Much has been written about the various “occupy” movements that have been sweeping the country, a lot of it unfairly focused on students defecating on cars, flags and a variety of other inanimate objects — when not copulating in plain view following more or less the same guidelines. The naysayers and fault-finders have also pointed out the anti-Semitic rants, the “F*** the Troops!” signs, the profusion of subtle messages such as “Workers Unite, End Capitalism, Eat the Rich, Kill Your Parents, Write Bad Checks” and the unnerving presence of at least one head on a pike which one can only hope is in effigy.

These isolated events (using the MSNBC definition of “isolated” which is: “pretty much anywhere you look”) should not distract us from the larger message, which is “yes we are devolving into Piltdown Man at an alarming rate, but we have a darned good reason!”

It is not as if the students doing this socialist pole-dance want to be poster-children for civilizational decline. In fact, those who squeezed in a medieval history course between the “Transgendered Communists of Color” prerequisites would be the first to acknowledge that a short, brutish life lived in a hut constructed out of cow pies and straw is not to be desired. But these same scholars will be the first to tell you that it’s the system that has turned them into the eat-your-granny primitives we see before us.

The “system” in question is a malevolent stew of Judeo-Christian morality and “rich-get-richer” laws in which people who borrow money (“debtors”) are expected to repay their “debts” to their “creditors”. The “creditors” in this instance are rapacious bankers who misrepresented student loans as free gifts from the unicorn god and thus duped a generation of Lesbian Studies graduates into life-long bondage.

Okay, even if you don’t accept the unicorn god scenario (and I make it even money half the protesters would), the students have a point: Who knew you couldn’t fork over a hundred grand for a B.A. in Philosophy, hang a shingle right after graduation (“Metaphysical conundrums solved while U wait”), and not pay off your loans in under a year? Who knew, being a newly credentialed philosopher, you couldn’t sway the bank manager with an air-tight treatise on why the loan didn’t objectively “exist” in the first place? Who knew that the assurances of your Feminist Environmental Marxist Studies professor that all the bank managers would either be dead or in camps by now might prove a hair premature?

You didn’t, Mr.Mowgli wannabe, that’s obvious. And you should have, and thereby hangs the solution. You don’t know anything of value, what you think you know is wrong, and the institution that was supposed to correct this lamentable situation is six figures richer for the four years you just squandered. Seems to me somebody owes you a refund. Seems to me if you could avoid partying away that refund in opium dens and titty bars on the way to the bank, that would make the student loan problem go away in a hurry.

In support of your suit I propose heading down to Wall Street with my own bull-horn and leading a chant thus (the obligatory repetition of each line — aka the freak chorus — included for effect and because I hope to get paid by the word):

To the greedy, fat-cat university administrators …
To the greedy, fat-cat university administrators …

Give us our money back or we’ll poop on your cars!
Give us our money back or we’ll poop on your cars!

We will drum ceaselessly and sing atonal dirges …
We will drum ceaselessly and sing atonal dirges …
(Some will start drumming and singing, who could have seen that coming?)

We will have sex in public places on campus.
We will have sex in public places on campus … even more than usual

We will put your heads on a pike, symbolically of course
We will put your heads on a pike … what was the rest of that?

After four years in your hallowed halls we are clueless
After four years in your hallowed halls we are clueless

We have no clue about basic economics
Wait, it’s the law of supply and … oh I don’t know

We have no clue about politics or history
We have no clue about politics or history, especially the part that happened in the past

We are so clueless and robotic …
We are so clueless and robotic …

That we will even repeat admissions of our own ignorance with no discernible comprehension
You’ll have to break that into smaller sentences dude

So, give us our money back would ya?
So, give us our money back would ya?

You have it, we want it
You have it, we want it

You know the drill
You know the drill

Hell, you taught us the drill
Hell, you taught us the drill

Your chickens … have come home to roost
Cluck, cluck, cluck

At this point I anticipate we will all find the closest prostitute (short toddle I expect), crown her “Reason”, and march on Columbia with a united heart and an arm full of sharpened stakes. The experience will be all the pleasanter for the fact that most of the marchers can’t walk and sing at the same time.

(Cross-posted at PJ Tatler)

All the Governor’s Rocks
(Excerpt)

“Governor, they found the rock.”

Of all the calls Perry never wanted to get at 3:00 AM, this had to be the worst. Better to learn that Austin had been reduced to a glowing slag-heap than to receive “the painted rock call”.

Groggy but still canny enough to realize the phone might be tapped, he played dumb while he collected his thoughts:

“What in the hell are you talking about? What rock? Do you know what time it is?”

“The N-word Head rock, Governor.”

Oh Lord in Heaven, not the Imperial Wizard Crypto-Racist Southwest Politician of the Year Plaque, awarded personally by Robert Byrd, in full robes no less. Think Rick, think!

