Les 2 minutes de l’hôtel de ville

Ils sont de retour:

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Keep On Fappin’ There, Andy

Everything Andy says would make more sense if said
while he was wearing a pink bunny suit

Andy McCarthy, J.D., Esq., Attorney-at-Law, America’s Shittiest Website™
The “Bush Did It” Defense of the Ground Zero Mosque Imam

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Why Does Erick Erickson Hate America?

“Can you hear them running for shelter?”

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Erick Erickson, who once twittered that retired Justice Souter was a “goat fucking child molester,” has been trolling Nancy Pelosi’s Twitter feed looking for dirt for a blog post on the Speaker, which is pretty much like Charles Manson doing a criminal record search on Sharon Tate.

And this is what the old Frito-breathed pud-yanker has come up with:

On July 4th the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives . . . oh, you’ve figured it out. Nancy Pelosi didn’t do a darn thing on Twitter for the 4th of July — no “Happy Birthday America” or “God/Allah/Aqua Buddha bless the USA” or anything else.

In his slobbering haste to accuse Pelosi of being an America-hating, terrorist-loving, Marx-worshipping, homosexual-loving traitress, it doesn’t occur to Erickson to take a gander at his own Twitter feed on July 4 to make sure that he had himself put on his flag lapel pin, put his hand on his heart, sung “Happy Birthday America” and otherwise polished his own America-loving patriotic credentials.

So, was there a heart-warming patriotic pageant on display on Erickson’s July 4th Twitter feed? Sadly, No!

However, it was enlightening to learn that Erickson was “smoking a Boston Butt on his green egg” on the evening before July 4. Sometime I really just don’t know how I survived before Twitter. But I give you my word, you will never hear me talking about smoking butt on my Twitter feed, and, if I you do, well, just press the unfollow button and get on with your life.

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Moobzilla vs. Mosquethra: The Battle For Lower Manhattan

ABOVE: The Three Faces of Eew

It was only a matter of time before Hugh Hewitt weighed in on the controversy over Cordoba House, and, boy, was it worth the wait. Pretending that he and he alone has discovered the ultimate arguments to demolish the Muslim-loving liberals, he throws down on the table two deliciously absurd arguments — well, three really, if you count his claim that Ground Zero is “sacred ground” just like the Gettysburg Battlefield and should not be encroached by any development — without realizing, of course, that he’s implicitly calling for razing everything in Manhattan.

The other two arguments are what I would call double flea flicker reverse strawmen. In a normal strawman, the writer demolishes an imaginary argument. In a double flea flicker reverse strawman, the imaginary argument does the demolishing. Serious scholars refer to this rhetorical tactic as an argumentum ad sparkleponium, or an appeal to a mythical race of creatures or a non-existent phenomenon.

To attempt to rebut the notion that those opposing the Cordoba House aren’t religious bigots, Hugh offers up his first example of the argumentum ad sparkleponium.

It is a certainty that many among the overwhelming majorities that oppose GZM would gladly write a check to the building fund of a mosque at a different location in Manhattan, a location not chosen to exploit the fact that an attack on America took place where the mosque was built.

Show me the money, Hugh! Show me the money! And the sparkle ponies.

He follows up with an even more awesome argumentum ad sparkleponium

Those same overwhelming majorities would oppose a Roman Catholic cathedral on the same site.

And Hugh Hewitt will appear in the next Old Spice campaign stripped to the waist and riding a white pony.

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We Could Call It The Al-Pigglywiggly

Shorter Dough-Jo Loadberg, America’s Shittiest Website™
Bridge-Building for Everybody! Whoopee!

