Archive Listing
May 28, 2009 - May 21, 2009

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

THE WORM THAT TURNED. I'm not trying to be a provocateur here. I don't much care what the Democrats do to extricate themselves from the nomination mess they're struggling with. It's probably irrelevant to the outcome of the general election. My own conclusion is that John McCain doesn't really want to be president. Otherwise, he wouldn't keep punching conservatives in the mouth with his brass-knuckled Hispanic-pandering immigration policies and loony-toon "Global Warming Tour." He'd rather be maverick than president, and just maybe, age is more of a factor than even Obama hopes. It's beginning to look as if the 2008 Republican nominee is merely a less lovable version of Bob Dole, secretly subverting the race for the nation's highest office into a kind of shining last moment in the Indian Summer sun. Not getting elected will be the consummate relief, immediately followed by a self-satisfied retirement into celebrated semi-private life.

Nobody seems to hold it against Bob Dole that he never tried to win and thus threw away a very real opportunity to prevent the ignominy of Clinton's Lewinski term. McCain knows this and probably counts on the likelihood that his own defeat will be blamed, like everything else that's happened in the 21st century, on one George W. Bush. Wouldn't that be the easiest vindication of all for an old man in the grip of a festering eight-year-long grudge?

Only time will tell if that's an accurate read of the situation, but at the moment it hardly matters to the Democrats, who fear they might be flinging away their best opportunity to win the White House since Bill Clinton rose like a golden mirage from the tumbleweeds of Arkansas. And given that fear, why all the bile and irrational anger directed at Hillary rather than where it properly belongs?

I'm referring, of course, to Howard Dean. It was his leadership of the Democratic National Committee which designed the 2008 nomination process for the express purpose of ensuring that Democrats would pick their candidate early. He was the one who front-loaded the primaries so dramatically that individual states like Florida and Michigan, afraid of being left out of the big circus, rebelled against his authoritarian rule and scheduled primary dates in defiance of Dean's grand Big-Brother dictates.

And like any overweening anti-democratic despot, he punished them for their disobedience. Michigan. And Florida. Think about that for a minute.

Florida. The state in which the Democratic Party made its absurd last stand in 2000, determined to rewrite settled election law on the fly in order to insure against some phantom but absolutely unacceptable disenfranchisement of voters who couldn't read a ballot or marshal the motor skills needed to punch out a chad. Florida. A major state which has been so close to a dead-even Democrat-Republican split that many of us in other parts of the country could be forgiven for believing that the home of Disney World actually decides the outcome of the presidential race for the rest of us. But Dean in his wisdom chose to piss off Florida Democrats by disqualifying their delegates.

The result has been the classic unintended consequences of most overly ambitious Democrat schemes. You change a process too much, too suddenly, and what you get is chaos. The Hillary campaign guessed wrong about all the new variables in the nomination race. What was intended to secure her early coronation proved to be her undoing. The Obama campaign guessed right, but not because they were brilliant. Instead, they were maximally cautious. They knew it would be impossible to stop Hillary's Panzer divisions in their tracks during the initial offensive. So they decided instead to survive the first wave and mount a massive, careful, and comprehensive infantry assault that could win, eventually, by attrition. Organize in every state, contend in every caucus, put troops in every foxhole. No genius involved. Just ground-pounder determination. Which, by virtue of its ubiquity, is almost always everywhere that luck strikes when it does. And so it came to pass. Hence, Obamessiah, the cold and remote new divinity of the party of the common man.

