Operation Yellow Elephant
Search Site
Our Sponsor
Reviews of This Blog
"It's ridiculous to compare you to a douche bag; douche bags serve a purpose."
"Pollutes most of what it touches"
"A blog you should be reading for up-to-the-minute news on wingnuts"
"Very funny"
"Shrill"
Online Store
Click here to enter store.
Media Links
Blogroll
100 Monkeys Typing
A Chicken Is Not A Pillage
A Lie A Day
The American Street
Bark Bark Woof Woof
Cloyce's Coffee Klatsch
Correntewire
Dependable Renegade
Elementropy
Jon Swift
Princess Sparkle Pony
The Republic of Dogs
Sadly, No!
Why Now?
World O'Crap
Wingnut Wide Web
Internment Spa Lady
Fat Andy in P-Town
Clown Hall
America's Worst Law Student™
Gipper's Nippers
Freepers Creepers
Feeds
Credits
Site Statistics
Archive for October 2004
Pep Talks
Posted by on 10/31/04 at 11:44 am
Category: Politics
ome pep talks for Tuesday. First, the St. Crispin’s Day speech as reimagined by the other Roger Ailes:
And our first Tuesday shall be stolen ne’er again,
From this day to the ending of the world,
And we on it shall be reenfranchised -
We many, we happy more, we band of voters;
For they to-day who cast their ballot for Kerry
Shall beat the freepers, and Repugs so vile,
This day we shall restore the Constitution;
And slimebags from Texas now-a-bed
Shall think themselves fuck’d like ne’er before,
And hold their manhoods cheaper still (if that’s possible) while all rejoice
That vote with us upon Election Day.
And just in case you need more encouragement, read this pep talk from Al Giordano.
Why We Deposed Saddam (Pt. 89)
Posted by on 10/29/04 at 3:38 pm Category: PoliticsRecently recovered documents found in one of Saddam’s presidential palaces reveal the routine oppression and human rights abuses committed by Saddam on the Iraqi people. At one patriotic rally for Saddam an eighteen-year old was pulled aside:
The staffer quizzed Ahmed about whether he was a Saddam supporter, asked him why he was there and what questions he would be asking the president.Ahmed told a reporter: “Then he came back and said, ‘If you protest, it won’t be me taking you out. It will be a sniper,’ . . . He said it in such a serious tone it scared the crap out of me.”
At another Saddam rally, the crowd was made to stand and recite the following:
I care about freedom and liberty. I care about my family. I care about my country. Because I care, I promise to support Saddam Hussein, president of the Republic of Iraq.
Actually I’ve changed the names; these events all occurred at Bush rallies, as Froomkin reported today in the Washington Post.
All You Need To Know About Lileks
Posted by on 10/28/04 at 6:19 pm Category: Politics
ou don’t even need to get past the first paragraph of today’s UpchuckBleat to find your first lie from Mr. Lie-leks:
All you need to know about Arafat was that he insisted on wearing a pistol when he addressed the UN General Assembly. And all you need to know about the UN, I suppose, is that they let him.
Lie-leks is referring to Arafat’s 1974 “Guns and Olive Branches” speech. But, as even this anti-Arafat source admits, the U.N. only let him wear the holster into the hall; Arafat had to leave the gun behind. All you need to know about Lileks is that he makes shit up.
No, you also need to know this about Gnat Daddy Lileks. Today Gnat caught Daddy watching pornography (involving animals!) on his computer: a video featuring “tormented bunnies” and called “Everyone Else Has Had More Sex Than Me”:
As luck would have it, Gnat snuck into my studio while this was playing, and I hit pause. I want to see the bunny. No. Why? Because the bunny is talking about grown-up things. Oh. That was enough, for now. Grown-up things are boring. For the moment. But oh, the angry tormented bunnies await.
When you get a gander at Mr. Lileks, that’s all you need to know about why Mrs. Lileks never comes home and why Mr. Lileks would be drawn to a song about how everyone else has had more sex than him. But he needs to be more careful around little Gnat who already has heavy burdens enough without having to watch Daddy Lileks writhe, sweat and shudder while watching an angry bunny sex video in his “studio.”
