Field of Schemes: A Glimpse at the Neocon Playbook

Occasionally, we get an IM, an email or read a comment saying, "That might have gone a bit far." For instance, Ezra Klein's recent deconstruction of Megan McArdle in the Washington Post tonally paralleled a lot of what Mr. Awesome had to say about her column, and some readers reacted as if Klein had been infected with a kind of political rabies. One can only imagine their reaction had they read our piece here. Probably something on the order of setting fire to this portion of the internet to prevent the contagion from spreading.

We're not insensitive or insensible to such criticism. Admittedly, sometimes snide jabs here veer wide of the mark or hit it with a viciousness that's perhaps inappropriate. For some time now, I've regretted saying that, "Glenn Beck is such a glutinous wad of overfed white Americana that he looks like 185 pounds of lard and bull semen poured into a 5-foot 8-inch man-shaped condom." Condom was all kinds of wrong. I should have said "tapeworm."

Joking aside, sometimes the content excoriates individuals, but despite whatever attempts I make at handwringing, I can't bring myself to feel much shame or dismay at it. The targets of that acidity willfully fabricate evidence, often in service of ideas that can bring direct harm to people. Mr. Awesome flayed McArdle's column, but the column itself was like watching Harry Lime in The Third Man explaining his indifference to the specks of humanity on the ground, then interrupting his impious sermonizing to shout through a megaphone at them that his defrauding them and their being prey to indifferent death is to their benefit. Whatever I may say about Glenn Beck cannot elide that the man has stood in front of The Alamo and fetishized it as a symbol of armed insurrection, lionized a man who shot minorities in the back and killed them, then turned to his audience with a wink and a smirk that looks like it was carved out of a bucket of Country Crock, as if to say, "I'm just thinking out loud! I'm not advocating anything. By the way, the President is a Fascist because he is a Communist, like Hitler. You know what to do, gang!"

It's nearly impossible to be washed over with guilt at unkind words when these people so readily just make shit up, then couple it with equally unkind words intended to demonize the people they're already misrepresenting with contrived evidence. To give you an example of how thorough and pervasive this is, how arrogantly false it is, how almost proudly full of crap the sort of people we occasionally assail are, take baseball.

'Poor People Can't Have Health Care Because I Fear Dumb Shit'

Note: unlike many of the other guest pieces on Et tu, Mr. Destructo? today's editorial response comes from a real, live person: the mysterious Mr. Awesome, a law student who is not a pundit and fears nothing. He last paid us a visit to relate his tale of seeing Barack Obama with The Devil.

Tripping the McArdleverse
by MR. AWESOME

Megan McArdle is a libertarian blogger for The Atlantic, a prominent DC-area think-speak magazine. Like all DC-area magazines, the quality of its contributors varies by an enormous margin likely explained through the dense, varicose veins of patronage and glad-handing that runs through that town. Sometimes, you can find incisive, solid commentary under the banner of The Atlantic. Sometimes, you will find contrarian white noise, and sometimes you will find grossly dishonest crap. Megan McArdle produces the last two, with gusto.

It's a Thousand-Year Reich! Uh-Uh-Ohhhh-Ohhhh! It's a Thousand-Year Reich! Uh-Uh-Ohhhh-Ohhhh!

Don't you hate it when you find a cool Youtube* like the Matlock beat, click the poster's profile and realize you'll never have any idea who that person is? Isn't it worse when it turns out they only have one video? Well, coldstatic, whoever that person happens to be, at least did the internet the courtesy of uploading nine videos, all of popular songs, set to edited footage of Triumph of the Will.

They're hilarious. Each one, by title or tempo manages to capture a perverse insight into the mood of the footage, loathsome though it is. For instance, take Ace of Base's "Beautiful Life," set against the Führer's trip to Nuremberg, which is filmed almost as if it's a weekend getaway:

Tea Party Host Stephen Baldwin Owes Nearly $1m in Back Taxes

Time has not been good to Friend of the Blog Stephen Baldwin. Once the star of such films as The Usual Suspects and Bio-Dome, this actor's career has taken a nosedive, resembling Danny DeVito standing next to "twin" Arnold Schwarzenegger when compared to his brother Alec's return to critical acclaim.

When we last checked in with Stephen, he was hosting a July 4th Tea Party and encouraging as many as 12 Americans (not pictured) — who looked like they got lost on the way to buy tickets to Spamalot! — to protest Barack Obama's tax policy, which unfairly penalizes people like Mr. Baldwin to the benefit of the people surrounding him.

Youtube Doubler VI: Requiem for Alex Jones

A friend of mine sent me this.

You can listen to this on a loop endlessly. It actually gets funnier and more beautiful at the same time, due in no small part to the piano version of the Requiem for a Dream soundtrack.

