Welcome to Scriptageddon Thursday, where we at It Is *Dancing*!!!! – the only blog brave enough to give you the furtive right-wing man-on-man action you know you want – explore the context behind recent baffling ejaculations.

Today, we offer the following brief dialogue as a gentle clarification of what could possibly have motivated Bill O’Reilly to declare, in response to this commercial, “I just want mayonnaise. I don’t want two guys kissing.”

The scene is the happening, if obscure, ‘Chockfull O’Meat’, an Irish delicatessen in historic Greenwich Village. A balding, splotchy man – PAPA BEAR – enters, affecting a sneer at the soft buzzing of a compact fluorescent bulb.

He makes his unpleasant way through a fairly short line of twenty-somethings, and finally arrives at the counter, where a CLERK with a strong Hibernian brogue colored with an affected lisp waits for his order.

PAPA BEAR. Some clientele you got here. This is the place with the two-dollar sandwiches, right?
CLERK. That offer ends at 6 PM, sunshine. It’s 1.75 for a 6-inch and 2.50 for twelve.
PAPA BEAR, grumbling. Of course. I guess I’ll have a foot-long.
CLERK. Sure. What’ll it be?
PAPA BEAR. Hmm. I’m thinking meatball and hot sausage.
CLERK, cocking eyebrow. O-kay. Is the sandwich all you want, sugar?
PAPA BEAR. What do you got in the way of condiments?
CLERK. All kinds. What do you want?
PAPA BEAR. How’s about a nice fat sweet pickle?
CLERK, coldly. What is this? You gonna ask for some beef on the side, maybe hot rolls?
PAPA BEAR. What? This is outrageous.
CLERK, in a cold whisper. You couldn’t care less that this is the best deli in the village. You’re just here to ogle the pretty young things. I got a reputation to uphold, buddy.
PAPA BEAR. No! They said this was – they said you couldn’t go to the Village and not eat here!
CLERK. Yeah, and they were right. Now, are you going to be buying a sandwich or what?
PAPA BEAR. OK, OK, fine. Large pickle, meatball and hot sausage twelve-inch.
CLERK. That’ll be 3.75.
PAPA BEAR. And slather it with mayo.
CLERK. What?
PAPA BEAR. Up one side of the sausage, down the other. Flopped out a little.
CLERK. What?
PAPA BEAR. You know, so I can lick it off. You’re some kind of liberal, aren’t you? You know how these things work.
CLERK. I warned ye once there’ll be no hawkin’ here! Out with you!
PAPA BEAR. But – but!
CLERK. Out! And get out of my shop!
The CLERK angrily gestures to the door. PAPA BEAR, muttering ‘I just wanted mayonnaise, I don’t want two guys kissing,’ makes his miserable way home, leather pants creaking under his overcoat.

Dear whatever the fuck you Clinton holdouts call yourselves now:

What the fuck are you thinking?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that we agree on a number of crucial points – which might well not be true at all, but I feel like being charitable. You agree that the craven effort to slash public services and progressive taxation to the bone are horrific and irresponsible; you agree that the mainstream policy establishment within both parties are essentially an interchangeable set of imperial apologists, and you agree that both the ‘culture war’ and for the most part the war on terror has been a protracted excuse for rolling back the 20th century. (To say nothing of, say, the war on drugs – which seems to be aiming for the 17th.)

Why in the fuck are you expecting this out of Hillary Clinton? Clinton was a life-long conservative until she got into the Oval Office and, as part of the notional role of the First Lady, became a political cipher. The one assignment she was given to fulfill the least ambitious of the fairly few progressive promises her husband made was a miserable failure. (And, for the record, she left the race with a more insurance-oriented healthcare plan than Obama’s.) Her career can be summed up as ‘typical corporate lawyer’ until the point at which she became a Democratic politico out of tribal alignment.

