Was that an anti-climax I just had? After months of furious dispatches from the Bat Cave, the Confederate Yankee now informs us that Beauchamp does not matter (and gets in a few more insults, to boot):
Scott Beauchamp doesn’t matter.
He’s a twice-AWOL serial liar with a pending mental health evaluation who can’t write believable military fiction EVEN WHILE IN THE MILITARY. He’s powerless, has been tried, found guilty and punished, and at this point, a distraction. We’ve been focusing on the wrong things.
What matters is the New Republic’s advertisers. No, not their editors, their advertisers.
And thus, a wingnut boycott will begin in earnest. Poor advertising flacks for companies all over the states will now be beseiged with poorly written missives demanding that they stop advertising in a magazine the email authors don’t read or they will continue to not buy their products.
Poor bastards. A word of advice, though- unless your company sells Cheetos, GI Joe action figures, or wetsuits, you shouldn’t notice any loss of business if you ignore the emails.
*** Update ***
It appears I was premature on the GI Joe sales issues. A clearly distressed Right Wing News elaborates:
First they changed Superman’s, “Truth, Justice, and the American way,” to “truth, justice and all that stuff,” in the latest execrable, feminized Superman movie.
Now, they’re going to defile, “G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero,” by making the team into an international agency,
“Hollywood now proposes that in a new live-action movie based on the G.I. Joe toy line, Joe’s — well, “G.I.” — identity needs to be replaced by membership in an “international force based in Brussels.” The IGN Entertainment news site reports Paramount is considering replacing our “real American hero” with “Action Man,” member of an “international operations team.”
Paramount will simply turn Joe’s name into an acronym.
The show biz newspaper Variety reports: “G.I. Joe is now a Brussels-based outfit that stands for Global Integrated Joint Operating Entity, an international co-ed force of operatives who use hi-tech equipment to battle Cobra, an evil organization headed by a double-crossing Scottish arms dealer.”
That’s a great idea, isn’t it? Maybe they can put a little paisley beret on G.I. Joe and replace his kung-fu grip with a special paperwork hand that he can use to fill out forms in triplicate really quickly.
Well, now. I didn’t see THAT coming. I still think there is cause for concern for manufacturers of Cheetos and wetsuits.
Clark
I bet the folks at Knopf and Yale University Press are sweating bullets over the lost sales to the readers of Confederate Yankee.
capelza
So, because I don’t want to go over there..has Bob Owens addressed the ObWings piece?
Is that why he’s moving the outrage goalposts?
Because they have surely been moved…first Beauchamp, then the TNR and now the advertisers.
Xanthippas
Translated: “Thanks to Yon telling everybody to leave Beachamp alone, I can’t get any more traction out of the story except by arguing that Pvt B never mattered and switching into boycott-in-feigned-outrage mode.”
r€nato
I’m sure there’s an Orwell quote – perhaps not even from 1984 – which would be appropriate to use here.
T&SPJ
Wetsuits. Ha, ha!
KCinDC
Capelza, he commented at ObWi.
D-Chance.
Beware that GI Joe action figure reference. There’s potential righty blogswarm outrage on the horizon over Joe and rumors of a possible (yes, still RUMORS of a POSSIBLE) live-action movie project which may stray from Joe canon.
Alexandra
Oh, snap! I laughed so hard at the Republican product descriptions. Trying to think what else goes with the wetsuits and cheetos, but I think you nailed it.
Redleg
I’ll bet the Confederate Yankee doesn’t care as much about Bush’s AWOL and serial lies.
Tom Hilton
Dumbass obliterated his right sidebar with a too-wide boycott list. Something tells me his own advertisers (both of them) won’t be happy.
ActualRealPatriotAmericanGoreSucksRedStateMan
Have you guys read/seen TNR’s ads? They boil down to classifieds for gay intellectuals seeking trysts with fanciers of Icelandic poetry, promos for academic books that no one reads, especially those people the authors acknowledge in the front, solar panels for your Hamptons vacation house, and zionist getaway cruises. the magazine is the vanity product of a bomb-Iran gasbag. wingnutistan boycotting TNR is the best way to augment hits on the mag’s loser site. I think Bugs Bunny said it best: “What a maroon.”
