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First Amynda implodes, now Pharyngurl is, in his inimitable style, leaping about and flinging his stinking emissions at Scott Adams. Never one to worry about making sense, he’s now accusing the creator of Dilbert of having “a piss-poor sense of humor”.

One wonders what he’ll do for an encore, assert that Bill Gates isn’t rich? That Michael Medved isn’t gay? That Big Chilly is not a sex machine to all the chicks? What Amynda and Pharyngurl have in common, besides their tendency towards foam-flecked rhetoric, is their combination of demonstrable ignorance with ad hominum-oriented arrogance. Neither of them is anywhere nearly as bright as they appear to believe, and both of them are apparently foolish enough to believe their own hype.

I mean, Pharyngurl’s a professor, so he must be highly intelligent, right? But he’s a professor at Minnesota freaking Morris! I grew up in Minnesota and let’s just put it this way, Minnesota-Morris is not exactly a fall-back school for kids applying to the Ivy League, or the MIAC schools for that matter. It’s basically a community college with a hockey team.

What neither Amynda nor Pharyngurl have every understood is that holding “correct” opinions is not necessarily a sign of intelligence, especially when those opinions can be demonstrated to be at least questionable. A predilection for name-calling in the place of legitimate, logical argumentation is always the sign of a fourth-rate mind.

Amynda is barely on the job before she manages to get a fiasco named after her. While it is an accomplishment of sorts, I truly thought she’d be able to do more unintentional damage to the Edwards campaign before she was inevitably “asked” to resign:

The Edwards-Marcotte Fiasco

Before entering politics, Edwards was one of the state’s best-known civil attorneys*. He even worked in the law firm of Wade Smith, Collin Finnerty’s lead attorney in the lacrosse case. So if anyone should be sensitive to massive prosecutorial abuse, it’s Edwards.

His response? First silence—and then, as Liestoppers and Betsy Newmark have noted, appointing as his campaign’s lead blogger a figure who has branded the players guilty, in ugly rhetoric that almost makes Wendy Murphy look temperate.

Amanda Marcotte wrote on the Edwards blog that she came to her post after a stint at Pandagon, “which is one of the top liberal political blogs on the internet and known mostly for insightful and often humorous political blogging.” [emphasis added]

What kind of “insightful” blogging has Marcotte offered on the [Duke] lacrosse case? Liestoppers had the graphic detail:

In the meantime, I’ve been sort of casually listening to CNN blaring throughout the waiting area and good fucking god is that channel pure evil. For awhile, I had to listen to how the poor dear lacrosse players at Duke are being persecuted just because they held someone down and fucked her against her will—not rape, of course, because the charges have been thrown out.

Can’t a few white boys sexually assault a black woman anymore without people getting all wound up about it?

So unfair.

Yes, how dare a rape victim act confused and bewildered like she was raped or something.

Natalia, do you know the details of the case? If so, why do you think a women enthusiastically jumped into a sexual situation with men making slavery jokes at her? Furthermore, what is your theory on why she supposedly looooooved having sex with guys holding her facedown on the bathroom floor? There’s no “if” they behaved in a disrespectful manner. We have conclusive evidence that happened.

This is about race and class and gender in every way, and there’s basically no way this woman was going to see justice. In her part of the country, both women and black people are seen as subhuman objects to be used and abused by white men.

Yeah, I know, Alon. Which is why I’m frustrated that people are pretending ‘can’t identify which one raped her” somehow equals ‘wasn’t raped’. I had some initial confusion about exactly who was assaulting me when I was assaulted, but that doesn’t mean that his hands weren’t actually where they were.

Plus, the media is acting like these men are exonerated!

After James Taranto brought attention to the words above, Marcotte deleted them (so much for “transparency” in the Edwards campaign).

What, you mean it’s not a good idea to put a foul-mouthed feminist in charge of public relations for your political campaign… in the South? Boy, you sure learn something new every day!

If this had happened closer to the real campaign season or if Edwards was a bona fide candidate, I’d suspect that Amynda was a Clinton plant. But as anyone who has paid any attention to Pandagon knows, that’s just Our Amynda being Amynda.

The funny thing is that whereas I was falsely accused of removing controversial material from my column – I most certainly did not and every single word is still on voxday.net in all its original Medved-stroke-inspiring glory – Amynda has now openly admitted to doing so. I wonder if all of those who foolishly tried to jump down my throat are going to be criticizing her for this post-facto attempt to hide her words.

