God bless Pat Buchanan. He makes our jobs so much easier. You see, we’ve all known that if you scratch beneath the surface of your typical hysterical teabagger you get an angry white man or woman who’s furious that the browns tricked a bunch of young, white college kids into getting one of their own elected president.

But most of these teabaggers also know that the horrible injustice of “political correctness” means they can’t actually wear their racism on their sleeve and so they go to extraordinary measures to disguise their bigotry. Helps if you’ve got a Jewish niece to hide behind, for instance (Too bad the internets caught you smearing your niece as a “little jewess” and mocking her batmitzvah.)

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It might take you a couple of reads before you realize what precisely it is that, Thomas Fuller, a New York Times reporter is describing in this paragraph:

A renegade Thai general was shot in Bangkok on Thursday as the military prepared to encircle the barricaded encampment of antigovernment protesters.

The general, Khattiya Sawatdiphol, 58, was struck in the head by a bullet during an interview with this reporter about 7 p.m. on the street in central Bangkok, near a park occupied by his hard-line followers. This reporter, who was facing the general and about two feet away, heard a loud bang not unlike a firecracker. The general fell to the ground, with his eyes wide open, and protesters took his apparently lifeless body to the hospital, screaming out his nickname.

You’d be hard pressed to find a better example of the stilted conventions of  hyper-neutral, impersonal, distanced, journalistic diction than this paragraph whose language goes a long way in obscuring the fact that what this reporter is talking about is SOME DUDE’S… FUCKIN’… HEAD EXPLODING TWO FUCKING FEET AWAY FROM ME WHILE I WAS FUCKING STANDING THERE JUST TALKING TO HIM!!!! …JESUS, FUCK, JEEEEEESUS FUCK!

You gotta wonder how many Vodka Martinis it took before Fuller was able to put pen to paper and carve out that unimpeachably grammatical,  perfectly emotionless paragraph.

So I’m browsing through The Maine GOP Party Platform/Teabagger Manifesto, (PDF here)when I come across this gem:

b. Seal the border and protect US citizens along the border and everywhere, as is the prime directive of the Federal Government.

So wait… sealing the border is the “prime directive” of the Federal Government? Says who, exactly? And what’s this “prime directive” stuff anyway? As always, Wikipedia can help:

In the fictional universe of Star Trek, the Prime Directive, Starfleet’s General Order #1, is the most prominent guiding principle of the United Federation of Planets. The Prime Directive dictates that there can be no interference with the internal development of pre-warp civilizations, consistent with the historical real world concept of Westphalian sovereignty. It has special implications, however, for civilizations that have not yet developed the technology for interstellar spaceflight (“pre-warp”), since no primitive culture can be given or exposed to any information regarding advanced technology or the existence of extraplanetary civilizations, lest this exposure alter the natural development of the civilization. Although this was the only application stated by Captain Kirk in “The Return of the Archons”, by the 24th Century, it had been indicated to include purposeful efforts to improve or change in any way the natural course of such a society, even if that change is well-intentioned and kept completely secret.

Oh God, has it really come to this? The GOP has been overrun by theocrats, gun nuts, racists and pimply Science Fiction obsessed losers.

ith apologies to Monty Python, I’d like for you to try a thought experiment. Imagine being a fly on the wall at a gathering of Tea Party intelligentsia. Now, imagine leaving that empty room and attaching yourself to a wall in an adjacent quarters that is playing host to a gathering of hysterical, conspiracy obsessed Tea Party organizers planning their next rabble rousing rally. Amid the fiery rhetoric and lunatic invective, the leader stands up and demands “What has Obama ever done for America?”

Then, unexpectedly, at the back of the room a solitary individual who didn’t get the memo about our president being the Antichrist, timidly responds by producing the following three charts. Read more »

From the New York Times:

A suspicious vehicle in the heart of Times Square led the police to clear thousands of tourists and theatergoers from the area on a warm and busy Saturday evening.

Police officials said a witness reported a running Nissan Pathfinder with Connecticut plates, with smoke coming out of the back. A bomb squad robot popped the back latch of the Pathfinder, and officers found what they initially believed was a bomb. The vehicle was found to contain explosives, gasoline, propane and burned wires, a Fire Department officer told Reuters. The officer, who did not give his name because he was not authorized to speak to the news media, said that a man was seen fleeing the S.U.V. and that the police evacuated the area in case there were other threats nearby. Police were treating the vehicle as a “failed device” and were searching for a suspect.

Talibuddy Displays His Pestorkable Daughters Like the Twisted Fuck He Is. Or is he just demented? What's with the Pebbles outfit, though, Talibuddy? Did his wife who does the soft-porn music videos design it? Does it mean something personal and freakish we need to know about?

Anyone who heard Senator Scott ‘Talibuddy’ Brown (R-Raytheon) speak during his special-election campaign can testify that he is as dumb as a bag of donkey shit though at least coherent enough to say things like, “Me Brown. Me drive truck. Me go putt putt putt.”

It was enough to get this favorite son of the teabaggers a part-time job in Washington, DC occupying dead Senator Ted Kennedy’s seat where he shouts, “Me Brown. Me go ‘no! No! Noooooo!’ ”

Brown’s election only affirms the old aphorism. Special elections are like the Special Olympics: all the retards get a juice box and one actually wins, in the case of Massachusetts’ senatorial race, the Talibuddy did, with the dedicated work of his fucking retard teabagger battalions.

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This is just bizarre – air travel (and other things) could be affected for weeks, or months:

Smoke and steam hangs over the volcano under the Eyjafjallajokull glacier in Iceland, Wednesday April 14, 2010, which has erupted for the second time in less than a month, melting ice, shooting smoke and steam into the air and forcing hundreds of people to flee rising floodwaters. Volcanic ash drifting across the Atlantic forced the cancellation of flights in Britain and disrupted air traffic across northern Europe, stranding thousands of passengers. Flights in and out of London Heathrow, Europe’s busiest airport, were halted, and the shutdowns and cancellations spread to France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland, Sweden, Finland and Switzerland. The volcano’s smoke and ash poses a threat to aircraft because it can affect visibility, and microscopic debris can get sucked into airplane engines and can cause them to shut down.

Xinhua/Reuters Photo