The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Authentic Frontier Gibberish’

Posted on | July 4, 2013 | 153 Comments

The best comedy ever made? That’s a tough call, but if it’s not Animal House, then surely it must be Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles — and not just because I first saw it as a 15-year-old with my dope buddies Mike and Dave after we’d toked up some fine Colombian gold bud.

Even without the buzz, it’s one of the zaniest things ever captured on film, but that day in 1974, I quite literally fell in the floor in spasms of painfully hysterical laughter. There was no film tradition Mel Brooks did not mock, nor any taboo he did not violate. The humor was a madcap mix of everything you could possibly imagine — vaudeville innuendo, sight gags, fart jokes — perfectly aimed at an audience that had grown up reading Mad magazine and had more recently graduated to National Lampoon and George Carlin albums.

Kids who see Blazing Saddles today cannot possibly imagine how shocking it was to see it in 1974. Unfortunately, most younger people now have only seen it on cable TV, where it gets chopped to pieces, and younger viewers are jaded by having seen other comedies that followed through the gigantic holes that Mel Brooks punched through the wall of Things You Can’t Say or Do in a Movie.

One of the running gags in the movie is that everybody in the “peaceful town called Rock Ridge,” is named Johnson. After the bad guys have made their first violent raid against Rock Ridge, there is an emergency meeting at the town’s church. One of the speeches — if you can call it that — is given by Gabby Johnson, a grizzled old-timer who jabbers incomprehensibly but with much passion and angry gestures. After Gabby has finished making noises about these sidewindin’ bushwackin’ hornswagglin’ cracker croakers, Olson Johnson then stands up to address the assembled citizenry of Rock Ridge:

“Now who can argue with that? I think we’re all indebted to Gabby Johnson for clearly stating what needed to be said. I’m particularly glad that these lovely children were here today to hear that speech. Not only was it authentic frontier gibberish, it expressed a courage little seen in this day and age.”

For some reason, that came to mind today as I was reading President Obama’s statement about the military coup in Egypt. No, it’s not authentic frontier gibberish, but it is certainly as incomprehensible as anything Gabby Johnson said that day in Rock Ridge:

“Core principles . . . universal human rights . . . legitimate aspirations . . .  the democratic process . . .  we are deeply concerned . . . an inclusive and transparent process . . . Given today’s developments, I have also directed the relevant departments and agencies to review the implications under U.S. law for our assistance to the Government of Egypt.”

Exactly what the hell does this mean? Have the White House speech writers been replaced by a Random Platitude Generator, a computer program that automatically cranks out empty rhetoric, glittering generalities and vague diplomatic argle-bargle?

The new sheriff . . . Well, he’s failed to answer the critical question we now face in Egypt: “What are we going to do about these sidewindin’ bushwackin’ hornswagglin’ cracker croakers?”

As for me, I say we work up a Number Six on ’em . . . .

 

 

UPDATE: Linked by The Lonely Conservative — thanks! — and welcome, Instapundit readers!

The latest news out of Egypt is . . . well, it’s not really news: The Muslim Brotherhood hates Jews,  John Kerry is a liar, and President Obama is a Stuttering Clusterf–k of a Miserable Failure.

Meanwhile, in the comments, I notice that some people are claiming Young Frankenstein is funnier than Blazing Saddles, which is proof some people smoked too much weed back in the day. You could have said Airplane or Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, and I’d have said, “OK, maybe.” But Young Frankenstein? No, sorry.

 


Category: Barack Obama, Egypt

Whittle On Beating The Soft, Creeping Tyranny

Posted on | July 4, 2013 | 16 Comments

by Smitty

We need reform, and need to vote for reformers.

Category: Uncategorized

FLASHBACK: Breitbart to Blumenthal: ‘You’re a Despicable Human Being’

Posted on | July 4, 2013 | 26 Comments

Following up on the Mona Eltahawy meltdown, Donald Douglas is celebrating the 4th of July fireworks and I promised I’d dig up video of Andrew Breitbart’s epic shaming of Max Blumenthal at CPAC. Yeah, Andrew nailed Max for all time in 2010:

“You’re ridiculous. You are a joke. You’re a despicable human being. You are the lowest life-form that I’ve ever seen.”

