Right Nut Chastises Left Nut for Scrotum-Based Lifestyle

You remember Kurt Schlichter, the Fantasy League tough guy who likes to provoke and transcribe imaginary arguments with people who don't know he exists.  Kurt has squeezed several books and countless Townhall columns out of this premise, and now he's brought his foolproof question begging techniques to the dating scene, and the result is everything you'd dream it would be, assuming you're asleep right now and having a nightmare.

TRIGGER WARNING

[Oh, not for you, I'm sure you're gonna be fine. But Kurt gets triggered like ten times in the first paragraph alone. So you might want to bring some extra popcorn.]

11 Things Every Real Conservative Should Ask On A First Date

Recently, a young being – I don’t want to presume its gender identity, but it’ll probably throw a hissy fit about my blatant chrono-shaming anyway 

Technically, I think you can only chrono-shame someone if you're a Time Lord.

– scribbled an article titled 10 Things Every Intersectional Feminist Should Ask On a First Date for his/her/xir fellow liberal freaks. It’s an illuminating view into the twisted minds of the SJWs, but the article never answers the first question we all asked ourselves reading the title: “Why the hell would anyone ever date an intersectional feminist?”

Kurt prefers a traditional, stay-at-home Fleshlight™ with strong family values and the Hands-Free attachment.

We Normals seek accomplices in reproduction, while SJWs seek accomplices in ideological onanism. 

I think it's a little prejudicial to label anyone who helps Kurt spread his DNA an "accomplice", when they're at worst an "unindicted co-conspirator" and in many ways, a victim themselves.

Take solace in the fact that we are totally going to outbreed these lunatics.

Nobody tell Kurt that antediluvian political opinions aren't hereditary.  (Of course, if he's right, he's in for a big surprise when he discovers his wife has been having an affair with the liberal mailman.)

But as conservatives, it’s vital that we also do some screening of our own. After all, the last thing we want to do is inadvertently turn down a Darwinian not-a-through-street and spawn more liberals. 

"I never would've impregnated you, Sharon, if I'd known you phone-banked for Howard Dean! Now our daughter's a lesbian and it's all your fault!"

I’m out of the dating game thanks to my closed-minded, heavily-armed, hot American-Cuban wife

"We haven't bred yet, because like I say, she's heavily armed, but I'm confident she's busy producing neo-fascist ova."

but let me try to help out you singleberries with some questions to assist you in detecting any right-swipes who are actually covert leftist weirdos, losers, and/or mutations.

Disclaimer: Kurt is a failed stand-up comedian who apparently studied under Mike Huckabee, so I must remind you that Management is not responsible for injuries due to Knee Slapping.

1. Do you believe that any group’s lives matter more than others? 

The answer should be a resounding, “Yes!”

Kurt goes on to affirm that "American lives matter more than the lives" of "perverts", apparently not having seen the news recently, and failing to note that the Venn diagram of these two groups resemble a pair of cells struggling, yet failing to divide.

2. How many genders are there? 

The proper answer is, “Two.” 

There are two genders. Not three. Not four. Not sixty–seven. Two. Male. Female. That is all.

He sounds like Picard defiantly shouting "There...are...FOUR...LIGHTS!" in Chain of Command, except Kurt has broken under torture (actually, just some harsh words), and is being super cooperative with the Cardassians.

Now here's another question, and I warn you, they get harder as we go on:

2. How many fish are there?

The proper answer is, “Two.” 

No! Idiot...The proper answer is "Four: One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. That is all."

3. How do you work to dismantle sexism in your life? 

The correct answer is, “I don’t. I work to support myself with a job so I’m not some freeloading bum feeding off of Uncle Sucker.”

Apparently Kurt has never been sexually harassed, nor read much about it, nor ever met a woman, as he seems not to understand it's a problem which occurs frequently in the workplace, where people have their jobs, which is all that separates them from bum-hood and a parasitic relationship with Uncle Sucker, who I guess is the new symbol for America, and is presumably a Black Cow with a goatee and a spangly top hat.

4. What are your thoughts on guns? 

Your date should answer, “You don’t have enough guns.” 

...while gazing with a disappointed sigh at your biceps.

This answer should come before you mention just how many guns you already have.

Exactly. In fact, you'll eventually notice that your date is answering all your questions a fraction of a second before you ask them, because one of you has come unstuck in time, and you must figure out which one before the meal ends, or you might screw up the timing of your patented fake-grab-for-the-check move and get stuck treating her.

Relationship Rule of Thumb: No one gets to first base without an appreciation of the Second Amendment.

Oh, I don't know. It looks like we've managed to skip a step getting to the Third Reich.

5. Do you support Israel in its fight against Seventh Century savagery? 

The only acceptable response is, “Oh, hell yeah.”

But the only legal response here is, "Your Honor, I object. Counsel is leading the witness."

Extra points if your date adds, “Every time the IDF launches an airstrike on Hamas an angel gets his wings. And all that land the Palestinian thugs are squatting on? That’s part of Israel too.”

For those playing along at home, psychopaths are a Double Word Score!

6. What is your understanding of settler colonialism? 

Your date must understand that it is awesome.

After confirming that she is indeed in favor of starting Armageddon on the West Bank, toss her a few softballs about chattel slavery, because no one gets to 3rd Base without a good argument against the 13th Amendment.

The greatest achievement of the last thousand years was the European settlement of North America (South America – whatever) and the building of the nation that is the greatest beacon of justice and freedom in human history – the United States of America.

I feel like we already covered this question with "settler colonialism".

Elizabeth Warren notwithstanding, Native Americans are terrific in many ways,

Personally I've never tried cooking them, but if you're gonna stoop to cannibalism and eat Plains Indians, then at least do as they'd do and use all the parts.

 including their legendary record as warriors serving in America’s armed forces, and they sure don’t need or want some lib doofus’s pretend pity. There’s no cheaper, tackier sentiment than a pinko rich chick from Brentwood calling Thanksgiving “a celebration of genocide” and whinging on about how those mean old settlers conquered the continent back in the olden days of the 1940s or something – as if she’s ready to pack up her condo and move back across the ocean with 325 million other folks.

Why do people even bother to say "I'm sorry," when the thing they're apologizing for is in the past! Get a TARDIS and say it while it's fresh, Doctor Whore!

7. Do you think socialism is wonderful? 

Your date should ask, “Is that a sick joke?”

Yes! Fortunately, due to Universal Healthcare, the chronically ill joke will get the treatment it needs.

8. Do you believe in climate change? 

The answer is, “Yes.” The climate changes all the time. What you really want to know is whether your date is a cultist affiliated with the liberals’ weird weather religion.

That religion, as theologians know, is called "Science" and wooing a believer leads to other awkward first date questions, such as "What manner of man are you who can summon fire without flint or tinder?"  (I know I'm leaving a Tinder joke on the table here, but honestly, I haven't got all day to waste on this guy...)

Here’s a good way to find out. Offer to drive your date, in a Ford F-150 pick-up truck with no catalytic converter, to a local wood fire BBQ joint that advertises, “We have the best ribs and the biggest carbon footprint in town!”

Chances are you'll get a $10,000 fine and have your smog certification suspended, and even worse, have to listen all night to Kurt bragging about how he punched up the BBQ joint's ad copy.

If your date’s response is, “But that seems like a socially irresponsible earth-crime against Gaia,”

You'll know she's fucking with you.

go alone.

Or you won't realize it was a joke and wind up boxing the clown, but at least you'll get a pissy Townhall column out of it.

 If your date’s response is, “Let’s Uber instead so we can both drink lots of beer,” consider proposing marriage.

There's no more stable foundation for a strong marriage than alcoholism. 

It's also a helpful tip for getting through one of Kurt's columns.

However, if your date uses the word "Uber" and she's not singing the Deutschlandlied, she's probably not the girl for you.