If you’re new to Democratic electoral politics, this is kind of how it happens – unlike the Republicans, open pandering to the hard left is treated mercilessly by the national media and as a result Democrats are pretty reasonably expected to run to the right of how they govern. If you’re not, and you supported Clinton for the same reason I did Obama – that is, looking for a charismatic and effective President to repair the unprecedented damage done to the American government, reputation, and very national psyche by Bush (and avert the possibility of further such damage by McCain) – well, it’s exactly why most of us are voting for him, and I really can’t imagine you falling permanently away from the man over a simple electoral defeat.

And if you supported Clinton in spite of all of that, if you supported a woman whose campaign was run by reactionary FUD-mongers – the same horrible, race-baiting bunch who ran Clinton’s stable in ’92 – and Mark fucking Penn, don’t lecture us about Zbignew Brzezinski. I’m not prepared to say that Obama accepting the man’s support makes me comfortable, but if you actually read Obama’s (admittedly slim, but fairly consistent) policy output, in focusing pretty heavily on promotion of the general welfare of man rather than the narrow interests of American capital, it alienates him completely from the people you’ve been insisting he’s gonna put in power.

Clinton was a mediocre candidate, she ran a horrible race (contrast Edwards, who was a generally middling candidate whose excellent race forced the campaign, however briefly, to focus on crucial issues rather than idiot scandals and probably saved the entire primary from complete political irrelevance), and now she’s finished. If you really wanted what you’re freaking out on Obama for lacking, you’d have backed Kucinich. The very fact that people out there have somehow decided that it’s useful to have opinions farther to the right during the primary than during the general election is fucking infuriating. If you ever believed in any of this, and I really doubt you do, you’d have done better to, you know, fucking put it out there while everyone else in your campaign was speculating on whether Obama was an inexperienced, unelectable secret Muslim.

Jesus Christ.

On the June 18 edition of Fox News’ Hannity & Colmes, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, co-host of ABC’s The View, asserted of Sen. Barack Obama: “[I]t bothered me that he seemed for a while more willing to give the fist bump to [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad than our own General [David] Petraeus.” Hasselbeck continued: “It bothers me. It bothers me as a mom. It bothers me as a working woman. It bothers me as a citizen of this country.”

(Via MMFA.)

(An addendum to Der Ewige Türke.) Read more »

The following, to believe Wikipedia, is an ‘oft-quoted excerpt’ illustrating the ‘rhetorical strength’ of its source: Read more »

When the sun rises again today, it’s certain to shine a little bit less brightly – for we have lost not just its worthiest follower but a man who pierced the darkness of vanity and self-righteousness like no other. A world without him to balance out the evil, self-important assholes – the ones who took ‘politically incorrect’ from him, back when it meant something noble, and twisted it into a badge to crown their shameful, petty tribal hate – is going to be just a little bit darker for it.

Parker and Stone and every other dour fascist who TV execs who still don’t get you signed to ride on your coattails are still around, metastasizing, bound for the Medal of Freedom and old-age home that eluded you, punishing us all for our horrible taste while you rot. I like to think you’d find it funny. You always were a motherfucker.

Rest in peace – and here’s to hoping if there’s anything after this life you’ll figure out how to freak ‘em out there, too.

Urgent news for right-wing negro-monitors: chocolate is delightful. It comes in many flavors, all of them delicious, and is appreciated by everyone.

I really never thought I would be in a political dispute over ‘chocolate is delightful’. God knows what else is upside down in that wacky universe of yours.

Djur adds: See this, and also this. The objection to “chocolate city,” in this case and when Ray Nagin referred to New Orleans as such after Hurricane Katrina, is usually justified by claiming the term amounts to reverse racism, but the real motivation is less rational. First, the idea that American cities like Detroit, New Orleans, Washington, and Atlanta could be majority black is terrifying for your average honky racist. Second, to ofays who resent losing the ability to freely use racial slurs in mixed company, a black man using jocular language to describe his brothers is an affront. “If James Brown can be black and proud,” quoth whitey, “why can’t I be white and proud? Why do we have a Black History Month but not a White History Month? If pro is the opposite of con, does that explain why my neighbor’s dogshit is so tangy? Did I just blow your mind or what?”

