The Further Adventures of Xenophobia, Warrior Princess

Happy Equinox. Exact this morning at 8:44 PDT.

I am back from 3,000 miles in the American West, and, having prepared my blogs a week in advance, the timeliness of the instantaneous news cycle has been absent — for a time and a place wherein Larissa Alexandrova can produce a superior, provocative, and astonishing essay, “Welcome to the final stages of the coup…” and can draw comment from all quarters, and then have said essay vanish like a cloudlet burning off with the morning fog at the seashore.

Where profundity shares the same fate as mindless ephemera.

Which I didn’t blog in for a week or so. But there is advantage to observing without speaking, and taking the time to digest one’s intellectual meal. (A sorrowful truth: we live in an age where information is much more highly valued than wisdom. The closest approach to the latter of which is the standard “wise-ass dumb” so popular among listeners to obese, drug-addicted talk show hosts everywhere.)

So, allow me to paint you a bigger picture.

i. Yippie-Ki-Yo, Mofo

I note in the blogosphere, the Pee Wee Herman approach to serious policy issues continues, using their favorite “I know you are but what am I?” playground squeal. (Has there ever been a more hebephrenic batch of wanna-be Junior High School bullies in charge of a major nation?)

Dr. Rusty Shackleford / The Jawa Report:
Hope, Change, & Lies: Orchestrated “Grassroots” Smear Campaigns & the People that Run Them [Updated] —  Extensive research was conducted by the Jawa Report to determine …

Discussion: www.redstate.com, Hot Air, Patterico’s Pontifications, Gateway Pundit, Michelle Malkin, Pajamas Media, Wizbang, The Strata-Sphere, Right Wing News, JammieWearingFool, Mother, May I Sleep …, The Other McCain, Scared Monkeys, NO QUARTER, Soccer Dad, Confederate Yankee, Riehl World View, The Campaign Spot and Atlas Shrugs

Yeah, Obama’s smearing McCain. And, suddenly, this rogues gallery of the Permanently Libelous is AGAINST smear campaigns?

Or, to note the cunning of this goose-stepping-in-lockstep and self-evidently conspiratorial nature of this Google gaggle: they are conducting, this morning, a furtherance of the “smear Obama campaign” that smears Obama by accusing Obama of smears.

Yes. Really. Having managed such a response from the logickal formulation:

Obama said “Lipstick on a pig”

Sarah Palin uses lipstick,

ergo: Obama called Palin a “pig.”

(Which is a shameless plagiarism of the old sillygism:

All men are mortal

Socrates is a man,

therefore: All men are Socrates)

They now go for the bonus round, in which Barack Obama is magically transformed into a horrible person who engages in “smear campaigns.”

Evidently there IS a significant demographic in our voting public that are demonstrably dumber than a turnip. What frightens me is that I just saw so many of them operating heavy equipment.

And let’s not forget dumbass and terminally weird:

Phyllis Schlafly / San Francisco Chronicle:

Feminists against Palin – shame on you

Er … the killer of the Equal Rights Amendment, quisling Republican stalking horse Phyllis Schlafly, whose vile offspring created “Conservapedia” (see here: “They Get Their Own Facts”) is going to lecture those she collaborated against, has held in open contempt for decades and opposes at every turn?

… The feminist tirades against Sarah are mostly so tiresome, but one line of their complaints is really funny. After 40 years of telling wives and mothers to get out of the home (which Betty Friedan called “a comfortable concentration camp”), put their children in day care (tax-funded, of course) and join the workforce, these same feminists now tell Sarah to stay home with her children.

Sarah doesn’t need feminist approval for her lifestyle; the only person whose OK she needs for her double career as mother and politician is her husband’s, and he seems very happy with Sarah.

Sarah Palin is an exemplar of a successful, can-do woman, and the feminists simply don’t know how to deal with her. I hope she will usher in a new era where conventional wisdom recognizes that feminist negativism is ancient history and American women are so fortunate to live in the greatest country on Earth.

