Ted Cruz is Stupid, Cynical or Both, And I Want Him to be the Republican Presidential Nominee

 

I've never met Ted Cruz, so I can't say as an absolute certainty that he's a psychopathic retard. But because he's a Republican and a Tea Partier, he can't honestly object to either characterization, since both are such a central part of his political base.

Republicans and Teapers get awfully pissy when I say things like that, but I'm hardly the one that's been in the trenches finding new and ever more self-defeating ways to turn superstition and stupidity into conservative virtues.

Even before the advent of the Tea Party, supposedly conservative politicians have equated self-promoting ignorance as folksiness, which explains the non-sexual appeal of Sarah Palin perfectly. Christ, when I try to explain to reasonable, intelligent people why I hold conservative positions, I have to bend over backwards to demonstrate that I'm not a fucking yahoo. And that's exhausting because people like Ted Cruz have made it their life's mission to make it exhausting.

I'm going to explain the antics of the junior senator from Neverland this week as succinctly as I can.

Cruz filibustered for 21 hours - reading Dr. Suess and comparing everyone that isn't him to the goddamned Nazis - on a day when there weren't any bills pending in the Senate, which makes it less of a filibuster and more a spectacular at of public masturbation. By the way, he did this on a measure that he said that he supported and ultimately wound up voting for. It was the single most bizarre spectacle I've witnessed in my 35 years of studying American politics.

Cruz has so entranced the stupid that Erick Erikson hasn't been able to get his head out of Ted's lap long enough to write a coherent blog post in over a month. He's made Mark Levin even more insufferably Mark Levin.

But people with normal cognitive functions - including most rational Republicans - have come to loathe Cruz with the power of a thousand suns. Jon Dickerson of Slate explains why;

He wasted precious time: Republicans don’t want to get the blame for a government shutdown. By soaking up valuable Senate time with no-win maneuvers, Cruz has left House leaders with less time to follow their legislative strategy—one that might have won limited concessions from White House. Or, with significantly more time, House Speaker Boehner might have been able to produce a funding bill that would have at least included a one-year delay of the Affordable Care Act. That would have put Democrats up for re-election in vulnerable states in a tough spot; at the very least, red state Democrats would have had to take an unpopular vote. Now the GOP looks fractured, time is short, and Boehner may only be able to pass the funding bill passed by the Senate Democrats—which he’ll almost certainly have to do with Democratic votes, offering even more leverage to the enemy.

Ego: He has used his colleagues to elevate himself in the furtherance of his 2016 presidential ambitions.

He made Obama’s critique look accurate: For years, President Obama has said a minority faction of zealots controls the Republican Party. By hijacking the system for a cause that had no chance of success, Cruz confirmed Obama’s cartoonish vision of a party controlled by a wing unconcerned about practical results.

He turned a tactical fight into a purity test: The majority of Republican senators agreed with Cruz on the importance of defunding Obamacare, but they disagreed with him on tactics. He characterized those with whom he had a tactical disagreement as ideological turncoats.

He blunted the GOP’s best plan of attack on Obamacare: The Affordable Care Act was falling under its own weight as stories of rickety implementation, layoffs, and companies dropping coverage of their employees continued to be published. By linking the “defunding effort” to continued funding of the government, Cruz distracted the public from Obamacare’s inherent problems. That distraction undermined Republican efforts to chip away at the legislation through smaller attacks, like a one-year delay that might have led to a full repeal if the GOP took back control of the Senate in 2014.

Let's try to look at this dispassionately, shall we? Cruz took something really unpopular (Obamacare) and attached it to something even more unpopular (a government shutdown.) The GOP is on the record as being against the former, but they know that they can be seen as favouring the latter.

This ain't 1995, teenagers. When Newt Gingrich convinced his party to commit ritualistic suicide back then, there were continuing resolutions to fund all but the most trivial parts of the government. America wasn't at war with three-quarters of the world and threatening to bomb the rest. And nobody was crazy enough to threaten to not raise the debt ceiling and destroy what's left of the world economy. Bill Clinton wasn't afraid of a government shutdown. Shit, he used it as a opportunity to get suck-started by the unpaid help.

The ramifications are so much worse now than they were then, and Senator Cruz and his shithead brigades couldn't care less. "We can let it burn now or later," is one refrain I've heard a lot from supposed "patriots" and "conservatives." These people are actually willing - no, eager - to drive their own interest rates through the fucking roof just to score points in some idiotic ideological beauty pageant.  They honestly believe that the ruination of the full faith and credit of the United States is a credible electoral path. And shitheels like Erickson say that if Obama doesn't want a shutdown, he should just give the Tea Party everything they want, which would make him a fantastic terrorist whisperer.

They aren't just assholes, They're out of their fucking minds.

But what did Cruz actually accomplish this week? Well, he wasted time that serious people could have used to make a deal. Oh, and he was on TV a lot.

Aside from that, not much. He actually wound up voting for the cloture motion that he was supposed to be (but actually wasn't) filibustering. Everything he wanted is going to be eviscerated in conference, but now it's going to happen with malice. Ted Cruz is singularly a man without friends in Washington. Good luck with having a career that way.

On the other hand, he's now the number one choice for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination among people without teeth or common sense. And you know what? I'm with them 100%!

Establishment tool Jonah Goldberg thinks it unfair to compare Cruz to Tailgunner Joe McCarthy. I don't, because neither actually did anything to further their stated aims. McCarthy never actually named an actual communist and Cruz has done nothing in real terms in stopping Obamacare. McCarthy and Cruz are both third-rate demagogues who were just smart enough to know that they could only further their own careers by exciting mouthbreathers.

And that's exactly what the GOP needs in a presidential nominee this year. I wasn't so silent in wanting Sarah Palin to be the nominee last year, and I want Cruz for the same reasons.

There needs to be a Great Cleansing in a conservative movement, and that isn't going to come through the wingnuts forcing sane nominees to act like lunatics, as happened to John McCain and Mitt Romney. And Reagan wouldn't have passed the Tea Party's schizophrenic purity test. Neither would Barry Goldwater.

They want the first Bircher nominee, never mind that most of the country knew that was a horrible idea 65 years ago. Jesus, they've made Barack Obama - who would have fit well in Gerald Ford or George H.W Bush's Cabinets - into a Maoist Antichrist.

I'm suggesting that sensible conservatives give them exactly what they want and nominate Ted Cruz. The apocalypse will take care of the rest.

I figure that Boy Ted will lose about 39 states. In the last ten years, the GOP has seen Colorado, Ohio, New Hampshire, Virginia and Florida slip away. Indiana, Georgia and Arizona have all been tighter than they should be, and the demographics suggest that even Texas is going to start turning purple in the next decade.

