What a horrible year it's been. There's been something to annoy everyone, and everyone took full advantage: The health-care bill, the Tea Party, the BP spill, the Ground Zero Mosque, the Glenn Beck and Jon Stewart rallies, the Republican comeback, the enhanced TSA patdowns, WikiLeaks -- and every big thing that happened, it seemed, led to an even bigger bitchfest.
Thank God for the rightbloggers who helped get us through all this.
Whatever the issue, however intense the debate, some conservative cowboy
could be counted on to bring The Crazy, and bestow upon a grateful
nation the healing gift of laughter.
We've sifted through our archives and found our 10 Best Rightblogger Rants of 2010. Read on! Collect the set! Suggest your own!
10. The World Series: Patriots Know Who To Root For!
You'd think people who are always bitching about Political Correctness
would know enough to leave politics out of sports. Alas, not even the
October Classic is safe from their ministrations.
Aaron Goldstein's essay at The American Spectator, "A Red State-Blue State World Series,"
focused on "the political and cultural divide that exists between the
two cities" whose teams were to compete in the Series. This year the
Series was between the Rangers of Arlington, Texas and the Giants of San
Francisco. You can guess which Goldstein considered a suitable home for
America's team.
"When
Damn liberal hippie.
Rangers center fielder Josh Hamilton accepted the American League
Championship Series MVP," said Goldstein, "the first thing he did was to
praise God and Jesus Christ." If that happened in San Francisco,
Goldstein added, "Half the crowd would have been on the phone with the
ACLU. The other half of the San Francisco crowd would be on the phone
with PETA because of the head of a ten point buck that is mounted above
Hamilton's locker."
Also the Giants' ace, Tim Lincecum, "was charged with misdemeanor
possession of marijuana in November 2009. ... And where else but San
Francisco could Giants first baseman Aubrey Huff be embraced for wearing
a ladies' thong?" I mean, c'mon, people -- swish swish, amirite?
The Giants won the Series, but despite this reversal, conservatives
scored big in the following week's elections. Maybe it's fixed, like
wrestling.
9. The Libertarian Case Against Public Roads. We've all
heard libertarians complain about being stereotyped as unreasonable
anti-government obsessives. "I even used to be [a libertarian] myself," Peter Bagge had one wise guy cracking, "only I'm in favor of roads."
Things can't have gotten easier for them after the libertarian magazine Reason ran a video
in which Professor Bruce Benson of Florida State actually argued
against public roads. "There's certainly no reason that private firms
couldn't run all the toll roads in the United States," said the
Professor.
As
Hey! Private Road!
No Toyotas allowed!
it stands, Benson told viewers, people abuse Gummint roads because they
don't realize that they're maintained by confiscatory taxes -- "we all
pay gasoline taxes," he admitted, "but there's no direct link between
that and the roads in the minds of most people."
If they did know, they'd surely go for the Professor's
solution, which is to replace Gummint roads with roads "created by
groups or firms who want people to come to their location. ... Las Vegas,
for instance, wanting people to have easy access from Los Angeles." If
you wanted to get from Los Angeles to, say, Ridgecrest, California,
instead, you could always get someone to put in a casino there, or take
your chances on the crumbling remnants of the old, defunded Socialist
Highway System.
Extra points for the video's groovy acoustic guitar soundtrack,
evocative of a free-spirited hitch-hiker thumbing a ride on the
Starbucks Highway until private security guards throw him off.
8. The Absolute Worst Tea Party Representative Ever. It
always amazes us when some patrician character declares himself part of
the grass-rootsy Tea Party. Take Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds -- a
Yale graduate, and for years employed by the state as a law professor
at the University of Tennessee, yet a big TP supporter who denounces Obama
as "the favored candidate of the Gentry Class" who allegedly enjoy
"looking down on Americans from Flyover Country." Presumably Reynolds
distinguishes himself from that lot by taking a jug and some chaw down
the General Store of a night, and talking Constitutional principles with
the salt of the earth.
(Elsewhere Reynolds has introduced his readers to a self-professed Yale
alum and "former Wall Street trader" who described himself as an "elite anti-elitist Tea Partier... tired of being condescended to" by the bad kind of elitists.)
But National Review's Peter Robinson topped that in a November interview.
Live Free or Die, My Subjects!
Robinson quoted his subject, and told him, "Are you aware that those
words could have been written by Sarah Palin? If you were an American,
you'd be a member of the Tea Party," to which the subject replied,
"Yeah, I have to accept that."
