Kim Jong-il: Welcome to Godhood

Note: unlike many guest pieces on Et tu, Mr. Destructo? today's article comes from a real, live person: Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, former Supreme Leader of North Korea and General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea, who evades foreign intelligence agencies by pretending to work the finance beat for the press in another Asian country. He last wrote about North Korea to debunk entertaining myths about the DPRK. He joins us today for his funeral.


Dear Leader
by KIM JONG-IL

If you're reading this, Jong-un, my spirit has already departed my totally ripped bod and is now soaring with the Manchurian cranes above the sacred peaks of Mt. Paektu. I probably expired after a lifetime of on-the-spot field guidance and direction finally depleted my physical resources.

This is more exhausting than most people think. I mean, your average Kim Joe-Blow might believe that a nuclear physicist is capable of splitting atoms without the Leader's input, or that a seventh-generation pig farmer has a suitable degree of animal husbandry knowledge without the Leader weighing in. Well let me tell you, we did not crack the top 200 nations in terms of GDP per capita (suck my chubby, Lesotho and Bangladesh!) by delegation.

It's an unfortunate truth, but our peoples are really, really shit stupid, and they need to be shown how to do everything. I swear, I don't know how many times I had to tell Jo Jae-yong, manager of the Huichon Ryonha General Machinery Plant in Jagang Province, to keep on making some machines.

"Faster, Jae-yong!" I'd say, "I don't care that you don't have any more sheet metal because we reneged on paying our Chinese suppliers. Use Juche!"

Conlin

by JONATHAN BERNHARDT

Perhaps we never liked him anyway.

The baseball writers of my age and generation have found former Philadelphia Daily News columnist Bill Conlin's fall from grace easier than most to deal with, though not comfortable. Given almost any other impetus, comfort we would have found; before this week, I knew Conlin almost wholly as a wide, pompous ass of the institution, the moron who vomited forth the line, "The only positive thing I can think of about Hitler's time on earth: I'm sure he would have eliminated all bloggers."

He was as an obnoxious intellectual nothing of Philadelphia sports thought, a man emblematic of ways of thinking left behind in real time, similar in many respects to Murray Chass, the former New York Times baseball reporter who to this day insists his online column is not a "blog" because of the gulf he believes yawns between his and bloggers' professionalism.

That is the only way in which the two men are similar. I apologize to Murray Chass for putting his name alongside Conlin's, and that should say all that needs be said about the severity of the accusations leveled against the Daily News columnist. When a man casually opines that Hitler should have murdered you and yours, there's a fair few things he can do to make you uncomfortable about his undoing; Conlin did possibly the worst.

Last Tuesday, the Philadelphia Inquirer's Nancy Phillips published a story alleging that Conlin molested four children between the ages of seven and twelve during the 1970's, among them his own niece. The other victims were friends of his children. Since then, another three have come forth to allege abuse at Conlin's hands.

It is impossible to feel any satisfaction over this. The concept itself is sickening.

Burn in Hell, Christopher Hitchens

Note: For discussion of Middle Eastern affairs, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn for insight to General Rehavam "Gandhi" Ze'evi, former Israeli Minister of Tourism. Having faked his assassination in the Mt. Scopus Hyatt Hotel, the General has been in deep cover, in Judea and Samaria, posing as an American goy pursuing graduate studies in the Middle East. He last joined us for Bela Lugosi's Dead, Part III: Killing the Bastard Bin Laden, Stage IV of the American Fever Dream.


Reflections in a Gimlet Eye
by GENERAL REHAVAM "GANDHI" ZE'EVI

"To the living we owe respect, but to the dead we owe only the truth."
— Voltaire

Hitchens was human trash, and his corpse should be interred in a grave worthy of his towering legacy, an eternally burning garbage fire, rising as high as a Baghdad sunrise, a smoky immolation of all the worthlessness that could be crammed in his "contrarian" paunch.

