You may or may not be shocked to learn that, after hours at the Space Access conference, discussions took place, often with alcohol involved. One of the results is my latest piece at PJM, in which I report on the president’s attempt to repair our relations with the solar system.
Category Archives: Satire
The Journochat
Iowahawk has managed to penetrate the Journolist, and found a copy of the latest chat session:
SPENCER ACKERMAN: did katha leave?
MATTHEW YGLESIAS: yeah
SPENCER ACKERMAN: shes a total bitch but she’s right… none of the hot media girls will hang out with us
EZRA KLEIN: i/k, but i don’t get it… i know i used to have kind of a complexion problem but it cleared up after i started using ProActiv
CHRIS HAYES: i/k a couple of us are a little chubby but were all pretty cute and it’s not like we wear gross clothes or anything
SPENCER ACKERMAN: ya but the only girls who will talk to us are ugly av club lepers like katha and jane hamsher and amanda marcotte
EZRA KLEIN: dont forget the two naomis
MATTHEW YGLESIAS: ewwwwww
JOSH MARSHALL: sometimes i really hate my body… does anyone know any good fast diets?
ERIC ALTERMAN: dont fall in that trap josh… read the article in the May Teen Utne about dealing with body image
MATTHEW YGLESIAS: idk if im ready to really be with a girl
KATHA POLLITT has entered the room.
KATHA POLLITT: this is katha and jane and amanda!! we are at amandas house and we have been reading EVERYTHING you boys said!!!! F/U!!! i hope your happy, jane is crying in the bathroom!!!
EZRA KLEIN: oh s**t sorry
KATHA POLLITT: tell it to jane you JERK-O-LIST AZZHOLES!! And guess what ezra?? I have a screen cap of the whole thing!!! I bet mickey kaus will be interested in seeing it!!!!
EZRA KLEIN: come on dont do that katha
KATHA POLLITT: too late ezra, and you can write ur own f**king blogpost for 1st period. FTW!!!
KATHA POLLITT has left the room.
MATTHEW YGLESIAS: faaaaack
EZRA KLEIN: we’re screwed
JOSH MARSHALL:
Highlarious.
You Know They’ve Gone Too Far
…when they’ve nationalized Iowahawk:
The legislative charter of the TWRA, established by Congress and the President, specifies its principle goal as the preservation of jobs in the critically important blogging sector of the American economy. Thus the board invited Mr. Burge to present a formal proposal on March 11. After a brief negotiation period, Mr. Burge’s initial request of $6.3 billion was lowered to a mutually agreeable $750 and cab fare to the Greyhound station. In exchange, Mr. Burge agreed to (1) regularly submit the financial records of Iowahawk to TWRA oversight regulators, (2) cease outsourcing joke production to foreign subcontractors, and (3) implement a rigorous program of personal hygiene.
Well, at least they didn’t force a merger with Saturday Night Live.
A Political Shocker
Arlen Specter is going to cross the aisle, and run as an actual Republican.
How To Get Your Family Out Of A Financial Crisis
Apparently, this is wise advice in these tough times, for families everywhere.
More Words Of Conservative Wisdom
T. Coddington Voorhees VII is guest blogging at Iowahawk’s place again:
That conundrum of electoral calculus was the topic of much discussion two weeks ago, when my Nassau confreres and I were summoned to the White House for an intimate repast with the new President and his inner circle. Mr. Obama was radiant as ever, still basking in the afterglow of his historic victory. I admit to a recent wobble or two in my faith in him, as the severe beatings suffered by my various family trusts have necessitated some unanticipated cutbacks in my household staff. But that easy, commanding elegance was a bracing reminder of why I endorsed Mr. Obama as the true conservative presidential choice. After dessert (black walnut dacquoise with sections of quince) we retired to the Blue Room where chief of staff Rahm Emanuel entertained us with some droll tales of his days as terpsichorean with the Mossad ballet auxiliary, even treating us to a few thrilling, if f-bomb laced, arabesques. He was followed by Vice President Joe Biden, who put on a fine display of his famed wit and penchant for unpredictable cerebral infarctions. Amid the sparkling bonhomie the President solicited our views on the causes of — and solutions to — conservatism’s sad state. Seizing the opportunity for a tete-a-tete with the world’s most powerful, popular, and beautiful man, I explained the tragic plague of rubes who stand athwart our modernization program.