It seems electing B. Hussein Obama to the presidency might not be all bad:

Only two weeks after the elections in November of 2008, the United States of America, a nation of former greatness, lay in absolute desolate ruin. Within the previous 72 hours a series of eight successive, delayed nuclear devices had been detonated. Indescribably large portions of metro Washington, D.C., Boston, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, and two thirds of the island of Manhattan have been turned into steaming craters. Millions are dead. President George W. Bush is in intensive care; two-thirds of the Cabinet, including the vice president, are missing or dead.

President-elect Barack Obama faces the most enormous challenge of any incoming president in the history of the nation.

The question is if the benefit of getting rid of DC, Los Angeles and Manhattan are worth sacrificing Boston, Chicago and Dallas. My feeling is that it is not, because I simply can’t countenance the disturbance of Tom Landry’s grave at the Sparkman-Hillcrest Memorial Park.

By the way, what is “an indescribably large portion” of a city? Is Kevin McCullough unfamiliar with the classic unit of measure “the square mile”? If I recall correctly from my time in Florida, Jacksonville is the largest American city in terms of area at 874 square miles, therefore the size of the steaming craters in each of the eight aforementioned cities can presumably be described.

A self-described feminist at the Daily Telegraph begins to have second thoughts:

I was half asleep in the front seat the other day, coming back from some exhausting tour of an educational establishment, and in the back seat were two twentysomething female graduates. They were talking about men, so I tried to focus, while keeping my eyes cunningly half closed.One of them made the eternal feminine complaint. “All men are useless these days,” she said. “Yeah,” said the other. “The trouble is that they haven’t risen to the challenge of feminism. They don’t understand that we need them to be more masculine, and instead they have just copped out.”I am afraid that, at this point, I copped out myself, and slid into unconsciousness. But before I went under I thought, hmmm, this is interesting; and I think back to that conversation as I read that women continue their astonishing dominance of university admissions.
Look at those girls go! Women now make up 57 per cent of university entrants, and they outnumber men in every subject — including maths and engineering….

Speaking as an ardent feminist, I expect that this will have many wonderful results: a culture that is more feng shui and emotionally literate and altogether nicer, and an economy that benefits from unleashing the phenomenal energy and talents of British women who are — if GCSEs, A-levels and university entrance results mean anything — currently giving the male sex a good old intellectual thrashing.Obviously a neanderthal corner of my heart worries about some aspects of the coming feminisation. Will we all become even more namby-pamby, elf-n-safety-conscious, regulation-prone and generally incapable of beating the Australians at anything than we already are? Hmm? And even if the feminist revolution is good and unstoppable (and it is both), we should perhaps consider some of the downsides — and the most interesting is that greater equality between the sexes is actually leading to greater division between the classes. Here’s how.Since the emergence of our species, it has been a brutally sexist feature of romance that women on the whole — and I stress on the whole — will want to mate/procreate with men who are either on a par with themselves, or their superior, in socio-economic and intellectual attainment. A recent study shows that if a man’s IQ rises by 16 points, his chances of marrying increase by 35 per cent; if a woman’s IQ rises by 16 points, her chances of getting hitched decline by the same amount.Now look at those university entrance figures again, feed in that basic human prejudice, and some recent social phenomena become intelligible. If you have a sudden surge in the number of highly educated women — more women than men — then it is not surprising that you have a fair few Bridget Jones-type characters who are having a tough job finding Mr Darcy. It is a gloomy truth that 40 per cent of female graduates born in 1970 are likely to enter their forties childless.

Needless to say, the future cat ladies of Britain are too short-sighted to see any problem with this:

As a very well educated, highly career-oriented, straight, single-ish woman in my early 20s – why ever should I want to get married and have kids? Far too many other things to be doing, thanks.
Posted by Jenny on February 1, 2007

Oh, I don’t know, perhaps because living under the regime of the more demographically friendly societal structure that replaces the unsustainable status quo is likely to prove rather less pleasant than the traditional Christian society that was abandoned in favor of equality and feminism.But it is encouraging to see that even those who have led the cheers for feminism in the past are beginning to recognize that it is a societal dead-end. Post-feminist society has not yet been fully articulated, but the significant trends are developing well in advance of the chattering classes. These are some of the probable developments:

1. The decline of the traditional university degree. Degrees are already scorned in a leading technology industry, the games industry, this trend will spread as more individuals, mostly men, realize that wasting 4-6 years and tens of thousands of dollars on a ticket to a dead-end job is a stupid investment.

