Today’s Pantload spoor from the LATimes, in a stoopid nutshell:

John McCain’s ineffectual and bellicose rhetoric on Georgia* and impotent demand for NATO intervention puts him miles ahead of Obama’s considered, ineffectual rhetoric, which is really more like Bush playing grabass with volleyball players. And if you ignore David Letterman’s mockery of McCain, you can argue he agrees with me.

If you ignore the fact that McCain sounds delusional and has no fucking clue what he’s doing, he sounds really impressive.

*Even the parts lifted from Wikipedia

The Doughy Pantload has his panties in a twist because Obama mentioned, among a score of other items (ceasefire, mediation, humanitarian assistance, etc., etc., etc., ) the possibility of bringing a resolution before the UN Security Council calling for an end to the fighting:

Why on earth is Obama calling for a UN Security Council resolution, essentially against Russia? Doesn’t he know Russia has a veto? Isn’t it crazy to think that Russia will vote against its national policy? Does Obama understand this? Or is this just the sort of thing Democrats must say whenever something bad happens? What am I missing?

What Jonah is missing is awareness of the bringing of such resolutions with the knowledge that the party holding a veto will be forced to either accede to the will of the Council or further isolate themselves politically. Does this moron actually think no one has ever brought a resolution before the Security Council even with the sure knowledge that it will likely be vetoed? When the US sought a Security Council resolution following North Korea’s invasion, they did so with the awareness and even the expectation that the Soviet Union could end its boycott of the Council and veto the resolution.

Hell, is Pantload stupid enough to think that even if the Security Council passed a resolution, it would somehow be self-enforcing and make the Russians immediately cease operations? If so, why bother with any resolution, ever?

Obviously, Russia is going to have to agree at some point to stop fighting — and asking for a broad resolution for an immediate end to the violence, which would ostensibly include Georgian military operations against Ossetia, might be one way of obtaining it. What is so difficult to understand about that?

Meanwhile, of course, teh Pantload is curiously silent about Bush’s strategery to stop the fighting in Georgia — doing an affably dumb interview with Bob Costas and chumming with the US Olympic baseball team, before surfacing at the Rose Garden briefly and flapping his gums. . . .

That’ll make those pesky Rooskies think twice about their aggression. . .

Normally Jonah Goldberg has a simple and easy to follow thesis, even if typically it is insipid, poorly thought out, and based on a series of falsehoods, myths, distortions or oxymorons. Liberal fascism, for instance.

Today’s Pantload spoor in the LA Times is not up to snuff. Although it is full of Jonah’s usual twaddle, it is a hopelessly unfocused morass of unconnected themes.

Our doughy nitwit tries to weave the death of a famous man, Solzhenitsyn, the demise of an unfamous man, Peter Rodman, the fact that communism was doubleplusungood, and a couple of lines in a speech by Barack Obama in Berlin into a sort of verbal stew about how liberals-heart-communism and Barack Obama is a revisionist because. . . . as crazy as it sounds, because Obama paid homage to Berlin and the airlift which saved West Berlin — during a speech given in West Berlin — without spending the rest of his speech killing a crowd’s enthusiasm with a dissertation on the Cold War and Kissingerian realpolitik. I suspect Solzhenitsyn somehow got thrown into this mutant degenerate spawn of Jonah’s printed mental onanism because his death meant that Jonah could use name without fear, since a corpse is incapable of providing Jonah with yet another Marshal McLuhan moment.

Even by the low standards of god-awful with which we have come to expect from the Pantload’s submissions to the Times, this one fails. It’s as if he had forgot his homework and this crap was all he could come up with during the ride on the very short bus to school.

DoughBob Loadpants: The day after his execrably stupid column asking whether Obama’s call for national service was not equivalent to a call for slavery, can-only-aspire-to-moron-status NRO nepotism exhibit Jonah Goldberg has the temerity to ask whether Obama is “Dishonest or Stupid?”