To Be Young, Gifted, and Black Enough to Annoy Kurt Schlichter

Kurt Schlichter is still bitter about lower primates getting higher educations. The first time the subject came up, he was peeved that Obama wanted to send poor kids to junior college, and insisted that anyone who benefited from such a program should be hazed. Not by Axe-scented Alpha bros with six pack abs, but by middle-aged white men with weak chins, and dewlaps that angrily swell and throb like the throat sac of a Sumatran siamang; so what Kurt is really proposing is the world's worst remake of Animal House.

Long story short: if you want the chance to earn an Associates degree in Business Administration even though you can't afford tuition, then you're going to have to wash Kurt's car. I'm sorry, but that's just the way life works -- apparently somebody slipped an amendment into the G.I. Bill when I wasn't paying attention -- and put a little elbow grease into the rims this time, wouldja?  But as Kurt has recently discovered, there's more to this outrage than just the prospect of underprivileged youths getting sent to a community college instead of a car wash. Now we're faced with the threat of privileged Black kids whose parents are paying for them to go to Harvard! And there's no way Malia Obama is going to cream and buff Kurt's BMW.

Usually, the admission of another rich child of privilege to the selective liberal finishing school known as Harvard is a non-story. But in the case of Malia Obama, it provides yet another example of the cynical elitism of modern liberals.

I think Kurt is confused here, because my elitism is idealistic, and my cynicism is egalitarian. But then, I'm an old fashioned liberal.

FULL STOP: This is where liberal liars will try to distract you from the glaring hypocrisy of the elite by accusing me of attacking the innocent child of Barack Obama. It’s unclear whether this reflexive misdirection is the result of them being too stupid to understand an argument or whether they are simply falling back on their default move, dishonesty, or whether it is some combination of both. I’m better on the latter.

Don't be hard on yourself, Kurt. You may be better on dishonesty, but you're no slouch on stupidity.

Now, Malia may well be fully qualified for Harvard in the way some other young person would need to be – through grades, activities and talents. We don’t know, any more than we know her father’s grades at any of the revered institutions of higher indoctrination he allegedly attended.

Allegedly. Birtherism may have lost steam, but there's still time to sow doubt about whether Obama actually went to school. After all, unless he becomes the first President to publish his college transcripts, how would we ever know for sure? Back in junior high I got a D in algebra once and hid my report card from my dad, and he naturally assumed I'd been skipping school to go undermine neo-colonialism in Africa.

 But what is interesting was the immediate assumption on social media that her admittance was something to congratulate her on, as if there was any doubt that the daughter of a rich, liberal president was going to get into whatever elite college she chose. She’s not a student; she’s a status symbol. Take that, Yale!

This custom humans have of congratulating one another on good news is baffling. Recently, a friend of mine passed his fortieth year, and people where all over Facebook wishing him Happy Birthday as if there was any doubt that a 39-year old man was going to turn 40 if he didn't drop dead.

Anyway, Kurt's not attacking the innocent child of Barack Obama, he's merely reducing her to an emoji.

And take that, West Point! The special snowflakes of the elite don’t join the military. 

Kurt frequently claims to have been in the Army, so I guess I'll have to take his word for it that it's populated primarily by idiots.

No, the elite’s spawn’s glorious presence on our soil is service enough. Tens of thousands of regular Americans will earn their GI Bill carrying rifles in places that will not appear on any rich kid’s itinerary. In contrast, Malia will spend her “gap year” in a festival of self-actualization traveling the world unraveling the mystery that is Malia.

This isn't a political column, it's a high school slam book. What happened, Kurt? Did you ask Malia to the Enchantment Under the Sea dance and get humiliatingly rebuffed in the hallway while the Glee Club looked on and tittered?

Anyway, Obama should start a fresh war, so his daughter will have somewhere to go fight without having to take the Bush Twins sloppy seconds. Okay, they didn't exactly hump M-4s through Anbar Province, but they did follow the example of Red Cell and test the security of the Dallas Chi-Chis, thereby preventing potential terrorists from getting drunk on margaritas with fake I.D.s.

It’s odd that the left is not recoiling to the shameful elitism this latest example demonstrates. It really shows that the Sanders insurgency was less about reforming the system than about the suckers demanding a few more scraps from the elite’s table. All they wanted was to be bought off with subsidized college. They were not interested in overturning the table; they simply wanted a place at it.

ADMISSIONS OFFICER: Ah, a poor Latino. I assume you've come to burn down the university?

STUDENT: No, I'd just like to register for classes...

ADMISSIONS OFFICER: (SIGHS) Fine, fill this out... (MUTTERING) Hypocrite.

What is most shameful is how the elite talks such a great game about education and the plight of inner city minority children, then leaves those same kids to the mercy of incompetent hacks in schools mired in chaos and dysfunction. The elite chooses the unions over the kids every single time because union slugs vote and contribute and little black kids in the inner city don’t.

As the spouse of an inner city school teacher, I hope you won't mind if I just pop in here for one sec Kurt and invite you to go fuck yourself. Because that's the most Libertarian way to have sex.

So congratulations, Malia, on your golden ticket into the elite. Good for you – in the sense that everything liberals like your parents do will be good for you and for people like you. Everyone else, though? Well, we don’t matter.

There’s your first lesson in liberalism. See, just because you take a gap year doesn’t mean you can’t learn something.

This has also been your first lesson in Adult Onset Petulance. Maybe take part of your gap year and help organize a telethon.

The Killing Joke

I don't believe we've examined Kurt Schlichter on Wo'C before, and can't really claim to know the first thing about him.  And yet, based on the tone of his recent Townhall piece, which is so vein-poppingly entitled that I suspect it would make Marie Antoinette snap her fan and mutter, "Check your privilege," Kurt was probably hurt by the rich buffet of puns and mispronunciations his last name offered to Middle School wags ("Schlichter? I barely know her!"), sending him running off to press the top of his head against the tetherball pole in a Charlie Brownian pose of existential despair, and it made him mad. It made him mean mad, and now he just wants to hurt us all back.  And while collective guilt isn't my favorite team sport, I'm willing to do my part, even if that means squeezing into short shorts and a sexy tube top to playfully wax Kurt's Dodge Charger for the big car wash fundraiser.

President Obama, Send Your Deadbeat Supporters to Wash My Car 

My car needs washing, and frankly I’d prefer that the losers who think Obama’s “free” community college idea is super awesome get off their lazy hindquarters and wash it for me for free. Sure, I could pay for it myself, but then I’d have to forgo things I’d rather have. It’s cruel and inhuman and, I’m guessing, both racist and phallocentric, to force me to prioritize how I spend my money. So, Mr. President, I need you to direct your minions toward my reserved parking space because, in the words of noted jurist and personal hero Judge Elihu Smails, I want it creamed and buffed with a fine chamois.

Now, at first glance, Schlichter's claim that it's "both racist and phallocentric" to make him pay for a car wash because he'd much rather spend his money buying...a black penis, I guess?...sounds silly, and that's the point. Despite the fact that Kurt looks (and "Schlichter" sounds) exactly like one of the evil frat brothers from Animal House all grown up and gone to seed, he's actually playing a deep Swiftian game here.  If the ultra-hip link to a Caddyshack .wav file wasn't enough to convince you that Kurt is actually a comedy-savvy joke machine on a par with Bruno Kirby's character in Good Morning, Vietnam, then this endorsement ought to do the trick:

Kurt Schlichter (Twitter: @KurtSchlichter) was personally recruited to write conservative commentary by Andrew Breitbart. 

Wow. That's a rare honor, like being a chiropractor who's personally recruited by Ed Wood to double for the deceased Bela Lugosi in Plan Nine From Outer Space.

He is a successful Los Angeles trial lawyer, a veteran with a masters in Strategic Studies from the United States Army War College, and a former stand-up comic.

In the inter-War years, most of America's beloved comedians came out Vaudeville, or the Catskills, while in the Fifties, it was the nightclub scene; in the Sixties, a sharper, more satiric comic voice developed at the Harvard Lampoon, but nowadays it seems as though nearly all the nation's edgiest comics are emerging from the Army War College.

