Salt City Sinner

posted on 6/7/2015 by the Salt City Sinner “Americans are dumb,” the accepted wisdom in some circles goes. “They are ignorant, bad at science, bad at math, bad at reading and writing. They eat bibles and drink reality TV, and the only things they produce are 'collateral damage' in countries they invade and Michael Bay movies.” Harsh and reductive, dicks in "some circles!" “Sure, listen to the liberty-hating commies in San Francisco and Manhattan,” goes the reply from other circles. “America is the greatest, freest, most awesomest country that God ever made. We beat the Nazis and the Soviets, went to the moon, and created the KFC 'Double Down,' a cheese-and-bacon sandwich that uses two pieces of fried chicken for bread. Seems pretty crafty to me!” Not presenting the best rebuttal, dumbasses in "other circles!" The truth, as it sometimes does in reality and always does in whatever dimension Peter Wehner and other “centrist” Democrats hail...

posted on 5/18/2015 by the Salt City Sinner Assholes! Almost everybody has one, and some people can't help but be one! They walk among us, occupying various perches from the lowliest of street-sweepers to the lofty ivory towers of academia to the hungry glowing rictuses of cable news to the hushed reverence of museums, monasteries, and mansions. Fun fact: statisticians have estimated that approximately 100% of elected officials in the United States are assholes, making them our body politic's most well-represented demographic, just ahead of white Christian males. A person's status as an asshole is like religious belief or sexual orientation – while some visual cues may give hints as to what it might be, it is impossible in most cases to detect accurately with the naked eye. For this reason, I hope you find the following field guide helpful. It is by no means exhaustive, but it may prove useful as a set of preliminary parameters in conversation both online and off. He...

posted on 5/11/2015 by the Salt City Sinner One year that I attended college in Arkansas, my girlfriend at the time and I used to hang out in Little Rock with friends of hers, including one friend we'll call “Rob.” Rob was ex-military, and politically on the conservative side, so needless to say he and I spent a good deal of time arguing about politics. We also spent a a not-insignificant amount of time arguing about religion, because Rob was definitely a God person, whereas I, since the last time I attended mass as a tween, have decidedly not been a God person. Our political arguments were often heated but there was a certain amount of mutual respect. When Rob talked about Jesus, on the other hand,his lips would curl into a gloating little smile and his voice would take on a condescending timbre as he said, for the hundredth or three hundredth time, “you'd understand if you'd ever been in the military or seen combat. There are no atheists in foxholes.” This wou...

posted on 10/30/2013 by the Salt City Sinner  Happy Devil's Night and preemptive Halloween, ye servants of darkness! It is by this point quite apparent, I would think, that I have a low-grade obsession with Joseph Farah's WND (formerly “WorldNetDaily”), which I think is probably the most insane right-wing website on planet Earth – certainly the most insane site that generates such a volume of traffic, anyway. It's impossible to know how many WND readers are there looking for their version of legitimate “news” and how many are, like me, lookie-loos attracted to the most ghastly political freak-show this side of Alex Jones, but the numbers are pretty impressive (1.680 in traffic worldwide, 454 in the US, according to Alexa ). Lest you think this is just a depressing measure of the size of the proverbial fever swamps, it's worth noting WND's email list has been purchased by the Republican National Committee for outreach efforts in the past. This lends Farah...

posted on 4/20/2013 by the Salt City Sinner A conspiracy theory without Glenn Beck kicking in his two cents is like a kiss without whiskers as the saying goes (or is it a soup without salt?). Joining the illustrious ranks of such deep thinkers as Alex Jones, Beck is now convinced that the official story on the Boston bombings is so much flim-flam and hocus-pocus. Like a newly hatched baby turtle’s irrepressible urge to seek the sea, or a flower’s instinctual strain for the light of the sun, Beck’s internet vanity press, The Blaze, is inevitably advancing the theory that all this Boston carnage has something to do with Benghazi. “Huh?” you say. Well, that’s not really a word, mister, but I’m willing to forgive it in this case because, seriously, huh? It’s not necessarily surprising that Beck’s first and most authentic reaction to the tragedy in Boston was to   use it  to   sell gold  . Glenndolf Beckler is, after all, a good capitalist, although his theory ...

