We Get Letters






Last Christmas I posted an article about how a conservative caller to a radio show began weeping and asking deranged questions about whether his prayers to Almighty God might have accidentally killed a Republican instead of his intended target, Democrat Robert Byrd. Economist Brad DeLong linked it off his site, which brought a steady stream of viewers, some of whom were really very nice about keeping me updated to developments in the story and making suggestions I hadn't thought of.

It turned out that Talking Points Memo ran a follow-up, suspecting that the call was a prank. At that point, I posted a response in which I outlined reasons why it might be serious, as well as my suspicion that the Republican party had stoked the flames of hard-right paranoia and rage so much that attempting to parody those attitudes might be beyond the point where doing so could seem implausible anymore. As one helpful reader pointed out, unbeknownst to me, I'd essentially drafted a political corollary to Poe's Law, which states that, "without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing."

I drag all this back up because it seems like Poe's Law struck again the other day, with an implied death threat in the comments section on the first piece on Wolverines' pathetic rap, "O.T.P. (One Term President)." Someone, responding to both that article and the subsequent post about Satellite High's awesome diss track, wrote a lustily violent reply about how real Americans like him were just waiting for stupid weakling communists like Satellite High and me to declare open warfare on America, because then they'd murder us all and stack our bodies in the town square like cordwood. The commenter then signed off as "Spoonman," which seems like a tremendously unfair thing to do to a Soundgarden song, but whatever. "Black Hole Sun" and "Fell on Black Days" were both better singles off that album anyway.

Because the diss track had been posted in several different forums on the SomethingAwful.com message boards, SA members who follow this site did some checking, and there is a poster on that site named Spoonman. Unsurprisingly, he spends a significant amount of his time posting in a forum called "The Firing Range," which is basically the SA's way of proactively ghettoizing the sort of people who'd pollute interesting discussions with softcore gun pornography and vigilante murder fan-fiction.

The forum itself has no shortage of that sort of thing, with people posting their daily weapon-carries like they were discussing the sort of outfits they put on in the morning. Encounters with minorities of any non-white color spotted in groups any larger than one are often described with hair-raised paranoiac alertness as to their sudden movements and how many bullets would be required to be loosed into their center mass, given the caliber of the poster's concealed-carry weapon and the number of bullets in the magazine. These are the sorts of people who enthusiastically cheerlead the existence of Castle Doctrine, as it gives those with disappointing lives another potential window through which ugly and impotent (sometimes) racially inspired revenge fantasies can explode into reality with crotch-engorging and self-actualizing power.

Take this winner, for instance. Seriously, click both of those pictures. Look at him. Just look at him. This guy basically fixes printers and network connections for some business of no consequence — a nobody in a department already derided by most professionals as the forgettable haven of nobodies — a probably spiritually and emotionally inert person doing a job of no real comparable worth to anything; biding his time until death and the moment that the sliver of posterity that remembers him begins the inevitable process of forgetting; hoping against hope that any day now Hans Gruber and Agent Smith start shooting the shit out of Midwest Phosphates Company and the well-armed butterfly named Morpheus that lives inside him can blast its way out of his shell and yippie-kai-yay some serious damage on the asses of all these terrorist commie Nazis.

I mention this stuff about the members of a message board forum because, knowing that, it's entirely possible that the hate-mail letter we got from Spoonman is completely serious, perhaps even from that specific poster. On the other hand, given Poe's Law, it's equally possible that it's a really funny troll written by someone with an ear for right-wing paranoia. Someone could have deftly mimicked a socio-political outlook that has become so crazy at this point that any document that one claims it produced is, on its face, totally plausible. Then he picked the name "Spoonman" because that song was playing on his iTunes at the time. Who knows?

I don't. Personally, I lean well to the side of "inspired troll," but you're welcome to judge for yourself:

March 9, 2010 4:23 PM

Anonymous said...

Alright my little commie a$$holes where do I begin....

This blog is weak! The reason being is you can't even make a cogent argument as to WHY you believe anything you do.... it is all emotionalism. "You FEEL something is amiss..." or those bad conservatives who made that nasty RAP song "hurt your feelings". Just attack anyone who actually uses facts to back up their beliefs. Look, I hate RAP, and you just reminded me why it seems to be the Genre of the stupid and the mentally deficient! Can you even pronounce M-E-N-T-A-L-L-Y D-E-F-I-C-I-E-N-T???

OK, so you know enough about word dynamics that you can actually rhyme words..... Wow, I betcha they give out Golden Globe awards to idiots like Kanye West and the other fags for that kind of massive skills huh?

Betcha those RAP skills of yours will really come in handy some day when some real American puts a bullet in your head! (Here's a tip.... try actully holding the weapon in the correct manner rather than to the side like a cheap street punk!) I guess you can rhyme your silly ass all the grave huh?

In your CRAPS, oh I mean RAPS, my bad....you just mouth the trash that Marx, Lenin, Engels, Pol Pot, Amin, Pelosi, and all the other Lib-tards tell you to say. No original thought there sport..... sad. But since you live a frairly lame life... I'm probably not telling you anything you didn't already know.... but if I am I'll spell it out for you - you SUCK!

Anytime your ass wants to mix it up in the streets with real Americans..... you bring your 'A'-game Sally! We're gonna stack you bastards up like cordwood! And then, that will be the day you are reminded that all the crap you got away with your whole life finally just ran out of steam. Oh well, enjoy it while you can.... 'cause we're gonna make you pay!

