The best part about being a Republican is that the right-wing media will defend anything. I mean, anything. There is nothing a Republican officeholder can say or do that is stupid, illegal, or offensive enough that an army of hacks won't take to their syndicated columns and talk radio mics to excuse it. This is why you are about to read a nugget of wisdom entitled "Was Rick Perry Just Kidding?" by a fifth-rate columnist whose own mother has never heard of him. If you haven't time to read the whole thing, here is the quick version of what happens in the following paragraphs: Bill Murchison lures Sound Logic and Good Argument into his dank, windowless van and proceeds to finger them.
Sneer, sneer, boo, hiss — and oh, boy!
A piece of prose that begins thusly can only be authored by A) Dr. Seuss or B) a man with a vast number of competing voices in his head. I don't want to give the rest of the column away, but Dr. Seuss died in 1991.
Did the "progressives" ever pour it on my governor, Rick Perry of Texas, for his playful reference at a Tea Party event to "secession" as an option possibly forming in the minds of sensible Texans.
Ah. It was "playful." All expectations that our public officials will not say things that are treasonous or completely retarded go out the window if spoken playfully. In his next column, Bill Murchison will go through airport security making jokes about the bombs in his luggage and wriggle out of legal trouble with a particularly wacky blazer and a spinning bowtie.
Why would we be thinking about such?
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.
Because of "progressive" depredations in Washington, D.C., the governor said, if not in so many words.
Bill is a contrarian. Since good writing involves communicating an idea using the smallest possible number of carefully chosen words, Bill goes for quantity and incoherence. He also sits angrily in his seat while everyone else in the stadium is doing the wave.
The establishment harrumphed and gagged and generally went red. Gail Collins of the New York Times: "[H]ave you noticed how places that pride themselves on being superpatriotic seem to have the most people who want to abandon the country entirely and set up shop on their own?"
That sounds like an entirely reasonable question. The kind a normal person would ask.
Come on, lady, back off a little. No one's going anywhere — as well you certainly know.
"As well you certainly know?" Either this was written in Urdu and translated back into English with a free online translator or Bill puts each word he wants to use on a notecard, scatters them to the afternoon breeze, and lets fate arrange them into sentences.
Nobody's called for a secession convention. I looked up and down the street this morning; not a single effigy of Nancy Pelosi dangled from the live oaks. Driving to the office, I heard no suggestion that we hang Harry Reid, Chris Dodd, or, preferably, both to a sour apple tree.
See? No one's violently trying to secede yet. They're just talking about it, which is always harmless and never progresses to the kind of behavior cited here.
No matter. Sigh.
Do you have any idea how big of a hack one must be as a writer to actually write "Sigh" to communicate that emotion? If your writing is so bad that you can't convey a simple emotion without saying "I AM EXASPERATED RIGHT NOW" then maybe writing isn't for you.
The progressives have the bit between their teeth and seem bent on the usual pretense that these Texans are a bunch of ingrates whom we shouldn't trust as far as we can throw a grand piano.
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Ingrates? No, Bill. We think you're borderline-illiterate yahoos in cowboy hats and Chevy Suburbans who say "y'all" a lot thanks in part to some of the worst public schooling north of El Salvador.
Well, you know what? It's too much trouble seceding, even if we could.
This is perhaps the least reassuring reassurance I have ever seen, rivalled only by Oswald telling the security guard "I just want a better view of the parade route so I can take pictures."
And, pace the governor, we can't.
Foil, runs nubuck gracefully. Pong lapdance railroad kidneys. Towel? Gap dash an eskimo!!
Rather than the secessionary right he alleged we brought with us into the Union, we brought the right — undoubted, but similarly impractical — to divide into five states.
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We'll have to stick around a bit longer.
This reminds me of that time I read the complete set of Time-Life Home Repair and Improvement books on peyote.
That shouldn't deprive us of the right to remind fellow Americans of some practices and virtues our land could do well to renew.
Oh, good. Please do lecture us so that we may become more like Lubbock and Beaumont. When I worry about our Practices and Virtues here in the midwest I often think, "You know how we oughta do things?
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Like they do things in Corpus Christi."
A key one is regard for the inherent right of local people, even under a federal union, to defend and oversee their own modes of life.
WOOOOOOOOOOOOO STATES' RIGHTS!!!!!1!1!!!oneone!!!! A noble concept always used to defend other noble concepts. OMG let's have another nullification crisis!!
In other words — golly gee! — Texans might not want exactly the same things Californians want. They might wish lower taxes and less regulation by government. Their approaches to education and health care and energy might differ as well. So also the ways they deal with simple matters like eating: more sirloins in Texas, more tofu on the Left Coast.
Let's look at the rankings.
Life expectancy by state: #10. California, #30. Texas
Adult obesity by state: #10 Texas, #30 California
Heart disease deaths per 100,000: Texas 220, California 191
Nice.
Alas, the Obama regime, as we may decide to start calling it one of these days, has other notions.
"One of these days" = January 2009
It appears to cherish uniformity, the close alignment of ideals and methods: everybody doing the same thing the same way for the same reasons.
Well, technically it believes, as most of us left-leaning yankees do, in trying to bring our slow southern cousins up to first-world standards, perhaps by teaching science instead of the Bible and working on getting those teen pregnancy rates below Nigeria's. I disagree, but the bleeding hearts believe they can fix you. Maybe make you less of an embarrassment. Me, I'm Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. I'm here on a mission of mercy. I came here because Mitch and Murray asked me for a favor. I said, "If you want a favor, take my advice and fire their asses, because a loser is a loser."
You think I'm fuckin' with you, Bill? I am not fuckin' with you.
The Obamanistas may want uniform rules regarding the cars and trucks we drive and the energy those vehicles consume.
Yep. Are we supposed to be ashamed of that? This is not unlike saying "Can you believe these nanny state liberals who want me to stop committing so many rapes?!?" I can live with having judged you on this point.
They want, it seems, national education standards — a goal furthered, as one hates to acknowledge, by a former Texas governor, George W. Bush via the No Child Left Behind Act.
Yep. And here's the important part, so stay with me: this time the national education (sic) standards won't be retarded. Semantics, semantics.
We may even wind up with national standards for humor. A joke, son, ain't a joke no more, and that's the truth.
This is the most forced transition to a slippery slope argument – and not even a good bad argument at that – in the history of whatever language Bill Murchison speaks.
The governor of Texas no more demanded secession from the Union than he called for a Lone Star Beer to be brought him.
Rick Perry, April 15, as the crowd chanted "Secede! Secede! Secede!": "There's a lot of different scenarios. We've got a great union. There's absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that."
He raised an eyebrow; he winked. Never mind. A stalwart "progressive" trying to show up conservatives is ever alert to serendipitous events and occasions.
Here's an idea, Bill. Threaten to kill an elected official and give the jury the old "But I winked!" excuse. Write me a letter on your prison stationery letting me know how it worked out for you.
So maybe he shouldn't have said it. That's from one perspective. Here's another: A Union of the sort our wise and virtuous founders thought they were creating is as loose and flexible as a Union can realistically be made; accommodative of divergent viewpoints, and all the stronger for it, all the more united, too.
You know what kinds of viewpoints they didn't accomodate? Secession. That has a way of making us weaker and more divided, not quite stronger and more united.
The Union we seem to see dead ahead through the windshield, with the people of 50 different states all cuffed together in mutual subservience, isn't what the founders had in mind. Good for Rick Perry on that score: He raised a useful subject, even if to his own detriment. Let's enjoy. Such a moment may not come again for a long, long time.
Flawless, Bill. Just flawless. Undermining your own argument, stringing together words into incoherent non-sentences, coming to no conclusion, and fizzling out because you couldn't think of a way to end it – brilliant. Here's the rub. If you consider our current situation "mutual subservience" then your level of anger is appropriate, like if I referred to you as "Child pornographer and white supremacist Bill Murchison." That would justify some pretty extreme anger directed at you. And since none of that is true, you'd be pretty baffled by the response. Yet that's exactly what you're doing here, cubby. Those cuffs and that forced subservience aren't real. They exist only in your head. If the rest of us lived in your head then this piece and Rick Perry's bloviating would ring true and sound to a downtrodden nation like a call to action.
But we live on Earth and you sound like an idiot.
JohnR says:
I really, truly enjoy reading these analytical 'gradings'. It takes me back to the days when I was grading undergraduate papers as a TA, and had recurrent fantasies about actually writing what I was thinking as a sort of mental health exercise. In some ways, it doesn't even matter whether the argument is right, wrong, accurate, understandable or some partial conglomeration of those things – the muddled thinking and stupefying lack of logical reasoning made it necessary for me to avoid drinking until I'd finished for fear I'd drink too much and show up for the next class with a kris between my teeth, or worse, lose my assistantship. The thing is, those students at least had a sporting chance of learning how to think. Guys like Murchison are long past that point.
JohnR says:
ps – of course you realize that you lose this argument by default, though – being an angry liberal and all.
j says:
correction: "ALL OF YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US."
j says:
oops, "ALL YOUR BASE"
Heqit says:
So, the shorter Bill M = "He was joking, you're so stupid to make a fuss — BUT HE HAD A GOOD POINT — but he wasn't serious — BUT YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO HIM — and obviously he didn't mean a word of it — BUT IF YOU DON'T START AGREEING WITH US WE MIGHT DO IT — and of course we truly support unity — WHICH IS WHY WE MIGHT HAVE TO LEAVE."
Yup, a model of clarity. I would ask if any of these numbnuts remember that several states already tried seceding once before and that it DIDN'T WORK, but I know that they do — long monologues about the Glorious Confederacy and The Right of States to Secede are always prime features of every Southern 4th of July gathering I've ever attended — and that would be every 4th I've experience, period. Anyone who claims that Southerners who talk about secession don't really mean it is A) lying, B) fucking insane, or C) both. And liberals are un-American! ARGH!
John says:
The really sad thing is, they're happy to make all of these excuses, but only for one particular affiliation of politician. Had a Democrat governer been in the same situation and said the same thing under Bush, this same columnist would have questioned his patriotism. This hypocritical support of dissent only when it is their side dissenting is well-documented.
It's really a systemic problem of American politics in general. People, for some strange reason, believe that exactly half of all politicians are not corrupt, evil, and tyrranical — their half. The other half is always the bad half. People don't view varying political ideologies as different methods of solving a given problem. They look at it as "Our (right) way and the wrong way". Viewed this way, they will never support their political opponents and will always unquestioningly support their own.
It really is sad what politics have devolved into in this country.
Heqit says:
But all the same: don't fuck with "y'all."
It IS the second-person plural pronoun that English so desperately needs.
A Cat says:
Out here in the "East" our creepy guys in vans diddle poor unsuspecting nouns.
comrade x says:
Sometimes I think it would be for the best if Crackerstan broke away from the Union again. After a few years the reactionary elite decended from slavocrats will have run the economy into the ground and we could control them like we control the other bannana republics- through the IMF and World Bank.
Meanwhile we wouldn't have the Southern millstone around our Republic's neck and we could actually begin to make some progress on climate change, stem cell research, fairer elections, etc, etc.
Oh, one more thing- we put up a wall along the border with the re- born CSA. That way we wouldn't have a flood of Crackerstanis taking refuge in the USA and leeching off of our " socialist" human services.
Irony. Delicious irony.
merl says:
what does saying "y'all" have to do with education? i graduated from a DOD school in Germany in 1977, i have lived in WA for 18 years. i say y'all, always have always will. I'm not stupid either. Progressives need to stop insulting people from the South. We resent it. Sometimes we vote against our own self interest because assholes insult us and we resent it.
merl says:
and yeah, fuck Texas, good riddance. I had to live in that hell hole at Fort Hood for way too long.
montage says:
dude,
Foil, runs nubuck gracefully. Pong lapdance railroad kidneys. Towel? Gap dash an eskimo!! = roflcopters.
A Cat says:
Before everyone jumps on board with the Crackerstan/Jesusland succession circle jerk, I'd take a long hard look at where all the US has moved all of our Military Installations. The number of Divisions headquartered in the CSA and probable CSA leaning states far outweighs what the "North" would have.
The amount of military material and human resources that have been located in the old CSA is really staggering. Looking at this historically, I think its rather huge mistake to have moved so much of our military into parts of our country who disliked it enough to have left it completely once and have been at odds with the rest of us even after they were conquered and forced back into the Union.
Tosh says:
Ed it looks as though you have an inexhaustible resource consisting of right wing dorks whose bloviations you may eviscerate.
As B.J. Baraka mused, "I pity the fool(s)."
Fulcanelli says:
The snark is strong in this one. Another good post Ed!
Natalie says:
"Foil, runs nubuck gracefully. Pong lapdance railroad kidneys. Towel? Gap dash an eskimo!!"
This made me laugh so hard that Michael came rushing in to the bedroom to make sure I was okay.
Also, Glengary Glen Ross reference = full of win.
Warmbowski says:
Ed, I have a question. How often do you see emoticons typed into academic papers? – Sigh!
daphne says:
Under the category of No Stupid Questions (though I don't subscribe to that): what does FJM stand for? Foolish Jackasses Masturbating? Foul, Juvenile Manuscripts? I've searched the homepage to no avail, and as a relative newcomer I wonder whether y'all have been familiar with it so long it no longer seems necessary to elaborate. I'm sure it'll seem obvious once I know.
daphne says:
Filleting journalistic mishaps?
comrade x says:
Hey Cat, relax. Crackerstan is only an excercise in satire.
Most of the installations in the South are for training. And just because a division is headquartered southward doesn't mean it is stationed there. Most Army and Marine divisions are scattered throughout the world. And having its HQ in a state that seceeds does not mean the division automatically becomes loyal to it.
Besides the missile silos are in blue states or red states with no cultural ties with the old South.
Kulkuri says:
The idea of fencing off Crackerstan is a good one, just let me get back to the States before you close the gate. As for most of the military bases being in the south, good luck with them paying (more tax cuts for the rich you know) for all that. They'll just go broke sooner. Hopefully next year we'll move back UP on the tundra. I'd rather deal with cold and snow than live among those who don't realize they are being played by the Never-Right elite (the rich bastards) and vote against their own self-interest.
comrade x says:
I hear ya. I lived in NC for a few years and it was amusing to see the locals vote almost 100% Republican while they were on food stamps and unemployment because the factory they worked in hauled ass to Mexico after they tried to unionize.
Nice people, just not very politically astute.
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