This week’s Radio Derb covers the GOP convention, racist shmacists, race righteousness in Tampa, media gnostics, Rand Paul and the Arctic Alliance, Ryan, Christie, Mrs. Romney, and Ms. Rice, Neil Armstrong, Akin, Prince Harry, the lady who found herself, and the lady who can’t help herself.
I just got back from Virginia Beach, and boy are my arms tired of gesticulating. We drove there to cover a surf competition, and spending 16 hours in a car with an all-male film crew inevitably leads to the question, “How much would you have to be paid to let a bum rape you?”
The correct answer is $10 million, but arriving at that conclusion required a lot of Steve Sailer-esque analysis.
Before we bottomed out at hypothetical hobo-sex scenarios, we covered the usual road-trip topics. We all agreed that telling someone their wife is ugly goes too far in one direction and talking about her beautiful ass goes too far in the other. Sex stories are usually the next step (before you met your wife, of course; nobody wants to hear about marital intercourse). Everyone has about three good stories in them, but eight hours to Virginia Beach and eight hours back means you”re going to run out of those about a third of the way into the trip.
“Kill-Fuck-Marry“ is a popular game, but it requires little intellect. A good road-trip game brings in philosophy. It involves playing out scenarios and summarizing both sides” pros and cons. “Would You Rather?” is usually the game that comes before games involving uncomfortable carnal scenarios with homeless men.
1. HOW MUCH WOULD YOU HAVE TO BE PAID TO FRENCH-KISS A HOMELESS MAN?
When amateurs are confronted with this question, they usually blurt out a number like $3 billion. Yeah, we know you”d do it for $3 billion. So would planet Earth. The question is, how much would you refuse? If three billion is your number, then you would refuse a duffel bag containing $2.9 billion. The Treasurer of the Absurd Questions Estate would proffer you said bag and you would say, “No thanks.” When confronted with this, people usually admit they would accept $2.9 billion and you”re forced to whittle them down to their real number. The final figure shouldn”t make you feel like you swindled someone. A good transaction means both sides are unhappy.
Another rookie mistake is to start asking questions about herpes and whether there will be a doctor present, etc. When a fee is agreed upon, you have to accept all the potential risks and eagerly play tongue hockey with him as if you were a teenager on a first date. Someone is paying a lot of dough for this and you don”t want them to feel shortchanged. You also can”t ask questions about the bum. You have to assume he is a lifer with gin blossoms, repulsive body odor, gangrenous toes sticking out of split boots, and an eye that’s swollen shut. We”re not here for nuance, so don”t be a pussy about the details.
ANSWER: $1,700
You”re not going to get herpes from a bum, and the whole thing is only a few minutes out of your life. Sure, it’s unpleasant, but people work in sewers. Redheads do roofing in the summer. Caregivers bathe the elderly. You can handle a gross kiss.
The other factor here is your obligation as a family man. Seventeen hundred bucks could buy the kids those cool little electric cars they want so badly. It’s a flight you and your wife could take while the kids are with the in-laws. It’s also a hilarious story. I would feel no shame if I had done this and someone brought it up at a party. I”d be thrilled to give the details. Anyone who wouldn”t do this for $1,700 is a wimp.
GSTAAD—Now is the time of sultry August days and nights, with the gift of privacy an added bonus. In summer the village contains the die-hards, the locals, and a few tourists. Bucolic freedom, fresh air, and sunshine were once anathema—foul-smelling, airless dives such as New Jimmy’s were the real McCoy—but now the sound of bells on roaming cows means instant happiness.
It’s called old age. I can now walk from my place to the next village and back, a trip of about one hour, before the pain becomes unbearable. The good news is that early next year I’m trying out a revolutionary treatment in Germany, one with a 70-percent success rate, especially among athletes. (Blood is extracted, jiggled with, then reintroduced, and presto, a new, improved Taki emerges and returns to competition pain-free. I hope.) Good old Fatherland. When it comes down to the nitty-gritty, only a German can be counted on. Just ask Wellington. In the meantime, I’m hobbling along getting ready for the autumn judo and karate season. Alas, autumn—a depressing time—is upon us. Why is it that summers lasted so much longer when one was young?
