I honestly don’t know what to make of this, but here is a video of James O’Keefe dancing around in a construction outfit in a video entitled the Landrieu Dance:
I predict this will be an instant classic of the wingnut genre, rivaling even the Defeatocrat Cheer.
Putting aside the fact that this probably is why these guys just had to beg for 50k to pay their credit cards (and money well spent, donors!), what is the point of this? I really think DougJ was on to something:
Could it be that wingnuttia has blasted past “Bush is a genius” simplicity into some kind of inadvertent right-wing version of “Pale Fire”? This isn’t about the increasing complexity of wingnut mythology; the stuff about bear DNA and field mice makes some kind of logical sense if you look at it from the right perspective. Dijongate—along with a great deal of what happens on Glenn Beck—doesn’t make any sense. It isn’t clear to me that it’s even supposed to make sense.
It’s been said that it’s almost impossible to follow the real plot of a Raymond Chandler novel (famously, Chander himself was unable to account for one of the bodies in the “Big Sleep”), that the books work more on the level of conveying some vague, overriding sense of corruption and decay. Is wingnuttia moving away from simple easy-to-follow diatribes about Islamofascism and soc-ial-ism and towards more vague, inscrutable, doomy stuff? Or am I getting carried away here? I can’t help but feel that the whole texture of wingnuttia is starting to feel different these days. And that more generally, any kind of mythology eventually moves towards forms that cannot be understood on a literal level.
I really got nothing. Enjoy the video.
Also, can any of you graphic designers come up with a handy “Peak Wingnut Was A Lie” .gif? I have a feeling that as the 2012 elections approach, it will be very handy.
JonF
Dave Weigel appeared to be touching himself repeatedly to this video.
Egypt Steve
Jesus H., what does he mean by “Open up your mouth and taste it”?
Dave
Hey, maybe they can run this as a short before “Atlas Shrugged”…
Villago Delenda Est
It’s all about the atmosphere.
Or the special effects.
Plots are for liberals who expect fiction to make sense.
Dana Houle
Note, also, the right has stopped railing on against post-modernism and other supposedly relativist, non-rational forms of thought and communication. It started no later than the 2000 post-election fight in Florida, when their entire approach was the change the meaning of what used to be considered fact and reality. Now, their forms of communication are primarily phatic and the employment of shibboleths to signal affinity and inclusion with no interest in any kind of rational meaning.
JGabriel
John Cole:
You sick, sick bastard. I couldn’t get through more than a minute of it.
From what I saw quick-clicking through the rest of it, I think O’Keefe has accidentally created a new wingnut-type of Dada — but that perception could be just a surreal consequence of fast clicking through random frames.
I expect it’ll cause nightmares for the next several days.
.
Bubblegum Tate
Holy fucking shit. It’s like “Do the Scarn” as interpreted by those two wannabe rappers the Young Cons.
“Conservative Soul” could become the next hip, ironic microgenre.
MattR
We can’t stop!! We’ve got to slow down first.
Scott
I ain’t watching that for the same reason I’ve never watched Cheerleader Malkin — I don’t want to waste my precious brainspace with winger crap.
David in NY
Trying to get my head around that one.
joeyess
Thanks a lot, Cole…… fucker.
Villago Delenda Est
There’s that “Free Newt!” ad again.
The Mumia people should be bringing legal action on his pasty white ass for that.
Bob
It’s an audition tape for Dancing With the Stars.
Dave
Are you allowed to imply that elected officials took bribes to pass a bill in a video?
joeyess
I would love it if O’Keefe came into my club. He’d have a hard time getting out, I can tell you that much.
Triassic Sands
How?
David in NY
Also, I thought maybe we had reached “Peak Wingnut” yesterday when the real conservatives bashed Trump and Jan Brewer vetoed stupid Tea-Party birther legislation. But today Brooks seems to be taking Trump seriously, and Jindal says he’ll sign birther legislation if it gets to him, and now this … Spiraling ever downward, I think.
ant
that video.
wtf?
JGabriel
Egypt Steve:
It means O’Keefe is projecting his coprophagic fantasies on others.
Again.
.
MattF
Looks to me like Fugue State, complete with dissociative amnesia, depersonalization, etc. So, guys, you really should continue to take your medication. Really.
