To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
When a juvenile detention center closed in Tarkio, Missouri, the residents, not the local government, joined their money and are looking to buy a business to move to the town.
Private, not government, action. Thank you, sir, may I have some more like this?
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I’ve racked my brains and broke my wit to come up with a suitable surrounding joke where the punchline is a pun of malfeasance as mall fee seance.
Cripes, I’m not man enough to do it.
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I bought this book as a four books for four bucks selection from Quality Paperback Club, as the soft covers do less damage to the walls and furniture when I read, hm, opposing viewpoints. So that’s why I paid over a quarter for this book, and my bookshelves and floor appreciated the comfortable soft binding.
In spite of Al Franken’s best efforts, I learned two things from Al Franken’s book:
Franken slaps around the label of liar widely. According to Franken’s definition, anyone who builds an argument by presenting any group of facts in a light to build to a conclusion, unless that conclusion is Franken-approved, it’s a . Say that Walter Mondale chaired a committee that issued a report that concluded something, and you’re a who tells if you don’t say Mondale disagreed with the report. Got that? To avoid the who tells tag, which Franken would build into HTML 6.0 for his convenience, one must not only tell facts, but one must tell all facts, in all contexts.
Let’s illustrate:
| Prosecutors? | who tell |
| Defense attorneys? | who tell |
| Debate teams? | who tell |
| Philosophers? | who tell |
| Grad student writing theses? | who tell |
You get the idea.
Franken illuminates, inadvertently but gleefully, the poison infecting our political discourse; a lack of empathy for people with other viewpoints, a recognition that perhaps we share common ground and we can discuss, even argue, our viewpoints honestly. Nah, never mind, anything with which we disagree is mendacity on the part of those with whom we disagree.
Franken likes to posit himself as an answer to Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, George Bush, The National Review, Sean Hannity, and other popular commentators on the other side of the political divide. Unfortunately, he lacks one component they do: they’re arguing in good faith, even when they stoop to fire-and-brimstone rhetoric.
Franken’s book is so over the top in its own mistruths that I couldn’t stand it. Part canard, it recycles some of the basic talking points of George W. Bush’s opposition without reflection, but not without invective. In other places, it blatantly presents its own misrepresentations; I particularly disliked the imaginative “Operation Chickenhawk” chapter, which imagined a mission in Vietnam led by John Kerry featuring a platoon comprised of Republican leaders who did not serve. An underground campus literary magazine would reject the piece if submitted by a college sophomore, but since it’s Al Franken, it’s worth printing in a book? Jeez, at least Motley Crue’s filler material was sophomoric and prurient.
If pressed, undoubtedly Franken would respond that he’s a comedian, not a thinker. That’s a convenient cop-out. Sorry, Al, if you want to play, you’ve got to be subject to all the reasoned scrutiny I can muster after a couple beers. I give you an F, for Farce. Farce you.
I mean, to take this book seriously as a political statement would be like taking financial advice from Triumph the Comic Insult Dog.
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I have a good, but misguided, friend who recently laid the all about oil canard on me when discussing the fact that George W. Bush will invade Iran if re-elected, and it’s all for their oil.
Yeah, that’s a fantastic idea, Chester. Iraq and Iran, all about the oil there. Bush is diabolical enough to fight unpopular-enough wars costing billions of dollars halfway around the world to get whatever oil the freed societies will sell us, which might not be much (for example, Iraq’s oil production ain’t that much these days).
Come on, you naive people. If Bush were that evil, and if he were so Machiavellian to do anything to get his hands on the precioussss, he would:
So we seal up the border and take care of cheap foreign labor in our auto plants by making them pay American minimum wage, and Bush gets his precioussss, not to mention retribution for the foosball drubbing Vincente Fox laid on him in early 2001. But why stop there?
In addition to the oil and the easy pipelines, it’s politically expedient. Big Pharma will like the end of the drug reimportation threat, Canadian hockey teams will be saved because they’ll get to charge ticket prices in US dollars, and most of Canada will enjoy our one-language policy that we’ll enforce in Quebec.
So quit being lazy, Chesters, and start using your imaginations for your simpleton conspiracy theories, for crying out loud. Any one or several of the above options will provide us all the petroleum we need to ensure that no hotel room will go un-Vasolined into perpetuity.
Iraq, Iran, and our various Middle Eastern expeditions have more at stake than some precioussss oil, and I’m not going to say it again.
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Open the journalistic template of local Davids versus Wal-Mart Goliath stories for this story: Small group is fighting big-box store in Mexico. Gist:
A Wal-Mart-owned discount store rising a half-mile from the ancient temples of Teotihuacan has touched off a fight by a small coalition that doesn’t want to see the big, boxy outlet from the top of the Pyramid of the Sun.
