James Dobson Did Not Fuck the President of Taiwan

Repeat, he is not resigning from Focus on the Family because he had sex with Ma Ying-jeou.  That was a DJ from Tennessee who has been expelled from Taiwan because he fucked somebody while knowing he had syphilis…?

Salacious!

Instead, James Dobson is transitioning out of Focus on the Anus because even among evangelical dead-enders, he’s becoming a dinosaur–although he was influential in getting Richard Cizik to resign from the National Association of Evangelicals after he said global warming was an issue Christians might want to care about.  This is one of the best secondary effects of the Democrats winning two-in-a-row: their aged enemies start to give up.

How stupid is James Dobson?  Well, in reply to a question about why F on the F can’t support teh gay, he mentioned:

Have homosexuals faced this kind of uphill battle? Perhaps in the past, but there is no evidence of which I’m aware that they are disadvantaged now. The average homosexual earns $55,000 per year, compared with $32,000 for heterosexuals.

The source for this statistic is a 1991 Wall Street Journal article on companies like Columbia House marketing to gays–ostensibly because they’re sophisticated nad upscale, although to my knowledge no sophisticated person ever fell for Columbia House.

Here are some delicious highlights from Dobson’s amazing “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America” that he wrote last year (which should be read in full).  It’s straight out of Left Behind.

After the Supreme Court installs gay marriage in 2010, the Boy Scouts nobly and voluntarily disband “rather than be forced to obey the Supreme Court decision
that they would have to hire homosexual scoutmasters and allow them to sleep in tents with young boys.”

There are also no more Catholic or evangelical adoption agencies anymore.  Not only is teh gay gleefully killing Muslims with his straight brethren, but “homosexuals are now given special bonuses for enlisting in military service (to attempt to compensate for past discrimination).”  Then they take away your guns (and give them to teh gays in the army?) and the right to say the Pledge of Allegiance in school.

Then terrorists blow shit up and Russia re-invades Eastern Europe.  Health care becomes universal, but waits are long and “because medical resources must be rationed carefully by the government, people older than 80 have essentially no access to hospitals or surgical procedures. Their “duty” is increasingly thought to be to go home to die, so they don’t drain scarce resources from the medical system. Euthanasia is becoming more and more common.”  And of course, in 2011 gas is $7 and the Supreme Court finds that all pornography has artistic merit.

Obviously, most everything bad about the future happens because Obama doesn’t hate gay people–even though most of the court cases cited in the letter already occurred (i.e., under fag-loving George W. Bush’s reign of left-wing terror).  He also cites a court judgment in England, as if that mattered.

Hello, Dobson?  This isn’t 1996, when there’s no war and no economic panic.  Kthxbai.

I love their logo, too.

You can tell that the moral order endures because this Christian child is supported by a beefy male forarm and a slender, feminine forearm.  You don’t want similar ulnas rearing your silhouettes.

The overall effect looks more medical than religious to me.  The typeface is crisp, the colors are balanced between neutral and bold and the crayoned-effect suggests something you’d see in a pediatrician’s office.

Tom Friedman’s Use of the Word “We”

So Tom Friedman went to Davos and wrote us all a little column about his experiences there.  Well, except that the entire column is devoid of anything to do with being present at the World Economic Forum, unlike this “Editorial Notebook” piece on the ed page, which is highly critical of Davos.  That’s kind of a strange omission.  Tom Friedman, purveyor of chitchat with movers and shakers on a galactic scale, has nothing to report from the preeminent meeting of globalization’s staunchest advocates.

Is this because the stirrings of remorse in his recent columns have hit a fever pitch and he’s basically renounced the WEF as a dog-and-pony show that accomplishes absolutely nothing and where business leaders pay exorbitant admission fees for influence over heads of state?

No, not really.  The column more or less cobbles together things you already knew if you haven’t had your head so far up your ass that the name Bernie Madoff means nothing.  If you exceed that standard, there’s not much else to glean.

But the juxtaposition of cliches is truly sterling!  With a title like “Elvis Has Left the Mountain,” you can be sure you’re in for a real hootenanny of mixed metaphors.  They’re strung together like pearls on which the washing is hung out to dry in the transparency-inducing sunlight of a leaner, greener future.  Or some shit.  Suck on this gem:

A broker friend told me [the financial crisis] reminded him of when he was a teenager and his doctor first diagnosed him as unable to digest wheat products.  He said to the doctor, “Well, just give me a pill.”  And the doctor told him: there is no pill.   “You mean, I’m just going to have to live with this?” he asked.  That’s us.  There is no pill — not for this mess.

The fact that there is no single pill doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be done.  We need a stimulus big enough to create more jobs.  We need to remove toxic assets from bank balance sheets.  We need the Treasury to close the insolvent banks, merge the weak ones and strengthen the healthy few.  And we need to do each one right.  But even then, the turnaround will be neither quick nor painless.  Indeed, the whispers here were what has been an exclusively economic crisis up to now may soon morph into a domino of political crises – as happened in Iceland, where the bankruptcy of the banks toppled the government on Monday.

