Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo: Liberal Extremism

Note: every week, news aggregators address hundreds of worthwhile stories or opinions that never catch on, either because they lack an obvious follow-up or because sites that live off ad revenue would rather bang high-traffic drums over and over. Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo provides a summary of good stuff you might have missed. He has a Bachelor's degree in political science, the rank of Field Marshal and was the last ruler of a free Uganda. He has not eaten anyone since 1980.


You Can Keep the 'Climate Change'; I'll Cling to My Fracking and Logs
by IDI AMIN DADA

• Due to budget cuts, the government will shut down or significantly scale back several web projects which increase government transparency. One of those projects involves showing which private companies were awarded stimulus contracts. Surely this move won't benefit companies owing millions in back taxes, for a total of almost $25 billion given to companies that hate the government so much that they want to ensure it won't be able to afford to give them contracts in the future.

• Blue Dog fuckhead Steny Hoyer insists on ruining the well-being of Federal employees, by asking as a part of budget negotiations to bring down their employee benefits to the nonexistent level of the private sector. Give Hoyer credit for mastering the art of Democratic negotiation: abandoning all major demands as a prerequisite for getting to the bargaining table and converting all those golden concessions into the lead of GOP demands rubber-stamped by "liberal" policymakers.

• State Park Obituaries:

California — Democratic (questionable) Governor Jerry Brown has proposed closing a quarter of the state's parks, with 70 scheduled to shutter as a result of budget cuts. Thankfully, closing 16 of those parks may violate federal law, meaning a mere 56 would be closed. Besides, the ones remaining open are already in such bad shape, it's like, who cares?

Ohio - A bill to allow Oil and natural gas drilling in state parks has passed the state house, and famous asshole governor John Kasich supports the measure. Nevermind that fracking for natural gas is like sticking nitroglycerine in your air-popper before the start of movie night, and that it's worse for the environment than just straight-up using coal. The big problem is that otherwise there's just not enough of a chance that Ohio will experience earthquakes, and this is something fracking can finally correct.

Where Have You Gone, Glendolyn Beck? Joe Farah Turns His Lonely Eyes to You

Right-wing publisher Joseph Farah made headlines again for making things up. It's not much of a surprise, falling on the predictability axis somewhere around finding out that Lindsay Lohan was arrested behind a Tony Montana-sized pyramid of blow, or that Ben Roethlisberger forced entry to her house and then her pants. Friends of the site might remember Farah as the man behind both the ultra-conservative website World Net Daily and the idea that the birther rappers Wolverines weren't a total embarrassment.

What makes the current revelation about Farah's willingness to make shit up singular is that he boasted about it to a mainstream blogger who was in the process of trying to establish the parameters of World Net Daily's dishonesty in a published piece. Salon reporter Justin Elliott had already written about how Donald Trump's claims that Barack Obama had spent over $2 million to fight lawsuits from birthers weren't true, then turned his attention to the source of those claims, to further debunk Trump and whomever was spreading them.

Trump's claim was based on a series of stories on the right-wing and Birther news outlet, WorldNetDaily. I emailed WND editor and CEO Joseph Farah 90 minutes before my story was published to ask if he thought Trump's comments were accurate, and whether WND had evidence to back it up. After my piece came out, Farah angrily emailed me to take issue with my characterization of WND as "a discredited birther website." Our subsequent email exchange — in which Farah acknowledged that WND publishes "some misinformation by columnists," which he claimed all opinion journals do — is telling for what it says about the standards of one of the most influential news websites on the right.

I really recommend you go read the article, if only for the ample sources of previous made-up-hilarity from WND (including links to a Photoshopped picture that allegedly proves Obama wasn't somewhere, despite the fact that the person manipulating it forgot to matte out Obama's knee).

Farah's crowing about the standards of his own online newspaper damn himself and it for three reasons: contempt, his essential admission that even he acknowledges his own paper's regular illegitimacy, and bad, bad timing. The last is harder to explain, but the first two are fairly easy. In fact, the contempt part is glaring.

GOP Whackjob Throwdown: Gaffney vs. Norquist

President of the American Center of Spiritual Flames and Security Warmth and friend of the site Frank Gaffney made the news again this week, boycotting the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and alleging that it has been infiltrated by a secret cabal of agents of the Muslim Brotherhood.

