Tips who writes for Andrew Breitbart's Big Mendacity site, this was the conference I attended this weekend:

...My friend Tupac Pelosi-Mumia, who lives with his parents Marge and Fred Bosley in Beverly Hills (“I kills me that they forced me to drive a Mercedes bought with his money made oppressing the workers at his department stores, but I do it for the sake of the struggle”), told me about a terrifying encounter he had with a couple of rampaging conservatives. All he did was throw a free range egg at them during a “No Free Speech for Fascists” demonstration there by Take Back the Mid-Day, his pro-civil liberties collective.

“They were going to give me a wedgie,” he reported, “But the surprise was on them — I don’t believe in wearing underwear! It’s part of the patriarchal paradigm!” The brutality of the wingnuts is truly terrifying. “Those conservatives are tough and mean and they will kick your ass,” Tupac said. “And that’s just the women.”

There were so many panels to choose from! I couldn’t decide on whether to go to “Gender Justice and Making Men Pay” or “Azatlan Now: Getting the US Out of North America,” so I just wandered around to see what superstars I could run into. It was awesome – I even got to shake Keith Olbermann’s hand, but he was kind of cold to me after I told him “I will totally watch your show as soon as I can find the Logo channel!” It is the Logo network, right? Or is it the Oprah one?

Plenty of petitions to sign too – I love getting involved in hand-on activism that makes a difference! I signed petitions about banning eating whales, tuna, beef, pigs, and chicken. I kind of drew the line at the super-vegan guys – call me a “bean curd criminal,” but as far as I’m concerned, you’ll have to pry my tofu out of my mom’s fridge.

I also signed some green energy petitions but had to stop to answer a call from United telling me my upgrade came through for the flight home – bingo! Finally, some guys dressed like pimps told me all about this deadly poison the capitalists are forcing on us called dihydrogen monoxide. I never took a science course at Berkeley since I didn’t have time as a double major in Womyn’s Literature and Oppression Studies...

It goes on and on like that.

Perhaps you can see why rarely bother trying to persuade Conservatives of anything anymore?

Between 9/10ths of the Conservative Movement who masturbate themselves blind in giggly, vicarious dread at the awful awfulness of the Cartoon Dirty Fucking Hippie Emmanuel Goldstein's their Brain Caste as created

to keep their tiny minds off of just how fucked Conservatism has left this country (from "Hating Goldstein")...

...
There is no Big Brother bestriding the Right, because there doesn't need to be: because the one, genuine innovation of the Right has been to spend 40 years carefully cultivating a dumbed-down Base which at this point are little more than reprogrammable Golem.

Whatever they are told today through the Right's trusted in-house organs, they will believe.

Whatever those in-house sources tell them tomorrow -- even if it is in 180 degree opposition to what they were told today -- they will believe.

Because the day-to-day ebb and flow of Conservative lies -- no matter how malevolent or jaw-droppingly ridiculous -- no longer matters to a Base that knows only two things: that Big Brother loves them and that Emmanuel Goldstein is to blame for all of their problems.
...

..and the remaining, Expatriate 1/10th of the Conservative Movement who lament the loss of the Glorious Imaginary Conservative Movement That Never Was, and strain their intellectual muscles extravagantly noticing -- finally and far-too-late -- just a fraction of what the Dirty Fucking Hippies have been trying to tell them for the last 30 years (Here, Andrew Sullivan actually has the balls to brag that his 2006 book finally taking note of the capture of the Right by the Fundamentalists was "a little ahead of its time"), I have no patience left for anyone on the Right.

They are the millstone around our cultural neck, and their continued, toxic influence is the single largest impediment to repairing the terrible damage they have inflicted on our nation.

Tell Me About The Liberals, George

Of Lies and Men

A strong contender for this weekend's "Most Pitiable Sight" award must go to Wall Street Journal sock puppet John Fund,

who I spotted skulking around the Netroots' conference room level of the Minneapolis Convention Center trailing eager-beaver, 3rd tier wingnut Warren Todd Huston

like some latter-day, Randite George and Lennie from "Of Mice and Men".

It is such a stark and pathetic reminder of the fundamentally peevish and parasitic nature of the Right that they would build an entire movement and schedule entire conferences around the act of hating people like me.

That they would shadow us from city to city just to do so.

