Harold Bloom's Explanation: Shakespeare as the Inventor of Modern Man

The Western Canon by Harold Bloom is by his own admission probably the last gasp of an ueber-narrative of the type no longer appreciated by the New Historicists and other "schools" of reductionism. Feminists and Ethnic/Racial-based scribblings of second-rate and third-rate twaddle-meisters which now pass for 'literature" in the Academy debase the currency of the life of the mind. Dead White European Males [DWEMs] are discounted and discredited by these epigoni dwelling in a generous academic house of bedlam. Foucault, Barthes, et al. announce the death of the author and give "social energies" the birthright of engendering great literature of a given epoch. In his trenchant remarks, Bloom adequately bemoans the "Untergang des Abendlands" without excessive Spenglerian gloom.

I myself quibble a bit with some of Bloom's choices. Leaving Paul Claudel out of the French canon is unfair. Leaving Animal Farm out of Orwell's oeuvre and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight out of the Early English canon are also quibbles I would make. But Bloom is correct in making Shakespeare the center of his canon. His remarks on Falstaff

"...Sir John Falstaff is so original and so overwhelming that with him Shakespeare changes the entire meaning of what it is to have created a man made out of words."

fit with my very inadequate experience in a lifetime of reading. Henry IV, Part 1 on a BBC DVD bowled me over last night, especially with Tim Piggot-Smith's rendition of Percy. But Falstaff, whom I had the privilege of trying to enact decades ago, is utterly the greatest scene-stealer in the history of drama, although Hamlet, Lear's Fool, and Iago all are close runner-ups, as is Lady MacBeth. I can understand why Queen Elizabeth enjoyed Falstaff so much in this play that she let it be known to the young playwright that more of the fat drunken highwayman/confabulist was wanted--with the much less interesting Merry Wives of Windsor the result. In this history of young Prince Hal, the language is supremely magical and exalted and rich---how did this glover's son with an affable personality surpass egomaniacs like Dante and Tolstoy and your average French novelist/philosophe?

Bloom comments on the uncanny ability of Shakespeare to survive translation into other languages. Moral fiction is an oxymoron of sorts and Shakespeare's detractors like G.B. Shaw and Tolstoy rank Uncle Tom's Cabin and Pilgrim's Progress above Lear and Falstaff. To which Bloom says:

Sincerity has no royal road to the truth and imaginative literature situates itself somewhere between truth and meaning, a somewhere I once compared to what ancient Gnostics called the kenoma, the cosmological emptiness in which we wander and weep, as William Blake wrote....Shakespeare gives one a more persuasive representaton of the kenoma than anyone else particularly when he sets the backgrounds of King Lear and Macbeth....we have to struggle hard to think of any representation that is not more convincing in Shakespeare than anywhere else, be it in homer, Dante, or Tolstoy. Rhetorically, Shakespeare has no equal, no more awesome panoply of metaphor exists. If your quest is for a truth that defies rhetoric, perhaps you ought to study political economy or systems analysis and abandon Shakespeare to the aesthetes and groundlings, who combined to elevate him in the first place.

And that is the rub, why the English common speech is permeated with Shakespearean tropes and quips and saws and sayings. He hit the ball out of the park and he bunted for base hits. He had his off days and his off plays. Marlowe was almost his exact contemporary and had written several masterpieces before Shakespeare had even got one minor hit. But the brilliant Christopher was a double agent and was killed, perhaps a political murder, before he was thirty years old. As Bloom notes:

"...as far as the School of Resentment is concerned...Foucault's Death of the Author ... merely alters rhetorical terms without creating a new method. If "social energies" wrote King Lear and Hamlet, why exactly were social energies more productive in the son of a Stratford artisan than in the burly bricklayer Ben Jonson? The exasperated New Historicist or Feminist critic has a curious affinity with the exasperations that keep creating partisans for the idea of Sir Francis Bacon or the earl of Osford as the true author of Lear. Sigmund Freud...went to his death insisting that Moses was an Egyptian and that Oxford wrote Shakespeare....It was somehow a great comfort to Freud to believe that his precursor Shakespeare was not a rather ordinary personality from Stratford, but an enigmatic and mighty nobleman. More than snobbery was involved. For Freud, as for Goethe, the works of Shakespeare were the secular center of culture, the hope for a rational glory in mankind still to come. There was even more than that for Freud. On some level, Freud understood that Shakespeare had invented psychoanalysis by inventing the psyche, insofar as Freud could recognize and describe it. This could not have been a pleasant understanding, since it subverted Freud's declaration that "I invented psychoanalysis because it had no literature." Revenge came with the supposed demonstration that Shakespeare was an impostor, which satisfied Freudian resentment though rationally it did not make the plays any less of a precursor. Shakespeare had played great havoc with Freud's originalities, now Shakespeare was unmasked and disgraced. We can be grateful that we do not have Freud's Oxford and Shakespeareanism to consort on our shelves with Moses and Monotheism and the various classics of New Historicist, Marxist, and Feminist Shakespeare. French Freud was silly enough; and now we have French Joyce, which is hard to take. But nothing can be as oxymoronic as French Shakespeare, which is what the New Historicism ought to be called."

Shakespeare is faceless as an author. With him there is no Yeatsian brooding over "perfection of the life or of the work." We know almost nothing about him.

The real Stratfordian wrote thirty-eight plays in twenty-four years and then went home to die. At forty-nine, he composed his last play, The Two Noble Kinsman, splitting the job with John Fletcher. Three years later he was dead...the creator of Lear and Hamlet died a not very momentous death after an uneventful life....we know that Shakespeare was quick to bring suits in Chancery to protect his estate investments.... [we must] fall back upon the work when no authorial maelstrom seems to be there. With Christopher Marlowe, I brood upon the man, who can be meditated upon endlessly, as the plays cannot; with Rimbaud, I brood over both, though the boy is even more enigmatic than the poetry...[but Shakespeare] has no incontestable spokesman in the plays: not Hamlet, not Prospero, certainly not the ghost of Hamlet's father whom he is supposed to have played....Ben Jonson or Christopher Marlowe in very different ways were great poets and sometimes remarkable dramatists, but the reader or player enters another order of art in encountering King Lear.

I suppose that I can go on quoting Bloom, who compares Dante & Shakespeare:

When you stand back from The Divine Comedy, the poem's strangeness shocks you, but Shakespearean drama seems at once utterly familiar and yet too rich to absorb all at once.

I experienced this richness and strangeness "...something rich and strange, those are pearls that were his eyes" last night watching Henry IV, but true horror and incomprehensible grief are unparalleled at the end of Lear, as the maddened King carries his dead daughter Cordelia onto the stage. Nothing in literature that I've encountered even approaches this absolute stomach-wrenching physical dread of my mortality as when I see how terrible life can be---without redemption or any ending that Hollywood or anyone could justify or rationalize---an inhuman condition.

Like the Shoah or other genocidal atrocities, it exists on a level of its own.

Dead Again. Conservatism Expired, Take it from The Expiring NYT

Sam Tanenhaus just can't help himself. In a book which is a wish being father to a [unexplained & shaky] thought, he once again declares the death of conservatism, with the usual dishonesty and insincerity and downright irrationality that the International Left, with its American subset, employs on almost every occasion. Basically, the libtards simply project their own bad faith and nasty impulses onto their opponents and then gleefully shout "gotcha!" Very sophisticated. James Piereson in The New Criterion remembers Rossiter"

“Our commitment to democracy means that Liberalism will maintain its historic dominance over our minds, and that conservative thinkers will continue as well-kept but increasingly restless hostages to the American tradition.” Liberals will always set the tone for public life, he argued, leaving conservatives with the thankless task of fighting liberal reforms and then adjusting to them after they have been adopted.

Condescending with a bit of the automatic snigger that phonies reserve for sincere patriots. So what else is new?
Sam Tanenhaus's book is something new in publication, but the same old drivel. Despite the fact that every poll by every pollster on the spectrum from infra-red to ultra-violet consistently comes up with the same percentage: 35% of Americans polled consider themselves "conservative" and 20% consider themselves "liberal." Yet p.o.s. Tanenhaus insists:

....the conservative movement collapsed under the presidency of George W. Bush, and that Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 marked the beginning of a new liberal era in American politics. Tanenhaus is not altogether certain as to the causes of this collapse, at times suggesting that conservatives undid themselves because they were corrupt and unprincipled in their pursuit of power and at others suggesting that they lost the support of the American people because of their devotion to right-wing “orthodoxy.” The one thing about which he is certain is that he dislikes conservatives—intensely and unremittingly so, judging by the rhetoric deployed in this book. Tanenhaus says at various points that conservatives are out to destroy the country, that they are driven by revenge and resentment, that they dislike America, and that they behave more like extremists and revolutionaries (“Jacobins”) than as genuine conservatives. In this sense, he has resurrected the liberal literature about Sen. McCarthy and “the radical right,” and sought to apply it to contemporary conservatism as if nothing of importance had happened in the meantime.

Why do conservatives allow themselves to be defined by such bottom-feeding pondscum-eaters as Tanenhaus? He takes great books like Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism and Amity Schlaes The Forgotten Man and uses the usual reductionist shell games to convince an entrenched elitist minority of self-anointed "gatekeepers" that they are the only game in town. In a classic case of projective dishonesty, S**T suggests, in Piereson's words, that by opposing an avalanche of unread, unthought-out Democrat splurging like some binge-and-purge bulemic,

"the right is the main source of disorder and dissension in contemporary society and the instigators of the long-running culture war that has divided the country"

Piereson easily refutes the straw men that resentment specialist Tanenhaus throws up as arguments, in a book written breathlessly immediately after the Obama victory before the entitlement Won ran up a $9 trillion spending binge.