These were damning charges, tying the kickoff weekend of conservative mendacity's 12-month regular season with an Islamic internationalist group whose breakaway factions have included some of the most notorious terrorists of the last quarter century. But Gaffney went one better, claiming that the prime agents in this conspiracy were Grover Norquist, his wife and Suhail Kahn, a man who spearheaded pro-Muslim outreach for the George W. Bush White House. There was only one problem with Gaffney's boycott of CPAC: he wasn't officially invited to it.

Take it away, Think Progress:

Gaffney was actually prohibited from participating in CPAC — disinvited from speaking this year by conference organizers fed up with his increasingly vicious attacks on fellow conservative leaders. Indeed, Gaffney appears to have invented the entire theory about the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrating CPAC as a pretext to explain his absence from the event.

A source close to conference organizers told ThinkProgress that Gaffney was “specifically not to be invited” to speak at the conference this year because CPAC Chairman David Keene and other conservatives were “sick of him” attacking other conservatives. “The whole boycott thing was just to save face,” the source said.

This is the sort of thing that happens to policy center presidents when they don't walk everywhere bearing a flaming scepter of insinuation and purified anti-Muslimry.

It's hard to tell whose side to take. Not even appearance makes one distinct. Variations on a theme of cuddly keep Dana Perino's deadly idiocy slightly cute, while Ann Coulter's deadly idiocy seems like the spikes in a North Vietnamese pit trap, but here neither man stands out. On the one hand, you have Gaffney's supercilious faux-academician "Tweed Spock" persona, one eyebrow perpetually theatrically raised over a herringbone ensemble. On the other, you have Norquist's vibe of the eternal midget anti-tax vampire, which he seems to try to change up every few years by adjusting the length on his Norelco beard trimmer, but which nevertheless fails to hide the fact that his contract with the devil has kept him ageless.

'Alvin Greene for Senate' Goes Viral, Awesome

I remember being on the fence about Alvin Greene, and I know I wasn't alone. His candidacy for South Carolina's open senate seat came out of nowhere, and his immediate personal impact was still stuck there for days. Truth be told, my first impression was that he looked like that internet cat who is outraged about your failure to remember the chicken nuggets.

The early rumor was that Republican operatives had again paid for a straw-man Democratic candidate, reprising an old southern GOP trick of queering the purity of the turf by using money and back-channel influence to create a pliable and more beatable opposition. It seems like it shouldn't work, but it's easier to create candidates in states without strong opposition party machines, because the absence of value the party sees in investing in the state opens the field to more x-factor personalities. South Carolina is a Democratic state only every four years; the rest of the time the Democrats treat it like a vague testing ground for people and not something to really go to war over. At first, Greene's reticence only fueled rumors that he might be this kind of GOP-planted wild card. But after weeks in which no financial shenanigans have been discovered, I have to think he's sincere.

Apparently I'm not the only one, because a spontaneous user-generated online campaign has blossomed around Greene (which has been given the stamp of legitimacy from MSNBC) including Twitter support and this original song and video by a group calling themselves, "MC Grassroots feat. The Real Americans." It's awesome, check it out:

Cliff Kincaid and Right Side News: When Gay Abortions Are Arizona's Down's Genocide

People send in links pretty often, and most of the time there's not much to do with them, short of repeating earlier pieces or pasting a picture I have of myself from the time I visited a church in Brazil and started weeping blood. Now and then, though, someone tweets or IMs something fascinating. Last week, a very funny Twitter poster and nice guy named Sskylark sent me a link to a website called Right Side News and their article, "George Will Sells Out [sic] to Cultural Corruption."

In the interest of citing sources, I will provide relevant links, but first let me implore you not to click either the link to the site or the article in question. (Most of the article is quoted below.) I know; you're tempted, drawn with a complex and unfamiliar yearning toward their content. They offer news from the Right Side, a pledge that unhouses your beliefs. You were wrong all this time and never even knew it. What side are you even on? The wrong side? The side that has more animal droppings in its food? The side that can't gamble well? You will not find these answers at these links. Instead, you could only destabilize the fragile world of simultaneous conservatism-and-correctness that their name has erected.

