American badass

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That would be one Steve McQueen, as shown in this commercial for Honda’s all-time badass motocrosser, the almighty Elsinore CR250M.

Repops of that great orange and black Elsinore jersey McQueen sports in the vid can be had all day long for about 40-50 bucks, my lifelong friend and vintage-dirt-bike enthusiast Stan tells me. By contrast, Steve’s smoke-tinted helmet visor with the little rearview mirrors mounted on each side are rare as hens’ teeth, going for around 3-400 smacks when/if you’re fortunate enough to find one at all.

The video is a commercial McQueen made for Japanese TV, for which he got paid a cool million bucks. He actually ran the Elsinore Grand Prix (for which Honda’s first two-stroke MX bike was named) himself in 1970 under the hilarious nom de badass Harvey Mushman—no, really. Of that historic race, McQueen had this to say:

“When you’re runnin’ with the top ten, as I was, you’re really honkin’ on pretty good an’ what happpens is that with so many bikes choppin’ up the dirt the holes in the course get worse…deeper with each lap.

“I was comin’ out of a wash under a bridge with this road dip ahead and I just kinda took one of those big jumps where you’re sure you’re gonna make it but you don’t. And I didn’t. My bike nosed into the dip, which was, like, deep – and I went ass-over the bars into the crowd. Didn’t hurt anybody but me. My left foot was busted in six places.”

This wasn’t enough to stop him however, as he got back on the bike and finished the race, still finishing in the top ten!

What’d I tell ya? Badass!

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“Argue with them and get in their face”

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Throw their own shit back at them, exactly as Bathhouse Barry once recommended be done to us.

A Wine O’Clock Wendy — I’m really trying to make this put-down go viral; I think it’s Streets Ahead of “AWFL” — and her Frankencuck husband were videoed ripping down posters of American hostages held by Hamas.

The woman putting up the posters was not having it.

Indeed she was NOT, bless her heart. After the “man” had committed assault and battery by placing “his” dainty hand over the justly outraged woman’s camera and shoving her—a Mark-1 Mod-0 insufferable shitlib smirk all over “his” womanly face—our Power Couple quickly scurried off with their tails tucked (y’know, like “his” squirrel-dick usually is) between their legs before the Bad Woman could punch their dim fucking lights out.

 

HELL yeah, that’s how you do it. The happy ending:

Brooklyn man suspended from job by his Jewish dad after ripping posters of Hamas hostages
A Brooklyn man seen tearing down posters of Israeli kids held by Hamas has been identified as a former magician — whose Jewish father suspended him from his gig at a user experience company, according to a report.

Noah Schaffer, 41, and his wife, Kelly, were seen being berated by a Jewish woman after they removed the posters this past weekend at Brooklyn Bridge Park, the group StopAntisemitism posted on X.

“This couple has been identified as spouses Kelly Ann and Noah Schaffer. Kelly has been previously arrested and works as a social worker for @UrbanDoveNY. Noah works as a strategist for @humanfactors,” the group wrote.

Again, that’s Noah and Kelly Ann Schaffer, likely of some precious, too-twee Brooklyn hipsterhood. Wherever these two vile creatures may reside, I think it would be just AWFUL if large, angry mobs started showing up on the doorstep of their domicile with torches, truncheons, and bullhorns at 3 AM every night for about, oh, a year. Anybody out there knows how to find their home address, feel free to let me know and I’ll happily update this post with it. Goose, meet gander.

Update! Done and done, courtesy of our friend Aesop, reporting in from his extended vacay:

Apparently, that address would be

Noah and Kelly Ann (McManus) Schaeffer
191 Willoughby St. Apt 12K.
Brooklyn NY 10026

Well whaddayaknow about that, in Brooklyn, just a hop, skip, and a jump from the borough’s Ft Greene nabe. Only reason I know even that much is I had two musician friends who lived thereabouts, but that was back in the mid-90s: bassist Bill and drummer Stanley. Used to drive out from Manhattan to fetch the boys a cpl-three nights a week, load their gear, and whisk the three of us off to whatever extra-money side gig we had scheduled in Brooklyn, central Lawn Guyland, or out in the Hamptons. As many times as I did that, I very much doubt I could find either of their houses today.

