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October 18, 2004

Dummocrats.com Coins New Term: Pretty-in-Pink Democrats

Dummocrats.com riffs off by Blaine comments and coins a new term: Pretty in Pink Democrats.

Even worse than liberals created by Blaine's social viciousness are liberals created by genuine ass-kicking. Such Cobra-Kai Liberals often try to pick fights with people later in life, always trying to heal adolescent feelings of impotency by wrestling people. Al Franken is the prototypical Cobra Kai liberal.

This is one group of liberals I have some sympathy for. If you were about to get all up in Elizabeth Shue's shit when some surf-nazis dressed as skeletons karate-kicked your ass into next week, you'd probably be looking for some payback later in life, too.

But they're not to be confused with Footloose liberals, liberals who are convinced that this really is 1952 and America is in danger of having John Lithgow take away their right to dance.

Somewhat related are Dead Zone liberals, who wake up with night-terrors at the thought of a Republican President praying to God and then nuking the world like the mutants from Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Creepy atonal organ music features prominently in these nightmares, as do frequent flashes of James Fransiscus' little white ass.

There's also the political movement called Benderism, composed of disciples of John "No, Dad, what about you?!" Bender. These Benderites live in a state of perpetual adolescent rebellion and are convinced that not behaving like a prick constitutes "selling out to the man." They also attempt to hide their weed in the shorts of law-abiding citizens like myself.

And then there are the Fake-Laugh Liberals, liberals who like to show their political stripes by forcing whooping fake laughs at unfunny statements they agree with. Jon Stewart and Bill Maher -- and, of course, Margaret Cho -- have careers only due to Fake-Laugh Liberals.

A subvariety is the See? I Get It, That's Why I'm Fake-Laughing Liberal, who are key to Woody Allen's otherwise-inexplicable ability to get financing for his latest cinematic abortion. These are liberals who fake-laugh not necessarily because of actual political sympathies, but because they want to show that they understood Allen's ten-billionth reference to Marshall Fucking MacLuhan because, you know, they went to a good college (and/or saw Annie Hall). By pretending to laugh at yet another Woody Allen Leopold & Loeb reference, they demonstrate that they're better and smarter than you are.

Finally there is the well-known group of liberals called West Wing liberals, liberals who have effectively opted out of reality and put bumper-stickers on their car reading My President is Jeb Bartlett. They think the key to winning elections is to be even more unabashedly liberal, because that seems to work on the TV show. I like these liberals, because they're pretty much absenting themselves from actual political discourse, leaving us conservatives free to spin our nefarious plots.

It's Still Kinda Funny Update: Luckily for us, we still have NRO contributor/star of St. Elmo's Fire Andrew McCarthy on our side.

Even if Ducky is lost to us forever.

posted by Ace at 02:36 PM

Comments

Wasn't Footloose was set in the the then-present day of 1984?

Posted by: George on October 18, 2004 03:22 PM

You want to see funny? Take a look at Bender in five years...

Posted by: George on October 18, 2004 03:29 PM

ace this will make you smile:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1329858,00.html

Posted by: VI on October 18, 2004 03:46 PM

VI,

Thanks, but I already posted that. Scroll down.

George,

Yeah, it was nominally set in 1984, but clearly it's actually set in 1952. Or during the sixteenth-century witch-burnings.

And yeah, it IS funny to see Bender in five years.

Posted by: ace on October 18, 2004 03:48 PM

I see what you're getting at -- the metaphorical 1952.

This ties in with something my wife and I were discussing this weekend. Is it not true that just about any of the teen movies made for our generation are better than any of the teen movies made today? Has not the Golden Age of teen cinema come to a close?

Take Footloose, for example. Not even the best movie of the period, but you have not only this metaphorical tie-in to persecutions of bygone eras, but there is a scene in which the hellfire and brimstone preacher literally runs across town to stop a book-burning. It gives the character depth, and paves the way for his later redemption. If this movie were made today, Lithgow would run to the book-burning, where he would toss a few books of his own on the fire, lynch somebody and then hold an impromptu Republican political rally on the spot.

Pretty in Pink. Breakfast Club. Weird Science. Real Genius. Better Off Dead. Even one of my forgotten favorites -- Three O'Clock High. All a bazillion times better than anything made for Generation Next. Gee, a kid has sex with a pie. Color me unimpressed.

Posted by: George on October 18, 2004 04:02 PM

I think there are Weird Science liberals. Actually, Chet liberals. They pick on everybody, and are very braggadocious. Until they get turned into a turd.

Posted by: sentinel on October 18, 2004 04:33 PM

Don't forget Big Trouble in Little China. God, I miss the 80s. My misspent youth.