But with most people in the area supporting Wal-Mart, the group is waging a lonely battle for what it calls its defense of Mexico’s landscape and culture.
The dispute in Teotihuacan – a town built next to the ruins of the 2,000-year-old metropolis – illustrates how the allure of low prices and U.S. lifestyles often wins out in Mexico, leaving traditionalists struggling to draw a line in rapidly shifting cultural sands.
Apparently, the group wants a return to rule-by-priests, human sacrifice, and war between the tribes in Mexico, because that’s the heritage behind the Pyramid of the Sun and other great historical sites in Mexico.
Or could there be something else?
“We’d rather not have Mickey Mouse on top of the Pyramid of the Moon,” says Emmanuel D’Herrera, a business owner in Teotihuacan, 30 miles north of Mexico City.
He’s a business owner in danger of a little competition, but so are all the traditionalists who stand to lose a little commerce of their own whenever customers have a choice.
He [D’Herrera] contends a tall sign will loom near the huge twin pyramids that draw hundreds of thousands of tourists annually, although a government-appointed archaeologist disputes that.
And while the store is visible from atop the pyramid, so are many other modern businesses and houses.
Probably D’Herrera’s, too, but we notice he’s not offering to raze his business or to spill his blood on the altar of traditionalism.
What does everyone else think about the Yanqui imperialists?
Underlining his group’s lack of support, D’Herrera said probably 70 percent of the town’s mostly poor residents support the new store because it will offer lower prices than the area’s small shops.
Damn the unwashed, uneducated masses and their thirst for civilization over an oppressive past and cheap consumer goods over sustenance farming.
Funny how the papers and media alter their support for the common man when it suits their cognac-sniffing sensibilities, ainna?
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At Hooked on Books, they have a bin of books marked Free with Purchase, so I always grab something. Once, I grabbed this book, and I have read it.
I’ve doubled the publication dates in the header because the book’s obviously an early sixties pulp novel, with its lurid cover and almost cartoonish action prose. However, sometime between editions, the “author” updated the setting a decade, changing a World War II secret agent into a Korean vet seamlessly.
Oddly enough, the book is set in Florida, much like Cancel All Our Vows, and like the other book, it features an almost textually unremarkable sexual assault, wherein the main character forces his attentions on a woman because she’s the type who needs it. By textually unremarkable, I mean that the book itself glosses over the assault as a matter of course–something reflective of the time and genre, probably.
Aside from that distasteful bit, the book’s a good romp. A wife and her brother kill the drunkard husband by sending the husband’s Cadillac into a canal when the husband’s drunk. The moment the cold water hits the husband, though, he “comes to,” thinking he’s a secret agent in a Korean river. He’s got to deal with his amnesia and to discover what’s happened in the twenty years he’s lost. Eventually, he recovers enough of his skills and his muscle tone (hidden beneath forty pounds of liquor) to break up a gun-running operation.
It’s easy reading, action movies in 60,000 words, and I ate books like this up when I was in high school. Perhaps that’s why I grew up misogynistic, my sensitivity destroyed by these books like the Greatest Generation and early boomers, who currently tut-tut hip-hop music for how it depicts women.
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Jed at Boots and Sabers helps me with my reluctance to fly.
Make mine a double.
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Aaron of Free Will Blog defends Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s RNC speech.
Remember my comments?
Of course you do. You’re not the one who’s been tippling on Dutch beer all evening.
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Headline of the day: Sunset Hills man shoots; kills alleged burglar
As one of the last regular users of the precious semicolon, I must protest whenever someone uses it incorrectly. It’s easier than protesting apostrophe abuse, and it doesn’t make on as hoarse.
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Well, I bought a used library paperback copy of this book from the St. Louis County Library as a discard, so I only paid a quarter for it. On the other hand, it is a used library copy of a paperback, so I am making no great investment in my personal collection. Still, I had not seen the book before, and I love John D. McDonald’s Travis McGee books and most of his other books (if you’re currently holed up in Florida, I heartily recommend you ride out the storm with Condominium).
This book precedes the heyday of John D. MacDonald’s writing career. The earliest McGee novel hits the scene in 1964, and McGee will lament about the migration to Florida that takes place when air conditioners become prevalent. Cancel All Our Vows precedes that era; the main male character is an executive, and the storyline takes place in a heat wave from which the characters retreat.
Unlike most of MacDonald’s other novels, this book is not crime fiction–a distinction blurred purposefully by the paperback publisher, who puts a gun on the cover even though one does not discharge anywhere in the book (what would Checkov say? Not, “Pardon me, we’re looking for the nuclear wessels–that’s another Checkov, you damn kids).