Proud to be Commie? Well, then don't be offended if I'm proud to send your Communist ass to a grave. Don't like it here? Don't worry, we can arrange the re-settlement fairly easy! Feeling disenfranchised? Get your ass on a plane and go to a Communist country that you think is wonderful. But you weak cowards can't do that can you? Why? Because those other great communists would probably put you in a Gulag (yet another fun and exciting invention of wonderful Communism...) and wait for your mangy ass to die a nasty death.... which if you think about it.... you can't really blame them, now can you? Afterall, what Commie likes competition from other brainless jackasses? They have to take care of their own jackasses first ya know.

signed,

Spoonman

(one of the many concerned Conservatives that will be using your corpse for fertilizer in our gardens one of these days! And don't think it ain't gonna happen Sally..... enjoy the freedom while you have it!)

What I can tell you for certain is that this isn't even my first online death threat. I actually got far more sincere and explicit ones when I lampooned a pop idol once. The piece is long gone, but the wounds... (pats theatrically at chest) they're still here. My apologies to the members of 98º.

Another thing I do know is that, while this might be familiar territory for me, this provided a totally new experience for Satellite High. A death threat is a very important time in a young man's life. He starts going through changes, and it makes him feel... different. I'm just glad that I could share this significant milestone with him.

It Takes a Nation of Millions to Keep Us White






Last week, we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo?, were pleased to help launch the premiere of "O.T.P. (One Term President)," the debut rap of Wolverines, a group of people who probably doubled their number of faithful listeners when their case was assigned to a Secret Service agent.

The group took their name from the American insurgents in the delusional right-wing fantasy and unintentional comedy classic Red Dawn. This seems only fitting, because, as we explained, these people are homophobic, racist, loathsome and insane, on loan to freedom from World Net Daily, the internet's #1 resource for Birther conspiracies and trying to figure out how the Toyota recall fits into the bigger picture of America's takeover by the New World Order. These are also the sort of people who would grow a skullet, wear a black bandana, dye a handlebar mustache and spray paint "nWo" on people's backs to protest the NWO and think it makes sense.

As said, these people made a rap. It looks like they accidentally popped a game into their Xbox called "RAP HERO" and got confused because when they mashed buttons, black people were making music instead of getting blown away all tidy-like. If you asked them what "flow" is, they'd assume it had something to do with cleansing the lower 9th Ward. Unfortunately in rap there are consequences. One of them is that—unless you're Puffy—when you suck at it, people who know what they're doing get to use you as a punching bag. For instance, an MC might notice that:

Like it or not, hip hop clawed to prominence from a minority culture, and attempting to co-opt its sound to further an agenda that actively works against that same segment of America is ugly and brainless. Also, these kids rap like a fucking Fruity Pebbles commercial.

So in the interests of fairness, we'd like to turn the mic over to the MC who made that observation, Satellite High:


For more music from Satellite-High, please check out the website or become a fan on Facebook.

All images in the video were either screencapped from "O.T.P." or taken from a Destructo article from last September, "White America's Inconvenience Tantrum, Part IV: The 9/12 Project—Building a Bridge to Nowhere with Fractions of Sense."

Newsweek, Part II: What They Talk About When They Aren't Talking to Themselves About Themselves






Note: unlike many of the other guest pieces on Et tu, Mr. Destructo? today's editorial response comes from a real, live person: the mysterious Mr. Awesome, a law student who is not a pundit and fears nothing. He previously paid us a visit to relate his tale of seeing Barack Obama with The Devil and explain why dumb shit takes primacy over the survival of poor people.

Newsweek Sucks Really Bad
by Mr. Awesome

Newsweek is not journalism. They produce spun-sugar articles, thin on everything but verbiage. Their treatment of fact and fact-checking is so poor you have to think they have something to hide. You’d think they had an agenda, or that they’re spinning for someone. It’s not journalism, so it has to be something, right?

But Newsweek’s reporting is so consistently insubstantial and meaningless that identifying a coherent agenda in the information vapor is just divination through cloud-reading. Some Newsweek piece of analysis may look like a donkey or an elephant at one point or another, but it’s always just a big, cold, mass of wet shit, barely tethered to the Earth. Or so I thought.

After I read Mr. Sese Seko’s takedown of the Newsweek editorial board’s slumber party transcript from a couple days back, I thought to myself, "I bet I could go to Newsweek.com like right now, and the first story I see would be a complete puff piece with no information or insight." And I was right. Check it out. Or don’t. It’s Newsweek, so you know it probably doesn’t matter either way.

The gist here is that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is this amazing young legislator who has a great budgetary plan to fix America. Hell, it’s not just a plan. It’s a bona fide Budget Roadmap. And you can tell he’s for real because the author, one Peter Suderman, describes him as "energetic, wonky" and a real salt of the earth guy with a background in a family construction business. Rep. Ryan is a bright young buck, gee whiz, like golly. He smells like cookies.

You know this Roadmap could actually "work" because the Suderman writes one line saying it "could work," (at least in theory!) and because the Congressional Budgetary Office reports the Roadmap could make America deficit neutral 53 years from now, which I guess is a way of measuring "working." The Sudester never actually defines "working," and he doesn’t quote anyone else’s definition of what makes budgets "work," so I’m guessing that budget neutrality is what it means for a budget "to work."

How does it "work?" Well, it slashes the hell out of Medicare and it replaces corporate income taxation with a consumption tax, which could refer to a value-added tax or a sales tax or an income tax with an investment and savings exemption — Suderman doesn’t say which, so, you know, whatever. He does say whatever this means will be simpler than our current corporate tax structure, so that’s nice. Simple things are good, whatever they are.

Going solely by the information available in the article, you may wonder how this would "work." This is not a matter of Ryan’s ideas being bad or wrong. It’s simply a matter of Suderman's explanation being grossly inadequate. The two changes Suderman highlights are seemingly unrelated. One reduces spending, and the other affects tax revenue in some way Suderman doesn’t bother to describe even on the level of increase or decrease. So, how do these combine to an overall reduction in the deficit? What do these changes actually mean as broad policy concerns? Who knows?