Now, though, the great strategy of Howard Dean has landed the Democrats in a quagmire that may not kill them but will still cause them many sleepless nights and the necessity of accepting wholly unnecessary risks. That's why the current profusion of articles demanding Hillary's withdrawal and indicting her hubris is so perverse, so bizarre, so laughable. It's not her fault the Democrats are about to nominate a candidate as weak as Michael Dukakis and as doomed to failure if elected as Jimmy Carter. It's Howard Dean's fault. Hillary is the stronger candidate. You can see it in the new tone of grudging respect and even affection (gasp!) being expressed for her by conservatives who have despised her since she first appeared at Bill's side in the '92 campaign. It's unthinkable. And yet it's a function of the fact that campaigning across America has made her warmer, more human, more attractive and sympathetic than she ever was as First Lady or carpetbagger senator. Even diehard Clinton enemies are contemplating the possibility that a Hillary presidency might be survivable.

To be fair, it was also Howard Dean's bungling that forced Hillary to dig deeper into herself to find an authentic connection to her fellow Americans. But in the same stroke, he has made it impossible for his hungry hungry party to nominate a candidate who has genuine appeal beyond the ivory tower millionaires, the left-wing crazies, and the always monolithic black vote.

Why isn't the Democrat party establishment furious as hell about this state of affairs? Why aren't there as many choleric columns about Howard Dean as about Hillary Clinton? Is it that the real problem of Democrats is that they're just too stupid to understand anything?

Your guess is as good as mine. Camille.

I guess.

THE POLAR BEAR SCAM. One of my younger email correspondents -- with whom I've had a bruising ongoing debate about the meaning of conservatism -- recently threw me an unexpected bouquet but asked me a troubling question: "I think you're amazing, although not old. What is up with this new old fart/curmudgeon pose? I'm being taught parliamentary procedure and political organizing by a team of people that were Goldwater and Reagan national delegates. They're oldddd. Maybe you're just wiser than you thought you'd be at your age, although the McCain thing makes one doubt."

Well, he's winning on the McCain front. (Does that make me youthfully flexible?) But it doesn't answer the real question. Why do I feel so old in the current political environment? And I do. Even though I'm not racing to find a wheelchair in which I can ride out the rest of my years and still feel quite perky and vital most days, I also feel like a yellowing chapter of yesterday that will never be read by anyone but historians as atavistic as I am.

The answer is actually pretty simple. I was raised in an environment where facts actually mattered. Then I went to college during the period when facts ceased to matter and became grist for the political mill which ground them into whatever consistency was convenient for the cause of the moment. Stripped of its pretensions, that's all post-modernism is: the deliberate perversion of facts into solipsistic bumper stickers. I'm older than most of the elder statesmen (and women) of the mass media, and so I'm aware that for the most part they don't even know what they're doing as they slant their coverage, undermine objectivity in the name of hidden agendas they believe in passionately, and treat facts as the malleable clay of a truth they honestly believe they can reveal through clever videotape editing and politically correct editorial rhetoric.

I'm old because I can look at Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, Brian Williams, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Katie Couric, Jonathan Chait, Glenn Reynolds, Markos Moulitsas, Ace of Spades, etc, etc, and perceive the limits of their experience, the incredible dimness of their relation to the continuum of American life. They claim authority, swell with that authority like cornered toads, and then prove that their self-professed wisdom, altruism, and lofty perspective are nothing but adolescent braggadoccio. In a word, they're kids. Ambitious, obnoxious, repetitive, predictable, ill-educated, attention-hungry, opinionated but not terribly perceptive kids.

Sooner or later, the tyranny of even aging kids results in disaster. That's the deal with today's government determination that polar bears are an endangered species. They're nothing of the kind. The classification, though, is one of those silent catastrophes that truly wise folk fear the most -- the kind of invisible turning point that almost no one sees at the time but proves in retrospect to have been the first irrevocable step toward ruin. To find an equally dire precedent, one would have to go all the way back to the banning of DDT precipitated by Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," which has killed upwards of 30 million people and is still racking up malaria casualties at this very minute.

