Democrat, Democratic, Democratical.

Today, I encountered a word I'd never noticed before: "democratical." I was writing about the "common sense" meme and arrived at the Thomas Paine pamphlet "Common Sense" and John Adams's criticism of it as "so democratical, without any restraint or even an attempt at any equilibrium or counter poise, that it must produce confusion and every evil work."

The OED defines "democratical" to mean the same thing as "democratic," and it gives some usage examples going back to 1589 and continuing only to 1850:

1589   ‘M. Marprelate’ Hay any Worke for Cooper 26   It is Monarchicall, in regarde of our head Christ, Aristocraticall in the Eldership, and Democraticall in the people.
1608   D. Tuvil Ess. Polit. & Morall f. 4v,   Ostracismes practiced in those Democraticall and Popular states of elder times.
1686   in Coll. Scarce & Valuable Tracts (1748) I. 111   The Democratical Man, that is never quiet under any Government.
1791   J. Boswell Life Johnson anno 1775 I. 460,   I abhor his Whiggish democratical notions and propensities.
1850   G. Grote Hist. Greece VIII. ii. lxiv. 231   The levy was in fact as democratical and as equalising as..on that memorable occasion.

There are also a 3 examples of "democratical" as a noun, defined to mean the same thing as "democrat." 2 of these are by Thomas Hobbes:

1651   T. Hobbes Leviathan ii. xxii. 122   Aristocraticalls and Democraticalls of old time in Greece.
1679   T. Hobbes Behemoth i, in Wks. VI. 199   The thing which those democraticals chiefly then aimed at, was to force the King to call a parliament.

What, you may ask, is the "-al" ending doing after the "-ic" ending? When do suffixes double up like that? This seems related to the present-day controversy about using the word "Democrat" as an adjective, when GOP types refer to the "Democrat Party," instead of the "Democratic Party." There's an insult perceived in leaving off the "-ic" ending, but, oddly, in the case of "democratical," there's insult in adding more letters — "-ic" plus "-al."

Does "-al" have any meaning? "Forming adjectives with the sense ‘of or relating to that which is denoted by the first element'" is the OED definition, which seems to say, it's just a way to turn something into an adjective. But that doesn't explain "-ical." The "-ic" already made the adjective. What's up with "-ical"? What are the other "-ical" words? Comical, radical... logical...

I know what you're thinking: "The Logic Song" by Supertramp!

When I was young, it seemed that life was so wonderful, a miracle, it was beautiful, magical
And all the birds in the trees, well they'd be singing so happily, joyfully, playfully, watching me
But then they send me away to teach me how to be sensible, logical, responsible, practical
And they showed me a world where I could be so dependable, clinical, intellectual, cynical...
I said now, watch what you say, now we're calling you a radical, a liberal, fanatical, criminal
Won't you sign up your name, we'd like to feel you're acceptable, respectable, presentable, a vegetable...
But I'm thinking so logical ...

Am I thinking too logical? So... musical interlude over. What does "-ic" mean? It's just another ending used to make an adjective and means "in the manner of" or "pertaining to" or some such generic way to say what differentiates an adjective from a noun. So what's with the suffix pile-up in the "-ical" words? Wonderfully, magically, the OED has an entry for "-ical":

Sometimes forming an adjective from a noun in -ic, as music, musical, but more frequently a secondary adjective, as comic, comical, historic, historical. Its origin appears to have been the formation in late Latin of adjectives in -ālis on nouns in -ic-us, or in -icē, e.g. grammatic-us grammarian, grammaticē grammar, grammatic~āl-is grammatical, clēricus clergyman, clerk, clēricāl-is clerical. So in medieval Latin, chīrurgicāl-is, dominic-āl-is, medicāl-is, mūsicāl-is, physicāl-is. In French, adjectives of this type are few, and mostly taken directly from Latin formations, as chirurgical, clérical, grammatical, médical, etc. But in English they are exceedingly numerous, existing not only in all cases in which the term in -ic is a noun, but also as the direct representatives of Latin adjectives in -icus, French -ique. Thus we find before 1500 canonical, chirurgical, domestical, musical, philosophical, physical. Many adjectives have a form both in -ic and -ical, and in such cases that in -ical is usually the earlier and that more used. Often also the form in -ic is restricted to the sense ‘of’ or ‘of the nature of’ the subject in question, while that in -ical has wider or more transferred senses, including that of ‘practically connected’ or ‘dealing with’ the subject. Cf. ‘economic science’, ‘an economical wife’, ‘prophetic words’, ‘prophetical studies’, ‘a comic song’, ‘a comical incident’, ‘the tragic muse’, ‘his tragical fate’. A historic book is one mentioned or famous in history, a historical treatise contains or deals with history. But in many cases this distinction is, from the nature of the subject, difficult to maintain, or entirely inappreciable.