This is pure Newsweek. This article does nothing to inform the reader about what this policy proposal means, how it operates, what it’s designed to do, or what it will do. The scraps of fact Suderman tosses out don’t inform because they’re presented without context necessary to provide actual meaning. A massive reduction in Medicare spending could mean anything, but Suderman doesn’t even attempt to list or summarize any of the specific changes behind this reduction. An ostensibly simplifying total overhaul of the corporate tax system along new and unspecified lines is even more offensively vague.

In context, the natural assumption is that this system must increase tax revenue, because it’s part of a plan to balance the budget. But that doesn’t fit the overall GOP theory of taxation. So maybe it’s a plan to reduce tax revenue, but spur business investment, a trickle-down sort of thing. Or maybe it’s a functional, re-design that’s supposed to reduce transaction costs and tax confusion. Who the fuck knows? Does Suderman know? Is the author sitting there, hoarding facts like a smug old miser? Did he read even that precious Roadmap? What the fuck, man? It’s like describing baseball as, "A process involving a lot of men in tight pants with wood." That explanation doesn’t "work."

And that’s it. That’s all Suderman says about the actual budget proposal.

The rest is just Suderman bemoaning how the Republican leadership is distancing itself from the Ryan plan. He argues that the GOP is letting the plan wither because Ryan proposes cuts to Medicare and Social Security, programs to which "the public is deeply attached." Deep attachment is an interesting way to phrase this. I guess after the public spent some decades paying into a retirement benefits package, they became deeply attached to it, in the sense that they fucking paid for it.

And it is balls-to-the-wall stupid. Take this gem:

So Ryan's proposal is instructive not only because it clarifies the difference between liberal and conservative policy, which is that serious reductions in government mean serious reductions in popular entitlements; it's also instructive about the road ahead for the GOP.

This sentence doesn’t "work." The difference between two policies is an unverified fact which, true or false, would apply to the theory or execution of either policy. I think he’s trying to imply that the difference is conservative policy recognizes this fact, while liberal policy doesn’t. Of course, Suderman does nothing to justify this distinction, provides no research to verify that the one policy does or doesn’t accept this as true, and provides no example of how this hypothetical difference makes a difference. He’s saying that one "half" of the political spectrum doesn’t recognize some essential fact of reality. And he’s just tossing it out there with the lazy disregard of small talk.

Suderman compounds his failure by failing to attribute these beliefs to any actual people. I don’t know if it’s ignorance, laziness, or dishonesty. But something compels him to make this point absent any liberal people who espouse this idea. He hasn’t just failed to make a point here, he’s failed to make a point about nobody in particular. There are concentric spheres of intellectual laziness and rhetorical shallowness here, interconnected cogs, whirling away to produce nothing but noise. It may be that he recognizes no connection between people and ideas. His Newsweek is strong.

Ostensibly, none of this is even related to the article, which is about how the GOP needs to start being more constructive (and less GOP, I guess), and embrace the many-splendored Ryan Roadmap. Skip to the bottom of the article, though, and you see Suderman is on loan or something from Reason Magazine. If you have an embarrassing knowledge of the libertarian intelligentsia, you will realize that the whole thing is a sad gambit.

The libertarians have been trying for some time to shift the Republican Party into a culturally, morally, religiously null entity, a sort of soulless big business-supporting tax-cutting machine without all the spangles and glitter of hating gay people and bombing brown people and so on. Part of that means rejecting the "deep attachment" retirees and old people voters have to the social security "entitlement" they fucking paid for.

I guess Suderman et al figured no one would notice this editorial slant in the hollow, echoing void of Newsweek. I was personally disappointed to learn that Newsweek is no longer even a primary source of honest emptiness. It’s like learning that a co-worker who constantly tells you mundane, meaningless stories was actually just stealing from another, equally boring co-worker, who read them in a creepy book about how to win friends and influence people. It’s still all nonsense and fluff, but now it’s dirty fluff. It’s like learning that crickets chirp in bad faith.

GOP 2010: Mindless Terror, Now with Collectibles!!!






Yesterday, Politico published a piece of investigative journalism whose ramifications could be sharply negative for the Republican National Committee. Good for them! You knew they'd have it in them — eventually... reluctantly. You can almost picture beads of sweat erupting on the tech guy's face as he queued the update, each keystroke resounding in his ears like a hammer striking an anvil.

In the piece, Politico excerpted details from a leaked 72-page RNC document explaining how to better raise funds for 2010 GOP campaigns. Politico summarized the RNC strategy thus:

The Republican National Committee plans to raise money this election cycle through an aggressive campaign capitalizing on “fear” of President Barack Obama and a promise to "save the country from trending toward socialism."

In neat PowerPoint pages, it lifts the curtain on the often-cynical terms of political marketing, displaying an air of disdain for the party’s donors that is usually confined to the barroom conversations of political operatives...

[The] RNC has shifted toward a reliance on small donors, but the document reveals extensive, confidential details of the strategy for luring wealthy checkwriters, which range from luxury retreats in California wine country to tickets to a professional fight in Las Vegas...

One page, headed “The Evil Empire,” pictures Obama as the Joker from Batman, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leaders Harry Reid are depicted as Cruella DeVille and Scooby Doo, respectively.

It seems like a great revelation, but it's not. It's an interesting story because GOP avarice and cynicism are so naked and well-documented, but aside from primary-source specifics, this is nothing you haven't heard before. This is all they ever do.

In 2004, the GOP strategy was to scare the shit out of you. John Kerry somehow not only wasn't a decorated war hero, but there was no way he could have learned how to conduct a war. Sure, George Bush managed to learn-by-doing when it came to starting and prosecuting wars, but this would never happen again. No other chief executive could be handed a war and use intelligence and good advice to figure it out. Turning over the United States to Kerry would have been like handing the keys to Baghdad to Muqtada al-Sadr and throwing a nude Lady Liberty into an unlocked death-row wing you'd just flooded with Astroglide. Still, Bush barely won.

