(Update) “Why America was nuked!”
By Mona
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.
-Voltaire
The multi-million dollar behemoth that is Townhall.com — joining talk radio giant Salem Communications with syndicated columnists and popular right-wing bloggers like Hugh Hewitt — is a good barometer of what passes for sane discourse among the contemporary GOP. Sure, some of their columnists include GeorgeWill, Thomas Sowell, Jacob Sullum and other respected voices on the right (or libertarians).
This blockbuster media empire, however, also carries columnists some may not know well, but who are influential with the right via the megaphone of TH. Consider what it means that one of the TH columnists, Kevin McCullough just spewed this,and that at TH it passes for serious punditry.
Only two weeks after the elections in November of 2008, The United States of America, a nation of former greatness lay in absolute desolate ruin. Within the previous 72 hours a series of eight successive, delayed nuclear devices had been detonated. Indescribably large portions of metro Washington D.C., Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, and two thirds of the island of Manhattan have been turned into steaming craters. Millions are dead, President George W. Bush is in intensive care, two-thirds of the Cabinet – including the Vice President missing or dead.
President-elect Barack Obama faces the most enormous challenge of any incoming President in the history of the nation.
But why?
How did it happen?
Turn back the clock to the week of February 5, 2007. With a courageous handful of dissenting votes against the measures, the two houses of Congress – purposefully ignore the pleas of General David Petraeus and both pass non-binding resolutions that condemn the President’s call for victory…
…. It matters not that at 6pm EST across America Hewitt, Levin, Gibson, and Savage tried daily to remind us all of what would come….
…because the Congress had decided to de-fund the southern border fence there is noted increase in the number of border crossings by people attempting to get in to the United States.
With them are the final two persons needed to activate the final two portable nuclear devices in American cities.
President Bush, out of loyalty and love for our best allies Israel, orders jet strikes on Tehran. Unfortunately the damage done is not able to penetrate deep enough underground to disturb Iran’s operational hub.
Beginning at 5am on Wednesday morning, Al Qaeda agents incinerate historic Washington D.C., downtown Manhattan is leveled, and the Sears Tower in Chicago sprays bits of glass as far as DuPage county.
Will we then be a nation UNITED towards victory?
Will it even matter?
The polarization in this country cannot be resolved given that the Bush, authoritarian, febrile right is now mainstream, and as Jim recently noted, is as sensible as the John Birch Society:
In the real world, neo-Birchism is the dominant tendency on the right…National Review, particularly its website, is one of the foci of post-Birch paranoia. But National Review isn’t unusual. What’s left of American conservatism these days is little but “a dark vision of paranoia and loathing.â€
No, NR is not unusual — TH issues a steady diet of deranged, paranoid and dangerous rants. This mainstreaming of lunacy is among the reasons why war with Iran is now nearly inevitable. People who believe — or at least find within the realm of reasonable — demented codswollop like McCullough’s hold the Executive office, and form a large part of the GOP base.
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Update:
What’s notable about the Town Hall stable of columnists, the vast bulk of them anyway, is that they write like 6th graders….Today’s conservatism is pure hatred and idiocy. It has all the intellectual heft and cool discernment of a middle schooler’s myspace page.
Among the most feeble-minded in the TH stable — a lad who can barely string together a noun and verb coherently, much less in an interesting manner — is professional virgin Ben Shapiro (author of books(!) like Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism is Corrupting our Future.) When young Ben is not using his crayons to demand chastity of his peers, he is at TH shrieking that Democrats and other Bush critics ought to be tried for sedition, and most recently is valiantly defending “traditional marriage” from the Evil Gay Cabal that is “knowingly” attempting to destroy it:
There are those who do not believe that the institution of marriage is under assault. There are those who do not believe that same-sex marriage is a knowing attempt to undermine the nature of marriage. There are those who do not believe that many homosexuals bear a particular animus for heterosexual marriage, and have designs beyond mere tolerance.
Then there are those of us who live in the real world. …
[Same-sex marriage advocates] make clear that in order to deny homosexual marriage, we must uphold the beautiful and natural distinctions between men and women. They also make clear that we must uphold the value of heterosexuality over homosexuality. We must take up the gauntlet and, in doing so, vindicate the possibility of a higher spiritual elevation through the deepest possible human relationship.
The increasingly wholesale erosion of serious and sophisticated political analysis on the right would be amusing, except that hordes of devoted followers believe that all this authoritarian, bigoted drivel constitutes brilliant insight. That fact in no small part explains our current national predicament. So friends, do your part, take up the gauntlet and, in doing so, vindicate the possibility of a higher spiritual elevation through the deepest possible human relationship.
