MNBlue – a blog that includes the likes of Andy Driscoll and Grace “The Government Brought Down the Towers” Kelly – is running this ad:
It links to another conspiracymonger blog, naturally – par for the course with MNBlue, really.
Just saying – they must really be shooting for that military vote, huh?
Gore Vidal – Vietnam Truther! (Emphasis added by me)
And what about Mr. McCain? Disaster. Who started this rumor that he was a war hero? Where does that come from, aside from himself? About his suffering in the prison war camp?
Everyone knows he was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. That’s what he tells us.
Why would you doubt him? He’s a graduate of Annapolis. I know a lot of the Annapolis breed. Remember, I’m West Point, where I was born. My father went there.
So what does that have to do with the U.S. Naval Academy down in Annapolis? The service universities keep track of each other, that’s all. They have views about each other. And they are very aware of social class and eventually money, since they usually marry it.
Ah. It’s all about the frat you were in!
Remember – Gore Vidal is a serious commentator.
Lord Nick tries his hand at geography and analogy in his drive-by on Rep. Kucinich’s (D-Land of Faeries and Unicorns) articles of impeachment:
On the same day that articles of impeachment against George W. Bush were referred to the House Judiciary Committee, a North Dakota sheriff reported that high winds had caused cows to “fly.”
Funny. I thought we’d see pigs.
There are two eternal constants here:
Back to Nick:
Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 by a Republican Congress (led by horn dogs whose own peccadilloes soon came to light) for lying to a grand jury about his relationship with a White House intern.
(Koff).
(Koff koff koff koff).
(Koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff).
(Ah KOFF koff koff hack hack koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff (deep breath) koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff hack hack HACK koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff (Deeeeeep breath) koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff koff).
Whew.
(Koff koff).
Don’t know where that coughing attack came from. That was a bad one.
Ten years later, a Democratic Congress has failed to impeach George W. Bush for lying the country into a bloody and unnecessary war, undermining civil liberties and employing torture.
And ten later, Nick “I’m Not A DFL Monkey” Coleman still can’t tell the difference between a president getting jobbed and a president doing his job.
So much for change.
Indeed.
I’m done with this garbage.
1. If your blog name is “Bill Dung” – change it.
More to come.
Susan Sarandon? Please call Alec Baldwin’s travel agent in re your plans.
Baldwin fell short on some promises in the past four years, and he could use the love.
Art: From South Park, via the Urban Dictionary:
Stan Darsh – Stemming from the South Park episode where the children go skiing and encounter a stereotypical 80s movie plotline. Sort of a lame whiney insult for someone equivalent to Douchebag or Lamer.
“DARRRSHHH! Sup STAN…DARSH! Stan Darsh!”
“Life”: “Scottsdale Woman”, from Fired Oglake:
Votes, please!
We’ll accept it as a given that nobody in the Twin Cities media excites more deranged, dissociative ranting than Katherine Kersten.
There’s really no arguing the point. Let’s move along with the premise.
Yesterday, Kersten took a tongue-in-cheek swat at perhaps the dumbest thing I’ve read in my life; a petition to have her removed.
And reading the petition is enough to make you both howl with laughter and pray for a driving rain of Zoloft to descend on the city; yes, Twin Citians, your fellow citizens are that stupid, and their votes do count just as much as yours.
Note to Kersten’s many dim-bulb critics; a columnist is a very different thing than a reporter. That’s why Nick Coleman can say things like “our schools are burning” without actually having to show evidence of a school belching smoke and flame.
Oh, and the dissociation isn’t just the deranged hoi-polloi of the febrile lefty-in-the-street; Paul Schmelzer, the Minnesoros Monitor’s occasionally-capable writer, who notes:
One signatory of the petition might lend more credence to that criticism than most: the Pioneer Press’ David Hanners, who won a Pulitzer Prize for the Dallas Morning News in 1989, was the eighth to sign.
Which is something of an appeal to false authority on the one hand – so what if he won a Pulitzer? It doesn’t mean he’s not an agenda-driven (and indeed as you continue through Schmelzer’s piece, he is; he’s a Moslem, and he’s irate over the TIZA school flap from a while ago; while I’m not placed to judge the accuracy of the complaints, I’m buggered to think of any other examples of the Monitor according religious faith any status in complaining about media coverage).
Indeed – given that Mindy Greiling’s op-ed detailing Kersten’s supposed inaccuracies has been pretty roundly savaged, one has to ask – what has Kersten supposedly gotten wrong?
Sigh.
At any rate, the “good” news is that now, 2,000 years of western civilization and 232 years of American democracy have reached their zenith with…
…the online Petition-o-matic site.
Ryan Rhodes has given it a test drive, and has started a demand to toss Nick Coleman for actual crimes against truth vastly worse than those of which Kersten is wrongly accused.
Please – circulate it, and sign it.
And for my part, I’ve started one of my own.
Do it for the children!
While Tom Shales at his best is an adequate (if past-his-shelf-date) TV critic, when he swerves into politics he distinguishes himself by being an even balder-faced flak than Lori Sturdevant or Frank Rich.
His “review” of the Pennsylvania debate focuses – like the rest of the nutroots – on the shock and awe they feel over actually seeing Democrats questioned.
But this bit here caught my attention:
Obama was right on the money when he complained about the campaign being bogged down in media-driven inanities and obsessiveness over any misstatement a candidate might make along the way, whether in a speech or while being eavesdropped upon by the opposition. The tactic has been to “take one statement and beat it to death,” he said.