At times I walk along a river, which is “clear and smoothly fast in the early morning.” (You get two guesses whose words those are.) I walk at sunset because it’s cool in the shade, the farmers are already in bed, and the only living things that cross my path are slugs. I can’t wait to get back to the gym and start training. But that’s for New York, which in tempo and temperament is light-years away from here. Gstaad is for walking, climbing, and dreaming—of one’s youth, of girlfriends past, of drunken nights in Boulevard Montparnasse, of lazy afternoons at the polo, of flower sellers at dawn, and of the magical word “yes” when uttered by a girl.
Down by the sea last week on the French Riviera, the wine flowed and flowed and flowed and flowed! It was pink and chilled, and I had difficulty speaking to three very attractive women that an executive editor friend had staying in his house in Grasse. One of them very sweetly told me all about it the next morning.
Me: “Did I misbehave? If I did, I apologize from the bottom of my heart.”
She: “Actually you were very sweet. You told me you were afraid to sleep alone and asked if you could share my bed and that your intentions were honorable.”
Me: “You Brits are hard-hearted. I woke up in my bed after a horrible night of fright.”
She: “You poor thing. I never realized what a sensitive soul you are.”
Ah, the rich. The rich, as used to be said of the poor, are always with us.
What do we others, we non-rich in all our generality, think of them? I turn to America’s Newspaper of Record for answers:
Americans admire the rich.
They just don’t like them very much.
That’s the conclusion of a new survey by the Pew Research Center that found an overwhelming majority of people have a high regard for those they consider wealthy”with almost half saying the rich are smarter and harder workers.
But the majority also believes the rich are greedy and pay too little in taxes.
And about a third thinks they’re dishonest.
What do I think of the rich? It depends on which ones you mean.
I don’t mind the rich. It seems to me that so long as everyone has the necessities, it doesn’t matter if a few have far more than they can use. We all have the necessities, and then some. Nobody’s starved in the First World for a long time unless they wanted to.
More viscerally: Having grown up poor by mid-20th-century First World standards in a municipally owned house heated only by a coal fire in the living room, and having gone to school with kids who did not wear socks or underpants (remind me to tell you about the “gold medal” sometime), the ordinary middle-middle-class American life seems like rich to me.
Possibly it’s just me”you can take the boy out of, etc.”but I still can’t get over modern life’s sheer glutted extravagance. You have a yacht? A beach house with five bathrooms? Hey, that’s great. My family owns two newish cars! We take vacations in hotels!
And it depends what kind of rich, as it always has, for everyone. Let me number the kinds.
Land Rich. This isn’t of much consequence nowadays, but in preindustrial societies it was the way to be rich. Feudalism was all organized around land wealth. In some times and places, you didn’t merely own the land; you owned the people on it, too.
In older, more conservative societies, the land rich survived well into the 20th century. In revolutionary France, they were massacred or exiled, though their estates soon found new tenants. Why do you think we use a French phrase to identify social upstarts?
The early USA was full of revolutionary spirit, too. It was also full of Land Rich. We weren’t of the temper to massacre our Land Rich, but their continued existence had to be fitted somehow to the Declaration’s egalitarian ideals and to the fact of widespread voting rights.
Thomas Jefferson, Land Rich as all get-out, came as close as anyone could to squaring this circle. He imported into his political philosophy the ancient prejudice of the Land Rich against commerce, banking, paper money, bonds, and debt. (It was a prejudice rooted, like many other prejudices, in fear. It was easier than we now remember for the Land Rich to get helplessly into debt through mismanaging their estates.)
How to get those votes, though? Why, by transmitting to voters one’s own dislike of businessmen, banks, and creditors. Raise up as your model citizen the yeoman farmer, who, though he might not be Land Rich, had at least a fair chance”not a solid one, but a fair one”of being Land Non-Poor.
