Dum Pendebat Filius

Whenever a group of crazed radical-Islamist extremists commits some horrible act of terrorism, such as the recent attacks in Bombay, wingnuts expect all Muslims everywhere to condemn it. Fair enough.

But when they do, wingnuts just sneer and say “they don’t really mean it.” Look at the Costco Coulter’s reaction today:

Some ignorant conservatives, along with the predictable liberal mainstream media, are falling for the crocodile tears from Muslims in response to the Mumbai attacks perpetrated by Muslims.

[...]

But here’s the real scoop. Muslims in India know that non-Muslims there are sick and tired of their crap and far less PC about Islam. They don’t want further bad publicity or gravesites that will be scenes of deserved vandalism and protests. This ain’t about doing the right thing. Or about charity. with [sic] Islam, it never is.

When they start denying burial plots to HAMAS [sic] and Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad and Fatah homicide bombers and terrorists at Islamic cemeteries all over the world (and especially in the Mid-East), then it’s something to take note of. Until then–as in when hell freezes–this is a calculated, empty, cheap PR ploy. That’s something Islam knows how to do well.

They aren’t doing this out of kindness, but out of recognition that it will bring increased, deserved ill will toward them from non-Muslims in India who are sick and tired of their crap.

Oh, and by the way, I’m sure the Paki [sic] Muslim cemeteries will happily oblige. Don’t you worry your little heart about it.

Damned if they do, damned if they don’t. If they remain silent, it means they support terrorism. If they condemn terrorism, it just means they’re lying. Nothing any Islamic organization does could satisfy the Costco Coulter.

“A Historic Victory,” read the blog-post title that popped up in my RSS reader last night. David Horowitz was weighing in on Obama’s victory. I couldn’t wait to see what he had to say, readers. I was expecting an unhinged screed, but, mirabile dictu, David Horowitz sounded halfway reasonable for once:

I think it’s important for all my fellow conservatives to take a moment in the next few days to reflect on these facts and not rush into the partisan struggles which are bound to crowd our political space in the years to come. Let us reflect on the fact that sharp as our divisions are, we are a nation that settles our differences at the ballot box and not in civil strife. Let us do the American thing and give this man the benefit of the doubt and the opportunity to prove his mettle by assuming his role as the leader of our nation — one and indivisble; let us see if he will live up to his promises to heal the country’s wounds and unify its contending factions.We face a terrible economic test at home, and barbaric enemies abroad. There will be time enough to hold him to account if he does not honor his promises, and to celebrate with him if he does. In the meantime, let us celebrate this historic moment in America’s progress, and do everything we can to show the generosity of spirit that has made America a land that we love.

You could have knocked me down with that proverbial feather, readers.

The reasonable words of David Horowitz, were, of course, an anomaly among Internet right-wingers. True to form, Michelle Malkin put up a brave front last night, promising her readers that she’ll keep on cranking out angry wingnut blog posts until Comrade Obama Hussein X sends his Liberal-Nazi Stormtrooper Collective over to her house to unplug her cable modem and send her to Gitmo:

Here’s my promise to you: As long as I can still publish a blog and speak my mind openly about the next denizen of the White House, I will.

And Crazy Pammy was either too tired or too angry to write much of anything, so she just reprinted a couple of jeremiads from her wingnut buddies. Among the delirious ravings we find claims that the election was stolen, that “this son of a bitch” Obama will not be a “legitimate president,” that Obama “is a committed marxist leninist who intends to impose a marxist dictatorhip [sic] upon this country, which advancig [sic] the interests of islam,” etc, etc. Pretty much exactly what we’ve come to expect from Crazy Pammy and her friends.

Readers, all three of you can use this space to post your comments, happy or sad, about tonight’s election results.

I’m very proud of my adopted home state tonight.

The Welsh-language text in the sign above reads, “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.”

Huh?

Well, you can probably guess what happened:

When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.

Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated”.

So that was what went up under the English version which barred lorries from a road near a supermarket.

“When they’re proofing signs, they should really use someone who speaks Welsh,” said journalist Dylan Iorwerth.

Swansea Council became lost in translation when it was looking to halt heavy goods vehicles using a road near an Asda store in the Morriston area.