Billy has long since moved to Norway, where his lovely and vivacious wife Ingegerd hails from originally. Aussie Stan, as his friends called him, lived in a HUGE three-story Victorian-style house on a lovely, quiet, tree-lined block off Flatbush Ave which his wife had inherited some years before I met him. I won’t say it was a mansion, but if somebody else wanted to I might put a “yes” to it. I pure-tee loved Stan and Mrs Stan’s crib; for starters, it had a paved driveway leading downhill into a three-car (THREE!) garage under the house equipped with automatic bay-doors and remote-opener fob. Through the inside door from the garage waited a sumptuous, nicely-appointed rumpus room/man-cave, complete with:

  • A tournament-size pool table
  • A vintage Wurlitzer jukebox loaded with old blues, country, and rockabilly .45s
  • A fully-stocked bar from the late 1940s–dark, worn wood and the traditional brass foot-rail at bottom, out of a long-deceased neighborhood gin-mill owned by a friend of Stan’s who just gave him the bar gratis when it finally shut down for good; the guy even went so far as to help Stan move the heavy-ass thing to his house
  • A classic Bally KISS pinball table in near-new condition
  • Assorted plush, comfortable leather sofas and recliner-chairs deep and soft enough to sink down into without a trace
  • A German foosball table, likewise meticulously preserved, but with that easy, loose feel to the action that all properly broken-in German tables ought to have; a fast, hard front-man pull-, toe-, or slap-shot past the opposing goalie would always yield that sharp, satisfying BANG! that every skilled foosballer lives for, so loud it can easily be heard way over on the far side of a packed, noisy arcade—a sound those shitty French tables with their wimpy cork balls simply can’t produce—usually accompanied by the metallic, whispery TINK! of the hard plastic ball meeting the thin sheet-steel plate mounted at the back of the goal-hole to protect the wood behind it. The game rooms I loved best in my misspent youth would go dead silent for a few seconds in the wake of such a resounding score, after which respectful pause the shouts and applause would ring out from the other players: POINT! HELL yeah! BURN! Sucker just got his ass SLAMMED!!! High fives, backslaps, gales of raucous laughter all around; those were the rooms I went to again and again and again, and there’s a damned good reason for that

Let me tell ya, driving down to park in the underground garage, unass the vehicle, from there to emerge into a veritable palace like Stan’s basement hideaway was, the whole damned house was—in cramped, overcrowded New York City, mind, not exactly renowned for its generously-sized, airy, comfortable indoor spaces—made you feel like you were really somebody. And that is the God’s honest truth.

Fort Greene was a nice enough if not particularly fancy area back then, but by now who knows. Been nigh on twenty years since I was last in Brooklyn, so I couldn’t guess how extensively or even whether Ft Greene has been gentrified; I do know that at this point most of seedy, grubby old Brooklyn has been tidied up, refreshed, and/or rebuilt to at least some degree. But no matter. Whatever the neighborhood’s current condition, if you’re in the area I think the sudden wee-hours appearance of a flaming bag of fresh-squeezed dogshit at Chez Schaeffer’s front door as a Halloween gift would surely not go amiss, to hijack from its proper context a fine old Captain Mal line.

A flick of the Bic, a press of the doorbell, a fleet-footed dash back into the anonymity of night’s darkness, and voila! Mission accomplished, and well done to you. Maybe the pissed-off woman in the above Andy Ngo vid would enjoy dropping one off for ‘em. T’is a consummation devoutly to be wished, the absolute least the rotten, uncaring douchetools deserve for what they did. A standard issue non-apology “apology” accompanied by an insincere, blasé shrug just ain’t gonna cut it, I shouldn’t think.

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Shaking in their boots, they are NOT

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Yeah, they’re afraid of us and all our big, scary guns. Just keep telling yourself that while clicking your heels together three times and maybe it’ll come true.

It’s been a while since the term studied insult was common in American discourse. Yet the thing itself has been much with us these past few years, so it’s well to understand what the term signifies:

studied insult: An insult carefully designed to pertain to a particular person or group, such that the insulted one(s) cannot fail to take note of the offense.