“Why not just drive them out?” asked the President, elegantly French inhaling his Marlboro Light 100. “Under the old bus, so to speak.”
“Alas, were it so easy,” interrupted Brooks, in a clumsy attempt to draw Mr. Obama’s attentions from me like some cocquettish debutante. Parker, Noonan and Frum were too lost in orgasmic schoolgirl giggling to offer anything more substantive. I ignored their embarrasing faux pas and pressed on with my thesis.
“We’ve tried, Mr. President,” I explained. “But there are unsavory elements within the party who keep bringing them back in.”
My reference, obviously, was to the self-styled luminaries of “populism” who hang like a millstone around the Republican neck — the Sarah Palins, the Plumbing Joes, the Bobby Jindals, the Rush Limbaughs, the motley middlebrow state college pretenders to the conservative throne. A shared contempt for these arriviste oafs unites the Nassau summitteers perhaps even more than our shared fondness for a snifter of well-behaved armagnac VSOP. I have made no secret of my feelings about la Palin and her grim brood of ill-mannered snowbillies, as well that horrid toilet tinkerer from Toledo whose fifteen minutes have somehow refused to expire. The recent emergence of Bobby Jindal and Rush Limbaugh in the intraparty maelstrom yet affords fresh opportunities for conservative dismality.
What is a conservative to do?
Take Your Tea And Shove It
Economy stimulator extraordinaire Iowahawk tells the American Tea Party what to do with their bags:
Thanks to the new federal mortgage bailout bill, Americans like me are finally on track for housing security. Previously facing a $1.2 million debt from three mortgage on a home recently appraised at $43,500, less missing bathroom fixtures and windows, the President’s plan allowed me to renegotiate my payments down to a level that will keep me solvent until at least mid June-ish. Now that my family and various friends from Jimbo’s Tap Room no longer have to worry about having a stable crash pad, we are finally free to resume the spending that will lead America back to economic prosperity.
I wish I could take credit for it, but it took the collective effort of hundreds of thousands of us in the subprime community, working with the financial industry and public sector officials. Unfortunately, there is another group out there who is working to kill important financial bailout reforms just as they are sparking a renaissance in the American housing market. I’m speaking, of course, of the so-called “Tea Party” tax protesters.
I’m sure you’ve heard of them or read their emails: “Wah, I paid my mortgage.” “Wah, I didn’t use my house for an ATM.” “Wah, Dave I need that hundred back I lent you at Christmas.” Now, I’m as sympathetic to a good sob story as anybody, but these whiners have nobody to blame but themselves for their predicament. Anyone who kept track of the Gallup presidential polls last year should have known what was coming, so don’t blame me if you decided to waste your money paying your stupid mortgage. But, in the six-dimensional bizarro world of these noisy tax gripes, they expect me to give up my bailout to pay for their irresponsible lack of foresight! Helloooo?! Beam me up, Scotty!
Some people are just ingrates.
A Trip To The Museum
We went over to the Holocaust Museum today. I’d never been, but never had much desire to — I’d read my fill of that history years ago. It’s not so much that I found it disturbing as simply a waste of time that I could spend looking at museums in which I was more interested. But Patricia wanted to, and one of the reasons that I love her is that she did, and so we did. As I expected, there was little unexpected for me in the permanent exhibit on the upper floors, but in the basement is space for temporary exhibits. One that opened a couple weeks ago (ten days after the White House had a new occupant, though I’m sure that was just a coincidence) was on Nazi propaganda. Now that, I found disturbing.