I’m just going with the flow here. Apparently all that’s needed to get something these days is to unleash your inner wanting and hack politicians will start promising to provide it for free.

Patronage and graft sure aren't what they used to be. In the old days, you'd get a bottle of free whiskey for voting twice. Now they just send you to Calculus class.

 In the dark, wicked past, things like fine touring sedans and reserved parking spaces – as well as community college degrees – came after one put forth something called effort.

I think you misunderstand, Kurt. They're not giving away degrees -- you still have to go to class, write the papers, pass the tests; in other words, earn them -- they're just subsidizing tuition, which in my day was -- at least at the Junior College level -- as close to free as made no difference.

 “Effort” is a word that describes the means by which the people called upon to subsidize lay-about Democrat-voting losers acquire the money the liberals seek to plunder. 

That's your definition, huh? So there's no English Comp requirement at the Army War College?

But today, we have legions of over-schooled, under-wise, neckbeards voxsplaining to us about how demanding they expend effort before they get stuff is really just discrimination.

Some people overexert themselves and get a charlie horse. Kurt gets a dennis miller.

Yes, it is. Life, using effort as a metric, ruthlessly discriminates between the lazy and those who have stuff. I am super comfortable with that.

Does Life also discriminate between "those who have stuff and those who would like to have stuff but won't ever get the chance to acquire any because they can't afford to go to college"? Because in that case, it seems like Life is kind of a dick.

I could go on a long diatribe about all the burgers I flipped and the toilet stalls I mopped over my nearly 35 years of work

Don't trouble yourself, we're bored enough as it is. (However, if a "successful trial lawyer" is still flipping burgers and mopping toilet stalls, I'm guessing your firm is sending a subtle hint that you're not going to make partner.)

but I don’t need to justify my right to my own property or the fruits of my labor. It’s mine, not the liberals’. That’s all that matters – whether I got what I have because I built a company or had super rich parents who handed it to me or because I won the lotto is, frankly, none of anyone’s business. 

What’s mine is . . . mine. Not yours. Go get your own. Keep your grubby mitts off mine.

Sorry, children of the non-super rich; if Obama's proposal becomes law you may get the otherwise unattainable opportunity to earn a degree, or enough credits to transfer to a four year school, but despite what the President says, you're going to have actually go to class and study, and not just walk into Kurt Schlichter's den and rip his diploma off the wall.

I’m always fascinated when some moral illiterate who’s still sponging off his mommy labels as “selfishness” my unwillingness to give him my hard-earned money just because he really, really wants it. Not that it matters – again, it’s mine, so if I want to be selfish with it that’s my prerogative. If you want the same prerogative, get your sorry tail behind a cash register and start selling people Big Macs.

Unlike the unlettered sponges who are continually importuning him for money and property, Kurt is a moral literate, although apparently he only reads morality at a Second Grade level.

I refused to listen to President Bottomless Piehole’s speech the other night,

"I meant to, but I was busy coining insulting nicknames for the President, and for some reason they all sounded like specialty desserts at Cracker Barrel, and then I got hungry and wandered off to the kitchen..."

 but I understand that he pointed out some Potemkin villager as his example of an oppressed prole trying to survive in the living hell that is the America he has led for the last six years. He lamented that Ms. Julia Potemkin worked hard, but darn it, didn’t have the money left at the end of the month to take a vacation or get a new car. Now, how did he come to the conclusion that this is a bad thing? People who are financially squeezed shouldn’t take vacations or drive new cars. 

They shouldn't get paid sick days either, which they wouldn't even need if they had to get out in the fresh air and walk to work.

That’s not a problem to be solved. It’s an example of thrift to be applauded.

And if you actually freeze or starve to death, Kurt will give you a standing ovation.

To the extent the situation Ms. Julia Potemkin finds herself in is even a problem at all, it is not for the President or anyone else to address.

While Republicans, as a party, have become anti-science, many individual members, like Kurt, are willing to scribble in a grandfather clause for natural selection.

 Hey Julia, you’re a grown woman, at least chronologically. Figure it out. Want a nice vacation? Work more hours, or get a better job. Save money by canceling cable, or cooking at home. Maybe you could do what I did for years as I built my law firm and just not take a vacation. I don’t know what the answer for you is, and I don’t care. You’re a grown women. If you’re unhappy, figure it out.

Again, I'm not as strong on my definitions as you are, Kurt, so maybe you can help me out: is this "voxsplaining," "mansplaining," or "psychosplaining"?

I do know one thing – the answer is not to come to me and tell me I should subsidize Ms. Potemkin’s decisions by giving her my money. That’s money I got through my decisions, like my decision to spend years working three jobs (lawyer, writer, Army reservist).

You're sure getting all exercised about a woman who doesn't exist. But of course, millions of real life Julias do work three jobs, many of them backbreaking and for minimum wage, whereas your employment hat trick consisted, respectively, of 1) a white collar career 2) more of an avocation or a hobby, and 3) a job that required you to show up for, what? One weekend a month and two weeks every summer?

 You know why I have a nice car? 

No, but if I had to guess, based solely on your column, I'd say you probably snuck up behind a disabled man in a parking lot, beat him to death in a foaming rage with a golf putter, then zoomed away in his BMW while muttering about sponges.

A lot of people want their college paid for, but they really don’t want to do the things consistent with buying – yeah, education is a commodity – a degree. 

Yeah, why don't these stupid middle class and poor people just buy advanced degrees from online diploma mills, then get jobs as conservative talk show hosts?

Their bright idea is to have mepay for it. And it’s a terrific idea – for them. Funny how that always happens. Oh, and besides being selfish, I’m also short-sighted because it would do all sorts of vague, unspecified good for “society” if everyone could get babysat for another two years past their terms in the Democrat-unionized K-12 moron factories.

He has a point. School only lasts for something like six hours a day, and if freeloading first graders cared at all about being fair to Kurt, they could easily pay for their own grammar school educations by laboring the remaining eighteen hours in a blacking factory.

Well, since apparently the government now exists to fulfill every transitory whim, I want in. I want my car washed, and I guess that leaves only one alternative, since I don’t want to pay for it. You people who think it’s A-OK to divvy up my money – which is really my time in dollar form – need to get up off the sofa, put down that Xbox controller, and pick up a sponge. Wax on, wax off. Get buffin’.

Hell, I'll go you one better, Kurt -- I think they should be forced to wash you. Anyone got a fire hose, or a water cannon...?

Hey, don’t be selfish. Think of the benefits to society that would come from me – a demonstrated job creator – if I was liberated from the tyranny of having to get my car washed. What, you still don’t want to? What about society? Why are you so greedy?

This doesn't make a lot of sense -- we all pay taxes for things we don't agree are worthwhile, or which don't benefit us directly; it's the price of living in a society in which our every whim is not catered to, assuming we're neither the super rich nor one of their paid courtiers -- but then I remembered that this is all satire, and Kurt is using his satirist's pen to stop widespread higher education before enough of his potential audience can go to college and realize this isn't satire.

Well, I’ll make you a deal. I won’t ask you to subsidize my life decisions and you won’t ask me to subsidize yours. 

But that's not quite fair to you, is it? I mean, sending people to college involves certain fixed costs which must be covered by tax dollars, whereas I'm pretty sure it doesn't cost you anything to be an asshole.

Darkness at Noonan*

Lesser Accepted Modalities of Incoherence, by Keith.

Previously, on Peggy Noonan's Lost Weekend...

Readers, I hope there is mutual understanding for not dropping the entire Noonan blog in one post. As difficult as it was to parse “High Noonan” there are still more paragraphs to cover. I believe there are twelve. But I'm counting anything with a double space as a paragraph. 

The president is interested in Ronald Reagan, and in the past has seemed mildly preoccupied with him, but he misunderstands him. Mr. Obama shows every sign of thinking Reagan led only through words.

From what is understood, he led through horoscopes provided by Nancy's astrologer.  Mercury was in perpetual retrograde.