The intention is to give offense to a specific person, and in a specific way. The British have long been celebrated for excellence in this field.

The question good-hearted people of every kind have been asking since January 20, 2021 is simple and plaintive: “How could they not have known this would happen?” The stolen elections of November 2020 were followed by one incredibly “stupid” policy after another. Surely the Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch remember the high points:

  • Strangling the supply of oil and gas.
  • Opening wide the southern border.
  • Massive inflation of the currency.
  • Pansification of the military.
  • Involvement in Russia-Ukraine War.
  • Massive financial gifts to Iran.
  • Abandonment of $80 billion in weaponry to the Taliban.
  • Use of the DOJ and FBI as political tools.
  • De facto legalization of rioting, vandalism, vagrancy, and theft.
  • Sam Brinton, Karine Jean-Pierre, and “Rachel” Levine.

I could go on, of course. Every single thing in the list above was done deliberately, with full foreknowledge of its consequences. They were strokes intentionally delivered to achieve two effects:

To weaken the United States, whether politically, militarily, or economically;

To insult decent Americans so blatantly that there could be no doubt about it.

Many good-hearted people simply can’t believe that the Usurpers really meant to offend us so blatantly…that those were studied insults. But in fact they’d been planned since Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in November 2016. Those barbs were intended to be blunt and brutal: We can do what we like to you, and there’s not one damn thing you can do about it.

I’m a fair hand with such things, and I tell you plainly: I could not have contrived more blatant, humiliating insults if I were given a decade to do it.

Francis has nailed it but good with this one, and Bayou Peter knows it.

I have to agree with Mr. Porretto. This is deliberate, in-your-face intimidation and triumphalism. “We got rid of Trump and his ilk, and now we’re in charge, and there’s nothing you can do about it!” That’s the message. That’s also why I, and many others, believe the 2024 elections will be a sham, and a fake, and a public lie. Having gone this far, the powers that be dare not see their handiwork overturned by another Trumpian revolution. They have to protect it, and themselves for having fostered and accomplished it: and that means we’ve probably seen the last free and fair elections in America for some time to come, until people get fed up enough to do something about the corruption and dishonesty that have come to rule the “old ways” of government.

Mr. Porretto asks, “What will we do on that day?” My question is, “When will that day come?” Either way, it’s not a comfortable thought. I’ve lived in disintegrating societies and nations in the Third World, and seen at first hand how many become casualties of the process – militarily, economically, socially, politically, culturally and in every other way imaginable. I think most of us will learn more about that in the not too distant future, because when the rot has set into a society as deeply as it has into ours, there’s a certain inevitability about the process. What’s more, unless the decent majority “screws their courage to the sticking place”, the end result is unlikely to be happy. The intimidation currently on display is designed to stop them doing that. Will it succeed? Or will it provoke them to say, “So far and no further!”?

Remains to be seen, I suppose, which we will soon enough. The one thing for sure is that, far from fearing us, all the evidence shows that in fact they despise us—that they hold us in complete contempt, and will go right on doing so until they’re given reason NOT to.

One of Jefferson’s most well-known apocryphal aphorisms sums up our condition more than adequately, as pithily and neatly as it’s ever been done: When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. Whether Jefferson ever actually said it—it’s almost certain that he didn’t—is pretty much moot, because of the overwhelming truth of it. That being so, which of those two sentences best describes Amerika v2.0 today?

Memezapoppin’!

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Welcome to this week’s installment of our Wednesday meme feature, folks. Links to the “found via” sources will be attached to the specific MiQ’s (Memes in Question) whenever I can remember them, which likely won’t be very often. Only the first two memes will appear above the fold to save on bandwidth usage, since I assume not everybody who shows up at this here websty will want to see all of them. This intro will appear at the top of each week’s Memezapoppin’! post. Enjoy, funny pitcher-lovers.

47YearsStillBroken

Bathrooms

Continue reading “Memezapoppin’!“ →

In a nutshell

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The tall but brilliant Diogenes Sarcastica sums the Mooselimb/Leftist alliance up.

The virulent anti-Israel protests across America and Europe throw a glaring light on the bizarre alliance, the odd combination of far left activist at universities and the anti-west, militant followers of muhammad that now threaten Jews in the street, and intimidates anyone brave enough to voice their dissent.