That the barrenness of their ideological cupboard is now so complete that a Wall Street Journal douchbag from New York and a mid-level wingnut talking point Pez dispenser from Chicago would travel all the way to Minnesota just to slink around among the happy energetic Liberals to grub for crumbs of incipient socialism About Which They Can Be Loudly Outraged, and crib notes about what panels the Dirty Fucking Hippies had put together to destroy America.

As I have noted in the past, Mr. Huston has been hustling hard to climb into the second tier of wingnut apologists for some time now (From this September 2010 Anatomy of a Breitbartian Ratfucking):

Local Breitbart Clone

uses adulterated video to justify 20,568th consecutive unhinged rant against Those Evil Liberals Who Are Destroying America (this time the target was ThinkProgress.com.)
...

Future historians take note: This is what it looked like when the Right stopped merely drinking the Koolaid and started injecting it directly into their spines.

Perhaps here, in the land of Mary Richards, Mr. Huston can finally turn the world on with his smile and

make it after all.

A Little Something

just for the hundreds of Godforsaken, morally malformed, Conservative losers gathered around the Brietbart Big Miscreant site, warming their mingy souls on the bonfire of their own, collective psychosis.

Because the Nut Bar in Crazytown never closes.

Call and Response

at the Church of the Robot Pimps* ** -- UPDATED 8/20 ***

So, one of Andrew Breitbart's local hatchlings wrote about Ray Bradbury.

Oh boy!

It was a small thing, really. Internet ephemera that will come and go. But it caught my attention because it was such a tiny, mingy gem of professional wingnut Goebbelspeak -- such a nearly-flawless example of the absolutely mechanical compulsion that drives Conservatives to pluck literally any issue out of thin air and then mangle it beyond recognition it in order to bash Liberals -- that I thought it would be worth taking apart to show how all the scummy little moving part work.

Were you to simply read Warner Todd Huston's article in any of the dozens and dozens of Conservative disease vector media outlets which happily pick up and pass along such poison, here is what you would find.

Let's start with the headline:

"Sci Fi Giant Ray Bradbury Slams Obama’s Era of Big Government"

And what does the author impute his headline to mean?

"You see, Bradbury did not say he’s against “government.” ... It is possible to be against welfare spending, the so-called stimulus, and Obama’s ever growing tendrils of Big Brotherism without thinking that government shouldn’t help fund a space program. Further, Bradbury did not state that only government can get us back to the moon, either."

So, according to our local Breitbart-knockoff, Obama is the sinister author of a Big Brother Government, and it is against Obama's Insidious Liberal Triumvirate of "welfare spending, the so-called stimulus" and "Big Brotherism" which the nearly-90-year-old science fiction Grand Master was inveighing.

So, is any of that actually true?

Nah.

How do I know?

Because it says so in the very first sentence of the LA Times blog/article to which our local Breitbartlette was referring:

"Ray Bradbury is mad at President Obama, but it's not about the economy, the war or the plan to a construct a mosque near Ground Zero in New York City."

So what specifically is it that Ray Bradbury is pissed at the President about?

Conveniently, the article makes that clear in the second paragraph:

“He should be announcing that we should go back to the moon,” says the iconic author, whose 90th birthday on Aug. 22 will be marked in Los Angeles with more than week's worth of Bradbury film and TV screenings, tributes and other events. “We should never have left there. We should go to the moon and prepare a base to fire a rocket off to Mars and then go to Mars and colonize Mars. Then when we do that, we will live forever."

Well, shit, I'm pissed about it too. Yes, this filthy, America-hating Liberal of the First Water could (and has) done thousands of word on both the pragmatic, dollar-and-cent value of sending human beings to space, as well as how vital it is to the human soul to have crazy, awe-inspiring, long-term goals to shoot for.

Hell, the space program's educational and technological spin-offs alone are enough to justify tripling our investment.

So what does any of that have to do with ""welfare spending" or "the so-called stimulus" or "Big Brotherism"?

Nothing, of course. Nothing whatsoever. Just another steaming bit of offal dropping off the assembly line at the Breitbart Conservative Lie Factory:



Now as to Mr. Bradbury's general complaint that "There is too much government today" based on what he actually said, there is no real way to suss out exactly what he might have been referring to.