I've spent three years trying to make a map where a Tea Partier wins the presidency, and I can't. In the last two cycles, those idiots have thrown away perfectly good Senate seats in Delaware, Colorado, Nevada, Indiana, Missouri and (if it weren't for Linda Murkowski running as an Independent,) Alaska - all of which, except Delaware, used to be pretty reliable Republican states.

There's no reason to believe that a Tea Party presidential nominee will be any more successful than their Senate nominees were in Republican-leaning states.

The Republican Party doesn't have many more elections in them to lose until they become the Whigs. The GOP only survived FDR because they Eisenhower was willing to save them. But no one with the seriousness of purpose of Ike would ever carry the idiotic standard of the Tea Party. Who needs to throw away their dignity with their professional prospects?

The Tea Party needs to run, win or lose, on their own. They can't be allowed any excuses, such as being hindered by a "moderate", which hasn't actually happened yet, or a lack of institutional support, which they say they don't want.

In an ordinary time, I'd support someone like Chris Christie, Jon Huntsman, Mitch Daniels or Jeb Bush (assuming that we could collectively forget who his brother is) - considered conservatives that can win - for president. Hell, I even like about half of what Rand Paul says, depending on my mood.

But I'm not. I'm tired of the Tea Party horseshit, and willing to give them their turn. Let them nominate a hack like Ted Cruz. It'll be fun to watch him struggle to win by 10 points in a cesspool like Mississippi, where the Republicans usually win by 25.

I don't want to see Cruz turned into Robert Taft, the serious conservative that wasn't given a chance. He needs to be Alf Landon, the guy who got beaten within an inch of his fucking life.

Then, and only then, does the Republican Party have a real chance of surviving the decade.

Besides, how bad could President Biden really be?

In Praise of Bob Rae. A Goodbye to a Good Man

On the day that he announces his political retirement, I come not to bury Bob Rae, but to praise him.

Not only did I vote against Rae twice when he was leader of the Ontario NDP, I actually enjoyed doing it. But I don't vote for someone as much as I vote against everybody else. Indeed, the proudest ballot I ever cast was for a transvestite to be mayor or Toronto, so convinced was I that he/she would be less embarrassing than Mel Lastman.

Having said that, there's much to respect and even admire about Rae.

He's easily one of the smartest people in Canadian elective office in my lifetime. Even those that disagree with him, as I repeatedly did, acknowledge that he's a heavyweight. And that's something that's profoundly lacking in public life today, where stupidity is too often considered a virtue.

Rae also engaged in the single greatest act of political bravery in my lifetime. For all intents and purposes, he pulled the plug on his time at Queens Park because he thought it was necessary.

Shithead conservative bloggers and dishonest Sun Media hacks, like Brian Lilley, enjoy pummelling Rae for Rae Days, all the while heaping praise on Republicans like Scott Walker for doing essentially the same thing.

Rae Days requires absolutely no courage for conservatives, since that's what their base vocally wants, anyway. However, the public sector unions were Rae's political base, and he knew it. And he still immolated himself doing what was right. If that's not bravery, I have no idea what is. Moreover, it speaks to the bald hypocrisy of his critics.

Speaking of hacks like Lilley,  (who, full disclosure, is apparently a friend of my ex-girlfriend) He joyously posted this retarded and fundamentally dishonest chart from Sun News on his Facebook page this evening.

Did Premier Rae spend a literal shit-ton of money in the face of what was then considered a brutal recession? He sure did. And that's the primary reason I voted against his government in 1995.

What is nicely left out is the fact that there was a worldwide recession during Rae's tenure at Queens Park. What those lying fucks at the Sun neglect to point out are the federal and U.S employment and deficit figures at the time.

Why is that? I suspect that it's because the prime minister of Canada during the worst of it was Progressive Conservative Brian Mulroney and the president of the United States was Republican George H.W Bush, who to varying degrees, did pretty much exactly what Rae did as premier of Ontario. All three raised taxes, all three had high unemployment, and all three had massive deficits.

But Rae is studied not only in isolation from the context of the time, the figures also leave out what his conservative peers were doing at the time.

By the way, why does Sun poster boy Stephen Harper get a pass? Unlike Rae, Harper started out with a $13 billion surplus, which he immediately pissed away on electioneering hucksterism. Then, in the guise of his Keynesian "Action Plan," he created tens of billions of dollars in new deficits, which he spends millions more advertising on television, five years after the fact. And none of that happened twenty years ago, when Keynesian economics were the the accepted wisdom, Harper's doing it now.

I point that out not to defend Rae, but to highlight the intellectual dishonesty and gullibility of what passes for the Right these days. Not only can we not win on our merits when we engage in nonsense like this, we don't deserve to.

I made no secret of my opinion that Bob Rae was the Liberal party's last, best chance of surviving, if not actually winning power. He was uniquely qualified to call the Harper government on its own bullshit. Rae was not only smarter than the rest than the rest of the federal leaders, he was more politically experienced and intimately familiar with the pitfalls of having headed a party and a government before.

If Rae compared his record in Toronto to Harper's in Ottawa, I believe it would have been devastating ... for Harper. And I think the Tories knew that, too.

But the Liberals insisted on being the Liberals. They continue to hate one another more than they hate Harper, and they refuse to renounce their addiction to stunt leaders, like Michael Ignatieff and Justin Trudeau. And that's precisely why "Canada's Natural Governing Party" is going to cease to exist by the end of the decade. By forcing Rae out of the permanent leadership race last year, I think they signed their own death warrant.

Although I opposed almost everything that he did in public life, I never doubted Rae's sincerity. I believe him to be someone who actually got into politics to serve what he thought was the greater good, rather than personal enrichment or self-aggrandizement.

Unlike most of the ward-heelers out there, I'm of the opinion that Bob Rae will better off without politics. Sadly, politics will be worse without Bob Rae.

I never voted for him and I never would, but I wish the man well in private life.

Scott Reid States the Obvious, Is Still Wrong

Here I go again, saying something utterly uncontroversial to anyone that isn't three years old, a partisan fuck, or an abject idiot.

People in politics, as a general rule, don't enter the life to serve you. And they really haven't for about thirty years.

Politics has become a laboratory for mediocrities to see how rich they can make themselves off of the public teat.

There's no greater example of that than the revolving door between politics and lobbying. This is nothing more than a legal version of influence peddling and trading in on public service. I actually have more respect for those that actually have the balls to steal taxpayer money without the pretence of serving anyone other than themselves. Were it up to me, politicians, their appointees, and the senior civil service would be banned from lobbying for life.