So Does That Mean That a Vente Cappucino at Starbucks Is Going To Cost More Now?
Posted by on 10/27/04 at 6:17 pm Category: PoliticsJames “Gnat Daddy” Lileks today once again unwittingly displays how truly clueless he is:
The work done for the day, we [Gnat and I] colored in her Wallace and Grommit book (it had no American price on the back, only British: 2 pounds 99. The clerk sold it to me for $2.99. Thank God it wasn’t Italian, in lira.)
Hello, James, anybody home? They have EUROS in Italy now, James. Since February 28, 2002.
If Lileks didn’t spend so much time coloring, swiffing and coughing up interminable right-wing rants he might have time to read a newspaper now and then. Ironically Lileks, who probably still thinks that you can’t buy toilet paper and deodorant in Europe, accuses Kerry, in the same post, of not knowing whether Chirac speaks English or not. Not so long ago the mouth-breathers at American Digest and Flatlander wanted Lileks to run for Senate. You might remember my reaction to that idea.
Department of Corrections
Posted by on 10/27/04 at 4:15 pm Category: Politics
wo corrections that, uh, weren’t. First, from the New York Times:
A front-page article yesterday about the Bush administration’s policy on prosecuting terrorists misstated the offense to which Elliott L. Abrams, now a member of the National Security Council, pleaded guilty in 1991 - and for which he was later pardoned - in connection with the Iran-contra scandal. It was withholding information from Congress, not lying to Congress.
Which isn’t to say that Abram didn’t lie to Congress, since the D.C. Court of Appeals lifted his license to practice law in the District for lying to Congress, as in saying untrue things rather than not saying true things. I’m sure Okrent will be all over this. (Yeah, right).
But the best correction ever comes from the Wall Street Journal:
NEWS CORP.’S Fox News was incorrectly described in a page-one article Monday as being sympathetic to the Bush cause.
Uh-huh.
It’s a Bleating Shame
Posted by on 10/26/04 at 3:17 pm Category: Politicsell, the Washington Post’s 2004 Best Blogs Readers’ Choice Award got “freeped”. According to the “Reader’s Choice,” the National Review Online’s freak show, The Corner, provides the best blog coverage of the Democratic Party. Equally annoying, “The Bleat,” a tiresome right-wing blog by James Lileks, a provincial wingnut whom nobody outside of Minneapolis has ever heard of, other than fellow wingnuts and those of us who annoy wingnuts, was voted as most original. Some poor schmucks no doubt clicked on the link in the Post article to Lileks’s blog. So, what would they have learned from the long-winded and rambling entry Lileks posted Monday on “The Bleat”? Here’s what they would have learned.
First, Lileks calls his daughter “Gnat,” as in annoying bug.
[Repairing my camcorder] is notably useless when it comes to rewinding the spool of time so I can recapture the moment when Gnat put on a crown at Burger King and did what appeared to be the Funky Chicken, the Mashed Potato, the Frug and the Batusi in one alarming spasm. People didn’t know whether to applaud or put a tongue depressor in her mouth
Hopefully when Gnat writes the bitter memoir of her life in the Lileks household she’ll call her dad “Cockroach” or “Spider” or “Reptile.”
Speaking of “reptiles,” Lileks sees them everywhere including in piles of leaves:
October has its glories, but the real truth of the month is a night like Saturday saw – a vile wind, low skies, sodden heaps of leaves shining in the gutters like some indistinct and disorganized reptile.
Where does he come up with that simile? Lileks must spend too much time playing with the refrigerator magnet poetry set his wife bought to try to shore up her unhappy marriage.
Post readers would also have learned that Lileks can’t spell or at least can’t type google into his browser.
I love that – T. S. Elliott was intelligent because he was a great poet, you see. (Dr. Pound; calling Dr. Pound) The old hoary fallacy: achievement in art necessarily confers some sort of moral wisdom.