But Reagan led through actions, as every leader must. The words explained, argued for and advanced those actions; they gave people a sense of who it was who was acting.

He was, after all, president of the Screen Actors Guild! 

Although, judging by the wistful, expressive eyes, I get a sense it was the chimp who was acting.

But Obama’s generation of the left could never see or come to terms with the fact that it was, say, the decision to fire the air traffic controllers, or the decision to take the hit and bleed out inflation, that made Reagan’s presidency successful and meaningful.

Not to mention dicier odds for air travelers. Plus lay-offs right and left ... 

With an effective presidency, everything is in the doing.

For instance, looking at the way wage stagnation and income inequality spiked after 1981, you might say that Reagan was "doing" the Middle Class (sans lube), in a kind of conjugal conjugation.

But wait -- Reagan was the Great Communicator, and it seems counterintuitive to claim that everything is in the doing, when his whole claim to fame rested on the assumption that lots of things were in the saying.

 The words are part of the doing and at some points can be crucial to it; at some interesting points they even are the doing...

For our readers who may be too young to remember mid-90s AOL chatrooms, "doing with words" is also known as "cybersex."

...such as looking at the Soviets and declaring that we knew what their system was and wouldn’t accept any but an honest interpretation of it, and yes, that constituted a change of attitude and approach.

“Ivan, we know what your doing, and it's just–like–really grody. Uck! Disgusting! Oh my gaaaawddddd.....”

I'm not sure what an “honest” interpretation of the Soviet Union might entail. How does one paranoid superpower, based on a consumer-oriented, free-market economy interpret another paranoid superpower with a state-controlled planned economy, particularly if they're not interested in speaking to one another and whose security interests are conducted through proxy wars in the developing world. 

That took words. But it’s never all words, it can’t be. It’s making the right decision and carrying it through—executing it.

If words could kill, we could really streamline this whole process.

Mr. Obama learned only half of Reagan’s lesson.

That's the half of not accepting counsel from Psychic Friends Network.

And here’s something odd.

An untouched bottle of Tanqueray in my liquor cabinet!

 The first President Bush, George H.W., learned half the lesson too, but the other half. Bush managed, executed and decided his way through the peaceful fall of the Soviet Empire and the reunification of Germany. But he couldn’t, for reasons characterological [sic] and having to do with his own highly refined sense of the demands of diplomacy, explain to people exactly what he was doing, why he was doing it and how. And so a feat of great historical weight and magnitude, deserving of a Nobel Prize for peace and utterly ignored by that silly committee, is half forgotten.

No Peggy, it is completely forgotten. The collapse of the USSR was decided long before G.H.W. Bush even paid notice. It was accomplished by reformists within the Communist Party. By the way, former President Mikhail Gorbachev won the Nobel Peace Prize for this particular achievement. He was there, after all.

Whereas Mr. Obama won that prize—for words.

He won it because the Nobel committee wanted to flip the bird to “W”. War criminals rarely achieve the Peace Prize. 

But let’s go back to the first paragraph, and the original point of this piece.

Do we really have to? 

Mr. Obama’s problem now is that people think he is smart.

We haven't forgotten, although by now it's becoming annoying.

They think, as they look at his health-care vows, that either he didn’t know how bad his program was, what dislocations it would cause, what a disturbance it would be to the vast middle class of America . . .

Peggy, to be honest, the entire piece of legislation is flawed. It is, as one wag put it, akin to applying duct-tape to a manifold when it's obvious a rod is going to blow. 

I'm surprised you are so negative on PPACA since the legislation was written entirely by lobbyists from the health insurance and pharma industries, building on bullet-points provided by the American Enterprise Institute.

The entire notion of health insurance as a commodity exists only in the USA, where hacks like yourself eke out a living justifying the entire commoditization of society from top to bottom, including the poorest amongst us. 

Or he knew, and deliberately misled everyone.

Well, you could have just said “Liar, liar … pants on fire” in the first place and let it go at that. But no.

If they thought he wasn’t very bright, they might give him some leeway on that question. But they think he’s really smart.

So you're saying that ignorance of the law is an excuse? Well, that explains why George W. Bush isn't currently occupying the Slobodan Milošević Suite at The Hague.  But as long as we're on the topic of Presidential intelligence, Peggy, perhaps you can clear something up.  Nixon thought Reagan was an amiable nitwit, a man whose brains were "negligible," and whose sole skill lay in persuasively delivering the words someone else wrote for him. Now, you spent years putting those words in Reagan's mouth, and you -- judging by your column -- have actual contempt for words, so I guess the real question is: were you the cynical one and he the stupid one, or was it the other way around?  (I know Paul was the cute one and Ringo the funny one, but I'm fuzzy on the rest.)

So they think he knew. 

And deliberately misled.

They think he knowingly quelled people’s fears when he knew they had every reason to be afraid. 

Which makes him just another dishonest pol, just another guy hiding in the deliberately obscure paragraph on page 1,037 of the omnibus comprehensive reform bill.

My copy of the legislation comes in at a mere 906 pages. Where is page 1,037? 

He has taken himself down, lowered his own stature. 

Commentators like to decry low-information voters—the stupid are picking our leaders. I think the real problem is low-information leaders. They have so little experience of life and have so much faith in magic—in media, in words—that they don’t understand people will get angry at you when you mislead them, and never see you the same way again.

We here at WO'C like to decry low-information pundits and you, Ms. Noonan, are the perfect example of Dictaphone on auto-pilot. Your thoughts are transcribed by unpaid interns and published by editors who have no patience to review your work. 

I took on this assignment as a challenge from the editor of this blog, since neither Scott nor Sheri were ever able to wrap their heads around the Swiss-cheese you parlay as serious political commentary. Now that I have, I'll join you at the bar. But only if it's on your tab. I need something completely nauseating to erase the memory of this exercise.

*Thanks to Fearguth for the title.

High Noonan

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to figure out exactly how drunk Peggy Noonan was when she barfed up this blog post.

"Uh, no sir, I don't believe you are 'cutting me off.' In fact, I seriously doubt the rules of English grammar even permit one to string those particular words together in that peculiar order.  Produces nothing but gibberish.  Now keep pouring -- and this time leave the fruit out of my Old Fashioned.  That maraschino cherry displaces far too much liquid."

By Keith, World O' Crap's Senior Sozzled Shoe Fetishist Correspondent.

The Accepted Modalities of Incoherence

Here's our gal Peggy, from her blog at WSJ on December 3. Subject: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as “Obamacare.” Peg's been late to the party when it comes to trashing this particular legislation. Let's see what possible wisdom she brings to the contentious and polarizing debate.

The president’s problem right now is that people think he’s smart. They think he’s in command, aware of pitfalls and complexities. That’s his reputation: He’s risen far on his brains. They think he is sophisticated.

Heavens to Betsy, if only this correspondent shared a similar “problem.”

That is his problem in the health insurance debacle.

Really Peg? How so?

People have seen their prices go up, their choices narrow. They have lost coverage. They have lost the comfort of keeping the doctor who knows them and knows they tend to downplay problems and not complain of pain, and so doing more tests might be in order, or tend to be hypochondriacal and probably don’t need an echocardiogram, or at least not a third one this year.

Other people never have the opportunity to see a physician in the first place outside of an ER. But then again this does cut down on unnecessary testing and diagnosis. And that keeps costs down, I suppose.

But how does the perception of President Obama's intelligence qualify as a factor in the debate over the legislation at issue? Concerned Americans demand to know, dear.

At the very least people have been inconvenienced; at the most they’ve been made more anxious in an already anxious world. In a month, at the worst they may be on a gurney in an ER not knowing the answer to the question “Do you have insurance?” and hoping they can get into an exam room before somebody runs the number on the little green plastic card they keep in the back of their wallet.

Why does the card have to be green? Do you have a preference for green or did you mistake your American Express for your insurance card the last time you presented for an unnecessary electrocardiogram, feeling as you were more anxious in an already anxious world?