Phyllis Schlafly is president of Eagle Forum, an attorney, and the author of 20 books, including “Feminist Fantasies.”

This is the GOP version of “feminism” — feed off the benefits that Feminism has allowed you (e.g. to take a lead role, carve out a career, be taken seriously) to belittle  disparage and utterly fail to understand feminism.

No one is questioning Sarah Palin’s right to make lifestyle choices as a woman. What they are questioning are the choices that she made. Specifically, that she would give birth to a mongoloid (which is what such babies were called PRIOR to the more PC “Down Syndrome,” unless they were called the far worse but more common “retards”) and take a five-month old baby on the campaign trail.

That’s quite a different framing than Schlafly’s diabolical twisting of the argument for her master Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies:

After 40 years of telling wives and mothers to get out of the home (which Betty Friedan called “a comfortable concentration camp”), put their children in day care (tax-funded, of course) and join the workforce …

Er … what was wrong with mothers getting out into the world? It WAS a sort of prison to too many women in the prior age. No one said you CAN’T choose to stay home and be a full time mom, BUT, you ought to have that choice. No one, save Phyllis Schlafly, thinks you oughtn’t.

And, having embraced the negative, Schafly argues demonically that somehow ” tiresome” “feminists” (she carefully cites no quotes, but, rather, puts her OWN words in the mouth of the straw man) are being hypocritical, and, therefore, SHAME ON THEM!

Er, shame on YOU, schlaFLY, and shame on the entire Right Wing Smear Machine, of which you are Godmother, one of the founding Uterine-American representatives of the Anti-Robin Hoods.

They steal from the poor to give to the rich.

And, finally, for those who collect crocodile tears (or put lipstick on them):

Ben Smith / The Politico:
McCain camp criticism rife with errors

—  Sen. John McCain’s top campaign aides convened a conference call today to complain of being called “liars.” [...]

ii. Yippie-ki-yo-ki-yay

This is precisely along the lines of the new viral meme: Barack Obama is a racial FRAUD!

No: seriously. Here’s the viral email that’s been bouncing through GOP AOL accounts, granny to granny (h/t to Bill Eagle for passing this along):

Jack Wheeler was the author of Reagan’s strategy to break the back of the Soviet Union with the star wars race and expose their inner weakness.  For years he wrote a weekly intelligence update that was extremely interesting and well structured and informed.  He consults(ed) with several mega corporations on global trends and the future, etc.  I think he is in semi-retirement now.  He is a true patriot with a no-nonsense approach to everything.  He is also a somewhat well known mountain climber and adventurer.

Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler

The O-man, Barack Hussein Obama, is an eloquently tailored empty suit. No resume, no accomplishments, no experience, no original ideas, no understanding of how the economy works, no understanding of how the world works, no balls, nothing but abstract empty rhetoric devoid of real substance.  He has no real identity. He is half-white, which he rejects. The rest of him is mostly Arab, which he hides but is disclosed by his non-African Arabic surname and his Arabic first and middle names as a way to triply proclaim his Arabic parentage to people in Kenya . Only a small part of him is African Black from his Luo grandmother, which he pretends he is exclusively. What he isn’t, not a genetic drop of, is ‘African-American,’ the descendant of enslaved Africans brought to America chained in slave s hips. He hasn’t a single ancestor who was a  slave. Instead, his Arab ancestors were slave owners. Slave-trading was the main Arab business in East Africa for centuries until th e British ended it. Let that sink in: Obama is not the descendant of slaves, he is the descendant of slave owners. Thus he makes the perfect Liberal Messiah. It’s something Hillary doesn’t understand – how some complete neophyte came out of the blue and stole the Dem nomination from her. Obamamania is beyond politics and reason. It is a true religious cult, whose adherents reject Christianity yet still believe in Original Sin, transferring it from the evil of being human to the evil of being white. Thus Obama has become the white liberals’ Christ, offering absolution from the Sin of Being White. There is no reason or logic behind it, no faults or flaws of his can diminish it, no arguments Hillary could make of any kind can be effective against it. The absurdity of Hypocrisy Clothed In Human Flesh being their Savior is all the more cause for liberals to worship him: Credo quia absurdum, I believe it because it is absurd. Thank heavens that the voting majority of Americans remain Chr istian and are in no desperate need of a phony savior. His candidacy is ridiculous and should not be taken seriously by any thinking American.