In 2006, they tried this same strategy with House and Senate races, ignoring the fact that at least in House races, all the big decisions are local ones. The GOP loss was breathtaking. It also didn't hurt that the GOP felt defending the country wasn't so essential that they couldn't suspend national business to figure out whether somebody had the right to unplug a vegetable or devote a lot of off-hours to having gay sex with boys.

In 2008, they employed the same tactic again, as Rudy Giuliani — America's lisping bag of human excrement — kicked stuff off with a real bang (pardon me) by standing in front of a massive Big Brother television display of the smoking World Trade Center, reminding us to "never forget" because "9/11" because "terrorism" and also "firefighters," and, in conclusion, "liberals are the poison germs sickening the volk who, if elected, would stab our troops in the back." The bravura performance was just explosive (again, sorry) and devastating (oops), and where once had stood the edifice of progressive America there was just a smoking crater (what a fucking asshole).

The GOP lost again. So of course they're trying this tactic again. Just like they did last year when they considered realigning the party intellectually along a dynamic new program of name-calling.

But it makes sense. This is what you have left when you lack anything like a unified strategy for governance. Hell, when your only ideological basis is "government is a horribly mismanaged menace that keeps diverting money to the wrong things, most of which are owned by friends of ours," you can't campaign on anything like a core message. The GOP is adept at manipulating blocs of single-issue voters, but knitting them into a cohesive quilt is next to impossible. Besides, gay activists use quilts.

You can't get the same all-life-is-sacred message to the abortion voters in the same speech that you outline the "let's murder the shit out of some fuckin' ragheads" to your foreign-policy base. Your war on affirmative action won't play well to the same audience of Jews you just sold a "bulldoze Palestine" stump speech to, because many of them might have benefited from it. Economically speaking, you're not going to get much mileage from, "What we did from 2001-2007 to destroy the economy must be done to fix it. We have to do the same thing, only harder. You grind your teeth at night? CHEW MORE. You can't stop drinking beer? Switch to bourbon."

Thus the only card left is demonizing the opponent. And since the RNC elected Michael Steele its chairman to distance itself from the southern-strategy campaign slogan we all know they wish they could run with — "AIIIIGHHHH! NIGGER PRESIDENT!" — they have to go with generic fear again. Which is great for them, except for the fact that it doesn't work on two levels.

First, while red-baiting worked in the 1940s and 1950s because America was just entering the first generation of citizens raised by anything vaguely socialistic and thus unfamiliar with how well it could work within a democratic and capitalistic system, we've at this point reared a full three generations in a governmental support system that includes unemployment, social security, Medicare and student aid. Socialism just doesn't petrify as much when you've got people who owe their educations to it, have been on unemployment for months or rely on things like COBRA. Just look at the Tea Party phenomenon for a clue: you literally have people raging against Universal Health Care because they're afraid they'll lose their Medicare. It doesn't take a lot of work to point out that the purpose of both is identical, varying only by degree.

Second, there's already an established track record of "HOLY SHIT, WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE" failing. It barely worked in the midst of the Iraq war (probably incumbency alone pushed Bush over the edge), and it tanked during the height of the insurgency. It tanked again in 2008, despite all those invocations of terrorists and horrifying black community organizers who patrol neighborhoods with clipboards, shooting questions at people. It's enough to make you question if it ever works.

Really, can you imagine walking into a voting booth and saying, "Well, look, this guy shares my economic and social goals, but he is going to murder me"? Unless you're black and live in a southern city that can flood, can you imagine a thought process that includes total certitude that the candidate intends to stand idly by while you die? I realize that there are a lot of dumb people in this country and in every country, but outside of the "Birther" demographic it's really staking a lot of political capital to assume that a deciding majority will think, "This person has spent years of his life and millions of dollars seeking the highest office in the land because he really doesn't want to be famous for being the best president ever and actually is indifferent to the fiery death of people who might elect him or proclaim him wonderful later." Further, "People who run for president are really vain and want to be loved, but this guy doesn't care. This man would literally prefer to see potential fans and voters die." Sure, that makes total sense.

But see, dismissing the RNC 2010 tactics as only this is shortsighted. Okay, maybe this is what they do every time. But a fool overlooks what they've got waiting to blow the doors off the opposition. Again, from Politico (emphasis mine):

The strategy was detailed in a confidential party fundraising presentation, obtained by POLITICO, which also outlines how “ego-driven” wealthy donors can be tapped with offers of access and “tchochkes.”

That's right. You ask what the brilliant strategy for RNC 2010 is? I give you:

Tchotchkes
Gimcracks
Oddments
Souvenirs
Party Favors
Memorabilia
Gewgaws
Bric-a-Brac
Collectibles

HELL YES. The RNC has got this shit going on.

They looked at Washington, D.C., then the merchandizing for Twilight and thought, "Hey, why not us? Maybe we can finally make a buck, here." This is corporatized politics with perfect synergy. The business of America is moving product, and there's no product that moves harder and faster and more like a tiger or a mongoose than freedom.

Freedom is flying off the shelves. We've got kids with stapled fingers in Micronesia putting freedom together, and you would not believe the margin on it. It's sick.

Here's the thing, though: why stop at just moving freedom and "granting access" and doggie-bagging a bunch of Movado watches? If we're going to make liberty collectible, we've got to start moving an entire line of goods. Now, I'm just spitballing here, but let's see what we can do with the following:

• Hummels for Hummers.

• "Snowglobal Domination" — commemorative Sno-Globe scatters nuclear winter on Mecca.

• Over 50 "Precious Moments" 9/11 Collectibles showing the World Trade Center during every second of its collapse, lovingly rendered in elephant ivory.