2. Educated women will find it increasingly difficult to find a man who will even date them, let alone marry them. This is not yet a conscious trend, it will become one soon. I was one of the first guys I knew who wouldn’t even go out on a first date with a career girl, this is becoming an increasingly common dealbreaker among the younger crowd.

3. Society will increasingly provide psychological rewards to women who bear children and penalties to those who don’t. This is already the case in dying European countries, where people will literally stop families in the street and congratulate them on having more than one child.

It took seventy years for the fundamental flaws of communism to cause communist society to collapse. Full-fledged feminism has only been in the ascendance for 34 years; while it is even less sustainable than communism, it still has another 25 years or so to go before it collapses entirely. I think an 8 to 12-year experience of female leaders is necessary to demonstrate the scope of feminism’s virulence in a final gasp before women finally accept that it is a poisonous ideology and abandon it en masse.

Insty doesn’t cover the half of it:

A big vulnerability is going to be on the gun issue, I think: It is for him [Giuliani] what Campaign Finance Reform is for McCain, something that chases away GOP base voters who lean libertarian.

Giuliani cannot win the nomination, nor would he win the election. He’s far more hopelessly unelectable than any of the genuine conservatives that the faux conservative media are trying to chase off as unelectable, he’s less electable than Bob Dole, for that matter.

Meanwhile, National Review editor Katherine Lopez demonstrates how the conservative commentariat is increasingly out of touch with the conservative Americans who still, mysteriously, to read them.

Glenn Reynolds thinks ” A big vulnerability is going to be on the gun issue.” I dunno I don’t think most Americans want New Yorkers running around with guns. I’m no libertarian but I bet he gets a pass.

Of course, this is the woman who is dumb enough to think that Americans are pining for a third Bush in the White House. Sure, Jeb talks a good game, but the problem is that after the lies his father and his brother told to get elected, no one with more than half a brain, conservative or liberal, believes anything that comes out of the mouth of anyone named Bush.

Most of the Americans who belong to the NRA or more serious gun-rights organizations aren’t libertarians. They are conservatives, a group that National Review and the Republican party once represented. Clearly they are no longer interested in doing so, their protests notwithstanding.

I realize there’s a bit of a tempest in a teapot about all this, but I don’t think Senator Biden’s words are anything but mildly amusing and generally accurate:

Mr. Biden is equally skeptical—albeit in a slightly more backhanded way—about Mr. Obama. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Let’s face it, Al Sharpton isn’t the most handsome man, he looks like an overbaked walrus and he’s most famous for his attachment to a girl rolled in fecal matter. Jesse Jackson is a plumped-out, rapping pimp. And while there are articulate and presentable public figures like JC Watts in Washington, they are Republicans and therefore out of the mainstream as Democrats like Senator Biden and the New York Times define it.

As Biden is essentially pointing out, B. Hussein Obama makes for a lovely token Negro who can be relied upon to avoid breaking into rap, impregnating the staff or stealing the silverware, and who will stay safely home on the left-liberal plantation despite the occasional genteel nod to the opposition. His primary appeal is that he makes liberal whites feel good about themselves for supporting him, which will make him the perfect fall accessory for the Lizard Queen. She needs a way to keep the liberal whites enthused enough to show up on election day since she’ll begin tacking hard to the center as soon as she feels the nomination is in hand; dangling a storybook Negro in appeal to the self-proclaimed moral superiority of the left-liberal voter is one sure way to do that.

The point is, as Biden surely recognizes, Obama isn’t running for president, he’s running for vice-president. I don’t pretend to know what’s in it for him, as he’s as likely to get chewed up and spit out by the Clinton Machine as he is to become the Lizard Queen’s heir apparent in 2016, but then, the ineffable mechanics of an ambitious politician’s mind are thankfully alien to me.

So obviously, this didn’t happen:

The daughter of a church minister who made false allegations of rape against four separate men has been jailed for two years. Abigail Gibson, 22, made the “vile” claims against a work colleague, an ex-boyfriend, a stranger and even her father, Ian, who is a respected minister at a young offenders’ institute. One of her victims, Mark Berry, 26, had known Gibson for just two weeks after meeting her at a supermarket where they both worked. But when she learned he had complained to bosses about being bullied by one of her friends at the store, she set about trying to get him sacked.

I think that the penalty for knowingly bringing a false charge against someone should be the same as the false charge brings. Although of course in Cool Brittania these days, it’s entirely possible that two years in jail is the maximum penalty for rape.

