Today's opining on the public discourse.
I'm stuck in an all-day training, which means no internet access for eight fucking hours. Generally, I'm able to sneak in a wee bit o' checking ye olde email during the slower times in the evening, but today I shall have to do it during lunch. What with soliciting captains for the HMS Elitist Bastard and having to figure out who's helming in July - PZ Myers or John Pieret - on top of wanting to catch up with my regular commenters, I've decided that today's the day for you all to have your bit of fun.
Discurso practically writes itself, and today you'll get to see why.
Here's the game: I'll post the outline. You'll have a range of political blogs to retrieve the details from. Copy and paste snippets for each number, post your response in comments, and voila - we've got a complete Discurso post. It's just so fucking sad that I can predict exactly what categories we'll have no trouble finding pieces for.
Right. Ready? Here's your links to political sites:
The Carpetbagger Report
Digby's Hullaballoo
Political Animal
Talking Points Memo
Think Progress
Salon - Glenn Greenwald
The Huffington Post
Make sure to copy and paste the URL of each article you're thieving from. Quick tip: if you right-click on the permalink, then click "copy shortcut," you'll get the link fast and easy. If you don't know how to hyperlink, don't worry about it. Have snarky commentary to add? Embrace your profanity and blast away.
We're set. Let's play Discurso Mad Libs!
Another day, another revelation of just how fucked up and illegal the Bush Regime is:
[1]
I used to think that a fat book would be written on the illegalities, insane power plays, and dumbassitude of the Bush years, but at this point, it looks like a library will be necessary. And that's just if we're doing summaries rather than details. Somebody tell me why we voted this fucktard into office twice.
And here's McCain, trying for a trifecta of dumbfuckery:
[2]
With ideas and policies like that, he expects us to elect him? It's true that a sucker's born every minute - but it takes eighteen years before they're allowed to vote, and I'm hoping like hell the suckers that have already reached voting age have wised up just enough to stay the fuck home this November - or vote Libertarian. Bob Barr wants you to give McCain the finger!
Well, two fingers, if you're an Anglophile.
Of course, with a media like this, it's a little hard to keep up hope:
[3]
Is there any end to the assclownery? Since when did becoming a "journalist" mean having the rational centers of your brain expunged? You'd think these stupid fuckers would've learned by now. Maybe they've been crossbred with magpies: they're certainly easily distracted by shiny propaganda, they have the attention span of a goldfish with ADD, and their love of meaningless trivia puts even the most rabid Trivial Pursuit fan to shame.
Maybe if I just stay drunk until January. Maybe then it won't hurt so bad.
Being the rebel that I am, I'm going to XXblatantly disobey Dana's instructionsXX boldly color outside the lines and respond to a few items from my "favorite" local conservative blog. (With appropriate supportive noises, I might even post something over there, the way I used to; haven't had the stomach for it lately.)
ReplyDelete25 Percent Tax and “Reasonable” Profits:
==snip==
"“The oil companies need to know that there is a limit on how much profit they can take in this economy,” said Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois..."
Memo to Sen. Durbin: Companies don’t “take” profit. They earn profit based on providing a product or service to consumers who want the product or service.
==/snip==
When the profits come from selling a limited natural resource that you didn't create and can't make more of, then yeah -- you're "taking".
Huck and Pittenger on Fox & Friends today: video clip of Fox News hosts being all chummy with Mike Huckabee, who's being all chummy and modest about how he's not a hero for having used the Heimlich maneuver to save former NC governer Robert Pittenger from a wayward piece of chicken.
No commentary from the blogger. We get the feel-good about Huckabee (wow, what a great guy!) but the blogger doesn't actually say he supports Huckabee -- so any comments criticizing Huckabee seem out of place or even mean-spirited. He gets a free shot serving positive messages about how wonderful Huckabee is, and what nice folks conservatives (and Fox News announcers) are, without being subject to any scrutiny because he didn't actually say anything.
I guess this is the positive flip-side of Neocon jabs at Obama via his "elitism", his "heavens, nobody's saying he's a Muslim!"hood, his flag pin, and his refusal to waffle in his views so they can attack him for being a waffler.
Our eroding freedoms on display complains about a Minneapolis regulation restricting car idling to 3 minutes except at traffic lights:
==snip==
Unsurprisingly, the reporter writing this story points out all the wonderful reasons why this is a good thing, stating them as fact, with no attribution, pushing the ever-present environmental and “for the children” rationales...
==/snip==
1. You need attribution for global warming? And the effects of pollution?
2. Somehow, this isn't what comes to mind when I think of my freedom being eroded -- but oh, I see! You have complaints about freedoms being eroded, so they must be just as valid as the complaints I have about Bush & His Amazing Singing Neocons eroding my freedoms, because otherwise I'm not being Fair And Balanced, right?
Welcome to the neocon reality inversion.
Wow! Anti-Semites AND communists:
==snip==
John at Power Line finds that the community blogs at Barack Obama’s Web site not only includes anti-Semites. It also includes Marxists and communists. Click on the image below for large screen capture. It’s likely this “My Obama” blog community will disappear, just as the “How the Jewish lobby works” blog disappeared earlier today.
==/snip==
Oh noes, Obama's [presumed] supporters include some really bad people -- I mean, a converted Jew who criticizes Zionism -- how much more evil can you get! Let's all vote for a Republican, because of course there are no crazy wackos who like them! (And in the meantime, let's do the American thing and raise a fuss until Obama takes that nasty free speech stuff off his icky liberal web site, and then we can give him a hard time for throwing "Juan Carlos from Knoxville, TN" under the bus! I mean, how could he do that to a blogger who has been posting on his site for months, and whose posts he might have actually read at some point? Liberals are sooo fickle.)
Yeah, okay, weak comeback. I'd much rather have seen Obama post responses to the anti-semites instead of just disappearing them.
But hell, McCain's site doesn't even have a forum, as far as I can tell. I guess that'll show those damn anarchistic liberals how to do things -- the president talks, and you listen.
(Psst, neocons: The Socialists for Obama blog is still there. ...Aren't you going to say something about how this proves Obama wants to force us to give our homes and businesses to The State?)
How did your congressman vote on these?:
==snip==
91% of House Republicans have historically voted to increase the production of American-made oil and gas.
86% of House Democrats have historically voted against increasing the production of American-made oil and gas.
Call your N.C. congressman and ask how he or she voted on these issues so you’ll know who to blame as gas prices continue to rise.
==/snip==
Umm... Bush? (There's the whole not- putting- money- into- public- transit thing, the not- putting- money- into- research thing, and of course that whole thing about laying waste to the infrastructure of that oil-rich country we somehow spent a trillion dollars to get quagmired in.)
Presumably if Congress decided to allow unlimited drilling and yet the prices somehow didn't go down much because THERE ISN'T THAT MUCH OIL LEFT DOMESTICALLY, that would also be the Democrats' fault. (For waiting this long to drill, perhaps.)
Wait a minute... American-made? Like, strong-muscled American workers pounding little hydrogen and carbon atoms together using nothing but their God-given strength? Or are we talking biofuels? Somehow, I don't think so.
===
Ok, lost your appetite yet?
This must be why we need the tequila.