Even this dream, of the phoenix never rising from the ashes, preserves that peasant’s megalomania more powerfully than any embalming fluids currently coursing through his veins. Formaldehyde's more potable than his lifeblood's cocktail of lies and booze, a tincture only the diseased imbibe. Hitchens was strictly for suckers, a mouse that roared, a VH1 I Love the 80s panelist with a fancy accent, a rap sheet and cirrhosis. "Rationalist," "skeptic," "contrarian," "public intellectual" — court jester. He plied that ancient trade for the deadliest predators on Earth; his was the reflexive, suck-up, kick-down cruelty of the British madding crowd. That’s all, folks.

To cite an author he hamfistedly emulated (more or less successfully), Hitchens was Squealer the pig, a silver-tongued correspondent to the middlebrow, flattering of power, contemptuous of the weak, the bashful, the foreign — the sincere. He was a kept man to the bitter end, the part-time iconoclast. As Norman Finklestein recalled, "'The last thing you can be accused of is having turned your coat,' Thomas Mann wrote a convert to National Socialism right after Hitler's seizure of power. 'You always wore it the 'right' way around.'" Hitchens afflicted the weak and comforted the powerful, an abnegation of any public service a gadfly could perform. Though his Oxbridge accent and erudition were crucial in fleecing the provincials he knew the USA was composed of, it was his more American qualities that endeared him to the terminal-stage Republic.

The multiple comparisons to Lord Byron that Hitchens received are so disturbing as to deserve no response. I'll try anyway. Byron — a superhuman defender of the voiceless, an impossibly good-looking sex machine, the noble son of "Mad Jack" Byron and sole voice in excoriating the destruction of Ireland, a Bengal tiger capable of ripping apart any of Wordsworth's reactionaries in verse or in person, a man disgusted by the fatuous, self-satisfied corruption of the Tory elite and the once-radical Lake poets (who should "change their lakes for oceans"), a man contemptuous of an imperial masculinity defined by cruelty and weakness, fled that stinking island — died a hero's death in Greece, fighting empire.

Hitchens died in Houston, Texas, headquarters of Halliburton.

Game Over: Scans of Over 50 Ron Paul Newsletters

For a certain segment of the Ron Paul fanbase, no evidence of his disseminating hateful, paranoid material will ever be enough. Citing James Kirchick's piece in The New Republic wasn't sufficient, because Kirchick could have just been "making everything up." Then, when I and others posted copies of "The Ron Paul Political Report Special Issue on Race Terrorism," that too wasn't convincing.

"Proof that he said/endorsed racist things? Hardly. Doing it repeatedly in one document isn't enough to prove that he did it. Now, if there were many documents..."

Well, now there are many documents. Over fifty. Right here.

As I said in my rundown on the Paul platform over at Vice, reasonable fans of Dr. Paul now must accept that

there's no way Paul could have been ignorant of the content [of] 8-12 page newsletters published under his name for over ten years. Paul supporters face three losing propositions:

• He lacks the competency to control content published under his own name for over a decade, and is thus unfit to lead a country.
• He doesn't believe these things but considers them a useful political tool to motivate racist whites, which makes him fit to be a GOP candidate, but too obvious about it to win.
• He's actually a racist, which makes him unfit to be a human being.

Further, you can't dismiss this in the name of higher political or socioeconomic aspirations. Since Paul has no chance of winning — seriously, no chance at all — his only value is as a voice, a conduit for principles. And if your only hope is to change the discourse by amplifying ideas, you can do that via many voices and avenues. As I said in my Vice follow-up, acknowledging some of Paul's good ideas,

when you opt to support anti-imperialist and civil liberties ideals by supporting Paul the Candidate, you end up supporting everything else about him. That includes those newsletters and the unambiguous message to those who enjoy them: You can write these things and succeed; this works. The other good ideas to which he's signatory can't erase the fact that he put his name to those words printed above. The moral weight of those newsletters drags down even the most high-minded aspirations he has about civil liberties, and everything crashes down on all of us.