As I’ve been writing for the last three years, the neocons and warbangers have no idea what they’re talking about. They don’t know military history, they don’t understand military strategy and they don’t comprehend the likely outcomes of the actions they’ve been advocating. Why so many conservatives continue to pay attention to them and echo their demonstrably incorrect blathering is a mystery to me:

We have been getting it wrong in Iraq, says new US commander

President George W Bush faced fierce new criticism over his policy in Iraq yesterday as both military strategists and his new commander in the Middle East delivered negative assessments of America’s prospects of quelling violence in the war-torn country.

In a blow to Mr Bush’s latest attempt to seize back the initiative in Iraq after almost four years of violence, Adml William Fallon, his nominee to be the new head of Central Command in the Middle East, said that the Bush administration needed to be “more realistic” about its objectives and admitted that he had no way of defining victory in Iraq. He told a Senate confirmation hearing: “I don’t know what winning is.”

…. In a damning assessment of America’s record to date, he said: “Securing the stability of the country has been more difficult than anticipated. Our ability to correctly assess the political, economic and security situation in Iraq has been lacking.

“It seems pretty obvious to me that what we have been doing has not been working,” he said, adding that the US could not hope to win “militarily”.

So, here’s the new commander in the Middle East repeating the same thing I’ve been saying about the past strategy… I’ll be interested to see if all the neocons and Three Monkeys in the convervatariat admit that they’re wrong or not, or if all of their fans will hold them accountable. Somehow, I rather doubt it.

When one of the guys responsible for winning comes out and says “I don’t know what winning is”, you can be assured that not only will you not win, but you’ll be lucky if you can manage to avoid getting your head handed to you.

Don’t you military ignoramuses understand that this “triumph of the will” stuff won’t work any better for the USA than it did for Germany in WWII or the Arabs during the Arab-Israeli wars? Winning wars depends primarily on technological advantage and logistics, and in the current situation, our technology is of little use and the logistics are against us.

If China or Russia or even Turkey chose to weigh in with their sometime ally Iran in the next year or so, the US forces in Iraq would risk elimination without the resort to nuclear weapons. At this point, I’m not concerned about winning, whatever Admiral Fallon may eventually determine it to be, I’m starting to worry about extricating the troops successfully.

Blithely assuming that everyone who isn’t in will stay out is an error that has been made by more than one defeated combatant.

Meanwhile, Bane links to a letter from a soldier in an Iraqi ops center:

Know this, our soldiers will not quit. We win every battle, we hold any piece of ground that we want to take. Do not listen to those in Washington who influence events by dishonesty, manipulation and greed. Listen to your hearts and know that America is a winner. We will not accept defeat. Don’t be fooled by the news media who so dishonorably portrays one side of the story for gain and sensationalism. We are not losing, we are not running, the enemy is reeling and is scared….

I tell you, we are kicking ass here. It’s good to be on the offensive.”

These two messages demonstrate the difference between STRATEGY and TACTICS. It is entirely possible to kick non-stop ass, win every battle and still lose the war. Success is quite often the father of failure, and it takes strong mental discipline to be able to discern the point at which hitherto successful tactics are nevertheless leading one towards a failed strategy.

RK sends us a link informing us that John Edwards’ campaign is officially doomed:

New Blogmaster
Amanda Marcotte in Diaries Feed of Amanda Marcotte’s Diary
1/30/2007 at 5:50 EST

This is both my first post to the Edwards blog and my announcement that I’m joining the presidential campaign for John Edwards for 2008. I’ll be taking over the job of Blogmaster (mistress?) over the course of the month of February.

Here’s a nice chance to compare political acumen. I’ve been asserting that Hillary Clinton has not only the nomination, but the election in the bag. Amynda obviously feels that John Edwards has a shot. Time will tell.

Of course, considering that the Edwards’ campaign will be saddled with the incomparable intellect that we’ve so often seen on display at Pandagon, it’s really not a fair test, is it.

Merely the latest demonstration of why the Original Cyberpunk is the most undeservingly unappreciated science fiction writer today.

He was waiting there for me, in the good chair. “Hello, Bruce.”

“Hello, Mr. President.”

“Please, call me Dick.”

I tried to. I couldn’t. “Sorry, sir. I can’t. Even Jack Bauer would call you ‘Mr. President.'”

He frowned. “Jack who?”

“Never mind. It’s good to see you again, sir.”

If you haven’t been reading it, you’ve been missing out. Go catch up, right now.