Makes you want to order that DVD of Hating Breitbart, doesn’t it?

“Memories light the corners of my mind . . .”

 

Category: Andrew Breitbart

Well, @MonaEltahawy Is Indisputably Correct: Max Blumenthal Is a Douchebag

Posted on | July 4, 2013 | 45 Comments

Mona Eltawahy: Almost as evil as Amanda Marcotte.

Not since Alec Baldwin went ballistic over the “toxic little queen” have we seen a liberal Twitter meltdown quite as spectacular as what happened to Mona Eltahawy on Wednesday. It had something to do with the coup in Egypt, about which my natural instinct was to make sarcastic references about the folly of Obama administration foreign policy and toward foreigners in general. Because they’re weird-looking and talk funny, that’s why. But I digress . . .

Mona Eltahawy’s career as a progressive journalist is a tribute to her infinite reservoir of hate. Unlike some liberals, she doesn’t stop at hating Republicans, conservatives and Christians. She also hates America, she hates white people, she hates Israel and she hates men. If hate were football, Mona Eltahaway would be the Super Bowl champion.

So, Mona the Hate Queen is a native of Egypt who moved back there in March in order to become as much of a pain in the ass to them as she has been to America. But then she had to go back to New York to face trial for defacing Pamela Geller’s anti-jihad posters. After the coup went down Wednesday, Mona was a hot property and she got on Twitter to explain what an exhausting day she had doing eight “media hits” (i.e., interviews on TV or radio). This was mocked by her fellow lefties as an act of journalistic self-promotion:

Rather than ignore such jibes, Mona  reached into her infinite reservoir of hate and started dropping f-bombs like the RAF over Dresden:


Was this tirade justified? Mona the Hate Queen’s point, as she subsequently explained, was about what she sees as a sexist double standard, whereby women are criticized as “attention-seeking” for doing the same kind of self-promotion that men do.

However, men don’t always get a free pass for self-promotion. Being a shameless self-promoter myself, I sometimes get irritated blowback from people who get tired of hearing me explain how wonderful I am.

What I think inspired the sarcastic jibes about Mona the Hate Queen is that rather than celebrating — “Woo-hoo! Eight media hits!” — she whined about how exhausting it was to meet the evidently insatiable media demand for her commentaries. And her eruption at her critics was a sort of feminist performance art: “Look at me repeatedly saying ‘f–k’ to men on Twitter! Praise my courage! Admire me!”

No decent person would ever praise or admire a monster like Mona Eltahawy, who rivals even Amanda Marcotte for Satan’s affection. Yet neither can anyone doubt that Max Blumenthal is a contemptible douchebag. He is to journalism what herpes is to sex. So at least for once, Mona Eltahawy spoke truth to power douchebag.

Andrew Breitbart always hated Max Blumenthal. There are scenes of Andrew’s epic CPAC confrontation with Max in Hating Breitbart. I’ll see if I can find a clip and embed it in an update. In the meantime, here is Mona Eltahaway looking weird and talking funny as she explains to CNN’s Jake Tapper that the military takeover in Egypt was not actually a “coup,” because that might be bad or something.

 

 


Category: Liberals

Russia Says ‘Nyet’ to Gay Adoptions

Posted on | July 4, 2013 | 28 Comments

Vladimir Putin signed a law yesterday that prevents gay foreigners from adopting Russian children and, in the course of researching a news article about it, I was somewhat surprised:

The government says the law aims to protect children from “dictated non-traditional sexual behavior” and cites “psychologists’ research” about stresses it says “are often experienced by children raised by same-sex parents.” . . .
Since his re-election last year, Putin “has embraced the Russian Orthodox Church as a moral authority and harnessed its influence as a source of political support,” according to the Reuters news agency. Russia does not recognize same-sex marriage, and Putin complained last month that protesters and journalists keep “pestering” him about the issue. Last week, Putin signed a controversial new law against ”propagating homosexuality among minors” . . .

