The 2012 National Review Cruise

This always delivers.

I alternate between feeling sad for them and wanting to strangle them. The picture of Ralph Reed is truly amazing, though.

Holy shit this may be the whitest person on Earth. We need to capture her to study how she manages to live perfectly inside her bubble at all times and study the effects of exposure outside it.

I always forget that Lileks is a republican of the nutbar stripe. I've always liked his sites about midcentury american ephemera.

Maybe it's because I've been drinking, but this statement from a horse slamming whiskey is seriously cracking me up right now.

I'LL FUCKING HOOF-FIGHT YOU

I'm enjoying the vision of Rove as Piggy, in Lord of the Flies.

I love the back and forth between "hey guys, we need to change something because we're going to keep losing if we keep doing this" and the hilariously sad outbursts of flat out racism in response.

Absolutely vile what that Ms Sullivan person said. Ironic so many of these people are Christian, makes me wish there was a Hell because they'd be going to it.

"Hey guys we need to change something because we're going to keep losing"
"No, no, we just need to explain our insults better. Get the message of how we are going to screw them out more."

God I hate cruises.

how can you be hating on cruises after:

Well allow me to retort.

I don't want to look at the pictures because I want to keep imagining it like this.

That's been on my mind this whole thread. The full length essay is better -- though it came out recently that David Foster Wallace fabricated many segments of his nonfiction essays? Don't have link.

BUT A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again is the first thing I think of when I think of cruises, though I went on one before I read it and still thought it was miserable.

I was fully expecting this to be the first few minutes of Ghost Ship and I am incredibly disappointed, as there is no example more illustrative of the dangers of sea travel.

Oh I love going on cruises, you just gotta' make sure you book a good one.

Although I was embarrased by some of my fellow tourists.
There we were taking a jeep excursion through these beautiful hills and jungle forests taking in the lush scenery and some fat lady couldn't believe gasoline was so expensive there.

So what am I reading here? Did all those assholes actually go on a cruise together, or is the author writing amusing but "enlightening" fictional anecdotes about these people's interactions with each other?

Here you go. Book your reservations today!

It's real. Hard to believe, I know.

You should know by now that you can't make this shit up.

This would be the one to go on for BF folks. http://jococruisecrazy.com/

I'm not seeing the irony - they'll need people to serve the drinks in heaven as well.

In all honesty, it's precisely because the people were so petty, banal, and stupid that I thought it was satire. It read like a caricature of Conservatives. Re-reading it with the knowledge that it's all real, I still can't believe it's not satire. It really feels like something a hack made up.

Edit- Example:

What the fuck is he talking about? Even a passing familiarity with Goebbels and the nazis would tell you that A) those people are not, in fact, basically Fascists and B) the New York Times was more critical than Goebbels was.

Look, I supported limited comparisons between Bush and Hitler. I thought they were valid for certain traits, although comparing anyone to Hitler is kind of a minefield due to that whole "killing 6 million Jews" thing. But this guy Hassett is comparing folks to Goebbels in an arena where such a comparison doesn't hold water. I don't understand what's the matter with these people.

Look Hitler was a politician who used politician tricks. You can compare almost any politician to Hitler, hell almost any person of any power to Hitler. Oh? Does your politician speak of change in well received speeches that pander to his fans? I'd like to introduce you to every politician ever.
He killed 8 million people. He also owned a dog. Guess which one he's most famous for?
It's like saying I'm this board's Babe Ruth. Oh not because of the whole homerun thing, but because I get gassy if I eat too many hamburgers. Just like Babe Ruth.

But do you know who got gassy near Hamburg? Hitler.

There really are people out there who think liberals are evil. My cousin believes that being liberal makes someone incapable of being moral. It's a small step from there to worse than hitler.

Say what you want about the tenets of national socialism, at least it's an ethos.

That's fine, though. I think conservatives are evil, although I can imagine a theoretical person who is both conservative and moral. That doesn't change the fact that I can think about these things rationally. Are the Conservatives basically Communists? No, no they are not. For one thing, that's the wrong fucking side of the political spectrum.

Or you can focus on Hitler's authoritarian streak, his inability to take criticism, his dismissal of his enemies' positions, and a myriad of other unpleasant traits for which he is also famous. You'll notice that there's a whole slew of traits there that don't include the Holocaust, and yet are still unpleasant and worth making comparisons about.

It wasn't just the Holocaust that made Hitler a bad man.

You seem suprised by this. These are people whose success is entirely attributable to cheerleading for the conservative cause. Calling liberals "fascists" isn't meant to provoke a rational assessment of whether the policies of the democractic party in the U.S. resemble those historically considered as fascist, but rather, to invoke an emtional response triggered by references to "bad guys" like Hitler and Mussolini. I will go out on a limb and guess that Kevin Hassett's actual knowledge of the interactions between Goebbels and Hitler lies somewhere between "little" to "none."

Heck, isn't Hassett the genius who predicted that the Dow would be over 36,000 by now?

IIRC, there was something to do with everyone in the SS being totes gay, and that's why they're progressives. Not to mention all the historical holes in how that worked out.

Basically the general way that plays out is that Hitler surrounded himself with homosexuals because only gays would lack the morality to carry out his plans.

No, really.

Mark M, I searched around for, but couldn't find, a post I made some months back musing about exactly how right wing politics got so surreal. (Thought it was in the Don't Talk to Me About Politics" thread but I don't see it.)

I guess in very short summary though, the right's fantastic vision of politics, itself, and its enemies has no brakes built in: Fox News (and the huge penumbra of Fox-compatible print and internet media) have been liberated from the sort of constraints of professionalism or reality that "weighed down" partisan perceptions of reality during the "postwar consensus" period.

Why - and how? - would someone going down the right wing rabbit hole ever get themselves turned around mid-burrow and come back to reality? Even the "bad news" of things like lost elections - or as they might put it, half-won and half-stolen elections - comes to them via Fox and the chain-owned far right local paper and their drinking buddies and their right wing political forum. This post-postwar-consensus politics, a crazier version of the sort of "FDR is a bloodthirsty bolshevik" far right politics of the early part of the century, has been ratcheted a few clicks crazier every year, sometimes over a generation or more. Along with right-winger's conception of their identity, of America, and of history, bogeymen included.

That must be why Werner von Fritsch started the rumor he was gay. Career advancement.

Oh my, yes. Generally speaking though anybody with an understanding of the political movements that can be grouped as fascist also realizes that it's a horribly problematic label given the variability (and generally militant national particularism) of the various parties so labeled. But hatred and contempt for revisionist marxist socialism and bourgeois liberalism was more or less a given on the hard right during that period, extending to the hard-hard-right where "fascist" parties lived.

Of course the goofballs on this cruise are comparing Liberals1 to Nazis1, where Liberals1 is their outlandishly scurillous caricature/understanding of liberals and Nazis1 is their ignorant/politicized/technicolour concept of Nazis.

Just like there are people who think all conservatives are evil. Not exactly breaking news there.

I'm so glad we didn't get all the way to page two without a false equivalence! I had a nasty feeling that no-one would point out that once a liberal may have thought something bad too!

Go fuck off, there are plenty of people on both sides who think the other side is evil, don't even try to pretend its just a conservative thing.