Bimetalism?

Rural mosquito abatement?

Cops, such as the one who busted him for daring to go pedestrian in LA in 1951?

In an interview, Bradbury revealed that the inspiration for this novel came when he was walking down Wilshire Blvd. with a friend and a police cruiser pulled up asked what they were doing. Bradbury answered "Well, we're putting one foot in front of the other." The policeman didn't appreciate Ray's humor and he became suspicious of Bradbury and his friend for walking in an area where there were no pedestrians. After some arguing the policeman told them to go home and to not walk any more. Bradbury said "Yes, sir, I'll never walk again."

The subtle Masonic villainy of "The Food Pyramid"?

Fuck if I know, but I don't believe it would be a huge stretch to imagine that the author of the intermittently-banned "Fahrenheit 451" and drum major for public libraries would be extremely concerned about things like the USA Patriot Act, secret prisons, rendition, torture, illegal wiretapping and the jackboot of the federal gummint on the throat of American librarians.

In other words, all of those grotesquely totalitarian legacies of the Cheney Administration towards which the Right was so giddily, volubly and unforgivably hospitable...and against which the Dirty Fucking Hippies raged virtually alone and in vain. (Hey, Tea Baggers: Where were your fucking rallies then?)

And against which we still rage, still virtually alone.

Ah but we must remind ourselves that we are no longer in the Real World, but deep inside the fetid bell jar of the Breitbart Universe, where every stale, 30-year-old Bircher beer fart has already been lustily re-breathed and re-farted a million times, and inconvenient facts and history that completely invert your bullshit theses can all be just...wished... wished... wished... awaaaaay.

And because we are spelunking through Breitbartian dreck, we must also remember that the attack is only half over.

That having invented an imaginary Conservative superstructure beneath a few passing remarks by Ray Bradbury, to go the "Full Breitbart" Mr. Huston must now proceed to invent an equally imaginary Crazy Left horde who apparently militate tirelessly against poor ol' Ray and against which Mr. Huston can then vent his bottomless spleen.

Here are Mr. Huston's own words, with emphasis added here and there as the mood suited me:

"Naturally the misinformed, and those unable to think clearly—by that I mean liberals—think that Bradbury is an old coot that is off his rocker."

What Liberals, Mr. Huston? Where?

"How can he say we should be going back to the moon but still be against “big government,“ they fume. "

"They"? Again, who the fuck are "they" and from which corner of your cardboard box basement anti-Liberal fort Panic Room are "they" whispering all of this to you?

Oh Jesus. Tell me you didn't assemble your entire Big Liberal Broadside Hissy Fit out a few, unattributed, anonymous sentences from the comment section of some random fucking blog post.

"This is a simpleton’s point, the sort of idiotic, childish taking point that one would expect from halfwits like Keith Olbermann or Media Matters."

I did a complete search of Media Matters.

Ray Bradbury's name has never been mentioned.


Then I did a Google Search of "Keith Olbermann" and "Ray Bradbury" and outside of Mr. Huston's own feculent bit of fake journalism ricocheting through the delicate digital minarets and wide, stony canals of Teh Internets

there is no indication whatsoever that Keith Olbermann has ever mentioned Mr. Bradbury.

Which is a shame as more people should read him.

Then again, in the Age of Limbaugh it has become almost a matter of Pig People etiquette to gratuitously slam an Olbermann or a Media Matters every time they take a dump. Exactly like, say, a "good German" in the 1930s reflexively cursing Jews for his every ache and sniffle.

Haters...Signify!

Mr. Huston continues:

"I am sorry for all those simpleminded lefties out there upset at Bradbury..."

OK, at this point there ceases to be any psychological distance between what Mr. Huston is saying in his article and the rantings of some withdrawal-stricken junkie thrashing around the floor of a CTA bus and raving about the imaginary devil-rats in his pants that are biting his naughty bits and screaming terrible things in his ears.

Except, of course, that the paranoid keening of random junkies is not useful grist for a well-funded Right Wing Hate Machine which must be fed 24/7/365.

"I am sorry that they are not sophisticated enough to understand that the warnings of this aged elder statesman of the literary world are worth considering."

What do you mean you can't hear the devil-rats!?

They're all around us!

And they fucking hate Ray Bradbury!