You can read the rest at ViralRead, but my take on it is that this is not really about Putin pushing an anti-gay agenda so much as it is about Russians getting sick and tired of the non-stop agitation. And ironically, considering that it was the Bolsheviks who pioneered “political correctness,” Russian society now doesn’t have the kind of hegemonic institutional bias that acts as a filter on public discourse in the U.S.

Whereas we have a national meltdown over “homophobia” because a celebrity with a bad temper goes off on a gossip writer, it seems Russians haven’t been so endlessly tutored on this subject. They have become fed up with being told by international busybodies that they have to embrace the gay-right agenda. The Russian cultural elite is evidently not as monolithic as ours. So the phenomenon of the minority tail wagging the national dog (whereby the 97 percent of Americans who are heterosexual automatically flinch in fear of being criticized for being less than enthusiastic about gay rights) doesn’t work in Moscow as effectively as it does in the United States.

Now that Russia has actually made it illegal to promote homosexuality to kids, small wonder they banned U.S. adoptions of Russian children. These days, American education system scarcely seems to teach anything else except the gay agenda.

But maybe our public schools still aren’t teaching the gay agenda as thoroughly as some “activists” would prefer . . .

 

Category: Gays, Russia

From West Virginia To Wroclaw

Posted on | July 4, 2013 | 16 Comments

— by Wombat-socho


This week’s book post unfortunately has nothing to do with Gettysburg or Independence Day (because all my relevant books are in storage), though I do recommend that you pick up Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels if you haven’t already read it; Gingrich and Forstchen’s Gettysburg is also worth reading (along with its sequels Grant Comes East and Never Call Retreat) if you like alternate history Civil War novels.


While recovering from getting a tooth pulled yesterday, I took the time to get partially caught up on what has come to be known as the “Ring of Fire” series of novels, by Eric Flint and an ensemble of co-authors. The series starts in 1632* when the West Virginia town of Grantsville suddenly finds itself in the middle of the Thirty Years War. From that point, the history of the war diverges considerably (and entertainingly) from our timeline, and within a couple of years Grantsville has become the center of the United States of Europe. This collection of (mostly) German and (mostly) Lutheran states under King of the Swedes Gustavus Adolphus is busily trying to adapt 20th -or at least 19th- century technology to the 17th century proto-industrial base while also trying to spread democracy and religious toleration without setting off a gigantic wave of peasant revolts all across Central Europe. Flint and most of his co-authors do a good job with these books, but I have come to the conclusion that one of his co-authors needs to be avoided in the future unless I badly need something to make me bored and sleepy.


After finishing 1634: The Bavarian Crisis , I’ve come to the conclusion that Virginia DeMarce is the literary equivalent of the cook who could burn water. Given a plot line involving a mad king of Bavaria, his unwilling Austrian fiancee, a pair of kidnapped Grantsburg women, and a siege conducted by a sulfurous Swedish general, DeMarce manages to turn it into a 700-page slog through all manner of minor characters’ lives, many of whom have -at best- tangential relation to the main plot line. My rule of thumb is that any novel requiring family trees to explain the relationships of characters who are not main characters is a waste of my time, and probably yours, too, unless you really enjoy convoluted soap operas masquerading as historical novels set in an alternate history. Adding to the boredom is the interminable reflections of the major characters on their fates in our timeline, as if that had very much relevance to their current situation after Grantsville had been mucking up history for going on three years. I don’t recommend it (or her previous collaborations with Flint, The Ram Rebellion and The Dreeson Incident) unless you are a completeness freak, and even then you might want to think twice.


On the other hand, when left to his own devices, Eric Flint does a damn good job. 1635: The Eastern Front begins with Gustavus Adolphus’ decision to reduce the treacherous Saxons and Brandenburgers to obedience, a decision which almost immediately results in war with Poland. Flint manages to juggle a number of other political subplots and minor (but nonetheless important) characters without getting bogged down in pointless minutiae, and winds up delivering something that is less a historical novel set in an alternate history than a technothriller using a weird mix of 17th, 19th and 20th century technologies. He manages to do this, moreover, in just 369 pages, only five of which are spent on a list of characters.


I’m currently reading (and expect to spend a fair bit of the weekend re-reading) Michael Flynn’s On the Razor’s Edge, which I’ll write about next week along with its three outstanding prequels.


