Red DawnThird in an interminable series. It is Saturday night in September. The first true wind of Autumn rattles the window; the geese honk mournfully as they beat their doleful wings southwards towards kinder, mellower climes. The crows gather, black as midnight, calling out harsh and coarse. They flap their ebon wings over lonely fields, stubbly fields denuded after the merciless harvest. The leaves of the trees burst briefly forth into lively color, only to brown and shatter, febrile and dry, dead before the bitter winds gusting out from the lifeless, icy North.

Right. And if all that weather-related crap ain’t depressing enough, David Broder still has a job that involves him telling you his idiotic opinions about things, and there is no way you can ever shut him up. He could die and he’d keep writing his goddamn column. There is indeed every reason to believe that this has already happened. It’s like that history teacher ghost dude from the Harry Potter books, only dumber and realer. Phooey. And so the geese honk sorrowfully, and then poop all over the place, their dung emerald and curlicued, like a malefic green Cheese-Doodle smooshed ‘neath your shoe, or a David Broder column a-slurp in your brain. I say: phooey. I say… phooey.

Enough. Now to the Rules. We are seeking to crown the most ludicrous examples of wingnut gibberish from the previous week. These rules are inviolate yet non-binding. What is essential is that the material in question exhibits “the same quality of ebullient, vaguely hateful, yet strangely entertaining nonsense that characterizes the dialogue in a Patrick Swayze movie of the caliber of Road House or Red Dawn.”

The first entry is less my personal submission than one made on behalf of my good friends at Lawyers, Guns, and Money. That would be this:

BOSTON (AP) — In a game that mirrored the season, the New York Yankees bounced back.

Alex Rodriguez capped a six-run eighth inning with a tiebreaking single off Jonathan Papelbon, and the Yankees overcame a five-run deficit to beat the Boston Red Sox 8-7 Friday night.

Jason Giambi and Robinson Cano started the comeback with home runs off Hideki Okajima, Derek Jeter hit an RBI single against Papelbon and Bobby Abreu tied it with a two-run double.

(Full Disclosure: I’m a Mets fan by birth and tribal allegiance.)

Second is the prefab wingnut OUTRAGE! over the MoveOn Petraeus/Betray-Us ad. There’s really not much more to say about this than has already been said, firmly but politely by Glenn Greenwald here, and equally firmly but with many, many more f-bombs by some clown here. (Again full disclosure: that last is a link to my personal site, and wow! was I feeling like swearing that day. Anyhow, the Mets fan-by-birth thing is to do with my growing up in Queens, NYC, where, um, people on occasion use naughty language. No, really, it’s true.)

Third, we have this, which I first discovered here (you may have seen it). Anyway, this class of “thinking” makes me supremely grouchy. It’s worth another look, because it is just so astounding:

But the Democratic Party is also vulnerable on Iraq, where the lead over the Republicans dropped 10 percent in August to a narrow four percent margin. Rather than harp on the withdrawal, the Democrats should continue to strike a bipartisan tone and refocus the debate to other international and domestic issues. This will help them carry the day in November 2008.

As Jane rightly pointed out, you would need to lack both a brain and a conscience to say something like this.

It’s a simple thing. This war is deeply unpopular because most Americans don’t think all the death has been worth it. That’s the end of it. Nothing has been achieved in Iraq except death, and everyone knows it. Even the administration’s own propaganda concedes this elementary point: we need to stay in the country we invaded in order to defeat the terror group who wasn’t in the country we invaded before we invaded it? That’s crazy.

This war will become glorious and popular again at exactly the same moment when all the corpses arise from their graves. And not a moment before.

You know, before this administration, I wasn’t especially political. And to tell the truth, I’d love to get back to a state of affairs where “politics” meant incomprehensible arguments over recalculating the capital gains tax and crap like that. I really do have other things to do — books to read, sports to follow, kids to raise, all that stuff that’s to do with… life….

Oh well, what the hell. So much for that hooey. A terrible ugliness is born. You know what I mean?

Related posts:

  1. Late Night: This Week In Obama Killing Your Grandma…
  2. Late Night: The Wacky World of Wingnut Funny
  3. Late Night: The Babble Phlegm of the Wingnut Republic; OR, What’s a Half a Million or So, Give or Take?
  4. On “This Week,” Paul Krugman Dispatches 3 Wingnut Talking Points on Auto Industry in 2 Minutes
  5. Sunday Late Night: I want my MDTV!