"The unthinking lefties chastising Bradbury also focused on the seeming incongruity of a celebrated science fiction author being against the permeation of machines in our lives. How could he be against fantastic machines and be a sci fi writer they burble.

"Clearly these people have never once read a Bradbury book."

First, this here Liberal got his first Bradbury book pressed into his hands by a kindly 5th grade teacher 1,000 years ago and never stopping reading and loving the man's work.

Second, there is a big, tasty helping of konservative kultural kizmet coming up, so hang in there.

"And I leave you unthinking lefties with Bradbury’s line above..."

Yeah, pal, we get it. You really, really, really don't like those dirty kikes Liberals and their international Jewish conspiracy Commie President who are secretly behind every bad thing that happens.

Message received.

So I looked across Teh Internets for these awful Liberals.

High and low I looked.

Left and right I looked.

Through Wordpress and Blogger and Drupal I looked.

And you know what?

Outside of a few, unattributed, anonymous sentences in a comment section, the only actual post or article I could locate anywhere implying in any way that Uncle Ray had perhaps gone irretrievably Koo-Foo-for-Cocoa-Puffs did not come from some frothing, nonexistent anti-Bradbury Liberal vanguard...

...but was instead to be found nesting quite comfortably smack in the anthracite heart of the Randite Right.

From Nick Gillespie at "Reason" magazine:

Ray Bradbury Hysterical Theater: We Got Too Much Gummint, Too Many Internets, But Not Enough Moon Colonies! UPDATED AUGUST 17!

Nick Gillespie | August 16, 2010

The inspiration for one of the worst movies of all time (Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451) and a pretty good one (Disney's Something Wicked This Way Comes), and a bunch of better and worse books, has gotten into the Grandpa Simpson zone of Larry King-esque observational complaints. Here's author Ray Bradbury in hypoglycemic overload:

...

Thanks, Ray, for making your work more difficult to access, you Luddite old fart.
...

Nick Gillespie, whose publication describes hims as "...[a] libertarian and doctor of literature, who...is injecting [Reason magazine] with a pop-culture sensibility."


Nick Gillespie, who, as it turns out, also happens to be one of Mr. Huston's fellow contributors to Andrew Breitbart's Big Government Miscreant site.

Which -- according the Commutative Law of Wingnut Guilt-by-Tangential-Association -- means that, in addition to being an elite member of the hardcore Randite Right...

...Nick Gillespie is also somehow a Dirty little Muslim Commie.

There will now be a short pause while the entire Universe laughs at Mr. Huston behind his back.


Seriously, outside of Mr. Gillespie's stiff-arm, I can find no record of any liberals out there anywhere who are upset by something that one of the last Grand Masters of science fiction (or speculative fiction, or magical realism, or whatever you want to call what Uncle Ray does) had to say in some LA Times article. Truth is, almost nobody noticed -- or really cared -- what Ray had to say about "too much government" until one of Brietbart's ideological rentboys decided to use the old gentleman's shouty opinions to mule in another assload of the Right's depraved ideological cancer.

And as much as reading this tripe ticked me momentarily off, I could not help but also be deeply amused by the irony of the words of Ray Bradbury being hijacked by a typist who (like virtually everyone still hunkered down inside the Conservative nattering classes) has devolved into some kind of mindless automaton.

A device which -- regardless of circumstances in the Real World -- endlessly, iteratively regurgitates its pre-programmed talking points...

...in a synthesized human voice...

...to a dark, crumbling auditorium devoid of anything but other mindless automata...

...who, in turn, rotely regurgitate back their squeaking, chittering approval.

Frozen inside an endless, fog-bound midnight, it is forever Call and Response time at the Church of the Robot Pimps.**

A dismal, nightmarish and ultimately terribly sad existence.

Almost like something out of a Bradbury story.

* Original Photo from here.

** (h/t "The Paper Chase")


*** Commenter Twinky P* correctly points out that Rumproast and Whiskey Fire each did posts taking exception to Uncle Ray's comments. They did "spank his butt" a bit -- mostly focused on Bradbury's apparently cranky tone -- but strangely no one rose to defend (or even mention) the Kenyan Usurper's Insidious Liberal Triumvirate of "welfare spending, the so-called stimulus" and "Big Brotherism". Also no fatwahs were declared.