All official road signs in Wales are bilingual, so the local authority e-mailed its in-house translation service for the Welsh version of: “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only”.

The reply duly came back and officials set the wheels in motion to create the large sign in both languages.

The notice went up and all seemed well – until Welsh speakers began pointing out the embarrassing error.

Here’s Crazy Pammy weighing in on some silly wingnut blogfight:

Viva the queen, the queen is the dead ( the dinosuars of the blogosphere) peddle your irrelevant bullying in your creepy sandbox.

Can anyone tell me what that means? Even if you click over to her site and read that quote in context, I promise you it won’t make any more sense than it does in my blockquote above.

Readers, it’s been pretty scary to hear about Barack Obama’s radical Marxist-Socialist-Communist plans to “spread the wealth around.” If you’re a good American, like me, Joe the Plumber, John McCain, Sarah Palin, et al., you recognize Commie doublespeak like this for what it is:

Obama explained his tax plan during the roughly five-minute exchange — telling Wurzelbacher that the tax rate on the portion of his income that was more than $250,000 would be increased from 36 percent to 39 percent. But he also mentioned that his plan includes a 50 percent small-business tax credit for health care and a proposal to eliminate the capital-gains tax for small businesses that increase in value. Obama said his tax plan, which he said focuses on bigger breaks for people making lower incomes, would be good for the economy. “If you’ve got a plumbing business, you’re going to be better off if you’ve got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you,” he said. “Right now, everybody’s so pinched that business is bad for everybody. And I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

Comrade Obama’s plan definitely sounds doubleplusungood to me, readers.

But, my friends, it gets worse. Even Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, was a goddamn commie, too. See The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter II, and just imagine what Joe the Plumber (if they’d had plumbers back in 1776, that is) would have made of this:

The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything very unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

Yikes, readers. I guess Adam Smith, too, was just a typical socialist left-winger, always trying to punish any hard-working citizen who earns a bit of financial success. Adam “Hussein” Smith just wanted to take money out of the pockets of hard-working “Joe Six-Pack” types (if they’d had six-packs back in 1776, that is) and give it to a bunch of shiftless layabouts.

Just like Obama.

Who else, readers, but Michael “Darth” Savage, could find a way to set the bar even lower? I was just on my way home from the grocery store, listening to “The Savage Nation” on FM NewsTalk 104.7, when I heard one of Savage’s looney-tunes callers suggest that “the real reason” Barack Obama’s going to Hawaii is not to visit his ailing grandmother, but to murder his ailing grandmother.

Savage’s reaction? He said, “I hope you’re wrong about that, but I was thinking the same thing.“

Apparently, “Darth” Savage and some others on the looney-tunes fringes of the right wing have a conspiracy theory that Obama’s not really a US citizen, and that his trip to Hawaii is supposed to somehow enable him to deal with this difficulty. Perhaps he’ll get his hands on some crucial evidence and destroy it; maybe there is a cache of fake documents in Hawaii that he’s going to collect; and just maybe he’ll kill his grandmother while he’s there, to prevent her from “telling the truth” about his lack of US citizenship.

Readers, what can you say about this kind of garbage? Every time I think I’ve heard it all, somebody like “Darth” Savage proves me wrong.

The GOP is keepin’ it real in Campaign 2008, that’s for sure. First Sarah Palin says that small towns are “the real America… the pro-America areas of this great nation,” then looney-tunes Rep. Michele Bachmann (R – MN) calls for a media investigation to root out “anti-American” members of Congress; finally, Rep. Robin Hayes (R – NC) told a crowd that “liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God.”

According to the Washington Post article I linked to above, Sarah Palin has sort of apologized for her “real America” remarks:

In an interview on CNN, Palin said comments she made last week in North Carolina praising small towns as “the real America” and the “pro-America areas of this great nation” were not intended to suggest that other parts of the country are less patriotic or less American.

“If that’s the way it has come across, I apologize,” she told CNN’s Drew Griffin.

She’s sorry if that’s the way it came across. If you can tell me any other way her comments could have “come across,” you da man. Here are her exact words:

“We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe” — here the audience interrupted Palin with applause and cheers — “We believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.

“This is where we find the kindness and the goodness and the courage of everyday Americans. Those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food and are fighting our wars for us. Those who are protecting us in uniform. Those who are protecting the virtues of freedom.”