Actually, that's not true. The only reason I wouldn't advocate stuffing the lot of them in a bag and drowning them like cats is that it would be impossible to find a big enough bag. So a lobbying ban will have to do.

The more mediocre a staffer you are, the more likely you are to moonlight in opinion journalism, especially in Canada. You almost never see the real kingmakers on TV or writing columns that even third-graders know are horseshit. Instead, you get the worst sycophants imaginable pretending to know "how it really works."

Which brings me to Scott Reid, the former Paul Martin consigliere. In 2005, Reid said the single most balls-out stupid thing I've heard in thirty years of studying politics.

You see, then-Opposition leader Stephen Harper was hoping to steal the Liberal issue of a national daycare credit from out from the Grits. So he offered a $1,200 a year tax credit to families as a way of ward-heeling himself into office.

Now, if you opposed the Tories, there were any number of ways to attack the proposal. For example, you do what I did: call it an unaffordable welfare program for the middle class and an example of hucksterism at its worst. The left is always going to oppose Harper's programs. If you want to beat him, you need to turn fiscal conservatives around from voting for him. I thought everybody knew that.

Apparently, Scotty didn't. That's why he said this ...




The "beer and popcorn" debacle reinforced the long held and richly deserved Liberal reputation for unbridled arrogance. Even when its true, you never tell the public that the government can spend their money better than they can. And, unsurprisingly, Harper made the Liberal Party wear that remark for years.

That's why I'm amazed that anyone listens to anything Reid has to say about politics. On the other hand, a lot of people are very fucking stupid.

On Friday, he published this in the Ottawa Citizen, and it stands as an example of how you can be right, while still being completely ignorant of a history that you yourself lived through. It really is a remarkable read.

Stephen Harper is gradually turning into Jean Chrétien.

From Teflon to tinpot, from insuperable to insurrection, the two leaders appear to be travelling remarkably similar paths in the second half of their time as prime minister.

That's demonstrably not true. Harper was Chretien from as far back as 2005, well before he moved into 24 Sussex drive.

This is because Harper heads a party populated mostly with lunatics and fetus fetishists. Hyper-religious "Big Government Conservatives" are not only fewer in number in Canada than in the United States, they also tend to be more geographically isolated and don't carry as many seats as they do in the U.S Congress. Majority governments do not rely on these people's support.

But they can fuck up the chance of winning one, as we saw in 2004. The Conservatives were enjoying a 10 point lead over the majority Liberals, when their candidates started spouting off about abortion, gay marriage, and other shit that sane people don't give a shit about. The Tory hopes of a majority evaporated and Liberals were only reduced to a minority, instead of being physically destroyed.

When the Martin minority government was defeated in the fall of '05, Harper knew that he had to muzzle those psychopaths, lest he be humiliated again. Not only did he vow not to legislate on those issues, he imposed brutal message discipline on his candidates. Since nothing succeeds like success, it shouldn't surprise anyone that he carried that discipline into government.

Chretien's experience was different. As a minister in the Trudeau government, he was routinely humiliated by the Prime Minister's Office. The Sun King once went so far as to rewrite one Chretien's budgets and release it to the public without consulting him first.

Then there's the nature of the Liberal Party itself, which is based almost entirely on regicide. Since about 1975, every Grit leader has had a powerful leader plotting behind the scenes to relieve him of his job. And Chretien knew that Paul Martin (who Scott Reid worked for, remember?) would do to him exactly what he did to John Turner, as he in fact later did.

Similarities in the personal styles of the two leaders have long been noted — and many of the qualities they share are admirable. They are both good at winning elections. They each lack any shred of indecision. And they both hold their ground stoutly. Perhaps most important of all, they understand who they are, what they stand for, and the importance of communicating consistency.

Each of those points are demonstrably false.

Both Chretien and Harper won their elections as a result of hopelessly divided governments. The Progressive Conservative coalition built by Brian Mulroney was destroyed by 1993, and Harper beat (albeit, only barely) a Liberal Party in a state of open civil war. Neither was a fantastic political accomplishment.

Furthermore, neither stands for anything at all. Chretien ran on the tired platform of "free shit for everyone," opposing the GST and NAFTA, only to head the most fiscally conservative, globalist government in Canadian history. Chretien successfully carried out Mulroney's legacy.

Harper, on the other hand, ran as a manager and a fiscal conservative. Once in office, however, he blew up the deficit faster and bigger than anyone since Trudeau himself, mostly on ward-heeling nonsense that the Liberals invented.

Neither communicated consistency, and only a moron would suggest they did. Both transparently lied to the public and dared them to vote for someone else, knowing that realistic alternatives didn't exist.

Increasingly, it is not just character but circumstance that begs the comparison of Harper with Chrétien.

The most top-of-mind parallel is caucus unrest. Brent Rathgeber, until his recent resignation, was as unknown to Canadians as the whereabouts of Mike Duffy’s dignity. Suddenly, we are to believe his departure heralds the evaporation of Harper’s control over his own backbench. That would be a gross overstatement.

But it is plain that a number of government MPs are no longer content to suffer in silence. Their personal ambitions are stagnating. Their ideological itch is going unscratched.

And they’re sick of taking orders from the hired help while getting the high hand from the prime minister.

Christ, Reid can't really believe that nonsense, can he? The facts are very different, and they go to the fundamental differences between the Liberal and Conservative parties.

The Tories are generally more disciplined when it comes to caucus and messaging generally. They are also much better team players until things become intolerable, as they did in the latter Mulroney years.

The Conservatives also never have a very deep bench. There's rarely a clear successor to power that everyone knows can win an election, which is why they've never enjoyed party dynasties, like the Liberals used to.

The Grits, on the other hand, tend to have very deep benches of talent. The problem is that they all think that they should be prime minister right away. Since Lester Pearson died, they've devoted themselves to stabbing one another in the back more than they have to actually governing. Whenever the the Tories have shown even a modicum of discipline, they've kicked the shit out of the Grits.

And if Reid is right, there's a Paul Martin in the Tory benches ready to take over when Harper is done in by his own hubris. If there is, I don't see one. Harper's most likely successor is Jason Kenney, and I can't think of anyone who wouldn't be able to beat the snot out of that greasy prick.

I will say one thing about Scott Reid's column. It has the worst people in the world publicly furious, and demonstrates as clearly as anything can that the Liberal civil war is far from over. Those crazed bastards are going to continue to going into elections devoting more time and energy hobbling each other than they do the Conservatives. And they're going to keep doing it until they cease to exist at all.

If there's anything at all the Conservative government can take comfort in during these dark days, it's that.