No sooner was that said than Gibson brought up, yet again, the controversial ravings of the pastor at a church attended by Obama. “Charlie, I’ve discussed this,” he said, and indeed he has, ad infinitum.
Oh.
Well, then.
Never mind!
(Note to all you anti-war people; Bush “has discussed” the war, “ad infinitum”. Just shut up and speak when spoken to!)
This is precisely what has happened with widely reported comments that Obama made about working-class people “clinging” to religion and guns during these times of cynicism about their federal government.
“It’s not the first time I made a misstatement that was mangled up, and it won’t be the last,” said Obama, with refreshing candor.
Ah. Well, that’s that, then! He “misstated” his contempt for the vast majority of the American people!
Sorry to impose, Tom!
The networks’ trick is covering an election with as little emphasis on issues as possible, then blaming everyone else for failing to focus on “the issues.”
Contempt for over half the voters – including, I hasted to add, me, a gun-toting Christian from a small rural town – is an issue.
By your leave, anyway.
We’ve ripped on “MNBlue” before; in a city full of batsh*t-crazy leftyblogs, it may be the dumbest of the lot.
And of the whole crew, “Grace Kelly” may be the worst of the lot. Grace is a flaming liberal (which is fine), and a 9/11 Truther (which is not).
And this is her idea of an April Fool’s joke:
Being lefties in Saint Paul, it’s easy for people like “MNBlue” to think that everyone agrees with ’em.
It’d be really cool if they were to get the word that politicizing the 35W Bridge disaster this crudely and stupidly is lame, even for someone as deeply dim and morally myopic as Grace Kelly.
Say, through a bunch of firm, polite, but forceful comments explaining exactly why this is so deeply, abidingly moronic.
Hypothetically, of course.
Michael writes:
Less than two weeks ago, the Minnesota DFL and liberal blogs screamed foul when images of the 35-W bridge collapse were used in an issue ad about Senator Coleman’s leadership.
MN Publius called labeled the ad “exploitive” and the DFL Party said that “Senator Coleman’s shadowy supporters are politicizing the tragic I-35W bridge collapse for his and their own benefit.
Living in a one-party town means never needing to develop a sense of shame.
To: Molly Priesmeyer, Rent-a-Blogger and Snark-Minx
From: Mitch Berg, Unpaid Hack
Re: John McCain’s Teeth.
Ms. P,
I realized that I said that I’d try to contact you the next time I had a question about your coverage of an event. And since the Sorosphere is suddenly all afroth over the state of Senator McCain’s teeth (that’s why we go to the Sorosphere; all that cogent analysis!), it’d be a good time to ask you…
…except your email address doesn’t seem to be anywhere on the MNMon’s (really, really badly-designed) site.
Sorry. Pinky swear, I tried!
So anyway, here’s my question: When you copy and paste a line that 5,000 other leftybloggers write:
If bloggers are saying one thing about John McCain this week it’s that the 71-year-old has some serious grit. Of course, that grit comes in the form of McCain Mouth, a deformity that apparently causes teeth to look like a mess of yellowed and contorted Chiclets. Today, BuzzFeed.com has picked up on the mouth meme, turning McCain’s piano-key chompers into an official phenomenon.
The consensus? “They’re old.”
Well, not nearly as old as the Senator is.
Because – you do realize this, don’t you, Ms. Priesmeyer? – Senator McCain had a bunch of his teeth broken off at the gumline while he was being held as a POW. Which, of course, can set a guy up for a whole lifetime o’ dental hurt.
But you didn’t know that – right? If you’d known that, you’d never, ever have written such a deeply, disturbingly dumb piece. Right?
Seriously – please plead ignorance. I’d like to know that even the MNMon has a level below which even they won’t sink – although reason tells me my faith is probably misplaced.
While looks are an easy and lame target,
[Being more mature than he used the be, the writer bites his tongue at the too-easy retort, knowing he’s a better person for it]
it’s at least refreshing to see McCain’s teeth get a razzing (though, unfortunately, not a cleaning). It gets a little tiring listening to the same sexist cries that Hillary Clinton is just too ugly to be president. Hatin’ on the looks of all the candidates? Now that’s equality!
No, that’s just stupid and sophomoric. Dinging Senator Clinton on her looks is stupid and sexist. Ripping Senator McCain for the appearance of a mouth that had the living sh*t beaten out of it by NVA goons is its own punishment, at least among people with consciences.
Glad to see Steve Perry’s bringing some professionalism to the good ol’ MNMon!
UPDATE: Brodkorb is even less-amused:
This is really disgusting attack on Senator McCain and Minnesota Monitor should be embarrassed
Michael has more faith in Steve Perry than I do.
UPDATED UPDATE: I’m gratified to see that the lefties in Brodkorb’s comment section are even more cheesed-off than the rest of us.
RE-UPDATED UPDATE: Mo’N @ Jo’T has the photoshop of the day.
UP-UPDATED UP-UPDATE: I never actually put Minnesota Monitor on my blogroll, so I can’t remove it in a fit of pique. I’m considering adding it for about five minutes, so I can gas it.
Ideas?
For those of you who were afraid the retirement of Mark “The Wege” Gisleson would make the local Sorosphere a kinder and gentler place – well, don’t worry. Steve “Mister Furious” Perry is more than happy to take up the slack – and watch his credibility crash harder than Lieutenant Commander McCain’s A4 Skyhawk:
While we await the release of John McCain’s medical file–which his campaign has pledged to disgorge by next month–I took a look through press accounts of McCain’s last release of medical information, during his 2000 run for the White House.One eye-opener: McCain’s startling claim that he believes the five years he spent as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam were actually a boon to his mental health and temperamental stability.