Administrative note: There will be no Live At Five today or Friday, no FMJRA on Saturday unless Smitty wants to do one, and no Rule 5 Sunday until Monday since I’m going to be off the Internet all weekend.


*The book’s Kindle edition is currently free for the downloading if you want to try the series on.


Category: Blogging, Books

A Career Opportunity My Guidance Counselor Never Bothered to Mention

Posted on | July 3, 2013 | 43 Comments

Who was ever more qualified for this job than me? If I had only known there was a need for courageous public servants to perform body-cavity searches on bikini-clad women, certainly I would have been willing to serve — courageously, I might add — performing this duty to protect my fellow citizens from the menace of unlicensed vaginas.

Indeed, for many years, I provided this service on a volunteer basis, as a sort of vagina vigilante. But for some reason, no one ever told me that people get paid to do that kind of work in Texas, and so instead I pursued a career in journalism. Alas, what might have been . . .

 

Category: Crime, Texas

Was the CIA Involved in Egypt’s Coup?

Posted on | July 3, 2013 | 72 Comments

Anyone who knows the Central Intelligence Agency’s history in orchestrating the overthrow of governments must be wondering whether the agency played a role in the collapse of the Morsi regime.

My hunch? Certainly they did, and we should be glad for it. Morsi’s government was a dangerous proto-fascist Islamic thugocracy.

Think about this: President Obama, John Kerry and other top administration officials have spent the past two years watching the “Arab Spring” turn into a bloody and disastrous failure. The Morsi government was unpopular and unstable, and it might have given way to a totalitarian Islamic dictatorship or the kind of chaotic “failed state” anarchy that could turn Egypt into a base for al-Qaeda.

Would that be good for Democrats in the 2014 elections? In 2016?

No, the endless mess in Syria is bad enough, and to have Egypt descend into a nightmare would have been added to Libya in the Republican indictment of Democrat foreign-policy failure.

So it is not difficult to imagine a series of meetings and phone calls in which top U.S. intelligence officials were told, in effect, see what we can do to influence events in Egypt in a “good” direction. Who can doubt that other intelligence agencies, probably the British and French, and of course the Israelis, were also working in the same direction?

Would CIA influence on events in Egypt involve anything illegal or particularly “spooky”? Probably not. It would most likely involve some basic communication and liaison work, to make sure that the generals taking over would be people we could work with, and to help them organize the takeover in an efficient manner.

The CIA used to do this kind of stuff all the time back during the Cold War, under both Democrat and Republican presidents, and the coup in Egypt appears to have been accomplished so quickly and with so little violence as to please any old-time Agency man.

If the secrets of CIA operations in Egypt the past few weeks were leaked to Glenn Greenwald, would he approve? No, of course not.

But f–k Glenn Greenwald. Way to go, CIA.

UPDATE: My conservative friends are skeptical of my theory that the New and Improved Nixon-Like Obama would be so cynical as to deploy the CIA to fix the Egyptian problem the way the Agency fixed the “Iran problem” in 1953 or the “Guatemala problem” in 1954. Ladd Ehlinger Jr. points out this very interesting article:

Army concern about the way President Mohamed Morsi was governing Egypt reached tipping point when the head of state attended a rally packed with hardline fellow Islamists calling for holy war in Syria, military sources have said.
At the June 15th rally, Sunni Muslim clerics used the word “infidels” to denounce both the Shias fighting to protect Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and the non-Islamists that oppose Mr Morsi at home.
Mr Morsi himself called for foreign intervention in Syria against Mr Assad, leading to a veiled rebuke from the army, which issued an apparently bland but sharp-edged statement the next day stressing that its only role was guarding Egypt’s borders.
“The armed forces were very alarmed by the Syrian conference at a time the state was going through a major political crisis,” said one officer, whose comments reflected remarks made privately by other army staff.

This is interesting, as I say, but does not preclude the possibility of CIA influence in Egyptian affairs. Besides which, I’ve staked out the Google bomb on this, so that when any conspiracy theorist or paranoid Islamic radical searches for “Egypt + coup + CIA,” that traffic’s coming straight to me, baby. Pragmatic? You betcha.

 

Category: Egypt
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