According to their media kit (do not click), 77% of their audience is aged 45-74. Feral youths hopping willy-nilly from this site will only tear their ad algorithms away from absorbent adult pants toward discounts on absorbing African beats. Worse, you might crash their servers. Accustomed as they are to 3,200-5,500 readers per day, referred readers from this site could dangerously increase their traffic by 50-100%, and conservatives are constitutionally unprepared for flooding. As for why a dead African dictator writing 10-15 times per month can compete popularly with dozens of contributors posting daily articles and op-eds, know too that popular approval and demand is the nostrum of the liberal, who needs his seething hordes to overwhelm the elite and narrow privilege of hard, sensible reality.

Field of Schemes II: Obama's Not a Natural-Born Man

The other week, while talking to a friend of mine, I extolled the awesomeness of the multiple baseball games I could watch on Opening Day with MLB Extra Innings, and expressed dismay that my backlog of article ideas seemed to be all book reviews. At this moment, President Obama threw out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals' home opener, and I thought, "Hel-lo, let's see what's happening at the National Review."

A little over a month ago, Mr. Awesome had this idea about Newsweek: "I bet I could go to Newsweek.com, like, right now, and the first story I'd see would be a complete puff piece with no information or insight." He's right, and to a certain extent, this is always true of the National Review and the Weekly Standard. Only instead of puff pieces without information, the daily fare is venomous attack propped up by fraudulent claims to research, baseless appeals to history or the rich chutzpah of either lies "linked" to sourced material or spun from whole cloth. It's just as vacuous as Newsweek, but the vacuity is tinged with contempt and malevolence. It's like the difference between staring at an empty cardboard box or at an empty shipping crate studded with rusted nails and graffitied with death's heads and a picture of someone having sex with your mother.

Anybody could write two articles per day, forever, just refreshing the Weekly Standard or National Review and breaking down the current iteration of craven dishonesty. The trouble is that it's exhausting. American conservatives are on to a sweet deal, here: making shit up is not a time-intensive gig. And somehow the burden of proof always falls on the people who note the absence of credibility. Forthright people are probably already busy reading difficult books with facts in them, so merely trying to course-correct the national dialogue involves doubling their workload. For the most part, this is why I don't bother. I have shit to do, like write about Amish pornography.

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.

Greenspan to UN: Let My Orly Go

Note: we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo?, like to broaden our coverage of the national discourse by occasionally turning to voices and viewpoints not represented by our regular contributors. To discuss "Birther Queen" Orly Taitz's attorney's recent announcement that she has sought the UN's protection from Barack Obama's skilled army of ACORN-trained assassins, we again turn to former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.

Orly Taitz, I Want You to Seek Asylum in My Pants
by ALAN GREENSPAN

Despite jabs I've suffered over the years for my "vedic calm" and "mandarin reticence," I am no different from any other human being and feel the need to reach out to others in their times of trial.

No, not the vast majority. I've never cared for them, to be perfectly honest. Especially not those who are armed and certainly as few people as possible who could be called "poor" or, worse, announce themselves as such before the driver can get around to the side of the car. But I am not inhuman.

Fucked-Up Video Wednesday: I Took All the Brown Acid

I'm not going to sport with anyone's patience or intelligence by pretending I found this junk all on my own. The first video was linked off Deadspin and is another product from the good people at Everything Is Terrible! — a blog devoted to sharing edited versions of videos found on old VHS tapes at second-hand stores. They're the people who found the amazingly bad "It's Time for Cat Massage!" and this nugget called "Look What God Made!"

I can't describe the following. Deadspin made a crack about watching this and then checking the water supply for drugs. It's not a bad idea. Everything is wrong with this video: about half a dozen classic children's songs rewritten with terrible slant rhymes; bad interaction with the CGI, even though the CGI is just a baseball animated over a real-life baseball; clumsy voiceover on children frozen with horrifying rictus grins; characters that look like Towelie from South Park; a girl being reassured that a baseball won't hurt her if she gets hit by it because BB the Baseball is "too sweet to hurt anybody"; it goes on.

