Why People Eat Birds

Goldberg Variations

National Review's Jonah Goldberg on the scandalous DHS report on an alleged resurgence of right wing extremism in this country; a report conveniently released just days before a wildly successful string of Tea Party protests were held across the country:

I wrote a book on fascism which tried to show that what everybody knows isn’t necessarily true. The idea that soldiers will return from war and become right-wing militants? Well, that has its roots in Fascist Italy, where veterans returned as black-shirted shock troops of “Il Duce,” Benito Mussolini. The only problem with this theory is that what they clamored for was socialism — the socialism of the trenches! — and their leader had earned the title “Il Duce” as the leader of the Socialist Party.

The idea that American “hate groups” are right-wing and bristling with vets got new life with JFK’s assassination at the hands of a disgruntled vet named Lee Harvey Oswald. Everybody knew right away that Oswald was an agent of “hate” — and hate was code for right-wing and racist. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren summed up the instantaneous conventional wisdom when he blamed the “climate of hatred” for Kennedy’s death. Everybody knew that the Right was involved.

There was just one inconvenient truth: Oswald was a Communist who, according to the Warren report, had “an extreme dislike of the rightwing” and had actually tried to murder a right-wing former Army general.

When Hollywood filmed the Tom Clancy novel The Sum of All Fears, it changed the real villains from jihadi terrorists to a bunch of European CEOs who were secret Nazis. Because “everybody knows” that’s where the real threat lies.

Sen. John Kerry belonged to an organization of vets that considered assassinating American politicians. (Kerry denied participating in those meetings.) Barack Obama was friends with, and a colleague of, a terrorist whose organization plotted to murder soldiers and their wives at a social at Fort Dix. A young Hillary Clinton sympathized with the Black Panthers, a paramilitary gang of racist murderers and cop killers.

Bring that up and you’re a paranoid nutcase out of Dr. Strangelove.

Crystal Ball

This is not a picture of your host, but if the next four years are anything like the past month, then he and SBD shall be indistinguishable.

Pictures That Explain What's About to Happen to Joe the Taxpayer and His Kids

In this picture, placed by destiny in this website for this very day, we see Chuck Connors playing the role of Big Government and we see some kid actor about to play the role of the little American taxpayer.




[H/T James Lileks]

Steele!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sydney Brillo Duodenum is pleased to hear that Michale Steele, former Lt. Gov. of SBD's home state of Maryland, has been chosen to the lead the Republican National Committee. This is very good news for the Republican Party. He is as close to a fresh face as the Republicans could hope to muster. We should fully expect Democrat asshats to claim Steele is some kind of cynical race card the Republicans are trying to play, but don't buy into that crap. Steele is a solid, proven conservative.

Steele is essentially the anti-Obama. Whereas Obama was raised by a socialist flake in Hawaii, Steele's mother was a hardworking laundress in working class Maryland. While Obama was testing out various pharmaceuticals, Steele was studying to be a priest. Whereas Obama learned his political skills in the unchallenging leftist environment of Chicago, Steele plied his conservatives principles in Bluetard Maryland. Based on watching him these past couple of years on Fox, he can represent conservative principles and knows how to push back on jackasses like Bill Maher and Steve Colbert and Alan Colmes and the rest of the nitwit liberal brigade. Having been head of GOPAC, we know he can raise money. Steele lost his Senate run to the unsufferable Ben "Bloomberg" Cardin in 2006.

Steele has nice shirts, but his tailor should consider reducing the amount of suit jacket material around his underarms, as it tends to bunch up when he appears on TV. Also, his mustache is a little cheesy, but we're looking past that right now. He also wears Sarah Palin glasses.

But if Steele doesn't deliver the money and the message, his ass needs to be thrown into the street.