It’s clear that Perry has given up being a “journalist” (he used to be a good one), and is auditioning for a job as a writer snarksmith on the “Daily Show”.
Since modifying and controlling ones’ behavior was a prime survival skill among American POWs in North Vietnam, it’s clear that Perry knows no more about this subject than Dan Haugen knows about the law or Molly Priesmeyer knows about business.
And I’d have to wonder – would Perry bring the same tact, intellect and sensitivity to the table if a woman ran for office and testified to having been raped? (“That’s a stupid question, Mitch. Of course he would! If she were Republican!”)
One wonders how Steve Perry’s “behavior” would fare (he’s, um, notoriously “prickly”) if he spent a weekend in jail on a traffic warrant, much less five and a half years of torture, solitary confinement and the sort of systematic degradation most Americans couldn’t comprehend even if the Daily Mold were still in operation?
Given McCain’s enduring and well-known fondness for calling his Senate colleagues names and telling them to fuck themselves, what are we to make of this?
That it’d be cool to stick Perry in a room with McCain for five minutes? (And since when does Perry, the guy who hired Mark Gisleson at the City Pages in ’04, get the vapors about a little rudeness and cussing?)
I never thought it would be possible, but…:
Perhaps it’s time to start a “MNMon Dead Pool”. Even Soros has gotta realize he’s wasting his propaganda dollar.
Although we can hope not.
(And could someone have a word with them about their spaghetti display code, their torquemadian comment engine, and their “Junior’s First Website, 1996” design?).
Wackjob town in Vermont refers an initiative to arrest Bush and Cheney for “war crimes”:
Brattleboro residents will vote at town meeting on whether President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney should be indicted and arrested for war crimes, perjury or obstruction of justice if they ever step foot in Vermont.
I think the rest of the US should vote to bestow a fate worse than prison.
Maybe having to share a hotel room for a weekend with Tim O’Brien and Matt Snynders.
Back when I was a kid, Erica Jong was the it writer. Her books were the ones that my friends’ moms kept carefully tucked under all the other books on their nightstands, out of view. We – the 12 and 13 year old versions of the neighborhood kids – snuck furtive glances at the oh-so-risque covers, got uneasy about the chances of getting caught, carefully put the books back where they belonged, and snuck carefully away.
Jong is still alive, but – if this post from Monday’s Huffpo is any indication – should have stuck with writing romance novels for women who’d just discovered the pill.
Social commentary would seem to be way beyond her.
I am so tired of pink men bombing brown children and rationalizing it as fighting terrorism.
And I, Erica, am so tired of purple(faced) women – women whose faces have turned bright purple from constant unrestrained ire – reducing complex questions to facile “racisms”. D’ya suppose the Huffpo will take note?
I am so tired of pink men telling women (of all colors) what to do with their wombs–which connect with their brains–in case you forgot.
Nope, Erica – unlike you, I am a genuine feminist. And, as it happens, a Christian humanist; I believe that when that egg gets conceived, the mom and dad have kicked off something that transcends either one of their own lives. To reduce it to a matter of female anatomical politics is…well, yet another thing I’m tired of purple(faced) women doing. And doing. And doing.
I am so tired of pink men having wives who stand behind them and nod sagely on television.
I am so tired of “pro-choice” purple(faced) women who have nothing but contempt for choices not their own.
I am so tired of pink men expecting that someone–a brown, black, yellow or white woman–will trail behind them changing light bulbs, taking out garbage, washing laundry, keeping food in the house, taking care of kids of all ages, of parents of all ages.
And I’m sick to death of purple(faced) upper-middle-class over-famed dingbats and their sneering paternalistic preconceptions, bigotries and prejudices.
I am so tired of pink men whose wives double or triple the family income thinking they can spend it without doing a damn thing at home.
I’m a little peeved about purple(faced) women who ignore Warren Farrell’s research – that shows that between working more on the job and sharing more responsibility at home, men actually work more per week than women do. I’d like those purple(faced) women to keep their purplefaced opinions out in Scarsdale and Beverly Hills, where they belong.
I am so tired of pink men spouting nonsense on TV. I am so tired of pink men arguing, blathering, bloviating, predicting the future–usually wrongly–and telling women to shut up.
And I’m dog-tired of purple(faced) women who think that the marketplace of ideas is a zero-sum game, where a “pink” man speaking necessarily shuts up a woman.
I am so sick of hearing that another pink man has dropped his children out a window, off a bridge or killed his pregnant wife or killed his unpregnant wife because he was infatuated with another pregnant woman.
I’m sick of it too! And just as sick when pink women, or women of any other color. I’m just as sick of purple(faced) women yammer ignorantly about “pink” mens’ infatuations, and ignore the fact that women (especially “pink”) ones, are the ones that initiate the vast majority of divorces, with all their attendant social cost to our kids – pink, red, brown, black and none-of-the-above.
I am so sick of pink men appointing their mediocre cronies to judgeships, to political advisors, to cushy jobs, to columns in the paper, to multimillion-dollar posts as CEOS or actors…
…and I’m sick of purple(faced) women barbering and phumphering about “pink male” mediocrity on the one hand, and voting for the likes of Barbara Boxer and Hillary Clinton on the other.
I am so tired of pink men.
And for this pale pink fella, it’s very mutual.