“Are you talking about that stupid sign at the hunt camp, the one we painted over, then flipped?”

“Yes Governor. Evidently if you turn the rock back over and look at it at an angle of 20-40 degrees off the perpendicular you can still see the N-word.”

Damnation! He had told his people not to cheap out on the paint. Two coats, they couldn’t understand two coats? Even strokes, put down drop cloths first, all ignored! How was he expected to restore racial purity to an unsuspecting nation if his minions couldn’t follow simple instructions?

“It was the Post wasn’t it?”

“Yes sir, they are relentless, especially the ones on the roadside artifacts beat.”

(Read full story at pajamasmedia)

If I were to craft a dark satire about moral inversion, cultural suicide and Orwellian disinformation I couldn’t do much better than the plot summary below:

• Five members of a Jewish family in Israel — including a three-month old baby– are literally murdered in their beds, with psychopathic fury, by Islamic extremists.
• A British journalist takes the media to task for its minimal, tepid and equivocating coverage of these murders, referring in passing to the perpetrators — and those who support and celebrate them — as “savages.”
• A sock-puppet Islamic organization complains to both the local media watchdog organization (the Press Complaints Commission – PCC) and the police that all Arabs have been defamed.
• Shortly thereafter the sock-puppet advises the usual media suspects (one of whom he works for) of his heroic j’accuse! moment and the airwaves are shortly vibrating with accounts of PCC and police investigations against the journalist and her newspaper.
• While everyone watches the attendant Kabuki theater the innocents in Israel are still very much dead and the forces that caused their deaths — and the deaths and misery of countless others — remain unexamined in any serious way.

There is of course nothing fictional, nor remotely funny, about this sequence of events. The recent murder of the Fogel family — shrouded by the media in euphemism and attempted mitigation — is described in much more clear-eyed fashion by Caroline Glick:

Ruth Fogel was in the bathroom when the Palestinian terrorists pounced on her husband Udi and their three-month-old daughter Hadas, slitting their throats as they lay in bed on Friday night in their home in Itamar.

The terrorists stabbed Ruth to death as she came out of the bathroom. With both parents and the newborn dead, they moved on to the other children, going into a bedroom where Ruth and Udi’s sons Yoav (11) and Elad (four) were sleeping. They stabbed them through their hearts and slit their throats.

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[promoted from the diaries-- streiff]

As part of the Left’s ongoing quest to make every attempt at welfare reform look like the opening scene from Oliver Twist, Susie Madrak of Crooks and Liars has written a profoundly misleading and wrong-headed piece that might better have been entitled “Please Sir, Can I Have Some More Cash?”

Relying heavily on unimpeachable sources such as FightBack!News (“News and Views from the Peoples’ Struggle”) Ms. Madrak weaves a tale in which Minnesota has surpassed Fascist Arizona in sheer villainy with its now infamous “Show Me Your Paper Money” law. On the off-chance you haven’t heard of this law, and aren’t already vibrating with outrage, Ms. Madrak is quick to enlighten you.

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Mr. President,

This being a month with the letter “a” in it I am sure you will be taking another much-needed vacation soon. I note with interest that, along with the undersized girl’s bike and sensible helmet, you have lately taken to bringing books as well. This is a welcome trend inasmuch as knowledge is power — and your utterances of late have betrayed an energy crisis of an entirely different kind.

I am specifically referring to your many forays into history, economics and theology in your public pronouncements. These have some of us (primarily those who have studied history, economics and theology) scratching our heads like Inigo Montoya and muttering “I don’t think that means what you think it means.”

What I’m trying to say here is while you get full marks for reading books — or at least carrying them around in plain sight for the cameras — it is possible that your reading choices could benefit from a bit of a tweak. While I’m sure The Post American World by Fareed Zakaria is a stirring read, part of your job is to prove him wrong, and that probably won’t happen if you are nodding and smiling at the bits where we are overtaken by China.

Accordingly, in the spirit of “better to light a candle than curse the darkness”, and incidentally shore up a few areas where you might be a little behind the curve, herewith a few of my favorites for those lazy days when the bike has a flat tire and Michelle locks your golf-clubs in the closet.

Next: Remembering the Forgotten Man

There was a piece last week in Rolling Stone entitled “Glenn Beck’s Shtick? Alex Jones Got There First” that perfectly illustrates three home truths:

• People primarily motivated by self-promotion will get into bed with anybody.
• Lefties obsessed with the destruction of a viscerally feared and hated enemy — and that’s all of them — are likewise not overly choosy.
• These two groups tend to cohabit a lot.