Adjectives of locality, nationality, and language, as Baltic, Arabic, Teutonic, and those of chemical and other technical nomenclature, as oxalic, ferric, pelagic, dactylic, hypnotic, megalithic, have usually no secondary form in -al.

That's long and complicated, though interesting as hell, but I boldfaced the bit that's most useful to understand what John Adams and Thomas Hobbes were getting at. It might be helpful to consider what it would mean to say: This political movement is not democratic. It's democratical. My sense is that democratic would refer to the principle that each person to be governed ought to vote. Democratical nudges us to worry about the chaos and disorder of attempting to let everyone decide everything.

This brings us back to why Democrats prefer the adjective "Democratic" (rather than to have the noun "Democrat" used in the combination "Democratic Party"). Presumably, they want to appear to be imbued with democratic values, rather than simply to be a party composed of Democrats.

A "Democrat" is, in the U.S. political sense, "A member of the Democratic party," as defined in the OED, beginning with this choice 1798 quote from none other than George Washington: "You could as soon scrub the blackamore white as change the principle of a profest Democrat."

There are times when all the world's asleep/The questions run too deep for such a simple man...

"'White turkey chili': That's what President Obama served Mitt Romney for lunch."

"Was this really an intentional (ungracious, gloating, etc.) slap? I'm a paranoid — but it is the sort of thing the hard core politicos I've known would find funny...."

ADDED: Just before Thanksgiving, The Atlantic published this item: "Why Does the White House Always Pardon White Turkeys?"

Petraeusgate drags in Gen. John R. Allen, the commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan.

"According to a senior U.S. defense official..."

... the FBI has uncovered between 20,000 and 30,000 documents — most of them e-mails — of 'potentially inappropriate'communication between Allen and Jill Kelley, the 37-year-old Tampa woman whose report of harrassment by a person who turned out to be Petraeus’s mistress ultimately led to Petraeus’s downfall....

The scrutiny of Allen’s personal behavior extends a remarkable string of failures and misconduct allegations that have dogged the last four commanders of the Afghan war. Petraeus took the job in 2010, after President Obama fired Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal for cooperating with a Rolling Stone profile that quoted McChrystal’s aides as mocking the president, Vice President Biden and other civilian leaders. 

A chain of events set in motion by the unignorable insult "Bite Me"...

“Are you asking about Vice President Biden?” McChrystal says with a laugh. “Who’s that?”

“Biden?” suggests a top adviser. “Did you say: Bite me?”

"Freedoms must not interfere with the freedoms of others," said Ahmadinejad.

"If someone insults, what would you do? ... Is insulting other people not a form of crime?"

In other words, it's irrelevant that the U.S. government didn't make the "Innocence of Muslims" video. In this frame of thinking, the government should be protecting people from infringement of their freedom not to be insulted.

Ahmadinejad also talked about Salman Rushdie: "Where is he now?... Is he in the United States? If he is, you shouldn't broadcast that for his own safety."

(Most of the linked article is about Ahmadinejad's opinion of Israel — it doesn't belong in the Middle East and will be removed.)

(By the way, in my home town, a man was arrested for what the news report characterizes as insulting journalists. If insulting people is going to be a crime, you'd think the least sympathetic victims would be journalists.)

"She should have paid them at least 10 grand. Two grand is not enough to get that kind of work done right."

When your first reaction to a murder-for-hire plot against you is the insult of paying so little for the murder:

Why did the UW frat Delta Upsilon get a 2-year suspension after 2 guys yelled at 2 trespassers?