Dennis SGMM
I’d say that the wingers blasted past the surly bonds of reality when they adopted the efficacy of trickle down economics as an article of faith. What put them in permanent orbit, though, was the myth of Ronald Reagan as a two-fisted tax cutting hero who also single-handedly brought down the Soviet Union. Who needs to study History when you can make up your own?
Comrade Javamanphil
I hope Mackenzie Crook is available because he’s got the part of O’Keefe in whatever movie gets made about this schmuck.
Silver
And they say that there are no brilliantly creative minds on the right…
Dennis SGMM
@JGabriel:
The boy has “plate job” written all over him.
freelancer
I smell a Pulitzer! No wait, that’s bum-dung.
jomo
You can’t refute a feeling. You can’t outargue a sense of doom and decay. It creates a cult of true believers who don’t even try to engage – they simply say “you wouldn’t understand”.
sb
Words fail.
Hann1bal
Just the premise sounds so incredibly ridiculous that there’s no way I’m getting off the boat.
Villago Delenda Est
@Dennis SGMM:
Well, to be fair, they took their cue on all this fantasy from the master himself, who imagined that he personally liberated death camps in Germany when he never left CONUS during WWII, and also that a scene from “The Bridges at Toko-Ri”, based on a novel by James Michener, was a reproduction of an actual bit of dialog from a real-life incident.
Reagan had a very bad habit of confusing something he saw in a movie with real life.
McKnuckles
@Comrade Javamanphil: HA!
McKnuckles
@Comrade Javamanphil: HA!
McKnuckles
@Comrade Javamanphil: HA!
Tsulagi
After watching that vid, you also too need to put out a call for a Peak Lame .gif.
ruemara
No, I won’t click that. White conservatives can’t dance. Well, I’m sure some can, but absolutes make better slogans.
reflectionephemeral
@Dana Houle:
I think that gives them just a bit too much credit– they’d bash their perception of postmodernism for its lack of belief in good and evil one second, then the next insist that climate change is a communist plot, then argue that slavery isn’t as bad as effete northern liberals make it sound. It’s all about emoting and sticking to the talking points.
But I do agree that everything that the right wing used to say about postmodernism applies 100% to today’s GOP. Facts don’t matter, only whether or not they are deeply felt. The difference is, postmodernists ruled the commanding heights of a few literature departments in the 1980s and 1990s, whereas anti-fact sentiment animates every single Republican elected official and member of the rank-and-file.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
The Wingularity Is Near.
We already talked about needing high order transinfinities to describe Peak Wingnut.
We have reached the knee of the curve where increasing wingularism approaches vertical ascent.
Zifnab
What I don’t even?!
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
I thought I’d generally been pretty well behaved here. So I’ve got to wonder why you’d wish that video on me, or most of your commentariat. While it’s probably nothing that years of therapy can’t ameliorate, I must advise that I did.not.enjoy.the.video. And I only made it to ~1:48.
Hann1bal
Also too, I couldn’t make an animated GIF, but I did use the TPM screencap to make a Blingee:
http://bln.gs/b/2152vl
It’s simple, but it conveys the message, I think.
SpotWeld
This is what hard core conservatives thing “being clever” looks like.
c u n d gulag
I’m glad that when my Grandmother passed away that she didn’t leave behind her knitting needles.
They would have way too handy to blind and deafen myself.
justanotherjones
That was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen. So bad.
YellowDog
Ice Ice Baby
R. Porrofatto
Just when you think they can’t possibly, they go right ahead. Every day they manage to reduce my vocabulary to the words “holy” and “shit.”
licensed to kill time
I wonder if James O’Keefe will ever gain enough self-awareness to be embarrassed by his ‘activism’ some day, the silly sod.
freelancer
Portal 2 out today!
alwhite
In order to survive the wingnuts need new outrages and new offense-to-be-taken every day and it can’t be the same old shit it has to be bigger, badder and worse than the last. The net of that is they are spinning off the planet & out of the universe. You’d like to think that would mean fewer and fewer near-normal people in their fold. But what really happens is the people spinning at that rate have lost all contact with the real world and this insanity appears reasonable to them.
