Cheap shots and big spenders

They're baaaaack!

(1) Jason Greenslate, the San Diego scrap-metal guitarist (his band is called Rattlife) whom we last met in August being interviewed by Fox's John Roberts, apparently living high off the lobster on food stamps that he clearly didn't need, unless as seemed likely to me at [jump]

Of the faking of Brooks...

...there is no end.

Another Reynolds portrait of Johnson, wigless and somewhat younger (via Wikimedia).

David Brooks's sudden and startling jump into commentary on literary classics inexorably calls to mind the words of Dr. Samuel Johnson, in Rambler 28, on "The various arts of self-delusion":

There are men who always confound the praise of goodness with the practice, and who believe themselves mild and moderate, charitable and faithful, because they have exerted their eloquence in commendation of mildness, fidelity, and other virtues. This is an error almost universal [jump]

Airborne elephant watch: Suck on what?

Image by Misty Vincent, Pictify.

Elephants may fly, and I really may have to forgive or otherwise learn to live with Thomas P. Friedman, describable today as Thomas L. Friedman, the Mystax Humilitatis, with his move in the following (my bold):

Today, Obama’s critics say he must do “something” about Syria. I get it. Chaos there can come around to bite us. If there is a policy that would fix Syria, or even just stop the killing there, in a way that was self-sustaining, at a cost we could tolerate and not detract from all the things we need to do at home to secure our own future, I’m for it.

But we should have learned some lessons from our recent experience in the Middle East: First, how little we understand about the social and political complexities of the countries there; second, that we can — at considerable cost — stop bad things [jump]

Knuckleheads up

Over at Townhall, where there's a central stupidity-conditioning plant maintaining a constant level of stupidity at all times of day and night, someone called Charlie Kirk (Mme Tussaud model pictured above) is talking himself into some serious butthurt over comments by Michelle Obama on the Jimmy Fallon show:

Michelle Obama was asked about the challenge Obamacare faces in not attracting the requisite number of young enrollees. Her response was "A lot of young people think they're invincible, but the truth is young people are knuckleheads”. She went on to add that young people often cut themselves while cooking or injure themselves by dancing on bar stools.

Bwahahaha

Odessa, 1890-1900. A bad place for Tsarist troops. Photographium.

It's hard to imagine David Brooks confiding his secret thoughts to a diary, but if he did I'm sure it would show in particular the spectacle of a man hiding from himself: a resentful debate with everyone who's ever offended him, from literary critics to ex–significant others, covering up the cold-sweat terror that their disrespect might be justified. And if Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin kept a diary it would be the same kind of wounded, truculent response to the insults he won't publicly acknowledge, trying to prove not to them but to his own frightened heart what the heart knows is wrong.

But when Brooks tries to devise a secret Putin voice in one of those channeling columns, it's the jauntily confident voice of a DC Comics supervillain, and the views are Brooks's own:

Merkelwürdiges Gefühl im Kopf

"Das Internet ist für uns alle Neuland". Photo by Armin
Kübelbeck, via Konrad Werner.

Jon Queally at CommonDreams passing on some Greenwaldian goose bumps which may turn out to be a little more excited than the occasion calls for:

Perhaps one of the most striking and revelatory aspects about the latest NSA surveillance news story, this one published Sunday by The Bild am Sonntag newspaper in Germany, was that it was not based on leaked documents from the now famous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

What the paper reported, based on information provided by a "high-ranking NSA employee in Germany," was that the U.S. spy agency—after being outed [jump]

Switzerland doesn't have a minimum wage...

...Yet.

Start spreading the news... Via Da Mook.

UPDATE BELOW

Gary B. Smith of Fox News, via Crooks & Liars:

SMITH: I know Brenda and before people on the left say “My gosh, that heartless Gary Smith! How can you scrap the minimum wage?” I went around and searched to see if any other developed country scrapped the minimum wage. In fact, Switzerland has no minimum wage.

How wrong is Krauthammer?

Photo by Michael Temchine, New York Times.

Charles Krauthammer cited in the Daily Caller:

“The president pretends that this is all settled science,” he began. “Newton’s laws were considered settled for 200 years until a patent clerk [Albert Einstein] in Switzerland turned them over with a single paper in 1903 — and that was pretty settled science. The idea that this is all settled is absurd."

Thanks, Daily Caller, for identifying that mysterious patent clerk. (By the way, I really hate the way semi-sophisticates like Krauthammer love to refer to Einstein as "a patent clerk" as if any old civil servant might have come up with the theory of relativity, like Lana Turner [jump]

Precious bodily fluids

Via League of Legends.

They're back!

Researchers from @HarvardHSPH find strong indications fluoride adversely affect cognitive development in children. | http://t.co/5xagx9J20a
— Richard J. Wood (@RichardJWood) February 21, 2014

Whaddaya know? The newest zombie scientific conspiracy theory ravaging our country is also one of the oldest, the very same one that took the John Birch Society to conspiracy-theory superstar status so many years ago! The fluoridation of our drinking water supply, [jump]

Somewhere, over the cost curve...

Shorter David Brooks, "Capitalism for the Masses", February 21 2014:

In my favorite opera, "The Barber of Barcelona", the wealthy young economist Count Brooks (no relation) must disguise himself as an impoverished hornist (with the orchestra of the Gran Teatre del Liceu) in order to gain access to the shuttered home of his enamorada. If this story were true, and who's to say it isn't, the Count might end up later in life as the head of a prestigious conservative think tank like the American Enterprise Institute, and what he'd be telling us all, I'm sure, is, "Don't follow your head, follow your heart. And stop arguing for capitalism on economic grounds, because in addition to all those ghastly formulas and tables it just doesn't make any sense. Instead, argue for capitalism on moral grounds: so what if it doesn't make us all rich, it's the right thing to do!"