Especially when referring to purple(faced) women who, were they not arrogant, overrated skags whose fifteen minutes expired thirty years ago, would have remarks like the below condemned as the bigoted, ill-informed, patronizing tripe it is:
So let’s just remember our mothers–who bore us, protected us against our fathers and grandfathers
Ms. Jong: if your many face-lifts will allow sound to past through your ears, listen up: Rot.
In.
Hell.
“Protected us from our fathers?”
There is no form of scum lower than you, you dessicated old plastic-surgery-lab-project slag.
I am not stupid.
No. You’re something much, much worse.
I know all generalizations are false. I know there are bad mothers, bad women, bad sisters, bad aunts, and bad females of every stripe. But I have seen enough men in high office to last a lifetime. Let’s give women a chance!
Ms. Jong; if you’re an example of what women in power are like – and I’d like to think you are not – you’ve set your cause back a few decades.
I try to be civil. Yes, indeed, I do.
But sometimes, it’s totally wasted.
To wit: Every time I try to figure out what are the most irredeemably stupid leftyblogs, I get to a short list; “Mercury Rising”, “Jesus General”, Atrios, “Clotting Stool” all hold places of honor…
…but at the top of the list is always “Shakespeare’s Sister”, a collection of the most vacuous, whiniest bloggers this side of Ken “Ned Luddington” Weiner.
And among the whole pack of defectives, “Space Cowboy” has to be…what’s the word?
The dumbest. The dumbest of the lot.
I know I’ve read things dumber than Space Cowboy’s drive-by of the President’s visit to Yad Vashem, but for the sake of my outlook on humanity, I don’t like to dwell on them.
It was only just yesterday when Olmert Pile thought that Bush is a wise man full of Yale and Harvard infused wisdom. Here’s a closer look at that wisdom, as exhibited by our man of the hour during a tour of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial:
At one point, Bush viewed aerial photos of the Auschwitz camp taken during the war by U.S. forces and called Rice over to discuss why the American government had decided against bombing the site, Shalev said. […]
Between 1.1 million and 1.5 million people were killed at the camp.
“We should have bombed it,” Bush said, according to Shalev.
[At this point, I guess I should take small solace that Mr. Cowboy hasn’t accused the President of bombing Auschwitz instead of finding Bin Laden. Oh, don’t worry – historical myopia almost as stupid follows. I digress].
“I was most impressed that people in the face of horror and evil would not forsake their God. In the face of unspeakable crimes against humanity, brave souls — young and old — stood strong for what they believe,” Bush said.
I really don’t know what to make of this. I’m not sure that Bush realizes that had the US bombed the camp, the people of whose adhesion to religion he’s so enamored [why does Mr. Cowboy have a problem with that? – Ed.] would be stone dead. Bush doesn’t seem to be aware that there were survivors at Auschwitz; is he really saying to the survivors that they should’ve been killed for the greater good of “disrupting service” at the camp?
One wonders only briefly if Mr. Cowboy has read anything on the subject at all. Briefly, I say – lefties that have read history are rarer than All Star Wrestling fans who can recite James Joyce.
While nearly everyone that was in the camps ended up “stone cold dead”, as Mr. Sensitive Cowboy puts it, anyway, there were survivors. And, nearly to a person, they said (after the war) that they hoped we’d bomb not just the railhead, but the “showers” and crematoria, right amid the camps. In those days before GPS and laser-guided bombs, a bombing raid leveled everything within miles of a target in a rolling cascade of destruction. And yet in account after account – Elie Wiesel’s is the most famous (“we didn’t fear death – at least, not that death”); other resports come to us from the Black Book of Nazi atrocities, from British Sergeant John Coward, an escaped POW who infiltrated Auschwitz and brought out intelligence and served as a witness at Nuremberg; from accounts related at the Holocaust Museum – a shocking number of inmates reported that they’d have preferred a death from an Allied bomb, if the same raid took out the gas chambers and crematoria, to what they knew probably awaited them.
And it’s completely irrelevant, because it’s not what Bush was talking about. At our remove from the events – 62 years after Auschwitz was liberated – it should be fairly obvious to the thinking sentient person that Bush was talking about the larger concept of Roosevelt bombing the Auschwitz/Birkenau complex, as opposed to weighing operational options in preparation for setting up an Air Targeting Order.
Bush wasn’t sending targets to the Air Force; he was apologizing in effect for President Roosevelt’s inaction on the camps.
Speaking of “thinking people”, Mr. Cowboy tries to put a “thinking guy” costume on…
A true thinking man, the kind that really has wisdom, might have opined that the bombing of the roads and supply lines surrounding the camp would’ve been a great way to start.
Which was, indeed, what the President was saying.
Would it have stopped the killing? Definitely not. And neither would have Bush’s vision of bombing the whole thing.
Which is, of course, a scabrous lie… .
But the former could’ve netted more survivors. Sure, it’s speculation..
…the sort of ghoulish monday-morning quarterbacking that would get a guy kicked out of Source Games on Warhammer night for being “too weird”.
Also, ignorant as hell. At the Holocaust Museum, and in the many books written about Franklin Roosevelt’s policies on the extermination camps, you can see letters from Jewish leaders fairly begging FDR to bomb the camps, regardless of the loss of life among the inmates, to prevent further, future industrial murders.
Ghoulish, horrible stuff, the stuff of Sophie’s Choice come to real life, the notion of sacrificing hundreds or thousands of ones’ fellows and coreligionists to save hundreds of thousands more.