Things Fall Apart: Ben Shapiro, Chuck Hagel and Friends of Hamas

Look, I'm not going to lie to you and say that I don't watch Fox News. The fact is that I do. A lot. What's important is why I watch it.

First, I'm love with my own anger, and few things make me as angry as what the ridiculous talking head culture has done to conservatism as an intellectual movement. Not only do liberals deride conservatives as mouth-breathing fuckheads, so does everybody else. And all you have to do is look at the "skewed polls" debacle leading up to last year's presidential election and any reasonable person will understand that that they're not wrong.

Then there's Benghazi, where four Americans were tragically killed. The same people who spent a year resisting any investigation into 9/11 - where three thousand Americans were murdered in the streets of their own country - want to derail Cabinet confirmations of national security officials until they find out who edited Sunday show talking points.

Second, I like to masturbate while watching Megyn Kelly get pointlessly, stupidly angry about her right to maternity leave. She seems to think that it's okay for the government to dictate that employers give paid leave to new mothers but not for, y'know, health care. You can argue for both or neither, but advocating one over the other is amazingly stupid. And stupidity in pretty packages makes me hard.  I'm pretty kinky, I know.

But I can't take Fox seriously as a "news" source simply because they get so many of their stories from Brietbart. com.

Whenever someone cites a Brietbart story to me to support an argument, I generally stay silent. I do this because I know as a matter of absolute certainty that it's always a matter of minutes, if not seconds, before the Brietbart material is exposed as a deliberate fraud. No one has ever gotten rich betting on the accuracy of a Brietbart story. The people who work there are stupid or lying, and very often both.

Brietbart is one of the primary reasons that I distrust bloggers who portray themselves as journalists. Bloggers, and especially conservative ones, have spent years bitching about journalism's lack of objectivity, so they built an entire model out of the very thing that they were bitching about in the first fucking place.

The difference between bloggers and the mainstream media is accountability. Mainstream media companies are, as a general rule, publicly traded entities. They are also answerable to advertisers. Those two things are not usually true of bloggers, who can always resort to begging their gullible readers for money when shit goes sideways. Bad journalists get fired, whereas shitty bloggers get jobs at Brietbart.com.

I took a special interest in Brietbart's Ben Shapiro when he was Adam Carolla's podcast a couple of weeks ago. Shapiro was plugging his silly book, Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America.

The central premise of Bullies, that liberals shut down debate by panting anyone who opposes them as racists or worse, is factually sound. But Shapiro's solution is equally destructive to the public discourse and borderline retarded, besides. Basically, he advocates retaliating in kind.

Again, this is another example of building a model from the very thing that you were bitching about in the first place, which is hypocrisy.

Second, it cedes the moral high ground. By retaliating in kind to demonic liberal tactics, you essentially allow that your underlying ideas are equal to those of your opponents, when they should be better. If you can't argue your way through those charges, the chances are that your ideas are worthless, anyway.

Third, It undermines any condemnation of actual racism. This is why I've always despised liberals for playing the race card so loosely. When everybody's a racist, how bad can racism actually be? With very few exceptions, I've always thought that liberal anti-racist crusaders are far more interested in money, power or self-glorification than they actually are with confronting racism.

As conservatives increasingly associate themselves with that tactic, I increasingly disassociate myself with conservatism.

In a roundabout way, this brings me to Chuck Hagel.

Hagel presents a perfect opportunity for debate amongst conservative foreign policy thinkers, of which there are basically two schools: Taft-Eisenhower-Reagan non-interventionists and the neocon Bush 43 thinkers.

That's a debate very much worth having. But the neocons want to avoid it all costs. While whining that America is going broke, they also want to argue that the United States needs to have a wildly interventionist and expensive foreign policy. They know that this makes no sense in any economic way, so they resort to charges of racism.

Because he has questioned the way that America is involved in the Middle East, Senator Hagel's enemies have decided to paint him as an anti-Semite. That's where stories like this come from;

On Thursday, Senate sources told Breitbart News exclusively that they have been informed that one of the reasons that President Barack Obama’s nominee for Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, has not turned over requested documents on his sources of foreign funding is that one of the names listed is a group purportedly called “Friends of Hamas.

Small problem: "Friends of Hamas" doesn't actually exist. Here's how the clusterfuck came to be.

The revelation could have doomed President Obama’s nomination of Chuck Hagel to be secretary of defense: He gave a paid speech to a group called “Friends of Hamas.”

Fortunately for Hagel, this claim, which galloped across the Internet, was bogus. I know, because I was the unwitting source.

In the process, I became part of an inadvertent demonstration of how quickly partisan agendas and the Internet can transform an obvious joke into a Washington talking point used by senators and presidential wannabes.

Here’s what happened: When rumors swirled that Hagel received speaking fees from controversial organizations, I attempted to check them out.

On Feb. 6, I called a Republican aide on Capitol Hill with a question: Did Hagel’s Senate critics know of controversial groups that he had addressed?

Hagel was in hot water for alleged hostility to Israel. So, I asked my source, had Hagel given a speech to, say, the “Junior League of Hezbollah, in France”? And: What about “Friends of Hamas”?

The names were so over-the-top, so linked to terrorism in the Middle East, that it was clear I was talking hypothetically and hyperbolically. No one could take seriously the idea that organizations with those names existed — let alone that a former senator would speak to them.

Or so I thought.

Basically, what happened is that a Hill staffer repeated a reporter's question as fact to Shapiro and Shapiro published it as fact.

Not only did Ben Shapiro not bother to get multiple sources, he didn't even google "Friends of Hamas," which would have pretty conclusively proved that they don't exist.

I get that there are honest disagreements about Hagel's views on foreign policy, and I'm not against an honest about them. But selective reporting - if Shapiro's "Friends of Hamas" story can even be called that - is something else altogether.

Obama Uber Alles, Republican Whining and the Road Ahead

So I've had indescribable fun watching Fox News for the last few weeks. It's actually been more enjoyable than I thought it would be. In fact, it struck me as kind of creepy because Republicans in America are starting to sound exactly the same way that Canadian Liberals have for the last decade.

Back when Stephen Harper's supposedly Conservative Party was elected to its first minority government in January of 2006, Liberal stalwarts started muttering about a dark Tory plot to "destroy" the Grits forever. That reached a crescendo in 2011 when the party under Michael Ignatieff was utterly humiliated by voters. They still won't shut the fuck up about it.

Smart Republicans - and more than a few stupid ones - finally reached the obvious conclusion that November 6 presented them with an undeniable existential crisis. They either get their shit together and stop acting like lunatics, pronto, or they cease to exist within a decade.