In this particular instance, the menage a deux is between Alex Jones, amiably described as:

The godfather of the 9/11 Truth Movement, [and] the most popular chronicler of what he believes is a New World Order plot to enslave the global population … [until] recently … a lonely and little-known voice in the short wave and Internet radio wilderness.

and Alexander Zaitchik of Rolling Stone. Their shared goal is a take-down of Glenn Beck. Jones attempts to do this by proving, between spasms of sputtering envy, that Beck has stolen his ideas and adulterated the message. Zaitchik does so by lumping Beck together with a 9/11 Truther smart enough to work with video equipment and dumb enough to cooperate with Rolling Stone – whose general regard for him is such that they described him thus in a separate piece:

The most paranoid man in America is trying to overthrow the ‘global Stasi Borg state,’ one conspiracy theory at a time

In fairness to both gentlemen, their case does seem airtight. Using seven — count ‘em seven — examples provided by Jones, Zaitchik weaves a tale of industrial espionage not seen since Jonah Goldberg ripped off my original idea that communism and fascism are essentially the same.

For reasons best known to his therapist, Karl Rove has decided — yet again — to poke a stick into the Sarah Palin hornet’s nest and give it a good stir. In an interview with New York Magazine Rove briefly departed from the theme of escalating self-congratulation he was very much warming to long enough to try his hand at Tina Fey shtick.

… When I bring up his statements [last October] about Palin during our interview, Rove says only that he wished he’d made his comments on Fox News instead—before going into a withering impersonation of Palin, recalling a scene from her TV show in which she’s fishing.

“Did you see that?” he says, adopting a high, sniveling Palin accent: “ ‘Holy crap! That fish hit my thigh! It hurts!’ ”

“How does that make us comfortable seeing her in the Oval Office?” he asks, disgusted. “You know—‘Holy crap, Putin said something ugly!’ ”

There is no mention in the article of Rove donning little Sarah glasses or ripping off his tear-away suit to reveal a faux Sarah ensemble (for which, on behalf of a grateful nation, I am truly thankful) but he may have been battling time constraints.

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From the diaries by Jeff

There is a classic Bob Newhart skit about a man visiting the home of a friend who has a large and vicious dog. After being intermittently dragged around the room and pinned to the furniture by the beast, Newhart’s character manages to mollify it with handfuls of gumdrops out of a bowl. This works fine until he realizes he’s running low on gumdrops and his host nonchalantly advises him that if you stop feeding the dog “he doesn’t understand.”

If there is a better analog to the current entitlement-withdrawal syndrome we are witnessing in Wisconsin and elsewhere — both in terms of the brute stupidity of its participants and the growing horror with which it’s being observed — I am at a loss to find it.

In a period of less than a week union thugs have made their displeasure with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Fox News, Glenn Beck, FreedomWorks, various Tea Party representatives, and pretty much anyone else who can’t sing “Joe Hill” from memory manifest by making sure the expression “when push comes to shove” is anything but figurative.

Consider this calorically challenged defender of the working man — who probably can’t see his belt, much less tighten it — heroically blind-siding a Tea Party activist then waddling off at high speed (relatively speaking):

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In the aftermath of this year’s CPAC it would appear that to know-know-know GOProud isn’t necessarily to love-love-love it. In fact, if you listen carefully you can almost hear the voice of the class monitor advising many of its erstwhile supporters to stay calm and move in an orderly fashion toward the fire exits. Tammy Bruce, in what can only be described as a terse statement, has resigned from their advisory board. Al Cardenas, the new chair of the American Conservative Union, which organizes CPAC, is publicly rethinking the wisdom of working with them in future:

I have been disappointed with their website and their quotes in the media, taunting organizations that are respected in our movement and part of our movement, and that’s not acceptable. And that puts them in a difficult light in terms of how I view things … It’s going to be difficult to continue the relationship [with GOProud] because of their behavior and attitude …

At issue have been a number of statements made by GOProud co-founders Christopher Barron and Jimmy LaSalvia in response to people and organizations who either stayed home this year or showed up expressing serious misgivings about GOProud’s role and agenda. These exercises in spleen-venting have been remarkable not only for their impolitic petulance but the disturbing tendency to play the “bigot” card — pretty much as a default — in the face of legitimate disagreements.

Thus it is that in Barron’s world, Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council doesn’t merely disagree with (or misunderstand) GOProud’s stance on gay marriage, he is actually in the business of “demonizing gays”:

It is the supreme irony that an outbreak of unusually cold weather has exposed ominous signs of weakness in an industry about to be further hobbled by regulations designed to combat global warming. It is doubly ironic that this should have occurred in a state whose name is more or less synonymous with energy production.

Texas, which produces and consumes more electricity than any other state, experienced power shortages last week sufficient to warrant rolling blackouts and an undertaking (subsequently reneged upon) to import power from Mexico.

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