But speculation requires a reflective thought process and reasoning. All you have to do is watch any Bush presser footage to know, unequivocally, that he does not possess skill one.
Well, let’s be fair, Mr. Cowboy; you had your mind made up about that a long time ago, didn’t you?
President Bush had tears in his eyes during an hour-long tour of Israel’s Holocaust memorial Friday
Let me know when the press orgy begins about Bush showing weak emotion.
“Weak emotion?”
Mr. Cowboy. You greasy little f*ckstick and wannabe Vulcan. I dare you to visit the Holocaust Museum, or Yad Vashem, and not come away emotionally wracked. I’m as dour and Scandinavian as they come, and by the time I got to the third floor of the Holocaust Memorial, I was biting my lip bloody. Many people – many in yarmulkes, many not – wept openly at the horror of what they saw. Some – my stepson was one – had to drop out of the tour. It’s just too much.
And any of them, from the President on down to the every visitor that takes the horror related at the Museum or Yad Vashem in, is a better person than you.
And I’ll tell you in person.
Why, what a rediculos bunch of hepocretecal loosers!
Developing. . . . .
In the special little world of the left-leaning gimmickblogger, everything’s acceptable – but don’t complain about government!
Cuckling Stool is a leftyblog whose gimmick – a conversation between an dyspeptic, smug, anonymous blogger and his fictional, smarter, dog – has reached about 14:59, dips into the same meme every untalented leftyblogger has been overusing for the past year. Conservatives never write, opine, or climb on soapboxes; no, it’s always “whining”.
Dear God, deliver us from Mitch,
It’s called a “back” button, slapnuts.
the man who thinks that sackcloth and ashes are a fashion statement. Mitch the hot dryer vent of human beings, taking the crease out of your slacks and the curl out of you hair. Mitch, the man who sells a line of custom hair shirts. Mitch . . .
Mommy?
Mommy, is that really you?
We get the picture, Spot. Why the rant?
Because “Spot” learned got a book of handy similes at the Solstice celebration?
Poor Mitch put up a post today lamenting the problems of the core cities:
The inner cities have their issues. If you’re in Minnesota and reading this, you know about them; you’ve either fled them, are paying for them via your taxes, or are – like me – living among them.
Where does Mitch live, Spotty? The near north side of Minneapolis?
Actually, grasshopper, he lives near Hamline University in St. Paul. But Mitch is so put upon, so besieged by something called “local government aid” that he can’t stand it.
Er…so what?
Crime doesn’t stop at Thomas Avenue (and my house had the bullet holes in it, ten years ago, to prove it). And – not to knock the great contributions that efficiency-apartment-dwelling anonymous wackjobs from the Bloomington bring to our society, but those of us who actually live in and pay taxes to the cities we live in have the right to an opinion. At least until Hillary! bans it.
Wait a minute, Spot. I thought that LGA in effect took money from guys like you, Spot, and used it to provide services to core city residents like Mitch. Right?
Well, yes, that’s right.
Actually, that – like pretty much everything Stoop has ever tried to write – is wrong. LGA takes money from the parts of the state that “turn a profit”, and transfer it to the parts that live “beyond their means”.
And, being a Saint Paul property taxpayer, I am the city’s “means”.
Why is he complaining and not you, Spot?
An interesting point, grasshopper. Perhaps it is because Spot recognizes that the entire metropolitan area is a community.
Let me translate that from Platitude to English: two parts of that “Community” have spent three generations addicted to several decades of hare-brained social experimentation, spending every dime they could squeedge out of taxpayers – their own, like me, and everyone else via LGA – to reinforce failure. Some of our neighbors (and more who, like Spot’s fictional owner, live in airless studio apartments and wait for entitlement checks) are “happy to pay” for whatever their betters tell them. On the other hand, “get” the whole “dissent” thing.
Regardless, Mitch, Spot says that you should get out of the house more: clean your garage, shovel your walks, mow the grass; you need the exercise.
Big talk, from a guy who’d seem to live on a diet of flaked-off lead paint chips.
Worthless, played-out Bad dog.
..that Ken “Crayola Boy” Avidor is lying?
His fingers are moving over a keyboard.
Foot sows the wind; soon, the only former Screw magazine art-director not to have a decent career will reap the whirlwind.
A few years back, many left-leaning commentators – up to and including Geraldo Rivera and some who are on the George Soros payroll – tried to bury Michelle Malkin in a wave of anti-Filipina bigotry.And while many people, left and right, rose as one to condem this ugly racist display, a number of left-leaning commentators were as silent as death on the subject. Among the silent – and thus, complicit – were:
The inference is clear; Perry, Bremer, Eric Black and the DrinkLib bloggers think the only place for a Filipina woman is writhing around a greased pole on a stage, or turning tricks by a navy base.
For that matter, on this blog I’ve commented many times at great length about the pre-1945 German trait of eliminationist anti-Semitism, as identified by Goldhagen. Who was silent on this subject? Perry, Bremer, MinMon and Drinking Liberally.
Their silence tells the tale; obviously, they hate Jews and want them all murdered.
Let us not forget that four years ago, DrinkLib participant and leading local leftyblogger Mark Gisleson called for the lynching of Vice President Cheney, among many other things. Whose silence again rolled like a hurricane storm surge? That’s right; Karl Bremer, the MinMon, the DrinkLib bloggers, and…well, OK, Steve Perry did sort of wind up giving Wege a muted “tut-tut” online.