It is certainly true, as Tanenhaus says, that conservatism as a political doctrine has its flaws and weaknesses, which are magnified when it is judged in the immediate aftermath of a lost election or in isolation from alternative approaches to public life. When judged in relation to liberalism, however, modern conservatism takes on a more favorable outlook. Many of the sins Tanenhaus attributes to conservatives—overly zealous attachment to principle or ideology, unwillingness to adapt to change, impatience with popular opinion—are on display as much or more among liberals. If Tanenhaus or anyone else wishes to see liberalism in action, he might venture on to an elite college campus where only liberal and leftist views are permitted peaceful expression, or out to Sacramento or up to Albany where liberal Democrats, long in control, have spent their states into near bankruptcy. The liberal faculty and public employee unions that control those institutions and jurisdictions have not exactly distinguished themselves for their far-sighted and open-minded leadership. As for New York and California, the public employee unions that control the Democratic party, and thereby the state governments, have exploited the prosperity of recent decades to build up huge government establishments that will no longer be affordable in the forthcoming era of austerity, especially as taxpayers and businesses flee to other states like Texas and Florida that have followed more conservative paths. As California and New York unravel, voters will undoubtedly turn to conservatives to restore levels of growth and prosperity sufficient to fund their social programs and educational systems. Liberals will come to understand that in order to fund their programs, they will have to tolerate conservatives and conservative policies. That will be a hard and painful lesson for liberals to learn. If conservatism is dead, in short, then so is liberalism, and much else besides.

Conservatism, moreover, is now a permanent and enduring aspect of American political life, supported by millions of Americans and defended by a large network of writers, journals, and think tanks. There is, however, a more important reason for its enduring appeal among Americans. Conservatism in America deploys the principles of tradition, reason, and orderly change in defense of liberal institutions—the Constitution, representative government, liberty and equal rights, the rule of law. It is generally the conservative, not the modern liberal, who emphasizes the inspired example of the founding fathers, the words of the Constitution, and the sacrifices made to build free institutions. If it is true that liberals want to overcome the past, or apologize for it, then conservatives want us to remember, to learn, and to build constructively upon it. That may be a challenging task in a culture of short memory, but it is far from a thankless one.

When Piereson admits that "conservatism as a political doctrine has its flaws and weaknesses," he does something that the triumphalist autistic solipsists on the left cannot do. Look reality in the face without projecting their hypertrophic big government philosophy into the frame.

New York and California now have their bloated irretrievable deficits firmly in place and a gigantic parasitic state apparatus requiring constant injections of tax monies to sustain the nepotistic hordes of corrupt Democrats. A parasite like Rangel is only one example of the crap-pie CA & NY taxpayers are going to have to swallow. TX & FL will benefit, and the bloated caterpillars of the Dem states will never graduate to flutter like a butterfly.
Mark Steyn asks the question:

Driving north out of New York the other day, I heard a caller to Mark Levin’s show discuss his excellent book Liberty and Tyranny. The word she kept using was “inevitable”: The republic felt exhausted, and there was an “inevitability” to what was happening. A quarter-millennium of liberty seemed to be about the best you could expect, and its waning was—again—“inevitable.”

Oh yeah, and it's "inevitable" that Tanenhaus's book will be on the Remainder shelf within three months, while Liberty & Tyranny will still be selling a thousand a week.

Demography is destiny.

Harold Bloom's Western Canon: Shakespeare as the Inventor of Modern Man

The Western Canon by Harold Bloom is by his own admission probably the last gasp of an ueber-narrative of the type no longer appreciated by the New Historicists and other "schools" of reductionism. Feminists and Ethnic/Racial-based scribblings of second-rate and third-rate twaddle-meisters which now pass for 'literature" in the Academy debase the currency of the life of the mind. Dead White European Males [DWEMs] are discounted and discredited by these epigoni dwelling in a generous academic house of bedlam. Foucault, Barthes, et al. announce the death of the author and give "social energies" the birthright of engendering great literature of a given epoch. In his trenchant remarks, Bloom adequately bemoans the "Untergang des Abendlands" without excessive Spenglerian gloom.

I myself quibble a bit with some of Bloom's choices. Leaving Paul Claudel out of the French canon is unfair. Leaving Animal Farm out of Orwell's oeuvre and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight out of the Early English canon are also quibbles I would make. But Bloom is correct in making Shakespeare the center of his canon. His remarks on Falstaff

"...Sir John Falstaff is so original and so overwhelming that with him Shakespeare changes the entire meaning of what it is to have created a man made out of words."

fit with my very inadequate experience in a lifetime of reading. Henry IV, Part 1 on a BBC DVD bowled me over last night, especially with Tim Piggot-Smith's rendition of Percy. But Falstaff, whom I had the privilege of trying to enact decades ago, is utterly the greatest scene-stealer in the history of drama, although Hamlet, Lear's Fool, and Iago all are close runner-ups, as is Lady MacBeth. I can understand why Queen Elizabeth enjoyed Falstaff so much in this play that she let it be known to the young playwright that more of the fat drunken highwayman/confabulist was wanted--with the much less interesting Merry Wives of Windsor the result. In this history of young Prince Hal, the language is supremely magical and exalted and rich---how did this glover's son with an affable personality surpass egomaniacs like Dante and Tolstoy and your average French novelist/philosophe?

Bloom comments on the uncanny ability of Shakespeare to survive translation into other languages. Moral fiction is an oxymoron of sorts and Shakespeare's detractors like G.B. Shaw and Tolstoy rank Uncle Tom's Cabin and Pilgrim's Progress above Lear and Falstaff. To which Bloom says:

Sincerity has no royal road to the truth and imaginative literature situates itself somewhere between truth and meaning, a somewhere I once compared to what ancient Gnostics called the kenoma, the cosmological emptiness in which we wander and weep, as William Blake wrote....Shakespeare gives one a more persuasive representaton of the kenoma than anyone else particularly when he sets the backgrounds of King Lear and Macbeth....we have to struggle hard to think of any representation that is not more convincing in Shakespeare than anywhere else, be it in homer, Dante, or Tolstoy. Rhetorically, Shakespeare has no equal, no more awesome panoply of metaphor exists. If your quest is for a truth that defies rhetoric, perhaps you ought to study political economy or systems analysis and abandon Shakespeare to the aesthetes and groundlings, who combined to elevate him in the first place.

And that is the rub, why the English common speech is permeated with Shakespearean tropes and quips and saws and sayings. He hit the ball out of the park and he bunted for base hits. He had his off days and his off plays. Marlowe was almost his exact contemporary and had written several masterpieces before Shakespeare had even got one minor hit. But the brilliant Christopher was a double agent and was killed, perhaps a political murder, before he was thirty years old. As Bloom notes:

"...as far as the School of Resentment is concerned...Foucault's Death of the Author ... merely alters rhetorical terms without creating a new method. If "social energies" wrote King Lear and Hamlet, why exactly were social energies more productive in the son of a Stratford artisan than in the burly bricklayer Ben Jonson? The exasperated New Historicist or Feminist critic has a curious affinity with the exasperations that keep creating partisans for the idea of Sir Francis Bacon or the earl of Osford as the true author of Lear. Sigmund Freud...went to his death insisting that Moses was an Egyptian and that Oxford wrote Shakespeare....It was somehow a great comfort to Freud to believe that his precursor Shakespeare was not a rather ordinary personality from Stratford, but an enigmatic and mighty nobleman. More than snobbery was involved. For Freud, as for Goethe, the works of Shakespeare were the secular center of culture, the hope for a rational glory in mankind still to come. There was even more than that for Freud. On some level, Freud understood that Shakespeare had invented psychoanalysis by inventing the psyche, insofar as Freud could recognize and describe it. This could not have been a pleasant understanding, since it subverted Freud's declaration that "I invented psychoanalysis because it had no literature." Revenge came with the supposed demonstration that Shakespeare was an impostor, which satisfied Freudian resentment though rationally it did not make the plays any less of a precursor. Shakespeare had played great havoc with Freud's originalities, now Shakespeare was unmasked and disgraced. We can be grateful that we do not have Freud's Oxford and Shakespeareanism to consort on our shelves with Moses and Monotheism and the various classics of New Historicist, Marxist, and Feminist Shakespeare. French Freud was silly enough; and now we have French Joyce, which is hard to take. But nothing can be as oxymoronic as French Shakespeare, which is what the New Historicism ought to be called."

Shakespeare is faceless as an author. With him there is no Yeatsian brooding over "perfection of the life or of the work." We know almost nothing about him.

The real Stratfordian wrote thirty-eight plays in twenty-four years and then went home to die. At forty-nine, he composed his last play, The Two Noble Kinsman, splitting the job with John Fletcher. Three years later he was dead...the creator of Lear and Hamlet died a not very momentous death after an uneventful life....we know that Shakespeare was quick to bring suits in Chancery to protect his estate investments.... [we must] fall back upon the work when no authorial maelstrom seems to be there. With Christopher Marlowe, I brood upon the man, who can be meditated upon endlessly, as the plays cannot; with Rimbaud, I brood over both, though the boy is even more enigmatic than the poetry...[but Shakespeare] has no incontestable spokesman in the plays: not Hamlet, not Prospero, certainly not the ghost of Hamlet's father whom he is supposed to have played....Ben Jonson or Christopher Marlowe in very different ways were great poets and sometimes remarkable dramatists, but the reader or player enters another order of art in encountering King Lear.