Four years of GOP, Fox News and fuckhead blogger assertions to the contrary, Barack Obama isn't an idiot and he noticed this, too. He's been using the chaos and infighting in the Republican Party to do whatever the fuck he wants. Even as they hilariously say that he didn't win a mandate at the polls, Republicans are effectively giving Obama one in being unable to sensibly oppose or effectively deal with him. This has lead the usual suspects to decry the President's plot to "destroy" the Republican Party or reverse Reaganism.

One certainly gets that sense from watching and reading Obama's second inaugural address. It was a fantastical wishlist of liberal nonsense that would have little chance of passing a Democratic Congress, let alone the one that is there, but it does seem to ignore the very existence of the GOP. I will grant you that.

The obvious question is "What the fuck did you expect him to do?"

From the very first day of his presidency - and we know from Robert Draper's Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives that the Republican leadership discussed this while Obama was attending his 2009 inaugural balls - the GOP made the very deliberate decision to cooperate with him on nothing, regardless of what he actually proposed. If Obama decided to enact unedited the entire 1996 Republican platform, Republicans would obstruct him for the sole purpose of making him "one-term president."

Well, in Obama's own words, he won. And Republicans not only lost, they lost in the most humiliating way possible. Not only did a do-nothing community organizer kick the shit out of the Republicans twice, he left them divided against themselves.

So I'll repeat my question: "What the fuck do you expect him to do?"

Let's not pretend that the GOP was particularly magnamimous in victory. I remember how, between 2000 and '06, chronic dickheads like Karl Rove and Bill Kristol were crowing triumphalist nonsense about "a permanent Republican majority" to anyone stupid enough to listen.  And when Democrats timidly suggested keeping TSA workers unionized, Rove ran ads against Max Cleland - who left three of his fucking limbs in Vietnam - starring Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Can we please stop pretending that conservatives are victims here? It's embarrassing. No self-respecting person wants to identify themselves with a cabal of bed-wetting losers.

I'd like to tell Republicans exactly the same thing that I've been telling Liberals here at home for the last six years. The whole point of politics is beat the other side to the maximum possible extent. It's usually not possible to destroy them completely, but when the opportunity presents itself, you fucking well take it. And you sure as shit don't apologize for it afterward.

I've shit-talked the guy endlessly, so it's only fair that I highlight when Erick Erickson says something that I wholeheartedly agree with.

We have too many outrage pimps on both sides of the aisle whipping the respective bases into a frenzy and fury against the other side. I don’t have enough time or energy to be outraged about it all. There are things to be outraged by, but not everything, and certainly not with full energy dedicated to every perceived slight and grievance.

What I am finding is that among conservatives there is too much outrage, piss, and vinegar. It makes our ideas less effective. We have become humorless, angry opponents of the President instead of happy warriors selling better ideas. We are not even selling ideas.

Conservatives, frankly, have become purveyors of outrage instead of preachers for a cause. Instead of showing how increasing government harms people, how free markets help people, and how conservative policies benefit all Americans, we scream “Benghazi” and “Fast & Furious.”

We’re off key and off message. We’ve become professional victims dialed up to 10 on the outrage meter. Who the hell wants to listen to conservatives whining and moaning all the time about the outrage du jour? Seriously? Mitt Romney ran a campaign on just how bad things are, but he was rejected by a majority of Americans who felt like he really did not care about them and really had no plans to improve their lives.

I'd honestly like to congratulate Mr. Erickson on both his eloquence and his honesty. Given his audience, I imagine that he'll take endless shit for having written that. God knows that I've been saying exactly the same thing for far longer, much to the displeasure of some of my friends, who are several degrees of magnitude saner than the fans of Red State.

I could care less if the Republican Party survives the Obama years. But I do think traditional conservatism can and should. But a few things are going to be necessary for that to happen.

First, come up with governing ideas that don't sound like they were lifted from a tenth grader's book report of Atlas Shrugged. Only sexless geeks and the mentally ill take that kind of shit seriously. Moreover, the left will demagogue us to death with it, each and every time.

You know why geriatric Tea Partiers loved the Ryan Plan so much? Because it didn't affect them. They were exempted from it's harsher provisions, and it's pretty easy to tell everybody to go fuck themselves when they have no skin in the game. Before the second Ryan Plan, these same assholes were marching on Washington with "Government hands off Medicare" signs. The best ones spelled "government" wrong, too.

Second, if you believe as I do that the debt is an existential crisis, start fucking acting like it. That means that your goddamned political base doesn't get a pass. The GOP presented the War on Terror as an existential crisis, but only asked one half of one percent of the American people - those in the volunteer military -  to do anything about it. Everybody else could go shopping. And now they're doing exactly the same thing with the budget.

And please don't say that "at least we're better than Obama." All that does is convince me that nobody's serious.

Third, poll after poll after poll is showing that Americans are getting more libertarian on social issues. Not only that, they're getting that way faster than anyone could have expected. Just look at how attitudes have shifted on gay marriage and marijuanna legalization in eight years.

Conservatives can no longer say that government is the problem, but only until it comes out against something we don't like. You're either for a small government with limited powers, or you aren't. And you sure as shit can't be taken seriously about the size of government when your presidential candidates and media types are endlessly rhapsodizing about fuck pills!

Are you going to lose Evangelical Christians that way? Maybe. But you've already started losing everybody else. If American conservatism doesn't become younger, duskier, more libertarian and less religious soon, it will become a fringe.

Fourth, the American people couldn't have been clearer in preferring Obama to the perverted mess that American conservatism has become. You need to work with that and persuade them otherwise. Cooperate when you can, negotiate when you should and oppose when you must. You've had it your way for four years and what did it get you? A Democratic president and Senate and Republican House that's at war with itself is fucking where.

Fifth, not everything is an outrage or a threat to the Republic. Stop acting like it is. You sound like liberals. For example, the Affordable Care Act might be incredibly bad policy, but it isn't "an effort to destroy capitalism itself."  That's doubly true when you campaign saying that you're going to keep all the popular (and ungodly expensive) parts of it.

Unless somebody changed the literature when I wasn't looking, retarded hysteria is not a conservative virtue.

Sixth, "personal responsibility" is more than a goddamned slogan. When you fuck up, cop to it. When was the last time you saw a Republican take responsibilty for anything at all. And it's not like there's been a shortage of Republican fuck-ups in the last dozen years.

You can't, for example, say that the Goddamned Liberal Media is irrelevant and ineffective, yet capable of thwarting you at every turn. Well, I guess you can because you won't stop. But it makes you look like a shithead and no one will take you seriously.

Seventh, if you only do it once (and I wouldn't recommend doing it much more than that) listen to people like Jonah Goldberg when he says things like this.

