NRO's The Corner: Rolling Bile, Spit, and Gnash Thread

Please the generosity of spirit:

Buh-Bye Arlen [Jonathan Adler]

My first job in Washington, D.C., during the summer after my freshman year in college, was an internship in the office of Senator Arlen Specter. (In my defense, my political views were still developing, and he was my "hometown" Senator.) At the time Specter was a nominal Republican, though it seemed most of his staff were Democrats. His counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee had previously worked for Senator Kennedy. I didn't see much of him, and what limited interaction I had was not particularly favorable — and I've not been a fan ever since. Good riddance.

In Case You Missed It [Jonah Goldberg]

You have 364 days to plan for the next National Asian and Pacific Islander HIV/AIDS Awareness Day.

05/20 09:30 AMShare

rot in hell you little pissant

American Idolatry [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

I’m still NR cruising (there were two cruises to Portugal and Spain, Jay was on the first — read about it here — and I’m on the second), so I can only keep up with so much of what is going on back home. And so, naturally, one of the things I’ve kept up with is…American Idol.

Please tell me that I am missing something about this Ellen DeGeneres–Crystal Bowersox controversy, because it reads like someone looking to manufacture outrage. I find it more shocking that “Hallelujah” (have you heard the words to that song? ) would be sung on a primetime show that lots of families watch than that Crystal would be asked to sing a Paul McCartney song.

"NR cruising" = hitting on Mona Charen at the martini bar.

I find it more shocking that “Hallelujah” (have you heard the words to that song? ) would be sung on a primetime show that lots of families watch

(have you heard the words to that song?)

only about 100000000 times since 1995

is she objectin to the biblical references...?

heyo! xp

uh probably the bit about getting tied to a chair or something would be my guess

In Case You Missed It [Jonah Goldberg]

You have 364 days to plan for the next National Asian and Pacific Islander HIV/AIDS Awareness Day.

05/20 09:30 AMShare

rot in hell you little pissant

love you for this goole <3

I've not been a fan ever since

Americans who say "I've not" are disgusting savages.

^^^ real talk

Lots of this going around today:

For the Record, I Would Have Voted for the Magna Carta [Daniel Foster]
There is something unusual happening in the blogosphere and the Twitterverse as I write. In response to Rand Paul's problematic take on federal authority and racial segregation, self-avowed libertarians like Washington Post’s Dave Weigel and The Atlantic’s Megan McArdle are falling all over themselves to say things like “for the record, I would have voted for the Civil Rights Act.”

Well, of course you would have. De jure racism is an evil. I would have voted for the Civil Rights Act too. And while we’re at it I would have never signed off on the Corrupt Bargain that ended Reconstruction by installing Rutherford B. Hayes in the Presidency. Better yet, I would have killed John Wilkes Booth during one of his early performances of Richard III or vacated the appointment of Roger B. Taney to the Supreme Court.

But at the end of the day, isn’t this counterfactual game sort of pointless? There is certainly a “correct” answer to all these historical questions — side with the angels on every significant civil rights debate since the founding — but that’s not the same as the thoughtful answer.

if only i could back in time to kill racists -- but that would be murder!! man, even that wouldn't be right. fuck me.

There is certainly a “correct” answer to all these historical questions — side with the angels on every significant civil rights debate since the founding — but that’s not the same as the thoughtful answer.

The Thoughtful Racist by Daniel Foster.

"if i were highlander i'd be down with wm lloyd garrison and freedom riding and all that, but dammit life is short and i want to be a racist"

there is certainly a “correct” answer to all these historical questions — side with the angels on every significant civil rights debate since the founding — but that’s not the same as the thoughtful answer.

I suppose it's unintentional that using phrases like "side with the angels" and "that's not the same as the thoughtful answer" exposes Foster as a cynical asshole.

*expose

yeah luvvit when the conservatives just get down to the "ugh you people think you're SOOO GOOOD" attack

^^^that is generally all they've got; also plays well to cretins.