I suppose that I can go on quoting Bloom, who compares Dante & Shakespeare:

When you stand back from The Divine Comedy, the poem's strangeness shocks you, but Shakespearean drama seems at once utterly familiar and yet too rich to absorb all at once.

I experienced this richness and strangeness "...something rich and strange, those are pearls that were his eyes" last night watching Henry IV, but true horror and incomprehensible grief are unparalleled at the end of Lear, as the maddened King carries his dead daughter Cordelia onto the stage. Nothing in literature that I've encountered even approaches this absolute stomach-wrenching physical dread of my mortality as when I see how terrible life can be---without redemption or any ending that Hollywood or anyone could justify or rationalize---an inhuman condition.

Like the Shoah or other genocidal atrocities, it exists on a level of its own.

Garrido: A Walking Brief for Mandatory Castration?

Philip Garrido may or may not have killed nine or ten "sex workers" buried in places to which he had access, but one fact is incontrovertible: he kidnapped and serially raped an eleven-year old girl [with the complicity of his wife?] 18 years ago. This crime in 1991 came three years after his release from a 50-year prison term for kidnapping and raping a casino worker in 1977 – and in the same town of South Lake Tahoe – that Garrido kidnapped Jaycee Lee Dugard :

Public authorities will be called on again this week to explain some of the remaining mysteries about his case, first, how he came to be released from a 50-year prison term for kidnapping and raping a casino worker in 1977 despite having told police officers that he could only achieve sexual satisfaction by applying violence. It was three years after his release – and in the same town of South Lake Tahoe – that Garrido kidnapped Jaycee Lee Dugard.

What kind of incarceration and punishment is this aberration of justice? This ridiculous release of an admitted sexual psychopath from prison coupled with the insouciant mindlessness of a Deputy Sheriff sent to investigate neighbors' complaints in 2006 that Garrido had "people" living in shacks in his backyard, with a mere reprimand from the stoned slacker Deputy to Garrido that such residential arrangements were "illegal," baffles sane people everywhere. Did all this result in perhaps a dozen murdered "sex workers" in a careless demonstration of California's stupendous governmental incompetence? Did the feckless Deputy Sheriff representative of law and order bother him or herself to inspect the backyard and discover a whole family of kidnapped "children" living in abject squalor? Nah, that would have been professional. Will this moron be reprimanded? I doubt if the press will do follow-up. Should Garrido have been castrated and then released? Yep.

Excuse my brand of condign punishment, but I have serious doubts that the ginormous brand of Big Government foisted on the entire country by a bunch of Keystone Kops and their judicial wardens and congressional nitwits will result in anything other than California stoned slacker eff-ups all across the fruited plain and purple mountains' majesty. Why?

The other night, I happened on C-Span to come across a witless fucktard of a clown who happened to be Chief Judge of the Ninth Circus Court of California presiding over a VA hospital case. This ridiculous moron, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, has gained a sort of notoriety for a pornclave on his official website as Chief Judge and Kozinski aptly represents the utter mindless vacuous vapidity of that much-ridiculed Court. And more largely, the type of stupidity that Dear Leader Obambi is going to inflict on the entire country if he and his gang of fucktard elitist illuminati legislate unconstitutional mandates for health and other restraints of trade into law.

Given the fact that Granny Rictus Mcbotoximplants and her House of Representatives crew of lawless relativists represent the same brand of moral anarchy that Chief Judge Kozinski [and the two other asinine 9th Circus Court judges on the C-Span case that I watched] consistently display, is there something in the water in Northern California that should be examined for imparting deranged mindlessness a la Garrido & the Contra Costa Sheriff's Department's total lack of professionalism in following up on Garrido's neighbors' complaints?

How's that porn site coming along, Judge Kozinski? Is your supply of medical marijuana running low? How long do you think California will remain populated with productive members of society before it lapses into a sort of Mad Max/Mad Men Moral Morass? Full of Stoned Slackers like Kozinski, the Contra Costa Sheriff's Dept., Granny Rictus Mcbotoximplants [AKA San Fran Nan] and varieties of the Sons of Anarchy ruling the roads?

Is the CalPers RICO scam going to spawn new ACORNs, SEIU brownshirts, and other socioarnarchists or varieties of liberal fascism? I can remember when people were migrating TO California, not FROM it to escape oppressive taxation and lawless anarchy.

The Great Bear Republic should secede and take its brand of anarchism and childish whimsy with it. And if the 15 million or so responsible citizens decide to depart that San Andreas of the imagination, maybe all those apocalyptic films with Mad Max post-nuclear landscapes will fit right into Mansonland and its inhabitants' mindset. Go medical marijuana!

Tolkien: Author of the [20th] Century

Tom Shippey wrote a book in 2000 entitled J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century which advanced the premise that Middle Earth and its literary dwellers "revolutionized," using a word that Tolkien would have despised, at least the publishing industry for fiction and in my opinion, created an entire niche for both fantasy games like "Dungeons and Dragons" and the fantasy subset universes of Harry Potter and the Twilight chronicles which LOTR served as godfather.

Amazon.com gives four or five stars from 29 of Shippey's 32 reviewers & zero 1's & 2's, so even non-LOTR worshippers admit, as do almost all reviewers, that Shippey [the Walter Ong Professor at St. Louis U. where I studied under Ong] has written an amazingly successful analysis of Tolkien's life-journey to world-class author. Shippey is uniquely qualified to write the book, as he filled both of Tolkien's academic chairs at Leeds and Oxford in Anglo-Saxon, and knows how the dying discipline of philology [Nietzsche & Tolkien were both harmless drudges in the Philology PhD mode before becoming culture-vulture superstars] explains vanished worlds that both Nietzsche and Tolkien tried to evoke.

Tolkien, according to Shippey, evoked Middle Earth from his deep studies of Norse and Finnish and Anglo-Saxon, which languages he was expert in and whose etymological obscurities constantly prodded him to probe the [obviously unwritten] pre-historical lays and epics sung and recited by bards and poets in the mead halls of Nordic myth. Nietzsche prodded Wagner, perhaps, to explore and update the Teutonic divinities in Parsifal. Tolkien did something similar to the Norse and Celtic [and Finnish] mythologies [Rivendell of the immortal Elves = Perce-val of Wolfram and Chretien et al??]. But Middle Earth and LOTR, to Shippey, is an invention that Tolkien elaborated over fifty years [including Silmarillion] to explicate and flesh out what the words of Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and other Old languages implied of the world of elves, dwarfs, and other mythological beings. The saga of the rings was of the one ring which bound all the others. When Frodo destroyed the ring of power, the other rings that gave the elves, dwarves [in LOTR spelling] and even men diminished in their own power, and the elves and dwarfs retreated to their secret places----Yeats in his Mythologies tried with Lady Gregory to capture the tales of West Ireland as the Celtic Twilight sank into the Western Ocean in much the same manner.

A day after finishing Shippey's book, for some reason I had a PBS special on Bhutan, the reclusive Himalayan kingdom, droning in the background as I searched for something online. The government of Bhutan is ruled by Buddhist and animist principles and has a policy of nurturing "Gross National Happiness." But its Prime Minister said that the very limited economic exploitation the country allows is often halted when mining engineers encounter deep water sources or other earth anomalies.
"Then we must halt to allow the spirits to be calmed."

Strangely, one of Tolkien's hints, at Shippey's reading of Middle Earth, is when the Dwarf says that the Mines of Moria went far too deep, and awakened "evil." The metaphor might be in my own mind, but the analogy might be that when humankind exploits the riches of the earth, an imbalance is created and forces are unleashed, spiritual or whatever, that propagate "evil" whether it be the Scouring of the Shire or the rise of materialism in Bhutan which the PM says is increasing "desire" and "cupidity" and is leading to a rising crime rate as Bhutan approaches becoming "westernized." Tolkien and Bhutan's PM might both be aware of the previous epochs of human moral and spiritual development, an awareness lacking in the MSM and secular dehumanized "humanism" purporting to know what is best for modern man.

W.H. Auden is one of my favorite authors and had a deep appreciation of Tolkien and corresponded with him while alive. Auden is of northern English stock, unlike the citified and latinized "intelligentsia" which greeted Tolkien's work with an "automatic snigger" that the literati illuminati reserve for those outside the "canonical writ" of secular materialist humanism.

The movie The Hobbit will be coming out soon, and perhaps another reconsideration of Tolkien will ensue. Peter Jackson is producing the movie and Gullermo Del Toro will direct. LOTR won dozens of Oscars in its three version. I hope the Hobbit movie is going to be a worthy successor.

T.R. Reid is a Serial Liar

Right now on PBS Evening News, a factitious moron touting a book named Reid [perhaps a relation to the brainless Senator from Nevada] is being thrown softball questions by a really stupid libtard bi-yotch who is their "Health Affairs" advisor.

Reid, who is a compleat liar, is completely counterfactual on all the health outcomes in the OECD countries. This is why PBS is almost completely unwatched, along with the other cable news networks, except of course for FoxNEWS.

Rangel Continues His Crime Spree With Impunity

The Wall Street Journal has a damning indictment of serial criminality on House Ways and Means Chmn Charlie Rangel's consistent failure to obey the laws of the USA. For any other citizen, this might mean trouble. But not for Obama Administration members, whose consistent inability to pay their own taxes while trying to raise taxes on everyone else.

When normal people happen to "find" their own money, it might mean a twenty left in a winter coat, or discovering change beneath the sofa cushions. But if you're Charlie Rangel, it means doubling your net worth.