Reminder that this person was an occasional commentator on Glenn Beck's show, appeared on FOX News on occasion, is a friend of Ron Paul and, like him, believes that we will be destroyed by human-computer hybrids controlled by David Rockefeller and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands.

Click the picture to play:

Previous YoutubeDoublers

MLB All-Star Game '09: Where Presidents Meet Captains and Baseball Meets Announcing Indifference

The 2009 MLB All-Star Game is in the books, the 80th midsummer classic, and this time it was once again for all the marbles. No, not pride, but home-field advantage for the winning league, a prize so coveted that the teams shed superior starting players as early as the third inning, and half the people in the dugout seem to find the onfield play merely a polite excuse to bullshit with members of other teams for three hours and tell stories they haven't heard before.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let's look at how the game unfolded.

Your hosts once again this year are noted dead-dad profiteer Joe Buck, Tim McCarver and Scraps, the small anthropomorphic mouse who inhabits an otherwise unoccupied chamber in McCarver's skull and controls his thoughts and actions through a combination of heart, grit, hustle, guttiness and mouse fundamentals. Conspicuously not in attendance: famed post-op transvestite Jeanne Zelasko, who apparently was called away from the game to narrate a GMC trucks commercial for which Will Arnett was available to do the voiceover.

Sotomayor Accused of Revealing Wu-Tang Secret

Alternate Titles:
• A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Hanzo steel shall not be infringed.
• Testifying Before the Senate Judiciary Committee with Orrin-chan ^_^
• Nomination to Highest 36 Chambers Subject to Proof She Can Interpret Ancient Scrolls of Shaolin Temple

A friend of mine was talking about this on his Facebook page, and I refused to believe it was real until I read a transcript and saw a clip. This is from Sonya Sotomayor's senate confirmation hearings for her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court:

Free Republic: The Obama Children Are (Black!) Communists Who Hate America Via T-Shirts

Malia Obama wore a shirt with the peace symbol on it. That is an assault. On what, most people don't know. If you're FreeRepublic, evidently, it's being white or — at the risk of what they would see as a redundancy — a real American.

FreeRepublic recently discovered that a journalist reporting on the Obamas, in the past, encouraged people to post racist comments on websites and blame them on Republicans and attempted to steer discussion of their site's comments on Malia Obama to nefarious doings by this interloper. There's just one problem: his post was made ages ago, and every post recoverable from the Malia thread itself can be linked to an actual regular on FreeRepublic.

Malia spent time with her family, visiting foreign nations. FreeRepublic wants you to think that somehow her doing so involved a racial or political element of such horrors you can't even imagine. But, when FreeRepublic's message board is examined, there is no proof of their members imputing that to her, because they post racist comments and then delete them as soon as anyone shows any interest in establishing a third-party record of them. Why, it's as if it's not racist or ugly if the evidence is ephemeral enough to excite your extremist base without lingering long enough to get archived by Google. Unfortunately for them, all it takes is an unrefreshed pageload and hitting print screen.

Like this:

Twitter Twaddle II

Last year, I signed up for Twitter in a misguided attempt to promote this junk. Here's what I've learned: Twitter don't promote shit. Unless you're willing to follow 1,000+ people and tell them outrageous lies like "I like your tweets," or, "Your Twitter feed is my first stop every day," you're not going to get much click-through to your terrible, terrible product. About the only other thing that works is sending over two million self-serious hipsters to Goatse, but you can't do that sort of thing every day.

America's Going Down the Tubes from All This Inter-Species WOP-Mick Miscegenation

Poor Brian Kilmeade. It's bad enough to be a pube-headed witless douchebag with the sort of pale fleshy lips you usually only see on fat animated Germans screaming for hasenpfeffer or on fat uniformed Germans sulking in the dock at Nuremberg. It's worse to be such an obvious closet case on the official cable network of GOD HATES FAGS. But worst of all now he apparently thinks ethnic groups are different species and that we endanger our health via race-mixing.

Matlock: The Sickest Beat You're Gonna Hear Today

I hate just posting Youtube videos because it seems so lazy. "Here. Media. Go look." I like to figure out where it came from and if you can find any more stuff like it. Unfortunately, I got nothing. I don't know if the person who uploaded this to Youtube even created it himself; his user profile doesn't contain any links to any other useful information, and his other videos are nothing like this one. In the end, it doesn't really matter, aside from the disappointment of not being able to hear more stuff like this.