ATS
The New Republic? The daisy- wielding Shock Troops of the Diasphora.
capelza
Oh hahahahahaa…he’s “center-right”? I think that pisses me off more than anything. Hijacking the center so anyone to the left of him is “far left”.
I wish these assholes would just own what they really are…right wing, very very right wing.
CY..I’ve met center-right and you are no center-right.
capelza
Good! GI Joe moves to Brussels…maybe they’ll make him anatomically correct.
Zifnab
PORKCHOP SANDWHICHES!
Zifnab
Gah, well, that’s the whole collection. Here’s the best one.
Thank you ebaum’s world.
Cyrus
OK, so a decades-old child-friendly toy that in the past has reinforced the superhero status of the U.S. military is changed to be more international in flavor.
To a sane person, this is pretty simple: the toymakers needed to reinvent it to launch the movie and make some more money off the property. With America’s reputation at its lowest ebb abroad, and the reputation of America’s armed forces in particular, Hasbro/Paramount figured they would make a lot more money by being a little less jingoistic. And their target market in America is too young to notice the difference. People zealously right-wing enough to care about the change, who would otherwise have bought the toy or seen the movie but now won’t, are a much smaller market than Western Europe and China.
To everyone who isn’t sane, this means that those millionaire toy company and movie moguls executives at Paramount (recent blockbusters include Saving Private Ryan) hate America. Or something.
KCinDC
The market is always right — unless it messes with G.I. Joe, in which case capitalism is a corrupting influence.
cleek
and so have all of his readers, apparently. there’s a regular Cult of Beauchamp chanting the litany in that thread.
Cindrella Ferret
According to K-Lo at over The Corner Saint Michael supports the boycott.
And I thought Yon jumped the shark with his child eating AQ story. The single, unsubstantiated source story. Jesus! I wonder if its too much Wild Turkey and Brown Acid?
NEXT DIVERSION: Boycotting magazines who won’t print all the news the Right deems fit.
So let me understand this:
1. No AQ link
2. No WMD’s
3 No WMD active programs
4. Mission Accomplished!
5. Sending the ENTIRE Iraqi Army home WITH weapons!
6. Unguarded ammunition supplies
7. A resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.
8. Abrogation of the 4th Amendment to save us from a bunch of guys with no state, no army, and no missiles … Jesus, Mary and Joseph–my head is ready to explode! What have we become? A nation of pussies?
OK–now what am I missing here? Who stabbed these guys in the back? Holy mackerel Andy! Where the Hell is my flag lapel pin? DO NOT TAKE THE BROWN ACID! We have evidence the Brown Acid is bad.
Say Goodnight Gracie. The Great Shark Hunt continues!
Jake
I will admit that on the rare occasions when I sit in front of the boobtoob, it is to watch something animated. (Go Team Venture!) But as someone who is technically an adult I can’t imagine going knotty-pants over the revamp of a story line for a frickin’ cartoon. Even Ren & Stimpy.
Mr. Hawkins needs to get a kung-fu grip.
libarbarian
You forgot to mention the special pants that allow you to maintain your wide stance while sitting on the john.
capelza
From CY…my irony meter is in pieces on the floor. The cat says “Oh hai! New toy!” The dog is barking at it furiously. I want a cigarette.
Jon H
I eagerly await the new battle cry:
YO, SPROUTS!
Also, instead of “knowing is half the battle”, the new educational tagline will be a monograph by Foucault.
Jon H
“You forgot to mention the special pants that allow you to maintain your wide stance while sitting on the john.”
Oh! Over the years I’ve seen mention of things called ‘tap pants’, but never quite knew what they were. I was under the impression that it was some sort of women’s clothing, but now it’s clear.
The Other Andrew
I like how, based on UN-cliche assumptions, they mock the new GI Joe movie. Because if Iraq has taught us anything, it’s that you only need brute force to win; political solutions and international cooperation are just frivolties!
Jon H
You know, if you think about it, it makes perfect sense to make GI Joe a UN-ish organization.
You might remember that they fired an awful lot but never seemed to manage to kill anyone.