Was it because the trespassers were black?

Delta Upsilon fraternity members said they'd had a problem with trespassers prior to an encounter...

According to an evidence packet released Friday morning, two members said they'd found heroin syringes on the property, 644 N. Frances St., and a Bose speaker had been stolen that night....

According to a letter from one of the women, she and a friend decided to take a walk to the lake in the early morning of March 16 and unintentionally walked on the fraternity's property. The members told the women to get off their property.

At least one of the members asked them, "how did it feel to be peasants?" and "How did it feel to be poor," the letter said. The members also told the women that they were among the one percent of the rich and the women should leave....

A bottle was heard to break, but the committee that imposed the suspension did not determine that the bottle was thrown (or aimed at the women). Note that there were no racial epithets: It was social-class taunting.

Originally the university said the fraternity members used racial slurs in addressing the women, but the committee said it could not corroborate that allegation.

Why did the university make it racial? (And why did the women even report this incident? If I were walking on someone's private property and they told me to get off, I'd quickly say "I'm sorry" and leave, and feel embarrassed.)

"When not shouting profanities at the chefs, bursting into noisy and prolonged bouts of flatulence during the traditional tea ceremony..."

"... insulting and belligerently interfering with my crew by petulantly flashing his cell phone camera directly into their eyes while they were working ('I’m a journalist! I’m allowed!'), this guy was drinking himself stupid. It was only through their infinite mercy—and perhaps no small amount of pity for this elderly and shambolic creature, that my crew did not punch his face in. They were sorely tempted. Anyone who attended the event will surely recognize which particular steaming dribble of ordure I’m talking about."

Who is Anthony Bourdain talking about?  Guesses are accumulating here.

By the way, what's with the word "shambolic"? I just realized I've been coasting complacently on the meaning of that word for years, conflating it with the song "Shambala" by Three Dog Night. But Bourdain can't be saying anything about washing away our troubles, washing away our pain, and everyone being lucky and everyone being kind.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that "shambolic" grew out of the word "shamble," perhaps influenced by "symbolic," and it means "Chaotic, disorderly, undisciplined." It was "Reported to be ‘in common use’ in 1958," but the first quote provided is from 1970:

1970   Times 18 June 9   His office in Printing House Square is so impeccably tidy that it is‥a standing reproach to the standard image of shambolic newspaper offices.

For a second there, I grasp at the theory that Three Dog Night really is behind "shambolic," but the song only goes back to 1973.

The Democrats' "jewbag" problem.

Have you noticed this controversy? It's the kind of thing that makes you want to say that if Republicans made a misstep like this we would never hear the end of it. It would be a "macaca" moment.

The staffer for DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz who posted the controversial 'Jewbag' photo on her Facebook page in 2006 is no anonymous aide -- but the daughter of Mark and Nancy Gilbert, two major Florida donors who have raised more than $500,000 for the Obama campaign.

Danielle "Dani" Gilbert, according to party sources, was tapped by Wasserman Schultz to serve as a liaison to the Jewish community, even though party officials and people close to Obama told her that more senior Democrats were already handling those responsibilities.

Wasserman Schultz has thus far refused to fire or discipline Gilbert, whose gallery of candid photos and personal commentary has since been removed from her public Facebook page, according to Democrats.

(Also on POLITICO: Wasserman Schultz says Mormonism off limits)...

Thanks, Politico. Thanks for inserting Wasserman Schultz's banal pronouncement about that other religion. I guess there's some relevance. Let's read that:

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz fired back Wednesday at Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch’s claim that Democrats would attack Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith in the fall election, saying the charge was “nonsense” and that the issue of religion was off-limits....

“That suggestion is utter nonsense. Let’s remember that President Obama has had so many things hurled at him – birth certificate questions, whether he is or is not a Christian,” Wasserman said. “For them to suggest that religion will be injected [into the election] by President Obama and the Democratic Party, I mean, I think they need to take a look inward at the accusations that their party and their supporters have hurled before they take that step.”

Well, I hope she's right about that, but of course, there will be many things the DNC won't control. It's hasn't been the RNC going after Obama over his religion, has it? And I seem to remember John McCain going out of his way to put Obama's religion far out of bounds, even declining to use the terribly juicy anti-American spoutings of Obama's pastor.

