Friday National Review Fail: The real victim is Wayne LaPierre?

How to kill Wayne LaPierre if you really hate guns:  You don't. "Face the fury of my elaborate dancing!"

Well, so Charles C. W. (Cringe Worthy) Cooke is suddenly worried about the victims or potential victims of hate speech—that is, not the hate speech of the ISIS websites that now seem to have inspired Sayeed Farook and Tashfeen Malik in their massacre of his workmates, or the very murderous anti-abortion, anti-LGTB Army of God (guys named themselves after Hezbollah?), of whom the Colorado Springs terrorist Robert Dear was a big fan.

He's plainly not worried about this week's assault weapon killings and their victims at all (except to heap scorn on those who publicly doubt that "thoughts and prayers" are the way to make things better)—to him the real victim is National Rifle Association president Wayne LaPierre, because the New York Daily News is ordering its vast army of anti-gun vigilantes to murder him.

No, really: he draws this parallel between what he calls the "underlying argument" of those who blame hate speech for the Colorado Springs murders:

Lectiones: Miscellaneous

Stuff you might think about reading:

Meme via Reclaim Reform.

Jersey Jazzman's fond farewell to Obama's worst cabinet appointment, the outgoing Secretary of Education, with a not very cheerful thought about his designated successor, New York State education commissioner John King, on whom I'd like to note the following statement from the New York State United Teachers:

“New York State United Teachers is disappointed in John King’s appointment as acting U.S. Secretary of Education. NYSUT has always considered John King an ideologue with whom we disagreed sharply on many issues during his tenure as the state’s Education Department commissioner. Just last year, our members delivered a vote of no confidence against him and called for his resignation. NYSUT urges its members to call the White House switchboard at 202-456-1414 — as well as a special White House telephone line dedicated to public comments at 202-456-1111 — to express their displeasure in John King’s appointment.”

And more below the fold!

So raise the scarlet standard high

Welcome Crooks & Liars Readers!

Updated version correcting an idiotic error called out by commenter Brett at NMMNB:

Photo by Justin Tallis/AFP via Arte.

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne is teddibly concerned for the unfortunate British Labour Party, which has just elected "hard-left" Jeremy Corbyn to the party leadership:

I can’t help noticing that, for most of my childhood and early adult life, a succession of Labour Party leaders reformed the constitution of the Labour Party. Neil Kinnock did, John Smith did, Tony Blair did, to make sure that it was more rooted in what the British people wanted. And it does seem, as an external observer, that a generation’s work has been unravelled in the space of 12 months.

If he thought they were so great I wonder why he didn't vote for them. I mean, isn't he British people himself?

Over in America at the National Review, ex-British Thought Leader Charles C.W. (Cruel World) Cooke is even more upset:

Cheap shot: Rebranding

Update 8/30:Welcome Crooks, Liars, and the People Who Love Them—thanks, Batocchio!
For those who can't get enough Trumpery, check out the Official Rectification of Names (shoop, shoop, shoop, shoop) Trump Song!

Drawing by Nick Anderson.

Charles C.W. (Crispy Wings) Cooke:

Know what else ”happened here”? By first explaining why he had Ramos removed, and then by bringing him back and debating with him for a while, Trump regained the moral high ground. As the Daily Mail reports, Trump did not banish Ramos. Rather, he let him return, and then he “proceeded to take questions . . . about immigration policy, the term ‘anchor babies’ and security at the Mexican border.” 

That's a good emperor: no banishment, just a temporary exile until the offender learns his lesson. Cookie really hates Trump ("resembling a man who hoped to discover whether methamphetamine or LSD served as the best accompaniment to a mostly whisky diet"), but he'll always defend his prerogative of ordering journalists around, at least if the journalist belongs to the Spanish-speaking persuasion.

And works for an organization that had the nerve to dissociate itself from a business deal with the vile billionaire after the v.b. mortally insulted its entire audience—

The Cruzible

Members of the 1953 Broadway cast, via Hana Theatre.

...if Arthur Miller were writing The Crucible today he would likely be less interested in effusive senators from Texas and more interested in the more modern pathologies that the Cruzes of the world tend typically to disdain. Presumably, Miller would look at our universities and our media, at our malleable “speech codes,” our self-indulgent “safe spaces,” our preference for “narrative” over truth, and at our pathetic appeasement of what is little more than good old-fashioned illiberalism, and he would despair. Ted Cruz, frankly, wouldn’t enter into his thinking.
(Charles C.W."Cheese Whiz" Cooke)

Act 1

Spring 1692, a bedroom in the home of Reverend Samuel Parris, where his little daughter Betty lies, apparently paralyzed, Parris kneeling in prayer at her bedside. The door opens, and the minister's enslaved Barbadian maid enters, rushes toward the girl, then steps back.