Earlier this month the Chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee "amended" his 2007 financial disclosure form—to the tune of more than a half-million dollars in previously unreported assets and income. That number may be as high as $780,000, because Congress's ethics rules only require the Members to report their finances within broad ranges. This voyage of personal financial discovery brings Mr. Rangel's net worth for 2007 to somewhere between $1.028 million and $2.495 million, while his previous statement came in at $516,015 and $1.316 million.

This man is a moral leper who himself has a half-dozen illegitimate offspring from his many dalliances outside the vows of marriage. For a Democrat, his remaining a responsible father puts him in the minority, as Teddy Kennedy never did acknowledge fathering a son out of wedlock and a pliant media never looked into that particular allegation, simply dismissing it as a canard. But he also isn't an out-and-out pervert like the Banking Committee Chairman from Massachusetts. This sport-of-nature ran a homosexual prostitution ring out of his Capitol Hill basement, but "apologized" and the media immediately gave him a clean slate.

Here are some more "oversights" that Don Charlie and his Gang of Lawyers and Accountants managed to overlook:

When you're a powerful Congressman and working diligently to increase tax rates to pay for President Obama's health-care plan, we suppose it's easy to lose track of one of your checking accounts. That would be the one at the federal credit union with a balance somewhere between $250,001 and maybe as high as $500,000. And when you're crunched for time and pulling together bills to pass in a rush, we guess, too, that you might overlook several other investment accounts, even if some of them are sizable, such as the ones Mr. Rangel missed at JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch, Oppenheimer and BlackRock.

Oh, and those vacant properties in Glassboro, in southern Jersey? Everybody in Manhattan tries not to think much about New Jersey, so those lots and their as-much-as-$15,000 value must also have slipped down the memory hole. (The New York Post reported yesterday that Mr. Rangel failed to pay property taxes for two of the lots, according to the county clerk's office.)

The Chairman probably isn't doing a lot of dining at KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell or Long John Silver's, either, which may explain why he didn't disclose the $1,001 to $15,000 in stock he owns in Yum Brands, the conglomerate that runs those chain restaurants. Compared to his undisclosed portfolio stake in PepsiCo—$15,001 to $50,000—that's practically a rounding error.

All lawmakers amend their financial reports from time to time, though rarely are the errors this extensive. Via email, a Rangel spokesman declined to offer details about how the errors occurred, noting that "Once the Ethics Committee completes its work, then we can answer questions in more detail." He added that Mr. Rangel is now "confident that his records have been subjected to an exhaustive and complete review, and that the amendments accurately reflect his financial interests."

Among other issues, Mr. Rangel is currently under investigation regarding his use of four rent-stabilized apartments at New York City's tony Lenox Terrace and soliciting donations with his official letterhead for the Charles B. Rangel Center for Public Service at City College of New York, which was itself built with a $1.9 million earmark. Yet another part of the probe is his failure to report $75,000 in income from a rental villa at the beachfront Punta Cana Yacht Club, in the Dominican Republic.

Mr. Rangel blamed that last one on the language barrier because he doesn't speak Spanish. We can only imagine what language he speaks with his accountants and tax attorneys.

It's obvious that even a kangaroo court as silly and corrupt as the House Select Committee on Ethics [members are selected for their moral turpitude, not their probity], might be unable to pass over each one of the abominations cited above by the WSJ.

Maybe Chiquita Obama will declare an Internet Security Emergency and follow in his moral minders' footsteps: those moral minders would be Chavez of Venezuela and Ahmedinejad of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Douchebag National Committee to Rush On Naming Health Bill After Kennedy

Democrats waxed tautologically indignant in March when they called on Republicans to denounce Rush Limbaugh "once and for all" for daring to predict:

by the time the debate on President Obama's health care plan is over, "it'll be called the Ted Kennedy Memorial Health Care bill.”

This, the Douchebags insisted, would be to "demonize a patriotic Senator," [who parenthetically should have been the poster boy for Mothers Against Drunk Driving]. Taranto at the WSJ says:

Byrd and Pelosi propose to brush aside the public revolt against ObamaCare, seize control over one-sixth of the economy, and give government life-or-death powers over all Americans--all so that they can pay tribute to their dead colleague. Haven't they heard of a nonbinding resolution?

Nope, these two flunked civics classes in grade school all the way through flunking out of junior college. Political hacks don't know s**t about politics, and I predict in 2010 they both will have had to abdicate their position in Congress [and in Reid's case, his crooked political operation in Nevada.]

Looks now as though the Douchebags are beginning to demonize their own, making the MADD poster boy into the elitist Congress's symbol of itself, Lucifer in all his o'erweening pride. [They won't get the Milton metaphor since they flunked English in middle school "once and for all."]

Fouad Ajami Tells the Truth About Chiquita Obama

Fouad Ajami is brilliant as he dissects the malaise/terminal illness besetting Obama....

A political class, and a media elite, that glamorized the protest against the Iraq war, that branded the Bush presidency as a reign of usurpation, now wishes to be done with the tumult of political debate. President Barack Obama himself, the community organizer par excellence, is full of lament that the "loudest voices" are running away with the national debate. Liberalism in righteous opposition, liberalism in power: The rules have changed.

Ajami is far above the libtard ass-kissing pattycake bozos on cable news and talk radio [though Rush L. appreciates his transcendent brilliance] and should be instructing tiny tyros like Bri-boy Williams, Kitty Kouric, & Chuckster Gibbs'Son on how to be anchors and not paperweights.

Democratic Treason Manual Based on Marxist Dogma

AGITPROP for prospective cadres in the Democrat handbook for dissimulation and deception is available in Saul Alinsky's handy dandy handbook for traitors.

"[Democrat treason cadres] must also, said Alinsky, cultivate unity against a clearly identifiable enemy; he must specifically name this foe, and “singl[e] out”[44] precisely who is to blame for the “particular evil” that is the source of the people’s angst.[45] In other words, there must be a face associated with the people’s discontent. That face, Alinsky taught, “must be a personification, not something general and abstract like a corporation or City Hall.”[46] Rather, it should be an individual such as a CEO, a mayor, or a president."

"Toward this end, Alinksy advised organizers to be sure that they always kept more than one “fight in the bank.” In other words, organizers should keep a stockpile of comparatively small crusades which they are already prepared to conduct, and to which they can instantly turn their attention after having won a major victory of some type."

Read up on Alinsky: Hillary Rodboy Clyntoon and B Hussein Obama both studied them intensely and traitors like Jane Mayer use them in writing their books on/against America and its trusted institutions.

Iran Nominates Interpol Terrorist as SecDef

Terrorist President Ahmedinejad who was one of the hostage-takers in the '79 US Embassy fiasco, and who was "re-elected" by a phony rigged election that even bleating moron Jimmy Carter couldn't say was legit, has nominated Interpol-wanted terrorist Vahidi as Secretary of Defense. The position is a joke as Iran's army probably couldn't withstand an attack from Iraq or even Turkmenistan.

Let's nab him when he travels outside the mess which is the Islamic Republic. Oops, I forgot we have another bleating cowering moron for POTUS at the moment. Dear Leader Brobambi will probably invite Vahidi to a cup of tea in the Rose Garden....

No Surprise. AP Story on Beck Boycott Full of Lies, Half-Truths...

AP is the most noxious part of the MSM supporting Obama and all his works. A band of committed leftists, almost every article is slanted against conservatives and against the United States, if there is some foreign policy implications. Let's fact-check these liars on this article versus a more reliablevenue with facts checked by real human beings, not journalism-school androids.

AP Big Lie #1: "A total of 33 Fox advertisers, including Walmart, CVS Caremark, Clorox and Sprint, directed that their commercials not air on Beck's show, according to the companies and ColorofChange.org, a group that promotes political action among blacks and launched a campaign to get advertisers to abandon him. That's more than a dozen more than were identified a week ago."

Fact-Check: Following on the heels of yesterday's denial by Best Buy of claims by Color of Change that they pulled their ads from the Glenn Beck program, today 2 more major advertisers denied CoC's take on events.

DefendGlenn.com contacted officials at WalMart in Bentonville, including David Tovar, the representative quoted in Color of change's well-hyped press release. They confirmed that WalMart, which was not even a sponsor of Glenn Beck's show on FoxNews Channel to begin with, was pulling its ads from ALL CABLE NEWS TALK SHOWS as of August 3rd, as a direct response to this "controversy". WalMart stated their reason for pulling all ads from "commentary broadcasts" was to "avoid polarizing our customers". This includes CNN and MSNBC. ALL PULLED. Since clearly WalMart has still been running ads on all of these shows after August 3rd, a representative told us by email that "it will still have to go through a business process and it may not take effect immediately". The "process" is apparently contractual (such as "Run-Of-Service" arrangements with networks such as FoxNews, which terminate at the end of August).

DefendGlenn.com has also spoken to officials from Procter and Gamble, and Sargentos. P&G said they have NOT pulled ads because they never advertised on Glenn Beck to begin with. In addition P&G said they would be "restricting our advertising to daytime lineups" in an attempt to "avoid controversy". While Sargento, whose brand-destruction by its own public relations reps has been well-documented here, has now said they will also be yanking ads from MSNBC and CNN "talk personalities" as soon as it can be "arranged".

AP Big Lie #2: "Beck's strong ratings — even at 5 p.m. EDT he often outdraws whatever CNN and MSNBC show in prime-time — make it unlikely Beck is going anywhere even with the list of advertisers avoiding him approaches three dozen."