The good is obvious. The ill is less understood. For starters, the movement has an unhealthy share of hucksters eager to make money from stirring rage, paranoia, and an ill-defined sense of betrayal with little concern for the real political success that can come only with persuading the unconverted.

A conservative journalist or activist can now make a decent living while never once bothering to persuade a liberal. Telling people only what they want to hear has become a vocation. Worse, it’s possible to be a rank-and-file conservative without once being exposed to a good liberal argument. Many liberals lived in such an ideological cocoon for decades, which is one reason conservatives won so many arguments early on. Having the right emulate that echo chamber helps no one.

We do ourselves no favors when we enrich and enable hucksters or reward the ignorance of our fellows. Unless and until we start calling out the shysters and the stupid among us, the left will continue to do it for us, and tar us all with that brush. Because we stupidly insist on embracing and defending idiot deejays and everyone ever associated with Brietbart.com, we give our opponents the club with which they beat us.

Eighth, it would be great if we stop defending the indefensible. There's nothing funnier to me than Canadian conservatives that take every shot they can at Obama, but defend Stephen Harper for doing exactly the same things he did, only more so. Canada's Conservative government is still running expensive television ads touting a massive stimulus program that ended four years ago. Over a third of the Obama stimulus was tax cuts, which wasn't true of Harper's old-timey "throw a blizzard of money at every pothole in the country" program. We don't just look stupid when we do this, we look dishonest.

It's also time to face the fact that Republicans are just as responsible for the debt explosion as Democrats, if not more so. Admitting that doesn't enable our opponents nearly as much as continuing to lie about it does. If you insist on hanging a Paul Ryan poster over your bed, you should understand that he voted for every single debt-creating bill Congress passed between 1997 and 2008. Period.

A wilderness period isn't just good for the soul, it's good for the mind. Richard Nixon said that losing the 1960 election made him a better president in 1968. Reagan almost certainly would have been a worse president if he was nominated and elected in 1968 or '76. Churchill also wrote pretty extensively about the virtues of a wilderness period.

Having said that, a wilderness period does you no good if all you do with it is build a bigger a echo chamber with which to feed some insane persecution complex. If this time is used to do nothing but humor those who see this as something other than satire, we're fucked.

Dick Armey, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Political Payola

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Praying for the Apocalypse: Dispatches From the GOP's Last Stand

One of the great joys of this past week has been watching the Tea Party-Republican reaction to the fiscal cliff deal reached on Tuesday morning. I wrote about my displeasure with it here and I have many of the same grievances with the bargain that hardcore Teapublicans do. The only difference is that I'm telling the truth and they aren't.

Most of the commentary that I've seen railed against the tax increase and the $4 trillion in new debt. The only problem with this critique is that if the GOP got it's way, the debt would have been much worse.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that almost all of the $4 trillion comes from the expansion of the Bush tax cuts for those making under $400, 000 and the permanent patch to the alternative minimum tax. The "new spending" (and that term requires that you believe that tax cuts that aren't paid for aren't spending, which they are) equals about $300 billion.

But Republicans generally, and the Tea Party in particular, wanted all of the Bush tax cuts made permanent, plus the patch of AMT, which would have made CBO's deficit projections larger still. That's the math, folks. Arguing with it doesn't change it.

That would have been fine if Republicans had a plausible way of paying for it. Luckily for them, Republican dogma dictates that tax cuts aren't spending, so the deficits that result from them, in the immortal words of Dick Cheney, "don't matter."

Of course, that brings us to loophole reductions highlighted in the various Ryan plans and the Romney campaign. These of course were nothing short of blatant lies, which we know because no one ever presented a list of deductions to be eliminated or the math behind them. The only reason to leave that information out is because you know that it would be politically impossible to pass. Romney and Ryan would have gotten their tax cuts, to be sure. But they either wouldn't have been paid for or the burden of doing so would have fallen squarely on the middle class.

And if deductions and loopholes are such a wonderful way of paying for tax cuts, why wasn't the idea explored in 2001 and '03? It had been done rather successfully in 1986 and there was certainly no shortage of economists in the Bush White House. My guess is - and this is only a guess because I'm not aware of anyone else asking the question - is that they either knew that the math didn't work or the optics of having the middle class pay for it would be politically worse than the deficits themselves.

But you can cut spending to pay for tax cuts, right?

Yes, that's theoretically possible. But Republicans have never actually tried it before. Neither Reagan or the second Bush tried cutting spending anywhere close to the costs of their tax cuts. In fact, both dramatically ramped up defense spending, which obliterated the savings from domestic spending cuts. But that too was okay because the GOP doesn't believe that defense spending is "spending," either. Indeed, Mitt Romney promised a third surge in security spending without bothering to figure out how he was going to pay for it.

Nor has anyone complaining about Obama's budgeting bothered to come up with anything close to $4 trillion in domestic cuts over a decade. They've promised a lot of reforms, but none of those take effect for a decade after enactment and are guaranteed to have monstrous transition costs. President Bush's 2005 Social Security plan was estimated to cost a trillion dollars in the first ten years, and I expect that Medicare reform based on personal plans would cost at least that much, and probably much, much more.

If the Grover Norquists and Erick Ericksons of the world had their way and everyone in the U.S government was suddenly a Republican, the projected deficits over the next 10 years would grow faster and larger than those currently on the table. Though they like pretending otherwise, their policies have costs, too. Both history and simple arithmetic teach us that.

As I've said before, I was fine with the sequester with its brutal, wide-ranging and immediate cuts. It was the GOP who objected to it most strongly because half of those cuts came directly from the Pentagon's hide, and the Republican platform calls for a dramatic increase in military spending. Another ideological perversion of the Republican Party is their failure to understand that defense spending, being wholly dependent on foreign policy, is the most discretionary spending of all. And at over $600 billion a year, it's the biggest discretionary program of all.

So when Republicans refuse to pay for their tax cuts or cut spending in a serious or timely way, they're left with one fallback position - shut down the government and possibly default on the debt.

You get a good idea of how unserious these people are when you read something like this;  "Specifically,( Pennsylvania Senator Pat)  Toomey tells Joe Scarborough, “We Republicans need to be willing to tolerate a temporary partial government shutdown, which is what that could mean, and insist that we get off the road to Greece because that’s the road we’re on now.”

Excuse me, but what in the fuck is a "temporary partial government shutdown?"

My guess is that it means that the parts of the government (which also happen to be the biggest parts of it) that Republicans like, such as the military and the CIA, continue conducting business as usual. The GOP might be stupid, but it isn't as suicidal as you might think, so Social Security checks will continue to go out and doctors will keep getting paid under Medicare and Medicaid. All "a temporary partial government shutdown" means is that there's no urgency to reach a deal.