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The Dumbest Argument Against Gay Marriage Ever Uttered By Someone Not Addicted To Vicodin

Shorter Msgr. Ross Xavier Pius Douthat, S.J., O.P., O.F.M., S.S.J., Th.D+, The New York Fucking Times Pope-Ed Page*
The Marriage Ideal

*Tbogg is also all over this POS op-ed

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Die Vereinigten Staaten von Arabien

ABOVE: Andy McCarthy, Patriot

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Another Sunday, another diatribe on America’s Shittiest Website™ from washed-up former U.S. Attorney Andy McCarthy about how Mooslims are just a few mosques away from turning all Dressbarns into Burqabarns. And although the current diatribe starts off with a promisingly amusing reference to Dough-Jo Loadberg’s heft, it rapidly descends into standard issue right-wing bedwetting about how the reason that leftists are willing to put a Koran in every hotel nightstand is that they hate America and how the only way to show true love for our country is to piss all over the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of religion.

But as I was reading through Andy’s overheated claptrap, I thought a little experiment — a word substitution game, if you will — might be interesting:

Most of all, Americans are tired of the shroud of political correctness the ruling class has placed around Islam Judaism. We don’t object to anyone’s freedom of conscience, and we abide countless places for Muslims Jews to gather and worship even though we know a very high percentage of the Islamic Jewish centers and mosques synagogues are heavily influenced by Islamists Zionists. But we’re tired of being told things that aren’t true: e.g., that Islam Judaism is peaceful, tolerant and non-threatening; that sharia halakha — which is relentlessly authoritarian, discriminatory, and, in parts, savage — is something we need to accommodate; and that there is no connection between Islamic Jewish doctrine (which is supremacist and belligerent), Islamist Zionist terror, and the broader Islamist Jewish threat to our civilization. We’re tired of being told that people who can’t bring themselves to condemn Hamas Likud are “moderates” deserving of being taken seriously and having their endless grievances against America addressed. And we’re tired of being told that we shouldn’t examine or object to an authoritarian ideology just because it travels under the label of “religion.”

Actually, the whole post reads even better in German. (And how funny is calling Jonah “dass große Kerl”? I think Dough-Jo Loadberg has a new nom de loon: Große Kerlberg.)

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Does Dolly Parton Sleep On Her Back?

Shorter Walter E. Williams, Human Wingnuts Online
Is Profiling Racist?

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You Gotta Prance With Them That Brung You

ABOVE: Kevin Gotkin in his dorm room

Shorter Master Kevin Gotkin (NYU Class of ’11), Mediaite
Another False Controversy: Mika Brzezinski’s Prop 8 “Prancing” Comment

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I Double Dog Dare You To Get Out Of The Boat

ABOVE: B. Daniel Blatt (body by Photoshop, face by nature)

Shorter America’s Dumbest Pseudo-Homosexual™, The Gay Wingnuts:
Judge Walker: Clueless about the “Historical Core” of Marriage

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Shape ‘Em Up and Ship ‘Em Out

Above: His many free lunches are courtesy of the Wingnut Welfare Machine.

Shorter James Taranto
The Wall Street Journal
“Best of the Web: Obese? Have a ‘Free Lunch’!”

• Seems to me, Senator Lugar, that starving poor obese kids by denying them school lunches is the perfect way to fatten our Empire’s shrinking reserves of cannon fodder.

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Gay Gay Gay Gay Gay Judge Makes Gay Gay Gay Decision

ABOVE: Don Bob “Duelling Banjo” Surber

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Among the tsunami of wingnut outrage about the decision in California that will require all men to get gay-married and have teh buttsecks on their honeymoon with their new husbands, it’s not really a shocker that Don Bob “Squeal Like A Pig” Surber would win the statuette for the best performance by a sexually insecure male over the age of thirty attempting to demonstrate his macho creds. For extra hilarity points, Don’s take on the California decision demonstrates — yet again — that singular absence of intellectual acuity that consigns him to the job of being an opinion columnist for a newspaper in West Virginia, a state where newspapers are more often torn up into squares for use in an outhouse (after clipping out any coupons for Hot Pockets and Slim Jims) than are actually read. (“Too derned many big words!”)