Still Waiting

People of the Lie

"[Narcissists]...project their own evil onto the world. They never think of themselves as evil, on the other hand, they consequently see much evil in others."

— M. Scott Peck, "People of the Lie"

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has paid any attention whatsoever to the Conservative Movement for the last 30 years that the Breitbart BigGovernmentMiscreant site has quickly rallied itself to respond to the glaringly indisputable fact that its owner is a lying shitbag.

I hope you weren't waiting for an apology...

Here's the headline:

From JournoList to Shirley Sherrod: The Left’s Default Response Is Fascism

by John Nolte...

Since I don't link to sites run by liars and frauds, if you want any more of Nolte's scintillating defense of his meal-ticket, you'll have to Google it yourself. Suffice it to say, you'll probably want to have a Kevlar sick bag on hand.

I post it here today (along a few of the comments it generated) to underscore a larger, sadder and much more important point: sooner or later, Liberals as a Movement must come to terms with the fact that people like Breitbart -- who operate with a free hand and a blank check at the very heart of the Conservative Movement -- are not simply crazy or misguided or possessed of a strange but equally sincere ideology, but genuinely evil.

And the reason we keep banging our heads when trying to cope with evil is that evil renders our entire Liberal toolbox worse than useless.

Evil doesn't care about policy or governance. At. All. Which is why we are so often reduced to a spluttering "But don't they realize...?" incomprehension when the Right stomps on the throat of the weak and defenseless...again. While smiling...again

Evil does not have a conscience which can be appealed to, or a sense of shame which can be invoked.

Evil doesn't give a shit about fair play or reason or causality or the niceties of democracy.

When faced with positive proof that what it is doing will harm others, Evil says "Go piss up a rope, hippie."

"Evil deeds do not make an evil person. Otherwise we would all be evil. If evil people cannot be defined by the illegality of their deeds or the magnitude of their sins, then how are we to define them? The answer is by the consistency of their sins. While usually subtle, their destructiveness is remarkably consistent. This is because those who have "crossed over the line" are characterized by their absolute refusal to tolerate the sense of their own sinfulness."

— M. Scott Peck, "People of the Lie"

Instead of a conscience, evil has vanity, megalomania, greed and an all-encompassing fear that they will be found out and ridiculed for being the wretched, little scuttlefish that they are.

They live in terror that someone might see the sorry state of their mingy soul, which is why they band together for protection under the banner of an ideology which glorifies cruelty and heartlessness, and why they reserve their most furious hellfire for kindest of people.

This is why they hate Shirley Sherrod -- a woman they did not even know existed a week ago -- with such hysterical, berserk fury, why they eagerly swallow every ACORN lie that churns out of the Breitbart/Beck/Limbaugh Paranoid Conspiracy Factory and beg for more: to Evil, those who advocate publicly on behalf of kindness, justice and compassion, and who -- by lesson and language -- implore their fellow citizens to assay their souls in a clear and Christian light are the sources of scalding pain.

Every act of decency rubs Evils' nose in the horror of its polluted existence, and every public gesture of confession and humanity threatens extinction. Faced with these threats, Evil has no recourse but attack!attack!attack!

To illustrate my point, I have mined a few, representative examples from the Breitbart Commenteriate and arranged them in no particular order on the Left.

I have arranged a few quotes from M. Scott Peck's "People of the Lie" on the Right.

---------------------------------------

Rebas_Thgil...
How about we keep Breittbart's websites alive
and well, as surely Shirley Sherrod's charade is
the thing that does not advance this country.

ninecats...
the more she opens her mouth,
the more she proves Breitbart correct...

---------------------------------------

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"Think of the psychic energy required for the
continued maintenance of the pretense so
characteristic of 'the evil'! They perhaps direct
at least as much energy into their devious rationalizations
and destructive compensations as the
healthies do into loving behavior.

Why? What possesses them, drives them?
Basically, it is fear.

They are terrified that the pretense will break down
and they will be exposed to the world and to themselves."