Still, we're waiting for the answer re: Barry's real or perceived intelligence.

Everyone understands in their own rough way that ObamaCare is a big mess. And that it’s not the website, it’s the law itself. They have seen systems crash. In the past 20 years they’ve seen their own computers crash. They know systems and computers get fixed.

Not my last computer. It caught fire! It melted! How do you fix that?

But they understand a conceptual botch when they see one. They understand this new program was so big and complex and had so many moving parts and was built on so many assumptions that may or may not hold true, and that deals with so many people with so many policies—and they know they themselves have not read their own policies, for who would when the policies, like the law that now controls the policies, are written in a way that is deliberately obscure so as to give maximum flexibility to administrators in offices far away. And that’s just your policy. What about 200 million other policies? The government can’t handle that. The government can barely put up road signs.

I'm beginning to understand a “conceptual botch” and I'm only half-way through.

Please walk us past the road signs. If you're not too dizzy from imagining all those complex bells and whistles achieving steady-state, that is.

The new law seems like just another part of the ongoing shakedown operation that is the relationship of the individual and the federal government, circa 2013.

Now I'm getting a bit worried. When will you arrive to something slightly significant?

But back to the president, and his problem with being known as intelligent—Columbia, Harvard Law, lecturer on constitutional issues at the University of Chicago Law School.

Not such shabby credentials, to be certain. Peggy, darling, in researching your degree from Fairleigh Dickenson I've noticed there is scant information in Noonan biographies on degree earned,  nor any information that provides validation of your qualification as pundit. We're still investigating. (Honest postcript).

The program he created in 2009-10, ran on in 2012, and whose implantation [sic] he delayed until one year after that election—in retrospect, that delay seems meaningful, doesn’t it?—has turned out to be wildly misleading as to its basic facts.

[“Implantation” is just too rich for comment. I'll pass. Scott?]

[From Scott:  All I've got is an entry from Peggy's dream journal -- most of it illegible -- about the lilting sound of Negro spirituals emanating from an In Vitro Fertilization clinic.]

Millions are finding you can’t keep your plan, your premium, your deductible, your doctor. And millions more will discover this when the business mandate kicks in. 

All of this—the fraudulent nature of the program—came as a rolling shock to people the past two months.

[Now I realize why no one else will touch this column. I'm pulling on my hair.] Peggy, this is your last chance to explain why the complexities of expanded health insurance has any connection with the intelligence, real or imagined, of the POTUS. And make it SNAPPY! Make us absolutely roll with shock!

It’s a shock for most people that it’s a shambles. A fellow very friendly to the administration, a longtime supporter, cornered me at a holiday party recently to ask, with true perplexity: “How could any president put his entire reputation on the line with a program and not be on the phone every day pushing people and making sure it will work?

It's not like it was something trivial, like a war, or preparations for a natural disaster.  If those go south, what's the worst that's going to happen?  American casualties would be five figures -- tops!  But if Amazon.com experienced connectivity issues, hundreds of thousands of people would be affected.  There'd be rioting and looting!  And thanks to slow load times, potential rioters might have to sit around for up to 8 minutes waiting to click on the stuff they wanted to loot!  Not to mention the fact that any online retailer with a crappy website can't be trusted to deliver the stuff you've stolen from them in less than 10 to 14 business days.

Do you know of any president who wouldn’t do that?” I couldn’t think of one, and it’s the same question I’d been asking myself. The questioner had been the manager of a great institution, a high stakes 24/7 operation with a lot of moving parts. He knew Murphy’s law—if it can go wrong, it will. Managers—presidents—have to obsess, have to put the fear of God, as Mr. Obama says, into those below them in the line of authority. They don’t have to get down in the weeds every day but they have to know there are weeds, and that things get caught in them.

Finally!  We've found the first evidence of Obama's low intelligence -- he doesn't understand how lawns work.

It’s a leader’s job to be skeptical of grand schemes. Sorry, that’s a conservative leader’s job. It is a liberal leader’s job to be skeptical that grand schemes will work as intended. You have to guide and goad and be careful.

Emphasis added, because when your high-priced Wall Street Journal pundits start to sound like a Nina Hartley tutorial video on anal sex, it is truly the Twilight of the Gods, and you might want to get to Costco and stock up on Ragnarök supplies, like those fifty-roll packs of toilet paper, or a 5-gallon jerry can of Thousand Island Dressing.

And this president wasn’t. I think part of the reason he wasn’t careful is because he sort of lives in words. 

Although what really galls you is that he actually lives in the White House.

That’s been his whole professional life—books, speeches. Say something and it magically exists as something said, and if it’s been said and publicized it must be real. 

Such as magical dolphins!  "It was a miracle a six-year-old boy survived the storm at sea and floated safely in an inner tube for two days and nights toward shore; a miracle that when he tired and began to slip, the dolphins who surrounded him like a contingent of angels pushed him upward..."

This is the same column that included the now classic Internet Tradition, "Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to. A great and searing tragedy has occurred [a six year old boy was reunited with his father], and none of us knows what drove it, or why the president did what he did. Maybe Congress will investigate. Maybe a few years from now we'll find out what really happened."

In the meantime, hit me again bartender, and make it a double.

He never had to push a lever, see the machine not respond, puzzle it out and fix it.

Peggy, just buy another one.  Or put it on your Amazon Wish List if you're cheap (but I'd recommend springing for overnight delivery -- you're clearly getting crankier by the minute...)

 It’s all been pretty abstract for him, not concrete. He never had to stock a store, run a sale and see lots of people come but the expenses turn out to be larger than you’d expected and the profits smaller, and you have to figure out what went wrong and do better next time.

I don't want to practice psycho-babble, but isn't the above teetering on  projection? What has the author of this essay accomplished in professional tenure? Books? Speeches? This her gin & tonic?

People say Mr. Obama never had to run anything, but it may be more important that he never worked for the guy who had to run something, and things got fouled up along the way and he had to turn it around. He never had to meet a payroll, never knew that stress. He probably never had to buy insurance! 

Apparently Obama never owned a car or a house, and is the only man in North America who can purchase a major appliance without being pressured to buy the extended warranty.

And you know, his policies were probably gold-plated—at the law firm, through his wife’s considerable hospital job, in the Illinois Legislature, in the U.S. Senate. Those guys know how to take care of themselves! Maybe he felt guilty. Maybe that’s to his credit, knowing he was lucky. Too bad he didn’t know what he didn’t know, like how every part has to work for a complicated machine to work.

So there you go: Providing modest reforms for uninsured Americans comes down, eventually and thankfully, to guilt – the guilt of the POTUS for enjoying continuous insurance coverage. I'm beginning to feel like a real sucker, Madame Peggy Barnum! Your readers salute you! Twice!

Here I will say something harsh

Thanks for the spoiler alert.

and it’s connected to the thing about words but also images. 

From what I have seen the administration is full of young people who’ve seen the movie but not read the book. They act bright, they know the reference, they’re credentialed. But they’ve only seen the movie about, say, the Cuban missile crisis, and then they get into a foreign-policy question and they’re seeing movies in their heads. 

Ah yes, that blockbuster about the Cuban Missile Crisis all the kids were raving about back in the summer of 2000.  It was like Titanic, except with even crappier accents!

But hey, at least these Democratic whippersnappers saw it.  Dana Perino was apparently in the multiplex theater next door, watching Chicken Run for the third time:

During a White House briefing, a reporter referred to the Cuban Missile Crisis -- and she didn't know what it was.  

"I was panicked a bit because I really don't know about . . . the Cuban Missile Crisis," said Perino, who at 35 was born about a decade after the 1962 U.S.-Soviet nuclear showdown. "It had to do with Cuba and missiles, I'm pretty sure."

So she consulted her best source. "I came home and I asked my husband," she recalled. "I said, 'Wasn't that like the Bay of Pigs thing?' And he said, 'Oh, Dana.' "

Anyway, we'd better get back to Peggy before the DTs completely take over the column...