ADDED: What does "jewbag" mean? Urban Dictionary has definitions like "cheap; selfish person," "A greedy jew or a handful of greedy jews," and "someone who screws over another person on an extreme level." The "conservative web site" referred to in the Politico article is The Washington Free Beacon, which says:

The Democratic Party’s newly appointed Jewish outreach liaison is pictured on Facebook in a series of provocative photos with her friends holding dollar bills and referring to themselves as “Jewbags” and the “Jew cash money team.”

I'm inferring that the "-bag" part refers to moneybags, rather than — to point to other meanings of "bag" —  

1. an "unattractive or elderly woman," which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, goes back to 1924 (P. Marks Plastic Age xviii. 202,   "I don't... chase around with filthy bags or flunk my courses"); or...   

2. "scrotum," which the OED locates back in the 1598 writing Frenche Chirurg: "The Scrotum, which we call the bagg wherin the testicles are contayned," which is the use of "-bag" in the present-day political slang term "teabagger," though I note that the 4th most-approved-of definition of "jewbag" at Urban Dictionary includes a second meaning "the action of tea-bagging a jew or someone of jewish descent."

"Tony Scalia's Retirement Has Started Early."

Says Charles P. Pierce on the Esquire website.

Calling a man of Italian ancestry "Tony" when that isn't his nickname? Isn't that on the level of calling a Latino "Jose" or a black man "Leroy" (or some such stereotypical name)?

Of course, quite aside from that, the blog post is bilge:

I think Justice Antonin Scalia isn't even really trying any more. It's been clear for some time now that he's short-timing his job on the Supreme Court. The job bores him....  he's now bringing Not Giving A Fuck to an almost operatic level.

Opera... see? That's like talking about a black person and throwing in watermelon.

His "originalism" was always a shuck, even if it was consistent, which it rarely was, and even if it was principled, which it never was.... But at least, for a while, he actually tried to act like a judge in a democratic republic, and not the lost Medici pope. 

Pope? More anti-Italian (and anti-Catholic) stereotyping crap, which Pierce probably thinks is just fine, indeed hilarious, because it's against a conservative.

It is plain now that Scalia simply doesn't like the Affordable Care Act on its face.... He doesn't think that the people who would benefit from the law deserve to have a law that benefits them. On Tuesday, he pursued the absurd "broccoli" analogy... And today, apparently, he ran through every twist and turn in the act's baroque political history in an attempt to discredit the law politically, rather than as a challenge to its constitutionality. (What in hell does the "Cornhusker Kickback" — yet another term of art that the Justice borrowed from the AM radio dial — have to do with the severability argument? Is Scalia seriously making the case that a banal political compromise within the negotiations from which bill eventually is produced can affect its ultimate constitutionality? Good luck ever getting anything passed if that's the standard.)

Pierce just doesn't understand what the Cornhusker Kickback has to do with the severability argument. He smears Scalia, but he doesn't do the basic work of fathoming the argument. He denounces without earning the right to denounce, and instead of saying anything of any value about law he flips out over into the ethnic insults.

Here's the portion of the severability argument — transcript PDF — where Scalia talks about the Cornhusker Kickback:

JUSTICE SCALIA: All right. The consequence of your proposition, would Congress have enacted it without this provision....

That is, Paul Clement's argument — attacking the statute — is that the test of what is severable — what will fall along with the unconstitutional provision — is whatever Congress would pass if it were asked to vote on the bill with the unconstitutional provision extracted.

That would mean that if we struck down nothing in this legislation but the -- what's it called, the Cornhusker kickback, okay, we find that to violate the constitutional proscription of venality, okay? (Laughter.)

He's stating a hypothetical: What if the only thing removed were that one provision, the Cornhusker kickback? For the purposes of the hypothetical, he made up a fictional constitutional ground that it is held to violate — a constitutional rule against a purely venal law. ("Venality is a vice associated with being bribeable or of selling one's services or power, especially when one should act justly instead.")  We know that the Cornhusker kickback — AKA the Nebraska Compromise — was a deal made by Harry Reid to get the vote of Senator Ben Nelson, the last hold-out among the Democrats. The state of Nebraska got 100% funding for Medicaid, unlike all the other states, so that extra funding to Nebraska approaches vote-buying.