Fact Check: Glenn's Show outdraws both CNN & MSNBC combined every day at 5PM even though they are prime-slotted at 8PM & for the obnoxious prick K.O. also at 10 PM. Glenn outdraws eyeballs on K.O.'s combined audience [as does K.O.'s 10PM competitor on Fox, Greta Van S.]

AP Big Lie #3: "But it could mean advertising time becomes cheaper on his show than such a large audience would normally command. Some of his show's advertisers last week included a male enhancement pill, a law firm looking to sue on behalf of asbestos victims, a company selling medical supplies to diabetics and a water filter company."

Fact Check: Most of the "33" companies contacted by DefendGlenn have told DG that they either haven't directed any changes in advertising or that they have stopped all advertising for all cable opinion shows as a result of the "Color of Change" boycott instigated by Van Jones, the Communist-by-own-admission "Green Czar" in Obama's White House. Looks like black racist Obama is getting worried about being outed... And that the reason he didn't visit Mama's deathbed in '96 was because he hated white people, even his mama....

Final Upshot: DefendGlenn.com has also spoken to officials from Procter and Gamble, and Sargentos. P&G said they have NOT pulled ads because they never advertised on Glenn Beck to begin with. In addition P&G said they would be "restricting our advertising to daytime lineups" in an attempt to "avoid controversy". While Sargento, whose brand-destruction by its own public relations reps has been well-documented here, has now said they will also be yanking ads from MSNBC and CNN "talk personalities" as soon as it can be "arranged".

Great work, Color of Change, you are killing the struggling shows like Hardball, Ed Show, Anderson Cooper 180, and Maddow, in addition to the once-strong brands such as Olbermann, which is now hemorraging viewers, by yanking their few high-paying advertisers away from them.

Meanwhile FoxNews continues to explode its ratings, and is able to replace advertisers on a moment's notice. For instance, last week, after Men's Wearhouse confirmed that it was joining Color of Change's astroturf fraud, JoS A. Bank Clothiers had ads to replace them on Beck's show only 2 nights later!

Finally, the upshot of this whole brouhaha will be that opportunistic advertisers like high-range clothier Jos. A. Bank and others will move quickly to usurp the millions of eyeballs watching Beck's show with an eye to buying whatever adverts recommend----death-row shows like Olberbite and Maddow are not going to attract anything but stoned slacker sport-of-nature maggots anyway, perhaps with disposable income, but rarely with a family or any dependents.

I sent a nasty e-mail to Sargento's in Plymouth, WI. Pls do the same.

And Color of Change is a black racist organization which echoes Kanye West:

"George Bush doesn't care about black people". He's given the troops "permission to go down and shoot us"
-Kanye West, 2005

and puts out a black t-shirt ad saying "Kanye was right."

Now we have a black racist president with a "Green Czar" who is a Communist, and a black racist organization trying to boycott Glenn Beck when he exercises his First Amendment rights. We will boycott the boycotters.

Alec Baldwin Sucks His Own Tiny...... Thumb, and In Public!

Alec is Tweety-Bird Matthews female counterpart. Joe Lieberman would eat him for breakfast politically and then spit him out on the sidewalk like grapefruit seeds. How he is unaware that his wife-beating and daughter-dishonoring wouldn't surface if he ever ran for as much as dogcatcher apparently escapes his solipsistic egomania. He is grammatically incoherent and intellectually unequipped for anything more than a playground name-calling match.

If he was worth saving, I'd say grow up and be a man. But this girly-man is the butt-boy that Andy Sullivan dreams about and every sane woman detests. Kim Basinger should have known better, but how was she to know that he was a bullying coward and would threaten his own daughter.

Unlike his daughter, he is a selfish narcissistic pig. Period.

Why Brobambi's Health-Care, Health-Insurance "REFORM"Stumbles

The Public Option as sport of nature Barney Frank openly admits, is a path to single-payer Health Care which has failed everywhere it has been tried in countries with over 10 million people. The idea is to introduce the public option, which will undercut private insurance because it is subsidized with taxes. After a few years, private insurance will become prohibitive in its costs and simply be destroyed by socialist competition, underwritten by tax dollars.

Even the often ideological LA Times notes the confusion that Obama's "abstractions" are producing among even his fervent socialist Alinsky allies. After a headline that "range of abstract messages are leaving voters confused," the article notes that mysteriously unnamed "strategists" are having problems with Obama's presentation of why health-care or more recently, health-insurance reform are so important:

The strategists, many of whom saw healthcare reform fail in the Clinton administration, contend that President Obama has advanced too many rationales for his plan, leaving people confused.

For example, Obama has argued that a new healthcare system is necessary to spur an economic recovery. He also has offered up healthcare as an antidote to rising deficits. Earlier this week in a conference call with religious leaders, Obama laid out a "moral" imperative for revamping the nation's healthcare system.

At other points, Obama has portrayed "meddling" insurers as a reason for scrapping the existing system.

"One of the difficulties has been that the explanation has changed," said Howard Paster, a legislative liaison in the Clinton administration. "Originally it was keyed very much to the economy. More recently, emphasis has been placed on issues of fairness and equity. We need to have a consistent set of reasons for doing this."

James Pinkerton goes on to note at Serious Medicine Strategy that:

Note what's missing from this litany: Any sense that the purpose of medicine is cures. The mechanisms of health care delivery are of interest to some, but the question of health cure delivery is of interest to everyone.

The White House announcement of Obama's long meeting with Daschle, who was to be his wagon-team leader on getting health-care reform through the House and Senate before the usual Dem problems with taxes, et al, made Sebelius the HHS nominee, underscores the emphasis away from actual efficient delivery of health:

The two agreed that substantive reform that lowers costs, reforms the insurance industry, and expands coverage is too important to wait another year or another administration, and they agreed to stay in touch over the coming weeks and months as this critical effort moves forward."

As Lloyd Green, a former Justice Department official in George H. W. Bush's administration is quoted at SMS, "Is Obamacare just another word for welfare?" As Green puts it:

Government option healthcare has become the flashpoint of the Great Welfare debate redux. The reality is that there is an insurance gap between between working whites and minorities, and the Obama Administration is asking taxpaying Americans to a) pay for closing the gap and b) making government both the insurer and regulator for all.
The Obamans and the Democrats have come a long way from the time--even if it was just a few months ago--when they argued that "health care reform" would make health care better.

After BJ in '96 secured a second term by "welfare reform," the socialist hordes are now citing economic and "fairness and equity" rather than actual improvement of health CURE delivery.
The ObamaCare fiasco has turned into a gigantic crusade for social justice and transfer of income under the guise of "reform."
The sort of "public option" is the camel's nose under the tent for single payer, a system which only works in monolithic small European countries with a work ethic. Not in a 310-million diversity colossus with over thirty million illegal immigrants who would soon be winkled into the program, leading to an influx of sick from Latin countries where crime and social backwardness has produced stunted generations with endemic public health problems.

Which may be, along with socialism, the other half of the Democrat strategy, replacing the "well-dressed" protesters against health care with criminal rent-a-mobs and union thugs for health care and more importantly other socialist nostrums to stimulate incentives for illegals to sneak in and become voters early and often for a Democrat cacique regime in the White House and across the soon-to-be-blighted plains.

And it appears that the American people are becoming disinfatuated with Obama despite overwhelming hosannas daily from the three paleo-networks and the Corrupt News Network & its unwatched evil twin MSNBC.

Chicken-Squat Swedes Cower and Supply Nazis with plenty of steel.

The Stockholm Syndrome reveals the real nature of the Swedish mentality, which a black former US Army Heavyweight Boxing Champ who lived there for a year told me is "the most racist in the entire world" and needless to mention, the most hypocritical.

The million Muslims infesting Malmo & other ports have set up mini-terror regimes in the face of which the craven kowtowing towheads [empty of everything except a metaphorical wet cunt itching to be penetrated] in Stockholm demonstrate cowardice. A clown laughingly called a Foreign Minister refuses to reject Sweden's tabloid ass-wipe Aftenposten's allegations of Israeli organ-harvesting among Palestinians.

Of course, the Swedes became accustomed to anti-Semitism in their wholehearted support of Hitler during World War II, when their cowardly menfolk descended into iron ore mines 24/7 to supply Swedish steel to the Nazi war machine. Seems like nothing's changed and the "DUMB SWEDES" are still stupid anti-Semites after all these years.

And now these girly men bow to their Muslim masters, who in their empty cunt-brains have succeeded Adolf and his National Socialists as their foreign policy mentors.

Sweden is the latest example of National Socialism, alright.

Dear Leader Brobambi Blames Conspiracy, Media, Palin for ObamaCare Fiasco

Obama should have had a father like John Wooden who told him upon going to college to follow three immutable rules: 1] Don't whine 2] Don't complain 3] Don't make excuses.

But Obama's daddy was a bigamist drunk who left him before he was a year old. And Obama's concern for his mother's health was so filial that in 1996, he demurred from visiting her on her deathbed because of "scheduling problems."

Caroline Baum of Bloomberg says that the dishonest insincere pretender POTUS leaves out someone to blame:

Opposition to fast-track health-insurance reform is coming from Obama’s own party. Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and one of six Finance Committee members involved in bipartisan negotiations, said on Fox News Sunday that the goal is to “get this right,” not meet some “specific timetable.”

He said the Senate lacks enough votes to pass a bill with a public option. “To continue to chase that rabbit, I think, is just a wasted effort.”

There’s always room for one more -- the Democrats -- on Obama’s blame-game list.

