Dangerous & Lazy

As 4chan takes the lulz to the streets, hilarity is already firmly ensconced in US corridors of power. In response to a symbollic anti-recruitment resolution from the Berkeley City Council, some tool from South Carolina has proposed legislation in the senate (the “Semper Fi Act 2008”; I’m not sure whether that bit of hilariously camp macho posturing is its official title or not) removing some federal money and that from Berkeley. Aside from the fundamental misunderstanding of the role of a national legislature here (which is even worse than last years “senate condemns a newspaper ad” silliness), it’s funny how the right wing are so keen to portray the US military as delicate flowers whose feelings need to be protected from horrid, mean leftists. Why do they hate the troops so much? And why are American legislators so keen to bring the political process into disrepute?

And Bill O’Reilly last night was outraged: “It’s not a matter of saying … they were voting on taking their parking spaces away, they’re making it difficult for them to operate.” The horror! How will those poor, poor marine recruiters cope with having to walk around the block to get to work?

Satirical genius, or spectacular tin ear for rhetoric? You decide!

I was impressed with his willingness to look at the issues that France faces in a new ways, not bound by tradition and dogmas.

— Obama on Sarkozy

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When I first heard Obama’s “uniter, not a divider” schtick from the 2004 Democratic convention, I thought he was just an idiot, warming up the crowds with a bit of feel-good, content-free nonsense. But I don’t think so anymore. Obama’s nonsense is an extremely calculated, supremely mendacious work of rhetoric. Look at how he chose to “honor” Martin Luther King yesterday: Read more↴

… this article is incredibly stupid. So stupid, in fact, that it makes the article next to it, Martin Kettle’s condemnation of the lack of “consensus” in US politics, look almost coherent. But not quite, obviously.

“…We’ll nationalize your fucking banks.”

So goes the social-democratic version of the famous anarchist slogan. Of course, the third-way version is more about:

A period of state ownership in which the government would seek to stabilise Northern Rock and find a buyer, while protecting taxpayers’ money

“Protecting” taxpayer’s money, eh? What an incredibly, stupidly, minimal vision of what a political system might acomplish.