Your Weekly Snark (1/29/10)

Roy Edroso on Jonah's latest:

Goldberg trying to do nuance is like a drunken bear trying to do origami, but I think he means that while independents don't care about gay people's civil rights, they do have a guilty conscience about it.

Ouch. Jonah mostly tries the "you people pointing out our bigotry are the real bigots" and "I know you are but what am I" schtick that made Liberal Fascism such a noteworthy piece of crap. But there are more choice Roy quips, so head over and enjoy.

Your Weekly Snark (and Insight)

We'll kick things off with Blue Gal:

By the way, you know it's a bad day for Boehner when a GOP lawmaker bragging in front of a hot mic about sex spanking a lobbyist is NOT the worst thing to happen to the party all day.

Truth and politeness are often at odds, and when it comes to important matters, I think the truth should normally win. So I largely agree with Thers in his post, "I Think You're an Asshole, And I Will Defend to the Death Your Right to Act Like an Asshole, But You're Still an Asshole, Asshole."

James Wolcott links a key Tristero post about ineffective Democratic politics, while Wolcott himself notes:

Part of the crazy cognitive dissonance of this summer is the rabid conviction the tea baggers and conservative bloggers possess that Obama is a suave-talking, solid-core radical socialist who practices Chicago-thug hardball, when in fact if Team Obama was the steamroller they claim, they never would have acquired the momentum they've mustered this summer--a true Lenin would have squashed them out of the gate and hardly would have allowed this much slippage this fast. They want Obama to be ruthless and authoritarian because they want to think of themselves as a heroic resistance. They evoke Hitler not because they fear another Hitler, their very obsession with Nazi imagery betrays their attraction; no, they're longing for a Leader, a Hitler of their own. Even a Hitler in high heels, if you can picture such a lady, and I think we all can.

This brings us nicely to a TBogg's defense of Sarah Palin, which is an inspiring model of bipartisanship:

Now I'll be the first to admit that Sarah Palin is a dim-witted opportunistic grifter who would climb over the still-warm bodies of her own children to grasp the golden ring of fame and fortune, a Lonesome Rhodes of the Icepack peddling bullshit homilies to the uneducated bitter clingers with attention spans slightly shorter than the time it takes to recite the pledge of allegiance, a quitter, a liar, a fraud, an emotionally stunted woman-child who thinks she can dazzle the big city folk with her small town beauty queen runner-up status... but I don't think that she's ever called Trig, even in jest, "the retarded baby".

So there.

She can thank me later.

A note on her Facebook page would be nice...

The TBogg post "What Would Dick Cheney Do?" (on ineffective Democratic politics) is also definitely worth a read.

For this one on ineffective media coverage, I've quoted the entire post - and it's not snark as much as a short absurdist tragicomedy - but it's a brief piece and you should be reading Balloon Juice anyway:

Chock-a-block with traitorous radicals
by DougJ

This, from the Politico, is a classic:

Nor are Democrats strangers to having their crazy uncles take center stage. During the run-up to the Iraq war, for example, Reps. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), Mike Thompson (D-Calif.) and David Bonior (D-Mich.) famously flew to Baghdad, where McDermott asserted that he believed the president would “mislead the American public” to justify the war. The trip made it a cakewalk for critics to describe the Democratic Party as chock-a-block with traitorous radicals.

Never mind that president Bush did “mislead the American public” to justify the war. Even if one accepts the benign interpretation that Bush misled the public inadvertently, at the end of the day, he said there were WMD and there weren’t. That’s where we’re at: having the prescience to see what is coming marks you as a traitorous radical.

Here's another complete post, but it's even shorter, head over for the links, and you should be reading Roy Edroso anyway. Here's why Roy is the master:

A STAR IS BORN. Joe Wilson yells at the President. Thousands of posts ensue, in which we learn that he took No-Doz, likes the Rebel Flag, and reacted protectively toward Senator Strom Thurmond when his illegitimate daughter came forward. His views on health care are suddenly of interest, and he has worked the outrage against him into a fundraising pitch. He is now the darling of the right and a national figure who will be considered in upcoming discussions of candidates for high office.

Ah gits weary/An' sick o' tryin'/Ah'm tired o' living'/An' skeered o' dyin'...

Caligula had to appoint that horse. Here they are nominated by acclamation.

Damn. Well, at least when the fast-approaching apocalypse comes, our side has the comedians to keep us laughing.

Your Weekly Snark

Let's kick things off with Helen (of Margaret and Helen) in "Summer of Love":

Honestly folks. If we paid as much attention to the sexual activities of Catholic priests as we do to homosexuals wanting to marry, we probably could have saved a lot of children from years of guilt, shame, anger and pain.

(Some Catholics definitely feel the same – and for a more somber treatment, here's a wrenching article and video on the abuses in Ireland.)

Steve Benen has a good post on Rick Santorum's "advice" to Obama on marriage and being an African-American leader. (You just know that won't end well.) Meanwhile, TBogg takes on a Santorum op-ed in "How I Would Have Won The Superbowl by Ryan Leaf," which starts out brutally funny and then goes all the way up to 11. Just read the whole thing.

That Ryan Leaf reference leads nicely to Thers, who fact-checks a Chuck Norris piece about supposedly persecuted Christians, and also delivers this:

…Here's the best part of Chuck Norris's silly article:

Broyles appropriately responded, "If the county thinks they can shut down groups of 10 or 15 Christians meeting in a home, what about people who meet regularly at home for poker night? What about people who meet for Tupperware parties? What about people who are meeting to watch baseball games on a regular basis and support the Chargers?"

People in San Diego who gather to watch baseball games and cheer on the Chargers should not be allowed to operate motor vehicles, period, as they're too potty to even know what fucking sport they're watching.

It's not exactly a secret that Newt Gingrich is a shameless liar, but if there ever was any doubt that he's irony- and conscience-free and a complete asshole, attacking Sonia Sotomayor as a "racist" while visiting friggin' Auschwitz and twittering about the dangers of "evil" should clinch it. (And no, his sleazy non-apology doesn't make things better.)

Eric Erickson of Red State compares rejecting Rush Limbaugh to denying Jesus (!), which Maha takes apart, as do Blue Texan and VA at Whiskey Fire. Erickson fares no better under the acid wit in of Roy Edroso in "The Conservative Comeback Part 56,729":

Bonus quote from Erick Son of Erick on how the purges are going:

Their typical means of ostracism is to condemn the rest of us for daring to say nice things about them. Reasons abound for this. Many of these weak minded fools are not really fellow travelers. Like a vulture flying in flock with swans, they benefit from the work the rest of us are doing to gain themselves credibility. The media plays along calling the vultures swans so others, they hope, see ugly ducklings around the vultures instead of swans.

It's like a six-year-old discovering the power of metaphor. I'm not the vulture, you're the vulture!

Long live the Judean People's Front.

Damn.

(Cross-posted at Blue Herald)