Of course, I hear this bullshit from professed liberals as well. The answer is simple: there is no white identity outside racism. There is a black identity because of racism. Community among the oppressed is admirable and necessary; community among oppressors is an abomination. As long as the term “chocolate city” has any meaning, it cannot be offensive. Whitey delenda est.

Burma? Nah. China? What are you talking about?

No: the worst human rights abuses ever are those taking place under Mugabe, in which a more or less normal African dictator has expropriated land from white people.

If it was ever necessary to prove how deeply indebted the Anglosphere’s right wing is to their childhood fetishes, here is the final word – nothing freaks them out quite like the colonials revolting, and they have endless stories of this or that Siege (always, curiously, in land that the natives used to have sole rights to twenty years ago) and this or that Rebellion and this or that tragedy. When darkies start oppressing whitey in any fashion, an injustice for the ages has taken place.

Zimbabwe’s regime is autocratic and the expropriation of land is unfair. But the consistent treatment of Mugabe as the worst human being alive is patently ridiculous. Just like the continuous efforts to make any oppressed minority in the Islamic world into Christians (e.g. the (90%+ Sunni) Kurds or Fur), it’s a clear example of people refusing to exercise an ounce of critical thought, moving into the world with nursery-school lies as firm and fixed as laws of nature.

And if there’s no better reason to be found to avoid an American empire per the British one, it’s more than worth the price of forbearance to avoid some honky complaining at our tanned grandchildren that ‘they kicked us out of Iraq, you know’.

I respectfully disagree. While I can’t vouch for the original author, I do feel that two things are both very true and very alarming:

a) The new mode of political discourse involves a replacement of class and race struggle with ‘culture struggle’, and
b) Taking their cues from every other group to consider themselves locked in a culture struggle, the Enemy of the right is a hodgepodge of accusations of elitism, defeatism, and radicalism which smells an awful lot like the ones that used to dominate the negative stereotyping of the Jews.

While the Clintonites’ ‘creative class’ nonsense is more or less innocent of first-hand anti-Semitism, the same cannot be said of the wider conservative culture they take a page from – in which ‘latte-sipping intellectuals’ are closely affiliated with Hollywood and high finance, George Soros is a liberal mastermind instead of a normal philanthropist, and almost every debased coin of the anti-Semitic realm has ‘degenerate/Aryan’ overstruck with ‘elitist/Patriot’.

The ‘creative class’ is a way for a movement that’s always been deeply affiliated with the Little People to avoid alienating the people that keep them little – that is, to pretend that the ‘average American’ matters not because she is poor, but because she is a boor. And it is much easier for the high-powered lawyers and corporate professionals who form the political base of the Clintonites (especially the Clintonites-cum-McCainiacs) to aim for the interests of the boor than the interests of the poor. All they have to do to sastify the boor is to call black people nasty names – and hell, they were doing that anyway.

‘Latte-sipping elitist intellectual’ is a couple of notes away from ‘radical elitist degenerate’, and whether you like it or not someone who believes in the former is usually willing to accept most of the premises of the latter. The only reason that widening ‘anti-Semitism’ has been so repugnant lately is because the main agitators for that widening are jackasses who believe setting fire to Palestinian orphans is an integral part of Jewish identity. Der Ewige Entartete has gone hand-in-hand with der other Ewige for a century now, and denying that is disingenuous.

I promise not to do this too often (and the source’s willingness to jump aboard the Natural Birth bandwagon seems like a matter almost as damnedable), but this NYT article, via Broadsheet, is breathtaking.

Some of you might have known women growing up that had to live through the pre-Roe period. It’s worth bearing in mind that for us (born in 1987 and 1986, respectively), even our grandparents were pretty young when Roe was decided.

Good on the NYT for publishing this. We’re much too blasé about what the Republicans want to take away from us; allowing them to remain as coy as they are about the kind of world they want to see is despicable, and our peers’ children (2002-) need to have something to remind them the consequences of reactionary excess.