What makes the alliance so strange are the deep-seated differences between leftists and muslim fundamentalists over core beliefs. The left supports women’s rights and full equality. Militant muslims oppose them. The left supports gay rights and gay marriage. Militant muslims toss homos off buildings. The left supports abortion rights. Militant muslims oppose them. They need the children to hide behind. The left is indifferent to religious freedom, Militant muslims believe infidels should be executed. The left opposes the death penalty. Militant muslims endorse it and praise their governments for using it.

These beliefs are not marginal for either group. They are foundational, and they are profoundly opposed to each other.

But they deal with differences very simply – Hate.

That about covers it, yeah. And why not, really? A feral, perfervid hatred for all and any who dare to disagree with their rigid orthodoxy is the one thing they have in common. Our pal DS also has a truly excellent random-thoughts-type post up:

Late-night Musings From The Bathtub
I think the single most important thing a man can do to be an ally is give his lady friends permission to give persistent dudes at the bar his number so when they call he can angrily say that’s not funny because she died 15 years ago that very night.

Nervous of flying? Don’t be. As long as 2 million parts in a plane work perfectly while traveling at close to the speed of sound as sharp metal blades rotate at supersonic speeds in temperatures of -65 degrees 7 miles above the earth surface, you’ll be just fine. Enjoy the in flight movie…

Someone told me yesterday that they don’t eat tacos because they’re bad for you, and I’m starting to realize what my parents meant when they said I should be careful who I surround myself with.

Anyone who says their wedding was the best day of their lives has clearly never had 2 snickers bars fall down at once from a vending machine.

Heh. That’s some goooood squishy right there.

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Thank HEAVENS, we’re SAVED!

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Well, ain’t that a relief.

McConnell claims he is in ‘good shape’ and ‘completely recovered’ after health scares

Not a word, of course, detailing what these serial “health scares” might have actually, y’know, involved. Beyond Yertle McTurtle locking up several times on-camera like a deer caught in headlights, that is. Everything’s cool, we good, we good.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said he is “completely recovered” after a series of health episodes earlier this year that raised questions about whether the 81-year-old senator could continue serving.

“I’m in good shape, completely recovered, and back on the job,” McConnell said in an interview that aired Sunday with CBS News’s Face The Nation.

When asked by host Margaret Brennan if he believes he is fit to continue serving “at a time when we are talking about incredible dysfunction in Washington, McConnell fired back, “I think we ought to be talking about what we were talking about earlier, rather than my health.”

Oh, by all means, Yertle. Important, crucially vitally crucial things like the absolute imperative shared by every single last American to keep hurling pallet-loads of US hush-money at a certain pint-sized dictator to continue his becoming silence concerning the Biden Crime Familia‘s frequent use of his “nation” as an ATM-slash-money laundry.

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“The most perfect comedy of all time”

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Blazing Saddles might like to have a word, perhaps, but me, I can’t argue with that assessment.

Here’s a peek into one recent discussion I had on our PJ Media Slack channel with my friend and boss Paula Bolyard, our editor-in-chief:

Chris Queen [9:15 AM]
Hey, I have an idea for a column.

paula [9:22 AM]
A column? What is it?

Chris Queen [9:24 AM]
It’s a collection of words that discusses a certain topic, but that’s not important right now.

Okay, so that didn’t actually happen, but the fact that you laughed at it — at least I hope you did — demonstrates the staying power of what I call the most perfect comedy of all time: 1980’s “Airplane!”

Earlier this month saw the release of a behind-the-scenes book telling the story of how “Airplane!” took flight. I don’t normally do book reviews, but I listened to the audiobook of “Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!” and it was one of the funniest and most fascinating listening experiences I’ve ever had.

As wonderful as I imagine the print edition of the book being, nothing can compare to hearing Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker telling the story of how they developed their love of comedy and filmmaking and how the two dovetailed together so perfectly with “Airplane!” Stories from cast and crew and studio executives, as well as appreciation from comedians and actors, make for a rich behind-the-scenes look at how a true film classic came together.

Could there possibly BE a more perfect opportunity to run a clip or three from the Zuckers’ magnum opus? I think NOT!