Posted by: Smack on October 18, 2004 04:44 PM

Big Trouble is outstanding, but I was thinking about the teen movie in particular.

Mean Girls grossed something like $100 million. It was not the worst movie I've ever seen, but it blew in comparison to just about any of the girl-oriented high school movies of the 80s. Basically, it's no Sixteen Candles. "No more yanky my wanky. The Donger need food!"

Posted by: George on October 18, 2004 05:05 PM

Surely there must be Wargames Liberals: those who believe war is mere primitive impulse which must one day destroy us all, unless a young Matthew Broderick can save us.

Posted by: Brian on October 18, 2004 05:06 PM

Bingo! Kerry is a Wargames liberal, obviously. He wants to get out of the need to win by refusing to play the game while retaining the threat that he could play. This doesn't work when you're locked in the court and the other guy is very determined to play and will bounce the ball off your head quite happily until you're an unconscious bloody heap on the ground.

Posted by: Eric Pobirs on October 18, 2004 06:07 PM

Hey, don't knock the Beneath the Planet of the Apes mutants.

Their psionic purity may be all the stands between us and total ape conquest.

BETTER A DEAD PLANET THAN SLAVES TO LIVE MONKEYS!

Cheers,
Dave

Posted by: Dave at Garfield Ridge on October 19, 2004 12:04 AM

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Top Headlines

Ryan Long goes to the No Kings rally to pick up young liberal hotties and is greatly disappointed in the quality of the mish
thanks to stevey

You know we "joke" about the GOPe just "conserving" leftist things?
David French just posted:

Populists ask what conservativism has ever conserved?
Well its about to conserve birthright citizenship!
Posted by: 18-1

I couldn't hate this queen of the cuck-chair more if it paid seven figures and came with a corner office.

TJM definitively ranks the films of John Boorman.

Kid punks CNN chump by speaking truth to retard

Podcast: CBD and Sefton talk birthright citizenship, the 14th Amendment and SCOTUS, no boots in Iran, Artemis II and refocusing NASA, the NBA's hatred of everything non-woke, and more!

In more marketing for Project Hail Mary, scientists say they've found the biosigns indicating life growing on an alien planet. It's not proof, just signatures of chemicals that are produced by biological metabolism, and it could be nothing, but scientists think it's a strong sign that this planet is inhabited by something.

In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of scientists announced the detection of dimethyl sulfide (along with a similar detection of dimethyl disulfide) in the atmosphere of an exoplanet called K2-18b. This is actually the second detection of dimethyl sulfide made on this planet, following a tentative detection in 2023.
Tons of chemicals are detected in the atmospheres of celestial objects every day. But dimethyl sulfide is different, because on Earth, it's only produced by living organisms.
"It is a shock to the system," Nikku Madhusudhan, first author on the paper, told the New York Times. "We spent an enormous amount of time just trying to get rid of the signal."

He means they tried to prove the signal was caused by things other than dimethyl sulfide but they could not.

Artemis moon shot a go, scheduled for 6:24 Eastern time tonight
Great marketing arranged by Amazon to promote Project Hail Mary. Okay not really but it does work out that way.

TJM talks John Boorman, director of Excalibur

Good rickroll

What? Skeleton of the most famous Musketeer, D'Artagnan, possibly discovered in Dutch church closet.
Dumas picked four names of real musketeers out of a history book, D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. So there was an actual D'Artagnan, though he made most of the story up. (Or, you know, all of it.)*

Charles de Batz de Castelmore, known as d'Artagnan, the famous musketeer of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, spent his life in the service of the French crown.
The Gascon nobleman inspired Alexandre Dumas's hero in "The Three Musketeers" in the 19th century, a character now known worldwide thanks to the novel and numerous film adaptations.
D'Artagnan was killed during the siege of Maastricht in 1673, and there is a statue honoring the musketeer in the city. His final resting place has remained a mystery ever since.

A lot of Dumas's stories are based on bits of real history. The plot of the >Three Musketeers, about trying to recover lost diamonds from the queen's necklace, was cribbed from the then-almost-contemporaneous Affair of the Queen's Necklace. And the Man in the Iron Mask is based on real accounts of a prisoner forced to wear a mask (though I think it was a velvet mask).
* Oh, I should mention, Dumas says all this, about finding the names in an old book, in the prologue to his novel. But authors lie a lot. They frequently present fictions as based on historic fact. The twist is, he was actually telling the truth here. At least about these four musketeers having actually existed and served under Louis XIV.
Fun fact: You know the beginning of A Fistful of Dollars where the local gunslingers make fun of Clint Eastwood's donkey and Eastwood demands they apologize to the donkey? That's lifted from The Three Musketeers. Rochefort mocks D'Artagnan's old, brokedown farm horse and D'Artagnan is incensed.