Pass this on to every thinking American you  know!

Gee. Let me translate to the language they use when they think nobody’s listening:

‘Obama ain’t a nigger; he’s a SAND-NIGGER!!!’

There is no hiding the ugly truth, and even the glow of the Sacred Halo of Ronnie™ can’t get out the pesky stain on the soul of the writer, nor the reader who passes this political pornography on to their friends, like a bad case of email crab lice, spread through indicted Senator Stevens’ dreaded series of tubes.

Sorry. Ain’t no two ways ’round it, it’s straight-up racism, ascribed, allegedly, to one of Saint Ronald of Ray-Gun’s anointed and exalted aides. Let’s see what Snopes has to say about this:

Claim: Editorial by Dr. Jack Wheeler describes Barack Obama as an “eloquently tailored empty suit.”

Status: True.

Example: [Collected via e-mail, August 2008] (almost exactly what you read above, give or take a typo.)

The legendary Urban-Legend-busting site additionally notes:

[Wheeler is] A NewsMax.com Pundit [who] has had two parallel careers for many years: one in the field of adventure and exploration as the owner of Jack Wheeler Expeditions; the other in the field of political and economic freedom as president of the Freedom Research Foundation. Wheeler is editor of ToThePointNews, “an online geopolitical intelligence service.”* [Note: Prose very neatly cribbed from THIS page. --HW] Wheeler’s articles are also published by WorldNetDaily.

The above-quoted opinion piece about Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama was published under Dr. Wheeler’s byline on his own To the Point web site on 5 June 2008.

Wheeler’s quite a character, all right. But it’s still the uninformed racist smear of some nutcase who’s hellbent on inheriting the mantle of Rule Brittania. You can climb as many mountains as you’d like and still have the racial tolerance of Simon Legree. Naturally, this Klannish slime has been lapped up by (probably) your grandmother and all her churchy friends. Frankly, beneath contempt, beyond that, as far as discussion goes.

This is the soft white underbelly of the GOP, even below those open slimemeisters of the blogosmear, who continually work in cahoots to get Herr Doktor Professor Architect Rove’s talking points into the blogosphere. You know, like:

Dr. Rusty Shackleford / The Jawa Report:
Hope, Change, & Lies: Orchestrated “Grassroots” Smear Campaigns & the People that Run Them [Updated] —  Extensive research was conducted by the Jawa Report to determine …

Discussion: www.redstate.com, Hot Air, Patterico’s Pontifications, Gateway Pundit, Michelle Malkin, Pajamas Media, Wizbang, The Strata-Sphere, Right Wing News, JammieWearingFool, Mother, May I Sleep …, The Other McCain, Scared Monkeys, NO QUARTER, Soccer Dad, Confederate Yankee, Riehl World View, The Campaign Spot and Atlas Shrugs

And, of course, last year’s Let’s Destroy Somebody Derbystakes winner, Michael Goldfarb of Murdoch/Kristol’s The Weekly Standard, who’s now “deputy director” of disinformation for the McCain campaign, orchestrating these blogswarms, no doubt, as he orchestrated the Private Beauchamp witch hunt last year. David Korn, blogging on Mother Jones‘ MoJo blog notes:

McCain’s New Target: The New York Times

On a conference call with reporters on Monday morning, Rick Davis, John McCain’s campaign manager, and Steve Schmidt, a top McCain strategist, were asked about a New York Times article reporting that Davis had been paid nearly $2 million for running a Washington outfit set up by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to stop stricter regulation of these two entities. Davis said he had never engaged in any lobbying for that group and downplayed Fannie and Freddie’s role in the organization. He joked that he appreciated “all the exposure I get” in The New York Times. He added that the newspaper must have “Davis envy.”

