NRO's The Corner: Obamacare ‘like a house on fire’ with more flammable parts yet to come

fits the profile

Benny made a terrible mistake. But he has owned up to it and learned from it," said National Review editor Rich Lowry. "He's a talented journalist, with obviously a lot to contribute. He knows he's joining a storied institution at NR, and we look forward to his helping us carry on our mission across all platforms."

Kevin Williamson has words for those vermin who participated in yesterday's climate change rally:

The streets of Manhattan are teeming with hippie filth this afternoon as the People’s Climate March (and Rally Against Personal Hygiene on General Principles) rolls through town like an addled occupation force. One particularly loopy-looking couple of well-seasoned veterans of the protest circuit, little signs reading “Divest from Fossil Fuels” pinned to their shirts, were desperately trying to hail a taxi. New York City taxis, as everybody knows, run on magic. I offered them a ride in my invisible solar-powered unicorn chariot; they did not take me up on it. I assume Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore shared a unicycle to get here.

But Grover and Moonbeam were far from the strangest or most ironic sight in the city today. Across town, the section of Park Avenue fronting the Waldorf was a sea of Communist banners, as if that kid from Rolling Stone had finally had all his dreams come true. It was some sort of China rally. The Chinese have good cause to be proud of their civilization, but not of that flag, and the government it represents, the so-called People’s Republic.

People’s March. People’s Republic. Listen to the Left, and they’ll always tell you who they really are.

"teeming with hippie filth"!!!!

That reads like he wrote it using a Mad Libs pad.

^This guy knows the power of sarcasm to sway the unreflective mind.

xp

"hippie filth"? haha the protestors I saw were mostly well-scrubbed college kids. kw channeling spiro agnew or rabid hippie-baiting TV host joe pyne

ludicrous, crusty, Morton Downey Jr-esque dullardry is the only kind of machismo these feebs can even slightly convincingly approximate.

right wing journos' MO is always to go to a protest and search for the weirdest outliers, then say "The left reveals itself!"

our favorite NRO denizen loved it:

I would like to add something quick to Kevin’s post. (I’m too nervous to watch every pitch of the Tigers versus the Royals.) I spent some time near the crowd today — and that crowd was more like a mob, in my view. Swarms of zealots, screaming — literally screaming — against a devil they call “fossil fuels.” These people did not seem to me democrats assembling in support of a cause (however misguided). They struck me as ideologues, people in the grip of a negative passion, the kind of mob that would be wowed by Hugo Chávez.

I hope I do them an injustice. (But I doubt it.)

P.S. I have never much liked the recent expression “on steroids” — that got old within a year of its regular use, to me. But Manhattan today has been Ann Arbor on steroids. (Some readers know that Ann Arbor is my hometown and a frequent punching bag of mine.)

P.P.S. If only people felt as passionately against dictatorship and human-rights abuses — in China, Cuba, the Arab world, and elsewhere — as they do against fossil fuels. There are real enemies in the world, but oil and natural gas aren’t one of them (or two of them). And against what is the people’s fury directed? Against what do the schoolteachers preach? Of course.

Those of us who have been working against various mandates imposed by the Affordable Care Act are as a matter of fact attempting to extricate ourselves from involvement in Lena Dunham’s sex life, the details of which we would gratefully leave to her own idiosyncratic management. It is the so-called Affordable Care Act that has involved us in subsidizing birth control, abortifacients, surgical abortions, and who knows what else, for the strong, powerful, self-actualized American woman who cannot figure out how to walk into Walgreens, lay down the price of a latte, and walk out with her own birth-control pills, no federal intervention necessary. The very conservative editors of this magazine are in fact trying to make it easier for them to do so with over-the-counter birth control. I suspect that Miss Dunham does not know very many conservatives, so allow me to pass along the message: We really, truly, sincerely do not wish to be involved in your sex life.

...which is why i wrote this paragraph.

nothing like kevin williamson straight up lying about what justice RBG said about abortion and non-rich women. and then the next day saying women who've had an abortion should be hanged.

Okay, I mean, she knows, right?

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/390235/me-corner-maggie-gallagher

the comments are hilarious

I wonder if that one son of hers just kinda shrugs at the drunk texts at 2 am.

the comments seem to confirm that 90 percent of NRO's traffic is hate reading

They probably checked their subscriber numbers and realized "Wait, the only people who actually support us financially are the ones who take our damn cruises."

Gary Thomas Byrne-McIntire • an hour ago

Interesting music selection.. R.E.M. --Stipe stated, "I don’t. I think there’s a line drawn between gay and queer, and for me, queer describes something that’s more inclusive of the grey areas."

would really like to know exactly how she interprets that song and video

that was just a dream?

amazing that the lol @ maggie havent been deleted (yet)

^ comments I mean. earlier k-lo posted her usual lukewarm oatmeal about the catholic synod and got her ass handed back by the corner's reliably homophobic professional catholics. they're incredible, literally "more catholic than the pope" and utterly lacking what the nuns used to call the virtue of humility.

heard George Weigel on NPR today in the car and underneath his usual condescending bluster he sounded worried.

I had to mention George Will's column

One of the wonders of this political moment is feminist contentment about the infantilization of women in the name of progressive politics. Government, encouraging academic administrations to micromanage campus sexual interactions, now assumes that, absent a script, women cannot cope. And the Democrats’ trope about the Republicans’ “war on women” clearly assumes that women are civic illiterates.

it gets better

KEEP NRO WEIRD

https://twitter.com/reihan/status/525737392842752000

Gourd Opinion Haver ‏@SeanRMoorhead 17h17 hours ago

.@reihan I am a licensed sexual orientation reparative therapist in Provo. Put me on the reverse racism beat and you'll never regret it.