• Laminated copy of a House bill to make the Franklin Mint part of the United States Treasury.

• Commemorative waterboard for pool exercise, leg strengthening.

• Half-baked Alaska at every attendee's table (undigestible).

• An official Pat O'Brien's Hurricane glass with a giant hole in it.

• Small ceramic figurines of black men in suits with goofy white makeup on their faces (it's cool, it's Obama as the Joker) that you can put on the lawn next to your mailbox to tell everyone else that you're TAXED ENOUGH ALREADY — YOU CAN KEEP THE 'CHANGE,' Sambo.

• A set of lead-tainted dinnerware so you can savor the flavor of non-government intervention.

• A Chia Head of Oliver North that only sprouts when watered with the blood of tyrants.

• G. Gordon Liddy's Home Locksmith Set.

• Shards of the True Cross (surgeon's shavings from Ronald Reagan's vertebrae and collarbones) dipped in platinum.

• Complimentary mirrored wingtips for "stall" surveillance.

• A die-cast Dale Earnhardt #3 Car with a Dale bobblehead popping out of the sunroof and shaking its oversized mustache back and forth across the top of the car, which has been glitter-paint graffitoed "OBAMACARE."

• Pictures of exploded Afghan and Iraqi children next to pictures of aborted fetuses, with "YES/NO" subtitles printed in hues discernible even to the red/green colorblind.

• A 200-image photo album of starving non-white people macro'd with bold IMPACT FONT just like "Fail Blog."

• Airbrush-on-black-velour mural of Elvis Presley, Ronald Reagan, Chuck Norris and George W. Bush winning the WWE Royal Rumble by throwing LBJ, Obama and Carter over the top rope, while Norris delivers a Sean Michaels superkick to FDR's Face so hard it throws him AND his wheelchair through the Spanish announcers' table.

Do you doubt the power of that kind of merchandizing? Do you think we can't franchise Ronald Reagan's America in every town? Ahahaha, next thing you're gonna tell me is we can't retake the White House in 2010. NOBAMA! NOBAMA! NOBAMA!

ARE Y'ALL READY FOR SOME WHITE PEOPLE?






Ahhh aaaahhhhhhh HOLY SHIT, Y'AAAALLLLLLL.

Y'ALL WANT TO MEET SOME CONSERVATIVE RAPPERS? CHECK ONE, CHECK ONE, CHECK IT: THIS IS WOLVERINES WITH "ONE-TERM PRESIDENT," Y'ALL. ONLY RAP GROUP MADE OF NOTHING BUT SUPER STARS-AND-BARS, REPRESENTIN' ALL THE PLAINS STATES WHERE REAL HARD-CORE MOTHERFUCKERS STILL GOT PEOPLE-WINCHES ON THE BACK OF THEIR TRUCKS. HELL GOOD LORRRRRRD YEEEEAAAAAAHHHHH...


It always bothers me how bad conservatives are at creative endeavors like comedy and non-country music. With comedy, I think it boils down to the form's reliance on pointing out contradiction and logical inconsistency. It's tough to embrace a dynamic of critique that bites inward harder than it does outward. For instance, bag on liberals' defense of abortion all you like, but it's a lot harder to do so as a defense of the primacy of life when anyone can start laughing and have their "HAs!" collapse into the word "Halliburton." Or, say, point out that the state of Florida has a "choose life" license plate that's excused on the basis that it's not an anti-abortion argument but rather a celebration of how wonderful life is — in a state that routinely executes people, embraces "Castle Doctrine," and is enormously dependent on the economic activity generated by MacDill Air Force Base (CENTCOM), Tyndall Air Force Base, Homestead Air Force Base and Eglin Air Force Base ("WE TEST CLUSTER BOMBS!").

Music is harder to figure out. They've got country music nailed, since turning your resentment at cultural marginalization into "I'm just an ignorant fella with no taste, goddamn I'm proud of it" self-aggrandizement works on the political level with the same degree of success as it does when talking about your redneck yacht club. But rock and roll and rap are hard. Conservatism has been against rock and roll from the start, and it generally abhors sex and drugs unless they involve underage boys or butt bumps of meth with a male prostitute.

Even when they find a means of creating conservative rock in a way that decontextualizes it enough that they can issue "messages" only, it's just so farcically and weirdly amazing that you don't even think of it as music and instead as some artifact of permanently fractured and artistically bankrupt minds that can't process the real world without some atavistic re-enactor mediation. I can't find the example I want, so seriously, look at this. Just look at it:


It's so exquisitely terrible — the founding fathers are shredding and standing on a table playing a violin solo? — that I resent tossing it into the mix here instead of devoting a whole piece to its transcendent... thingness. (I only hesitate because the video's both educational and intentionally parodic and declares itself so on its Youtube page. But that part hasn't gotten through to exactly the sort of commenters you'd expect it not to get through to, because if anything it represents a slick apotheosis of a kind of political video they're already looking for.) This kind of culture regurgitates down through ages. This is what happens when conservatism and rock collide. The video would unconvert any kid on the cusp of conservatism just as effectively as (to borrow a line from a friend) a Rush live album would unconvert a proto-libertarian with the words, "THIS NEXT SONG IS BY OUR DRUMMER. IT'S ABOUT THE PRIMACY OF THE INDIVIDUAL."

As for rap. Well, rap is just too thuggy. It's what ruined the NBA.

Whenever serious conservatives put on a rap or rock-and-roll suit, it usually wears badly. To a certain extent, all rock and rap is a little gimmicky, but you have to live the gimmick to make it work. Nobody really cares when a bookish high school kid reinvents himself as a bourbon-soaked rock wailer so long as he's committed to it and is passionate about it. If he can sell himself enough on the transformation, the audience is willing to believe him. Ultimately this is why conservative rap tends to fail horribly. They perform at a remove from their own medium, too nervously aware of what they're doing. Most of the time it's trying to keep the blackness of the whole exercise at arm's length: "Sure, I'm rapping, but it's... you know, haha, I'm not like them. Also, not racist."