The headline to Surber’s post on the California decision starts off the fun: “Judge: Voting Unconstitutional,” revealing that Don Bob not only hadn’t made it through the 138 page decision (“Too derned many big words!”) but also apparently learned everything he knows about the opinion from the chryon crawl during a Fox News Broadcast (“I wish they’d slow that derned thing down a little so it’d be easier for me to read!”). Understandably the subtle difference between the process of voting and the result of a particular vote is difficult for Don Bob to grasp, particularly inasmuch as Don Bob still can’t figure out the difference between antifreeze and crème de menthe, regularly pouring the former into his Southern Comfort stingers. (“Doc, this ringing in my ears won’t go away and I think I may be going blind.”) I looked back through Don’s scribblings to see if he expressed similar outrage when the Supreme Court has overturned democratically adopted gun prohibition laws. Sadly, no!

The voters of California decided that marriage is between a man and a woman.

A gay federal judge told them to go to help.

Wait a minute! Judge Walker is GAY? Are gay judges even allowed? Won’t they decide cases based on which side has the cutest attorneys and shout “fabulous objection” and stuff from the bench? And what children will ever again dream of going to law school once they realize that they might have to stand up in a courtroom and call a gay judge “your honor”?

The irony is that the same type of improvisational adjudication gave us the Plessey [sic] v. Ferguson ruling that denied blacks their 14th Amendment rights for 58 years.

Er, right, Don Bob. A case striking down a discriminatory law as unconstitutional is exactly the same thing as a case upholding a discriminatory law as constitutional. Because, I guess, if you let courts strike down discriminatory laws it means that courts cannot strike down other discriminatory laws and so gay marriage will mean that women can’t vote and blacks must ride in the back of the bus or something.

Don, it’s arguments like this that causes the Pulitzer Committee to call you each and every year and ask you, yet again, to stop nominating yourself. Not going to happen, Don Bob. Ever. As in I’ll gay marry Ryan Kwanten before Don Bob even gets a Pulitzer nomination and I’ll gay-have Ryan Kwanten’s gay children before Don Bob wins the prize itself.

Impeach the judge for hearing a case in which he had a pecuniary interest — a tax break if he marries his gay lover.

OMG, he might save a couple of hundred bucks on his California taxes. That’s nothing of course compared to the money that he’ll save by having a family membership at the gym and by being able to share a Costco membership. Assuming, of course, the gay judge Walker wants to gay marry his gay lover and live in a gay house on gay street and do gay things with other gay-married gay people. Did Don Bob mention that the judge was gay?

Actually, you have to wonder if there is any judge who could have been impartial in deciding the California case. If the opponents of gay marriage are correct, gay marriage will destroy the institution of “opposite” marriage, which will be bad for heterosexuals. And of course the gay judges will always vote for the gay. So who could possibly be impartial except perhaps for . . .

. . . a Karakasa. (Jesse Taylor nominates Cthulhu for the job.)

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Irony 1, Patterico 0

Andrew Breitbart’s boy ward Patterico, worried about an upcoming LA Times profile of the Big Sleaze, cautions his bossman:

Andrew, I have one piece of advice for you: record your interview. Unless you want to see pieces of the interview bubble up in distorted fashion in a future Rainey column.

Live by the out-of-context quote, die by the out-of-context quote? One can only hope.

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K-Lo: Shortered And Fixed

ABOVE: K-Loaded

Shorter K-Lo, America’s Shittiest Website™
Re: Cesar’s Phone Booth

K-Lo, America’s Shittiest Website™
Re: Cesar’s Phone Booth FIXED

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Let Them Eat Shame

ABOVE: Julie Gunlock

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When we last visited with the well-fed and rosy-cheeked Julie Gunlock, she was in high dudgeon about the cuisine at a DC soup kitchen that was serving fancy-pants gourmet items to the homeless instead of graham crackers and gruel. If you give a homeless man a bowl of pumpkin soup, she whined, he’ll never break the vicious cycle of poverty, alcoholism, drug abuse and disease and instead will simply spend the rest of his life supping on puff pastry, arugula, balsamic vinegar, baby artichokes and other delicacies normally reserved for people who have their own homes.