Clearly, making them US military would be completely unrealistic.
glasnost
Cole, this comment by, apparently, Bob Ownes on Matt Yglesias’ site might be worth an update:
The knives are being swung at the back of our soldiers comes from the hand of Franklin Foer.
http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2007/10/victorys_just_a_beauchamp_away.php#comments
A classic moment in grammar.
glasnost
I mispelled Bob Owens.
Undermines my point I know, but I’m just a commenter.
Tsulagi
Holy shit. The past week seeing references to a Baptist preacher double wetsuited with a dildo up his ass I thought was a joke. Some going for outrageous; maybe an Onion parody.
Just used Google. My God. You just can’t spoof these socon nutters near to the level that is everyday normal for them. Added bonus, the self-fucker snuffer was a Liberty University graduate who worked for Falwell for a while. I’d really like to hear his “not my fault!” explanation to Jesus.
In light of the above, gotta disagree with you. Those products are obviously sacrosanct. Can you really disprove that at this moment Liberty University grad students aren’t creating hooded wetsuits with ball gags molded in? Or Cheetos enlarged and reshaped in the form of dildos? I think not. Especially with Xmas just around the corner.
John Cole
That was just TEH AWESOME.
The Other Steve
I’m fairly certain GI JOE became a Brussels based global organization back in the 1980s when the stupid cartoon first hit television.
This is the real GI JOE!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwMG7ifuTjQ
The Kids over at NRO probably don’t remember anything prior to GI JOE cartoons.
Julie
Granted, I was pretty young myself then, but I thought G.I. Joe (at least the cartoon version) was always sort of a US-led international organization. I distinctly remember them teaming up with the Russians (!) to fight Cobra and promote Glasnost and understanding and whatnot.
Enlightened Layperson
Wait a minute, weren’t you the one defending Cheetos recently?
jcricket
So, I get that GI JOE can recruit patriotic people from America and her allies (at least back in the day before we started getting our “hate” on all our former allies) to be foot soldiers in the original WOT.
But why do the foot soldiers join up with COBRA? Do they get good medical benefits? 401k match?
John Cole
I did in fact defend them, but after I started to like my Mac, my liberal assimilation was completed.
jcricket
Yes, liberals don’t eat processed crap like Cheetos from Big Agra. Instead we eat Pirate’s Booty from Trader Joes or anything from “Annies” that they sell at Whole Foods.
Better start shopping at the right places John or we’ll revoke your townhall membership.
Jimmmmm
In GIJOE/Porkchop Samwiches, where did the JOE team-member come from, hammerspace?
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/148551/cartoon_physics_101_what_is_hammerspace.html
sidereal
Actually, that was pretty funny. But don’t anyone tell Right Wing News that kung fu was invented in communist China.
My favorite bit is the part where CY has decided that the fevered innuendo and unsourced speculation about Beauchamp from the right blogosphere has simply become fact, presumably via repetition.
WhyDo'Conservatives'HateOurTroops?
Let’s see: We send them to war without proper body armor, without properly armored humvees, without enough numbers to secure saddam’s countless munitions dumps, filled with weapons long used against them, and with a policy of torture for our moral footing. we keep them there in longer and longer stints, and when they come back badly wounded we stick them in festering VA and hospital wards and ignore their care. Oh – and we wear flag pins on our lapels. Hence, we love the troops. But an obscure pro-bomb-Iran pro-overthrow-saddam pro-ariel sharon magazine runs a description of a military vehicle going over a dog. THE LEFT HATES THE TROOPS!
this is why they are insane. they hate-fear greenwald and cole in particular because they document everything and their arguments are fortified by serious work. disagree with the conclusions if you like but when you have to say “oh i don’t read that” you’ve lost it from jump street.
Yogi, why to conservatives hate reality?
Punchy
Thanks, John. You owe me a new monitor, or at least something with which to clean it. Christ Almighty this shit is funny…
rachel
I don’t hate Cheetos because some righties like them; I hate them because they’re disgusting. So are Twinkies.
jcricket
Because reality has a well known liberal bias.
This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.
CruzBustamove
Joint Operating??? Pass that doobie, brother!
Nancy Irving
Isn’t Cobra also the name of a govmint health program? If so, the wingers can take consolation in the fact the Joe will still be battling EVIL!