(Davos humor: What is the capital of Iceland?  About $25).

Second, we’re going to have to get used to a lack of trust…Never before in my adult life have I looked around at every bank in my town and said, “I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer to put my paycheck in a mattress.”

Paraphrase: I have a friend who grew up to be one of the people that got us in this mess.  I may or may not have spoken to him at Davos.  When he was a teenager, he spoke to doctors with the flip, arrogant sense of entitlement that underpinned the failures of global finance.  Our future, which has to be gluten-free, will require more than a simple catch-all answer or “pill.”

Specifically, my three-fold solution is an incredibly vague version of what people have been already advocating for months except I refrain from words like nationalization because they alarm Davos attendees who might pull their shrunken but nonetheless vast capital to safer havens.  Trust me, I’m an adult.

We need to do what I say–and what’s more, do it correctly–or else there is a chance that there could be consequences for governments.  Like the consequences that already happened in a peripheral European nation now run by a lesbian and which I will proceed to joke about as a means of telegraphing to you, my readers who are sitting in this auditorium with me, that I remain as ever one of you, gleefully above the suffering that your actions and my boundless cheerleading of them can bring, even to the most prosperous corners of the earth.

And whenever I say we you can be sure I mean, “We the powerful, whose power must continue,” unless I use the word we in the sense of “We are just going to have to live with it,” in which case I mean we as in “Everyone living in a country that permits investing,” a group in which my personal responsibility can be diluted to invisibility.  In any case, there is nothing wrong with the World Economic Forum in Davos, which I really like attending, and any association of it with the fucked-up shit about the world today represents a major logical fallacy on your part.

Thanks, Tom!

Maureen Dowd: Just a Bad Person?

In addition to bizarre full-page ads like the one I mentioned two days ago, another pleasurable thing about the dead-tree version of newspapers is the ironic juxtaposition of articles and opinion pieces.  For example, on Sunday in hte NYT there was a smart article about how in light of Rod Blagojevich (and the other 3 governors who appointed interim senators) the 17th Amendment should be updated so that, as with House vacancies, Senate seats are filled by special election.

Adjacent to this highminded contribution to public discourse is the real estate occupied by Maureen Dowd.  Her column was devoted to attacking David Paterson.  She spends the first two paragraphs lionizing Rod Blagojevich, lavishing attention on his hair in that semi-ironic way she has of dabbling at arm’s length with girlish crushes on powerful public figures–so that you think she’s kidding when she’s really not.

The rest of her column is pretty amazing.  While it’s fair to say that Paterson waited a weirdly long time to appoint Kirsten Gillibrand, Dowd takes an almost personal offense at how he didn’t appoint Caroline Kennedy.

The Democrats would have had another Kennedy int he Senate representing New York – Bobby’s niece and a smart, policy-oriented, civic-minded woman to whom the president feels deeply indebted in an era when every state has its hand out.  Instead they have Gillibrand who voted against the Wall Street – as in New York  – bailout bill.

Holy shit!  First, this obsession with the Kennedys is too much.  Why are they so fucking great?  They’re mostly just tragic.  Not even Bush got us closer to nuclear war than JFK did.  He was a mediocre president, and that’s that.  Bobby Kennedy was cool, but his assassination precluded him from doing much, either.  Being his niece is not a qualification.  It’s not even that interesting.  As for “civic-minded” and “policy-oriented,” those terms are so vague as to encompass nearly everybody.  They certainly don’t exclude Kirsten Gillibrand, about whom Dowd literally gossips:

The 42-year old Gillibrand, who has been in the House for only two years, is known as opportunisticc and sharp-elbowed.  Tracy Flick is her nickname among colleagues int he New York delegation, many of whom were M.I.A. at her Albany announcement.

Fellow Democrats were warning Harry Reid on Friday that he was going to have his hands full with te new senator because she’s “a pain.”

That unattributed quote says it all.  Maureen Dowd is a hypocrite and a malicious bitch.  She can’t even come up with a decent adjective to pump up the dynastic cipher she so desperately wanted to crown, but she will totally parrot the most cowardly kind of innuendo–and if a man spoke publicly about Gillibrand this way Maureen Dowd would be the first to call him a sexist asshole.

Gillibrand is too moderate.  But she won her election in 2006 in a Republican district and hopefully will lean leftward without the same electoral pressure.  We’ll just have to see.  Whereas Hillary Clinton, David Paterson, Andrew Cuomo and Caroline Kennedy are all married to or descended from prior politicians, Gillibrand is not.  Unless she told Maureen Dowd to go fuck herself, there is nothing on the merits that suggests the process leading to her selection as senator was corrupt or inappropriate.

Except for, you know, that neighboring opinion piece that puts this whole shit fit into perspective.

*************************

Putting Maureen Dowd into perspective, these are the most contemptible women in the world.