As a political appeal, this worked for most of the 19th century. When actual yeoman farmers ceased to be much of a constituency, elements of Jeffersonian flimflam survived in the modern Democratic Party. We hear them today: Evil bankers! Predatory lenders! Wall Street paper-shufflers!
Police opened fire on a surging mob of angry mine workers on August 16th at South Africa’s Marikana platinum mine. When the guns went quiet, 34 were dead and at least 78 wounded. This came a few days after the killing of 10″including a pair of policemen who were hacked to death”bringing the total death toll to 44 and shock to the “Rainbow Nation.”
These deaths cast yet another pall of doubt over the ruling party’s ability to lead the people to the “promised land” that “liberation” was supposed to deliver.
It had started with a dispute between rival unions”the NUM (National Union of Mineworkers) and the feistier AMCU (Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union). Disputes over low pay led to abuse being heaped on the “greedy capitalists” who care naught for the worker. The press took a hit for allegedly publishing false figures on pay scales. The mine’s owner, a London-based company called Lonmin, said that wages were higher than those reported. Politicians had a stab at Lonmin executives as well as the unions. Then virtually all but the accused agreed there had been a massive failure of political leadership.
When unions, politicians, and mine bosses had caught their collective breath there was fury and pandemonium as the pointed fingers flew in every direction and the ANC scrambled for political cover.
Not to be left out of the fray, in came crashing the redoubtable Julius Malema, former leader of the ANC Youth League, with his shaved pate shining bright to lay the blame squarely at the feet of the man he once promised to die for, President Jacob Zuma.
But now we know everyone missed the mark badly. A dead rabbit was the real reason unrest turned to tragedy.
Eyewitness accounts reveal the protesters” pugnacity was not all the fault of the capitalists, unions, or politicians but the result of the intervention of a witch doctor known as Nzabe who had been summoned to minister to the miners.
A miner named Bulelani Malwana told the Daily Dispatch that the “traditional healer” led strikers through the following aggression-boosting ritual:
They were cut several times on their upper body and a black substance was smeared on the wounds….After they got the muti people were so aggressive. They just wanted to fight. They felt so invincible.
The last thing I had expected of Dinesh D’Souza’s first Michael Moore-type political documentary, 2016: Obama’s America, was that it would prove one of August’s aesthetic marvels. Yet this anti-Obama film’s sumptuous digital cinematography”featuring majestically saturated colors and handheld camerawork that’s never jittery but instead swoops indolently to the edge of trance-induction”ranks it behind only Oliver Stone’s hedonistic drug flick Savages as the psychedelic movie of the summer. (Here’s the trailer.)
But the stylization can get in the way of the message. For instance, D’Souza’s last interview is with a former comptroller general who has comptrollerish stuff to tell us about Obama’s deficits. Sadly, I lost track of his point (We Are Doomed, I imagine) because the camera pirouetted so obsessively and entrancingly around the talking head’s demonically glowing floral necktie that I felt like Ken Kesey in a 1959 CIA experiment.
Kaleidoscopic editing and some cleverly animated maps and diagrams all add to the visual quality. The musical score, unfortunately, isn’t as good. It starts off wonderfully by using Nick Lowe’s insouciant 1979 power-pop hit “Cruel to Be Kind” to explain why Ronald Reagan’s presidency was a success. And there’s some moody Islamic music when D’Souza visits Indonesia, Kenya, and his own homeland of India in search of people who knew the Obama family.
Unfortunately, the score eventually devolves into a TV-quality collection of deliberately unsettling synthesizer blurts. On future documentaries (and with this one already nearing $10 million at the box office, D’Souza should get a chance to make more), D’Souza and his co-director John Sullivan should experiment with using modernist classical music. Nobody does free-floating angst like modern Europeans.
Aesthetics are crucial to Republicans, since, let’s face it, most partisan politics are status games, and looks are the prime status marker. The GOP has started nominating good-looking candidates. Now they need more good-looking films like this one.
