Five Before Chaos

Funky Austrailians? Who knew?? I give you… The Bamboos.

Funk Medley

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The camera doesn’t lie, does it?

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Ok, here’s a thoroughly entertaining, juvenile, disgusting and informative bit about the mighty elusive giant squid. Don’t watch while eating. (h/t to Pharyngula)

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Hillary Clinton is a sleazy thug. Ah, now I feel better.

My Clinton fatigue is only rivaled by my Bush fatigue, and to be honest, it’s made blogging, both here and at GMD, quite difficult for me lately. Whether it be the playing the race card, Bill Clinton’s arrogant and asinine statements, praising John McCain, or blackmailing Pelosi and th DCCC, no politician, save Bush, enrages me on an almost daily basis.

Part of that frustration in undoubtedly rooted in a frustration with the media and Clinton’s “inevitability” narrative; they’ve been fed this line of crap for years and seem reluctant to really talk about the real “inevitability: - that Hillary will not win the nomination. Thankfully, the morning lede from Reuters gave me a bit of hope…

Somebody forgot to tell Hillary Clinton the Democratic presidential race is over and Barack Obama won…

The article goes on to explain the many reasons why this is the case, along with the obliviousness still shown by the Clinton campaign. She really doesn’t seem to give a rat’s patoot about how this will affect the party, reinforcing that “will do anything to win” meme. But as Stoller aptly pointed out, there’s not a lot of truth to that meme (emphasis mine):

I‘ve never liked the line ‘the Clinton’s will do anything to win’. Hillary Clinton won’t, for instance, renounce her support of the Iraq war or get rid of an obviously incompetent Mark Penn as the captain of her campaign. And many politicians face a similar incentive structure to the Clinton’s and are just as ruthless. More accurately the line should be ‘the Clinton’s will turn their back on you for short-term political gain’.

I still don’t think this is going to go all the way to the convention. As Clinton acts more and more desperate, I really think more and more superdelegates are going to come out and do what they can to end this circus. And it won’t be a moment too soon for me.

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No, don’t worry, this isn’t a post abut my favorite and thoroughly unhip rock band. It’s the reaction I had when I read John Dolan’s Alternet article, Fighting Words: How to Humiliate — and Convert — a Right-Winger.Being one who’s often stressed the importance of not making nice with the wingers (I often mention “ripping out their spines and jumping up and down on their heads”), let’s just say that the article struck a nerve with me. Dolan summs it up quite nicely in his intro:

I’d like to suggest a very simple strategy for American liberals: Get mean. Stop policing the language and start using it to hurt our enemies. American liberals are so busy purging their speech of any words that might offend anyone that they have no notion of using language to cause some salutary pain.

Hallelujah and amen to that, brother. One thing that many liberals fail to see (or simply don’t know how to deal with) is the fact that for the right-wingers, they’re not interested in negotiating.  Whether it be Rush Limpballs saying how we are “snakes that need to be destroyed” or  Ann Coulter’s inane, belligerent B.S., or Dick “go-fuck-yourself” Cheney, it’s obvious they’re not into making nice. This viewpoint that somehow they are somehow able to be reasoned with is naive and incredibly harmful. And I’ve often been critical of the absolutist pacifist perspective, in that it denies us a sometimes effective tool, and often puts one’s own moral purity above saving lives:

Liberals aren’t generally perceived as fighting the robber barons — they appear as a secular clergy far more obsessed with cleaning up our gloriously obscene language than fighting back.

Note that I’ve used the word “fighting.” Americans are a violent people — and I mean that as a compliment. We are a magnificently violent people who value courage above all else. In this, the ordinary American is in total agreement with George Patton, John Paul Jones and John Brown. They were all violent leaders, who sent a lot of Redcoats, Nazis and secessionist slaveholders to an early grave. I consider that glorious; so do most Americans.

And so the argument goes that we shouldn’t embrace their tactics. Well, considering how effective their tactics are, perhaps that needs a re-examining. We should fight like they do, with one difference: don’t make stuff up. Now, I know that there is a wide, diverse range of opinion on our side. And of course, some of you may accuse me of being captivated by machismo, or whatever, or romanticizing violence. Whatever. Sorry, I just tend to look at it as having an understanding of human nature that’s not so idealistic. Most of my arguments with my fellow lefties are not over the goals or aims of our movements, rather over the effectiveness (or more often, non-effectiveness) of the tactics that people use. Simply put, it’s time to stop being so goddamn nice all of the time. The time for politeness and symbolic gestures has long passed. Dolan gets that. As Putney Swope once said, “Don’t rock the boat. Sink it!”

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Well, it seems like the MSM picked up on Hillary’s Bosnian “embellishment”. Good. It’s apparently not an isolated incident. A few weeks ago, she also boasted to CNN that she “helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland”, as well as “drove out the snakes”. Well, I made that second part up, but she made up the first one. According to Lord Trimble of Lisnagarvey, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and former First Minister of the province, who was directly involved in the negotiatons, Hillary’s claim is “a wee bit silly”, and, according to the Telegraph:

I don’t know there was much she did apart from accompanying Bill [Clinton] going around,” he said. Her recent statements about being deeply involved were merely “the sort of thing people put in their canvassing leaflets” during elections. “She visited when things were happening, saw what was going on, she can certainly say it was part of her experience. I don’t want to rain on the thing for her but being a cheerleader for something is slightly different from being a principal player.“

Hmm. Cheerleader. She certainly does like to “enhance” her accomplishments, no? And once again, just like everything else in that clusterfuck of a campaign of hers, it doesn’t appear that they really thought these things out in the beginning. They were probably drunk on the “inevitability” narrative, figured they just had to throw out a few talking points on her so-called “experience” (which, in the realm of foreign policy is wafer-thin), and hope nobody would notice, instead of focusing on her real experiences and accomplishments, which aren’t nearly as broad as she’s making them out to be.