Not being a real government shutdown, that allows people like Erickson to think that Republicans have room to maneuver. This is because people like Erickson don't know how life works outside of their silly ideological bubbles.

Friends, this isn't going to be a replay of 2011. Back then, both sides were negotiating before the government hit the debt ceiling and continued as Treasury was juggling existing money to pay the bills. In this case, the ceiling was reached on Tuesday morning, Obama is on the record as saying that he isn't going to negotiate serious spending cuts and Boehner has said that he isn't going to negotiate with Obama at all. In addition to that, I expect the intellectual misfits in the Tea Party to start calling for a default by the end of next week.

The timing of this suggests to me that a default is a serious possibility this time. In fact, I think it's probable.

The markets freaked out in 2011 just because the GOP talked about defaulting and America's credit rating was downgraded for the first time in history. Can you imagine what will happen if those crazy bastards actually do cause a default?

Remember the meltdown following the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy? This will be much worse. At least the government had access to $1.6 trillion for TARP and the Recovery Act then, which it won't this spring because no one will lend America money at anything less than ruinous interest rates. The economy won't "slow down," it'll come to a screeching halt and the United States could start losing a million jobs a month immediately.

By the way, do you know how hard killing terrorists will be when Congress doesn't even have change for the bus? China might also use the opportunity to ramp up its ambitions in the South Pacific, and God only knows what signals Iran will read into a U.S default and Depression.

And all of it will happen at the insistence of alleged "fiscal conservatives."

It's time to finally, finally admit that these people are fiscal conservatives the same way that Lindsay Lohan is sober and chaste. They are to sound economic policy what snake handling is to modern spirituality.

These people are willing to usher in Armageddon based solely on the factually unsupportable belief that Jesus will be waiting at the other side.

If you live outside America, you would be wise to get whatever money you have there out soonest. And if you live in the United States, know that Glenn Beck is probably right and you should start stockpiling gold, canned goods, firearms and explosives forthwith

The Republican Party is going down and they're fixing to take America down with it.

Thoughts on Thoughts About Django Unchained

Since I'm dating again, I've been to see a lot of movies over the last few months. I've been meaning to write about them, but I'm awfully lazy. You can deal. Or not. Whatever.

Django Unchained is a flick that I can't pass up writing about because it does the one thing I look for most most in life: It reaffirms my faith in human stupidity. The things in modern society that make people almost reflexively dumb have always been my favorite and always will be. That's, as the kids say, just how I roll.

When I heard that Quentin Tarantino's next project would be a spaghetti western set in the antebellum slavery era, I knew that the world's worst people would be set of into fits of apoplectic shitheadery. The buzz in the week or so prior to the movie's release confirmed that. All the right people were getting powerfully indignant, which made Django Unchained a "must see" for me.

Much has been written about Django Unchained and almost all of it misses the point. Instead of critiquing the film like a normal human being would, every half-wit in Christendom has used it to espouse their own moronic political perspectives, which goes a long way in proving that people who see politics in everything should probably be buried alive.

I chose to focus on Ari Melber's thoughts in the Atlantic, if only because he managed to stuff so much stupid into such a small space. Once you read the whole thing, you won't be at all surprised to learn that Melber's primary gig is writing for The Nation.

The problems begin with the script. The n-word is not a bug here. It's a feature. It is the connective tissue of the screenplay. It is the epithet setting the opening scene. It is the relentless insult that follows Django, played with abiding intensity by Jamie Foxx, from slavery to freedom. And it is the recurring personification of the antebellum South's racist hierarchy, as white and black characters alike say they've never seen a (black man) on a horse.

That alone will leave many people cold, even if audiences recall the n-word's ostentatious use in classics like Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and, most chillingly, as the trigger of the climactic hostage scene in True Romance, when Dennis Hopper used the word to bait Christopher Walken into a rash murder.

Tarantino, of course, has long argued that his dialogue simply reflects reality. (The Gangsta Rapper Defense.) It is one thing to reflect a tragedy, however, and another to revel in it. And that tick goes way beyond the rhetoric in this movie.

It's difficult to be properly outraged by Django Unchained without citing Tarantino's liberal use of the "n-word." For that reason, that's the main thrust of the criticism against it. Besides which, just using the phrase "the n-word" automatically makes readers use the word "nigger" in their own heads. Editors of course know this, which is why they like devoting as many column inches to using "the n-word" as they can possibly get away with.

Look, if Django Unchained was set in a modern Connecticut country club, you'd probably be right to condemn using the word 109 times in 165 minutes. But it's set in the pre-Civil War American South, where not using it would probably be noteworthy. I get that the fact that people used to speak that way raises endless hackles in people's liberal sensitivities, but that doesn't change the fact that people actually did speak that way.

Melber then goes on to opine about Tarantino's almost tantric levels of violence.

While Django Unchained presents a morally stark universe, where people do and say evil things with no remorse, it also luxuriates in the license that such evil provides.

We are invited to cheer on the slavish killing of men and women, black and white, because they are implicated in an evil institution.

The comparisons to Inglourious Basterds here are unavoidable. Who could begrudge an uprising for freedom, or a squadron of Jewish soldiers seeking justice against Nazis?

Initially, Inglourious Basterds faced a suspicion that the Nazis were used for the same reason they figure prominently in so many video games—they make for "easy" killing. (Many popular American video games are premised on gruesome Nazi hunting, such as Wolfenstein, Battlefield 1942, and the Call of Duty franchise, which has sold over 100 million copies.) In other words, if you want to peddle violence, just find people worth killing.

Back in Germany, however, Tarantino found a way to dodge that bullet.

In a memorable twist, Inglorious Bastards ultimately presented the banality—and even plasticity—of evil. As a villain, Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) turned out to be just a sick operator, not an ideologue. He would do the bidding of anyone in power. That is why Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) famously carved a swastika into Landa's forehead. If Landa wasn't branded with his identity, he would have easily discarded it, and become something else.

Ah yes, where would we be without including the confusing mush of liberal views about violence in a movie review? I'd have been disappointed if our pal Ari didn't go there.

Liberals are strange people when it comes to the use of violence. Stopping the genocide of Saddam Hussein was morally wrong, but we apparently can't put an end to Bashar Assad's by force quickly enough. That Mr. Melber seems to oppose glorying in the murder of even Nazis tells you everything you need to know about where his head is at.

Also, the Landa character in Inglorious Basterds was much more common in Nazi Germany than Melber would have you believe. Most of those who carried out the Hitler's unspeakable evil, even those in the SS, weren't ideological. They were opportunistically evil.