Maybe there should be a constitutional rule like the one Scalia hypothesizes. That is a quick attack on the political process that produced the bill, but it's actually not irrelevant to the question of severability, because there's a question about deferring to democratic decisionmaking, and that deference is less justified when the process itself is dysfunctional democracy. But the function of the Cornhusker kickback in the hypothetical is mainly, simply, that one provision of a big statute has been stricken down.

JUSTICE SCALIA: When we strike that down, it's clear that Congress would not have passed it without that. It was the means of getting the last necessary vote in the Senate. And you are telling us that the whole statute would fall because the Cornhusker kickback is bad. That can't be right.

So Justice Scalia has landed a brutal attack on Clement's theory of severability at that point. The hypothetical was knife-sharp and brilliant. But Pierce can't even understand it — or lies about his incapacity. 

MR. CLEMENT: Well, Justice Scalia, I think it can be, which is the basic proposition, that it's congressional intent that governs. Now everybody on this Court has a slightly different way of divining legislative intent. And I would suggest the one common ground among every member of this Court, as I understand it, is you start with the text. Everybody can agree with that.

So Clement readjusts and begins to articulate a text-based approach to severability, which he knows is more what Scalia wants, but he craftily preserves the other theory, which he knows some of the other Justices might prefer.

At the Wisconsin protests today — one year after protesters stormed the Capitol.

As the Wisconsin State Journal puts it: "Union members rallied outside the Wisconsin Capitol on Saturday to mark the anniversary of the Republican-led Legislature's passage of a hotly-disputed measure that stripped most public union workers of collective bargaining rights."



How do they know who's a union member? There was a huge crowd, including lots of children (and dogs!) on this sunny warm Saturday:



They couldn't have all been union members. But I saw lots of generic printed signs and flags, and there were massive trucks painted with "Teamsters" and "Boilermakers" imagery.

Speaking of imagery, here's a woman holding a sign depicting Governor Scott Walker's head emerging from a hairy asshole. The sign reads "Buttholes for Billionaire$:



Another sign depicts Scott Walker peeing on the words "Public Employees." Walker has a Hitler mustache and the words read "Gov. Dick Tater":



(Is this sexist, an insult to all men, to call one man a "dick"?)

The socialists were there:



They want to tax the rich.

There were puppeteers... who had trouble wrangling the papier maché Scott Walker in the March wind:



There was this young woman aligning Governor Walker with murderers Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer:



"Wisconsin regrets Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Scott Walker." Oh, there's always so much to regret. Grisly mass murders... balancing the state budget...

... spending a beautiful Saturday photographing the deeply aggrieved.

"Irish call for apology following 'Drunk Vomiting Shamrocks' clothing line."

"Urban Outfitters' St. Patrick's Day products, including a trucker’s cap illustrated with a drunk vomiting shamrocks and a 'Leprechaun P***' beer jug have, angered the Irish community in the United States and Ireland."

"Are you just occupying space?"

The Occupy Wall Street — or Occupy [Your City] — movement made me remember an old expression: "Are you just occupying space?" It was normally preceded by another question. For example: "Are you getting any work done or are you just occupying space?" In the expression, to "occupy" is to be irritatingly passive and ineffectual. In my experience, it was a relatively mild insult, usually deployed by mothers and schoolteachers.

Should protesters want to convey an aura of inaction? Perhaps! Think of the old protest slogan: "We're here/We're queer/Get used to it." The message is: look, we exist. The onlooker is challenged to stop denying the existence of the people who are making their existence apparent by just occupying space. That's all.

What's perplexing about Occupy [Your City] is that the onlookers already know that people affected by the economy exist. Everyone is affected. The onlookers don't feel that they are at any sort of distanced relationship to the problem the protesters are attempting to highlight. The protesters are simply the people who have taken up urban camping as a manifestation of concern about the problem.

The onlookers might admire the protesters for their stamina and hardiness, but they might also be annoyed by the filth and chaos, especially if it undermines their ability to pursue their own livelihood. Why do these people who are just occupying space think they are heroic when I work all day and go home at night to take care of my family?

