December 24, 2005 by s.z.

Christmas Eve Ultimate Wingnut Challenge:  Media Vs. Lifestyle  As we race to eliminate a dozen or so contestants before the bells toll in the new year, we should take a minute to think of that babe who was born in a stable over 2000 years ago.  And we should, like the Little Drummer Boy, give him our very best -- in this case, our very best wingnuts.  Therefore, in honor of that baby, we're going to let loose the Media Wingnuts, and see what they can do against the Lifestyle Wingnuts.  Blood may be shed.  Feelings might get hurt.  Pies may get thrown.  We guarantee it won't be pretty.  So, let's begin! 1.  First out of the gate from the Media Wingnut team is Ann Coulter.  Her latest column is about the NSA wiretapping story, and about why fascism is the best form of government. I have difficulty ginning up much interest in this story inasmuch as I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East, and sending liberals to Guantanamo. . But if we must engage in a national debate on half-measures: After 9/11, any president who was not spying on people calling phone numbers associated with terrorists should be impeached for being an inept commander in chief. And while an ept commander-in-chief would have found a way to do this legally, you go to war the commander-in-chief that you have, not the one you might want (especially when it's the inept one who declared the war). Among the things that war entails are: killing people (sometimes innocent), destroying buildings (sometimes innocent) and spying on people (sometimes innocent). That is why war is a bad thing. But once a war starts, it is going to be finished one way or another, and I have a preference for it coming out one way rather than the other. Civil liberties are just one of the sacrifices we have to make during war time (and since, as Rumsfeld has stated, the War On Terror is "the mission of a generation," be prepared to do without privacy for a pretty long time.  Ann goes on to defend the Japanese internment camps, links to Michelle Malkin's book on the subject, and then says: Note the following about the Japanese internment: 1) The Supreme Court upheld the president's authority to intern the Japanese during wartime; 2) That case, Korematsu v. United States, is still good law; 3) There are no Japanese internment camps today. (Although the no-limit blackjack section at Caesar's Palace on a Saturday night comes pretty close.)  So, if it was legal for FDR to intern Japanese-Americans in W.W.II, then not only is it legal for George Bush to intercept (without warrants) the communications of Americans, it's time for him to start some internment camps.  Ann will help him to round up prisoners. 2.  Lifestyle Wingnut Dennis Prager's most recent column, "Jews who support the Christian right," is about how somebody called Dennis an "Uncle Jake" -- but since nobody has done more for Jews than Dennis, then that guy is as wrong and stupid as all the smearers who say mean things about Bill O'Reilly. Jews who support the Christian right are "Uncle Jakes." So says a pro-Israeli Jewish official in his recent column for the Israel Policy Forum, a pro-Israel organization. "Uncle Jake" is M. J. Rosenberg's term for Jewish equivalent of "Uncle Tom." Just as the left sees conservative blacks as traitors to African-Americans, so it sees conservative Jews as traitors to the Jewish people.  I am the "Uncle Jake" most criticized in the Rosenberg column. Say it ain't so, Dennis! Speaking personally, I have been called many things in my life, but "Jewish traitor" is a first. For the record, and offered with obvious embarrassment at having to list these things about myself, here is a brief review of my Jewish activities: Since Dennis is so embarrassed, we'll skip to the end of his list: And I have brought tens of thousands of Jews back to Judaism and Jewish identity -- Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox. Tens of thousands -- wow, I bet that's even better than Moses's record.  Anyway, Dennis claims that Rosenberg is not only one of those damned smearers, but he's also wrong to believe that the Christian Right's agenda of "opposing abortion, poverty programs, progressive taxation, laws that protect gays, affirmative action, the environmental movement, and feminism" is anti-Jewish, because apparently one can be a super Jews like Dennis, while still being an asshole.  If you think most abortions are immoral; that a lower tax rate is better for society, including the poor; that the problem of poverty in America will not be solved by the government spending trillions more; that marriage should not be redefined; that a race-blind society is a finer society and that race-based affirmative action hurts both the recipients of the lowered standards and the society at large; that we desperately need the oil from a small percentage of the Arctic National Wildlife Preserve because doing so will help us rely less on Saudi oil and won't hurt any caribou; and think that, in retrospect, the feminist movement (as distinct from the belief in man-woman equality, which every religious conservative I know holds) hurt more men and women than it helped -- you are anti-Jewish. Yeah, the truth is that you're just anti-humanity. 3.  Next we'll hear from Media Wingnut Rush Limbaugh, who will tell us "Why I’d Never Want to Be a Liberal." I wouldn't trade places with the Democrats today -- you know, people say to me -- and have said to me over the course of my career, "Rush, do you realize how your life would be different if you were a liberal?" And they go down the list. "Hollywood would love you. You would have a television show in prime time on a network. You could name your ticket and price for virtually anything. You could get movies made. You could do all that if you were just a liberal. Isn't that tempting? Wouldn't you love to do that?" And then they come and-- (interruption) yeah, I'd have e-mail and I wouldn't have little political rats at AT&T and BellSouth playing games with my connectivity! Because there's no reason this stuff drops out like this accidentally. Businesses couldn't stay in business doing this. Anyway, how do I get sidetracked? Could it be the drugs? They tell me, "You'd be part of the big clique. You'd be really popular. Letterman and Leno and all these guys would love you and you'd be a standing guest wherever you wanted to go. Wouldn't that be more fun for you?" Yes, if Rush weren't a conservative, he'd be the richest, most popular guy in the world!  