2016 is a less strident version of D’Souza’s 2010 book The Roots of Obama’s Rage, which suffered from a silly title. (Obama’s emotional gamut runs merely from condescension to peevishness.) Still, the veteran conservative author makes a decent biographical case before overextending his argument.
He argues that Obama’s mother taught him to worship his absent Kenyan father’s anticolonial leftism. (After all, Obama named his 1995 autobiography Dreams from My Father.) D’Souza then leaps to the conclusion that Obama’s foreign policy is too dovish, too anti-British, and too anti-Israeli.
The documentary warns that Obama’s congenitally anti-imperialist foreign policy will manifest itself more openly after he’s safely past reelection. It makes good use of the open-mic gaffe where Obama was filmed reassuring Vladimir Putin’s former sock puppet Dmitry Medvedev that on nuclear arms negotiations, “This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”
Medvedev responded, “I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.” (That’s pretty sinister-sounding in a Boris and Natasha way.)
D’Souza’s book was infinitely denounced and his highly profitable movie has gone almost unreviewed. Yet newly uncovered facts more or less supporting D’Souza’s perspective can be found in the nominally pro-Obama biography, Barack Obama: The Story, by veteran Washington Post reporter David Maraniss. (My book review is on VDARE.com.)
For instance, Maraniss interviewed retired professor of Cambodian history Naranhkiri Tith, who had publicly debated Obama Sr. ten or twelve times in Hawaii. Tith said Obama Sr. saw the Soviet Bloc as “a liberating force” and “viewed communism as a savior.”
Obama Jr. himself remained active in leftist fringe parties well into adulthood.
So the miracle has happened. A generation has been inspired and millions of children have been driven away from their televisions and handheld devices and have gone out on the track, running, jumping, throwing. Faster, higher, stronger. Thank you, Olympic Games, and see you down in Rio.
And now back to reality. Yes, for once the Brits got it right and proved the gloom gluttons wrong. No, the rains did not come, just a few sprinkles. Yes, Uncle Sam came first in the medal count, and no, the Chinese were not caught doping because they used clones rather than real people. (At least they acted like genetically cloned humans, or perhaps it’s just me.)
Oh yes, I almost forgot. And thank you NBC, a network so used to lying about politics, it produced breathless fake suspense time and again, as its commentators used hyperbolic commentary despite knowing the outcome of the various events on which they were reporting. NBC, CBS, and ABC are old hands at this. They learned long ago to ignore, say, Rand Paul, and gush over, say, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama. The Olympics were a slam-dunk after politics.
But let’s be serious for a moment. Doping is the large elephant in the Olympic living room that somehow is totally ignored by the professional cheerleaders who report the games. In Barcelona in 1992 we were astonished at the Chinese women’s swimming performance. Big-shouldered and unsmiling, they powered through the water on their way to medals. Their coach had performed similar “miracles” while in charge of the East German swimmers during the previous decade.
Twenty years on, 16-year-old Ye Shiwen beats the time of the male World Record holder and passes the urine test immediately following. Is it a miracle, or is it that the masking agents the Chinese use are far superior to the IOC’s detection methods? I am of the latter opinion. If this sounds like sour grapes, it’s only because I”m old enough to have attended the Olympics when dope was something musicians smoked in downtown Greenwich Village dives. Anyway, immediate urine and blood tests mean little nowadays. Just look at the great Lance Armstrong.
My uncle, a hurdler, ran in the Los Angeles 1932 Olympics and carried the flag into the Berlin stadium in 1936. My father was on the Greek relay team. They both said that the nerve-racking part was the entrance”we always go in first as well we should, having invented the bloody games back in 776 BC“as all athletes back then were required to march like soldiers, in step and looking sharp.
Watching the motley way athletes marched in on the opening-night parade had me reaching for the sick bag. Mind you, it’s a sign of the times: lack of respect, clowning around, and using the F-word, as Katerina Thanou, a Greek silver medal winner in the 100-meter dash in Sydney, did once she stood at the podium. (She was expelled for drug use in 2004 in the Athens Games.)