A Question of the Hour
By Jay Nordlinger

In recent years, I’ve had several occasions to go to Norway, and a visit to that country will make you think about immigration, assimilation, and all that jazz. So will a visit to Holland, for example. Anyway, I returned from Norway a couple of days ago.

While there, I thought of something Mark Steyn said — one of his greatest Broadway analogies ever. Some people think that a new Europe will be essentially like a cast change of Hello, Dolly! You may remember the “black Hello, Dolly!” (starring the great Pearl Bailey). Sure, the cast was of a different color. The show had a different flavor. But it was still Hello, Dolly!

Will Europe be that way? Will Norway still be Norway, only in hijab?

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/391152/question-hour-jay-nordlinger

How fucking dumb are these guys

You may remember the “black Hello, Dolly!”

Actually, no, since I'm not obsessed with maintaining our culture's racial purity, I do not remember that.

greatest broadway analogies

"Would The Book of Mormon be the same if it was performed by Muslim actors and instead of singing it was beheadings?"

The show had a different flavor. But it was still Hello, Dolly!

how pissed was Nordlinger to find out HD's title already had an exclamation point

man the 20th century was pretty gnarly huh dudes

https://twitter.com/HeerJeet/status/526750972341927936

(keep scrolling)

Benjamin Dueholm ‏@bendueholm 12m12 minutes ago
@HeerJeet They never do though. When Buckley died the eulogies were all about binge drinking and the harpsichord. Race politics vanished

Okay, let me give you a domestic version of the Africa business. Years ago, I spoke with a judge in West Virginia — a die-hard liberal Democrat who, as a young man, had worked with Sargent Shriver in the War on Poverty. I asked him, “Did it do any good?” Quietly, and with sadness, he said, “No.”

If an arch-right-winger like me says that — or even the best economist at the Cato Institute — that’s one thing. But for him to say that — I was kind of moved.

goole's friend is back:

For the Left, particulars do not matter: It does not matter whether Michael Brown was in fact shot in the back with his hands raised in a gesture of surrender, or whether that University of Virginia student did in fact suffer the horrific gang-rape described in Rolling Stone. For the Left, this is all tribal, white hats vs. black hats. Fraternity members and police officers are, in their view, by definition on the wrong side of every dispute. That is why we have such rhetorical inventions as “rape culture” and pervasive white supremacy—these are metaphysical propositions that cannot be disproved, because they are not subject to evidence. If the particulars do not support the general case, then the particulars either are ignored or are dismissed as lies produced by a conspiracy.

For the Left, this is a bit of a problem insofar as it touches police, because the Left believes in effectively unlimited state power. It is difficult to reconcile a taste for unfettered state power with a belief that those entrusted with that unfettered power are violent and psychopathic white supremacists.

If you doubt that this is a fundamentally tribal question, consider this: What would the Left’s reaction be if police officers were being hauled in on charges of sexually abusing children as frequently as public-school teachers are? We’d have presidential speeches and blue-ribbon commissions up to our lumbar clefts if that were the case. But public-school teachers are white hats, in the Left’s view, while police are black hats.

just magnificent

consider this

decries rhetorical inventions. promptly uses a rhetorical invention.

What would the Left’s Right's reaction be if police officers were being hauled in on charges of sexually abusing children as frequently as public-school teachers priests are?

something along the lines of "allowing homosexualists to become cops opened the gates to perversion" no doubt

I don't even understand Williamson's question, no matter how many times I've read it.

it actually makes LESS sense the more you "think" about it

this is genuinely dazzling work

false equivalence is the fallacy of our time

the answer is, i'd be happy? i think i'd be happy about that.

We need to close the year with a post from NRO's house intellectual Kevin Williamson:

To add just one thing to Quin’s excellent observations: Some of my lefty/opportunistic correspondents have asked: “How could something like this possibly happen? How could somebody accept an invitation to speak to a group without being sure what that group is about?”

Answer: Easily, in my experience.

Like politicians, opinion writers receive a great many invitations to deliver talks about the things we care about. I imagine that Steve Scalise gets a great many more than I do. But I myself have, within recent memory, accepted an invitation to give a talk (I believe it was to be about the national debt) to a perfectly respectable-sounding organization (Something Somethings for Liberty, I think) that turned out to be something else: Birchers, in this case, not David Duke nut clusters. I withdrew when I discovered what they were about. But it is not difficult to imagine that if I had a politician’s packed speaking schedule rather than my own comparatively leisurely one, I might have shown up and given my entitlement-reform talk to a bunch of people who think that Dwight Eisenhower was a Soviet agent.

On the other hand, it is more difficult to explain away all those photos of noted Democratic and progressive leaders in the company of Louis Farrakhan. Is there anybody who doesn’t know what he is about?

https://twitter.com/NRO/status/560890219897974784

boom

jews aren't white, the UN told me so

I need to poll these:

Following up on Joel’s post about Governor Jindal’s comments on assimilation yesterday, here’s my top-ten list of what we should expect from those who want to become Americans (and those who are already Americans, for that matter). The list was first published in a National Review Online column nearly 15 years ago, and it was fleshed out in this congressional testimony seven years later:

1. Don’t disparage anyone else’s race or ethnicity.

2. Respect women.

3. Learn to speak English.

4. Be polite.

5. Don’t break the law.

6. Don’t have children out of wedlock.

7. Don’t demand anything because of your race or ethnicity.

8. Don’t view working and studying hard as “acting white.”

9. Don’t hold historical grudges.

10. Be proud of being an American.

My list and Governor Jindal’s appear, unsurprisingly, to be similar — especially, per Joel’s post, with regard to my last item.