You tell me, readers, how those words could be interpreted in such a way as not to imply that some parts of America are “real” and others are not; that some parts of America are “pro-America” and others are not.

Still, even a left-handed apology such as “sorry if that’s how it came across” is better than no apology at all, I guess. In this age of the non-apology apology, we can’t expect much better.

Rep. Bachmann is up for re-election, and her Hardball appearance backfired on her: her opponent has raised over a million dollars since she made those idiotic remarks on TV. (If you want to help defeat her, readers, you can make a contribution of your own at ActBlue. It was the best $25 I spent all week.)

Pathetic Rep. Hayes initially tried to deny that he’d said “liberals hate real Americans,” but he had to fess up when faced with audio evidence. His excuse, amazingly, is that he “actually was trying to work to keep the crowd as respectful as possible.” How he figured saying “liberals hate real Americans” was going to keep things “respectful” is anybody’s guess, readers.

Readers, we all know that liberals are a bunch of hypocrites and elitists. They always pretend to care about working people, but really don’t care about anything but stuffing their fat faces full of expensive delicacies like lobster, caviar and champagne while luxuriating in swanky suites at ritzy joints such as Manhattan’s fabled Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

Just imagine the joy you’d have felt if you were a wingnut blogger and somebody pointed your attention to a NY Post Page Six item claiming that Michelle Obama had spent $447.39 on room service at the Waldorf-Astoria. It would have been a confirmation of everything you’ve ever thought about hypocritical liberal elitists, wouldn’t it?

While [Sen. Barack Obama] was at a meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria at 4 p.m. Wednesday, Michelle Obama called room service and ordered lobster hors d’oeuvres, two whole steamed lobsters, Iranian caviar and champagne, a tipster told Page Six.

The right-wing Internet fell for it, readers, hook, line, and sinker. Crazy Pammy immediately got stuck on stupid:

Can you imagine if Cindy McCain did this? The New York Times would have team [sic] of asshats crawling all over the Waldorf kitchen. Chris Matthews would digging [sic] through the wet garbage chasing Cindi’s [sic] empty oysters in the event she didn’t eat every oyster. What waste! What disdain for the oyster-less poor.

It’s good to be the queen!

She approvingly links to other self-righteous wingnuts waxing hysterical about The Lying Rich Obamas and their Dastardly Secret Plan to Screw the Taxpayers, invoking the already-very-stale cliché of “Joe the Plumber”:

On October, 15,2008, Michelle Obama spent $447.39 on room service (for 2) at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for an afternoon snack of Lobster Hors D’Oeuvres ($50.00), Whole Steamed Lobsters (100.00), Iranian Osetra Caviar ($150.00), and Bollinger Champagne ($44.00)

Sounds exquisite, doesn’t it, if your culinary tastes run to lobster, caviar and champagne? But this insight into the Obama lifestyle makes us wonder how often Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher of Toledo, Ohio and his family eat lobster with all the trimmings.

How often does the average person eat like this? Or is it only those who make $250,000 or more? Or only the 95% of the population laboring under the illusion that they will get tax breaks under the Obama Wealth Redistribution Plan?

[emphasis mine; original text's font-weight was bold throughout]

Wow, readers. Those Obamas are just typical socialists — they lie to the working class and promise them tax breaks, then they go to luxurious first-class hotel suites and gorge themselves on expensive food and drink. What a bunch of fucking hypocrites, huh? High dudgeon, readers, and lots of righteous anger: these tasty treats were just the thing for a right-wing blogger to indulge in.

Crazy Pammy’s looney-tunes commenters had a field day, too. Michelle Obama is a “skanky nazi”:

Just another plain skanky nazi aiming to use government power to get a quality of life that she could NEVER achieve by merit and talent in the open market.

And the same goes for her big-talk no-accomplishment conman husband.

Just plain old stinking lying thieving nazis.

We’ve seen them all before.

We watched them destroy Germany back when Berlin was considered the flower of Europe.

And now they’re after America.

