Name that Decimation! I

Mary Pickford in Maurice Tourneur's The Poor Little Rich Girl (1917), via perfectmistake13.

OK so Driftglass has naturally zeroed in on the single most (also, he's having a fundraiser, and he's reprinted one of his earliest pieces, from 2005, which is so good it hurts) grotesquely reprehensible moment in yesterday's Brooks ("How to Repair Moral Capital"), the point where, after the fairly specific, though incomplete, denunciation of the Trump, he makes his ritual bow to denouncing Hillary Clinton as well, just in case you got the momentary impression that both sides may not do it:

This year Trump is dismantling those restraints [the "codes" that "adorn" the "struggle for power" in "decent societies", which I'll be getting back to] one by one. By savagely attacking Carly Fiorina’s looks and Ted Cruz’s wife he dismantled the codes of etiquette that prevent politics from becoming an unmodulated screaming match. By lying more or less all the time, he dismantles the fealty to truth without which conversation is impossible. By refusing to automatically respect the election results he corrodes confidence in our common institutions and risks turning public life into a never-ending dogfight.

Clinton has contributed to the degradation too. As the James O’Keefe videos remind us, wherever Hillary Clinton has gone in her career, a cloud of unsavory people and unsavory behavior has traveled alongside. 

It hadn't even occurred to me to bother to look at the James O'Keefe videos, given that every one of his projects to date has turned out to be a fraud. Expecting an O'Keefe video to provide a useful reflection of anything is like expecting Han van Meegeren's new painting to be an authentic Vermeer—it's never happened before, why would it happen now?

Grimes for Senate

Ex-celebrity burglar James O'Keefe (third from right) with fellow demon sheep, after he finished with parole, June 2013, lifted from his Twitter feed by New York Daily News. 

Looks like young James O'Keefe got one of his operatives to visit Kentucky posing as an outraged out-of-state liberal donor threatening to withhold contributions to Alison Lundergan Grimes because of her backward anti-Obama position on the Kentucky coal industry:

"My friends and I are longing to give all our money to defeat that vile turtle-face McConnell, but alas, how can we contribute our millions to a hillbilly gun hugger who advocates destroying your beautiful Kentucky mountains and giving everybody black lung?"

"Oh no, sir," says some pathetic staffer (fire those people, Alison!), "She's just saying that because she wants to win. And you want her to win, too, right? Besides, she won't have to vote on the issue in the Senate because the coal's gone already."

Although they certainly didn't have permission from Grimes to say so and Grimes certainly did not tell them those were her views (even if they are, which is beside the point). They had no right to say it and they had no idea whether or not it was true. But they did provide some video that O'Keefe is now using to demonstrate that "Grimes is a liar—her own staff says she is".

Anyway I trolled the troglodytes a bit over at a Jim (dumbest man on the Internet) Hoft subsidiary called "Progressives Today", as follows:

Cheap shots and chasers 3/23

Willard Mitt Romney on electric cars (I think):

We all like wind and solar, but you can’t drive a car with a windmill on it.

Actually gas is just as bad. We tried putting an oil refinery on top of our old car, but then there was no room for the dog. How about ammonia, though?

Los Angeles. Photo by Daughter Number Three.

Bishop trivia:
The Bishop of Vienna from 1541 to 1552 was named Friedrich Nausea, a latinization of the original German family name, Grau (from grauen, to inspire dread, and cognate with the root of English gruesome). In 1551 he went to the Council of Trent, where he stood proudly for the congregation taking Holy Communion in both kinds and revocation of the rule of priestly celibacy, but died there without making it home. In 1897, they named a street in the Ottakring after him, Nauseagasse.

Friedrich Nausea, from Austria-Lexikon.

OMG, he literally broke Breitbart's heart!

I can't blame you if you don't remember, but a couple of weeks ago I said something about how a movie about James O'Keeffe would have to be one of those teen implausible-schemes-for-getting-laid farces? This turns out to be so much truer than I could possibly have imagined! Down to the date-rape drugs and purloined panties to show the guys!

Click the link to get the full story, but I want to note that in his suit to prevent the publication of the emails documenting his antics, he alleges

The Information further includes proprietary ideas for future video work and e-mail communication of a highly private nature including those concerning Plaintiffs romantic relationships. Plaintiffs statements on Twitter claim that the material is so provocative that it caused Andrew Breitbart to suffer a fatal heart attack.

Attaturk got the scoop on this yesterday, the swine. My version has more emotional depth, though.

Insider poopology

Time Saving Truth from Falsehood. By François Lemoyne, 1737.

Just about the same time as I got the message from Mara Liasson that the new rules on insurance coverage for family planning were all part of Obama's 11-dimensional election strategy which involves getting Rick Santorum the Republican nomination—actually it's not her fault, I made most of it up—the august Markos was coming up with a similar idea: that Democrats should go vote for Santorum in the upcoming primaries and caucuses that allow it, starting with Michigan, by way of, if not actually nominating Santorum, at least making Romney's victory as painful and exhausting as possible; he called it Operation Hilarity.

High-minded Kossacks rose, however, in protest against the plan, which smacked [jump]