Give Patrick McHenry (R-NC) Islamophobic Birther Tweets or Give Him More Just Like Them

Do you use Twitter? Why not try an experiment? Take an apolitical Twitter account. Make a racist or verbally violent comment on muslims or Obama's supposed conspiracy to destroy white, conservative Christian America. Append the hashtag #tcot to the comment so it gets filtered into a feed read by people interested in the "Top Conservatives on Twitter." Then ask yourself a question:

Q: How long will it take for someone to follow your feed or RT (re-tweet) your comments in approval?

A: Not long at all. But what may surprise you is that your new fan may be Republican United States Representative for North Carolina's 10th District, Patrick McHenry.

That's what happened to a Twitter user named MagicHDetective, after posting the following tweets satirizing far-right paranoia over Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hasan:

And here is the email notification he received from Twitter just a minute after that last tweet, showing him that Representative McHenry was now following his tweets:

It's My Birthday!

Seventy-nine years ago today, I plopped forth out of my mother's yawning ladyparts and onto the land I love so much, The Belgian Congo Zaire Democratic Republic of the Congo somewhere near where birthers say Obama was born. Some things never change. You rule a country on a throne of Hennessy empties and steal from the people, and apparently now Barack Obama steals from disadvantaged white people. According to those birther guys, he and I are a lot alike. At least they're consistent. Their thesis seems to be: black people steal.

Anyway, wow, what a long strange trip it's been. I hope you all had a great summer!

Now, what do you get for the guy who has it all? I honestly can't tell you. I hadn't even seen this coming — like the date isn't really even that important to me — so I didn't put together a gift list. I tried going over to Stormfront, the world's #1 white supremacist website, to get some ideas of What African Leaders Spend Their Money On, but even all those suggestions seemed too predictable. Best not to get me anything.

Besides, I feel I owe you guys something. For a while now we've been about a third of the way through redesigning this site to make it look a little more professional and to add more widgets and tables to it, while still keeping a sparsely elegant look. We came up with something that (surprisingly) turned out very Gawker-esque — the same textual width down the middle, but with nicely distinct and unflashy columns down both sides — and hopefully we can get that rolled out within a month or two. Unfortunately, the economy being what it is, we're paying our designers in the sort of cash that doesn't inspire quick work — or even work at all! — and I can't blame them for not snapping to it. Hopefully publicizing their lollygagging shames them a bit into getting some more stuff done.

And if the economy stays as horrible as it is through that process, maybe we'll integrate some sort of shameless "Look at Our Amazon Wish Lists and Buy Something off Them Here!" widget in one of the new columns, and we can celebrate my birthday by giving me things any day of the year. Until then, I'm celebrating by corning six pounds of brisket and drinking Irish beers.

L'chaim!

This Is What Birthers Believe

I kinda wish there was a little more going on with this, because I feel like they dropped the ball on a couple of potential gags. The most obvious one to go for is the fact that they're plotting this in the early 1960s, designing a conspiracy for a black man to take over the United States at right around the same time whites were trying to flush them out of streets with fire hoses and the National Guard had to personally escort them to college. Granted, some birthers think this plot was only cooked up decades later, but enough believe in its creation from the very beginning to merit pointing it out. Nothing makes the farce of this Obama conspiracy plainer than the fact it was supposedly hatched at a point when it would seem most likely to fail.

Birthers Are Awesome

Some people get mad at birthers, and occasionally I'm no different. Most of the time, though, I think they're amazing. There's just something so grandly foolish about believing that Barack Obama's parents set him, as an infant, on a nearly 50-year course of immaculate deception on the one-in-billions shot that he'd become President of the United States. It's even nuttier when you realize he was born in an era when people still wanted to set the hoses on blacks who merely wanted to be present at the same part of a lunch counter as whites.

That's the great thing about conspiracies, though: making sense is always secondary to their being scary as hell. I remember reading a book by Richard "Detective John Munch" Belzer once in which he spent an early chapter explaining how the moon landing was part of a plot by the U.S. government to exploit space for some reason or other; then, in a later chapter, he explained how the moon landing was faked by the CIA. At no point during the book's editing did it seem like a big deal that the two chapters' both being "true" meant that either one or both were wrong.