posted 1/23/2013 by the Salt City Sinner "Investigative Journalism," just like Aaron Klein does! Let's leave the indescribable recent news from Connecticut out of this as much as we can. What happened at Sandy Hook was beyond horrible, and to be quite honest, the events of that day - and the shooting deaths that have happened since - still are too angular and sharp for my mind to get a good grip on them. I suspect I have something to say about gun violence in America, but for now, I'm just quietly watching, trying to understand how things in this country have gone so terribly wrong. Not so for self-described "investigative journalist" Aaron Klein! Alex Jones' "Infowars" - tinfoil hat not included Klein is an ultra-right-wing talk radio host and author of several splendid books filled to the brim with piping hot paranoid conspiracy yarns. He also is a frequent contributor to store-brand Stormfront imitator WND, your one-stop shop f...

posted 10/31/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Perhaps the best political or literary take-down of my generation was penned by Matt Taibbi in response to Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat." In the review, Taibbi notes the peculiar quality that distinguishes Friedman from the usual beltway idiots ( link ): The usual ratio of Friedman criticism is 2:1, i.e., two human words to make sense of one word of Friedmanese. Friedman is such a genius of literary incompetence that even his most innocent passages invite feature-length essays...Thomas Friedman does not get [metaphors] right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always  screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest detail without genius. in a like manner, Paul T. Mero, alpha brain at Salt Lake City's conservative Suth...

posted 8/20/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Everybody loves an underdog. Exhibit A: Now, even if you are not a sports fan, you might have seen and probably enjoyed the movie 'Rudy.' This enjoyment can be taken too far, of course - once upon a time I had a corporate gig where our incoming employee orientation included a screening of the above scene to get us "jazzed up" about locum tenens healthcare staffing. A very obnoxious trope that is found in a vast majority of American cinema is the "triumph of the underdog" - you know, every movie has to have the third act, where the hero loses everything and we suffer in agony with him as the odds stack up against him. Then, in Act Four - hey, presto! our hero triumphs over the vastly overwhelming forces of evil to win the day! This love of the underdog has a dark side that has metastasized most odiously in America. You see, not only does everybody love to see the underdog take down the uberdog - at this po...

posted 7/26/2012 by the Salt City Sinner For somewhere between five and ten years now, I have been fascinated by WND , formerly World Net Daily. I've posted more than a few entries about Big Joe Farah and his online mental health clinic, and with good reason .WND is the progenitor and primary past and present promoter of the Obama birth certificate conspiracy, promotes the idea of an American Christian theocracy, routinely cranks out hate speech about Arabs, Muslims, gay people, and pretty much anyone else who doesn't fit their target demographic of old, white, ultra-far-right cranks. Of particular note lately is WND's decision to hire Colin Flaherty as their new Black People Are Scary Correspondent. Flaherty has been cranking out a series of " black mobs attack white people " stories for the last month and a half. WND and Flaherty are also pimping his recent rant, "White Girl Bleed A Lot," which is basically a book-length "black mobs...

posted 7/17/2012 by the Salt City Sinner I pointed out the other day that WND, or Big Joe Farah's Woodshed Of Racist Ultra-Christian Freaks (as I like to call it), has taken a few bold steps over the line that previously separated it from openly white supremacist operations like Stormfront. Now it seems that major establishment conservative magazine and website National Review has finally been driven over the edge as well. As Wonkette and Gawker have both pointed out, yesterday's Reagan-fellating column from prominent conservative pundit Jay Nordlinger contains an interesting slip of the tongue: Truth is, some conservatives lamented the fact that [Ronald Reagan] had indeed "grown" in office. He had gone out of his way to accommodate liberals and moderates, and to accommodate the Kremlin. He was raising taxes, spending like crazy, welcoming wetbacks , pursuing arms control. Jay Nordlinger, hero of Real (Really White) America "Welcoming wetback...