This is why Wolverines' "O.T.P. (One Term President)" is so shitty. It's so obvious that everyone involved derogates the form and style of what they're doing, so you can't engage what they're doing on anything like a visceral level. The arm's-length aping of form immediately tells you that they'd rather look and act like anything else. They're there not because of rap but in spite of it. This is also why all their preemptive protestations of "we're not racist" ring so hollow. If they're not, what explanation do they have for "haha just playin', guys" distancing from unironically looking and sounding like rap artists in a rap video? If it's not race, then what is it? Culture? Attitude? It all comes back to the joking line above, about the NBA. White people can't stop complaining about how "they" thugged up the game and made it unwatchable. Well, not they, but their culture. Well, not their culture, just an attitude and a cultural thing. Whose culture? Well, er... look, I'm not racist, but....

Look, just please don't think I'm a "rapper." This is parody.

There are other reasons the video's shitty, though. There's the editing and acting. There's the fact that their beat is shitty. And the music is shitty. Whether someone wrote it or sampled it, goddamn does it suck. Their flow sucks; motherfucking Snow blew this shit out of the water with "Informer" about 17 years ago. Their stories suck (you bake PIES???). Their points suck. Their rhymes suck — all end rhymes, Jesus, it's like the last 20 years of hip-hop never happened. Their singer sucks. They couldn't even fucking use autotune well. Of course, all this is excused by saying, "Heh, we didn't really want to sound like rappers," which I'm sure will be the default defense on the song's musical/writing merits as soon as it runs up against a racism charge, at which point I'm sure they'll go on the attack by saying that anyone who detects racism is the real racist, because they're looking to demonize white people based on the victimized status of whiteness. Or something.

Really, the only strategy in their making anything like this is to cause racists to chuckle at how well done it is (and send money), then bait critics to engage the quality or intent. The strategy requires compartmentalizing the video, whereby its appeal isn't part of one discussion, just as its shittiness isn't part of another, just as the shittiness of the people who created it aren't part of yet another one. It makes for an interesting argumentative stab, but it necessitates anyone watching it to overlook that every part of its generation, execution and distribution is uniformly disgusting. To be sure, some people will attack it on only one of its lack of merits, but most people are smart enough to realize that it's comprehensively repulsive. Just looking at its creators says as much.


THE PLAYAS
This song and video was written and performed by the terminally insane. These people are affiliated with World Net Daily, a far-right website that now functions as the de facto home of the Birther movement and, on the surface, looks just legitimate enough that non-insane conservatives are sometimes suckered into mistakenly assigning them something like credibility. The site's famous guest contributors reads like a who's who of the profitably — and only sometimes disingenuously — nuts: Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Walter Williams, Chuck Norris.

WND is famous for embracing as editorial staff policy the assertion that the Y2K bug was fabricated by the Clinton Administration as a planned crisis to enable United Nations' armies to seize control of the U.S. and absorb it into one-world "NWO" government. (I guess that was thwarted by the Invisible Hand???) It has a pernicious habit of publishing op-eds that talk about Anglo-Saxon racial values and their erosion at the tides of immigrants and multiculturalism, then deleting the op-eds and pulling the "Whoops!—how'd that get there?" card whenever someone notices that they're advocating racism. As regards the Israel-Palestine conflict, their record could generously be described as "vigilantly genocidal" toward Arabs and Palestinians. True to self-contradictory paleoconservative form, their abiding respect for the Jewish people involves dropping words like "Nazi" like they're raindrops, arguing that Universal Health Care in the U.S. would lead to nationwide concentration camps and Nazi executions. Again, there's also the "Barack Obama is a Kenyan muslim Nazi communist Bill Ayers terrorist"-Birther thing they've been humping for two years now.

I could go on, but you could read all this on Wikipedia, which World Net Daily has repeatedly accused of being part of an un-American pro-Obama conspiracy. WND staffers plant anti-conservative edits on Wikipedia, then blame Wikipedia when it doesn't delete them fast enough. Then they blame Wikipedia for deleting pro-WND edits from Wikipedia pages, despite the fact that WND publishes stories about how they deliberately vandalize Wikipedia. At one point, WND claimed that Wikipedia had a stated admin policy to delete anything questioning Obama's American citizenship, which was patently untrue, but probably an easy mistake to make when you apparently don't understand Wikipedia's policy of deleting "factual" edits that rely on links to falsified data, forged birth certificates and your run of the mill "made-up shit."

The shitty rap's tie to WND comes in the form of MOLOTOV MITCHELL, a man who journalists would bother to call "confused" if he weren't merely a breathtakingly offensive and unregenerately stupid racist. First of all, there's the fact that he can't stop talking about his conservative American patriotism, yet has styled himself after a guerilla weapon named for Soviet War and Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. Granted, the Finns named it that, as a jeering gift for their enemy, but the name at this point has virtually zero anti-Communist resonance. (Its origins aren't even specifically anti-Communist. It was first used in the Spanish Civil War, by everybody.) The fact is that it's been used all over the globe by just about every military force but is now most identifiable as a guerrilla weapon and a terrorist weapon used in precisely the sort of asymmetrical insurgent fighting that targets American soldiers. And it's got a Soviet name. Basically Molotov Mitchell might as well have called himself "Hijacked American Airlines Plane." Yeah, technically anyone could have hijacked it, but all people are going to think about is the first plane to hit the World Trade Center. The fatuously dumb name scheme thing gets carried over to his Youtube channel, where he goes by the name "Illuminati TV." He has but two names on the internet, and both directly reference conspiratorial anti-American fantasies that only keep retardedly crazy people awake at night.