“T.S. Elliott”? He was obviously thinking of the kid in E.T., not the poet T.S. Eliot. Then in the next breath he makes fun of the CBC for mispelling Marlboro as Malborough. Lileks may have his literary greats screwed up, but he’s got his cigarettes down pat. “Old hoary” is also nice, kind of like the “Shrimp Scampi” that he and Gnat had at the Olive Garden last week.
Another thing they’d learn is that Lileks often uses big words he doesn’t understand as when he says “swamping the gunwales.” You can swamp a boat, and you can overrun the gunwales, James, but you can’t really “swamp the gunwales.”
An additional key insight that Post readers would garner into James’s personality is that he doesn’t learn from his mistakes:
I was tired and somewhat ill. I had stayed up too late the previous night fast-forwarding through “28 Days,” waiting for the moment when a character says “you know, in retrospect, having a lot of guns about would have been bludey useful when you’re overrun by facking zombies, raht? Facking raht, mite.” But no matter how many times I watch the movie hoping it will improve, it always gets worse.
James, surely you know that definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. But like his political hero, George W, Lileks just keeps doing the same shit over and over, hoping things will get better.
Lileks, the astute Post reader will also notice, throws in lots of French words (penseur et savant, déclassé, c’est dommage) for no apparent reason other than to suggest an intellect is hiding somewhere behind this drivel. The stray French words seem, um, forced from someone who has a pole up his behind about how Democrats seek “greater integration into the European-led global order.”
Lileks also thinks that people, including any unwitting Post reader who clicked through to his site, are interested in reading paragraph after paragraph on his computer woes, which seem mostly self-inflicted — a combination of cheap stuff and woefully mismananged do-it-yourself repairs. Lileks can’t even manage to install a CD drive without screwing it up and whining endlessly about it. (I guess that’s why he calls his blog “The Bleat”).
Finally, the Post reader would have learned that Lileks thinks the Democrats have hired “a fleet of lawyers fueled up and ready to shove their thumbs into the eye sockets of the electorial process,” linking to this article on the Democrats as proof. Once again, if poor old Lileks could navigate his browser to google, he would have found the Republicans are also hiring teams of lawyers to shove their thumbs into the electoral process as well, such as described in this article. But I suppose this doesn’t count because, in the world of “The Bleat,” IOKIYAAR.*
*IOKIYAAR: “It’s OK if you are a Republican.”
Priorities
Posted by on 10/25/04 at 9:50 pm Category: Politics
hat you will not find mentioned at the Bush campaign website today:
The disappearance of 380 tons of powerful conventional explosives from Al Qaqaa
What you will find mentioned today on the Bush Campaign website:
It’s Official
Posted by on 10/23/04 at 9:17 pm Category: Politics
t’s official. Bush supporters are dumber than Kerry supporters. Even though this has been painfully obvious for some time, an official study was done to prove the obvious. (Rather like the famous study that demonstrated that one of the problems confronting stupid people is that they are too stupid to understand that they are actually stupid.)
So here are some of the findings of the University of Maryland study:
Despite the report of the 9/11 Commission saying there is no evidence Iraq was providing significant support to al Qaeda, 75% of Bush supporters believe Iraq was providing substantial support to al Qaeda (30% of Kerry supporters), with 20% believing that Iraq was directly involved in 9/11. Sixty-three percent of Bush supporters even believe that clear evidence of this support has been found, while 85% of Kerry supporters believe the opposite.. . .
Despite a steady flow of official statements, public demonstrations, and public opinion polls showing that the US war against Iraq is quite unpopular,2 only 31% of Bush supporters recognize that the majority of people in the world oppose the US having gone to war with Iraq. Rather, 68% assume that views are evenly divided (42%) or that the majority favors it (26%). Among Kerry supporters, 74% assume that the majority is opposed (evenly divided, 20%, majority favors it, 5%).
. . .