Robinson's subject happened to be Prince Hans Adam II, the hereditary
ruler of Liechtenstein. (Robinson referred to the Prince as "Your
Highness" throughout.) "Prince Hans-Adam II," the principality's page
tells us, "grew up with his three brothers and sister at Vaduz Castle,
the parental home." We'd love to see him at one of these Tea Party
things, giving the crowd a royal wave and describing himself as a "royal anti-elitist Tea Partier" before giving the stage over to his jesters and minstrels.
7. Back to the Future. Jacob G. Hornberger
got to talking, as libertarians will, about how little freedom we have
left, and how much better things were "from the inception of the nation
to the latter part of the 19th century. The principles are simple to
enumerate: No income taxation (except during the Civil War), Social
Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, economic regulations," etc.
Some spoilsports pointed out, and Hornberger generously acknowledged,
that "I made a mistake and neglected to include the slavery exception
in my article..." Nonetheless, he said, "should those exceptions and
infringements prevent us from appreciating and honoring the fact that
our ancestors brought into existence the freest, most prosperous, and
most charitable society in history?"
Bryan Caplan got in on this theme, focusing not on black people but on women. "In what ways, then," he asked, "were American women in 1880 less
Don't do it, ladies! The next step
is Social Security!
free than men?" True, they couldn't vote -- "Yet the fact that women
were unable to vote in defense of their 'basic liberty rights' doesn't
show that American political system denied them these rights." As to the
objections many of you are no doubt raising at this moment, Caplan had
answers to those, too -- e.g., "For a women to work outside the home
against her husband's will was probably almost as contrary to their
mutual expectations as adultery ... from a libertarian standpoint,
[women] were freer than they are on Sex and the City."
If you wonder why the prescriptions of these freedom fans do not strike
you as conducive to actual freedom, it may be that it's not your freedom they're fans of.
"Yes, I wish to clone myself and raise the baby as my son. Seriously.
I want to experience the sublime bond I'm sure we'd share. I'm
confident that he'd be delighted, too, because I would love to be raised
by me...")
6. They Just Got Caught Up With The Wrong Crowd. The horrific history of Catholic child abuse presents problems for religious conservatives, but Rod Dreher of Beliefnet found a possible loophole: Blaming society.
Noting
Well, at least there was no rap music.
a British company that sold bikinis for children, Dreher said that
while "I'm the last person to want to cut the Catholic Church any slack
over clerical child sex abuse" (under the title "Sex-mad society
scapegoats the Catholic Church"), you had to admit, "it's not only
Catholic bishops who have failed to halt the sexualization of children.
We are all complicit. ... As awful as the 1950s church was, with abuse of
children going on behind a veil of sacred secrecy, is it really true
that kids back then were worse off than kids today, in terms of the
moral environment?"
Well, it depends: If the '50s boys you imagine had happy, healthy
childhoods, perhaps not. If they were being fucked by parish priests,
then definitely yes.
5. The Dry-Cleaning Bust Explained. The "Going Galt"
thing -- whereby patriotic businessmen claim they will withhold their
useful labors from society until the Kenyan pretender Obama is turned
from office -- is still going on. Dan Kennedy has proof!
Kennedy knows "the owner of several companies" who showed him "a pair of
cufflinks he'd just had custom-made, engraved with the words 'Who Is
John Galt?'... This business owner said the cuff-links were the last
item other than absolute necessities that he would buy until Obama was
an ex-president."
Better
And that sign has got
to go, too.
yet: This owner of several companies "said he was sending out a letter
to the restaurants and shops he patronized," Kennedy claimed, including
"his dry cleaners, the service companies that tended his lawns at his
homes -- over 200 different business owners -- letting them know that
President Obama had determined he was making too much money and was too
rich for reason. Therefore, he was going to cut sales and production at
his companies by half, himself work but one day a week, cut business
spending to the bone and personally buy nothing -- other than vacations
out of the country -- until the president exits."
What joy there'll be at this patriot's dry cleaners when President Palin
is sworn in, and this wealth-producer is again sending in his
monogramed socks.
4. There'll Be Bowing, Praying, A Muezzin Braying, and Muslims in The Streets. That whole Ground Zero Mosque thing put some people on edge, and others over it. Someone sent around an e-mail
with pictures of hordes of Muslims bent in prayer and filling midtown
streets, claiming "this is an accurate picture of every Friday afternoon
in several locations throughout New York City where there are mosques
with a large number of Muslims that cannot fit into the mosque. They
fill the surrounding streets, facing east for a couple of hours between
about 2 & 4 pm."
New Yorkers will have quickly guessed the photos are from a public event: The annual Muslim Day Parade. But John Derbyshire of National Review
Have you forgotten 9/26?
-- whose offices are in New York -- was enraged: "If this kind of
obstruction of roads and sidewalks is really going on in Nurse
Bloomberg's city -- where a restaurateur can get a four-digit fine for
placing a chair on the sidewalk without the proper permit -- it's a
disgrace."