That's the difference between smart and wise. Smart sees the short-term advantage of seizing on a popular cause-celebre to drive home the reality of a danger they think they perceive based on bumper-sticker scripture. Wise sees the danger of holding entire nations hostage to an invented crisis that has the potential to deprive the only free societies on earth of fundamental liberties, even life itself -- in a fraudulent, cold-blooded conspiracy to manipulate good intentions into a surrender of political and economic freedom. To more, bigger, and hungrier government. You won't believe what we'll be asked, and told, to do to save the polar bears. Until it's too late.

I feel old because I can't believe such naked machinations succeed. Without even a whimper.

I'm not worried about the polar bears. They can take care of themselves. I'm worried about us. The ignorant fools who can't be bothered to learn the facts and happily consent to halfwit Byzantine plots against our way of life.

Today was a turning point. If you don't know that, you're a child. A remarkably backward and not terribly worthwhile child.

And I am older than Methuselah.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

THE BIZ. Yes, the magical week is here, the third one in May, when all the media drop every other story and immerse us in a raging river of sex, sex, and, well, sex. If you don't ordinarily watch your local news shows, make an exception. You'll learn more than you ever thought possible about orgasms, female anatomy, naughty women, and naughtier experts. Why? Because it's the week when the most important ratings measurements are taken. The network entertainment shows are also guaranteed to chip in with their most salacious plots, boldest cleavage displays, and dirtiest double-entendres.

What's interesting is that the same phenomenon also appears to infect the Internet, which has no similar ratings pressure. But there seems to be some principle of contagion at work. Suddenly, in this week of all weeks of the year, sex is on everybody's mind as if by magic, for good and ill.

Unfortunately, though, this year it's tending more toward the 'ill' side. The gossip site tmz.com, for example, is obsessing about individual female body parts to a degree reminiscent of dismembering serial killers. Today's HOT photo feature is about famous women who have "Man Hands." Ugh. Although, to be fair, they're also not overlooking the sturdy appeal of breasts, breasts, and, of course, breasts.

Breast fever has also reached the gnome who compiles HotAir.com. (Why should he give a rat's ass about Neilsen ratings?) But this week he's linked to a sad story he calls "The Scourge of Buxomness," a Fox News piece about men's nipples (yuck), and a Newsweek investigative piece about the quest for the 'Perfect Bra.' The pic at the top of the post comes from the online edition of Newsweek, which if you click on the main graphic allows you to virtually 'try on' the perfect bra and adjust its straps to your own comfort preference and fashion sense. I guess that's a bonus for the ladies, perhaps to make up for the bonus they toss to the men, a definitely NSFW video feature called the "Bounce-O-Meter," which is nominally educational for women but also one of the more dangerously hypnotic and addictive visual drugs for men we've ever seen. But HotAir still hasn't had his fill of sex. He also links to a story about a recent tabloid survey which disclosed that Brit sex is kinky and getting kinkier.(Yawn). And to yet another piece about designers creating sexy burkhas, including a punk rock 'abaya,' whatever that is.

Well, you get the idea. We're not going to do a site by site analysis of the Internet to prove the main point. It's Sweeps Week, that's all. If you're one of those continental Euro types who don't have any interest in sex anymore, turn off the TV, the radio, the computer, and avoid every periodical publication until next week.

You know it's bad when even RealClearPolitics.com (yaaaawn) can find a sexual angle to opine about. Yup. They did. Take a gander at this piece about the horrible sexist hatred of women that's responsible for Hillary's flameout in the Democratic primaries. It's wrong, of course. Men obviously love women, or Sweeps Week would be about beer and sports, not all boobs all the time. But how else are they going to sneak our favorite subject into their political monomania? A Paul Begala column on strange sexual positions Hillary refused to try with Bill? Not going to happen.

Mostly, we're pleased that whatever causes the May Sweeps to exert a contagious influence on all forms of media, we, happily, are immune to the impulse to exploit and pander to it. (Let us know what you think of the Bounce-O-Meter. And if you like it, email all your firends about InstaPunk and then send us some money.)