The meaning is clear; all left-of-center alt-media commentators are racists who want to murder jews and lynch Dick Cheney.
Their silence is the proof.
When will leftybloggers rise as one and attack Steve Perry, Karl Bremer, the Minnesota Monitor and all of the Drinking Liberally leftyblogs?
———-
Stupid, right?
Yep. Intentionally so.
If only Steve Perry’s “Daily Mole” could say the same thing about Karl Bremer’s grindingly, corrosively stupid “Reader Op-Ed” hit ‘n run on Tracy “Anti-Strib” Eberly and, by the way, every single center-right blogger in the Twin Cities.
What happens when a leading local Republican blogger publishes a virulently racist screed that refers to Native Americans as “dirt worshipping heathens,” “domestic terrorists permanently stuck in the Stone Age” and “humanoid animals,” and describes them as a race “so primitive that they created nothing of any lasting value, nor did they contribute anything of note to the world”?
In Minnesota, evidently nothing—at least from his right-leaning compatriots in the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers and the mainstream media.
Wow. That’s pretty damning stuff. Where could that have come from?
Minneapolis regulatory affairs consultant Tracy Eberly published such a piece on his local blog Anti-Strib on October 11. Those are just a few salient quotes from it. If you want to read his further defense of genocide against Native Americans, you’ll have to visit his website yourself. Suffice to say it would make Andrew Jackson proud.
Um, yeah, Karl/Steve. About that.
Bremer knows how to put links into web copy; he provides copious links to the other Minnesota Organization of Bloggers (MOB) blogs that he wants to smear by association. So why – in the left-leaning “Mole”, publishing to a left-leaning audience – can’t he provide a link to Eberly’s actual piece?
Does he (and, by association, Perry, MinMon and the Drinking Liberally bloggers damn, now I’m picking up that awful habit), know is audience isn’t going to bother googling and digging to find the article? Is he counting on inertia (a reasonable assumption) to keep his audience from knowing the actual context in which Eberly was writing?
So read Eberly’s piece. I did. For the first time. I didn’t like it much, and don’t agree with it. Of course, I understand where it comes from – and it’s not racism.
To know that, of course, the reader would need to know the context of the story as well as the pull-quotes Bremer has elected to highlight. But that would undercut Bremer’s foamy-mouthed, self-righteous “point”. It’s unsurprising, of course – Bremer, a long-time anti-Michele Bachmann zealot, writes for “Dump Bachmann”, a blog whose entire oeuvre is built around crimes against context (and which also refuses to condemn the attacks on Malkin, the Holocaust, and to renounce the attack on Dick Cheney Crap. It’s catchy, and hard to kick).
More on that later. Bremer next lets his imagination romp and play – with results that some of his associates might find…hinky?:
Eberly is a member of a group known as the Minnesota Organization of Bloggers, or more appropriately, MOB. Self-described as “a group of mostly center-right bloggers,” MOB includes virtually every Republican blogger in the Twin Cities, including GOP-affiliated Minnesota Democrats Exposed, TCF-connected Power Line, and St. Paul Pioneer Press editorial board member Craig Westover.
Bremer slips from omission into lying, here. PowerLine is not “connected” with TCF, any more than Karl Bremer is “connected” to the Nazi Party for whom his deafening silence about the Holocaust is a sure sign of support (dammit) my employer is “connected” to my blog (I’m going to make sure Scott Johnson sees that, however; Steve Perry might want to see to the “Mole’s” “fact”-checking).
More importantly (to me)? The MOB is rigorously non-partisan. As one of the group’s “organizers” (there is no “organization”), I am the one, along with Chad the Elder, Brian Ward and King Banaian, to state this for the record; the MOB eschews politics completely, as a matter of principle. The group is a blogroll and a twice-annual gathering at a bar. Not only that, but we have made a point of reaching out and inviting leftybloggers to our semiannual MOB parties; not only as blanket invitations on our blogs, but specific emailed invitations to the leftybloggers themselves. These invitations have included several sent to specific City Pages writers (Paul Demko among others) while Perry ran the place.
Karl Bremer’s “boss” at DumpBachmann, Eva Young, attended the last MOB Party. She seemed to have a great time! And – what’s this? Tracy from Anti-Strib attended! Eva must hate Indians, too!
Some “right-leaning” group, that MOB, huh, Karl?
Eberly reportedly finished third in the runoff for their little club’s “mayor,” so he clearly has their respect.
For the benefit of any “Mole” reader who reads this; the “Mayor” race is the MOB’s equivalent of a “Miss Congeniality” award and – again, I say this as one of the MOB’s Capi di tutti capi, the mayor election is not an official MOB function. It is something the Kool Aid Report does for the fun of it.
Yet since Eberly’s “dirt-worshipping heathens” column ran last month, the silence from the usually fawning MOB mob has been deafening.
Let’s make sure we provide the context that Karl Bremer (anti-filipina, anti-semite and pro-lynching-advocate-by-omission that he is Jeebus, this “smear by omission” thing is a slippery slope!) is apparently afraid to, yet again.
Anti-Strib is a rant blog. It is not the Weekly Standard. It is among local center-right bloggers what “Norwegianity” is for the local center-left; the loud, unrepentant, sometimes gauche, sometimes dead-on (well, Anti-Strib, anyway), shoot-first-ask-questions-later portion of the local center-right psyche. They are South Park conservatives of the most unrepentant stripe; they whiz on Political Correctness with the sort of glee that PZ Meiers piddles (or tries to piddle) on faith, or “Crayola Boy” Avidor pees on…I dunno, artistic talent?