The protesters should be able to connect with the nonprotesters, since the economic problems are shared and there's little emphasis on solutions. (Did you see this Onion piece: "Nation Finally Breaks Down And Begs Its Smart People To Just Fix Everything"?) There shouldn't be an us/them relationship between the protesters and onlookers. It's a shared predicament, and the protesters don't have superior knowledge about the problems or what to do about them. But they are there, out on the street. Then what?

They could turn inward and resist communication, like the Occupy Oakland protesters who wore masks and then turned their backs on a reporter who wanted to interview them about what they were doing. But it would be better for them to turn outward, adopting a demeanor that would allow onlookers to talk with them and have real conversations about shared problems. Of course, a conversation goes both ways. You can't just harangue people. There must be back and forth, and since the protesters don't really know what to do about the problems, they can demonstrate their good faith by really engaging.

An outsider to the protest should be able to move into the crowd and get a dialogue going, the way investment guru Peter Schiff did the other day:



Last March, during the height of the occupation of the Wisconsin Capitol, we were impressed by a man — we call him "The Man in the Middle" — who was not one of protesters, who took a seat in the center of the rotunda and invited people to sit down and talk to him one on one. That was one of the best moments in the protests.

Why don't people talk to each other? There was a popular chant last winter — now taken up by the Occupy crowds — "This is what democracy looks like." But democracy should look like people talking to each other. Not staring each other down from a secure distance.

Elizabeth Warren's put-down of Scott Brown elicits a return put-down from Scott Brown.

Are they even now? Or is this going to come back and bite Scott in his once-publicly-naked butt?

In Tuesday's debate — among Democratic candidates to challenge Senator Brown — Elizabeth Warren said "I didn’t take my clothes off" to pay for school. That was a reference to the fact that Brown posed for a photograph in Cosmo and made money to pay for college. Asked by a radio DJ for a response, Brown said "Thank God."

So... is he allowed a tit-for-tat insult or will this little lapse work wonders getting women voters to turn away from the ultra-handsome politico?

"Thou art waxen fat, thou art grown thick, thou art covered with fatness...."

Anti-fat insults, from the Bible.

No, I didn't go looking for anti-fat insults, though I did have a tab open on the Frank Bruni column delving into the hot topic of whether Chris Christie is too fat to win a presidential election.

Let’s talk about discipline.... Discipline can... be overrated. A vegan-come-lately, President Clinton fought and often lost his struggles with diverse appetites...

[And] President Bush...  seemingly kept his midlife resolve never to touch booze again, worked out religiously, maintained an early bedtime and vacationed like clockwork at his ranch[.] Bush was arguably more disciplined in those arenas than his predecessor and successor combined, but discipline was entwined, as it often is, with an absolute certainty and even inflexibility. And those qualities arguably had consequences far greater than Christie’s evident gluttony might.

As an open tab, that item had a chance at getting blogged, but the fact is, I was just looking up "apple" in the Bible, for my previous post, and got drawn into Deuteronomy 32. If you think we are cruel to fat people today, you should see what God had in mind.

McCain won't apologize for calling Tea Partiers "hobbits" — "Why should I if it was a fact?"

It's a fact that Tea Partiers are hobbits?

Constituent: "Are you saying you're not apologizing?"

McCain: "I don't know what to apologize for."

Heard in the back: "For calling tea partiers hobbits!"

McCain: "What I said was true."

It's true that Tea Partiers are hobbits? You know, that's a real taunt. Let's say I call you a prick, and you say I should apologize, and I say, "Why should I apologize? It's true! You are a prick!" That's doubling down — a deliberate attempt to piss you off. And if you think that sounds as though I'm insinuating that McCain is a prick, I will not apologize. You know why?