There was some grand final inference we were going to draw, but it's slipped our mind for the moment. If we think of it, we'll let you know. Later in the week. It might be something about vaginas. Friday-ish.

P.S. About the audio file. If you think about it the way Randy Newman does, hats are actually sexier than bras. Is that the point we couldn't quite remember earlier? No. But it's more intriguing than anything tmz.com has to offer. Unless you're the kind who gets off on this kind of (NSFW) 'Girls Gone Sweeps Week' gallery. But in that case, we don't want to have anything to do with you. Unless you send money.

Monday, May 12, 2008

ANSWERING A COMMENT. I may have misunderstood his intent, but well respected InstaPunk reader Joshua Chamberlain seemed to be declaring his impatience with the subject of UFOs in his comment on the Thursday, May 8 post, which concluded with the sentiment, "Too many credible stories about UFOs and USOs. If any of them are true, the scientists are full of shit. Which isn't that much of a reach. Let's face it." Mr. Chamberlain's observation was, "You're not serious."

To be blunt, yes, I am. There are two poles of scientific certainty: the theories scientists are certain are true; and the theories scientists are certain are nonsense. Examples of the first kind are black holes, neo-Darwinian evolution, and man-made Global Warming. Examples of the second kind are ESP, reincarnation, and UFOs. Most people follow the easy middle path mapped out by the scientists, accepting what they say is true and rejecting what they say is untrue. Some have the temerity to question what scientists believe in while still following their lead in dismissing phenomena that are documented by more evidence than has ever been put forward for black holes. On the face of it this seems rather arbitrary. If scientists can be mistaken about subjects they have spent entire careers studying, why can't they be just as mistaken about subjects they've barely studied at all?

Yes, I know there are professional skeptics who make their money by wading into one controversy after another -- always claiming to be objective and devoted to the scientific method -- and always emerging from their investigations with exactly the same conclusion: nothing to it. To me they'd have more credibility if they occasionally (or even once) conceded that they don't know enough to be certain one way or the other. They're incredibly tiresome about repeating the Sagan Rule, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," but they almost never consider the possibility that the difference between extraordinary and ordinary may consist of baseless assumptions. Moreover, they're just as remiss in acknowledging that most of the phenomena they apply this standard to don't actually have what a real scientist would call a control -- that is, an equivalent population that can be compared to the population being studied or experimented on. There is no other self-conscious intelligent species we can look to as a basis for determining whether or not it is an extraordinary claim that ghosts exist, or reincarnation, or remote viewing, or Jungian synchronicity, or visitation by advanced alien species. If we really did have such a control population, it might be that the ordinary assumption regarding all these phenomena is that they're routine and to be expected.

If we could kidnap Leonardo da Vinci from the fifteenth century and bring him to ours, what would we have to do to convince him that a smaller unit of matter than any he was aware of could be split apart to produce an explosion that would level Florence and kill everyone who lived there? Would it be enough to show him the physics calculations and explain the technology? After all, that's all it would take to transform our faith that this is so into knowing certainty, and most of us aren't half as brilliant as Leonardo What if we showed him film of the first Los Alamos detonation and he didn't believe it? Is it really the claim that's extraordinary, or is it rather that his assumption set is simply too primitive? Even if he refused to believe it until we actually set off a nuclear warhead in his line of sight, it doesn't change the authenticity or the matter-of-fact correctness of the calculations and technology descriptions we showed him in the first place.

The Sagan Rule doesn't relate to evidence per se; it relates to the point of view of the percipient, specifically the closed-mindedness of the determined skeptic. If you're pre-disposed to disbelieve something, you're going to be harder to convince. That doesn't change the acceptable measure of proof at all. None but a handful of people has seen the wreck of the Titanic at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. But we all (agree to) believe it exists, even though photographic evidence can be faked and all the supposed eyewitnesses have an economic incentive for making us believe their claims.