By now Mitchell's notorious enough that Germany banned his Youtube about Ugandans killing gay people, and HuffPo already profiled him, including direct quotes of his like:

"Two weeks ago, [abortion doctor] George Tiller was killed in a fourth-trimester abortion, a lethal lead injection."

"Has gay culture earned our respect? ... People have to earn respect, no matter who they are. And breaking the records for drug abuse, infidelity and suicide won't make you popular. Getting the government to punish people who don't like you doesn't help either."

It's an unusually good HuffPo article, devoid of a lot of snark and brimming with enough links to establish beyond doubt that Mitchell's a moronic Birther racist homophobe.

As for the other rappers, there's CONSTITUTION KATE, who like 99% of the people who put the word "constitution" in their names online is probably an originalist. Kate probably hasn't read a single bit of constitutional jurisprudence outside of the document itself, but I'm sure that's hardly necessary. All she has to point to is the original document and note that there's nothing in there about Universal Health Care being a fundamental human right or an income tax being legal. (Kate probably doesn't realize that there's nothing in there about how the Supreme Court really works, but whatever.) And I'm sure that, like everyone else who can't stop invoking the constitution as a rigid original document, Kate would be only too willing to revoke her right to vote. I'm sure she's probably cool with reinstating the three-fifths compromise, too.

(Basically what I'm saying is that, apart from everything she thinks, Kate turns me on. If you're reading this, baby, send me nudes. I wanna knock those hipster frames off your nose with the power of love — yeah, I do it to Huey and THE NEWS. I wanna drive your children to hockey practice. I want to sit in the sun with you and watch you desiccate — no pun intended. I want us to build a house together and come across whatever Dorian Gray portrait enables you to look like that, then gaze in admiration about how your true form is your already huge jaw improbably even huger, detached from your head so you can masticate the tormented bodies of a bunch of Mexicans on fire. I want to help you melt down your fillings so you stop hearing whoever it is that makes you do such stupid shit. I want to fall asleep next to you, unfulfilled, as Jay Leno's monologue paints our McMansion bedroom blue. I want to have kids with you, then watch you eat our young. It's okay, girl; we won't abort. I'll let you wait until they're ripe. I want to help you bury gold in the yard.)

Finally there's DJ DOLCE MELODY. She sucks at everything in this video. She's also a racist moron. She's trying to get those rockabilly bangs going on, but it's like her forehead had a growth spurt. This is just me playing CSI, but I think that Dolce fucked her way into the group. Out of all the tone-deaf shit that slides in this crew, shes the only one that had to be autotuned. But you probably just roll with that, with Dolce.

I'm trying to picture how she got this gig, and I can only think of Molotov Mitchell spotting her down the end of the bar, bewitched by the girl with the Herman Munster head and the Betty Page bangs sipping on a cherry Coca Cola with her ruby red lips. He asks her to dance and she says, "Okay, but as long as you're not part black. Their legs have an extra ligament, which is why intellectually superior white athletes can't compete with them at speed positions like wide receiver." He nods, and she insists that he not be too good at it. "It's fine," he replies. "I'm not. Fags have ruined dancing."

Then she does a bump of cocaine off a spoon and assures him that she has it "under control," because of "free will." He doesn't care, because she can do whatever she wants so long as the market's threshold never dips below what she can afford to spend. While they're dancing and she's chewing off her lower lip, she asks him which Ayn Rand rape scene is the hottest. They replicate it in the alley just minutes later, then together kick the shit out of a Korean dishwasher who interrupts them and doesn't speak English. Only at this point does Molotov eject his cocktail.

As for the THE MZA: HOLY SHIT, THE LARD CAN TALK???


THE LYRICS
(All lyrics in bold, responses in plain text.)

Whatever happened to the "HOPE" boy?
Teleprompt this: "You can't stop this, OTP."
Teleprompters? Obama? GRRRR.

It's really a testament to the substance the American right has to offer that blasting a device every politician uses represents an inescapable damnation. At this point, let's blast Obama if he carries note cards with him and then loses his place in his speech due to a torrential downpour. (Real Americans: all Sharpie, all the time.) Let's blast him for sending out letters that have signatures on them that he didn't actually personally sign. Then let's blast him for using photocopiers for those letters. As if that would be the last stop on the outrage express. I bet a staffer wrote part of that letter. On a personal computer, with a word-processing program. A real man writes out every single letter in quill and ink like the founding fathers. Of course, if we'd stayed true to the intentions of about half of them, that nigger wouldn't be able to read in the first place.


Fool me once, shame on me, shame on we
United States of America
Fool me twice? It's not gonna happen, G
"Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."


Fool me once, it happens all the time!
Oh. Perhaps this wouldn't happen so frequently if you weren't an idiot.


Public education made me dumb, man
Ahahaha yes. Thank you, Mr. Party of Personal Initiative and Responsibility. It's public education's fault that you didn't pull yourself up by your bootstraps and learn something anyway despite your disadvantages. Unless you're writing all this in the guise of some stupid midwestern American or black person or something, who was "taken in" by Obama. See, it isn't clear what's happening when you pretend to be stupid and then switch to being "smart" and "incisive," probably because what you consider those last two to be is actually really stupid.


I used to be a pie baker
Look into my eyes, all you'll see is pies
I could make a french apple cobbler with a greyerre crust
The only thing funnier than the gruyere misspelling is the mispronunciation in the song itself. And the only thing funnier than that is, "I USED TO BE A PIE BAKER/LOOK INTO MY EYES, ALL YOU'LL SEE IS PIES." I mean, at best you could call this some tortured metaphor about things being as American as mom and apple pie, but the dude is literally yelling about pies.