I can recall about a dozen years ago that BJ Clinton, before he was outed as a stalker for overweight bimbos, used to prattle on and fatuously intone about "the innate wisdom of the American people."

Now that the American people are demonstrating convincingly in an ABC/WaPo poll that

[a]mong all Americans, 49 percent now express confidence that Obama will make the right decisions for the country, down from 60 percent at the 100-day mark in his presidency. Forty-nine percent now say they think he will be able to spearhead significant improvements in the system, down nearly 20 percentage points from before he took office,

you can bet that the doofus MSM sycophantic suck-up circle will begin to wonder why they supported this finger-pointer and whether it might be a good time for a "rolling reassessment" as they called such things back three decades ago.

For Obama, it's a rude welcome to democracy, and the Democrats are doing in '09 what they did in '93 and in '77---overplaying a bad hand. ObamaCare is 1200 pages of undigestible gibberish and Obama plans to sell this to a country which has a northern neighbor whose older and well-off citizens come to S. Florida to Boca & environs seeking world-class medical care in an expeditious fashion because the hard truth is that S. Florida has just about the best health care for people over 65 in the world. Ask our Canadian friends with a condo/house in Boca where they have fled from their own country's balky, underfunded tardy medical system with unconscionable waits in queue for treatment that is done in days here in S. FL. According to other neighbors, ditto for the UK [Boca also has a lot of Brit refugees from their NHS] and some from the state medical system in Australia.

France, where I lived for a few years, did have a first-rate state system, but now finds itself overwhelmed by costs and by covering a lot of illegal and semi-legal immigrants in their country. There is no way with 300 million people that the US could cover 40+ million without coverage without going into colossal deficits---- and the illegal immigration rate into the US would increase with the zany package the House maniac majority passed. The only place state single-payer systems have worked is in Scandanavian countries with less than 10 million people. Switzerland also has a hybrid system which works, but has a tiny population.

So I guess Obama is off to Marha's Vineyard for some down time from the "wee-wee days" of August.

Doucherina Contessa Goes Bare-Ass on MSNBC

Megan McArdle notes that Reason Magazine has recently caught Queen of the MSNBC Douchebags [though Maddow is a close runner-up] fretting about "racial overtones" with a man in a white shirt showing up at a townhall meeting with an assault rifle on his shoulder, except rods-and-cones-challenged Contessa identifies him as "white," though photos show clearly that he is a man of color. Perhaps Contessa Brewer forgot that Doucherinissima Janeane Garofalo the Buffalo had already retired the Guinness Cup for incredibly idiotic racist hyperbole. Megan amplifies and expatiates:

Meanwhile, Matt Welch catches E.J. Dionne going off the deep end:

Remember when National Rifle Association President Wayne LaPierre's Godwin's Law comment about "jackbooted government thugs" was the worst thing ever? Well, the mainstream commentariat continues to use the same incendiary, totalitarianism-invokingWashington Post columnist and serial public broadcasting commentator E.J. Dionne:

This is not about the politics of populism. It's about the politics of the jackboot. It's not about an opposition that has every right to free expression. It's about an angry minority engaging in intimidation backed by the threat of violence.

Another Hobbit with leftoid paranoia is verbally slapped about the head and shoulders by Nick Gillespie, as the diminuitive failed Broadway critic Frank Rich soils himself in front of fellow-sport-of-nature Maddow who gets rattled by any demonstration of Constitutional Rights being observed---her PhD is from an un-American University. Rich drools on his soiled underwear before Maddow and babbles that:

the walk up to the [JF] Kennedy assassination, [when] there was all this hate talk about Kennedy, and then there was the John Birch Society, they were worried that the government was going to fluoridate the water and poison the country...it always seems to happen when there's a new liberal group taking over...it's not coincidence that the militias started up again in the 1990s or when Kennedy came in..

Gillespie politely begs to differ with this note on Rich's hallucinatory Oliver Stone/Quentin Tarantino reading of those times:

A propos of the above: JFK was not assassinated by a right-wing crank, but by a demonstrably pro-Castro defector to the Soviet Union who tooks shots at a rising right-wing freakazoid not long before shooting the president (yes, Oswald done did it). And, you might remember, that revolutionary (coff, coff) violence that wracked the '60s and early '70s was the result primarily not of out-of-control Barry Goldwaterites but by groups on the left.

The facts, ma'am, just the facts! Megan ends her observations with an overall assessment:

We'll leave aside the garden-variety hypocrisy of people who have suddenly discovered that dissent may not always be the highest form of patriotism. (And, to be fair, those who have suddenly rediscovered their right to peaceably assemble and demand redress of grievances)
Talk of death panels and crazy signs is, if polls are to be believed, a tiny fringe of the many Americans who do not like this health care plan much. It's even, as far as I can tell, a small minority of the many Americans attending town hall meetings to harangue their congressmen. Democrats appear to think that blowing those people up into the totality of the movement will help them win the PR battle on healthcare. I suspect this will do more harm to the Democrats, and their ability to effectively deliver their message, than it will to the conservatives.
I expect the conservatives to become unhinged; it's the normal response to losing power. So why are so many journalists losing basic touch with reality?

Matt Welch then definitively slaps a silly Asst. Prof. of Journalism at U. of Missouri, an otherwise creditable School of Journalism, even sillier as Herr Professor Davis pontificates:

Hate, shuffled off stage in the post-racial haze of the election of the nation's first black president, is back with a vengeance. Hate, if it ever truly threatened to leave the political stage, is most definitely back, larger and nastier than ever.

Welch gives no quarter to either leftist America Haters [The MSM] and others on the Right:
T

he "best way to beat hatemongering," [Davis's] subhed advises, "is to report it." I didn't realize that we were now teaching strategies for "beating" various societal phenomena in J-school, but I will admit to a certain unfamiliarity with academia.
Anyway, some of Davis' writing I think illustrates, in an unintended way, why people distrust both journalists and those who deliver lectures on the topic. To get all journalistically theoretical for a moment, what is the definition of journalism? Well, I don't know, but I do know that one thick chunk of the idea is to write or say (or aim to write and say) things that are unequivocally 100 percent true, and hopefully verified in some way. This is even more true, if such a thing is mathematically possible, for those who deliver lectures on all that should be true and good about journalism.

What, class, do we notice about Davis' statement above? IT IS DEMONSTRABLY FALSE. We used to have slavery in this country, and Jim Crow laws, and all kinds of officially sanctioned, legalized discrimination against disfavored minorities. And you want to tell me that hate is "larger and nastier than ever"? We had a CIVIL WAR in this country, where people not only brought their legally licensed firearms to townhalls, but they MURDERED THE SHIT OUT OF ONE ANOTHER. How many people died in racially fueled street riots 41 years ago, compared to how many died in racially fueled street riots in 2009? This little couplet, tossed off without evident concern, as if OF COURSE we all know this is true, is blatantly, sophomorically, and insultingly untrue. It's an advertisement for the author's fundamental lack of seriousness about the very subject he aims to address. More like this:

Somewhere, somehow, the news media have to make the same determination those brave civil rights-era reporters and editors made: This is wrong, deeply wrong, and we must cover it, day in, day out, like any other beat, albeit a more distasteful beat than most.
The same? Really? Let's see, every day in the Jim Crow South (and not only the Jim Crow South), black people were denied entrance to schools, businesses, and various public facilities, and when they attempted to be treated as equals, they were routinely met with official state violence. In 2009? Some loathesome individual citizen, with no official power over anyone, brings a "Death To Obama, Death To Michelle And Her Two Stupid Kids" sign to a political event at which no Obama attended (he is detained by the Secret Service). A man exercising his legal right to bear arms shows up on the periphery of an Obama event and menaces no one (the White House later says it has no problem with citizens legally bringing guns to public gatherings). Fox News alarmist Glenn Beck, ridiculously, claims that Obama has "a deep-seated hatred of white people," (and is rewarded for his omniscience with an advertiser boycott). Slappable broadcast shouter Sean Hannity "openly relishes violence" (this is Davis' claim), while Rush Limbaugh mentions "Obama" and "Hitler" in close proximity. That's the sum of his examples.

To draw any kind of equivalence between the official, police-backed bigotry of the United States–a bigotry that waged violence and worse against patriotic American citizens each and every day of each and every week–with the widely condemned hyperbole of talk show hosts and a scattered few non-violent acts of individual citizens, is not just kind of basically obscene, and an insult to the casualties on the often very lonely right side of the Civil Rights struggle, but it also serves to undermine faith in the very project under discussion. If this is the cavalier attitude with which ever-crusading journalists are going to treat the facts that concern them most, how can those of us who disagree with their basic premise begin to trust the forthcoming product from the Hate Beat?

Meanwhile, I can predict the kind of "hate" that will escape attention by the new desk. It's the kind that assumes, lack of evidence notwithstanding, that we are always–but especially now that liberal Democrats run the country–on the verge of a race war. It's the kind that takes a surface look at current events, luxuriates in historically ignorant alarmism, then proclaims that America itself is "delusional," "irrational," "hysterical." You can't get away with hating a (Democratic) president's policies, or even a single policy, but hating on the country as a whole for failing to get on board? Well, that's just journalism!

Saul Alinsky's 13 Rules For Radicals does insist that alarmist hysteria creates an atmosphere where the Radical Left can buffalo a large segment of the population to take their frontal lobes out of contention while considering topics which are emotionally overwhelming. Those who counsel cooler deliberation are then branded hate-mongers and racists---at least in the most recent effusions from faux-academics like Prof. Davis. The real rent-a-mobs are the ACORNista shabby stoned slackers and the SEIU Marxist cadres Axelrod and Emanuel summons when things get very dicey.