They haven’t read the histories, the texts, which carry more information, more texture, data and subtlety, and different points of view. They’ve only seen the movie—the Cubans had the missiles and Jack said “Not another war” and Bobby said “Pearl Harbor in reverse” and dreadful old Curtis LeMay chomped his cigar and said “We can fry a million of ‘em by this afternoon, Mr. President.” Grrr, grrr, good guys beat bad guys.

I dunno. I read James M. Cain's novel “Mildred Pierce” and thought it was terrific. But liked the Michael Curtiz movie better plus it was Joan's Oscar! The film ending is more satisfying. OTOH “GWTW” cut out a lotta sub-plots and the movie, despite its flaws, has most likely been seen by more folk than have actually read the novel. It's really all a hodgepodge of information, texture and data. Subtlety is disqualified now that we know your main john is Rupert Murdoch.

It’s as if history isn’t real to them. They run around tweeting, all of them, even those in substantial positions.

What is a substantial position? Is it gainful … or just more chicken wings and pedicures? Deep-fried on a stick?

“Darfur government inadequate. Genocide unacceptable.” They share their feelings – that happens to be one of the things they seem to think is real, what they feel. “Unjust treatment of women—scourge that hurts my heart.” This is the dialogue to the movies in their heads.

You know Peggy --- you need an outline to proceed with an essay of this scope. An outline format is available to you in MS word. You just type some critical points and subpoints, then think about them before you or your interns (most likely unpaid) do the typing. Lots of teenagers writing first-time essays have tremendous success with this method.

Let us pause, and review:

1) Murderous, trecherous corrupt govermnent inadequate;

2) Genocide unacceptable;

3) Unjust treatment of women;

4) They share their feelings.

Peggy is moving quickly to somewhere's dark and fearful.

There’s a sense that they’re all freelancing, not really part of anything coherent.

Here! Here! I'm a card-carrying member of the Freelancer's Incoherence Union! (Don't laugh, one day we shall RULE).

For four years I have been told, by those who’ve worked in the administration and those who’ve visited it as volunteers or contractors, that the Obama White House isn’t organized. It’s just full of chatter. Meetings don’t begin on time, there’s no agenda, the list of those invited seems to expand and contract at somebody’s whim.

Well, sometimes you have to go to a meeting with the bullet points you have, and not the bullet points you wish you had.

 There is a tendency to speak of how a problem will look and how its appearance should be handled, as opposed to what the problem is and should be done about it. People speak airily, without point. They scroll down, see a call that has to be returned, pop out and then in again.

They show a basic awareness of how politics works!  They use air to speak, rather than one of those electronic voice boxes like laryngectomy patients!  They return calls!  All classic symptoms of Cuban Missile Crisis movie viewing!

It does not sound like a professional operation. And this is both typical of White Houses and yet on some level extreme. People have always had meetings to arrange meetings, but the lack of focus, the lack of point, the sense that they are operating within accepted levels of incoherence—this all sounds, actually, peculiar.

Got that, kids? Accepted levels of incoherence.

It's almost time for another session for repose and bullet-points, but I'm anxious for the next shoe. In my newly-acquired “airily” fashion.

And when you apply this to the ObamaCare debacle, suddenly it seems to make sense. The White House is so unformed and chaotic that they probably didn’t ignore the problem, they probably held a million meetings on it. People probably said things like, “We’re experiencing some technological challenges but we’re sure we’ll be up by October,”

Just like...The Missiles of October!

and other people said, “Yes, it’s important we launch strong,” and others said, “The Republicans will have a field day if we’re not.” And then everyone went to their next meeting. And no one did anything. 

Simply because Obama could present as a sentient being capable of a comma,  all freak and leave early for lunch.

And the president went off and made speeches. Because the doing isn’t that important, the talking is.

“The doing isn't that important”

to be continued …

And James O'Keefe as "Dildo" Your Yeoman Purser

John Fund is a serious, serious man.  True, his bio describes him as an "American political journalist and conservative columnist," which means he's a "journalist" in the same way Ronald McDonald is a "clown" -- he's not, but he plays one on TV.  Also, he's "currently the national-affairs columnist for National Review Online," which is like being the one sort of smart guy in the slob fraternity -- the Hoover, say, to Jonah Goldberg's Flounder.  Prior to that, he spent twenty years writing for The Wall Street Journal, which I'm not really familiar with, but it's owned by Rupert Murdoch so it's probably safe to assume it's a guttersniping scandal rag with tits on page 3.

Among Fund's known associates are alleged sex tourist and admitted drug addict Rush Limbaugh, with whom Fund wrote a book, presumably a guide to the best drugs to take when visiting a Dominican joy house; and Hans von Spakovsky, who I'm just going to assume is a James Bond villain.  Finally, and most alarmingly, he's a senior editor at The American Spectator, which, judging by the title, is some kind of trade journal for voyeurs.  (I guess I could have actually looked some of these people and publications up, but John's article is a puff piece for James "Love Boat" O'Keefe's latest video expose, and if there's one thing I've learned from O'Keefe, it's that facts merely fuck up a good story.)

Anyway, even if John Fund's professional credentials are largely self-refuting, and he runs with a disreputable crowd of idiots, fabulists, and sociopaths, you can't deny that he has serious hair.  As Melanie Griffith's character Tess says in Working Girl, "You wanna be taken seriously, you need serious hair" and John Fund has taken that lesson to heart and to head.  He's got the kind of hair that would have graced an ad for The Dry Look in 1972, when Gillette was trying to persuade hopelessly square Greg Marmalard types to give up that greasy kid stuff in favor of the more natural stiffness of hair spray, the kind of cautious, One Step Beyond Brylcream 'do that makes him look like the third hippest aide to Bob Haldeman.

The Truth about Navigators: James O’Keefe reveals corruption at the heart of the president’s signature program. 

James O’Keefe, the guerrilla videographer who helped bring down ACORN (the “community organizing” group that Barack Obama worked for as a lawyer and trainer) and got NPR’s president fired, is back.

James O'Keefe is a "guerrilla videographer" in the same way the Contras were "guerrilla freedom fighters," in that they've both received money under suspicious circumstances from shadowy right wing figures.  I hear they also shop for Double-Header Jelly Dildos at the No Exit Only Outlet Mall in Sartreville, Arkansas.

This time, his undercover investigators focused on Obamacare’s “navigators,” the nearly 50,000 people who, in the words of the Department of Health and Human Services, “will serve as an in-person resource for Americans who want additional assistance in shopping for and enrolling in plans” on the Obamacare exchanges (at least when they’re finally working). The total value of grants doled out for nonprofits and community organizations to hire navigators has topped $67 million nationwide, and some of the money is going to a group run by ACORN’s highly controversial founder.

Why is ACORN's founder so highly controversial?  Well, it turns out that despite being history's greatest monster, he's spent less time in jail than James O'Keefe (known to the boys in Cellblock B as "O-Face").

The events of O’Keefe’s video of a Texas navigator site run by the National Urban League are a familiar sight to viewers of his past efforts exposing Medicaid and voter fraud. Government-paid workers supposedly trained to uphold the law advise clients on how to lie on government forms, evade legal requirements, and ignore proper procedures.

If you wanted to lie for a living, Miss Government-paid Worker, you should have invested in a spy cam and a copy of Final Cut Pro (sure, they're pricey, but poor people have too many luxuries nowadays anyway -- TVs, cell phones, souls -- and you could easily finance your guerrilla videography start-up by selling the latter to Andrew Breitbart.  Or at least you could have, before he was transferred to the Home Office).

“You lie because your premiums will be higher,” one navigator advises an investigator for O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, who tells the worker he sometimes smokes. “Don’t tell them that. Don’t tell ’em.”

Judging by the history of O'Keefe's little scoops -- such as his creatively edited NPR hoax -- the navigator's words were likely uttered in response to some entirely different statement, and then carefully and deceitfully dubbed elsewhere to create an incriminating context.  Unfortunately, I don't have access to the raw video from Jimmy's latest mixtape, but I'm going to guess that the provocateur said something like, "I know insurance agents ask a lot of personal questions, and I know it's important to be honest, but I'm wondering...just how honest?  Should I tell them my hopes and dreams?  My deepest fears?  My secret ambition to be on Iron Chef with an ingredient only I know how to cook?"