To his credit, Derbyshire later acknowledged the existence of Muslim Day, though of course he did not approve.
His original post, however, remains unamended, Facebook-liked by 68
people, and suitable for forwarding by your aunt in Nebraska who isn't
one bit surprised that New York has descended into such dhimmitude.
3. Special Prize for Graphics. At Pajamas Media, "Zombie" examined the Texas schoolbook controversy
(short vs: rightwingers made the books more rightwing) and came to what
he probably considered a Solomonic conclusion: "However grotesque
Texas' twisting of facts may seem at first glance, it's positively mild
compared to what's going on coast-to-coast in the rest of the country's
classrooms" -- that is, there's been a "subtle yet effective long-term
project by the American left to fundamentally transform our schools" (too many ladies and minorities in textbooks, for example), and the Lone Staters are just trying to restore balance.
The whole five-part [!] series is a pip, but the illustration provided by Buzzsawmonkey is by far the most eloquent part:
Yes, that's Obama and Karl Marx fighting over a little boy with Jesus and Texas. And you thought The X-Men vs. The Avengers was epic!
2. The Sperm Donor Menace. Social conservatives may be getting the idea, in this post-DADT
era, that the Gay Menace will not long survive as a subject of outrage
or fundraising tool. So some of the more adventurous among them have
begun working on new frontiers.
The folks at Family Scholars, out of the Institute for American Values,
have found a rich vein: the menace of test tube babies. Actually it's
the test tubes that are the menace -- at least some the babies are
growing up to complain of the stigma of their in vitro origins.
"You know what I am afraid to tell people?" says "Alana S."
"I'm afraid to tell them that my dad was a sperm donor. To me, that is
creepy. To me, that sounds disgusting. To me, there is something wrong
with that. It embarrasses me. So for the most part, I don't tell anyone.
I tell them my dad is dead." Nice save!
Alana has "gay, bisexual, and transgendered friends," and accepts that
"gayness is not a taboo anymore." ("That said," she adds, "I can not
endorse gay marriage.") So now it's her turn to be the victim.
"Kids (like me!) eventually grow brains and realize that they've been
suckered out of a major, major requisite for happiness," she said. You
can't put your arms around a fluid fertilization medium!
Her plight, and that of others in the "D-Generation" (for "donated," not for the very fine Jesse Malin band, alas), is recorded at Family Scholars under the "My Daddy's Name is Donor" tag. There you may read stories like "Donor Kids Crave Genetic Identity" and weep. And they're all over that movie with the photogenic, inseminated lesbians -- a Family Scholar is here to tell you that "in real life, there is no script for these kids," and you'll certainly hear from her again come Oscar time.
Expect more op-eds on this theme until they get a Proposition on the
California ballot. It's time someone put a stop to activist
embryologists!
1. An Analysis of Obama's Multiple Mental Illnesses. 10 out of 10 rightbloggers agree: That Obama ain't right. He's either a fascist or a socialist or an alien or a who knows what-all.
Beyond therapy.
But there's a rightblogger sub-species that goes in for more specific
diagnoses of the Commander In Chief: Long-distance psychoanalysts such
who in 2009 deduced that Obama went on vacation to Martha's Vineyard
because "that's where the utopians go. And like many utopians, he wants
to transform all of us into the idealized participants of his dream. I
suspect he hears his inner voice more loudly than he hears the shouting
crowds of unruly moms, grandmas, and sick kids...."
One indefatigable practitioner of this craft is an American Thinker contributor called Robin of Berkeley.
"Obama's odd mannerisms intrigue a psychotherapist like me," she told
her readers. "He also presents a serious diagnostic challenge." But not
such a challenge that, even from miles away, Robin could not begin her
examination:
There are a multitude of physiologicalShe also considered the possibility ofconditions that can cause people to act strangely. For instance: head
injuries, endocrine disturbances, epilepsy, and toxic chemical exposure.
It makes me wonder: Did Obama ever have a head injury? His stepfather inIndonesia was purportedly an alcoholic abuser. Was Obama subject to any
physical abuse?
Asperger's Syndrome, cocaine addiction and a hereditary "delusional
disorder." Also: "While I can't prove it, the degree of Obama's
disconnect reminds me of my sexually abused clients."
Robin's still at it -- recent sample:
"Recent photos of Obama have been alarming; they depict a man boiling
over with rage. ... He wants us to suffer. That's why there's an impish
gleam in his eye when he consigns Republicans to the back of the bus" --
and she has to be considered a strong contender for this No. 1 slot next
year, too. Rightbloggers, step up your game!