It's fine to have convictions about things he believes in. But when you voluntarily whitewash his record or choose to ignore it and champion him anyway, you are complicit in supporting the idea that racism and homophobia are morally inconsequential to the process of running for President of the United States. And, while many Paul supporters consider racism a social injury subordinate to extra-legal military conflict, there are just as many who disgustingly handwave at racism because it's an inconsequential burp on the way to more tax cuts, Free Markets, Free Money, Free Black Peop — stuff for me!

And still, for the faithful, this will not be enough.

Below, I've tried to give helpful general (bold) titles to each excerpt of the various Ron Paul newsletters available. These come courtesy of a zipfile of scans sent to me by reader Heresiarch, who, along with others, compiled it from various sources — although the lion's share, if not all, come from James Kirchick, who wrote the original, big Ron Paul story in The New Republic, in 2008. (You can see many of his highlights on the scans.) I have omitted the over 65 pages of scanned federal earmarks Ron Paul requested for his district, in a fit of States' Wants pique. I have also omitted the scans of Von Mises Institute brochures about a Secession Conference at which Paul spoke.

No attempt has been made to organize these via topic, since pages of each newsletter are apt to feature mini-articles on multiple topics, making organization futile. (My summaries don't indicate all that go on in the scans, so please click away.) Finally, below some of the scans, I've offered some comments in plain text. Those within quotation marks are direct quotes from the text appearing in the newsletter scans. Those without quotation marks are my own observations.

VICE: Nobody Likes You, Jon Huntsman

Beaten down by years of feckless centrist candidates with no interest in the working class, Democratic voters turn to increasingly bizarre outlets for signs of rescue. Seemingly since 2000, they've annually flirted with some new Republican hopeful — a mythic, "Reasonable One" — whose bipartisan appeal will somehow unite the country and deliver... the same sort of feckless centrist anti-working-class policies they despise from their own candidates. Maybe it's the bad-boy stigma of it all. "Sure, he's going to fuck me, but he's so cool. He won't even pretend like he was that interested in it afterward!"

Jon Hunstman stands ahead of the other candidates as this election's Reasonable One, and somehow makes the exercise in anticipating disappointment even dumber than normal. After all, there is no Reasonable One in the modern Republican Party: an ideologically intolerant and rabid base ensures the instant punishment of the weak, the compromisers, the humanely tolerant. Worse, even if Huntsman — the aw shucks, regular guy, son-of-a-billionaire — were to govern exactly as he likes and not while fearing the teaparty lash, he's still not "The Reasonable One."

Lastly, he doesn't even have the decency to be ruggedly indifferent and overpowering. When America goes to bed with and gets used by the wrong guy, we want someone to make us feel like it was our fault afterward. Huntsman is the sort of person who'd apologize so much about having an early meeting that we'd all just beg him to leave.

Click Jon's pic below to be taken to the Vice article...


...and see for yourself what all this has to do with two porn stars and Newt Gingrich.

Ron Paul Is Dead, Miss Him Miss Him Miss Him

Note: unlike many guest pieces on Et tu, Mr. Destructo? today's article comes from a real, live person: Mornacale, a serious journalist and Brusly High School and Louisiana Campaign for Liberty's 2011 Douchebag of the Year. Despite showing all outward signs of an intelligent human being, he's still a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates. He has yet to be seriously accused of killing anyone. You can follow him on Twitter.


How I Became Douchebag of the Year
by MORNACALE

Ron Paul died on the night of December 12, 2012. I know because I killed him.

I won't insult you by explaining who Ron Paul is, or detailing the extent of his fame/infamy across the internet. Nor will I expect that you aren't aware that Dr. Paul is (as far as I know) as healthy as ever; I understand he even gave an eerily good showing in the debate last night. This is a story about a hoax. Well, no. This is a memorial of a joke, a celebration of how a few bored strangers can unite the world in mourning over the tragic death of a living man.

