A hopeful, farfetched theory on Syria

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 4 Comments
If you can't spot the devil at the table, you are the devil.

If you’ve played an hour and can’t spot the devil at the table, you are the devil.

We all know that Barack Obama is either a genius tactician or the puppet of a Maoist conspiracy. He’s black, and all previous black candidates for president were puppets of Maoist conspiracies. That’s why they lost. Obama won, so it therefore follows that he is a genius tactician. I introduce this airtight syllogism because his recent behavior re: Syria seems kind of weird. He said he wanted to intervene, but then he went and asked Congress, the same people who vigorously opposed his plan to put different light bulbs in the White House. Why, if Obama wants to intervene in Syria, would he seek a resolution from the most hostile House of Representatives and the most dysfunctional Senate in recent history? The answer is simple: he doesn’t want to intervene in Syria.

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Close Readings: Wayne LaPierre urges gun owners to Stand and Fight

By Dan Brooks in Rhetoric 4 Comments
NRA executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre, seconds before having his hand shot off

NRA executive vice-president Wayne LaPierre, seconds before having his hand shot off

“After Hurricane Sandy,” Wayne LaPierre writes in an essay for the Daily Caller called Stand and Fight, “we saw the hellish world that the gun prohibitionists see as their utopia. Looters ran wild in south Brooklyn. There was no food, water or electricity. And if you wanted to walk several miles to get supplies, you better get back before dark, or you might not get home at all.” Ah, yes—the hellish world of a gun-free South Brooklyn. That’s just one of the nightmare scenarios the NRA spokesman invokes in his call to gun owners to Stand and Fight.

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The American public cannot get enough drones

By Dan Brooks in Existential Dilemmas 4 Comments
The drone that captured our hearts or, if that was not possible, incinerated them with a missile

The drone that captured our hearts or, if that was not feasible, incinerated them with a missile

Despite our misgivings about using them to kill US citizens overseas, the American people love drones. It’s like the way we can hate Darius Rucker but still like acoustic guitars. An ABC-Washington Post poll from February of last year found that 83% of respondents approved the use of drone strikes against suspected terrorists overseas. Two thirds of them said they approved such strikes even when the alleged terrorists were American citizens. And why not? An unmanned drone comprises all of man’s deepest yearnings: to fly, to play video games, to kill people on the other side of the world without having to look them in the eye.

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Behold the terrifying future of journalism

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 2 Comments

Don’t try to understand it. It makes no damn sense at all.

Miracle Mike Sebba sent me a link to this page of “unskewed polls,” which purport to show actual public opinion by correcting poll results for “massive over-sample of Democratic voters.” That phrase comes from the Examiner.com article that comes up when you click on the Reuters/Ipsos poll link. It’s also in the Examiner article you get from the NBC/WSJ link, the Examiner article from the NY Times/CBS News poll, and every other poll link on the page, all of which point to Examiner articles by one Dean Chambers. Mr. Chambers also appears to be the sole writer at QStar News. He’s a whole damn network.

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My god, I hope this isn’t real

By Dan Brooks in conservatism 8 Comments

It's time to wrest polits away from the politians and return it to the American people, 16% of whom appear to be utter morons.

While I was languishing in the airport yesterday, beacon of vigilance Ben Fowlkes sent me the most recent Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll of registered Republicans. It is disturbing. It starts off okay, with a healthy number of respondents expressing their intention to vote in the 2010 congressional election and their reluctance to settle on a candidate for president in 2012. It’s disappointing to see Sarah Palin in the lead—and terrifying to see Dick Cheney in third—but three years ahead of the actual election, name recognition is pretty much all there is. Things start to get a little crazy with question three, in which 39% of Republicans opine that President Obama should be impeached. Exactly what crime he has committed goes unspecified, but perhaps respondents were rushing to get to the next question, in which nearly two-thirds of those polled agree that the president is a socialist. Thus begins a series of money shots, in a barrage of insanity that leaves the reader crouched numbly on the floor like a Japanese girl on the internet. If this poll is to be believed, 73% of Republicans think homosexuals shouldn’t be allowed to be schoolteachers. Seventy-seven percent want the Biblical account of creation from Genesis to be taught in public schools. Thirty-one percent want to outlaw contraception. And fully 23% of Republicans believe that their state should secede from the United States of America.

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