Schmidt then went bad-cop. “We’re First Amendment absolutists,” he said, noting journalists are free to “write whatever they want to write.” But, he continued, “whatever the New York Times once was,” it is no longer a journalistic entity. Schmidt called it a “pro-Obama advocacy organization” and claimed the paper “attacks” McCain every day. Schmidt went on: the Times is “an organization completely, totally 150-percent in the tank for the Democratic candidate” and has “cast aside its journalistic integrity and tradition” to get McCain.

It was a blistering slam. And several times throughout the call, Schmidt chided the media for treating Obama more kindly than McCain. (In recent weeks, many news outlets have scored McCain’s ads as being full of falsehoods.) Clearly, the candidate who once was beloved by the national media (and who joked the press was his base) has calculated that the old Republican play of bashing the media, especially The New York Times, will help him get elected. Also, Schmidt might also have been trying to establish a context for judging any future Times investigations that might pose a problem for McCain. (“See? I told you they were out to destroy Senator McCain.”)

By the way, neither Davis nor Schmidt pointed out one error in the Times‘ story about Davis.

Well, that’s what they pulled last year during the Petraeus hearings on the 9-11 anniversary, recall. Same playbook, same team.

But, in the immortal words of musical experimentalist Brian Eno, “Here Come The Warm Jets.”

iii. Hip Hip Talley Ho and Yippie-Ki-Yo

Looking at her résumé, I would swear that Sarah Palin attended Morton Blackwell’s “Leadership Institute” at some point. (very good Salon piece on it HERE).

TIME noted (in 2006’s “The Right’s New Wing”):

–The Leadership Institute, based in Arlington, Va. Led by former Reagan aide Morton Blackwell, 64, the institute had a record 3,562 graduates last year. The students, most of whom attend college or high school, learn about p.r., fund raising and direct mail; aspiring young pols get “candidate development” training. In its 25 years, according to Blackwell, the institute has trained some 40,000 conservatives–the movement’s field army–including nearly 200 who went on to become state legislators and more than 300 who wound up as staff members on Capitol Hill.

Palin’s first run for mayor on social wedge issues like guns, gays and abortion is textbook Leadership Institute training:

… Thirty-five years ago, Blackwell dispatched a particularly promising 17-year-old pupil named Karl Rove to run a youth campaign in Illinois; Jeff Gannon, a far less impressive student, attended the Leadership Institute’s Broadcast Journalism School.[...] (2005)

But the historical record isn’t yet clear. Certainly the whole school of “We say it’s so so it’s so,” GOP argumentation is in full display after lie, dissemblement, mendacity and obfuscation piles up with such rapidity and volume that the effect is monumental, a veritable tsunami of bullshit. The Googly reveals nothing. Ditto my Magic 8-Ball.

The latest bit of news is that Palin is going to Europe to meet with “World Leaders.”

This will establish her bona fides in foreign relations in precisely the same manner that meeting the Queen of England would qualify a blue-ribbon pig as the Foreign Minister.

Not that I’m calling Sarah Palin a pig. No: with her utter lack of knowledge about the Greater World beyond Hawaii and Idaho, she is LIKE a prize-winning pig, inasmuch as NEITHER is qualified as a vice-presidential candidate. Good fucking grief.

By that standard, shaking hands with the faculty of a small land-grant college qualifies one for a doctoral degree, or to be president of Harvard.

Rightie Bloggers convincing a credulous public

Thus, Xenophobia, Warrior Princess, who strides the land Right-Winging wrong, and defending the powerful and wealthy.

Drill Baby Drill.

But we must take a moment to empathize with poor “Sen. John McCain’s top campaign aides” who “convened a conference call today to complain of being called ‘liars’.”

I sure hope they don’t cry themselves into a fitful sleep. Crocodile tear stains are very difficult to get out of satin sheets.

Sarah Palin would know that.

Courage.

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