Ron Paul was murdered by a Twitter hashtag. It was a nice, quiet one; its neighbors never suspected a thing. But in the evening of December 12, 2011, #MakeRacistJokesNotRacistAnymore began trending. Unable to think of any racist jokes of my own to respond to the amusing ones on my timeline, I chose to slightly re-interpret "joke" and tweeted, "Ron Paul died." (Note: all images below link back to the original tweet.)

Found Stuff: High School Walkthrough

Alex Nicholson has been finding stuff literally for years. Sometimes it's not even intentional. That's how good he is. "Found Stuff" is his attempt to freeze some of these objects and moments in time, to share them with you so he can get on with metal detecting and forget about them. You can follow him on Tumblr and Twitter.


With bullies, homework and public schools' flagging soda availability, high school is no figurative cakewalk and is only a literal cakewalk at graduation. On top of strict teachers' BS, there are unwritten rules to trip up on: how you should act, what you can say, which glass you can't break when there isn't a fire, where you can't dump out a bag of peanuts to smash 'em up and access the nuts inside. Fortunately, a high school strategy guide that was circulated and edited by a wise clique has made its way to the internet. Follow this walkthrough to make high school the easiest four years of your life. (Note: As most campuses have no speed limit for foot traffic, it's possible, using this guide, to finish high school in three years.)

VICE: Ron Paul, Part III: The Enpaulening

Today, on Vice, we have to deal with Ron Paul, Part III: The Enpaulening. There was the first version, and it was ugly and real, not like what we expected. It was like First Blood.

Then the replies made it all a vengeful, direct attack on something that was right. Like Rambo: First Blood Part II. We had to kill — even the made-up crap. We had to look the bad thing in the eye and say, "Aaauughhh!!!" Now, the third part, like Rambo III, it's about Afghanistan. We need to get the bad guys out. We need to fight them. Only the bad guys are us and Ron Paul is... right?

He is. Click the man who has delivered over 4,000 babies to be delivered to the Vice article that reconsiders Ron Paul:


One thing that couldn't be addressed in the Vice piece, for space constraints, is that Paul is the only major politician on the radar of the 24-hour news who rejects any premise for invading or interfering with Iran, which pairs the most sensible attitude on the matter with the most easily maligned candidate. The United States either has troops, drones or sympathetic regimes surrounding Iran, and American foreign policy wonks daily advocate either an invasion or terroristic strikes on sites within its borders.

Increasingly, our justification for striking at Iran is its angry opposition to the fact that we surround Iran, threaten to bomb it and may already be doing so via clandestine strikes and assassinations. We practice a bullying foreign policy, and then we act surprised when that policy backfires. Our only solution is to double down on that bellicosity and violently eradicate the same antipathy that we've directly engendered.

Lastly, while you're there, feel free to keep clicking the MORE button and dig on those comments. There's probably a 5-1 ratio of negative to positive responses, which is sort of entertaining when it's not a stone bummer.

Twitter Ephemera: Mike Florio

I'm not sure what Mike Florio's purpose is, but his weekly appearances on NBC's Football Night in America are keeping him from discovering it. Each week, he faux-banters with Peter King while trying to make reading a Huffington Post listicle of the day's football news off an iPad2 seem natural. Usually it seems the opposite.

Unengaged by news or analysis, the viewer is left to stare at Florio's complexion and let his mind wander. Instead of someone like Collinsworth or Dungy breaking down film, Florio reveals that some vampires aren't sexless teens, sexless Victorians or street-brawling brutes who also have sex. For some, the Dark Gift manifests as little more than looking like a pallid, venial, social-climbing CPA who apparently cannot die.