Seems like the Irish are not too thrilled about this. In the Irish version of the Independent, Kevin Myers has a satirical look at some of Hillary’s other “accomplishments” (h/t to Mike Eldred):

Before this interview formally began,” I said, after I had recovered, “you mentioned something about bringing down the Berlin Wall: what was that?”

She smiled again, and I leapt back 30 yards. She was well into her story by the time I had recovered my seat. “So, having told Mother Teresa just how to cope with the starving children of Calcutta, I returned to the Vatican, in my one-woman yacht. For the purposes of this trip, I was named Ellen MacArthur in honour of my mother, who took the Japanese surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri. In the Vatican, I could tell that the Pope was clearly worried. ‘What is it, Norman?’ I asked him. ‘You look kinda stressed.’

“The Pope shook his head sadly. He knew he could hide nothing from me. He often said I was J3 — a cross between Joan of Arc, Jane Austen, and Jane Fonda. The reason for his concern? World communism: it was about to triumph.

“Well, I’m the kind of woman who never ducks a challenge. So I told the Pope never to worry his little old head, and so I left Italy and set out for Europe. I went to the shipyard town of Denmark, where I spoke to the union leader, a tribal chief known to his people as ‘Luck Will Answer’, and told him that the Pope’s homeland of Hungary would light the fire of world freedom. I guess the Solubility Movement began there and then: I got the name from thinking how we should kind of dissolve communism, rather than confront it. The next year, I got the Nobel Prize for Peace: but for political reasons, I went by the name ‘Nelson Mandela.’”

Please,sombody, make her go away. Far away.

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I don’t know what to make of this, but FBC seems to have its busiest days whenever I dip my toe into the pop culture swamp that I’m so incredibly isolated from. The traffic from me commenting about the white trash with a toilet seat grafted to her ass got a lot of people over here. Anyways…

There is a rather funny blog out there that’s making the rounds called “Stuff White People Like”. I’ve actually looked at it and it’s quite funny, because a lot of it’s true. It’s breaking the white people stereotype that we’re all a bunch of dumb Republicans, and playfully sets its sites on liberal, middle-class white America. Whtehre it be explaining the intricacies of the absurdities of St. Patrick’s day, or having gay friends, it’s all there:

If white people could draft friends the way that the NFL drafts prospects it would go like this: black friends, gay friends, and then all other minorities would be drafted based on need and rarity to the region.

When choosing gay friends, white people like to base their decision on their own needs and requirements. Younger white people tend to prefer young, social gay people-this is their all important ticket into nightclubs and parties.

When a straight person goes to a gay night club, they are reminded of how progressive and tolerant they are. If they are hit on by a member of the same sex, it provides them with a valuable story that they can use to prove to their other friends that they are more progressive and tolerant. “This guy/girl hit on me, I said I was ’straight but not narrow,’ and it was totally chill. Oh, you went to an Irish bar this weekend? That’s cool, I guess. “

But, silliness aside, part of the reason this site is so hot right now is because it is resonating on a deeper level with many, as Vanessa E. Jones points out in her Globe piece about the blog, Coffee and Yoga and Prius and “Juno”:

The blog treads new ground by showing how closely associated materialism is with white middle-class liberalism, says Philip Kretsedemas, a sociology professor at UMass-Boston. “What is unique,” Kretsedemas says, “is seeing liberals as owning their whiteness. It seems like a non-liberal thing to do. Liberals are supposed to be critical of race, not supposed to see race. The people who are white are the Archie Bunkers of the world.”

Culturally significant and funny. Have a look.

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Well, this is some good news. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) is going to introduce a bill to decriminalize small amounts of marijuana possession at the federal level:

Frank announced his plans late Friday on the HBO show “Real Time,” hosted by Bill Maher.

“I’m going to file a bill as soon as we go back to remove all federal penalties for the possession or use of small amounts of marijuana,” Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat, told Maher.

Now, I’m not too optimistic this has any chance of succeeding with this current President and legislature, but a year from now, who knows? It’s a great step in the right direction, because it would untie the hands of a lot of states that would otherwise pass similar legislation.

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Someone should have told Hillary Clinton that if you’re going to have your “experience” be the major theme of your campaign, you should at least make sure that those so-called “experiences” actually happened, and if they didn’t, at least don’t tout ones that can be instantly refuted by news footage:

At least when this stuff happened with Al Gore, it was the media making stuff up, not the actual candidate himself. Makes me wonder if Hillary even knows where that 3am phone even is. Does it even exist?

At the WaPo, Michael Dobbs’ Factchecker has a rather in-depth analysis of the latest HRC embellishment.

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…in which Chuck Todd, political director at NBC News restates the painful, mind-numbingly obvious revelation (in regards to coverage of McCain’s recent gaffe on Iraq that shows he really doesn’t have a clue):

Todd: He’s got enough of that in the bank, at least with the media, that he can get away with it. I mean, the irony to this is had either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama misspoke like that, it’d have been on a running loop, and it would become a, a big problem for a couple of days for them

Crooks and Liars has more.

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