Liberals don't seem to understand this, but history teaches us that humans are far more likely to be Hans Landa than they are, say, Mohandas Gandhi. While we properly celebrate the Gandhis among us (when of course we aren't shooting them to death,) we shouldn't ever shirk from branding the Landas, if only as a reminder of what most of us could be at any given moment.

His depiction of that in Inglorious Basterds proved that Christoph Waltz is the greatest underappreciated actor of his generation. All too often, movies fall down in presenting evil as wild-eyed and unknowable, which it isn't. Far too often, evil is bureaucratic and entirely too civilized. The reality of Hans Landa, much like Gus Fring on Breaking Bad, is much more chilling than the marauding psychopaths presented in popular media.

Outside of the Great Liberals Parlours, where shitheads and cowards run free, evil isn't often reasoned with or debated away. It is instead taken out with violence, but only because that is the only language evil understands.

Django is fighting for his life against slavery, torture, rape, and murder, arming him with a moral clearance to go on a killing spree that would make those video game manufacturers blush. This is one freed slave against an army— "Slavery Scarface," as The Daily Show writer Travon Free put it. The spectacle is more like pornographic violence than a dénouement, and even if the corpses are not total innocents, the nation's tolerance for wanton, mass shootings is quite low right now.

Oh good, a Sandy Hook reference. Life just isn't going to life for the next three months unless we collectively absolve Adam Lanza of his sins by blaming everything around us for them. Supposed intellectuals on both the left and right can't bring themselves to admit that having readily available artillery around the mentally ill usually has less than ideal consequences, so they have to think of clever ways to inhibit everybody's freedom, starting with Quentin Tarantino's.

Besides, who in the fuck is Ari Melber to be deciding what "the nation's tolerance" for anything is right now. Tarantino isn't exactly celebrated for filming tea parties. His flicks are orgies of cartoonish violence. If indeed the nation's tolerance for that is quite low, Django Unchained would have failed at the box office, which it hasn't. In fact, the R-rated film is running closely behind Anne Hathaway as a singing French whore, which I'll remind you she came up with new and exciting ways of promoting. Is an R-rated gorefest that clocks in at nearly three hours ever going to defeat the glorious promise of Anne's transformative cooter? I would suggest to you that it is not. But with a domestic box office gross of over $68 million in a week, it appears that Django Unchained is being tolerated just fine.

And it should be. Django Unchained is a superb flick with a great cast. Despite everything else that you may or may not like about him, Tarantino makes incredibly interesting casting choices and makes them work. God knows that he's done more with Samuel L. Jackson than any other three directors Jackson has worked with in the last twenty years.

As I mentioned earlier, if Hollywood had any decency or brains, Christoph Waltz would be in every movie, including porn. The fact that he's not the biggest star in the world is all the evidence I need that society is well and truly fucking doomed. He is what all actors should be, which is all the more impressive when you consider that English is his third language.

Every decade or so, Jamie Foxx has to prove that he can do something worthwhile before sadly returning to make unwatchable shit for a huge paycheck. The last time he did that was in Ray. While his Django isn't nearly as impressive as his performance as Ray Charles, it's still better than anything he's done since then.

I spent endless years avoiding Leonardo DiCaprio as thoroughly as I could. I gave him a chance when he played the late, great Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries, and he fucked it up horribly. But he impressed me far more than I thought possible in J. Edgar and he did it again in Django Unchained. Also, I'm wondering if I get away with having a beard like Calvin Candie's. It rocks you like a goddamned hurricane.

Then there's Kerry Washington, who I've spent the last eight months, since the premiere of Scandal, trying to figure out how to devote my life more fully to. Not only is she a damn fine actress, she might very well be the most beautiful woman I've ever seen. She's certainly healthy competition for Aishwarya Rai, who appears to have dropped off of the face of the earth. Given the limitations of her role, I understand why Tarantino didn't use her more in Django, but that doesn't make me any less sad.

Even Don Johnson was impressive. Don Johnson, I say! While I'm at it, I'd respectfully ask you all to refer to me only as Big Daddy from here on out. On second thought, maybe I'll wait until I get a white suit and a bolo tie. And I know that some of you will understand better than others why I should be called Big Daddy, but it'll be fun for the rest of you to figure out. One at a time. Or in groups. I'll leave that for you to decide.

In the last several years, movies have mostly sucked. Practically everything out there is a sequel, a reboot, a comic book movie, a friggin' cartoon or all four. The world needs more writer-directors like Quentin Tarantino, if only because very few other people are producing anything that's original and worthwhile.

Say what what you will about it, and I happen to think it's an incredible movie, but Django Unchained is certainly an original. If anybody that didn't have Tarantino's track record went to a studio with the idea of building a spaghetti western around slavery, it never would have been made because it looks dumb on paper and seems almost guaranteed to lose a ton of money. Modern studios aren't exactly famous for celebrating originality, which is too bad.  But if Hollywood is only going to let Quentin Tarantino make movies like Django Unchained, he should make more of them.

If I were to find fault with the movie at all, it would be length. A good editor could have cut it down to two hours and twenty minutes of cinematic majesty. The last half hour alone could have been cut down by a third without anyone noticing. As a nearly three hour movie, the length will also cut into the box office, since theatres can't run as many showings in a day as they can with a standard length film. But that would be the only fault I find in Django Unchained.

I'm not going to lie to you, even if it was a lesser film, I'd still love it because it so upsets loathsome race-hustling assholes like Spike Lee and Tavis Smiley. Neither of those dickheads actually come out and say so (and neither has actually done anything crazy, like see it,) but I suspect that if a black director made Django Unchained exactly the same way Tarantino did, they would be demanding a fucking parade for it and insisting that it be shown in grade schools. Their problem with the movie isn't so much the depiction of slavery as much as it is that Tarantino is insufficiently dusky.

Look, I'd get it if you see Django Unchained and don't like it. Tarantino flicks certainly aren't for everybody. You probably didn't take your mom to Reservoir Dogs for Mother's Day and you shouldn't give her a ticket to Django Unchained for her birthday, either. I'm not going on a hunger strike for you to love Tarantino generally or this film in particular.

What I take issue with is the fact that nobody who is criticising Django Unchained is criticising it as a movie. Idiots everywhere are using it as nothing more than a vehicle to talk about how wonderful they are and to make semi-retarded political statements, often without going to the trouble of actually seeing it. Morons are making it political because they're compelled to make everything political. And people who make everything political are universally stupid.

The irony in that is that Quentin Tarantino's movies are stylistic throwbacks to the 60s and 70s, an era when absolutely everything wasn't inherently political.

The Revenge of Dana Loesch: The Final Nail in Breitbart's Coffin

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