This book reminds me more of Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann. Both deal with attitudes about adultery and marriage, and both are set in the decade after World War II–although Cancel All Our Vows was written 13 years before Valley of the Dolls.
This book deals with said executive, having a midlife crisis (both he and his wife are getting old–they’re in their thirties! Undertakers are standing by!). When he meets the wife of a man he’s just hired, he starts thinking that cheating might be the answer to his emotional doldrums. He’s got a good house, a good wife, good job, good kids, the good life, but he’s missing something. Something illicit sex might provide. His wife notices and thinks about a fling of her own. Unfortunately, at the last minute she decides she doesn’t want to fling, but the college boy forces his attention on her, and they’re all flung. So she’s an adultress in her mind and in her husband’s, and then he goes with the little twitcher who drew his attention in the first chapter, and they drop peyote or something after she talks all crazy about opening the doors to the darkness of their souls, and woo doggy.
At times I felt bad for the main characters, and at other times I wished that maybe some deserved violence would come. But it didn’t, and the book ends on a more hopeful note than Valley of the Dolls.
These books are most interesting to me for the insights they offer into the mindsets of the past. These sort of conundrums continue to occur–Heather and I watched Lost in Translation last night, and some of the themes are similar–but the characters react so differently based on society’s expectations at the time. Interesting.
Which is about the most resounding endorsement I can give this book. Don’t pick it up expecting a crime book, no matter what Fawcett wants you to think. The ploy must have worked, for this paperback I have is dated 1987, some 43 years after its first printing, and it’s because John D. MacDonald wrote the book, not because the book grips readers that much.
The end.
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The campaign worker, whose name badge indicated she was Ms. Kerry Edwards, walking up the driveway, past the pick-up truck with the American Flag, Green Bay Packers, and two George W. Bush stickers on it to rap on the door politely and ask Ms. Heather was home.
No, I told her, the Bush Cheney volunteer of the house was not home.
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Why was I the only one at the recycling facility with a W sticker on his vehicle?
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This morning, as I was taking my empties to the recycling facility so that they could hold beer again, I heard John F. Kerry’s response to the presidential radio address, where in Senator Marrybucks said:
Parents are sitting at kitchen tables and wondering how they’re going to make ends meet: How they’re going to buy back-to-school clothes this week, and still pay last week’s doctor bill. How they’re going to make this months [sic] mortgage payment, and still cover next semester’s tuition. And whether they’re going to be able to save for retirement or just have enough left over for a night at the movies.
Undoubtedly, some people will rejoice that John Kerry can get down rhetorically with the commen proletariat and empathize with their psychological discomfort. Unfortunately, John Kerry, in the interest of time, cut some of the best parts of his litany.
We here at mFBJN have done some crack investigative journalism, and by that I mean our staff did a little dumpster diving outside of JFK2HQ in our constant effort to find discarded 3/4 full bottles of Pierre Ferrand Ancestrale Cognac, Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve Bourbon, or Jameson 15 Year Pot Still Irish Whiskey (discarded because the freshly-opened bottle “just tastes better”) or unshredded credit card slips (which you think this crack investigative staff would prefer to find is for you to judge, gentle reader). In addition to a cool pair of cuff links, our staff found a list of the dilemmas that John Kerry cut to make his speech fit.
These dilemmas that John Kerry cut from his empathy for the hoi polloi include:
That six thousand dollars can only be spent one way, friends. You want to know the strata of used cars? $6000 and up, or anything you buy from a new car dealer is a good used car; anything $1000 and up that you can buy from a used car lot is a questionable used car, anything over $200 that you get from the classifieds which runs for a year or maybe two if you’re not afraid of brakeless driving is a fair used car, and anything you buy for $49 as salvage with the promise you’ll fix it up is a poor used car.
Face it, Johnnie Rich (1 of 2), I cannot personally abide by empathy coming from someone so far out of my social strata, particularly when its condescenion comes with a slate of government spending to salve the ills you imagine we have.
Now pardon me while I pick up the chip and reset it for the next guy.
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YGDY, your favorite hits of the 1980s, with none of the hard rock or rap. This next song was the only hit from California-based Faith No More, it’s "Epic"….
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Via Spoons, we have this story: Bush Glosses Over Complex Facts in Speech:
President Bush glossed over some complicating realities in Iraq, Afghanistan and the home front in arguing the case Americans are safer and his opponent cannot deliver.
On Iraq, Bush talked of a 30-member alliance standing shoulder to shoulder with the United States, masking the fact that U.S. troops are pulling by far most of the weight. On Afghanistan and its neighbors, he gave an accounting of captured or killed terrorists, but did not address the replenishment of their ranks — or the still-missing Osama bin Laden.