Canadian history is crushingly dull.
Imagine anybody screaming, “Peace, order and good government!” while storming the barricades”or, for that matter, there being any barricades to storm.
Canada’s leaders are so boring, no one’s ever tried to shoot one. Our flag is a dead leaf.
Stubborn attempts to excite Canadians about their past simply reemphasize our comparative mediocrity. Look! One of the guys who invented Superman lived in Toronto until he was ten! Jackie Robinson played in Montreal for one whole season!
Then last week, Canadian history threatened to take a turn for the fascinating. We were informed that our first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, was a “white supremacist.”
We finally had our very own racist Founding Father to bitch about like those lucky Americans get to do with Thomas Jefferson. For leftists, it’s like finding out we’re finally getting Target stores up here.
Oddly though, the Folsom Street Fair-style festival of white liberal self-flagellation has yet to begin, even though Tim Stanley’s Ottawa Citizen article, “John A. Macdonald wanted an ‘Aryan’ Canada,” couldn’t have been more provocative.
Stanley cited 1885 parliamentary debates on the Electoral Franchise Act, during which Macdonald declared that “if the Chinese were not excluded from Canada, ‘the Aryan character of the future of British America should be destroyed.’”
You see, while we’d wisely picked our own cotton, we did get the Chinese to lay the tracks for our national railroad. Inevitably, some of these “sojourners” wanted to become Canadian citizens after we drove the last spike.
Hence Macdonald’s warning that “if the Chinese (who had been in British Columbia as long as Europeans) were allowed to vote, ‘they might control the vote of that whole Province’ and their ‘Chinese representatives’ would foist ‘Asiatic principles,’ ‘immoralities,’ and ‘eccentricities’ on the House ‘which are abhorrent to the Aryan race and Aryan principles.’”
Of course, these statements have been part of the public record since the day they were uttered, but the Hansard is neither mandatory nor recreational reading. Stanley says he brought them to the public’s attention now because the Conservative government (boo!) just renamed the Ottawa River Parkway after “Sir John A.”
Stanley coyly pretends to wonder if “we should be naming public monuments after white supremacists.”
As we all know, labels such as “white supremacist” and “racist” are career- and reputation-destroying epithets. The Southern Poverty Law Center has (ironically) grown rich tossing such toxic accusations around freely (like putting David Duke on the same list of “radical right activists” as a New Black Panther leader.)
Looking back all the way to America’s Civil War, there have been three dominant presidential coalitions.
The first was Abraham Lincoln’s. With his war to restore the Union and his martyrdom, Lincoln inaugurated an era of Republican dominance that lasted more than seven decades and saw only two Democratic presidents: Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson.
The second coalition was FDR’s, where he and his vice president Harry Truman won five consecutive presidential elections. Only Gen. Eisenhower could break that streak.
The third was Richard Nixon’s New Majority, cobbled together after his narrow 1968 victory, where he annexed the Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Christian conservatives of FDR’s coalition to win 49 states in 1972. Ronald Reagan would follow up with 44- and 49-state landslides and see his vice president win 40 states in 1988.
That New Majority is now history. In the five elections since 1992, Republicans have won the popular vote once—in 2004. And while Mitt Romney is slightly ahead in polls today, reaching 270 electoral votes will be no easy task. The electoral map is becoming problematic.
According to GOP Chairman Reince Priebus, the party has a 3-2-1 strategy. While holding all the states McCain won, the party must first recapture three red states that Barack Obama carried: Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia. Next, Romney must carry the two major battleground states that Obama won last time: Ohio and Florida. Third, add one more state Obama carried in 2008, like Colorado. Then the GOP is home.
Yet with the exception of Indiana, none of those six states seems close to secure. And the GOP must win them all. And now Missouri, after Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” gaffe, has moved from Republican red into the undecided column.
The good news: With Paul Ryan on the ticket, Wisconsin is in play, and Mitt’s birth state, Michigan, is getting a second look.
Yet consider the uphill struggle the GOP faces in a year when the election should be a cakewalk.