Via SweetComments.net.

And if you want some actual analysis of the silly thing, go check out Steve M., who nailed it much more cleanly than I would have done.

Cheap shots, homophones, and psittacidae

Via Wikipedia.

Curse you, Autocorrect!

.@newsds1 @coyne_bill Inorite. Starting with principle and principal. I hate those fuckers.
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) February 16, 2014

And John McCain, Ted Nugent, National Review Fail of the Day and much much more—well, a bit more—below the fold:

Broken eggs

Image via Rockying.

Anti–Tom Friedman writes:*

ANTAKYA--Here in the most famous Syrian city not actually in Syria, the coffee house wags are saying what Syria needs is Saddam Hussein. No, not in Syria, in Iraq.

Because while Westerners may like to think that the conflict in Syria is an outgrowth of the so-called Arab Spring and the hunger for democracy, [jump]

National Review Fail of the Day

National Review's "media blogger" Andrew Johnson, apparently unhinged by the increasing number of nice people running late-night talk shows but unwilling to turn his stupid television off as a normal person might do, was desperately watching someone called Jimmy Kimmel:

In perhaps the biggest sign of Obamacare’s lack of popularity, in the lead-in to the video, Kimmel asked his audience who had already enrolled in Obamacare, and no one raised his hand.

Fatted calves

Pastor Brooks here, delivering your Tuesday sermon on the familiar text of Luke 15:11-22, the tale of the Prodigal Son. As you'll recall, this was the younger of two sons whose father divvied out his estate for them in order to avoid the inheritance tax; the kid moved out and to another town and blew all the money on drugs and meaningless, loveless sex, whereupon he returned home looking for a handout.

The father saw him coming, ran out to greet him, embraced him, laughed and wept, and ordered up a huge feast, slaughtering a veal calf. When the older brother showed [jump]

Presidents' Day Specials

Cheesecake by Eli's of Chicago for the 2013 Inaugural.

In honor of Presidents' Day (which I always think of as Nixon's Birthday, since it was instituted during his reign, and is a generic and moveable feast like the birthday of the sovereign of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, which has been celebrated on the first, second, [jump]

Out of the frying pan

Updated 2/18!

It's a totally National Review day! I've just spent hours of my afternoon at NRO arguing against the false assertion by Peter Kirsanow that the president's order to impose a $10.10/hr minimum wage on federal workers is unconstitutional. I must have left about fifteen or more comments all told and maintained at all times a decorous and respectful tone—well, respectful by my standards. Then I saw the reference to President Obama as a "chocolate hitler" (see screenshot) and did something I've never done before: flagged it as "inappropriate". (That's my downvote in red.)

So guess what happened?

Mississippi cheap shot

Ooh, and speaking of National Review headlines, I cannot contain my enthusiasm for this one, in praise of Chris McDaniel, Teahadi primary challenger of noted pork-delivery senator Thad Cochran, who promises to get rid of all those corrupt earmarks (without apparently noticing that Congress itself managed to get rid of them, at least sort of, in 2010):

Pulling Pork 
Senator Thad Cochran’s conservative opponent stresses fiscal restraint. 

By Andrew Stiles

Does that make McDaniel Real Wanker of the Day?

Update:

Looks like State Sen. McDaniel is a bit of a Nullificationist who draws support from racists, neo-Confederates, and even the Fascists of the Greek Golden Dawn party! H/t Anomaly100.

National Review Safer, Still Lying, and Less Read

Wesley J. Smith, in a self-portrait revealing how deeply he identifies with fetuses, to the point of believing he looks like one.

Texas Abortion Safer, Still Legal, and More Rare

By Wesley J. Smith

That's the headline for the reproduction in National Review Online of a couple of paragraphs ripped from the Houston Chronicle noting the busting of a Houston women's health care clinic for performing abortions without admission privileges at any nearby hospital, in [jump]

Fullers' soap

Revised for intelligibility 2/16/2014

Image by Cherie Goodpasture.

In the flush of excitement yesterday I missed noting that David Brooks had written yet another column, this one in his "Look what I just found in the Kindle" vein, on a new opus by Count Mikhail Georg'evič Ignat'ev, Fire to Ashes: How a Simple Nobleman Singlehandedly Destroyed an Entire Canadian Political Party (September 2013).

I really meant to let it go by—there's more to life than Brooks, you know—because I couldn't imagine how I could have any especially interesting opinions about Michael Ignatieff or Canadian politics, but then Driftglass happened by complaining about an angle of the column whose deep comedy had escaped me, his drawing a contrast between ideas of the pure-hearted, cozy refinement of the life academic and the frighteningly violent vulgarity of the life political, both taken entirely from fiction, as if Brooks had no personal experience of either:

The Ambassadors

Detail from Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors, 1533, copied by Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve.

From the Most Corrupt President Ever department:

You may have gotten an enjoyable giggle last week from Jon Stewart on some of the incompetents that President Obama has nominated to represent our country in the capitals of Hungary, Norway, and Argentina (among who knows how many others). But the reason we watch Stewart, you know, is that his comedy often provides a truer picture of what's happening than the Villagers do, and when you find him in agreement with the Washington Times, Fox, and an extremely purse-lipped Washington Post, that could be a sign that he's missed his bus and jumped into a cab share with a dangerous crowd.

Every US president naming the hundreds of ambassadors and ambassadorial officials that lead American foreign policy implementation all around the world nominates a [jump]