Now, some people like to say hobbits were the good guys, so it wasn't even an insult in the first place. (Which makes me think of another answer to anyone who complains about my "prick" insult, above.) Anyway, yesterday, some guy called in to Rush Limbaugh's show to make the hobbits-are-good argument:

... I think conservatives should embrace being called hobbits by the establishment because in the movie the Lord of the Rings the hobbits are the heroes who succeed where the elites have failed in defeating a tyranny.  The movie is about power.  There's a ring of power, and all these elites are unable to give up the power.  Whenever they get the ring, they're corrupted, but the hobbits are the only characters in the entire movie who resist the power and are willing to relinquish the power and defeat the tyranny.  So, I mean it's... I mean, that's not what McCain was intending. He was intending to insult us, but actually hobbits are the heroes.

Rush was not buying this own-the-insult gambit:

That's a long thought process to trying to feel positive.  The bottom line is, people don't want to be insulted by losers!  McCain is a loser!

Rush said "Look, if you want to be called a hobbit, I mean, I'll be glad to call you a hobbit."

Frankly, sir, as a giant in the industry and in humanity, I could never be a hobbit and I could not be happy being a hobbit, but if you want to be one, and if you draw strength from it, have at it!  I myself will remain a giant, happily so, and they know it.  Don't call me a hobbit.

Who had the better argument? Rush or the caller? Remember the attempt by Tea Partiers to get the upper hand by embracing the insult "tea bagger"?

Protesters at the Capitol rally against Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser.

It was a constrained and organized media event, with the sign-holders arrayed on the steps around the "Forward!" statue and the speakers in front of them facing the media...



... including the shameless New Media Meade:



There were lots of handmade signs and preprinted signs, and for some reason quite a few men were holding signs that said "We are Wisconsin Women":



"You can put lipstick on him, but it's still Prosser," declares this woman who is "Waiting 4 Justice":



It strangely seems to suggest that the judges ought to be women, but I assume it means he's a pig — an allusion to the old "you can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig" remark. The lipsticked face of Prosser has a speech bubble that reads "Bitch," a reference to an incident, leaked to the press, in which Prosser, provoked by something that wasn't leaked, called Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson a "bitch." Does that make him a pig in the sense of "male chauvinist pig"?

This is my favorite sign, because I love the way "GOP" is inserted:



You can see the whole sign in this enlargement of the first photograph. It begins "Prosser is Unqualified!" and then lists 4 problems. Given the insertion mark, I take it she originally wrote "Follows a political agenda," which really does make a person unfit to be a judge. I can only guess at the thought processes of whoever worked on that sign. Adding "GOP" like that shot the righteous indignation to hell.

ADDED: Here's a news report on the rally:

Progressive groups, elected officials and protesters led a call for Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser to step down pending the results of an investigation into his workplace behavior at a rally Tuesday afternoon. Held at noon on the Capitol steps facing State Street, it was organized by Lisa Subeck, City of Madison alder and executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Wisconsin.

"The Wisconsin state Supreme Court should not be allowed to choke out justice for women," said Annie Laurie Gaylor, who represented the Women's Medical Fund at the rally. "Prosser is a supreme disgrace."

Lighten up, it's just fashion.

Until it's not.

And here's the "I love Hitler" video that just couldn't be brushed away as drunken smack-talking.

Asking to be insulted and getting it.

I just ran across this passage written by David Rakoff, in an essay — from this book — about Paris fashion shows:

All of the designers I have met up to this point have been very nice, although upon being introduced to Karl Lagerfeld, he looks me up and down and dismisses me with the not super-kind, “What can you write that hasn’t been written already?”

He’s absolutely right, I have no idea. I can but try. The only thing I can come up with at that moment is that Lagerfeld’s powdered white ponytail has dusted the shoulders of his suit with what looks like dandruff but isn’t. Also, not yet having undergone his alarming weight loss, seated on a tiny velvet chair, with his large doughy rump dominating the miniature piece of furniture like a loose, flabby, ass-flavored muffin over-risen from its pan, he resembles a Daumier caricature of some corpulent, overfed, inhumane oligarch drawn sitting on a commode, stuffing his greedy throat with the corpses of dead children, while from his other end he shits out huge, malodorous piles of tainted money. How’s that for new and groundbreaking, Mr. L.?

"Put Some Pants On!""

"Because We All Can't Look Good In Shorts."

Oh, but the trick is know if you can. Like, what about this guy?

"You stupid ignorant son-of-a-bitch dumb bastard..."

100 movie insults in 10 minutes. NSFW: