We should probably freak out now

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 5 Comments

I don’t know about you, but I’ve contracted Bach-mania. It attacks the brain stem, and the only cure is the electrifying charisma of Michele Bachman. Or, you know, October. For now, though, with a mere 16 months left in the campaign season, Mm-Bach is tied with Mitt Romney for President of Theoretical Future America. It’s possible I meant to type “Theocratical Felcher America,” but we’ll get to that in a second. First, I went to continue the nascent and ugly trend of Combat! blog quoting Combat! blog. Remember yesterday, when we were talking about her segment on Face the Nation, and I was like:

…large portions of this interview are not about getting caught lying, at least not yet.

Wasn’t that clever? It seemed like a cheap shot at the time—possibly even lazy—but it turns out it was a genius laser telescope peering 24 hours into the future. According to this depressingly non-surprising article in PolitiFact, Michele Bachmann defended herself against allegations of untruthfulness Sunday by lying her ass off.

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Friday links! Alternative to what? edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 4 Comments

Now that our country has replaced its constitutionally-prescribed government with a liberal/socialist totalitarian state headed by a foreign Muslim, the Republican Party faces a tough choice. They can suffer the social ostracism, media persecution and periodic witch hunts that come with going their own way and standing on principle, or they can, you know, retire to one of their summer homes. The life of the rebel is not easy. In an America gripped by radical liberal social engineering, a few proud dissidents will hold their heads above the crowd, but many more will be cut down. Those who survive live as hunted animals, lapped at by a tide of conformity that has dragged this country further from its founding principles than ever in history. Frankly, the whole thing is sexy as hell. Like a less rapey Ayn Rand novel, the rebels who stand for conservatism move through a dystopia of groupthink and wealth redistribution. This Friday, we consider their habitat—a place we once dared call America.

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Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head

By Dan Brooks in inside Michele Bachmann's head 5 Comments

"The pancake is neither a pan nor a cake. Ergo..."

 

Part of the problem inherent in measuring an extradimensional space from which neither light nor reason can escape is how to determine scale. Obviously, the inside of Michele Bachmann’s head is larger than some gravitational manifolds and smaller than others. Is it smaller than the Horsehead Nebula? Probably, because I can’t see it right now. Is it bigger than a singularity? Yes, because her eye makeup isn’t getting sucked in through her pupils. Between these poles, though, little was known until last week, when Michael Zimmerman PhD informed us via the Huffington Post that a high school student is successfully refuting one of Mmm-Bach’s most infuriating claims. From October, 2006:

There is a controversy among scientists about whether evolution is a fact … hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel prizes, believe in intelligent design.

Shocking, right? If hundreds of Nobel laureates believe in intelligent design, maybe it’s not the church-organized attack on the knowledge of schoolchildren I thought it was. Of course, Bachmann will just say shit. Whereas Zack Kopplin is a high school senior and therefore has to back his claims with evidence. In gathering support from scientists, he has provided science with some valuable information of its own. It turns out that the inside of Michele Bachmann’s head accommodates less information than that of a 17 year-old in Louisiana.

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Actually, federal taxes are the lowest in 60 years

By Dan Brooks in lying 4 Comments

He also does not look like what you imagined, unless you are a second-century Celt.

Okay, so that headline is a little misleading: federal tax revenues are the lowest they have been, as a share of GDP, since before the Korean War. You know those checks that Don Draper gets and immediately turns into Cadillacs while poor people wait for Medicaid and the Department of Energy to be invented? He pays more taxes than you. Despite all the sorghum subsidies and porno art grants and million-dollar screwdrivers that have turned the US government into a voracious leviathan bent on devouring our children, the bites are smaller than they’ve been in two generations. Such news seems odd just now, since congresspeople have been describing their employer as a “gangster government,” and a whole national movement of incredibly angry old people has risen to protest our unjust tax burden. Oh yeah—we’re also going to shut down the government over our looming financial crisis. It’s the hottest legislative issue since we had to compromise and give everyone  a tax cut last year.

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Trying to make sense out of Jared Lee Loughner

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 3 Comments

By now you may have heard about Jared Lee Loughner, the Arizona man accused of shooting Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 19 other people at a meet-your-congressperson even in Tuscon Saturday. Besides a slough of community college professors only too eager to talk about how weird he was in class, not much is known about Loughner. Or rather, a ton is known about Jared Lee Loughner, but it doesn’t really fit together. For example, he made this YouTube video. It’s constructed around formal syllogisms in which meaning flickers like those things you see on the periphery of your vision when you’re really tired, but it makes no sense at all. There are references to the Gold Standard and the Constitution, but there are also references to “conscience dreaming” and the US government trying to control the structure of English grammar. It doesn’t really hold together as an ideology, because Jared Loughner is a crazy person. That’s bad news for the people trying to triangulate his actions within contemporary American politics, and there are a lot of them. In the aftermath of his senseless attack, both halves of our fractured national discourse are scrambling to make Jared Loughner a charactering in some narrative they’ve been condemning all along.

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