Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Dear Baal: please take this framer back to hell's workshop and bring us a new one. This one is broken.

Because LI has the sickness unto death this morning, we have been looking around the liberal blogs, trying to find some outrage about the Democratic Party’s embrace of the surge. Or trying to find some bland spinning, something tasty - oh, you know the taste - old jism and pesticide - that consultant's breath perfume, that body odor that's built right into the suit, the hardened partisan hireling suit with the matching enviro-boots - good for climbing up to the confabs to really really really think about America's problems with some of Hilary's closest friends! O, you know the type of text I'm talking about, all down from the mountain and shit. Looking for a niche. Looking for a steal. Since, like the Underground Man, we think nothing is more refreshing than a tooth ache, we scoured the net. Really! Because we wanted to quality produce. But we never expected to hit fool’s gold like this piece by a Jeffrey Feldman – a … wait for it… expert on… o wait for it … “framing”. Framin’ dem dere issues, my masters. Too make us feel all rich souled in these here prosperous states. Although sick unto death, the terrorist RAF star seemingly emerging where our own little throbbing LI heart used to be, we are generous enough to link here, for our UFOB squirrel hunting friends – for if this ain’t target practice, I don’t know what concentric rings around a bullseye are for! Bring out the dart gun, boys! and a wooden stake, garlic, and a bible.

Oh please, Baal, take back your prophets and give us less disgusting ones!


PS- being in the gift giving mood - thinking of what to send your favorite Democratic congressman? How about this nice music video? xox, motherfuckers.

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

LI, i'm afraid Baal has hung a fresh corpse and an "out of business" sign outside his workshop, and gone for a round of golf with bones and skulls. Even he knows when he's licked!
I do wish that in his masterful "framing" of the "double bind", MR.JF could have mentioned that the concept of the double bind was first formulated in order to explain psychotic behavior!

Arkady said...

He's a prize winner, Roger. I'm going to be paying some serious attention to him from now on. Bless his heart, he has the integrity to bring the batshit to the mountain of guano and explain the wholesomeness of this strategery to the naysayers and defeatists. The comments there showed signs of being exhausted by non-stop "dreck and nonsense", as one fellow put it. But what they fail to understand is that by framing values, we come to have values. It follows, then, that by framing victory, liberals will come to have victory. This gets to that core dime's worth of difference between the liberals and the wingnuts. Actually existing liberalism is vastly different from wingnuttery. It is much more magical, by which I mean real magic, none of this hokey stagecraft stuff, and if we believe -- if only we are willing to believe! -- fawning lickspittles will turn into tigers.

northanger said...

has anyone seen this?

[+] The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert "black" operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

Roger Gathmann said...

North, well, given the unparalleled record of failure by the Bush admin, the Iranian president must feel a lot better today. Whereas his own idiocies unstabilized him a lot at the last election, Ahmenidjad's luck has turned as the U.S. kidnaps Iranian diplomats and tries to pawn off weapons incised in English ("Dangerous! product of the Iranian terrorist factory, your trusted brand for reliable IEDs") as Iranian products. The CIA will no doubt use that weird Iranian deathcult they so like, what is it called? MKO, according to the handy Wiki.

Anonymous said...

LI, you know a fucking frightening aspect of the "liberal" crave/slave mentality is how it presents itself as the going way of "opposition", and throwing in the spice of cynicism and/or righteousness amounts to little more than a shrug of the shoulders while watching someone bleed to death.
The Dems have to be strong on national security!? In that case, it would seem best not to give billions to a Cabal that has been anything but!
OK, forget the brownie sub-humans in other parts of the world who deserve death ( aka democracy ) but is this Cabal good for the security and well-being of the good people of the USA!?
LI, why does one have to go through the fucking laundry list all over again with all its shit and blood that nothing can wipe clean? For "recent memory" there's Afghanistan and Iraq. ( Or Lebanon, where today the group - Al Fatah Il Islam - has become the excuse for another massacre. Where did this group come from? Oh, it's a "Sunni" militia with folks from Yemen, Bangladesh, etc., implanted in Lebanon by the U.S. and the Saudis to fight Hizbullah. )
One can extend the list, but LI all I want to say in my stupefied state is, why the FUCK do the representatives of the "opposition" not hammer home that this Cabal is deathly incompetent - STUPID - even when it comes to the interest of the US?

Arkady said...