Barry Goldwater noted in the Sixties that "When treason rules the land, none dare call it treason."

Warehouse 13 Needs Updated Computer Skills

The Secret Service was using an alleged computer hacker as a Confidential Informant or Expert when things went awry:

The indictment in federal district court in New Jersey marks the latest and largest in at least five years of crime that has brought its alleged orchestrator, Albert Gonzalez of Miami, in and out of federal grasp. Detained in 2003, Mr. Gonzalez was briefly an informant to the Secret Service before he allegedly returned to commit even bolder crimes......

Federal investigators say Mr. Gonzalez is a high-school graduate and self-taught programmer who cut his criminal teeth as a leader in the self-styled Shadowcrew, an online credit-card hacking ring. In 2004, 26 leaders of the 4,000-person ring were arrested and convicted. "He was one of the key leaders," said Scott Christie, a former U.S. prosecutor who worked on the case.

Mr. Gonzalez wasn't charged when he was arrested in 2003 because he agreed to become an informant for the Secret Service following his arrest, say Justice Department officials. In November 2004, the government permitted him to move from New Jersey to Florida. Much of the subsequent hacking took place there, according to court records. He was arrested in conjunction with the Dave & Buster's hacking scheme in May 2008 and has been in detention since.

Thank you, Feds, for letting Gonzalez go southward to FL. Warehouse 13 is a Syfy network show about Secret Service with superannuated computers and I'm just wondering if the Feds gave Gonzalez money to make the move to Florida where he apparently upgraded his operation into Major League playoff contender international crime.

Your US govt. expertise at work. Maybe they should hand the operation over to the DEA.

France Sees Health Costs Spike While Death by Committee: Obama'll Be Pulling the Plug on Granny:

France's Health Costs are Spiking Rapidly Upward

Meanwhile in the WSJ,Andrew Klavan gives us a glimpse of Brave New World married to Nineteen Eighty Four:

It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that's part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance.
—President Barack Obama in a New York Times interview on how costly medical decisions should be made.

The people behind the long table do not know what they've become. The drug of power has been sugared over in their mouths with a flavoring of righteousness. Someone has to make these decisions, they tell their friends at dinner parties. It's all very difficult for us. But you can see it in their eyes: It isn't really difficult at all. It feels good to them to be the ones who decide.

"Well, we have your doctor's recommendation," says the chairwoman in a friendly tone. She peers over the top of her glasses as she pages through your file.

You have to clear your throat before you can answer. "He says the operation is my only chance."

"But not really very much of a chance, is it?" she says sympathetically. Over time, she's become expert at sounding sympathetic.

"Seventy percent!" you object.

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Martin Kozlowski
"Seventy percent chance of survival for five years—five years at the outside—and even that only amounts to about 18 months in QALYs: quality-adjusted life years."

"But without this procedure, I'll be dead before Christmas."

You try to keep the anger out of your voice. The last thing you want to do is offend them. But the politicians promised you—they promised everyone—there would never be panels like this. They made fun of anyone who said there would. "What do they think we're going to do? Pull the plug on grandma?" they chuckled. The media ran news stories calling all rumors of such things "false" or "misleading." But of course by then the media had become apologists for the state rather than watchdogs for the people.

In fact, the logic of this moment was inevitable. Once government got its fingers on the health-care system, it was only a matter of time before it took it over completely. Now there's one limited pool of dollars while the costs are endless.

"You have the luxury of thinking only of yourself, but we have to think about everyone," says the professor of ethics. He's a celebrity and waxes eloquent every Tuesday and Thursday on Bill Maher Tonight. "This isn't the free market, after all. We can't just leave fairness to chance. We have to use reason. Is it better for society as a whole that we allocate limited resources for your operation when we might use the same dollars to bring many more high quality years to someone, say, younger?"

"I'm only 62."

He smiles politely.

"Look, it's not just about me," you argue desperately. "My daughter's engaged to get married next year. She'll be heartbroken if I'm not there for it."

"Maybe you should have thought of that before you put on so much weight," says the medical officer. "I mean, you people have been told time and again . . ."

But the chairwoman is uncomfortable with his censorious tone and cuts him off, saying more gently, "Perhaps your daughter could move the wedding up a little."

The member in charge of "stakeholder" exceptions shakes her head sadly as she studies your file. "If only you could have checked off one of the boxes. It would be awful if you were penalized just because of a clerical oversight."

It begins to occur to you that this is how you are going to die: by the fiat of fatuous ideologues—that is to say, by the considered judgment of a government committee. They are going to snuff you out and never lose a minute's sleep over it, because it's only fair, after all.

That logic is implacable too. Free people can treat each other justly, but they can't make life fair. To get rid of the unfairness among individuals, you have to exercise power over them. The more fairness you want, the more power you need. Thus, all dreams of fairness become dreams of tyranny in the end.

You know you should keep your mouth shut. Be humble—they like that. But you speak before you can stop yourself.

"What you're doing here is evil," you cry out. "You're trying to take the place of God!"

"Sir, this is a government building!" says the chairwoman, shocked. "There's no God here."

I don't pollute my mind with Maher, is the professor a real animal?
UPDATE
The Vancouver Sun uses "cutting" and "chopping" metaphors freely to demonstrate how budget cutbacks are slicing, sorry, 25% of all major surgeries in Vancouver hospitals immediately and the patients can just wait until their turn in the queue arrives, if they've lived that long....
UPDATE 2
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Conservatives Rebound Up to 2/1 ration over Self-Defined "Liberals"

Don Surber celebrates America's return to sanity, which will not be covered on the MSM, as it is merely a Gallup Poll, and therefore merely [oops!] the Gold Standard of polling, though I'm sure the MSM libtard chorus will claim the 160,000 surveyed in the poll are "unrepresentative." And that is part of the reason that the Conservatives have gained about five points in the last 6 months since the previous sounding was taken. CNS has the advance numbers:

In 2009, 40% percent of respondents in Gallup surveys that have interviewed more than 160,000 Americans have said that they are either “conservative” (31%) or “very conservative” (9%). That is the highest percentage in any year since 2004.
Only 21% have told Gallup they are liberal, including 16% who say they are “liberal” and 5% who say they are “very liberal.”

Now the Conservatives outnumber Libtards in ALL FIFTY of these United States. Puerto Rico and District of Columbia mercifully do not have the status of statehood and hopefully never will.

Just shows what a tiny dose of "Hope and Change" does to an alert electorate.

A White House E-Mail-Gate!

Camille Paglia said it best:

The ethical collapse of the left was nowhere more evident than in the near total silence of liberal media and Web sites at the Obama administration's outrageous solicitation to private citizens to report unacceptable "casual conversations" to the White House. If Republicans had done this, there would have been an angry explosion by Democrats from coast to coast. I was stunned at the failure of liberals to see the blatant totalitarianism in this incident, which the president should have immediately denounced. His failure to do so implicates him in it.

A commenter on Fareed Zakaria's zany half-wit remarks on how America is failing to respond to a crisis where "Costs are rising so fast that every day more than 10,000 Americans lose their insurance coverage." Does he just make up these figures as he did many facts in his book about America in the 21st century? Of course, his failure to note that many Americans gain insurance coverage and how many do so brand him as just another lyin' libtard. Commenting on Zakaria's hysterics and echoing Camille about the media's dereliction of duty is PeterClarke1:

The biggest story since Watergate and news media like ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN etc. with their pro and biased Obama reporting are no where to be found or heard.

So, this Administration is attempting to shift the blame from the President and his un-elected czars to “third parties-unnamed”. Laws that the President was sworn to uphold, the privacy act of 1974 and The Computer Matching and Privacy Protection Act of 1988, have been broken by the illegal act of gathering and soliciting emails and conversations about information from one citizen concerning another American citizen relating to health care.

Where are the voice and outrage from our elected Senators and Congress members. NOT a word spoken from them against this abuse of power and illegal act by the white house (snitch e-mails and a "reality check" section on the White House Web site). I guess they are still on vacation and hiding from the voters.

Time for Congress and the Senate to do their job of representing the people by holding hearings on the possible impeachment of this President for such illegal activities which are clearly in violation of the constitution.

Where, at least, is the appointment of an independent prosecutor to investigate such abuse of power by the President and his administration? No one, including our President is above the law! Please help inform the American public, by forwarding this article to all your individual friends and news blogs etc.

As I do in hopes that the American public will continue to regard the MSM as an active member of the DNC and essentially defaulting on their First Amendment privileged status. GE and its slavish NBC collection of orcs and uruk-hai commentators should expect Standard & Poor to downgrade its bond ratings and the Dow Jones will throw GE off its thirty blue chippers.

That would be a good start. Jack Welch is spinning in his... [oops, he's not dead yet!]

Welcome to the world of government rationing: Health Care for Dummies

Canada Free Press has a genius named E. James Small who lives in a small town in Nova Scotia and apparently is not infected with what's in the water in New England. As a Canadian, he knows the pitfalls that the Dems and their parrot-choir media schlepper-gofer crew ignore or hide:

Many Americans, mostly Democrats, are very confused as to what kind of health care system is best to have in the USA. The problem is, many people just don’t understand the fundamental differences between “free” government health care and that which you have to buy in the free market.

So, I came up with a novel idea. I decided to compare it with automobiles. That’s something most people can understand.