You know, his name pie baker/yes he the pie baker/all you other pie bakers are ILLEGITIMATE NIGERIAN MUSLIM FAKERS WHO DON'T HAVE A BIRTH CERTIFICATE OR EVEN ONE FOR MAKING PIES.


r-a-double u, fat girls are lovin dude
Wow, harsh. It's really hateful how he's making these elitist statements about overweight Americans, assuming that they are so hungry that they can't even wait for the pies to bake and instead eat them R-A-double-U.


That was then, nowadays find me on the corner with a Mac 10
I lost my job at the bakery, Obama faked me, so I turned criminal
I'm sellin dr*gs at the terminal
Word. Just like all them niggers slangin' on the streets of West Baltimore. (It's cool, he saw The Wire. He heard it was Obama's favorite documentary.) You know, nigga tries to get a Baker's Square franchise, opens it up, does his best. Then the Obama Secret Police shut it down, cite some New World Order reg about illegal distribution of pies. Man, nigga just tryin' to go straight, but them FDA motherfuckers sayin' his pies ain't pure. He stepped on them pies. Doubled that pie weight, tried to make it back. But them pies cut with powdered sugar, yo. Now he outta business, gotta take that last pie package and trade it in for a full-auto. Now motherfucker gonna lattice-top any nigga step to him. This a pie corner.

Also, thank you for censoring the word "drugs." Can't imagine what would happen if my kid read your lyrics and started baking.


B. Hussein, baby where's my job?
Just words just speeches, ya weakless
Weakless.


OTP, angry mob reppin 2-0-1-2
Karma's gonna get you
Karma? Thanks, but no thanks. YOU CAN KEEP THE PAGANISM.


Why am I still up in Iraq, man?
I dunno, you tell me. Why are American servicemen in a war zone created unnecessarily under false pretenses from a former president whose policies you embraced uncritically? This is like getting angry about Brian Jones' sitar on "Paint It Black" by writing a diss track about Ron Wood.


Whats the holdup? I'm still duckin rounds in the sand, man.
Yes, big-jawed white girl with Fey glasses on, you really are ducking rounds in the sand, man. Look at you, putting it all on the line, jump-cuts whizzing past you, someone in a burka dancing on the sand, your having to remember lines at a camera, even when the camera is shooting at you.


I'm sick of smellin like a mosque after Ramadan
HAHAHAHA I'M SURE LIBERALS WILL CALL US RACIST FOR THIS RAP, BUT IT IS THEM WHO ARE RACISM.


While you smellin like some prawns and filet mignon
We on the battlefield, camouflage khakis and M4's
Blood, sweat and tears for Iraqi's
Below find a list of credible reasons why this quasi-hipster-clad white girl with no obvious health handicaps and an excess of vigor, anger and patriotic feeling hasn't joined a branch of the American military to contribute her service. Please also find an explanation why DJ Dolce, Molotov Mitchell and the MZA haven't either. Please also find a list of reasons why this pose they're striking isn't insulting to any troops in harm's way:


But then I look at you, sittin in the West Wing, won't do anything
but polish up ya Nobel Peace Prize
You dropped charges for terrorists, (WHOA)
You think ya Fergie, ya glamorous (WHOA)
I mean, everything about the rap is bad, but the rhymes are just so bad. Worse, every time you think they might start to be onto something moderately less horrible, they drop some cutting edge pop-cultural bomb like this and just explode another layer of earth beneath entrenched lowered expectations.


You roam the world to apologize, bowin to Saudis, investigatin G.I.'s
But pretty soon, you gonna pay the piper and I don't mean a sniper,
You know, a lot of rap lyrics involve the hint of murder if not the outright threat of it, but this is the first time I think anyone can remember a lyric essentially meaning, "Please do not incarcerate me for my continually implied desire for treasonous murder, because I did not explicitly mean that, even though... but... no, really, I didn't mean that."


My vote's got a teflon coat
Jeremiah Wright, say it for the troops:
"ya chickeeeeennnnssss...comin home to roost"
Friendly reminder that these are the same people who support the discharge of thousands of capable homosexual troops since the beginning of the Iraq war and have no problem with their replacement by thousands of troops who have aggravated assault, sexual assault, robbery and drug-dealing convictions. Some of these people, who go into service because it's the alternative to jailin', have been implicated in the same sort of abuses that delegitimize our presence in Iraq — abuses like excessive beatings, rape and theft. Whatever. Thank God they weren't fags. I'm sure none of the people who were subject or witness to beatings, rapes of thefts will ever hate the United States or do something disadvantageous to it, so long as we remain a Godly nation, because God Is Great.

Also, reader Evan Harper points out that, just after disavowing any intention to talk about presidential assassination, they drop two potential references to assassination: both teflon (which, on bullets, reduces wear on the barrel and helps a rifle fire truer, longer) and the Jeremiah Wright "roost" quote, which itself was taken from Malcolm X's comment on the JFK assassination.


One term President? Naw, I'm not feelin that
Hardcore birther here, let me make it clear fo ya
Barack Hussein, he isn't even president, we ain't seen a BC
He's sealed up all the evidence
There's really no need to add more about this than has already been written.


But now they all come to the MZA, I'm runnin five Tea Parties,
flanked by these freedom fighter hotties
Reminder that the average age of a tea party attendee is only in the 20s because people keep bringing toddlers and infants who have no choice but to attend them. It's demographically and physiologically identical to the breakdown of the total number of family members in an episode of Roseanne. Well, apart from the fact that Roseanne's was probably a union household due to her early-season factory job. But the fat and angry aspects are still 100% spot on.


I'm a right wing extremist, can I get a witness?
You ain't down if you ain't on a watch LIST
There you go. (Not racist or terrorist.)


Socialist medicine, I told ya
Spendin trillions on nothin, I told ya
Hahaha, okay.

UPDATE!

To hear an awesome diss track responding to this video, please click "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Keep Us White."