This isn't entirely fair to Florio. If he could glitter in sunlight, we'd at least think of him as a lovable, portable rave. And it's true that his site, MikeFloriosExtremeFootballZone.com (I'm guessing), breaks some news among the rumors that it breaks and then forgets about when they get embarrassing. He occasionally even mounts the righteous steed of Costasness, but that doesn't work out too well. Some people are just too small for that ride.

NotCoachTito: Dispatches from Parody Limbo

NotCoachTito is the former fake manager of the Boston Red Sox. He currently resides in the Parody Account afterlife, occasionally sending vulgar messages from the Other Side, about Bobby Valentine and John Lackey, to his personal medium Hunter Felt. In his spare time, NotCoachTito enjoys drinking Bigelow Green Tea, listening to Happy Mondays and pinch-running for his best hitters in the ninth inning of tied games.


Chris Brown Beats a Bill Walton to Death
by NOT COACH TITO

Chris Brown is why America can't have nice things. The renowned domestic abuser and also room-temperature-tapwater R&B artist recently struck his latest blow against actually entertaining pop culture, this time on Twitter.

A few weeks ago, "CHRIS BROWN IS A LEGEND" (yes, of course, in all caps) appeared in Twitter's trending topics. @TheBillWalton—an award-winning account written in the voice of basketball legend/current broadcaster/diehard Deadhead/Bill Simmons lust-object Bill Walton—responded with this joke: "'Chris Brown Is A Legend' is trending on Twitter. With that, we should all celebrate his greatest hits starting with Rihanna. Congrats, Ike!"

Vote for Ron Paul or the Dog Will Be Angry

Well, that's it. I'm voting for Ron Paul because of graphics.

The Ron Paul campaign released a new ad recently, which features the kind of sick computer generated explosions, dogs on things and big truck metaphors that pretty much immediately win me over every time. Plus, the voiceover is performed by a guy who narrates trailers for horror films, so his inclusion here is totally appropriate. NEXT NOVEMBER, THE NIGHTMARE BEGINS WHEN YOU'RE DEAD.

The Ron Paul Political Report: Special Issue on Race Terrorism

One of the most entertaining aspects of yesterday's Ron Paul rundown is watching comments and Tweets roll in declaring that it contains no proof of Ron Paul's racism and everything of my perfidy or incompetence. In many cases, much of this outrage seems to be the product of a complete unfamiliarity with how links work. ("He didn't even prove that thing he said in blue words!") But most of it probably extenuates from the need to rationalize away all criticism of His Auric Eminence.


Thankfully, most of the rationalization is dumb. Let's take a look:

VICE: Ron Paul—Reactionary Racist Leprechaun

This week, the good people at Vice.com asked me to write about Ron Paul, because we both thought Newt was just too tiresome, and, "Please, God [we're] sick of Herman Cain. No more Herman Cain."

A lot of this Paul information isn't new. That's because Ron doesn't change. Time lumbers on, indifferently, into a bigger future, and he remains, hiding behind his 18th century battlements, picking lice off himself, rubbing coins fervidly and wearing a special kind of hat that says, "You can't force me to be a bowman if we fight France."

Unfortunately, Paul fans don't change much either. They see "no more War on Drugs" and "let's stop fighting in the Middle East," and everything else about the man goes unresearched or becomes a kind of meaningless hum. Which is why every now and again, you need to slap them. Hopefully this helps. Click the smilin' Ron Paul below to be taken to Vice:


By the way, the nice fella in the picture with him is Don Black, founder of Stormfront.org, America's #1 white supremacist site, which endorsed Ron Paul in 2008. (Even now you can find great information about him there, like, "All Republican candidates are Jew tools except for Ron Paul," which, perversely, is a fair reading of the GOP establishment's Israel policy.) The Paul campaign spent weeks pretending the endorsement and Stormfront's donation weren't an issue. That might have had something to do with not wanting to alienate supporters, like campaign coordinators who are Klansmen and neo-Nazis, or campaign volunteers like neo-Nazi Holocaust Museum shooter James van Brunn.