A bit heavy on the Rex Kramer, you may have noticed, only because Robert Stack’s Kramer would have to be my favorite character from the movie. I’ve seen Airplane! about a bazillion and one times over the years and can still hardly help but laugh every time he’s on screen, even if only for a few seconds. Back to the book review for our closer:

For years, I had heard some of the stories, such as how devout Christian Peter Graves was skittish about the creepiness of his character Capt. Oveur, but the directors talked him into going with it. “Surely You Can’t Be Serious” is loaded with fascinating and hilarious stories of how Abrahams and the Zuckers cast dramatic actors like Graves, Leslie Nielsen, Robert Stack, and Lloyd Bridges in these roles.

The directors’ advice to their stars to deliver lines as if their characters don’t realize they’re in a comedy is genius, and it’s a huge part of the appeal. The list of actors that studios or producers wanted to cast but who didn’t make it into the movie is fascinating. Barry Manilow? Dom DeLuise? Bruce Jenner? (Abrahams claims that Jenner offered to read for the roles of Ted Striker and Elaine Dickinson, but it’s hard to tell if he’s deadpan or serious in delivering that line.)

The influence of studio executives like Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg and producers like Howard Koch helped the directors bring their comic vision to life on the big screen. It’s inspiring the way men like these went to bat for the team in order to bring “Airplane!” to life.

The way the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team was able to get around plagiarizing “Zero Hour!,” the movie that served as the inspiration for “Airplane!,” was genius, as was the latitude they gave actors Norman Alexander Gibbs and Al White to develop the “jive” dialogue and train Barbara Billingsley in how to “speak jive.”

Music played an important role in making “Airplane!” so great. Composer Elmer Bernstein was responsible for many iconic “serious” movie scores, and he understood what the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team was looking for. His score helps give “Airplane!” the drama and tension that makes it so effective as a comedy and as good storytelling.

More good schtuff yet to the article, of which any fan of Airplane! (and how on earth could anyone NOT be?) will want to read the all.

Update! And stop calling me Shirley.

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Turnabout: fair play

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Paleosimian dismayed to find shoe on other foot.


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A fool for Richard Russo

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That would be moi. I’ve been a huge Russo fan ever since I swiped a former Significant Other’s copy of Empire Falls and, after finishing it, proceeded to wolf down the rest of her library of Russo’s amazing work in one great gulp of binge-reading. This rave review of his latest release describes what’s in store for the Russo reader.

In an endnote, Russo says that he kept returning to North Bath because he liked the characters—and there is a lot to like. He kept hearing Sully’s voice in his head, and gradually, he acknowledges, that voice became Paul Newman’s, who so unforgettably portrayed Sully in the film of Nobody’s Fool. But another voice also stuck with him, that of the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who turned a bit part in the film as the officious but hapless officer Douglas Raymer—whom Sully bests in a comic confrontation—into such a definitive portrayal that Russo made Raymer a major character in subsequent North Bath novels. In Somebody’s Fool, Raymer is now the retired chief of the former North Bath police department, called back into service to deal with a dead body and with corruption in the newly consolidated Schuyler Springs force—whose crooked cops have much do with Thomas’s near-death experience. While it’s not uncommon for authors to disdain or disown film adaptions of their work, Russo has said of the 1994 film, “You could examine it frame by frame and you’d learn just about everything you needed to know about adapting a book for film.” It’s not an exaggeration to say that the film helped bring Russo back to North Bath.

Even as Russo publishes Somebody’s Fool, another of his works has made it to the screen—in this case television—in an AMC miniseries adaption of Straight Man. This 1997 novel is Russo’s “university book,” but unlike those that Vidal disdained, Straight Man is a wickedly funny, harshly critical depiction of life in an English Department where ideology shapes professors’ research and writing, academics use petty politics to advance their careers, and the decline of the humanities has created a constant fear of budget cuts. Though the novel itself is 25 years old, it so accurately depicted where the humanities were headed that it doesn’t take much massaging to turn it into 2023 series with the ironic title of Lucky Hank—a reference to the bored, cranky English Department chair, William Henry Devereaux, Jr., who endlessly torments his deserving colleagues. Though quite different from Nobody’s Fool, Lucky Hank has garnered similar acclaim—in part because both sources benefit from Russo’s gift for creating comic characters with serious significance.

