Favorite poster from NR's "The Corner"

'm not suggesting that Obama loves the mullahs or that he wants to turn America into Iran. I am not saying Obama wants the mullahs to abuse their own people — I'm sure he'd prefer this all to end without (further) bloodshed. I am merely saying that (a) the president does not think the mullahs are evil, (b) he thinks they have a point, (c) he thinks he can forge a rapprochement and deal effectively with them (though he is under no illusions about stopping their nuclear ambitions), (d) he is not a big believer in freedom, and (e) he thinks the world would be more stable and easier for him to navigate if the mullahs win.

So, um...the second set of assertions contradict the first set. Is this why Macca's no longer a prosecutor?

My god that second post is even more insane than the first.

"I think he sincerely believes he could deal with the mullahs and make them less anti-American than they now are, once they realize how he is reversing a lot of what offends them (and him) about America."

Like what is he even talking about here? Bonkers.

We didn't listen to his delusional ramblings 5 months ago and they all came true u_u

Yeah it's true. All those conservatives in camps. When will we learn to listen?

the k-lo fat jokes upthread gave me a stomach ache

Stay away from the ice cream.

i always picture k-lo as one of the humans in wall-e

hahaha!

Carl Owen counters this nonsense:

OK, let me see if I've got this right. Since Barack Obama has taken the presidential oath of office we have witnessed: a) Hezbollah lose a shoo-in election in Lebanon, b) Pakistan begin serious efforts to control the Taliban and al Qaeda elements inside its borders, c) Netanyahu of Israel mumble support about a two state solution and rethink settlements and, d) A major awakening of the Iranian citizenry against the heavy-handedness of the mullahs. What hasn't changed? The simple-minded thuggery of the Right when it comes to foreign policy (and Grover Norquist, someone should gently remind him that it's 2009, not 1989). They have long preferred a modified Teddy Roosevelt approach. Speak loudly and wail away with the biggest stick you can find. I don't know if all this is the results of one speech in Cairo by the President but if it is I hope he gives a second, and soon

conservatives are so weird, part 1mx

The Age of Jackson [John Derbyshire]

I heartily applaud Jonah's nicely balanced, commendably sour refusal to celebrate Michael Jackson's peculiar life in the same gushing spirit the media has displayed. Sourpuss refusals to go along with gushy media enthusiasms are a part of what we're about here at NRO, and long may that remain so.

Working up my Radio Derb transcript here, I find I've been chastened by the concurrent death of Farrah Fawcett, who was only twenty months younger than me. I hear footsteps coming up the driveway, and shall keep perfectly still till they've gone, as I hope and trust they will. In that spirit, I'm trying hard to find something positive to say about the guy the media were calling "the Gloved One" the last time I paid any attention, which I see was a decade or two ago.

All I could come up with was that Jackson, like Fawcett, was a relic of the time when we were a single nation, listening to the same pop songs, going to the same movies, sticking the same babe posters on our bedroom walls, laughing at the same jokes, even giving our kids names from a common stock. Whether Jackson should be extravagantly mourned or not, I leave to you to decide; but that era of national-cultural unity surely should be. Requiescat in pace.

06/26 11:41 AM Share

looooool

hates black people

Isn't he British?

hes confusing the pre-revolutionary war era with the 80s i guess

Oh, the good old days when every other little girl was named "Farrah"

The Cap-and-Trade Stampede [Victor Davis Hanson]

It was somewhere around 3-4 years ago that "global warming" suddenly morphed into "climate change" in vernacular speech. Soon previously antithetical events, from floods to draughts, forest fires to ice storms, record lows and unprecedented heat, windless days and violent gusts — hitherto known by our parents as "the weather" and "stuff happens" — suddenly became symptomatic of the horrible middle-class habits of burning carbon to go places and keep either warm or cool. One could not lose an argument, since on any given day something other than clear and 75 degrees was attributed to carbon footprints and global changes. When undetectable the problem was "insidious," when a Southern California canyon went up in wildfires it was, "You see! We warned you!" — as if the newer "climate change" fulfilled some deep-seated psychological need in many in the media.

In the methodology of phrenology or astrology, any natural disaster was hyped in magnitude (the locus classicus was Obama's claim in May 2007 that "10,000" had died (actual death toll: 12) in a tornado in Kansas (apparent proof, he further claimed, of what happens when Bush diverts the Kansas National Guard to Iraq and leaves the depopulated state short-handed while thousands perish).

I just spent a few days in the Sierra in May during freezing cold temperatures and snow; a week ago it was quite cool and raining in New York; each time I have passed through Phoenix this spring it seemed unseasonably cool; and just gave a talk on the Russian River and about froze. Meanwhile the grapes look about ten days behind due to unseasonably cool temperatures. Any empiricist would be worried, as Newsweek once was, about global cooling. Will the planet boil, if we slow down a bit, review the science and dissenting views, and consider the wisdom in a recession of allotting nearly a trillion dollars to changing our very way of life (while the Chinese absorb market share)?

06/26 11:33 AMShare

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/temptrend.png

...u fukkin moron

i love is the elevation of big-ass cars with shitty mpg and dirty-filthy coal plants and 68-degree a/c settings to a "way of life."

i really love the idea of VDH doing a few things here and there and needing a jacket (esp "my vineyards are late") followed with "any empiricist would be worried..." no, fuckstick, no empiricist would be worried. a narcissist would be worried, tho.

empiricist, imperialist, whatever.

love how people who pull out these anecdotes about it being unseasonably cold somewhere are usually willing to acknowledge that the global avg temp has gone up ("oh but it was only a tenth of a degree") but can't put it together enough to realize that that means that someone, somewhere is saying it's gotten hotter where they are. duh.

but, my fucking vineyard??!?

oh, my grapes are 10 days early. weird.

just a simple agrarian, thinkin baout things

Jay Nordlinger: the screwiness moves:

There is mail in that column, too. And I so like one letter I publish, I’m going to talk about it again, here in the Corner. The letter comes from an Italian-American friend of ours — reader, cruiser, etc. (I’m not implying anything by “cruiser” — it’s just that he has come on at least one of National Review’s cruises.) He was thinking about the Ricci case. And he says that, when he was growing up in Kansas City, Italians weren’t considered white — far from it. Now they’re lily, it seems.