In the interest of elaborating on CALVIN WOODWARD’s points, I thought I would list some other things Bush did not address last night:
Actually, history will show that Bush left more out of his speech than he included. Perhaps this was because it was a speech designed to come in under an hour with planned interruptions for applause, chants, and inevitable protestors.
Or maybe Bush is really trying to hide everything else from the world, which receives its information only when the Master pours his words into our ears.
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The San Francisco Chronicle runs a story wherein Austrian historians question the memories Schwarzeneggar used in his speech at the RNC, including Soviet troops and socialism:
Austrian historians are ridiculing California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for telling the Republican National Convention that he saw Soviet tanks in his homeland as a child and left a “Socialist” country when he moved away in 1968.
Recalling that the Soviets once occupied part of Austria in the aftermath of World War II, Schwarzenegger told the convention on Tuesday: “I saw tanks in the streets. I saw communism with my own eyes.”
No way, historians say, challenging Schwarzenegger’s knowledge of postwar history — if not his enduring popularity among Austrians who admire him for rising from a penniless immigrant to the highest official in America’s most populous state.
Yeah, a bunch of historians are going to directly challenge Arnold’s popularity by quibbling over rhetorical flourishes (socialism as an adjective versus a formal Socialist party) and whatnot.
Here’s the challenge to Arnold’s memory:
“It’s a fact — as a child he could not have seen a Soviet tank in Styria,” the southeastern province where Schwarzenegger was born and raised, historian Stefan Karner told the Vienna newspaper Kurier.
Schwarzenegger, now a naturalized U.S. citizen, was born on July 30, 1947, when Styria and the neighboring province of Carinthia belonged to the British zone. At the time, postwar Austria was occupied by the four wartime allies, which also included the United States, the Soviet Union and France.
The Soviets already had left Styria in July 1945, less than three months after the end of the war, Karner noted.
I don’t remember Arnold saying, “In Styria,” but then again, I am not going out of my way to challenge a popular leader.
James Joyner had the first rebuttal here.
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I’ve corrected a couple minor grammar and punctuation mistakes, but I have not redone the Roman numerals because I repeated a number early, and didn’t want to spend the morning editing the numbers on the posts. Perhaps next time I’ll wisen up and use Arabic numerals.
But that’s so un-pretensious.
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Neil Steinberg, of the Chicago Sun-Times, today:
The spirit of Wendell Willkie doesn’t get invoked much by Republicans for one big reason: He lost. But there was Dick Cheney at the convention Wednesday night, harkening back to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s opponent in the 1940 election, and how Willkie, though running against him, nevertheless supported FDR’s foreign policy. Cheney did leave out one small detail: Willkie supported FDR’s stance toward the war in Europe because he agreed with it.
In Al Franken’s book, this makes Neil Steinberg a who tells
To some of us, though, it looks like a big journalism mistake wherein a professional either mistakes Dick Cheney for Zell Miller because they look so alike, or because he didn’t watch the speeches or attentively read transcripts thereof and whose editors down the line made the same mistake.
So be it. I don’t question Steinberg’s core integrity; I do shake my head over his errors in thought and word.
Zell Miller’s speech here.
Dick Cheney’s speech here.
Press ALT+F and type WILKIE into the Find What edit box. Cripes, do I have to explain everything?
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Stephen Green, the so-called “VodkaPundit,” claims:
Before we get to the (ha!) insightful stuff, let me note something:
1 hour, 45 minutes.
46 posts.
Who’s got the hardest-working blog in the business?
Ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you, over the course of the last few days here at MfBJN, we had over 10 hours of live blogging with , hrm, C, carry the XVII, well, a lot of posts and a lot of booze.
Who’s the hardest drinking blogger in blog business?
I meant working.
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So it ends.
This is the first convention I’ve watched. I am sorry I didn’t see the Democrat convention this year so I could have more personal compare-and-contrast details, but perhaps in four years I’ll remember to pay more attention. If I can remember this resolution tomorrow, when I have pulled the shades and crawl into this office to complete a work day.
I endorse George W. Bush for president, for what it’s worth; I don’t know whom I might convince to vote for him. The best I can hope, I suspect, is to inspire someone who would lean in that direction but who would normally be to lazy to vote.
Perhaps one day, I can attend a national convention, not as a blogger, but as a delegate from my home state. Some of this will depend on the loosening of the social conservatism of the Republican Party, and some will depend upon whether they have an open bar.
Thanks for stopping by. God bless you, and may God bless America.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog inanity, already in progress.
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