Yes, but we all just know that the earth isn't really being visited by a extraterrestrial civilizations. Sure we do. We also know that there's such a thing as an electron, which is sort of there and sort of not there too, according to quantum physics. What kind of evidence do you accept for the latter? And why is that so much more plausible than the evidence you dismiss for the former? Or haven't you ever really bothered to look into either?

You're on your own in researching the reality of the electron. But I can give you a start into investigating the possibility that the UFO phenomenon is a deeply mysterious reality of some sort whose fundamental nature isn't understood by anyone:

1952 White House Flap

Operation Mainbrace

Edwards Air Force Base

Browse and sharpshoot to your heart's content. At the end you may think you know. But you won't know. Nobody does. And the scientists who keep telling us they're sure how the universe works are guessing along with the rest of us.

That might be kind of sad, and it also might be kind of wonderful. It sort of depends on your point of view. Like everything else.

UPDATE.  On a different subject, faithful InstaPunk readers please note the update to the May 4 post about the Liberty Medal. I really am asking for some audience participation here. Not for Country Punk, who posted the original. But for Sid Mark, the amazing gentleman he was writing about. Thank you.

Sunday, May 11, 2008

A Mother's Day Tribute to:

EQUALITY. We're into the new NEW feminism now, the post-Hillary, post-modern, post-love generation of git-up-and-go professional mothers to be. They'll be up on all the pre-nuptial agreement laws, time-off for post-partum murderous fantasies therapy, breastfeeding-till-puberty fashion statements, daycare-reimbursement rights, car-seat regulations, divorce-the-bastard-to-death self destructiveness, single-mother-I-get- the-house-and-everything- else-but-a-father litigation, my-kid-can-do-no-wrong denial, and post-doctoral, Michelle Obama, permanent, pissed-off hard-on about how-much-my- life-sucks-now politics. A breakthrough. Thanks to the fearless pioneers of the last half of the twentieth century, tomorrow's kids will have moms who know what men and phones are for (although the order of those should probably be reversed if priority is important).

Who could possibly have foreseen an age in which women would get "push-presents" just because they're maybe possibly capable of becoming mothers someday, and, well, basking in literally unbounded admiration just for the fact of their belonging to the superior female sex? Who could ever have anticipated the attractive distance and ennui of Michelle Obama?

Oops. maybe one guy foresaw it:



Yeah, he knew something about Princetion, and even Yale. But what the hell did he know about iPhones, text-messaging, and girl power? Women invented all that stuff. And future babies will thank them forever. Especially when they figure out how easily their moms could have ditched them in that incredibly uncomfortable and vanity-assaulting ninth month.

Happy Mother's Day to all the old-fashioned mothers out there. We love you. Oh yes we do. You we absolutely revere and treasure. Because we know you never thought about killing us to keep your career, your figure or your boyfriend.

Nobody under the age of 40 can be really sure of that anymore. Moms.

WICKED. Try listening to the audio file as if it were a fetus talking to the neo-Mom of the graphic above after she'd decided to, uh, "end the pregnancy" for the good of all concerned. Would Gloria care? Would Michelle? Would the current Princeton female graduating class? [Text your answers to 98987.]

That's the basis of our heartfelt thank you to the real mothers who don't need push-presents or all the convenient empty clap-trap of post-modern narcissism. Which has always been there. It just never used to be regarded as a virtue.

Friday, May 09, 2008

TGIF. The inspired diggers over at HotAir found this terrific clip of Hillary Clinton acting out the final scene from Sunset Boulevard. It's too good to pass up, even if the only value-added we can provide is the easy-to-find clip of the original scene.

Here it is:


But who, we wonder, is the dead guy in Hillary's pool? You know, the murdered guy who narrates the whole pitiful story.


Has anyone checked on Bill's whereabouts today?

Never mind. We're sure he's fine. But, uh, what about that Mark Penn fellow?

Just asking.

Thursday, May 08, 2008

NOTHING'S AS SIMPLE AS IT SEEMS. Okay. So this is interesting. From a lot of different angles.