Bush supporters have numerous misperceptions about Bush’s international policy positions. Majorities incorrectly assumed that Bush supports multilateral approaches to various international issues—the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (69%), the treaty banning land mines (72%); 51% incorrectly assumed he favors US participation in the Kyoto treaty–the principal international accord on global warming. After he denounced the International Criminal Court in the debates, the perception that he opposed it increased from 24% to 38% among Bush supporters, but a majority of supporters (53%) continued to believe that he favors it. Only 13% of supporters are aware that he opposes labor and environmental standards in trade agreements – 74% incorrectly believe that he favors including labor and environmental standards in agreements on trade.
. . .
Kerry supporters were much more accurate in assessing their candidate’s positions on all these issues. Majorities knew that Kerry favors including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements (81%); the US being part of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (77%); the International Criminal Court (65%); the land mines treaty (79%); and the Kyoto Treaty on climate change (74%). They also knew that he favors continuing research on missile defense without deploying a system now (68%), and wants the UN, not the US, to take the stronger role in developing Iraq’s new government (80%). A plurality of 43% was correct that Kerry favors keeping defense spending the same, with 35% assuming he wants to cut it and 18% to expand it.
So now you know why wolfpack ads work.
Delicious
Posted by on 10/23/04 at 7:27 am Category: Politics
ome inspired pranksters tried to pie Ann Coulter yesterday. Whether it was a rebuff to her anorexia or her political views remains unknown. The CNN caption refers to her as a “journalist” once again demonstrating the liberal bias of the news media. I think a more accurate title for Ann would be right-wing-smear-mongering-buffoon-who-thinks-she’s-a-fox-but-in-fact-is-only-a-skanky-Fox-commentator, but I guess that wouldn’t fit on a TV screen.
Of course, the redoubtable James Wolcott’s commentary on this is funnier than anything I could dream up, including this comment:
When a pair of hooligans tried to attack her with pies during a speaking appearance, an episode broadcast on cable news today, Coulter didn’t freeze like a deer in the headlights. She showed lightning reflexes, ducking away from the lectern and running backstage on high heels, which any woman will tell you is difficult to do. Because of her quick getaway, the flying pies wildly missed their target, sparing her a humiliating cream pie bukkake facial that would have made the papers and been downloaded millions of times on the internet.
Read his entire post on the pie throwing here.
I’m Gonna Get You, You Siwwy Kewwy
Posted by on 10/22/04 at 9:06 am Category: Politics
ick Cheney, his feeble condition recently emboldened with a flu shot, yesterday mocked Kerry’s “camo” jacket and hunting trip, concluding:
My personal opinion is that his new camo jacket is an October disguise. (Laughter.) It’s an effort he’s making to hide the fact that he votes against gun-owner rights every chance he gets. (Applause.) But, my fellow sportsmen, this cover-up isn’t going to work because you and I know that the Second Amendment is more than just a photo opportunity.
“My fellow sportsmen”?? Who is he kidding? Perhaps Cheney thinks we forgot his most recent hunting expedition where he flew Air Force Two to Ligonier, Pennsylvania, hopped in a humvee (as protection against local insurgents) and went to shoot caged birds. Our manly and sporting vice-president bagged 70 ringneck pheasants and an unnamed number of mallard ducks as they were released from their cages. Senator John “Box Turtle” Cornyn who attended the “hunt” conceded the birds had little chance: at times, he said, it seemed “kind of like how Tyson’s and Pilgrim’s Pride and other people do it.”
Sadly, the White House declined to release the photos it has of the Vice Sportsman-in-Chief in full hunting drag shooting caged birds, allegedly because they made the man who is one heartbeat from the Presidency look too much like Elmer Fudd.
No Parley Espanol
Posted by on 10/22/04 at 6:40 am Category: PoliticsScottie McClellan was asked yesterday when Shrub’s interview on Univision would air. Scottie said this:
Let me try and get you that information. Let me just double check that. I think one of the programs was Sabado, which airs on, I think, Saturday nights.
No, Scottie, a program called “Saturday” airs on Sunday. Moron.