Shorter Jeffrey Rosen

Did you know they don't have the internet in the United Kingdom?

Have You No Decency, At Long Last?

If you oppose marriage equality, someone -- and we're not sure exactly who -- will stop at nothing to ruin your life. Take it from someone whose well-concealed identity as a tedious scold was made public by radical homosexualists:

First, note what the movement of tolerance does when you simply exercise your rights to free speech, taking a position they disagree with. They go personal. They go for the jugular. They try to embarrass and humiliate you. They will stop at nothing not only to discredit but absolutely destroy you [sic].

In this case, they will find pictures of you modeling lingerie and tell people you had objects surgically inserted into your breasts. In fact, since they will stop at nothing, they presumably will do this even if you haven't posed in lingerie or gotten breast implants. They will make you write ungrammatical sentences. They are that evil.

Speaking as someone who supports marriage equality, I don't care if you've posed in your underwear or had breast implants. Speaking as someone who's sane, I wouldn't pose in my underwear or get breast implants if the revelation of those facts would embarrass me, humiliate me and/or destroy me. If you're going to do that kind of thing, don't claim you're a victim of character assassination when it is revealed that you've done that kind of thing.

K-Lo and her co-author seem to smell a big gay conspiracy behind Operation Destroy American Beauty, but they don't marshal any facts to place a smoking gun in the mitts of "the movement of tolerance." I don't know, nor do I care, who divulged the extremely uninteresting details of what-her-name's beautiful life, but such revelations happen to famous people -- and morons too -- regardless of their views on civil rights. Were John Edwards and that cable-teevee douchebag with the eight kids victims of the Gay Crusades as well? Only in the dankest recesses of K-Lo's barren bonce is Miss California a wall trophy for the gay mafia.

Goldcrapp

Of all the reasons John McCain had his ass handed to him last November, surely Michael Goldfarb's incompetence must be ranked somewhere in the low 700s. Still, Goldfarb's status as a first-rate cretin cannot be denied:

Yesterday THE WEEKLY STANDARD obtained a copy of Elena Kagan's senior thesis, written almost thirty years ago while an undergraduate at Princeton. The title of the thesis: "To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933"

Goldie has blisters on his lips from reading through this tome in 24 hours, and has uncovered such subversive bon mots as these:

Why, in a society by no means perfect, has a radical party never attained the status of a major political force? Why, in particular, did the socialist movement never become an alternative to the nation’s established parties?

Radicals have often succumbed to the devastating bane of sectarianism; it is easier, after all, to fight one’s fellows than it is to battle an entrenched and powerful foe. Yet if the history of Local New York shows anything, it is that American radicals cannot afford to become their own worst enemies. In unity lies their only hope.

Goldfarb hasn't yet reached the part where Kagan calls for show trials and the public execution of Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale for crimes against the workers, and the redistribution of mood rings from the oligarchy to the proletariat.

O.J. Simpson's choice for President in 1988 has died.

The locker room showers of this country are a little less integrated today. And presidental politics lost the finest double act this country had seen before McCain/Palin:

At a meeting of young Republicans in July, Mr. Dole remarked with barbed humor that "Kemp wants a business deduction for hair spray." Speaking to the same group, Mr. Kemp came back with the retort: "In a recent fire, Bob Dole's library burned down. Both books were lost. And he hadn't even finished coloring one of them."

Shorter Creamin' John Hawkins (See Post Below)

Huh? Whut Arkansas Project, Swift Boat Veterans, Jerome Corsi, Regenery Publishing, Fox Networks, Sinclair Broadcasting, Washington Times, NewsMax, WorldNetDaily, Rupert Murdoch, National Review, American Spectator, David Horowitz, Matt Drudge, Republican National Committee, National Republican Congressional Committee, Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales, Floyd Brown, Roger Stone, David Bossie, Stanley Kurtz, Alan Keyes, conservative talk radio, Pajamas Media and conservative blogosphere? Did whut? (drools)

They Bring a Knife to a Fight, We Piss On Ourselves

Hold him back! Hold him back!

"Professional blogger" John Hawkins is hoppin' mad. He wants to defeat the treacherous leftists, but those pussified conservatives won't let him win. If only he had a cunning plan:

Instead of continuing to complain, here’s a better idea. Why don’t conservatives do opposition research on the journalists endlessly running stories about Bristol Palin and Joe the Plumber? Have they ever been arrested? Whom do they own property with? Have they ever been paid to do a speech for someone and then run a favorable news story about him? Certainly Keith Olbermann’s personal life is just as newsworthy as Joe the Plumber's, and the details of Maureen Dowd's life are just as noteworthy as those of Bristol Palin — are they not?