And – take note, Karl Bremer – just because we share a label doesn’t mean we think, act or believe the same. I’m not a screedblogger, so sometimes the Anti-Strib is off-putting. It’s a “big tent” groupblog, so the writing is mighty uneven, ranging from amateurish and awful to really good (sort of like the City Pages).
Do I care for the tone of Tracy’s piece? Of course not. Of course, unlike Bremer, I know some of the backstory that is probably opaque to Bremer and his readers; as he notes, Eberly is reacting to “Doug”, a malignant comment-section tumor (one of only four people that’s ever been banned from this blog) who claims to be (among many, many things) Native American, and who relentlessly romanticizes Native culture. “Doug” is such a remorselessly abrasive jagoff that if he were to start advocating for unicorns and puppies, I’d be tempted to rhetorically warm up the .270 and the meatgrinder. And I hate that – because while I deeply respect Native culture (I’ve spent a lot of time reading about hunter-gatherer and aboriginal farming cultures in recent years) within their cultural context, Doug’s relentless preening is enough to make Russell Means break out a copy of Fort Apache out of pure snotty spite.
Tracy’s article is an attempt to let the air out of a really obnoxious balloon. Was it coarse and un-PC and maybe just a tad less artful than I’d shoot for, myself? Sure. Remember, I banned Doug rather than indulge in a reaction I’d rather not have; after almost six years of this, I’ve learned to pick and choose my stressors. Tracy sees it differently; that’s Tracy.
I don’t endorse his reaction; neither do I think it’s a sign of racism or lousy character or bad breath or anything other than wanting to give the relentless prig Doug a rhetorical wedgie.
Suffice to say every regional leftybloggers had best be very careful about their own flippant bigotries.
And, of course, “logical fallacies” – like the kind Bremer smears all over himself in the next bit:
Minnesota Democrats Exposed is authored by Michael Brodkorb, a paid consultant to the Minnesota GOP, Norm Coleman and many other past GOP campaigns. Brodkorb calls Anti-Strib.com a “daily read,” and it’s the first permanent link on his website, where he has been flogging Al Franken relentlessly lately for Franken’s statements about Native Americans.
The “daily read” list is in alphabetical order. And – lest the distinction be lost on anyone dim enough to take Karl Bremer as an authority on anything – Tracy Eberly is not running for US Senate.
Even Westover, with his bully pulpit on the Pioneer Press editorial page, has remained on the sidelines
Bremer, again, fails to provide a link to allow the reader to note that Westover has “remained on the sidelines because his blog has been moribund for six months. Clearly, Westover’s “silence on Al Quaeda” during that time means he also supports stoning gays – by Bremer’s logic.
Substitute “Blacks” or “Jews” or “Christians” or “Catholics” for “Indians” in Eberly’s harangue, and what do you think the reaction would be, even from the right?
That’s easy. “That’s stupid enough to be a Karl Bremer opinion”
Isn’t it time Republicans and their internet and media cheerleaders [Hahahahahahaha! – Ed.] quit pointing their fingers at liberal political groups and their TV ads, and cleaned up the hatefulness in their own back yard? A good place to start would be a repudiation of one of their own family members, Tracy Eberly and Anti-Strib, for the shame he’s laid upon their doorstep. Because as long as they remain silent about fellow MOBster Tracy Eberly and his “earth-worshipping heathens” slurs, they will all wear the mantle of racism in my eyes.
OK.
Tracy; don’t insult Native Americans. Please.
Now – Steve Perry? What do you think about the fact that Karl Bremer has selectively misreported key facts of this story? If these misstatements aren’t corrected and atoned for, you will forever wear the mantle of “hack” in my eyes. And I know that’d hurt you to the quick.
Eva Young (Karl’s boss at “Dump Bachmann”) – either Karl misrepresented the MOB, or you are a closet right-winger because you attended the last MOB party. Clearly, if Bremer is correct, your participation in the MOB party means you Hate Native Americans! Where’s the correction – nay, the outrage?
See where this leads?
Karl Bremer is a Stillwater writer and part Cherokee Indian.
Good thing he’s got “aggrieved minority” to fall back on.
To paraphrase the Everly Bros and Linda Ronstadt – I’ve been cheated, been mistreated; in addition, I’ve been put down and (coincidentally) pushed ’round; I almost hesitate to add that I’ve been lied to and made blue. With a nod to Stephen Stills, I’ve been aro-o-o-ound the world, looking for that…girl (I think Stills is singing “Mormon”, but I’m sure that’s wrong) .While I have not been (a la Charlene) to Nice or the Isles of Greece, with their attendant yachts and champagne I have had shotgunned Summit on a pontoon boat on Minnetonka. With apologies to Ms. Smyth and Messrs. Lennon and McCartney, I’m neither a warrior nor an eggman. But I will lay claim the high-and-low-searching Seeker of Pete Townsend fame.
And the thing I seek at the moment is one bit of knowledge. To wit: what does “Pwn3d” mean? I’m assuming it’s the past tense regular verb form of “Pwn” (To Pwn. I Pwn, you pwn, he/she/it pwns…), which only highlights the limitations of grammar for analyzing intent.
Anyway – while I have no idea what the state of “pwn” means, it’s been brought to my attention that I apparently am…it. Whatever it is.
Searching for clues (or, alternatively, “clw3z”), I went to my email, where I saw a note from a correspondent:
He notes that his predecessor at *giggle* Screw went on to the NY times…And he went on to….…get fired from the 4th most-read freebie rag in Minneapolis.