-- Page 124

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

---------------------------------------

doawkins...
Mark Levin says she is an idiot.
Sherrod is nasty.
...
She is racist and seems to deserve trouble.
My own company handbook wouldn't allow
her to trash talk at the NAACP and get
by with it. It creates a hostile enviironment.


peaches1...
I can't believe how absolutely stupid
these people are.
They are the racists.
Every word coming out of this woman's mouth
is a lie or some sort of racist remark.
---------------------------------------

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"A predominant characteristic of the behavior
that I call evil is scapegoating.
Because in their hearts they consider themselves
above reproach, they must lash out at anyone
who does reproach them.
They sacrifice others
to preserve their self-image of perfection."

-- Page 73

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

---------------------------------------
The_Great_Satan
Would liberals like to shut down
any broadcaster that doesn’t follow leftwing ideology? Yes.
Would liberals like to shut down talk radio? Yes.
Would liberals like to ban
Conservatives from liberal infested academia? Yes.
Would liberals like to shutdown
companies they don’t like? Yes.
Would liberals like to
imprison dissenters? Yes.

There is a name for people like this, it is Fascist.
...


pnipni
This whole thing is a disaster.
Shirley is a racist liar,
and the Democrats are mostly socialists,
and we have a mad Socialist/Fascist
out to destroy America!
...
---------------------------------------

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"Since they must deny their own badness,
they must perceive others as bad.
They project their own evil onto the world.
The evil attack others instead of facing their own failures."

-- Page 74

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

---------------------------------------
Cali~Gal
The left is chasing it's tail, and Obama
and the thug's in-charge are getting
trigger happy. Ms. Sherrod is a phony,
paid liar and a fraud...


attila_the_pun
I think liberals do this on purpose.
Their hypocrisy is so utterly mind boggling
that it stuns any decent human being
like a taser gun, thus incapacitating them for a short time.
---------------------------------------

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"Utterly dedicated to preserving their self-image of perfection, they are unceasingly engaged in the effort to maintain the appearance of moral purity.

...

While they lack any motivation to be good,they intensely desire to appear good. Their goodness is all on a level of pretense. It is in effect a lie. Actually the lie is designed not so much to deceive others as to deceive themselves.We lie only when we are attempting to cover up something we know to be illicit. At one and the same time 'the evil' are aware of their evil and desperately trying to avoid the awareness. We become evil by attempting to hide from ourselves. The wickedness of 'the evil' is not committed directly, but indirectly as a part of this cover-up process. Evil originates not in the absence of guilt but in the effort to escape it."

-- Page 75

There is little point in engaging people like this directly. They are a cultural dead-loss who live 24/7 in a madhouse furnished floor-to-ceiling by Hate Media tropes and venom, and with whom we no longer even share a common vocabulary.

However, to the fake Centrists like David Fucking Brooks and Equivocators like Anderson Cooper who automatically flee and cower behind the Big Lie of "Both sides do it" every time another bigoted, psychotic wind blows inconveniently in from the Right I would ask when exactly are we scheduled to finally arrive at the Magic Reasonable Centerpoint between us and these people that will satisfy you?

How much further Right must sane people tack and how much more of what is good about America must we surrender to these scum in the name of the mindless, capitulating "compromise" that you sanctify?

To Conservative Revisionists like Andrew Sullivan I would ask, just how far back into the history of your beloved Conservative Movement do people like me need to fucking hand-walk you before it will start to sink in that the core of the Right has always been like this? That it was designed from the start to manufacture people like this?

And to my fellow travelers on the Left who despair at the realization that our homegrown enemies of democracy do not respond to reason and right, I would remind them that we have access to an inexhaustible stockpile of the one weapon against which they have always been powerless:

"The Devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked."

-- St. Thomas More

Or, in the modern parlance...

Who's Next?

Liberals: We're What's For Dinner.

In case no one had the balls to tell you the unvarnished truth, Mr. President, the thing that has been so dispiriting about Brietbartgate is that it happened right in front of us and in real-time. The very speed of it gave us all a window not into your good intentions or high ideals, but into the raw and naked organizational reflexes of the Obama White House.

And what we saw made us ill.

Not only did it confirm every Liberal's ugliest fears about how completely craven and appeasement-happy your Administration is when it comes to dealing with Right-wing scum, but in the heart of the Great Recession, you also managed to morph yourself into just about the worst possible caricature anyone striving to gain the trust of an unemployment-shell-shocked public could be:

You became Everybody's Nightmare Dumbass Boss.