Maureen Dowd's personal life? That's your plan? Maybe John Tierney has some sepia-toned daguerreotypes he can sell you, and a stereopticon to view them on.

Here's another example. On college campuses, conservative speakers often need bodyguards to give a speech. Conservatives are shouted down and attacked — and nothing serious ever seems to happen to the fascists who engage in these thuggish tactics. So why shouldn't conservative groups do the exact same thing to every liberal speaker who comes to the college? Go on stage, lock arms, and shout him down — then sue the university if they're given so much as an hour's detention more than the protesting liberal students.

Detention? But what will you do if they take away your hall pass?

Are you sick of feeling like you need to familiarize yourself with porn terms just to understand what they’re saying about the tea parties on MSNBC or CNN? Then start filing obscenity complaints with the FCC.

Careful, Johnny. You never know who might get swept up in your Rosie Palmer Raids.

But there are some things that even John Hawkins won't do for love

Obviously, we don’t have to become liars — in fact, even setting aside the ethics of it, it's better for our credibility if we don't.

You can't kill a corpse, Johnny.

How much credit did John McCain get for refusing to talk about Jeremiah Wright and Barack Obama’s lack of patriotism? How many times was George Bush — a moderate on domestic issues who bent over backwards to create a “new tone” — accused of being Hitler? How many times has Fox News, which makes more of an effort to be balanced than any of the other networks and all the biggest newspapers in America, been accused of being as biased as Rush Limbaugh?

How many fingers am I holding up, Johnny?

Now that John Hawkins has proposed all these ideas, he has an obligation to carry them out. John owes us a report on Keith Olbermann's sex life by next week and, above all, he must storm the stage when President Obama speaks at Notre Dame on the 17th. Otherwise, he's all talk and no action.

Sully Rewrites His Story

Sully Joe Sullivan is still backpedaling on his glowing endorsement of the bullshit 20/20 piece saying that Matthew Shepherd's murder wasn't motivated by anti-gay bigotry. In 2009, he writes:

I agree, but then I've never been on the gay left and have always opposed these laws. There is a real debate about the 20/20 story and, for the sake of balance, you can read the critiques of it here and here.

Of course, Sully didn't think there was a "real debate" of the 20/20 piece back in 2004, when he was pimping it -- and his tangential role in it:

Now ABC News has prepared an important, thorough and debunking review of what happened. I was tangentially involved in the documentary, but wasn't privy to its most closely held findings. I have a feeling it will reveal how dangerous it is to rest an entire political argument on one incident, whose details were always murky and subsequently turned into myth.

How does one have a real debate a "thorough" "debunking"? How does one debate a false story, a "myth."

Perhaps Sully should explain his acknowledged role in the piece, rather than pretending to be a neutral observer, as he now does. Why doesn't Sully acknowledge his involvement any more? If there's a real debate about the piece, Sully should explain what he knows -- both about the reporting and the murder itself -- so we can judge the piece on all the facts.

Sully's fallback position is that Shepherd murder isn't the issue, what he really cares about is the injustice of hate crimes laws. (Of course, he could have made that argument without endorsing shoddy reporting or attacking his political enemies -- if he wasn't Sully, that is.) But he still doesn't understand hate crimes legislation.

At least this go round he doesn't claim that such laws create protected classes or punish thought. But he still argues that there's no reason to treat variations of the same criminal act differently based on intent. Yes, the victim of of a revenge killing which started as a bar fight or a lovers' quarrel is just as dead as the victim of a fatal gay-bashing. And both killers deserve harsh punishment. But if we want to discourage things which should be stopped -- and can be stopped -- by imposition of harsher penalties, it makes sense to impose a greater punishment on those things. There are criminal laws which impose greater penalties for killing on-duty police officers, or federal workers, or children. There are criminal laws which impose greater punishment for defrauding or abusing the elderly or incompetent, because they are more vulnerable to abuse. These laws reflect not only value judgments, but also practical judgments as to most effective way to deter certain types of crimes. For Sullivan to pretend that hate crimes laws are some aberrant deviation from what exists in our present legal system is simply absurd.