And the weekly prize for brevity in bitchery goes to….. Alicublog:
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
SHORTER CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: Bloody hell, Bush bollocksed the war! But I still prefer his dick to Clinton’s. Glug, glug, glug, glug, glug. 1:52 PM by roy
Read more: Christopher Hitchens, Mockery
Despite his attempts at gentility Dinesh D’Souza just can’t help flashing his wad
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When a clever and ambitious wingnut makes a lot of money, he invariably begins to ape his oligarchical masters. Naturally he believes he was born to be one of them. After all, isn’t it his destiny to be a Ruler of the Universe?
But the devil is in the details and it’s the teensy little slips, like tacky carpets, pleather and full-on genocidal wingnuttery, that let the Dinesh D’Souza’s of this world down. No matter how hard they try to be classy they give themselves away as imitating sycophants.
D’Souza is author of such jeux d’esprit as:
…a parody of African American students at Dartmouth entitled “This Sho Ain’t No Jive Bro”; an interview with a Ku Klux Klan member featuring a graphic of a hanged black man;…
and his latest book is the charmingly-titled “The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11”. He makes a shedload of money from mad, rich rightwingers by pandering – at a price – to their darkest, paranoid, eliminationist fantasies.
But all his money can’t buy him any taste, as Tbogg notes:
D’More D’Souza
Just to point out what makes seemingly intelligent people say incredibly stupid things, it should be noted that wingnut welfare pays really well.D’Souza lives here in San Diego in Fairbanks Ranch, one of our more exclusive gated communities:
Since Dartmouth, the conservative fray has been quite remunerative for D’Souza. Six years ago, he and his wife bought their home in Fairbanks Ranch. The nearly 8000-square-foot house has six bedrooms, seven and a half baths, and a four-car garage, where they keep their maroon 1992 Jaguar XJS. A circular drive fronts the French country stone house. The cathedral-like front room, with its full-length mirrors and tapestries, has an 18th-century French decor of (veneered) golden maple burl furniture. The slick floors echo like a museum as one walks through. In his office, there’s wall-to-wall leopard-print carpet; floor-to-ceiling bookcases are stocked with titles in history, politics, and philosophy. The view out back features a bright blue pool and the arboretum-like landscape.
Today, at his desk, D’Souza is comfortably dressed in preppy garb. Plain shirt (with the polo player insignia), plain pants, tasseled loafers. At one point, his wife Dixie breezes in. She is blonde, petite, California-tanned, and effervescent about her husband. She’s wearing a stylish pink plastic-leather rain jacket.
[…]
Added: For those not from my neck of the woods – Fairbanks Ranch
Eww. The words leopardskin, pink and plastic-leather should never appear in the same galaxy let alone the same article. And on a Republican too. Ick. I’ll presume the word stylish was ironic, as clothes worn by Republicans are obviously transmuted into unstylish tat merely by the act of a wingnut wearing them. Go on, name me one truly chic Repubkcan… can’t, can you?
I love the deftly slipped in (veneered) tooi, n relation to the furniture; you can almost see the delicately-curled sneer. Quite Betjemanian.
Poet and cultural critic John Betjeman would’ve loved mocking D’Souza’s social pretensions (he felt a social fraud all his life too) and he knew just where to slip the knife in. Just as in the above quoted-profile I bet D’Souza wouldn’t even have felt it. He”d’ve had the poem framed.
Here’s Betjeman on petty-bourgeois aspiration:
Mineralia:
Why carbon offsetting is just as another money making scheme exploiting liberal guilt.
How does Bush define victory? It’s the oil, stupid:
Under the new American-drafted law, the Iraqi government will offer contractual concessions up to 30 years’ long to foreign companies, using a system known as a PSA (Production Sharing Agreement). In other words, American and other Western oil companies are being allowed to exploit Iraq’s current predicament and negotiate self-serving, one-sided oil PSA’s that will legally commit the entire country of Iraq for the next 30 years.
Animalia:
3 cat videos –
Hot cat on turtle action!
The cat that likes to floss
Just Say No! Cats and the demon weed
Vegetalia:
Professional chav Jade Goody’s racism gives a fading reality show a popularity injection and the nation something to talk about. (Pssst, don’t mention the war!)