Re: Mother of Michelle Obama Questioner Will Not Be Deported [Mark Krikorian]

No surprise there. In a tightly run immigration system that actually had integrity, the illegal-alien mom might have something to worry about. But given that the "kids say the darnedest things" moment happened before the TV cameras, in front of the first lady (and her Mexican counterpart), the illegal-alien mom actually won the lottery — she's as good as amnestied now.

meanwhile, Derb finds reasons to hope: "Hungry, angry people working two jobs for a handful (or wheelbarrowful) of inflated-away dollars won’t be in a mood to fuss much about the human rights of detained terrorists, or of people in unfriendly nations, or of migrants violating our borders. Nor will they bother much about global warming or spotted owls (yummy!) Smiting one’s enemies hip and thigh may even come back into fashion — a jolly good thing in my opinion."

leftists always say that the poor and desperate turn to fascism, always nice to hear someone hoping for it

In Case You Missed It [Jonah Goldberg]

You have 364 days to plan for the next National Asian and Pacific Islander HIV/AIDS Awareness Day.

05/20 09:30 AMShare

fuck this dude btw

Raquel Welch [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

My column on her awakening to the pain that the Pill has wrought seemed to strike a nerve this week. For more on the topic in the last weeks (the anniversary of the Pill) see here and here.

http://www.takimag.com/site/article/two_and_a_half_men_airs_otherwise_unpalatable_truths/#When:04:02:20Z

oh man i didn't know that Derbyshire moonlights on other websites spouting even more ridiculous creepy shit

* Inside a pretty woman there is often a slut, who can be awakened by a man with good “game.”

* Low-class white women are often obese and coarse.

Now, these aren’t the kinds of truths you’d want as up-front advertisements for a stable, harmonious society. They are truths none the less, and need an occasional airing.

the kind of fascinating part is the delusion that because society rejects a belief it is inherently noble to support it.

Palin on Rand Paul [Ramesh Ponnuru]

Pete Wehner: "Understandably scarred by the 2008 campaign, [Palin] is on a quest to clear her name by pounding the media at every turn. They are always to blame — even when, as in the case of Rand Paul, they are not actually to blame."

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re: Palin on Rand Paul [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

She may also be determined to demonstrate what political loyalty looks like, in response to the lack thereof some on the McCain campaign showed her.

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Re: Palin on Rand Paul [Ramesh Ponnuru]

Loyalty is no excuse for making false claims. Those of us who believe that the media often treats conservative points of view unfairly should be especially annoyed when that legitimate argument is used to cover for Republican mistakes and thus discredited.

----------------------

Re: Palin on Rand Paul [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

No argument here, Ramesh.

OWNED.

Sex Makes Babies [Maggie Gallagher]

The problem is not the Pill. The problem is the idea, which promoters of the pill introduced and promoted with great fanfare, that we have separated sex from reproduction.

We teach the young to think of pregnancy as a rare emergency, an unexpected side effect of engaging in sexual acts. This disconnect produces a great deal of lunacy in our culture, and suffering for children, too.
----------

Newsflash: Sex makes babies.

is that what's behind all the gay hate, that they get off easy?

pretty much

'Obama's Katrina' [Yuval Levin]
I think it’s actually right to say that the BP oil spill is something like Obama’s Katrina, but not in the sense in which most critics seem to mean it.

It’s like Katrina in that many people's attitudes regarding the response to it reveal completely unreasonable expectations of government. The fact is, accidents (not to mention storms) happen. We can work to prepare for them, we can have various preventive rules and measures in place. We can build the capacity for response and recovery in advance. But these things happen, and sometimes they happen on a scale that is just too great to be easily addressed. It is totally unreasonable to expect the government to be able to easily address them—and the kind of government that would be capable of that is not the kind of government that we should want.

Let’s say a major hurricane hits a large and densely populated American city with five hundred thousand inhabitants. Much of the city is below sea level, and the flood-waters that follow in the wake of the storm quickly overrun it, filling nearly every street with water, in many places fifteen feet in depth. The magnitude of human suffering and destruction of property is mind-boggling. But within six days, everyone is out of the city and in total approximately one thousand people—one in five hundred residents—lost their lives in the calamity. Hour by hour, the government response was messy and ugly—it could hardly be otherwise given the magnitude of the disaster. But looked at with a little perspective, is that really a story of a failure of government response, or is it an example of how to contend with an immense natural disaster in a densely populated urban center? Is it a model of incompetence, or the most effective mass evacuation in human history?