"A good Bone-In Rectum is more tender and flavorful, of course, but legally problematic, as that's also the title of a 1982 feature film from Man-Chest Motion Pictures.  But I've been experimenting in my kitchen day and night, until now I can turn out a delicious boneless pork rectum using nothing but a Crème brûlée torch and a speculum.  I should just be up-front about that, right?"

There’s much more in the video, which O’Keefe hints will not be his last. Left unexplored is how so many navigators nationwide were hired without any background checks required.

They probably lied to conceal their real plan to help poor people sign up for health insurance by saying they just wanted to buy a gun.

 While Texas and some other states have passed requirements of their own, the absence of such checks at the federal level was acknowledged by HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius last week. She was asked by Texas senator John Cornyn if “a convicted felon could be a navigator and could acquire sensitive personal information from an individual unbeknownst to them.” 

“It’s possible,” was Secretary Sebelius’s less-than-comforting reply.

Anything's possible, I suppose.  If you wanted to go all nutty, worst-case-scenario, you could imagine some weird dystopia where an admitted rapist is elected to a state legislature and allowed to carry a concealed firearm, but that's crazy enough that you'd probably have to subcontract the job to Anthony Burgess.

Michael Astrue served as commissioner of Social Security until earlier this year, and in the 1990s served as general counsel for HHS. He wrote in The Weekly Standard last month that he is genuinely frightened of the lax security surrounding the Obamacare website, and the fact that navigators will access the federal data hub to help people enroll:

HHS opened the door to large-scale fraud by providing funding for tens of thousands of “navigators”—people who are supposed to persuade the uninsured to apply for coverage and then assist them in the application process. Instead of hiring well-screened, well-trained, and well-supervised workers, HHS decided to build political support for the Affordable Care Act by pouring money into supportive organizations so they could launch poorly trained workers into their communities without obtaining criminal background checks or creating systems for monitoring their activities.

Yeah, why didn't they just hire people already well-trained in a heretofore non-existent program?  There must have been some previously vetted professional Navigators with high level security clearances available for temporary, low-paying jobs telling people how to look up insurance plans.  I myself don't have all those qualifications, but I did take a night class in "Mastering Netscape Navigator" in junior college, so I'm more than a little hurt that Health and Human Services didn't head-hunt me.

As a practical matter, these navigators are unaccountable

They're loose cannons who don't play by the rules!...while explaining another, more complex set of rules involving deductibles and subsidies. I dunno about you, but I smell a four-quadrant tentpole summer action franchise!

It will not take long for navigators to become predators, and HHS has no plan to deal with the new breed of predators it is creating.

Well, whatever plan they develop, I just hope it doesn't involve using Aliens to deal with the Predators...

...because frankly they're crappy project managers.  They set unclear goals, have poor follow-through, and half the time their team-building exercises involve laying eggs in your chest.

Last Friday, the Washington Post ran a piece by Ed Rogers, a former top deputy in the 1988 George H. W. Bush campaign, entitled “Six Reasons Obamacare Will Get Worse for Democrats.” One reason leaps out:

Navigators. If you liked ACORN, you’ll love the Obamacare Navigators.

I thank Ed for clearing up my lingering confusion.  I thought Navigators were contract workers hired to help vulnerable Americans understand their rights under a new program, in the face of a ubiquitous disinformation campaign funded by a cabal of right-wing billionaires, when in reality they're just another impostor fragrance.

I’m sure there will be good, sincere people who really want to help people navigate the Obamacare maze.

Fortunately, we've got Young Jimmy Olsen O'Keefe to smear the crap out of them.

The law’s problems are coming from more sides than a pentadecagon. 

The Pentadecagon, as you probably know, recently replaced the Pentacle as the logo for Koch Industries, because David and Charles were afraid people might be catching on.

How Much Is That Kidney In The Window...?

Thanks to severe sinus irritation due to allergies, I've been advised by competent medical authorities to seek out a dry, barren, lifeless environment, such as the high desert, or John Stossel's conscience.  And since one of those doesn't require springing for gas, what say we pay a little attention to that man behind the mustache...?

The market is fine for some things, people will say, but other activities are too important to be left to the market. Or too complicated. Or too fundamental to our democracy. 

I say: Privatize everything.

The problem with selling the privatization of government functions, such as Social Security, is that up till now it's been done on a piecemeal basis, allowing opponents time to marshal effective counter-arguments.  But if we privatize everything all at once, the public will either be too overwhelmed to organize, or -- thanks to privately owned media -- they'll never even hear about it.  And by the time they realize their Social Security checks are now available only in the form of ATM cards that charge $4.50 per transaction, with a $25.00 shipping and handling fee, it'll be too late, since the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will have been turned into upscale condos.  Of course, the proles might get a little restless, but thanks to competition, every conservative billionaire will be able to afford his own private District Attorneys Office, individual Police Department, and Personal Pan Pentagon.

To some of you, that will sound callous -- but failure to privatize services, keeping them in government hands instead, is what impoverishes and kills people. Nothing compassionate about that.

As John has already proven through geometric logic and the sinuous, hula-like language of his undulating mustache, getting rid of the FDA, USDA food inspectors, and seat belts will save thousands of worthless lives (but valuable livers) a year!

Take organ donations.

Why do I suspect that when Stossel got to the end of the movie and heard Charlton Heston bellow, "Soylent Green is people!" he didn't think, "Twist ending," he thought, "Sound business plan!"

Regulations forbid buying and selling organs, so the market cannot operate. 

Personally, I'd rather have a surgeon operate, if for no other reason that it must be really difficult to get a rubber glove onto an invisible hand.

Desperate patients must wait and hope someone gives out of sheer generosity

But I thought countries with strong market economies like the U.S. already gave more to charity than European-style social welfare states?  Are you implying that the inherent generosity of the American People is not operating as advertised?  This comes as a huge disappointment, John, especially after I gave two months' worth of stool samples to our local church's Fecal Transplant Drive.

that someone dies at just the right time, and that hospital administrators bump their case to the top of the list.

The implication here seems to be that hospital administrators are fascistic bureaucrats, whereas in a perfectly privatized paradise (and following a temporary dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) hospital administrations will simply wither away.

In the U.S., 100,000 people are on waiting lists for kidneys. Kidneys make up 80 percent of the organ shortage. We have two kidneys but only need one. 

Not on St. Patrick's Day.

Donors could save many lives, but not enough choose to donate. By contrast, in Iran, there's often a waiting line of willing donors . That's because in Iran, it's legal to sell organs. It's the rare thing that Iran does right.

I've always thought that A Modest Proposal is the Randian version of that Twilight Zone episode, "To Serve Man" -- guys like Stossel get to the end and are shocked to discover: "It's not a cookbook!"

People still buy and sell organs even when it's illegal, but, as is so often the case, the black market produces horrors that are unlikely to occur when people can trade in the open.

I can see how that argument would work for something like medical marijuana, but not so much for organ harvesting, if only because nobody's likely to wake up in an ice-filled bathtub in Mexico and find a note telling them, "Get yourself to the hospital. We took your dime bag of East Coast Sour Diesel."

 So we get headlines like "Girl smuggled into Britain to have her 'organs harvested'" and "Chinese boy, 6, has eyes gouged out for organ transplant black market."

I must respectfully disagree, John. We don't get headlines like that because the free market doesn't allow people to sell their organs, we get them because the free market allows Rupert Murdoch to publish newspapers.

Surely, it is better if organ exchanges -- like any other exchanges -- take place voluntarily.

So I take it you'd support Obamacare if the state health insurance exchanges also allowed the sale of human organs, perhaps through some sort of eBay plugin, or a Woot! daily special?