These white women, behaving like bitchy schoolgirls in the playground, have reduced Ms Shetty to tears on several occasions, accusing her of wanting to be white, having facial stubble, being “a dog”, making their skin crawl, touching their food (“you don’t know where those hands have been”), and have signally failed to get her name right, calling her “the Indian” at one point.
They might not have been quite as motivated by group tyranny as Orwell described – that “hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture . . . that seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current” – but there seems no doubt that their pack behaviour was offensive to Ms Shetty and damaging to our desire to be seen as a tolerant nation. Remember the message: without intellect we are lost. Clips of those lumpen women are being broadcast round the world as typically British, voicing British sentiments; by default we are all cast in the same mould of molten ignorance; all reduced to the racist drone of a thousand pub conversations.
Marginalia:
Madison Guy has links to some of the best street fashion photoblogs on the web, courtesy Avedon’s comments section.
James Wolcott asks why are are British sex scandals so much more interesting than American ones? Short answer, for our politicians the illicitness is 75% of the fun and the danger of being caught adds more spice. American politicians do it from a feeling of entitlement rather than in the spirit of titillating adventure, so it’s more about the greedy consumption of a ‘luxury’ sexual product like high-class call-girls (or rough trade or kids as the case may be) than the eroticism and thrill of the chase. Though the erotic aspect falls down somewhat in light of the four-year liaison between former PM John Major and ex-health Minister Edwina Currie – “By the way, Edwina, that was a not inconsiderably satisfying orgasm”. Ewww.
Resolution? What New Year’s resolution? For your sweet tooth, here’s Fanny, a French patisserie chef who blogs in English at Foodbeam.
Read the recipes and patisserie reviews, drool over the pictures, and get baking. I made her Petits carrés au caramel et au chocolat, known to us commoners asmillionaires shortbread, last weekend using white chocolate ( because that’s what we had) and it was very, very rich and absolutely delicious.
Read more UK, Politics, Oil,IraqCats, Cake,Big Brother, Fashion,. Sex scandals.
Atrios calls out that stupid fucker Kevin “I thought Kenneth Pollack was smart” Drum on Drum’s amnesia about the war debate and asks:
..adding, as I meant to say in the original post, there are also numerous obvious bad consequences to killing a bunch of people for no good reason. So, yes, there were numerous reasons to oppose this war and no good reasons to support it. Why are we still arguing about this?
Because the idiots and criminals who conspired to get the War on Iraq going, have not had to pay for their crimes yet. Worse they’ ve been rewarded for it. As long as that is the case, as long as having been wrong about the War on Iraq carries no cost, people will be able to argue that having been a supporter of the war was the right thing to do.
In this case, Kevin Drum is just self aware enough and still possesses a rudimentary sense of shame, so he’s unable to argue with a straight face that he made the right choice at the time, but what he can do is rubbish his then opponents.
For this to stop, people need to start losing their cushy thinktank jobs and pundit gigs. People like Peter Beinart or Kenneth Pollack should at the very least be laughed of television when they open their big fat mouths.
Read more about:
Kevin Drum, War on Iraq, chickenhawks
Which is better, New US Left or Old US Left? Bit of a pointless question, in light of the fact that what America considers ‘left’ is, by international standards, pretty right-wing and at best gradualist in tendency. So the spirited yet essentially empty discussion going on over at the News Blog re a blogspat between Max Sawickyand Steve Gilliard is being conducted somewhat in the manner of two bald men fighting over a comb.
The argument goes like this (and I’m paraphrasing madly): Max said the New Internet Left is just a money sucker for the Democrats, and Steve replied that Marxism is boring, Marx is irrelevant and the Old Left were a bunch of a hippie nutters who were dangerous with it, who set back the left’s cause for generations, and who should just shut up and let the New Blogging Vanguard get on with it.
But both fail to lift their eyes above the American horizon, both fail to notice that the Left is an international phenomenon and neither acknowledge that the use of modern technology as a tool for political organisation is not confined to middle-class reformist Americans. (I get the impression that in their heart of hearts they think the ‘free’ market will sort it all out if only the Dems can get elected. Then things can go on as normal and they won’t have to change their comfortable lifestyles at all. Change the system? Why… that’s crazy revolutionary talk!)
Both Gilliard and Sawicki seem to have internalised the reformist view that US voters just need to get rid of Bush, fiddle round the edges a bit and everything’ll be fine and dandy and politics can go on as usual.