Let me count the problems with this bohunkus analysis of cosmology. I'm not just having fun here. I'm demonstrating some of the principal problems with official science the way it's practiced in academe. The official logic is silly but important.

Let's start with the most disingenuous part of the story: "Previous models are founded on the rationale that intelligent life on Earth emerged from a sequence of unlikely 'critical steps'" [Italics added] The word 'rationale' is in this case a synonym for 'assumption.' An assumption that's suspect on several counts.

First, the universe is immensely vast, which means that even the unlikeliest events are, in sum, inevitable. Eventually, somebody does win the Powerball Lottery. All it takes is enough trials. Our universe provides an almost infinite number of trials. Which means there's a pretty big population of Powerball winners when you start multiplying billion-to-one odds by umpty-quintillion ticket buyers.

No matter what the odds are against life on earth, there are probably billions of planets where similarly 'unlikely' events have taken place.

Second, the assumption implies that the vastness of space somehow matters in terms of ET contact. There are two reasons to doubt this. There's Arthur C. Clarke's admonition that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Which scientists routinely discount in every specific question they look at. Why? Because they can't conceive that someone out there could be smarter than they are. Not possible. They sort of insist that everyone else would apply their logic to any situation they can imagine. The fact is, we have no way of knowing the process or technology by which a vastly superior civilization might discover that we exist and come for a visit.

The other reason is that there's something unique about earth we already know about, something that sets us dramatically apart from 99+ percent of other planets. The moon. (Despite science's insistence that it understands everything important about the universe, it still can't explain definitively where the moon came from.) It is a stabilizing factor in our planetary orbit and rotation. It keeps us from flipping and rolling and having the high old time we'd no doubt prefer if we were the planetary teenagers Carl Sagan warned us not to be. Without the moon, and its exact size, rotation, and periodicity, there's no chance there'd be life on earth. The nature of the moon's relationship to the earth, and the sun, makes us a glowing signal to anyone out there looking for advanced life in the universe. We're a kind of neon sign to anyone who has the 'magical' technology to sift through galaxies in search of likely loci of life.

Beyond this, the root assumption still sucks. The four 'unlikely' phases of the development of life on earth have the flavor of Zeno's Arrow. In a proper logical context, life seems incredibly unlikely to the believers of neo-Darwinian evolution. Four big steps are required, each of which is prohibitively improbable. Provided you think it's all caused by mutation and adaptation. With no intelligence involved.

Uh oh. Intelligent design. The great non-theory of the non-scientific. Fuck off. If intelligence is possible as an attribute of organic life forms, it's also a pre-existing potentiality -- call it a built-in property of the universe itself, like leaf shapes and cranial brain location -- and maybe it drives relentlessly toward manifesting itself. If so, that would change the odds the Brit scientist is "rationalizing." No more Zeno. In this case, the universe is teeming with intelligent life and the odds are very different from what the experts would have us believe. Change the assumption, change the odds.

Why are they so resistant? The scientists, I mean. They're not behaving rationally at all. On the one hand, they chafe at the idea that a change in a few constants of physics would result in no universe at all. They tell us the fortunate circumstances that underlie this universe mean only that that all other combinations of physical laws are also being tried out in universes unseen. On the other hand, they insist that conscious intelligence is a freak by-product of an entirely accidental process and means nothing, while they simultaneously argue that it just might be the rarest thing in the universe. What happened to the infinity of everything being tried?

I think it's called having your cake and eating it too. Their very particular arrangement of probabilities makes them (purely by coincidence, mind) the smartest beings in the universe. Hmmmm.

Not buying it. Too many credible stories about UFOs and USOs. If any of them are true, the scientists are full of shit. Which isn't that much of a reach. Let's face it.