It’s becoming clear.
Pwn: v. to be proven less pathetic than the subject of ones’ narrative.
I think I know all I need to now.
And with this, all discussion of “cartoonist” Ken Avidor is over. Turn out the lights.
CORRECTION: Everly Bros, not Buddy Holly. Blah.
As they teach (I’m told) in law school: “When the law is against you, argue facts. When the facts are against you, argue law. When both are against you, argue like hell”.
The blogging corollary might be “when the facts make you look like an idiot and your every attempt at a response looks like a more-and-more desperate attempt to change the subject because the entire world is starting to think you’re a giggly self-absorbed little jagoff, you should quit before you get too far behind, if it’s not already too late”.
Which, with Foot on the case, it pretty much already is.
I’m a pretty normal guy. I’m 44, I live in an old house in Saint Paul with a couple kids, two cats and a dog. I drive a four-door but I’d rather bike. I like good beer, play guitar and a slew of other instruments, have the odd date, meet my friends at Keegans’ when I can – you know. Pretty normal stuff.
Of course, when I was 16 I started working in radio. Now, working part-time at a station in North Dakota is the laxest possible definition of “public figure” that can exist in nature – but even then and there (and over my next years, as my career took me to the Twin Cities), some of the wierdness that attends “public” life caught up with me. The anti-semitic calls and threats (although I’m not remotely Jewish, the “Berg” name irks some); the occasional lonely person with weird ideas, the people who can’t take disagreement in stride – I’ve been through ’em all. And I’ve pretty much ignored them. Because they’re pretty much idiots.
Over the last few years, I’ve duked it out with the people who run the “Dump Bachmann” blog. I don’t pay ’em a lot of attention – with their fevered tone and breathless conspiracy-mongering and seeing spies in the bushes, they’re like a homegrown Democrat Underground, and pretty much a laughingstock among real bloggers and media. They’re the kinds of thing best ignored (except for Michele Bachmann; knowing that such a bunch of tinfoil-hatted whoopdidoos were stalking her, I’m fairly convinced, was worth at least a point in Bachmann’s victory last November – the best showing by a Republican on the top rail of results.
So at worst, they’re a mixed blessing. As a rule.
I’ve also pretty much dismissed Ken Weiner, AKA “Ken Avidor”. I dismiss him because he’s pretty dismissable. A former art director at a pr0n mag even other pr0n merchants giggle at with derision, it’s not hard to see why even Tom Swift has better cartooning chops.
A while ago – before the September 15 counterprotest I helped organize with the folks at True North – I got an anonymous email from someone at a Google IP address:
Crazy Ken Avidor is planning upon coming to your counter protest with his cameras, specifically to get pictures of you. I know this on a first hand basis. He’s a f*cking moron, don’t give him any fodder.
I responded at the time – if you want to talk to me, just ask. I’ll take on all comers, because – depending on who you are and what your motivations are – I either have no trouble talking across ideological divides (hence I had a great time talking on MPR and with Chuck Olson in the past few months), or I’m just plain smarter than you and dealing with your arguments is child’s play (certain other adversaries that shall remain nameless), which is kinda sad considering I’m really no great shakes in the “brain” department myself.
But no matter; Avidor showed up, camera in hand (I’d left), and posted this little brain fart.
Now, nobody’s under any obligation to ask “hey, mind if I film you”, although it’s generally considered good form by reputable videographers and journalists. Which Avidor, of course, is not.
Last week, Avidor posted the “big scoop” – that I have been known to edit Wikipedia entries. This is, of course, something that’s pretty publicly available. Avidor leapt about like a poo-flinging monkey yapping about the fact that I’ve written, in the past, about the likes of Ed Morrissey, Hugh Hewitt, and the Northern Alliance – without bothering to actually note if anything I wrote was wrong or anything, of course, or whether any of that Wiki editing took place in a men’s room at the airport.
I’m always inclined to ignore this kind of obsessive niggling; I let it go the way of the rantings of the dissociative guy at the back of the bus who skipped his meds.
Fortunately, Learned Foot at Kool Aid Report has not been so inclined. He’s showed, so far this week, that Avidor observe a curious double-standard about his Wiki obsessions, that he handles criticism with all the grace of Marie Antoinette, he lied about the responses (one needn’t “have a cow” to crush a target as trivially simple as Avidor) and tried to ignore it all when Foot busted him, and concluded with some advice:
I wonder if Blogger Berg and Blogger Swiftee are considering swearing out a restraining order yet. This guy is obviously unstable.
This last was over this bit – in which Avidor crosses the line from “demented idiot” to “borderline stalker”, apparently hiding in the bushes and (unlike Michele Bachmann) actually spying and taking pictures of people.
The obvious response is – nothing. Let him slither through the bushes with his little camera. I’ve done nothing in my life that I can’t take in front of the whole world (like, say, work at a pr0n magazine and participate in the victimization of women). I’ve run into people like Avidor before, and they’re nothing to worry about – they don’t have the balls or the brains to do anything but slither about and heckle impotently (just check out the traffic on the DU post. I doubt Avidor has the capacity to be embarassed).
So let me know when he does something that rises to the level of “would matter to vertebrates”.
…as a matter of fact, I do noodle about the odd Wikipedia article.
I mean, all you had to do was ask.
“Having a quick laugh at your expense”
does not equal
“Having undies in a bunch” or “Melting down”.
That is all.
Go put that on a dozen email listservers. Hop along now!
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