In a purely free market based system, people are free to choose whatever kind of car they want, as long as they can afford it or find a way to pay for it over time. If they want a Smart car, they can buy one. If they want a Cadillac, they can buy one. If they want to get a Ford Excursion, or a Ferrari or a Lamborghini, they can buy one. There are a lot of choices out there in the free market, plenty of choices for just about every budget.

Some people, however, don’t have cars. Some because they don’t want them, some because they don’t need them. However, almost everyone in the USA who wants or needs a car has one (or several in many cases) or can get one if they need it, and they do so by paying for it to the tune of many thousands of dollars per year on average, likely many hundreds of thousands over their lifetimes.

Many times people who do need a car get it by financing it if they can’t afford to pay cash for it. Or, they buy used cars or cars of slightly lower quality that are affordable to them. But they manage to get their ride. Somehow, the free market nearly always provides.

The point is, there are very few people who don’t have a car if they need one. The poorest among us out there even have cars. I know people who don’t even have flush toilets but they have a car or two. Sometimes it’s a struggle, but they manage to get one.

Now, let’s look at what would happen if we depended on the government for our cars.

“Universal Car Ownership”, we’ll call it. Everybody who works contributes to the system through their taxes and the government will give you your car. For “free”. Even people who don’t work and don’t pay taxes will get a car if they want one.

Sounds pretty good doesn’t it?

Okay, so the government assesses how many people need cars and allocates the money collected from taxes (or goes into debt) as necessary to make all those cars for the entire population who needs or wants one.

Since the budget is somewhat limited, they decide that everyone will get a Yugo, the pride of Serbia, because the government decides that’s the one they can afford for everybody. And all for free to those who need a car!

Well, not entirely for free. You paid for it with your taxes, as mentioned above, and the government is going into debt over it, so your kids will also contribute. But what if you don’t want or need a car? If you take the bus, or walk, or drive your bicycle to work, you and your kids will still be paying for all those Yugos that everyone else owns. But take pride in the fact that you are indeed contributing to the Universal Health Ca… sorry, I mean, the Universal Car Ownership program!

But you may want a Toyota instead of a Yugo. Sorry, the government is only providing you with Yugos, as that’s all they have rationed for, given the amount they have allocated in the Universal Car Ownership program’s budget. And, since the free market doesn’t exist under the government Universal Car Ownership program, you are not allowed to buy your own Toyota. Same goes for Corvettes, Cadillacs, Ford Excursions, Volvos and any SUV or minivan on the market, even a basic Chevy. You get a Yugo. That’s all you’re allowed to have. If you need two cars, sorry, you can just have one.

Hopefully it won’t break down. If it does, you can apply to the government for a new one.....

...But the waiting list is six months long.

Maybe in a few years, if the money exists and they can afford to fund the program further, they may allow you to upgrade to a Smart car. Only seats two people and half a bag of groceries but gets great gas mileage! However, if they don’t allocate the money, you’ll have to keep putting Bondo, mufflers and Rust Check on that old Yugo to keep it from falling apart.

But for now, Chevy’s, Cadillacs and all other cars are banned from the roads under the Universal Car Ownership program. If you have one from years ago, you won’t be able to license it, because it’s not endorsed by the government. Only Yugos are permitted according to the new health ca… (’scuse me again!)… Car Ownership program.

Welcome to the world of government rationing.

That’s a somewhat simplistic analogy to a health care system to be sure, so that it can be explained in a way that Obama voters (and Trudeau voters in Canada forty five years ago) can understand, but it’s damned well accurate.

They tried this in the Soviet Union. They still do it in Cuba. Look at the cars they all (...Oops! Not all!...) drive. The system works real good, doesn’t it?

How’s all that “hope and change” working for you out there, guys?

Referring to Canada Free Press for guidance on how to avoid having Obama do to the US what Pierre Trudeau did to their country is a sobering and enlightening shortcut to political wisdom. It also proves that there are pockets of sanity in Canada just as there are in the States.
UPDATE
Dr. Anne Doig, the incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association says that Canada's health-care system is sick and doctors need to develop a plan to cure it.

Thank God the docs in Canada take the Hippocratic oath and not the hypocritical one sworn by in the UK and the leftist death panel advocates in the USA. You know, docs are dedicated to the SAVINGS of other people's lives.

Dear Leader Brobambi Opposes Democracy at Home and Abroad.

Mary O'Grady pummels Obama for his pusillanimous cowering before Ortega/Castro/Chavez and the other caciques destroying democracy in Latin America. The Economist also has a long article on the recent summit in Quito, headlining Brazil's economic gains [and political stumbles, especially where Lula supported Morales in Bolivia, only to see that drug czar raise Petrobras gas royalty payments to Morales' corrupt Bolivian government.]

The Economist notes that Iran, Russia and China are moving into these countries, to the detriment of the USA [and Mexico/Canada]. Mary O'Grady notes that disloyal Democrats like Dodd and Kerry have long labored against American interests in Latin America, but now their sustained treason appears to infect this White House, as Brobambi scuttles and kowtows sideways and floorward to appease these caudillos.

Will Chavez Inspire Dear Leader Brobambi to Beat Fox & WSJ Journalists?

Chavez, Ortega, Castro, Zelaya, Morales, Correa all are hoping that Obama will withdraw support from Colombia so their drug cartels can operate [Chavez's agents were captured recently in Colombia with conclusive laptop evidence that Chavez is arming the FARC]. Obama is also supporting stolen elections by Iranian hard-liners like Ahmedinejad and opposing Israel, the only truly democratic country in the region now that Lebanon's President Hariri has been assassinated by Iranian ally Bashar Assad in Syria. Syria's ally Hezbollah is pressing to destroy what remains of Lebanon's democratic institutions and Obama seems ready to kiss and make up with Bashar....

So far, the slavish adulation of the American journo-cadres in print and electronic media has been overwhelming, but if that starts to diminish, will Obama mimic his idol Cesar Chavez and beat up opposition journalists? Or maybe Dear Leader Brobambi will follow the agenda he proposed in his [DISAPPEARED!!!] Columbia U. thesis vis-a-vis the Soviets and call for unilateral disarmament! Or mimic his childhood hero Che and attack Israel to demonstrate his hatred of true democracies. And his disdain for the U.S. Constitution which he supposedly "taught" as a college professor.

Clueless Republican are unable to understand the Tea Party and Town Hall protestors because the conservatives despise the borrow-and-spend Republicans almost as much as the tax-and-spend Democrats.

And like his State Senator records, his true and original birth certificate, his Columbia U. records, and other aspects of his past that the uninquiring minds of the mainstream media aren't interested in pursuing, the Cheshire Cat Brobambi keeps disappearing bit by bit until all that's left is a goofy smile.

NRO McCarthy Sums up Pelosi, Boxer & Kondracke---3 Females with PMS problems

Andrew McCarthy correctly cites Jonah Goldberg's great work, Liberal Fascism, as summing up the playground politics doucherinas Pelosi, Boxer, and Kondracke play when slinging "Nazi" metaphors, [except Boxer, accustomed to ACORN fashions, slams the protestors for being "well-dressed." Boxer is a failed novelist, Pelosi a failed politician, and Kondracke, just a failure.

Let’s put aside the Left’s propensity to slander conservatives with comparisons to Adolf Hitler, who was patently a man of the Left. Earlier this year, one New York Times writer seemed to find comparisons to National Socialism quite worthy when — at least in the telling — those comparisons worked in the Left’s favor. While Americans were hotly debating the merits of the Obama “stimulus” in April, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto called attention to a very interesting economic analysis offered by David Leonhardt. Leonhardt wrote:

In the summer of 1933, just as they will do on Thursday, heads of government and their finance ministers met in London to talk about a global economic crisis. They accomplished little and went home to battle the crisis in their own ways.

More than any other country, Germany — Nazi Germany — then set out on a serious stimulus program. The government built up the military, expanded the autobahn, put up stadiums for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and built monuments to the Nazi Party across Munich and Berlin.

The economic benefits of this vast works program never flowed to most workers, because fascism doesn’t look kindly on collective bargaining. But Germany did escape the Great Depression faster than other countries. Corporate profits boomed, and unemployment sank (and not because of slave labor, which didn’t become widespread until later). Harold James, an economic historian, says that the young liberal economists studying under John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s began to debate whether Hitler had solved unemployment.

McCarthy finishes off the pea-brained NYT Leonhardt, while giving the devil his due:

...whatever you may think of the merits of Leonhardt’s argument, it was appropriate for him to make it: The wisdom vel non of policies adopted during over a decade of Nazi socialism cannot be off the table simply because, in the end, the Nazis were monsters. We may find the seeds of their monstrousness in those policies, or we may not. But the thought that we should not talk about them is absurd. Notably, Leonhardt’s piece ran without any teeth-gnashing from Mort Kondracke and our other Beltway chaperones.

National Socialism is banned from the Right’s case against socialism, but is somehow acceptable when leftists use it as a smear or when the Left’s nuanced geniuses, after their very thoughtful consideration, decide its invocation is suitable for mature audiences? I don’t think so.

What's sauce for the three douchina geese is sauce for the gander!

Azeris called in by Police for Voting Armenian in Eurovision

Freddie Mercury, the iconic lead singer of Queen, was born in Baku, which is now monitoring the votes for Azeri & Armenian contestants for the Eurovision championship---akin to American Idol. FM's parents moved to London shortly after he was born, I was told by Azeris while I was staying in Baku back in the '90s. Ironically, the "Azeri" contestant in the contest is Iranian-born and lives in Sweden! Yet voting for the Armenian has been monitored by Azerbaijan's paranoid president and his ex-KGB lackeys.