Why? Because in his view, bilingualism has nothing “to do with the importance of teaching kids a second language” and anyone who things that bilingualism is connected to learning a second language has no idea what he’s talking about.

Pantload, meet Mr. Webster:

Main Entry:
bi·lin·gual·ism
Pronunciation:
\-gwə-ˌli-zəm\
Function:
noun
Date:
1873

1 : the ability to speak two languages 2 : the frequent use (as by a community) of two languages 3 : the political or institutional recognition of two languages

But then again, Jonah’s primary vocation for the past few years has been the exhibition of stupidity to grotesque excess.

Although Jonah’s fact-challenged and intellectually-stunted writing often raises the question “stupid or dishonest” reflection on his past works pretty quickly leads to one conclusion: it’s the stupid.

Well, not really.

Today’s epic Pantload spoor is titled Can Obama rescue Bush?

If history is written by clueless Doughy Pantloads, Bush will be either venerated or overlooked, depending on how lucky he is or how successful we are in blaming others for his fuck ups.

Verbatim Doughy Pantload:

A successful Obama presidency would have the unintended consequence of making Bush’s memoir a success story.

The latest from the Doughy One: an op-ed defending neoconservatism citing an article by arch-neoconservative Robert Kagan.

That’s like quoting an article from a pederast defending child sex.

Goldberg’s latest crapone, however, does contain further proof that the Doughy Pantload remains oblivious to irony. Starting with this wonderful line:

During the post-9/11 age of neo-phobia, when an irrational fear of anything that might be called “neoconservative” gripped the nation, such critiques passed as intelligently nuanced.

Ironic, because there is nothing irrational about fearing the group of influential and incompetent ideologues who “masterminded” the Iraq invasion, an action which a recent Pentagon studied labeled a major debacle. The fact that the administration which gave birth to this debacle continues to rely on the same soggy-headed twits who dreamed up the invasion in the first place should inspire fear, none of it irrational.

Also ironic is Pantload’s use of the term “intelligently nuanced,” after his blunt treatise on so-called “liberal fascism” and years of absurdly ignorant commentary bursting forth from the strained seat of Jonah’s overstuffed pants.

A Pantload op-ed is hardly complete without an absurdly mangled historical misanalogy to demonstrate the depth of his ignorance and analytical deficits. And this one doesn’t disappoint. Attempting to defend the Iraq invasion as an action, he trots out the “examples” of Germany and Japan, the classic neo-conservative retreat to intellectual absolute zero:

America’s forcible promotion of democracy has been both successful (Germany, Japan) and unsuccessful (Vietnam). Where Iraq falls in the win-loss columns is unknowable right now. But the idea that the “Iraq project” is some bizarre and otherworldly enterprise will seem laughable to historians a century from now, even if it is viewed as a disaster.

Of course, America did not attack Germany and Japan with the goal of forcibly promoting democracy, as our bloated neocon idiot suggests. In fact, we didn’t attack them at all; each country declared war on the United States and unleashed unrestricted and total war against American territory, armed forces and merchant shipping, without provocation.

The fact that, after successfully defended ourselves against Axis aggression in the most destructive conflict in history, we found ourselves with no choice other than to occupy and rebuild those countries along a democratic model cannot seriously be taken as a justification to attacking nations which posed little or no threat to us on false premises, in order to install a government to our liking. Especially when that formidable task is undertaken by a group so lacking core competence and expertise as our inept and ideologically blinded Neoconservative warmongers. Compounding the blunder of invading was the burden of the neoconservatives staffing the occupying authority with ideologically compatible incompetents, like Neoconservative Michael Ledeen’s unqualified but well-connected Neocon daughter.

We didn’t choose to occupy Japan and Germany, we did so because we had no other choice after the end of the war. Analogizing World War II to Iraq is like comparing shooting a gun-wielding attacker in self-defense to shooting a stranger in the back because a drunk known to be a liar told you maybe he has a weapon. One is justifiable because you had no other choice; the other is reckless and stupid.