You let yourself become the stereotypical feckless employer who can be cowed and bullied by any sleazy consultant with a loud mouth who knows which buttons to push (and which everyone but the Clueless Boss seems to know is a criminally reckless fraud) into making truly astonishing, bonehead decisions that end up:

1. Costing some of your best, most-loyal and most hard-working people their jobs, their peace of mind and their good names for no damn good reason, and,
2. Badly damaging the morale of the very people you most need, while at the same time,
3. Enhancing the reputation and prestige of the scumbag consultant who fed you poison in the first place.

In case you didn't recognize it as it whizzed by, this was your 3:00 AM phone call Mr. President, and you failed the test of it pretty fucking spectacularly.

Organizational culture comes from the top, Mr. President: you set the tone.

So Learn, Baby, Learn: man up or lose your base, Mr. President.

It's really that simple.

Full Metal Thurm

(h/t Daily Dish)

With no place left to run, and no lies sufficiently greasy and opaque left to cover up his perfidy, contemptible Conservative hatchet-man, Andrew Breitbart finally loses his mind...

...and goes all-in, full-on

Nathan Thurm.

For those of you keeping score locally, amid all of their many, many, many, thousands of dully repetitive screeds about the Horrible Horrors of Unions and Big Gummint and Unions and Rampant Black Racism and Unions and Liberal Media Conspiracies and, of course, Unions, somehow our local Conservative stalwarts haven't found time to put pen to paper and talk about this major, national Breitbart story.

The story of a liar shitting all over himself (again) because he has been caught out over a piece of ratfucking fiction that he help proliferate (again) which had been crafted to make national headlines, destroy innocent lives and gave aid and comfort to his fellow Conservative blackshirts (again).

A story, in other words, that works every, single one of their Conservative hot-button ivories as thoroughly and perfectly

as Bach working the keys of a harpsichord.

"Why", I wondered. "Why?"

And then I remembered...

...

And finally the Pièce de résistance as we were addressed by the boss. No, not Bruce Springsteen -- he'd never address such an audience of real Americans -- no, my boss, Andrew Breitbart, the man for whom I write at the various Big sites. Chairman Eric O'Keffe of the Sam Adams Alliance introduced Breitbart by giving us a warning. "We cannot delegate our government to the hired help," O'Keffe told us. He urged us to action saying that we need to take control of it ourselves.

Me and the boss, Andrew Breitbart

Breibart's boundless energy was very much in evidence as he took the podium to detail his odyssey from somewhat naive denizen of Hollywood to crusader for the conservative cause. He told us that in 2000 he witnessed the evils of the left in Hollywood as it geared up to destroy George W. Bush. Even before 9/11, he told us, the left kicked its hate of America into high gear. But it was after 9/11 that his naiveté was ripped away and the vile nature of the left was revealed to him.

...

Oh yeah, that's why.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something
when his job depends on not understanding it."
-- Upton Sinclair

Andrew Breitbart Presents --

Huckleberry Finn: Confederate Hero!

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn't know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I'll go and write the letter - and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:

Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. Huck Finn.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now.

But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking - thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell.



THE END

The agonizing moral reversal of Huck's initial decision to betray Jim at what he genuinely believes is the peril of his immortal soul is arguably the single most famous moment in American literature, and what makes "Huckleberry Finn" the great American novel (despite the problems of the final chapter.)

It is also exactly the kind of vital context that a depraved Conservative fraud like Andrew Breitbart would amputate without a backwards glance if doing so would advance his hateful, deranged political agenda a few inches.

Long ago I began saving myself untold ergs of mental energy by simply presuming that if a Conservative is in front of a camera, behind a microphone or by-lining an editorial about anything to do with culture or politics, I assuming they are lying. Because to remain a Conservative these days you have to lie to yourself pretty much 24/7, and if you are a Conservative media thug you have to keep that lie-based consensual political hallucination going by broadcasting outright bullshit 'round the clock.

Lying well or poorly. Lying smoothly or awkwardly. Lying out of stupidity or fear or racism or venality or just because they're fucking nuts. Lying by omission. Lying by false equivalence. Lying by beating statistics until they bled.

But lying.

But for years now I have always, always, always presumed that somehow, some way the Conservative who is opining about the state of the nation is in some crucial way just fucking lying his ass off.