This is the image that greets you at the beginning of the display.
The placard that accompanied it said that one of the elements of convincing propaganda, to appeal to the masses, is a powerful image combined with a simple message. It helps even more, apparently, if it is done in the style of socialist realism, like this.
Farther on in the display, it discussed how Goebbels and the other Nazi propagandists were enamored of new communications technologies, using the gramophone as an example. If they were operating now, they would no doubt be fascinated by Web 2.0.
A few steps later, I came across the following striking quote, by a woman in Germany who had attended one of Hitler’s rallies:
How many look up to him with touching faith! As their helper, their saviour, their deliverer from unbearable distress…
I was so relieved that I live almost eighty years later, and that our society had grown beyond that kind of primitive thinking — that the president is responsible for the personal well-being of every citizen, and every sparrow that falls in America, like a demigod. I mean, obviously, any responsible leader today, confronted with such idolatry would use it as a teachable moment about the nature of our Republic, rather than basking in the worship, as Hitler did, to gather more raw unchecked political power unto himself.
I also found interesting the description of how the Nazi authorities encouraged and organized public rituals, ceremonies, meetings and other public events. I could see how this kind of activity might solidify public support behind otherwise less politically palatable notions felt important by the state.
Of course, one of the most disturbing tactics, used not only by the National Socialists, but also the fascistic international socialists in the Soviet Union, was the continual rewriting of history to glorify the state, and make it out to be the victim of past failures and treachery, and misguided policies. Some of the examples they gave were almost as though modern leaders were continually talking, fantastically, about how we got into our current economic problems through deregulation and tax cuts, and (non-existent) laissez-faire policies, rather than overspending and overregulation, and continuing government interference in the free market, often at the behest of corporations.
Finally, during the war, one of the hallmarks of the Nazi regime was to control the flow of information to the German citizenry. I hadn’t realized that they actually built specialized radios whose sensitivity was so weak that they could only pick up German government signals, but generally not overseas views (such as the BBC). They viewed clandestine listeners to foreign broadcasts as traitors to the state, undermining the war effort. I’m certainly glad we live in a nation where such attitudes would be odious, to both Congress and the President.
All in all, it was a relief to leave the museum, and walk back across the mall toward the White House, secure in the knowledge that such things could never occur here.
[Update a while later]
We’re all fascists now (part II).
And try to figure out which chapter of the story we’re in.
[President’s Day update]
The administration is no longer issuing denials on the Fairness Doctrine. I guess when the campaign did it last summer, it was, you know, “just words” to get elected.
But I’m sure they mean well. They just have to keep their options open in case some people don’t follow the leader’s sage advice to “not listen to Rush.”
[Update a few minutes later]
What I find fascinating is how the BDS-afflicted had to doctor the photos of President Bush to push their conception of him as a fascist dictator, yet the Obama promoters did it to him with no apparent sense of the irony of what they were doing.
These folks seem to have had their sense of irony excised at birth.
Just Arrived In Big Hollywood
Cold Humpcrack Creekwater: Two retarded gay cowgirl sisters (Rene Zellweger, Traci Lords) defy a fundamentalist sherriff (Chris Cooper) and discover love in this 1930’s period piece set in the Appalachian outback of Nebraskansaw.
Angel Soft This: In a shocking and sometimes humorous indictment of the toilet paper industry, filmmaker Morgan Spurlock documents the ravages he suffers after 30 straight days of non-stop butt-wiping.
Snow Fuji Mountain: Mothra (Toby Damon) and Gamera (Orlando Law) discover forbidden love while destroying Tokyo in this story of nuclear-triggered sexual awakening.
I would actually pay to see some of these.
The Pelosi GTxi Commercial
Some enterprising 527 (or the RNC) needs to buy some ad time for this. Perhaps during the next Congressional hearings on bailing out the auto industry.