Bioethicist Sigrid Fry-Revere, founder of the Center for Ethical Solutions, went to Iran to meet organ sellers and buyers.

Dude, she scored me a totally sweet pancreas!  But then she got busted at the border, and now she's going all Midnight Express in a Turkish prison.  I visited her a couple times, tried to cheer her up, but she just kept making me rub my nipples on the glass.

After, she told of people like "an apprentice who needed the money to start his own shop ... He had his own shop now. He gave his kidney to a 15 year-old girl, who is going to school and doing well. He checks in regularly with her mother because it gives him such a lift to hear that the girl is doing fine."

Well, he sold his kidney to a 15 year-old girl, which makes me wonder what she'd originally earmarked that money for.  Maybe college, although if she's anything like me, she was probably saving up to buy her neighbor's 1970 Plymouth Duster.

Fry-Revere says organ trading in Iran is much like open adoption in the U.S.: The two parties can decide whether to visit and get to know each other. Other times, the donation is anonymous. Both are much better than kidnapping and eye-gouging.

Okay, but why are you calling it a "donation" if the organs are sold?  For that matter, why are you comparing the organ market to adoption, unless the next step is legalizing the sale of babies (presumably for parts)?

In America, we let people sell blood. And sperm. And eggs. Why not kidneys?

In Britain that makes a complete breakfast.

 Why do politicians recoil at the idea of a legal market? Fry-Revere says, "I think it's just, old habits die hard."

And so do guys who don't want to sell their organs, and who continue to balk even after the privatized City Council has condemned their kidneys through Eminent Domain.

There are all sorts of services that people think the market can't handle. It's like they have some sort of mental block.

Or some sort of...memory.

 President Obama says that without government, we can't put out fires. But almost half the people government pays to fight wildfires work for private companies. In parts of America, private companies also put out house fires. They get to the fire sooner.

And stand around, watching it burn, while you argue with the Billing Department about the status of your account.

Markets aren't perfect, but they allow for a world where prudence is rewarded and sloth punished

I can see why people who have more disposable income than kidneys could benefit from such a system, but it seems like the sloths are getting kind of a raw deal.  Unless of course they're into pain and humiliation, since Stossel thinks we should be free to pay for that, too.

Punish me, Mistress!  Please!  I've been a b-a-a-a-d sloth!

Toad in the Hole

 When it comes to Concern Trolls, I don't claim to be a connoisseur, but I do prefer the imported variety.  Call me a snob. Perhaps it's because I know Toby Young not from his failed stint at Vanity Fair, or his memoir about it, How To Lose Friends & Alienate People, which sounds like it ought to have been ghostwritten for Sarah Palin, but because he was a judge on the sixth season of Top Chef.  Here's a bit of his bio from the show's website:

Young has appeared as a judge on a variety of food reality programs, including Hell's Kitchen, Kitchen Criminals and most recently, a 20-part BBC series called Eating With The Enemy. In addition, he was a contestant on Come Dine With Me, a popular Channel 4 reality show, which he won.

[I]n 2005, co-wrote a sex farce called Who's the Daddy?

I find the news that someone is still practicing the fine old art of British sex farcing delightfully quaint, like watching a cooper assemble a firkin in Colonial Williamsburg.

President Obama's socialist agenda will divide America – or, rather, make the existing divisions even more bitter and rancorous

What a contrast last night's Inaugural Address was compared to the one President Obama gave four years ago. Gone was any attempt to reach out to his Republican opponents.

Well, in all fairness, you don't reach out to John Boehner, you reach around to John Boehner, and even then you might have to grope around for a bit.

In its place was an aggressive assertion of modern liberalism, with the emphasis on gay rights, gun control, gender equality, combating climate change and – if his remarks about Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and income inequality are anything to go by – redistributive taxation. 

Ah, Modern Liberalism...aggressively asserting rights we should have had in the Seventies, and tax policy we did have in the Sixties.

This is a fully-fledged socialist agenda that will leave the the 47.2 per cent of Americans who didn't vote for Obama feeling ostracised and angry.

My great aunt, a rock-ribbed Republican who has lived her entire life in a small rural community, no longer dares to show her face in town, thanks to carbon offsets.

 If this is going to be the tone of Obama's second term, the next four years are likely to see America more divided than at any time since the 1960s. 

Toby has a point.  Obama's predecessor brought together a much higher percentage of the American people; in November, 2008, 75% of them thought he was an idiot.

Obama's opponents will claim – rightly – that he has no mandate for his egalitarian agenda.

Winning a clear majority of votes used to be sufficient to claim a mandate, but English is a fluid, dynamic language, and now the term is reserved exclusively for Australia's Number 1 Adult Male Review.  So while you're in decent shape for a man your age, Mr. President, you're gonna have to swing a pretty hefty banana hammock before you can assert the right to increase the progressivity of the tax code.

 He made numerous attempts yesterday to claim the mantle of previous presidents who've advanced the cause of equality, including Abraham Lincoln. But he overlooked the fact that in almost every case they were able to take the majority of the American public with them thanks to exceptional historical circumstances. 

It's always polite to hold off on promoting gay rights until a war starts, or the stock market crashes.   It's like waiting for the hostess to pick up her shrimp fork.

Lincoln, for instance, would not have been able to get the 13th Amendment through Congress if the North hadn't been about to declare victory over the South in the Civil War – and even then he only managed it by the skin of his teeth, as Spielberg's recent biopic makes clear. Similarly, Franklin D Roosevelt would not have been able to persuade Congress to embrace the New Deal if it hadn't been for the Great Depression.

Of course, Lincoln had the advantage of a Congress free from the kind of Southern reactionaries and bigots who are obstructing progress now.  But perhaps if that same group would take arms against the lawful government again, he could rack up a similarly impressive legislative record.  True, nobody's fired on fort Sumter yet, but they're already making noises about nullifying federal laws, and in America, nullification is like the Soup Starter of bloody insurrection.

Just add Treason!

Obama's circumstances are less like those of Lincoln or Roosevelt and more like those of John F Kennedy. 

Or so the patriots calling for his assassination seem to hope.

Kennedy had a similarly ambitious liberal programme, 

He planned to create vast new federal bureaucracies tasked with adding extraneous vowels and consonants to all our words!

but was unable to get almost any of it through Congress. To take just one example, his civil rights bill was successfully obstructed by a Senate dominated by conservative Southern Democrats.

And now conservative Southern Republicans are obstructing legislation.  Why?  Because old times there are not forgotten.

In Kennedy's favor, he did end discrimination in federal housing, but he had to do it through an executive order.  I trust it's not too late to impeach him.

 One of the clear lessons of the fourth volume of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson is that, without Kennedy's assassination, the 1964 Civil Rights Act would never have been passed.

So while conservatives obstructed equal rights for African Americans, a Communist with an itchy trigger finger facilitated them.  I'm not entirely sure what Toby's point is here, but I think he's advising us to stock up on magic bullets in the event of a filibuster.  I'm sure Hogwarts has a pawn shop...

The vision outlined by Obama yesterday was, in its own way, as ambitious as anything set out by Lincoln, Roosevelt or Johnson. But there's no corresponding historical crisis to provide Obama with the political opportunity to realise that vision. In the absence of that, Obama has little hope of getting a programme of liberal legislation through Congress. I'm even sceptical about the passage of a gun control bill. Instead, Obama will just end up dividing America – or, rather, make the existing divisions even more bitter and rancorous. 

"Congratulations, Mr. President.  You endured a long and brutal campaign to win an exhausting and thankless office, during which you became a repository for the hopes and dreams of millions of struggling Americans, and according to our extensive polling, the best and most rational course now would be to give up."

He is leading his forces into a civil conflict he cannot possibly win and unless he reverses course the next four years will be among the ugliest in America's history.

Sure, Vietnam, the Depression, Jim Crow, the Civil War all seemed pretty ugly at the time, but if Obama doesn't turn Caucasian and veer to the right of Mitch McConnell immediately, people might circulate some intemperate emails.