In most cases a performance like that would be hard to top. Most decent people with even a modicum of shame know that it’s not really good form to argue that some people simply deserve crappy food because they are, well, less fortunate. Noblesse oblige, and all that, keeps all but the most lunatic of wingnuts from straying down the path of trying to yank shit off of a hungry person’s dinner plate.

Of course, veteran SadlyNauts know that the preceding paragraph is a dead giveaway that Julie Gunlock has indeed managed to sink even lower in her culinary Darwinism.

What, your are probably wondering, could be worse than complaining that the food doled out in soup kitchens is too hoity-toity? Think children. Think hungry children. Think hungry poor children Think school breakfasts and lunches that are sometimes the only meals that children eat that don’t come in a snack food bag from 7-11. And, yes, Julie Plumplock thinks that this free lunch for 8-year-old freeloaders should be stopped so that their impoverished parents can whip up in their tiny kitchens some nutritional lunches for their kids to carry to school to eat instead of the government-subsidized food in the cafeteria.

Feeding a child is one of the most basic parental responsibilities, yet first lady Michelle Obama wishes to liberate parents from this fundamental role by urging them to rely on the public schools to feed their children.

Julie thinks, apparently, that if inner-city and rural mothers are liberated from the tyranny of the statist school cafeteria, they will be able to send their children to school with cold poached salmon (high in Omega-3s) and whole grain salads (say a tasty tabbouleh), both to be washed down with pomegranate and acai berry juice and all packed up in a fancy little lunch boxes.

In this op-ed in the Washington Post, the first lady pushes for congressional passage of the Child Nutrition Act, a bill that would not only increase funding for the already-wasteful and badly managed school-lunch program but relax eligibility requirements so that more children can be enrolled.

Oh my god! There go the socialists shoving more food down poor kids throats. Those throat-cramming socialists, by the way, include the noted Marxist Saxby Chambliss who, along with a number of other Lenin-worshiping Republicans, supports the bill

If this country is going to get serious about childhood obesity, we need to detangle food and the public schools and get back to better parenting — basic parenting. Government doesn’t do anything well, least of all cooking.

This is rich coming from Julie Gumlock, a name that refers to the visceral reaction of most people when they encounter one of her culinary delights. Ms. Gumlock has printed a number of recipes in her food column in The Examiner including one called — I shit you not — Cheese Platter Pasta. Here is a shorter version of Cheese Platter Pasta:

I have to think that even on the worst day in the most pathetic school cafeteria in the deepest backwoods of Georgia every single tray of food served up from that kitchen would be tastier and more nutritious than Ms. Gumlock’s Cheese Platter Pasta, which disqualifies Ms. Gumlock absolutely and forever from uttering another word about any school lunch program.

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Girl, You Make My Day*

Heartless jerk Steve Spruiell continues to flop, flail and moan like an Italian soccer player in the middle of a penalty dive because we made fun of his outmoded Byron-Yorkish locks. I didn’t see all of the tweets shown below when Steve first spluttered them out yesterday, mainly because Steviekins doesn’t have the Twitter reply thing quite figured out yet, but I thought that all you SadlyNauts! might find them amusing.

Notice he goes on and one about everything BUT what started this in the first place — namely, my query as what kind of hypocritical simpleton complains, on a site that doesn’t allow comments, about Krugman putting a limit on the length of comments at his own blog? Hey, Stevie, come on. Step up to the plate on this one and take your best swing whiff at it.

Not bloody likely, of course. Steve-o would rather whine about how I was making fun of his kid, which I wasn’t (unless, of course, the haircut was the kid’s idea, which, frankly, seems unlikely). But this effort by Steve to fall on his Sarah Palin memorial fainting couch clutching his progeny to his breast is, frankly, pretty lame given that I showed more concern for the little tyke, by pixelating his face, than Spruiell did when he posted the identifiable picture in the first place. Steve at first seemed to concede this until he got all tanked up on Cap’n Morgans and Sunny Delight last night in his double wide and started tweeting again.

For continuing coverage go to my Twitter page and Stevie’s Twitter page. (Note: Sadly, No! is not responsible for any trauma caused by viewing the background design on Steve’s page.)