Every leader in every one of the power blocs that make up the Democratic coalition supports military invasions, global preeminence and the assumption of the right to meddle. Whether they're cynical old hacks like Sweeney or benevolent cruise missile liberals from Hollywood. They can't form a coherent argument against Bushist interventions because everyone would say, with some justice, that they're only upset because this is not their invasion. They cut their own hamstrings, drove what remains of the liberal left into the furthest margins of their party and they're stuck.

Roger Gathmann said...

I've decided not to translate all of the communiqe from The Red Wrath, the group that succeeded the RAF in Germany, since I have this idea that I should, if at all possible, avoid the fbi. LI has the greatest admiration, we'd like to state here, for Mr. Hoover's force. Good guys. Good boy. Stay. Stay!

However, this part from the 1983 communique is interesting:

Resistance has become do-able.
And it has become more popular and fantastic than ever before
The ghost has returned to Europe – but as a wholly other communism. This time we don’t have the party, which is “always right”, shrieking on its feet of clay about the leadership and the followership, but a swarm of red witches and black men pursue their state hostile business like voles.
Molotovs fly, pig autos burn, the forces of order are knocking their knees together, speculators about their objects, secretaries and officeholders are smoked out, Industrial plants and U.S. bases bombed out – the crowd demonstrate, secret groups conspire. The destruction spreads out!
Putting it all nice and compactly like this sounds groovy, but in the details it is bound together with a lot of uncertainty, hard work and danger, as we know best. But what else can we do? The wisdom of the resigned has never done anybody any good. Old William Blake already saw it all when he stated: the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of intelligence (and our Bund republik intelligentsia should be flattered, since all too often they are merely wise and otherwise nothing). And that is a little something, in face of the truly insane shit in which we are stuck up to our necks."

Roger Gathmann said...

B..but, I'm pleased to see, finally, this evening, some boil over. This morning on the stories in the NYT and the Washington Post there were hundreds and hundreds of comments, but even on long time anti-war sites - even on Atrios, who Mr. Scruggs probably does not like - there was like nothing. Since Atrios was anti-war from the beginning, that hurt. The rest of the hesitation to say something disgusted me - cause I know it was all about being called by some DNC honcho and being given a line. Give us a chance. The crap doled out by Tomasky in the Guardian - just bullshit - obviously went out there. Of course, Mistah Scruggs, you are right that they are all into being superpower invaders, but I disagree that this gives them no leaway - you invade here or your invade there. The Republicans had no problem opposing Clinton. It is just called, uh, knowing why you hold the position you do. I don't give a shit, really, about labels, parties, whatever - "I know what I want and I know how to get it". I'm hoping that the Dem leadership is not going to have it so easy after all. This evening I feel less like I've been raptured to zombie city. I think there might be a counter-cave coming up. But it is difficult to predict events inside D.C. Oz., where they are always, always winning.

Arkady said...

The Republicans did oppose the Clinton interventionism, by the same method used by the Dems: a sufficient number always crossed the aisle. The sturm und drang was a bit louder, them being wingnuts and all and prone to embarrassing excesses of hysteria, but they always found a few who could manage to cross the aisle and swoon into his pain feelin' arms.

The oddity of those years was the Republican embrace of something close to liberal proceduralism. They're capable of it when it works well for them. The Democrats are not. Or rather, they're not capable of it when it would benefit their putative constituency. The Republicans do bring home some bacon to the Snopes territories.

Arkady said...

To be clear, Roger, I agree with you on all major points. My argument is something like John Wayne Gacy was worse than Ted Bundy because Gacy gets official "credit" for 33 murders, whereas Bundy only had 30. Interestingly, the former was a low level Dem hack and the latter a low level Repub hack.

Arkady said...

The more serious side of my argument is that the Dems are more vulnerable, or could be made to be, because their branding requires them NOT to nod and wink at murder. They have to get huffy and hand wringing about it. The Repubs don't.

Roger Gathmann said...

Mr. Scruggs, historically, the Repubs are happier about invasion and encroachment in the Americas, while the Dems are a more let's go shoot up some Asians kind of party.

Anyway, more than party organizations themselves, I think foreign policy reflects the different regions in the U.S., with the South being more aggressive, and the Northeast being more financially aggressive, in an Emerging Markets are Forever kinda way.

Arkady said...

That doesn't provide a lever for attacking them, either group. Neither does their nominal ideology. On a mass level, all that can affordably be attacked these days is their branding.

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