Comment by Leonard —
February 6, 2007 @ 7:48 pm
“Indescribable!”
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Comment by I've got questions... —
February 6, 2007 @ 7:51 pm
Wait, people respect George Will? Really? Is it because he talks baseball? Why aren’t the libertarians arguing passionately about the salary cap?
Comment by Michael —
February 6, 2007 @ 8:14 pm
Considering that the Bush administration’s position is that the fence could allow them to gain control of the border by 2009, this scenario is no less likely with this congress than it was in 2006. Or 1777
Comment by Gary Farber —
February 6, 2007 @ 9:41 pm
I’ve tried to puzzle out what Leonard was saying in #1; it finally came to me that maybe he was trying to quote The Princess Bride, but substituted “indescribable” for “inconceivable.”
Comment by Walt —
February 6, 2007 @ 9:47 pm
Gary, they use the word “indescribably” in the TH column. Leonard is updating the joke for the context.
Comment by Brian —
February 6, 2007 @ 9:52 pm
I hate it when these guys scribble their dearest fantasies: cities destroyed, millions killed, and try to pass them off as nightmares.
At least he threw in Dallas and Chicago so it wouldn’t be a completely bicoastal affair.
Comment by Fledermaus —
February 6, 2007 @ 10:06 pm
the two houses of Congress – purposefully ignore the pleas of General David Petraeus and both pass non-binding resolutions that condemn the President’s call for victory
Because, you know, if it wasn’t for those non-binding resolutions the terrorists would be saying “You know Ali, we have all these suitcase nukes but we can’t use them now because the senate failed to pass the non binding resolution we might as well just give up”
Comment by Jon H —
February 6, 2007 @ 10:21 pm
Gosh, you’d think Congress were resisting an attempt to deploy a million troops, not 17,000.
If the stakes are so high, why isn’t Town Hall calling for a literal million man march on Baghdad and Tehran?
Comment by Brian C.B. —
February 6, 2007 @ 10:27 pm
“including the Vice President missing or dead.”
He’s in the “missing” category. I’m pretty sure Cheney can’t be killed. He’s probably wandering the suburbs of Pittsburg, repeating “Brains…delicious brains,” interminablly. Anyway, why bomb Teheran? Wouldn’t it be more useful to bomb, you know, the Iranian nuclear facilities?
As for the rest of this crap, “Green Lantern: We’re Calling You!”
Comment by c-cipher —
February 6, 2007 @ 10:41 pm
What’s notable about the Town Hall stable of columnists, the vast bulk of them anyway, is that they write like 6th graders.
There was an older form of conservatism that favored virtue, rallied around excellence and, in unguarded moments, even had a few nice things to say about elitism.
Today’s conservatism is pure hatred and idiocy. It has all the intellectual heft and cool discernment of a middle schooler’s myspace page.
Comment by Madeline F —
February 6, 2007 @ 11:25 pm
Nearly inevitable? To me it seems that people are not happy with the war on Iraq, and recognize that we don’t have the soldiers to win that, much less start another losing war on Iran.
A war on people named José, though, that’s a lot more likely.
Comment by Thoreau —
February 6, 2007 @ 11:29 pm
Mona, I still can’t bring myself to believe that they’ll actually do it. I hope I’m right.
Comment by abb1 —
February 7, 2007 @ 5:38 am
With them are the final two persons needed to activate the final two portable nuclear devices in American cities.
Doctor Doom and The Penguin? Magneto and Mystique?
Comment by Alex —
February 7, 2007 @ 6:53 am
Why would bombing an “operational hub” in Tehran stop an agent-in-place in the US from exploding their bomb?
The voices are obviously from outside the head on this one.
Comment by bryan —
February 7, 2007 @ 7:25 am
“Doctor Doom and The Penguin? Magneto and Mystique?”
ha, obviously magneto and mystique.
Comment by Brian C.B. —
February 7, 2007 @ 8:10 am
“There was an older form of conservatism that favored virtue, rallied around excellence and, in unguarded moments, even had a few nice things to say about elitism.”
C’mon, man. Martin Van Buren and his cabinet are dead. Stop the mourning and move on.
Comment by Brian C.B. —
February 7, 2007 @ 8:13 am
“With them are the final two persons needed to activate the final two portable nuclear devices in American cities.”
I’m thinking more The Keymaster and The Gatekeeper. Mostly because the thought Sigourney Weaver with blown-dry hair and a torn red dress gets me hot. She could probably hitch across the border. Rick Moranis, well, yeah. The fence would stop him. So, they have a point.