TITUBA: My Betty be hearty soon?

National Review Fail of the Week

Chilly Willy, via Rufio Jones.

Oh hai, Charles C.W. (Chilly Willy) Cooke:

DECEMBER 15, 2014 6:16 PM

Why Gun-Control Advocates Lie about Guns 
The facts aren’t on their side. 

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Oh, well, that would be a reason. Which facts are those? It's that desperately mendacious Mike Lupica writing in the Daily News over an unsettling Pew poll:

Over the course of 900 words, Lupica lambasted the public for continuing “to protect gun nuts,” chided the “mouth-breathing” NRA for its murderous myopia, and contended emotively that “there are no words” available to describe the horror of “a recent poll that says a majority of Americans believe it is more important to protect the right to own guns than it is for the government to limit access to guns.”

Are you seriously denying that the NRA is composed of mouth breathers, Charles? No,

Cookeing with gas

JULY 11, 2014 5:30 PM

John Boehner’s Legal Lesson 
At least the Obama suit will pull back a bit the ignorant pall of our political culture. 

By Charles C. W. Cooke

So nice of the National Review to hire German immigrants to write the subheads, putting "back a bit" on the German side of the sentence object. But what exactly is a "pall" in this context? It looks like a piece of cloth used to cover some kind of ritual object—a communion chalice or a coffin—but which? And does that mean our political culture is one or the other? And why would a pall be ignorant? (as opposed to a "pall of ignorance", which is a fairly normal phrase, not to say a cliché).

The pall is the thing like a mortarboard on top of the chalice. I guess it's the kind over the coffin that could be pulled back, and that Cookie has in mind, but this is a cheerier picture. Via Jet Buenconsejo.

Cookie Wookiee

Image via TorWars.

In a fairly astonishing tour de Cooke or Cooke's tour, as we call them in English, Master Charles C.W. (Chemical Weapons) Cooke (Oxon.) takes on President Obama's unseemly witticisms:

Ryan through his teeth

Remember vice-presidential candidate Ryan pretending to wash the dishes because he didn't really have time to help but could make plenty of time for a photo op? There's a man who understands the value and the culture of work, eh? Via Hinterland Gazette.

The whole editorial staff of the National Review gathers to argue that "Paul Ryan is Right":

New York City manages to graduate barely half of its black male students from high school — and among high-school dropouts, two-thirds reach the age of 26 without ever having held a full-time job lasting at least one year. And perhaps most significant, the vast majority of blacks are born out of wedlock. You could not come up with a more effective system [jump]

Propaganda lesson

From KochCash.org. Check it out.

Master Charles C.W. (Constant Wanker) Cooke (Oxon.) informs us that Harry Reid treats the philanthopists Charles and David Koch exactly the way Stalin treated Leon Trotsky—or at least the way Big Brother and the Ministry of Truth treated Emmanuel Goldstein, with [jump]

The Temptations of Saint Huckabee

Defenestration, installation by Brian Goggin, San Francisco 1997. Image via infoteli.

And speaking of floridly bad writing, here's Sir Charles C.W. (Constant Worry) Cooke, Bart., in the National Review:

No sooner had the word “libido” left Huckabee’s lips than all context, judgment, and verisimilitude were hastily defenestrated; Huckabee, who has not held public office since 2007, had been turned into the de facto spokesman for the entire Republican party; and the word had gone out across the Kingdom that there was a new monster at the gates....

In this Corner and punch drunk

Members of the Gang of Eight, in C.C.W.'s fevered imagination.

Mr. Charles C.W. (Country Western) Cooke in this Corner:

1.  the Gang of Eight’s bill is far-reaching — “comprehensive,” if you will — and it quietly and radically changes the legal immigration regime as well. 
2. [quoting Mr. Hinderaker]  Instead of reforming our Ted Kennedy-inspired, irrational 60s-era immigration regime, it perpetuates it and even makes it worse.
3. This is exactly what it does, once again eschewing merit-based immigration for a family-based system and privileging low-skilled immigration uber alles.

Plus ça ne change pas, the more radically different it is?

Cooke's Tour

Jim Dine, Late Friends, 2012, via Pace Gallery. All illustrations from ArtObserved, March 2013.

Charles C.W. Cooke (Christoph Willibald?), the latest and most convincing Evelyn Waugh imitator to be recruited by the National Review (true, he sounds less like Waugh himself than Lord Sebastian Flyte imitating Waugh, but that's much closer than Mark Steyn has ever gotten, and besides old Mr. Buckley would have been a bit suspicious of Steyn for being, um, [jump]