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

DONE AND DONE. I don't know how CountryPunk knew the race was over before the first votes were reported, but he did. Now I have two tasks. One, to acknowledge that Obama will be the nominee of the Democratic Party, and two, to renounce any possibility of my support for John McCain.

America wants to reap the whirlwind. So be it. You want an angry young man for president? Have him. Just be aware that the best way to judge a man is to know his wife. Michelle Obama is no Jackie Kennedy. She's a good looking woman to be sure, but she's also a bitter, whining harridan who probably makes her husband as miserable as he will make us. I cringe at the thought of her being the hostess of state dinners. But we survived Rosalynn Carter and we'll survive the pissed-off, victimized Princetonian, too.

Now for McCain. My fleeting hope was that he was actually a politician. He isn't. He's just an arrogant asshole. His decision to speak to La Raza -- in clear defiance of the conservative base of his party, which believes in the rule of law and disdains race-based extortion -- is both unconscionable and incredibly stupid.

It's the last part that's so dismaying. Politicians routinely do unconscionable things. But they normally do them to satisfy the people who have worked and sacrificed and gone the extra mile to get them elected. John McCain is yet another of the new breed of western Americans who are willing to betray their country for the sake of Spanish architecture, Mexican food, and cheap gardeners. Only it's not that cheap. It's that the braggart of the Straight Talk Express is actually in the pocket of all the special interests who are willing to do anything to keep the flow of illegal low-cost labor flowing into the United States, law and cultural integrity be damned.

Forget the hero of the Hanoi Hilton. The John McCain of 2008 is corrupt. So corrupt that his debts to the illegal immigration promoters outweigh even his desire to be president of the United States. That's a big fucking debt.

We're all on our own now. Do whatever you want. The United States is lost. Run a third-party ticket for Ron Paul. Run a fourth-party ticket for Mike Huckabee. Stay at home and give Obama the biggest congressional majority any president ever had. The Democrats will have their day now.

And I have just stopped caring. Go to hell. All of you. Pretend that the Islamists don't want to kill you. Maybe they'll relent and give your wife and daughters an anesthetic before they cut off their clitorises. Pretend that Iran doesn't really plan to nuke Israel. Just remember to act surprised when it happens and Obama initiates a new round of talks to deal with the implications. Pretend that the Iraq War is nothing but a drain on American resources and explore the cornucopia of consequences when we abandon them for the tenth time in twenty years.

I. DON'T. CARE.

Me? I love Obama. He's so coolly eloquent. Isn't that the height of statecraft? Sure it is.

Whatever. I don't know anything. I thought the Republican Party would have the balls to defend their own president, who accomplished an absolute goddam miracle -- preventing another major domestic terrorist attack for more than seven years. But no. They don't even want to appear on the same podium with him. Fuck them. They don't deserve anybody's vote. Give the damn Democrats every single seat in the House and Senate and then see how quickly you want to throw them out of office. HINT: When they decide all your paychecks should go directly to them first, so they can decide how much you're not allowed to spend on Big Macs, spinner wheels, rodeo tickets, smokes, hookers, tattoos, cheesy lingerie, Southern Comfort, ten-gauge ammunition, and RVs. That'll settle your hash. Oh. Excuse me. No, it won't. You'll happily trade all that for FREE healthcare.

Assholes.

Thanks a lot, John McCain. There's more than one kind of traitor. There's the kind who talks when he shouldn't. And there's the kind who sells out the whole damn country because he's too smug and rich to remember what his country is even about.

And thanks, Obama. We need you. In a strange, fucked up way, we need you. We really do. Let's just hope the lesson you're there to teach us doesn't kill us. It probably won't. But not because you won't be trying.

Have at it, weed.