He owes his current status as an impoverished multi-millionaire and an obscure radio personality to his conservative politics. And I look at these people and I say, “I got that out of my system in high school.” Yes, as a lonely, friendless, loser back in high school, Rush vowed that he didn't need any of them, didn't want to be part of their clique, and that someday he'd make them all pay!  And then he began assembling his unholy army of rats dittoheads. I wouldn't trade places with liberals today because they live a lie. Liberals are miserable. [...]  I don't encounter happy liberals. Um, isn't his mistress Daryn Kagan supposed to be a liberal?  4.  Now here's Lifestyle Wingnut Peggy Noonan with a little rant about how the media is becoming more openly liberal all the time.  (Hey, while your perception is that the media is becoming more "pro-establishment, let's suck up to people in power" all the time, and so you suspect that Peggy must be crazy, remember that at least she's not throwing cats at people, like that woman on "The Simpsons.") We all criticize the mainstream media, regularly and with reason. More and more and day by day the MSM is showing us that its response to the popularity of conservative media and the rise of alternative news sources is to become less carefully liberal. What in the past had to be hidden is now announced. This is not necessarily bad: it makes things better by making them clearer. I didn't enjoy their ideological smuggling. And she didn't enjoy it when Dan Rather would send her secret messages with his eyebrows, and when Katie Couric would try to seduce Peggy while interviewing pop stars on "The Morning Show." 5.  Our last contestant is Michelle Malkin.  Her topic for the day is "The Left's privacy hypocrites." It's about how we should take Ann Coulter's advice and start interning Arab-Americans.  No, wait, it's about how the liberals are big hypocrites because they have a hissy fit when brown people have their telephone calls and emails tapped without warrants being obtained, but don't care a bit when white neo-Nazis are being spied on from space. Funny enough, another story about unprecedented domestic spying measures broke a week before the Times' stunt. But neither the Times nor the ACLU nor the Democratic Party leadership had a peep to say about the reported infringements on Americans' civil liberties.  [...] That's because the targets of the spy scandal that didn't make the front-page headlines were politically incorrect right-wing extremists. According to the McCurtain Daily Gazette, in the days after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the U.S. government used a spy satellite to gather intelligence on a white separatist compound in Oklahoma. The paper obtained a Secret Service log showing that on May 2, 1995, two weeks after the April 19 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building that killed 168 people, the FBI was trying to locate suspects for questioning. [...]  But with the exception of a brief Associated Press recap, the story received absolutely no mainstream-media attention. No civil-liberties circus. No White House press-corps pandemonium. The left believes the government should do whatever it takes to fight terrorists -- but only when the terrorists look like Timothy McVeigh. If you're on the MCI Friends and Family plan of Osama bin Laden and Abu Zubaydah, you're home free. Michelle presents no evidence that the program is ongoing, that it was more than a one-time thing, or that it broke any laws (only that it purportedly went against DOD/CIA regulations, which presumably President Clinton had the power to supercede in the absence of any laws prohibiting such actions). But yeah, other that that, having a satellite taking photos of your compound from space is exactly the same as having your phone calls intercepted, so obviously the only reason the Left isn't all over this story is that they don't care if white terrorist suspects have their rights violated. And there you have our contestants for today. Now, vote TWO of them off the island. The remaining three will live to fight another day (and to compete for the title of The Ultimate Wingnut of 2005). So, vote off the two contestants whom you feel were the least wingnutty in this round (or just generally the weakest). Unless you have some gold on you, it's the best present you could give to that babe in the manger. 2:07:31 AM

"Jonah and the Derb" - Coming This January to Fox! One is a nerdish fanboy whose mother is Lucianne Goldberg.  The other is a British ex-pat with an abiding disgust for homosexuals and a belief that naked women older than 20 aren't interesting.  Together they play inane computer games while pretending to work on their NRO columns, refuse sexual advances from Jennifer Aniston, and fight crime!  Be sure to catch this buddy comedy about fish-out-of-water misfits who don't play by the rules -- it will touch your heart, and maybe, just maybe, it will teach you a thing or two.  So be sure to catch "Jonah and the Derb," starting January 11th at 8:00, right after "The O.C. Goes to Iraq."  Anyway, I've tallied the voting for our latest round of  "Ultimate Wingnut Challenge," and it seems that we must say goodbye to the Korner Kids (so it's nice that they have their sit-com to fall back on). Yes, John "Hindrocket" Hindrocket has vanquished his peers on the Blog Star Team, and has wiped out his competitors at the Corner.  Not bad for the boy from Minnesota who was voted "Most Likely to Change His Name to Jeff Gannon" by his high school classmates.  But how will he fare when up against  world-class wingnuts like VBen Shapiro or Rush Limbaugh?  That's what we'll find out in the coming days, as we race to find The Ultimate Wingnut of 2005! P.S.  Sophronia reminded me that Doug Giles was previously voted off Wingnut Island for failing to blame feminists and homosexuals for Hurricane Katrina.  However, since I already said he could play (and since it's Christmas), I'll let him back in the game if he promises to refrain from lapsing back into sanity.  And as Tara pointed out, I once said that JimJeff GannonGuckert could help out one of the weaker teams (he deserves his shot at the crown after all he's done for the wingnut cause).  So, he'll be joining the Respected Conservative Thinkers.  (And even if he's neither respected nor a thinker, he does have skills which Krauthammer and Decter might find useful.) 1:25:40 AM