UPDATE: Oh, and how about we place a little side bet on how long it will be before Steve calls me a fag?

*Cf.

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If You Go Down To The Woods Today . . .

ABOVE: Tim Daniels

Shorter Tim Daniels, The Daily Little Tucker
Hypothetical Reasoning

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Reason No. 5,673 Why Bruce Jenkins Should Never Write About Baseball

I still get the San Francisco Chronicle delivered to my door, meaning that when summer arrives and Chron sports columnist Bruce Jenkins turns his attention to baseball, I find myself mourning the loss of FireJoeMorgan.com all over again.

First, a few nice words about Jenkins. He writes decently about the NBA, very well about tennis, passably about soccer and magnificently about the Mavericks surf contest. That’s quite a bit of subject matter. And considering that the Chron already has John Shea and Henry Schulman covering MLB in the Sporting Green, there’s absolutely no reason Jenkins should ever be called upon to write a single word about a sport he deeply misunderstands.

Jenkins was regularly pilloried by the FJM boys for a few typical Morganesque qualities — he hates baseball statistics that are more useful than batting average, lamely mocking anybody who seeks a better understanding of the game through more rigorous statistical analysis as a basement-dwelling nerd, and he generally just writes stupid stuff all the time.

Case in point, in today’s 3-Dot Lounge column, following a dumb appraisal of Stephen Strasburg’s arm injury (‘Limiting young pitchers’ workloads turns them into pussies because Tom Seaver!’) he writes this:

Now that the Phillies have added Roy Oswalt and fabulous outfield prospect Domonic Brown, they could win the NL East in a runaway — and the Giants need that to happen. You don’t want Philadelphia anywhere near the wild-card race.

I don’t want to go overboard and say that this is the most idiotic thing anybody has ever said about anything ever, but it is. The 59-45 Giants, with a .567 winning percentage as of today, lead the Phillies (56-47, .544) by 2 1/2 games in the wild-card race. Currently sitting above the Phils in the NL East standings is Atlanta (59-43, .578).

So Jenkins is basically saying that it would be GOOD for the Giants if a team they currently lead in the race to the playoffs started winning a lot more games, thus relegating another team that actually has a better record than the Giants from division leadership to the wild-card chase, which would of course decrease the Giants’ chances of making the playoffs.

Seriously, I see no other way to interpret what Jenkins has written here. He offers no explanation for how his preferred scenario for the rest of the season would actually help the Giants other than to simply state ‘the Giants need that to happen’.

Can’t link to the Jenkins column because it’s ‘exclusive to the print edition’ — but if anybody can tell me what the hell he’s getting at here, I’ll be as appreciative as Rich Lowry getting a free replacement graphic for the shitty mess of pixelated blah currently illustrating The Corner.

NOTE: The Phillies do face the Braves six more times this year, so while he doesn’t say it, maybe Jenkins is thinking the improved Phils will beat up on Atlanta in those games, thus helping San Francisco. But the Giants also have to play this new juggernaut Phillies team for a three-game set down the stretch as well, so even crediting Jenkins for this logic seems questionable (and I would bet a jillion dollars he never even considered the remaining schedule before blurting out the above brain fart).

UPDATE: It occurs to me that Bruce Jenkins is very likely to write about baseball again, so it would be helpful to explain to him why he is so stupid. I’ll try to put it as simply as possible:

Baseball is a sport in which two ‘teams’ try to score ‘runs’ at the expense of the other over the course of a ‘game’, at the end of which the team with the greater amount of runs is declared the ‘winner’.

Major League Baseball, the highest level at which this sport is played, pits 30 such teams against each other over a ‘season’, with each team playing 162 total games against some portion of the other 29 teams in MLB. This is called the ‘regular season’ because it is followed by an extra season — called ‘the playoffs’ — in which only the eight teams who had the most wins in the regular season are allowed to play. The winner of the playoffs is crowned the winner of that particular season of baseball, which is why everybody hates the Yankees.