A commenter asked which should be read first, The Hobbit of LOTR?
Easy, no question -- read The Hobbit first. It's actually the start of the story and comes first chronologically. It sets up some major characters and major pieces in play in LOTR.
Also, the Hobbit is Beginner-Friendly, which LOTR isn't. The Hobbit really is a delightful book, and a fast read. It's chatty, it's casual, it's exciting, and it's funny. In that dry cheeky British humor way. I love that the narrator is constantly making little asides and commentary, like he's just sitting next to you telling you this story as it occurs to him.
LOTR is a very long story. Fifteen hundred pages or so. The Hobbit is relatively short and very punchy and easy to read. If you don't like The Hobbit, you can skip out on LOTR. If you do like it, you'll be primed to read LOTR.
Oh, I should say: The Hobbit is written as if it's for children, but one of those smart children's stories that are also for adults. Don't worry, there's also real fighting and violence and horror in it, too.
LOTR is written for adults. (It's said that Tolkien wrote both for his children, but LOTR was written 17 years later, when his children were adults.) Some might not like The Hobbit due to its sometimes frivolous tone. Me, I love it. I find it constantly amusing. Both are really good but there is a starkly different tone to both. LOTR is epic, grand, and serious, about a world war, The Hobbit is light and breezy, and about a heist. Though a heist that culminates in a war for the spoils.

The Hobbit Challenge: Read two more chapters. I didn't have much time. Bilbo got the ring.
I noticed a continuity problem. Maybe. Now, as of the time of The Hobbit, it was unknown that this magic ring was in fact a Ring of Power, and it was doubly unknown that it was the Ring of Power, the Master Ring that controlled the others.
But the narrator -- who we will learn in LOTR was none of than Bilbo himself, who wrote the book as "There and Back Again" -- says this about Gollum's ring:
"But who knows how Gollum had come by that present [the Ring], ages ago in the old days when such rings were still at large in the world? Perhaps even the Master who ruled them could not have said."
In another passage, the ring is identified as a "ring of power."
I don't know, I always thought there was a distinction between mere magic rings and the Rings of Power created by Sauron. But this suggests that Bilbo knew this was a ring of power created by Sauron.
Now I don't remember when Bilbo wrote the Hobbit. In the movie, he shows Frodo the book in Rivendell, and I guess he wrote it after he left the Shire. I guess he might have added in the part about the ring being a ring of power created by "the Master" after Gandalf appraised him of his research into the ring.
I never noticed this before. I know Tolkien re-wrote this chapter while he was writing LOTR to make the ring important from the start. And also to make Gollum more sinister and evil, and also to remove the part where Gollum actually offers Bilbo the ring as a "present" -- Bilbo had already found it on his own, but Gollum was wiling to give it away, which obviously is not something the rewritten Gollum would ever do.
But I had no memory of the ring being suggested to be The Ring so early in the tale.

Finish the job, Mr. President!
Melanie Phillips lays out the case for the total destruction of the Iranian government and armed forces. [CBD]

TJM acts like he knows anything about John Wick and screenwriting. It's embarrassing, really.

Podcast: Sefton and CBD talk about how would a peace treaty with Iran work, Democrats defending murderers and rapists, The GOP vs. Dem bench for 2028, composting bodies? And more!

Oh, I forgot to mention this quote from Pete Hegseth, reported by Roger Kimball: "We are sharing the ocean with the Iranian Navy. We're giving them the bottom half."

Batman fires The Batman
Batman is disgusted by the Joachim Phoenix version of Joker
Batman tries to fire Superman
Batman is still workshopping his Bat-Voice

Forgotten 80s Mystery Click: Red Leather Suit and Sweatband Edition
And I was here to please
I'm even on knees
Makin' love to whoever I please
I gotta do it my way
Or no way at all

Tomorrow is March 25th, "Tolkien Reading Day," because March 25th is the day when the Ring is destroyed in the book. I think I'm going to start the Hobbit tomorrow and read all four books this time.
The only bad part of the trilogy are the Frodo/Sam chapters in The Two Towers. They're repetitive, slow, and mostly about the weather and terrain. But most everything else is good. Weirdly, the Frodo-Sam chapters in Return of the King are exciting and action-packed and among the best in the trilogy. (Though the chapters with everyone else in Return of the King get pretty slow again. Mostly people talking about marching towards war, and then marching towards war.)

Sec. Army recognizes ODU Army ROTC cadets for their bravery and sacrifice in private ceremony
[Hat Tip: Diogenes] [CBD]