Regardless, this is the sickest beat you're gonna hear today:

White America's Inconvenience Tantrum, Part III: A Pictorial Roundup of the Obese Shuffle of the Ignorant and Damned

Yesterday, while any reasonable person in America was busy spending time with friends, drinking cold beer and eating large amounts of animal parts, a subset of this great nation apparently began the day with posterboard, magic marker and loyalty oaths. While others entertained themselves, these patriots were busy making sure everyone else would be entertained by them throughout the week. Because it would require the intervention of a bored and capricious greek god to make the July 4th tea party protests any more of a sublimely humorous collision of ironies than they already are.

First of all, you have hundreds of people holding up images of Barack Obama as a leader of a cult of personality, implying that he thinks himself a godhead and that liberals worship him. Meanwhile, they're wearing Sarah Palin t-shirts, other Sarah Palin t-shirts, holding Sarah Palin bumper stickers, holding up Sarah Palin lipstick references, wearing Sarah Palin campaign signs, and waving countless handwritten signs sending her messages like "Run, Sarah, Run!" despite Palin's not being affiliated with the tea parties in any official capacity whatsoever.

And as if that irony weren't enough, there's the fact that her recent resignation from Alaska's governorship so dominated the holiday news cycle that it pushed their largely meaningless demonstration from the News in Brief sections of virtually every mainstream outlet and off their pages entirely. Their hero not only quit on them; she obliterated almost all traces of their relevance to the media. Nevermind the further irony that said heroes' state relies on government pork handouts for its own existence and practices a socialistic redistribution of wealth from energy profits.

Then, just when you think there can't possibly be any more ironies, there's the fact that a group of people who claim to "surround them" (whoever they are) managed to mobilize perhaps a tenth of the 3 million people they commanded on April 15th. Of course, on April 15th, their powerful grassroots movement had been promoted for three consecutive days on FOX news, with over $500,000 of free advertising time on that network, with that network setting up staging areas and on-location shows with live cameras. That, and the whole thing was funded and organized by an astroturf group created by Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey. But once you strip away niggling facts like no longer having millions in organizing and advertising capacity or the inducement of being able to get on live TV with news celebrities, these groups really do speak with the Voice of the People. About 1/1,000th of them, if we're generous.

There is just so much irony to work with, even at a glance. For instance, you have:

Sarah Palin Resigns Governorship, Experiences Official Eagleton-Like Manic Episode

Well, you ivory tower elitists, left-coast homosexuals and east coast Mercedes-Benz socialists have finally done it. Together under a banner depicting David Letterman's gapped front teeth, you've joined your voices to an infernal chorus that insulted Sarah Palin's retarded baby so hard that it made her job disappear.

Today, Palin addressed the media and her constituents, announcing her resignation, effective in a few weeks. It was uncomfortable, staggering to witness and humiliating. Imagine if Thomas Eagleton had been administered shock therapy during his renunciation of the Vice-Presidential candidacy, on live television. Then imagine he said he counted the experience as a victory for the all the Vampeople of the Greater Galactic Rim. It's on the same level of dignity.


The video is mostly funny. It's hard to feel pity for someone who's already feeling so much for herself and so little for others. A woman who can can say at the beginning of her speech, "If I have learned one thing: life is about choices," yet deny choices to women who've been impregnated by a rapist or blood relation — the make them pay for their own rape kit. At this point, all that can come through is the hideous comedy of it.

Search String of the Day for 7/2/09

I could probably post about two or three of these per week. They'd probably all be entertaining. I'm still always a little bit awed at how a search string for "Sluts Packin' Nuts #2" can redirect to something like my liveblog of Glenn Beck and the April 15th Tea Parties, but for the most part the novelty has worn off. Not because the searches and their connection, somehow, to text aren't intrinsically fascinating, but because I realize that I will never understand.

The internet is its own beast now, operating via its own inscrutable yet somehow still perfectly valid wisdom. We can either join the stream or wait for its surge to pulverize us. This is something we all must accept.

Still, I have to admit, I'm strangely honored that this redirected someone here. I would instantly read any article whose headline read, "Dead Yuppie Was Sodomized," and while I'm squeamish about going through those Google results, I have to confess some disappointment that I'm not looking at such a story right now. I'm even sort of upset at myself for not having written it. But it's the internet. I will never know. This too shall pass.

Also, since this isn't a very long entry, enjoy this picture:

Fucked-Up Video Wednesday

As if spawned from the action-movie version of the mentality that this Onion article spoofs, someone has apparently made a movie called Robo Geisha. I say apparently, because there is just such a comprehensive level of badness to this video that it would immediately make the world a better and more awesome place if this trailer were just an elaborate and dedicated troll. Also, a friend of a friend says the Japanese, where discernible, is incredibly poor.

Here's the premise: there are Geishas that are robots, and they Geisha dance and have a Geisha army. Also, Geisha transform.