Russo supported himself in college by working the kinds of hard jobs at which many of his characters toil. There, he watched his father and his father’s friends use humor to get themselves through jobs, after which he’d join them at some local bar to help laugh away the day’s aches. It’s that kind of storytelling, in Russo’s hands, that makes his blue-collar novels so engaging and palatable, because oftentimes the circumstances of his characters are difficult at best, near-awful at worst. American fiction is better because Russo stuck with characters who he thought he was escaping when he went off to school. The arc of his career reminds me of the words of the narrator of Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound, writing about himself in the third person, when he observes that all he wanted as a young student was to leave behind “all the shallow provincials” of his hometown “for the deep emancipating world of Art. As it turned out, he had taken them all with him.”

Russo has done the same, in the process taking many of his lucky readers along for the ride, too.

It’s a ride I very much look forward to taking, and highly recommend to everybody else out there too.

(Via John Tierney)

Update! Just for shits and giggles I had a look in on the IMDb page for the Empire Falls miniseries, which I remember greatly enjoying back in the days when I still watched TV now and then. Somehow, I’d forgotten that it was Paul Newman’s last acting performance. It’s one of the vanishingly rare exceptions to the rule that any film or TV project featuring a long list of A-list actors is guaranteed to suck big green donkey dick.

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Now the only question is, will 2024 be rigged? Do the votes matter anymore?

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Good question from what is an accurate article IMO. At least here in NC I see the tide changing substantially. From a barely reddish state with a commie gov, to a hardcore super majority legislature and supreme court to match. Next up, getting a solid non rino republican governor and the turn around will be nearly complete.

When you’re climbing to the mountaintop the worst moments are just before you arrive.

WAYNE ROOT: FINALLY, Some Good News. “The Great Awakening” and “The Great American Divorce” are Converging. The Debate is Over. We Won!

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The best thing about living in San Francisco?

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It’s all the interesting, unusual, culturally-diverse people you meet there.

We all know that San Francisco has a terrible, awful, horrible, homeless problem with homeless people sleeping everywhere. One homeless man set up camp across from a Catholic grade school. It would have been a curiosity except for the signs he hung outside of his tent.

“Free fentanyl 4 new users” and “Meth for stolen items.”

Joseph Adam Moore served six years for unlawful sex with a 12-year-old girl and was accused of having sex with a 15-year-old girl just a month after getting out of prison. But his probation deal did not include staying away from schools. So he camped directly across from Stella Maris Academy and began to host parties of stoners — much to the neighborhood’s dismay.

“Some of these people brought barbecues, a beach umbrella, and even a dune buggy that sat on the pavement,” said Nathaniel Weiner, a neighbor. “They’re ‘creating a Burning Man-style party’ in a quiet residential neighborhood where people are just trying to live their lives.’”

Note that I haven’t even used the word “police” in this piece. Apparently, the only law Moore is violating is the one about public camping. The cops are hamstrung by about a thousand rules and regulations regarding the treatment of the homeless; they can’t be forced to go anywhere or do anything; they can’t be forced into a mental health facility; they can’t even be forced to go into a shelter.

Dan Noyes, a reporter for ABC7 in San Francisco, had an enlightening interview with Mr. Moore.

Moore says he’s lived across the school for two years and that his signs offering free drugs are no joke. He told Noyes “he’s just passing on the drugs that other people give him, in exchange for blankets and supplies he provides.”

Moore: “So they bring me trash that they’ve scavenged, things that they think are valuable, or they give me some of the drugs that they have, which I don’t do.”

Noyes: “You’re exposing grade school kids to this? This is not right. You know that?”

Moore: “No, no, it’s shallow.”

Oh, absolutely. Wouldn’t EVER want to be perceived as “shallow,” you know. Or “unevolved,” or lacking in empathy for the “less fortunate” who have been “victimized” by our rapacious “capitalist” system. Why, that would be just awful. After all, a mentally-ill pedophile dope-slinger says so.

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Jesus CHRIST, but this chick can RIDE!