Sadly, after all this time, it has proved to be a presumption that has rarely failed me.

Which leaves us with the same question we always seem to return to after the White House gets head-faked and humiliated by the Right yet again: How the fuck is it that insignificant Liberals like me can figure this shit out with one frontal lobe tied behind our backs, while the Most Gifted Democratic Politician in a Generation keeps proving himself over and over and over again to be clueless, callow and jejune?

Mr. President, if you would like to know what the people who put you in the fucking White House are thinking about Brietbartgate, it is just this simple: No matter how many times you finally figure out that you were wrong and we were right, how is it that your loyal Liberal supporters still get the back of Rahm Emanuel's hand every time we ask for something like, say, Single Payer health care, while your entire Administration jumps like trained seals every time a Right wing scumbag like Breitbart snaps his fingers?

PS. "Thanks You" notes for several kind and generous people are still pending. I have not forgotten. I am just a terrible person.

Happy Potato Day Eve, Andrew Breitbart!

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Baracknophobia - Obey
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Health Care Reform

Can you believe it has been one year since the professionally indignant and compassionately malformed Andrew Bleat-Bark Breitbart let fly with the little gem above and got spanked on a basic cable comedy show?

Perhaps sensing that This!Was!His!Moment! Mr. Beet Red Brietbart bounded into action, in the sense that he penned a spittle-flecked Column of Scattershot Outrage (Does he ever write any other kind?) in the Moonie Rag Washington Times (Who else would have him?) to the effect the had been taken cruelly out of context.

By the basic cable comedy show:

...
The “joke” was that these right-wing zealots weren’t giving the new president enough time, that the previous president did worse things, and that I, in particular, was ridiculous for blaming the president for “St. Patrick’s Day” becoming “Potato Day” at my kids’ public school. (Yes, the name change took place. No, I did not blame President Obama — specifically.)

As is his style, Mr. Stewart took wildly out of context my clip from Fox News’ “Hannity” in which Sean and I discussed the Obama administration’s decision to call the “war on terror” an “overseas contingency operation,” and “terrorism” a “man-caused disaster.”

Well of course! Because how could anyone but a paranoid, unlettered Leftist possibly interpret the sentence

"...and since Barack Obama's the President, they no longer call it Saint Patrick's Day; they're calling it Potato Day. This political correctness is dangerous; it's the destruction of language."

as laying the blame for the "destruction of language" directly at the doorstep of the Kenyan Usurper...which in turn -- like Commie dominoes falling -- led directly to the jackbooted Orwellian nightmare of some school somewhere using the phrase Potato Day?

(Fox News -- already a fan of Mr. Beat Box Breitbart's ability to elevate through sheer manufactured apoplexy a series of imaginary slights, trivial events and brutally doctored footage into Unimpeachably Damning Proof of the Sinister Global Hippie Commie Conspiracy -- responded by upping his on-camera presence noticeably.

And making him get a damned a hair cut.)

Of course if Andrew Blight? Brat? Breitbart had gotten out a little more during his formative years instead of nesting in Matt Drudge's wattles, he might have become aware of a man named "George Carlin".


Who practiced a craft called "humor".


And who spent the better part of a generation methodically demolishing exactly the sort of bastardization of the English language

which Mr. Bright Rat Breitbart apparently believes began at 12:01 P.M. on January 20, 2009.

And why has the King's English been taking such a savage beating for so long?

Well, frankly, one very big reason is because the people who really own and operate this country -- people like the Washington Time's Ultra Conservative owner and Cult Leader Sun Myung Moon and Fox News' Chief Gorgon Roger Ailes (both of whom make no small contribution to Mr. Batshit Breitbart's daily bread) -- want to keep us stupid and afraid.

Actually that Carlin fella that Mr. Brickbat Breitbart apparently never heard of explains the whole thing pretty well right here.


So I just wanted to take a moment from the busy work of destroying America to wish Mr. Andrew Breadfruit Breitbart a Merry Potato Day, and a full and speedy recovery from the groin pull he suffered while backpedaling full tilt waughhhhh! away from his former protege, James "King of All Pimps" O'Keefe.

At your age, Mr. Mr. Andrew Brood Fart Breitbart, you really do need to warm up a little before trying those sudden and violent changes of direction.