Now let’s say a massive oil drilling platform, working with a variety of flammable and explosive liquids and gases in huge amounts more than 40 miles out in the ocean suddenly experiences a catastrophic failure that sets off a fiery explosion, sets the rig on fire, and causes it to sink—releasing an enormous gush of oil into the ocean more than 5,000 feet below sea level. Vast quantities of oil spill into the sea, threatening fish, wildlife, and coastal industries. The company that owns the rig, together with federal regulators, scientists, and engineers, tries a variety of different techniques—from remotely operated vehicles to containment domes to pumping heavy fluids down large pipes onto the well head—some of them invented on the fly, while 80 ships and several thousand people engage in a sophisticated cleanup and containment effort. Is this a failure of regulation and a model of slothful inefficiency, or is it an impressive display of human ingenuity and power in response to a terrible accident? We don’t yet know how long the spill will continue or how bad its consequences will turn out to be. And obviously it would have been great to avert such an accident, or to respond even faster and more effectively when it happened. But can we really say that not having done so is a massive failure of government, or of the oil industry?

We seem to think that given our modern powers, there ought to be no accidents and no natural disasters anymore, and when those happen we blame the people in charge. Well, call me crazy but I don’t want a government so powerful that it could move half a million people in mere hours in response to a hurricane, or would have such total control over every facet of every industry that the potential for industrial accidents would be entirely eliminated. Such power would come at enormous cost to a lot of things we care about.

you're crazy

the kind of government that would be capable of that is not the kind of government that we should want

rong

Considering the positions + readers of NRO, that's actually a pretty well articulated point. If you are against government power then you certainly can't complain when they fail to act effectively in the face of disaster.

Well you can't wan't to drown government in the bathtub and expect it to do your laundry in the end I suppose.

As I leave Oslo, Evo Morales, the Bolivian president, arrives. He is just perfect for the Norwegians — I mean, for the Norwegian political elites: Third World, “indigenous,” not quite a commie, not quite a democrat, something in between. Perfect.

love the scare quotes there

those Norwegian political elites, thinking they're hot stuff.

Post of the week:

Rhymes Without Reason [Mark Steyn]

I had no idea until today that this was the marching slogan of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid:

Butch, femme, bottom, top
Israeli apartheid has to stop.

Hmm. Michael Coren expands on the paradox of an anti-apartheid rallying cry itself obsessed with categorization. But I found myself wondering: Is there a Queers Against Sharia? If not:

Butch, femme, top, bottom
Gay bars in Riyadh? It's hard to spot 'em

Bottom, top, femme, butch
Pride parade's dull since the Taliban putsch

Top, bottom, butch, femme
With complimentary FGM

Top, bott, butch, femme, trans
Quit your chanting and read your Korans.

If there's one thing I never get tired of, it's the idea that to criticize one thing you must also criticize all things wrong with the world. (Also, a google search didn't reveal gay rights criticism of Islamic states?)

well that's the thing with any ideological cultural crit---all the failings of the world (as you see them) are secondary to the collective's failure to understand whatever it is you have ~grasped.~

how is Evo Morales not indigenous? also, the critique (such as it is) could be said about the "elite" in any country (I think).

http://article.nationalreview.com/435185/conservative-rock-songs-deconstructed/john-j-miller

lol

found this clicking around from that link:
John J. Miller on Iron Maiden on National Review Online

hahaha.

The second song is one of Iron Maiden's most familiar: "Two Minutes to Midnight." It's an anti-nuke tune whose politics aren't exactly to my liking.

lol pathetic

http://rightwingnews.com/2010/06/the-20-hottest-conservative-women-in-the-new-media-2010-edition/

http://rightwingnews.com/resizebyid.php?id=1

Judge Not [Jonah Goldberg]

Yes, I was a judge of the Hottest Conservative Women in New Media "contest." My shame spiral is bottomless.

figured that out years ago, J

http://i47.tinypic.com/2irn3m8.jpghttp://i47.tinypic.com/2irn3m8.jpghttp://i47.tinypic.com/2irn3m8.jpg

poor k-lo

the liberalheretics' video section is just a ray stevens video.

http://www.theliberalheretic.com/blog/node/993

Shall we create a new thread? This one's almost two years old, and a new cycle's about to begin.

Go for it!

You have the honors! I'm stuck for titles this morning.

Mods...lock, please?

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