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Ahh, but let’s not forget the number of times she had to have busted her ass whilst learning how to do all this.


Amazing. The union between (wo)man and machine on display here is damned near total, and quite impressive. Take especial note of the scrupulously careful, almost gingerly way she places her feet on the rear pegs as she keeps the front wheel in the air throughout. Hats off to ya, ma’am.

Update! After re-watching it for about the tenth time, I realized there’s another party involved that deserves some kudos: whoever was behind the camera recording it. Always in focus and perfectly framed; steady-handed zoom-ins and -outs; never any shaking, wobbling, or losing track of the subject. This is some incredible stunt-riding and some top-notch lensmanship both, I’d say, a real two-fer.

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The way forward, the way back, the past as prelude

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The problem with this kind of thinking can be summed up by the parts I’ll put in boldface.

Things are going a little sideways now, wouldn’t you agree? The world is not coming to an end, exactly, but our arrangements in it are breaking up all at once, threatening to wreck everyday life for a whole lot more people than just the poor mutts on the margins. The endless insults to common decency and common sense by the vicious governing blob that runs things don’t help, either. The main question du jour: when things break really badly, will they break against that vicious blob hard enough to make it stop?

This blob — a weird cabal alien to our heritage — is composed of people with names and duties, and institutions too. They have already lost their credibility, their authority, and their legitimacy. The problem is that they haven’t lost their power to wreck our country. Exposed and disgraced as they are, they still occupy the seats of command, still twiddle the dials on the control console, still enjoy a foolish illusion of invulnerability.

I’m in favor of wholesale impeachment of these top people as the best way to go, first, to pry their hands off the levers of power, and second, use the process of impeachment to move public sentiment to a firmly anti-blob position.

See what I’m talking about? Those two statements are self-evidently contradictory. If they still occupy the seats of command—and they assuredly do—how the hell do you propose to successfully impeach them, then? Do you seriously expect a system under their control to right itself just because you have your lawyers ask their lawyers, nicely and politely, to cut out the shenanigans and skullduggery? Even if that miracle somehow does happen, who’s going to make it stick? Or, in Stalin’s famous (and possibly apocryphal) formulation, how many divisions has the Pope?

Yes, their assumption of invulnerability is in fact a foolish illusion, but not because they’re afraid of being impeached. It’s the same old story, though: the Second Amendment has no power against tyranny if Our Side has preemptively foresworn to see that’s it enforced—ie, to ever do anything with all those guns but keep them safely locked in gun safes or closets no matter what…exactly as the rabid opponents of the 2A have mandated. They did that for a reason, and so far it’s worked out quite well indeed for them.

There’s more to Kuenstler’s piece, of course, lots of it good. But in the end he’s self-stymied by some too-familiar habits of thought and emotion: the hopeless faith that, in a rigged game wherein the rules are arbitrary and favor one side over the other, appeals to the umpire might still somehow save the day. That, despite a veritable Everest of indisputable evidence to the contrary that stacks up higher each and every day, there’s still something of honesty and probity left in the crooks and grifters at the helm of the ship of (Super)state. That, in people visibly, demonstrably evil to their very marrow, there is nevertheless some good in them somewhere that might somehow be brought forth, if we can only appeal to it vehemently enough.

Would that it were so. Alas, it is not. The number of decent men in the US Congress can be counted on one’s fingers without resort to one’s toes; much as I do appreciate them, Rand Paul and Matt Gaetz will never be able to impeach anybody all by themselves. As to dismantling Foggy Bottom, fuhgeddabouddit, ain’t gonna happen without gunplay.

Not that pointing out the mal- and mis-feasance rife throughout FederalGovCo isn’t a worthwhile endeavor, mind; in fact, it’s a vital step in the whole long slog. I repeat: a process, not an event. But at some point cold, hard steel (or lead) must come into play, and all the pleas in the world for comity and gentlemanly restraint aren’t going to change that.

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The Daily Donnybrook, and other fine things

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Welcome to Ye Olde Colde Furye Blogge’s shiny new open-comments thread, where y’all can have at it as you wish, on any topic you like. Do note that the official CF comments policy remains in effect here, as enumerated in the left sidebar. All new posts will appear below this one. There will be blood…

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