Comment by KCinDC —
February 7, 2007 @ 8:35 am
Wait, Mona is joining in the “24″ blogging now?
Comment by The Fat Lady Sings —
February 7, 2007 @ 12:45 pm
How can you wade through such bullshit and not come out feeling the need to be de-loused? I have a bad taste in my mouth just from reading your snippets. What awful, deranged idiots! Pity we closed all those mental institutions thirty-odd years back. That McCullough amadán needs to be heaved into one and have the door padlocked behind him!
Trackback by Radio Left —
February 7, 2007 @ 1:15 pm
Mikes Blog Roundup…
Crooks and Liars
My Two Sense: Last night, Glenn Beck said that he doesn’t have many black friends because he is scared he might say something somebody "could take wrong." A lot of these guys say the same thing…
Shakespeare…
Comment by Eric the .5b —
February 7, 2007 @ 2:36 pm
There are sane conservatives against the war…but they’re being awfully quiet.
Comment by K. Signal Eingang —
February 7, 2007 @ 3:13 pm
re: the identity of “the final two persons needed to activate the nuclear devices…”
Should be obvious given recent events…
http://i10.photobucket.com/albums/a106/SQUEENY_WEENIE/Ignignokt-and-Err-Y.gif
Comment by Glaivester —
February 7, 2007 @ 8:33 pm
I agree about Kevin McCullough.
Articles pretending to be from the future have never impressed me. Usually they make such asinine predictions that they are only good to archive so that you can laugh at how wrong they were later.
This one from back in September 2002 is my favorite.
On the other hand, a response to Michael’s and Madeline F’ comments that are apparently against immigration restrictionism:
The people we are importing from Mexico and the rest of Latin America are mostly poor, unskilled, and are largely racial minorities who very much feel a sense of racial solidarity with other Latinos. In other words, they are natural liberals. Do any of you honestly think that when they have kids here who automatically get citizenship or when they get citizenship themselves, that they are going to vote against a tremendous welfare state? Does anyone here not think that many of these people look upon Hugo Chavez and other socialist demagogues as heroes?
Yes, yes, I know, we should be teaching them to be libertarian and converting them, not prevening them from coming here. Yes, I am sure that a person earning $5.15 an hour (or less) and who has no skills is very much going to agree that free health care, free public schooling, welfare, housing subsidies, and high taxes on the rich gringos are bad things?
Liberals like Matt Yglesias realize this.
Comment by Glaivester —
February 7, 2007 @ 8:36 pm
I made a comment that appears to have been moderated out.
I don’t know if it was intentional or if it was lost in the spam filter.
Comment by Mona —
February 7, 2007 @ 8:57 pm
Not by moi!? I know I’ve read Jim say his spam filter has sometimes snared legit comments.
Comment by Jim Henley —
February 8, 2007 @ 7:54 am
Four comments have now been freed from Akismet prison. Unforch, there’s no whitelisting capability. I should probably stress that comment spam is a huge issue here otherwise. Te four comments I freed were in the hopper with 94 outright spam messages.
Comment by smchris —
February 8, 2007 @ 8:07 am
Yeah, but that’s nothing compared to what the aliens did in 2016 after President Hillary vetoed the Pentagon’s appropriation for particle beam weapons research.
[Seems like they have decided to retreat to their base of the perpetually fearful, doesn't it?]
Comment by Robby K. —
February 8, 2007 @ 1:59 pm
Crisis on Earth-TH!
“Uncle Sam, why have you summoned us to your Earth?”
“To help us overcome the Muslims who WON the War on Terror!”
Comment by Fraud Guy —
February 9, 2007 @ 10:11 am
I noticed a strange part of the McCullough’s doomsday story:
“President Bush, out of loyalty and love for our best allies Israel, orders jet strikes on Tehran.”
Not because our national defense needs, not because of real American interests, but out of his loyalty for Israel, Bush orders the strikes that cause the retaliatory nuclear attack.
Well, Kevin McCullough apparently believes that Bush has his priorities straight to order the attack. (Of course, if we had humint and investigators looking at real threats, we might have caught the perpetrators before they could cause a problem.)
“Damn the nukes; attack Iran!”
And note that Bush ordered the attack after his successor has been elected; i.e., after his policies were apparently repudiated, and when most Presidents avoid doing anything consequential to allow their successor a chance to fulfill their mandate. I guess McCullough thinks that Bush should try to go out with a bang if his plans are stymied by those damnfool elected representatives.
Trackback by Anonymous —
December 21, 2007 @ 7:58 pm
Amatuer Panties
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