Bill Kristol: A Nepotist Who’s Wrong About Everything

Ha ha ha ha ha!

When the Times took him on a little over a year ago, smart people freaked out.  This was of course cited as the secret intolerance of liberals for differing opinions.  But actually, it was mostly because in pursuit of a post-William Safire conservative the NYT mistook “wrong-about-everything” for “right-of-center.”  Worse than Kristol’s track record of bombastic inaccuracy is how his father, Irving Kristol, was buddy-buddy with Abe Rosenthal, the father of Andrew Rosenthal, the editorial page editor who hired Bill.

Everyone knows how conservative the Times can be, but clubbiness trumps even that.  New York is the Nepotism State.

As his final thought, I love how Kristol said

“It’s been fun,” he said, adding, “It’s a lot of work.”

Yeah, having the choicest perch in all of opiniondom sure is tough!  You’re even expected to be right on occasion.  Better go back to writing for wingnuts only, because nobody there calls you out when you’re comically incorrect.

Like from April:

But a surprising number of Democrats with whom I’ve spoken expect a McCain victory. One told me he was struck by the current polls showing a dead-even race, suggesting both a surprising openness to McCain among Americans who disapprove of Bush and a striking hesitation among the same voters about Obama.

Then there’s the fact that we’re at war. As a Congressional staffer put it, “Here’s something to consider: Although Hillary will be out in May, she may determine the outcome in November. McCain’s secret weapon — among Clinton supporters — may be Hillary’s 3 a.m. national security ad.”

And an experienced Democratic operative e-mailed: “Finally, I think [McCain’s] going to win. Obama isn’t growing in stature. Once I thought he could be Jimmy Carter, but now he reminds me more of Michael Dukakis with the flag lapel thing and defending Wright. Plus he doesn’t have a clue how to talk to the middle class. He’s in the Stevenson reform mold out of Illinois, with a dash of Harvard disease thrown in.”

Or September, in a column titled “A Star is Born?”

Thursday night, after Barack Obama’s well-orchestrated, well-conceived and well-delivered acceptance speech in Denver, Republicans were demoralized. Twenty-four hours later, they were energized — even exuberant. It’s amazing what a bold vice-presidential pick who gives a sterling performance when she’s introduced will do for a party’s spirits…

I spent an afternoon with Palin a little over a year ago in Juneau, and have followed her career pretty closely ever since. I think she can pull it off.

And this is just amazing:

It’s also hilarious that his final column heralds the end of the era of conservative dominance.  What a coincidence.  He stops writing for the Times the moment conservatism died.  Nothing too egomaniacal about that.  Now all that needs to happen is for a plane carrying Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity and the Big Bopper to crash.

Full disclosure: I have a friend who was expelled from college for being part of a group that pied Kristol.  But it’s not like my father and his father baked the pie.

Pandora Gets Passive-Aggressive

Ahem, if you’re not going to order another soy chai, get out.

Do I really need to feel apologetic to a website cause I got up and did something else?  (I’m being a total grandpa about this, aren’t I?)

I Would Have Liked to Have a Beer With Him, If Only to Mess with An Alcoholic’s Head

So Bush’s farewell speech was tonight.  I can’t think of anything I care about less.  Planes are crashing in the Hudson and even Bank of America is getting some cash from the govt.  If the speech had Sarah Palin in it, I’d be all over it, but I honestly can’t even work up getting my feathers ruffled about W. anymore.  He fucked up everything, we all know it, the percentage of people who think he did a good job (27%) is exactly the number who disapprove of Obama’s transition, so we have a good estimate on the number of incomprehensibly stupid assholes among the adult population (seems low to me).

In the most charitable spirit I can muster, if I had to think of one good thing the Bush Administration did, it would be expanding Daylight Savings Time a month at either end.  That was rad, even if it gave me a 23-hr birthday this year.  I doubt anyone in the White House really put a lot of thought into it, but it happened on their watch.  So, um, thanks, George.  Now get the fuck to Dallas and get bored!

Five more days.  Say it with me: President Obama.

I’m Officially Old

Someone just got elected to Congress who’s younger than me: Aaron Schock, born May 28, 1981 in Peoria, Illinois.  I’m older by a mere 80 days.  He’s a total asshole Republican, but I have to say, he’s fairly easy on the eye as young right-wingers go.  Not that I want to do him necessarily, but cuter than a lot of Mormons I’ve evaded.

My objection is that people in Congress are supposed to look like this:

i.e., all avuncular and busted and shit.  I already want to accept the Werther’s Original that Ike Skelton (D-Missouri) may be about to offer me.  (Camera-shy: delicious caramel).

On the subject of people in Congress, this is just plain weird:

What is that?  God, that’s weird.  Why wasn’t I informed that there’s a tranny in Congress?  You know how happy that would make me.  Actually, Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) is not a tranny at all.  Her vertebrae merely run through her esophagus.