[joeblough]

One commenter felt bad for Obama supporters, whose hard-earned campaign donations were disappearing into Michelle’s gullet:

My question to Obama supporters would be:

Are you happy to know that those of you who gave $20.00 to support your candidate that it is being spent on a $450. snack? If I was you I would want to know if it was your donation that was used to stay at The Waldorf-Astoria and eating Lobster. I would question someone who is suppose to be an advocate for the middle class and poor, then hypocritically do the opposite. How do you feel, thinking your dollars were spent to make a difference and bring change then spend it on a very expensive meal. Did you compute that it took 22 people contributing $20.00 to pay for that meal? Will you in your lifetime stay at the Waldorf-Astoria?

With a campaign that has raised more money than any other campaign in history, are you sure it is being well managed? Obama, by the way, claims that he knows about how to run something, since he has ran a campaign. Think carefully…..if a candidate would spend campaign money this way, how will he spend your tax dollars?

[jcheney]

But guess what, readers?

The story was a complete fucking fabrication. Page Six issued an embarrassed correction:

October 21, 2008 –

THE source who told us last week about Michelle Obama getting lobster and caviar delivered to her room at the Waldorf-Astoria must have been under the influence of a mind-altering drug. She was not even staying at the Waldorf. We regret the mistake, and our former source is going to regret it, too. Bread and water would be too good for such disinformation.

The NY Post is a newspaper. The editors, being real-life journalists, had the journalistic integrity to admit they’d been made fools of, and to publish a retraction.

Will wingnut bloggers, such as soi-disant “Citizen Journalist” Crazy Pammy, have the honesty and decency to issue retractions of their own? Will they even mention that the story turned out to be an out-and-out fabrication, and apologize to their readers for having been fooled by it? Don’t hold your breath, readers.

UPDATE 2008/10/22, 00:31 EDT — Crazy Pammy has added this text to the top of her post:

UPDATE: The NY Post has taken the story down …… Page Six retracts

That’s it. No explanation, no apology. The rest of her blog post, with all its Sturm und Drang, is left untouched, needless to say. Anyway, she did at least acknowledge reality for one second, so I guess that’s a good thing.

It’s not surprising when a Grade-A fool like the Costco Coulter displays her ignorance of the meaning of the most basic political terms, such as “socialism.” It’s quite another when someone who’s running for President does the same thing:

In the radio address, McCain didn’t directly call Obama a socialist, but he let the now-famous Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher nearly do it for him.

“You see, [Obama] believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that help us all make more of it. Joe, in his plainspoken way, said this sounded a lot like socialism,” McCain said Saturday.

Readers, words don’t just mean whatever we want them to mean at any given moment. Socialism means collective ownership of the means of production in a centrally-planned economy. Most of us learned this in our ninth-grade Social Studies (or Civics) class.

Socialism does not mean “redistribution of wealth,” or “higher taxes,” or “taxing the rich,” or whatever else some fool decides he wants the word to mean on any given afternoon. When the word socialism is redefined to mean one of these things, the word has lost its meaning and has just become a term of abuse, just another scary word to scare the voters with.

This “socialist” silliness is just one of the many deeply foolish and nasty themes with which the kooky fringes of the right wing have been trying to dupe the American voter over the past couple of weeks, as desperation causes their shirts to get all wet and nasty with flop-sweat. If they can’t convince the people to vote their way, then by God, they’ll tell them lies to scare them.

It’s one thing to hear some kooky AM-radio talk show host or wingnut blogger say something stupid and ignorant such as “Obama’s socialist policies,” but it’s beyond pathetic to hear invocations of “socialism” come from the mouth of an ostensibly intelligent man such as Sen. McCain.

If Sen. McCain doesn’t know what the word socialism means in real life, he’s a fool. If he does actually know what the word means and still pretends to think Sen. Obama’s policy proposals resemble “socialism” in any way, shape or form, he’s a duplicitous liar who’s trying to play the American voter for a fool.

What do you think is the case, readers? Does John McCain not know what socialism is, or is he just cynically trying to dupe the voters?

Readers, Saint John Straight-Talk McCain, darling of the political press corps in Campaign 2000, was never anything but a myth. We’ve seen the real John McCain this year, and he’s an absolutely craven, cynical, deeply nasty political hack who’s willing to do and say anything to win this election. He’s even using the same robocall company that smeared him in 2000, for God’s sake. The man has sold his soul.

He claims to respect the American people, while he’s desperately trying to play them for a bunch of fucking fools.