MORNING. It's clear that CountryPunk and, obviously, TruePunk overreacted to last night's election results. As to their gratuitous slamming of McCain, I can only assure you that I have sent them both stern emails reminding them of the unfailing admiration we have always had here for the Republican presidential nominee:

Time Out
Ear to the Ground
InstaPunk Is Always Right
Where's the Dark Matter?
The Superior Conservative
McCain for President
Pressing the Point
A Surge McCain Doesn't Support
No Republicans Left in the Race
Six Is a State of Mind
McCain Reacts Angrily to NYT

Well, there's more, but you can see that we've been in the bag for McCain from the very beginning. Sort of like Hugh Hewitt and Dean Barnett were for Mitt Romney. But that doesn't mean we're incapable of being objective. We love the guy to death, but we can still speak from a certain distance. Just like Hugh and Dean said they could.

It's all going to be okay, people. Truly. It's absolutely not the case that Mr. McCain is some kind of loose cannon, egomaniacal, rude, arrogant, just-plain-nasty closet liberal control freak who thinks government should be limited except when people behave in ways he doesn't approve of. That's not who he is at all. He would absolutely talk to Rush Limbaugh if he didn't already know that Limbaugh is a treacherous, uneducated, and largely malicious distraction from the, well, sanctity of the ongoing dialogue between the American people and the mainstream press, which has always been so supportive of patriots like, uh John McCain.

I know from some of your emails that you're concerned I might be withdrawing my declaration of support for the Arizona senator's bid for the presidency. Not a chance. I understand the objections. CountryPunk has a parochial view. TruePunk is just crazy. But we all always knew that.

Why would anyone think it's reasonable to expect a Republican nominee to subscribe to all Republican positions? Isn't it enough to be vaguely pro-life? Why can't a Republican kinda sorta believe in Global Warming and the need to pulverize the entire global economic system to make it one percent cooler? Who wouldn't want to turn the American southwest over to an ethnic minority that would rather be Spanish than Indian if it means laying a more persuasive legal claim to lucrative lands developed by Anglos? And is it really so bad to have spent seven years undermining and sniping at a president who dared to undertake an attack on enemies who'd been bombing us for a decade before he took office? Of course not. That's just understandable maverickousness, common in Washington as a head cold.

I really want to be clear about this. Especially now that we know Obama will be the Democratic nominee. How should I put it? I want to be precise. Here's my best attempt:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH! WE CAN'T ELECT OBAMA. WE JUST CAN'T.

Does that clarify matters for you?

I thought it would.

YTW. No, we're not going to keep talking about Hillary and Obama. YouTube Wednesday is about distractions, not current events. Although we couldn't resist this one, which will be ancient history by tomorrow, so we have to do it today.


That's it. Done with the candidates. Honest. For example, how could one get more high-toned and above it all than promoting some Physics Phun?


Oh. You prefer no-toned and below it all? We got that covered too.


Okay. That was kind of ucky. We admit it. Makes us want to take a bath. You know. Get really clean. That's what the "Devil's Pool" is all about. If you're evil enough, you can paddle around inches away from the tallest waterfall in the world. InstaPunk contributors spend every single day of summer there every year.


Too sinister? For good people, maybe. That's probably why our genius American environmentalists are fully prepared to ban water altogether.


They might even get away with it. Unless Bengal cats find out about it.


You don't know about Bengals? Get with it, folks. Most of the cats you're seeing these days in cat food commercials are Bengals. They're, uh, intensely interactive with every environment. Camera show-offs too. And kind of scary. Like seven pound leopards.


But clumsy. For some reason, they just don't care about heights. When they fall, they don't even land on their feet. That would be caring. About heights.


Actually, you can keep YouTube Wednesday going indefinitely if you just follow the Bengals...

Now, isn't that better than all the political harping and carping you're getting everywhere else today? You know it is. Bengals make lots of speeches. But they absolutely never make any promises and they never ask for your vote. They pretty much do whatever they want to. Follow their example as long as you can. You've got till maybe January or February to squeeze it all in.

Get busy.

P.S. Couldn't resist. One more. It's kind of like peanuts. Hard to stop.


But we're GOING to stop. Right now.

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