The fact that neoconservatives like Goldberg are incapable of grasping the blatant distinction between defending against aggression and fostering it — a distinction as obvious as the intellectual fat girding Pantload’s thinking, as surely as the physical fat girding his midriff — only serves to underscore why it is rational to fear the neoconservative lunatics who are now pining for yet another war against Iran.

Obviously, the South Americans turned them down.

“This is the first time we have been able to get dates that are undeniably human, and they are 1,000 years before Clovis,” said Dennis L. Jenkins, a University of Oregon archaeologist

I don’t know who poor Clovis is, but whatever happened to flowers and candy?

… so much for the dream of bucolic farm life. The air there will kill you faster than the smog here, according to Discovery News. (Be sure to click and look at their little “worst offenders” slideshow):

Feb. 29, 2008 — Like flatulence that never dissipates, gaseous ammonia and other odorous gases resulting from animal manure can attach to dust particles, leaving behind matter that is both unpleasant and unhealthy for humans, according to new research that evaluated the levels of dust stink.

The study, which will be published in next month’s Biosystems Engineering journal, is among the first to quantify dust gas emissions. Dust from structures housing cattle, laying hens and pigs was studied, with the dust particles produced mainly from feed, manure, bedding, soil and the animals’ dry skin.

Co-author Jongmin Lee explained that an attraction-producing force, known in physics as the Van der Waals force, causes gas molecules to bond with those of the dust. The resulting bond is weaker than most chemical bonds, but it’s enough keep the gas stuck to the dust.

“The reverse of adsorption, desorption, is the transfer of gas from dust particles to the surrounding air, and the principles are the same as for adsorption,” Lee, a researcher in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, explained to Discovery News.

He added that heat can permit the gases to volatize and separate from the dust.

Lee and colleague Yuanhui Zhang therefore created a closed cylinder device that both introduced heat and then allowed for the measurement of the released gas from dust that was scraped off of barns, pipelines and exhaust fans from animal structures located in Illinois. They focused on ammonia, one of the smelliest gases produced by animals.

Based on their findings, laying hens and pigs produced far more ammonia dust than cattle did. The researchers attribute this to the way in which the animals were housed.

Someone must have really hated Mr. Van der Waals to name that “force” after him.

According to Doughy Pantload logic, that is.

Roy actually read Liberal Fascism and had this comment:

We get a hint at the problem early on, when Goldberg defines fascism. “Scholars have had so much difficulty explaining what fascism is because various fascisms have been so different from each other,” he says. But he is unwilling to take as a guide such apparently definitive statements as Mussolini’s (”the resolute negation of the doctrine underlying so-called scientific and Marxian socialism”) — even while calling Il Duce “The Father of Fascism” — prefering instead to emphasize Mussolini’s youthful enthusiasms for Marx and socialism, which Goldberg accepts as proof that Marxism, socialism, and fascism are all the same thing — that is, liberalism.

As a perhaps semi-conscious defense of this selective reading, Goldberg notes that “as a pragmatist, [Mussolini] was constantly willing to throw off dogma, theory, and alliances whenever convenient” — yet he doesn’t seem to grasp that this statement cuts both ways; if Mussolini was just conning people when he denounced the Left, why couldn’t he have been conning them when he embraced it?

Catch that? According to Pantload, since Mussolini was a socialist when in his youth, he was also a socialist when he came to power as a fascist and renounced everything socialist.

Ultra-conservative batshit-crazy David Horowitz was a notoriously a member of the radical left in his younger days, so it’s clear that he, like Mussolini, remains a committed communist rather than the batshit-crazy paranoid conservative he manifests so obviously, or rather that Horowitz’s Conservative group and the Young Spartacists are the same thing.

In the way that socialists and liberals are also fascists.