Though he has four straight trillion-dollar deficits and 42 months of 8 percent unemployment to his credit, Obama appears to already have four of the seven mega-states—California, Illinois, Pennsylvania and New York—secure and is more than competitive in Ohio and Florida.
Looking to the future, what is the Republican strategy ever again to win New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois or California, other than due to some national calamity or new depression?
Where the Democratic base seems secure, the GOP base, the South from the Potomac to the Pedernales, is seeing Democratic encroachments—in Florida, Virginia and North Carolina.
Moreover, while the Nixon-Reagan coalition was united on the mega-issues of morality and patriotism, today’s GOP is fragmenting on everything except the imperative of removing Obama.
A recent article in The Huffington Post, that eternal blast of lavender-scented, dreamcatcher-filtered wind from the left, recently suggested that America needs a Voter IQ Law.
Apparently a flaccid stab at Swiftian satire, the article was in response to recent laws requiring basic ID for voters to cast ballots in November’s election. The article’s author, Daniel Treadway, who looks as geekily beta as you’d expect from a progressive male scribe, implied that voter ID laws are designed to disenfranchise blacks and “lower-income voters.” (Although it’s helmed by a woman whose net worth is estimated at anywhere from $35 million to over $100 million, HuffPo postures itself as a staunch defender of society’s poor and marginalized members. I can only speculate about the reasons for this, but my best guess would be “wealth guilt.”)
Unctuously snarky anteater-faced Democratic water boy Bill Maher, who apparently never met a white rural Goy that he liked or didn’t accuse of being retarded, recently suggested much the same thing:
If Republicans can make it harder for minorities to vote with their tricky ID laws, then we get to make it harder for teabaggers to vote by bringing back the literacy test.
Prog Munchkins across the land rejoiced at the suggestion, saying such a law “will only affect conservatives” and eliminate “low info red staters,” with the end result being that the “GOP would cease to exist.” Special venom was aimed toward Tea Party members, AKA “teatards,” whom progs are fond of depicting as mentally challenged even though a New York Times poll found them to be more wealthy and educated than average Americans.
Are these leftists right? Are these devotees of political correctness correct? Are most of them even aware that their cherished Voting Rights Act of 1965 is what initially did away with literacy requirements for voters?
Presumption of intellectual superiority is tattooed on the modern progressive brain. With smug triumphalism, they trot out studies that attempt to prove that conservatism is caused by “Low-Effort Thought” and “Low IQ.” They will even get all eugenic on your ass by suggesting that leftists are smarter due to evolutionary advantages. Because it doesn’t follow the script, they tend to ignore studies that show that Republicans tend to be far more informed than Democrats on political issues and that Republican males have perennially been shown as more likely to have college degrees than Democratic males.
This may be due to what I’ll call the “Barbell Effect””there are indeed many leftists of high intelligence and erudition, but they’re counterbalanced by a surfeit of borderline-retarded constituents mainly aggregated in inner cities whose intellectual aptitude would make your average “teatard” look like a Rhodes Scholar. For every reputed teabagger you see hoisting a misspelled picket sign, I can point to some no-information imbecile who thinks Obama dispenses welfare out of his “stash” or who voted for him even though they were clueless about his policies.
And although it’s true that wealthier people tend to vote Republican, in the 2008 presidential election voters making over $200,000 a year”in other words, the meat ‘n’ potatoes of the oft-scorned “1%”“favored Obama over McCain. Modern proglosauruses probably also avoid pondering the fact that IQ and income tend to be correlated, meaning that a Voter IQ Law would squeeze out many of the selfsame “low-income voters” whose interests they’re always white-knighting.
Leftists are eternally eager to mention IQ except when it applies to their vaunted “oppressed minorities,” and then suddenly things such as race and IQ cease to exist, and you’re a bad, bad, evil witch for even suggesting that they do. But they force the issue by their incessant bashing of “dumb rednecks” and their childish refusal to acknowledge the existence of “dumb coons” and “dumb wetbacks.”