Now each individual team can only control the outcome of the games in which they actually play — and even then, there is a lot of luck involved. Thus a team like the Giants can work positively towards defeating a team like the Phillies in a regular season game, thus improving the Giants’ chances of getting to play in the extra season and decreasing the Phillies’ chances of same — but only when the Giants are actually playing the Phillies. When the Phillies are playing, say the Braves, the Giants can only hope for a particular outcome of that game, but cannot do anything to effect it.

And it is not stupid for the Giants to hope for certain outcomes for games involving the Phillies, Braves, etc. even though they can only directly control a handful of them. In fact, it would be logical for the Giants to hope that they, the Giants, win all of their games while the other 29 teams* win half of theirs and lose the other half. This would be the optimal result for the Giants because it offers the maximum assurance that they will make it to the playoffs, which is their overarching goal in any given baseball season.

We can see how hoping for certain results that you cannot control for can be a smart thing to do, with the following example:

1. I value my life and want to continue living it.

2. A giant asteroid crashing into the Earth would almost certainly kill me, everybody I know and the vast majority of all human beings.

3. Humanity would not currently be able to do much of anything about it if a giant asteroid happened to crash into the Earth.

4. Therefore, I hope a giant asteroid DOES NOT crash into the Earth.

5. Therefore, I am a smart person, because I smartly hope for outcomes that will positively reinforce the first premise listed here, my desire to continue living my life.

6. Conversely, I would be a dumb person if I were to hope for outcomes that threatened my life, given my assertion that I want to keep living it.

Similarly, it would be very, very dumb for the Giants to actively want one of the teams that they are competing with for one of the very few spots in the playoffs to actually become better and win more games. Because that would decrease the Giants’ chances of making the playoffs. Which is the whole fucking point of baseball, you dumbass.

Please make a note of it.

*I can say this because of inter-league play, though obviously the Giants will be more concerned about the performance of their National League competition than the teams in the American League.

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Bad Hair Day

ASW™ Logo (Fixed)

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So, yesterday I put up a Shorter ridiculing Steve Spruiell, a blogger at America’s Shittiest Website.™ Steve had gotten all pissy over at ASW™ about Krugman limiting the length of comments on his NYT blog in order to deal with an influx of cut-and-paste trolls.

The point of my post, in addition to taking a jab at Spruiell’s David Cassidy-ish 70s do, was that Spruiell wasn’t fast enough on the uptake to realize that he looked like a complete idiot and a total hypocrite accusing Krugman of censoring blog comments given that Spruiell was doing this from a blog which doesn’t even allow comments in the first place. Sir, have you no sense of irony?

Unable to comment on Spruiell’s post itself, and learning that Spruiell was a Twitterer, Milou (“Snowy” for you Francophobes) and I rushed over to Twitter and set up an account and twittered this to Steve:

Spruiell mulled for quite some time over my shameless reference to his passé teen idol coiffure and finally manned up enough to fire off this limp riposte:

Well, as we say over here, Steve, “Sadly, No!” The post wasn’t “entirely” devoted to your physical appearance. It was mostly devoted to the hilarity of your dissing Krugman about his comments policy from the safety of comment-free blog.

Now, as to the physical appearance business, I do readily admit that commenting on the physical appearance of some of your colleagues is part of our comedy schtick. And I’ll also admit that in the case of say, Jonah Goldberg, this is perhaps a bit unfair because, after all, Jonah didn’t get to pick his mother. But you, dude, you picked that haircut. Voluntarily. You marched straight into some suburban Hair Cuttery of your own free will and accord and said “Make me look like this” while pointing to the cover of an ancient issue of Tiger Beat.

Of course, you got me on the anonymity charge. But sometimes anonymity is a good thing, as your son, whom you shamelessly hold up as some kind of human shield in your Twitter profile pic, would probably say if he could.

(Pixelation added by the Sadly, No! Graphics Studio)

UPDATE:

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The Wikileaks Watusi

Shorter John Hayward, AKA Doctor Zero, AKA Jim Treacher Stand-In, The DC Trawler
Undocumented Brutality

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