“I can’t figure out if we got a promotion or a demotion. I mean, just as it’s time to line up for minority benefits, we get bumped to the back of the line for being white.”

And I especially loved this: “Heck, here in Los Angeles” — where our cruiser now lives — “people refer to me as Anglo. Imagine that, in the very place where Rudolph Valentino was the original Latin Lover.”

Valentino would not be a “Latin lover” today — Sonia would definitely say no. He would be an unwise non-Latino, with a poverty of experience. America has always been screwy about race and ethnicity, of course. But you’ll agree that that screwiness moves.

does the screwiness move in a corkscrewy motion

screwiness may be long, but it bends towards justice

what are "minority benefits" please

future telling bald hotties, touch sensitive wii justice with apple controls, jetpacks

Newt Tweets Andy [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

Jonah:

While annoying, none of this surprises me. I can't tell you how many people have told me that my book is idiotic on its face because the dictionary says so. By the way, my dad wrote about the deep-seated bias of dictionaries for the Wall Street Journal a few years ago.

my DAD, that's who!

"the deep-seated bias of dictionaries"

the deep-seated bias of the phone book

http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110001946

it's conservapedia type stuff

Jonah is the Michael to his Joe.

shorter schiffren: there are two qualities in life, misery and power, choose one

On Sanford [Lisa Schiffren]

Even after a hard day of canoeing down the Dordogne river in southwest France, I felt the need to comment on a few of the more pressing stories of the day. I agree entirely with Mark Steyn about Mark Sanford. Last week I believed that he could tough it out by just moving forward and continuing the good fight. After his most recent public wallow, he’s toast.

Toughing it out requires ceasing the whinging, adolescent babbling about your stupid, trite reasons for straying, and your sense that your personal adulterous relationship is deeper and more wondrous than everyone else’s dumb affair. You know what we call men who have dumb affairs and keep their mouths shut? Husbands. Occasionally, presidents. Hard to see how a wife with any self-respect could tolerate hearing the guy she’s trying to forgive and reconcile with refer to the other woman as his soulmate — on the record, and in public. There are limits to what marriage therapy can do when someone doesn’t want to be there. Ditto being politically sound. You can have great ideas and be such a head case — in this case, such an egotist — that voters can’t pull the lever. We’re there. And I bet that Sanford — unlike Newt, Giuliani, Clinton, etc. – isn’t unhappy with that resolution. Mark Sanford doesn't want to be president.

I think the love affair is over for Rich Lowry!

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=Nzc0MzY3MWRjMjE1OTE0NmI1ZjYzYzQwMWY1ZTE5Njk=

It’s just too absurd. Palin mentioned Alaska or Alaskans 34 times in a 17-minute statement that must be a new record in the history of protesting too much. Palin says she hates politics as usual, and true to her word, on July 3 she staged a spectacle in politics as unusual. But she still proved adept at the traditional political art of extreme disingenuousness.

She didn’t want to put Alaska through the hell of a lame-duck governor who would “hit the road, draw the paycheck, and ‘milk it.’” Never mind that if she feared becoming a lame duck, she could run for re-election — especially if “serving [Alaska’s] people is the greatest honor I could imagine.” Or that she could endeavor to work her hardest at her job until her last day in office. That may sound outlandish, but it’s been done before.

I hate being in agreement with Rich Lowry on anything.

Little fartbursts.

Lowry writes with the disdain of a recently abandoned lover.

Could this be the scandal?

AP headline "Palin breaks silence about resignation". Didn't she resign on Thursday? Not exactly shutting up for long, is she?

hell the governorship took up too much of the time she could be using for blabbing inanities to the press and updating her facebook status.

i guess it was just a matter of time before the lazy, self-absorbed nitwits the Repubs have spent years courting finally ended up in the driver's seat. or something.

i wouldn't characterize it that way -- the GOP has an extremely good track record running charismatic lightweights.

this is a couple days old, but, when do american right wingers get really credulous about the chinese government? when they start killing muslims:

Hard to Believe the Lovable Uighurs Could Be Involved in Terrorism . . . [Andy McCarthy]

even though the ones we were holding at Gitmo were trained in al-Qaeda-affiliated camps.

The Wall Street Journal (as flagged in the NRO web briefing) reports on rioting in China by Uighur "students" that has left scores dead and hundreds wounded. The "students," described elsewhere in the story as from a "predominantly Muslim ethnic group[, which has] long chafed at restrictions on their civil liberties and religious practices imposed by a Chinese government fearful of political dissent," expressed their dissent by torching cars and buses, as well as — according to accounts of some witnesses to state-controlled media — rampaging "with big knives stabbing people" on the street.

No reason for non-Muslims in Bermuda, Palau, or the United States to worry, though. The lovable Uighurs are merely trying to address "economic and social discrimination." Once they get social justice, I'm sure they'll stop.

07/06 08:55 AMShare

christ

i wouldn't characterize it that way -- the GOP has an extremely good track record running charismatic lightweights.

^true. i guess it's this whole white trash celebutante component that's off-putting