It actually becomes harder to bring them back not easier.
daveNYC
@David in NY: That’s why there will never be a peak wingnut. There’s always going to be someone in that group willing to dial up the five minute hate a little higher.
Comrade Mary
@licensed to kill time: I think slime mold is at least a few centuries ahead of him in the “gaining self-awareness” game. Sorry.
Jim C.
Wow. The level of narcissism in that video borders on Lebronesque.
Mouse Tolliver
He smokes like a woman. Or a gay man. Just sayin’.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@daveNYC:
That is why we need to prepare for the Wingularity. I think when the Wingularity arrives, all the conservatives there are will lift off-planet into the Rapture on their own power.
Wingnuts will be able to transcend not just reality, but the very fabric of spacetime.
Tonybrown74
That is the … LAMEST … piece of shit I have ever seen!
cleek
once the foundations of a form are firmly established, further variations will always be more abstract, more inwardly-referential and more inscrutable to those who haven’t followed the form from the time of its establishment. all forms tend towards abstraction as new creators, firmly versed in the established ways, seek to differentiate themselves from those established ways while still maintaining a connection to the past. it’s not enough to play yet another military band tune, dixieland must follow. and it’s not enough to play yet another minstrel tune, jazz must follow. and it’s not enough to play still more dance music, be-bop must follow. then free jazz – at which point nobody pays attention because it’s just masturbation.
we are witnessing the birth of “conservatism” as a means of expression. no longer content with political outcomes, it has transcended policy, and now seeks to give expression to the soul of the modern “conservative” thinker.
this is the dawning of a new age.
licensed to kill time
@Comrade Mary: I was trying to imagine his potential children’s “What did you do in the war, daddy?” type questions, and him hauling out these videos with a sheepish grin.
You’re right, he’ll forever reside in the primordial ooze.
Hermione Granger-Weasley
@alwhite:
yes, we are at the knee of the curve. The Wingularity is Near.
Do you think Obama being re-elected will realize the Wingularity?
kdaug
@freelancer: Do tell.
R-Jud
@c u n d gulag:
She took them with her?!
freelancer
Is today Super Tuesday for wingnut music videos?!
To be fair, the guy does sound a lot like Turner, but he’s still a total balloon-head.
Davis X. Machina
You know, one has to wonder, if Hugo Black had lived to see YouTube, and specifically that, and Malkin-avec-les-pompons on YouTube, would he still be the First Amendment absolutist that he was?
lurkergirl
Sweet jumpin’ Jaysus on the cross, as if we needed further proof conservatives really don’t understand pop culture. I wonder which high school AV club they raided for their equipment.
sukabi
don’t try to make sense of this… it’s a window into insanity… all the fears, phobias, and paranoid delusions of the right harnessed into one incoherent video… designed to keep the righties too mad to think, and used as a shiny object to distract those on the left from the real fight ahead… Koch Bros. Inc, and their ilk are busy raping and pillaging while the O’Keefes and Becks are busy providing the distractions…
sukabi
@sukabi: adding once you get to the actual “music video” part of the mess… it’s an incoherent cross between the Village People and Michael Jackson.
rdldot
@cleek: You’re making too much sense, so just stop it! I think the conservatives have been in the ‘Politics are Farce’ mode for a while now. They don’t really believe in government or governing, so why take it seriously?
Saint Paul Guy
Sorry Village People but… YMCA, YMCA..A
Donut
I swear to freakin’ gawd, so much of the moran-ic, adolescent, repressed shite that these Republican boys carry around in their wee lizard brains is just freakin’ pathetic. They are stuck 13 years old, forever. They resent everything they cannot and/or refuse to understand intellectually. Never forget that. Their entire world-view can really only be understood once you realize they are perpetual man-children.
Ah, fuckit. I’m preaching to the choir…
Never mind…
TuiMel
My reaction?
James O’Keefe: The Incredible Whiteness of Being
60th Street
Bad wingnut interpretive urban dance…
I’d love to see how this would go over at a teabagger rally.
Do it LIVE!
Sentient Puddle
I do appreciate the mention of cake, what with today being Portal 2 and all.
Libby
Okay I only lasted 23 seconds into the dance portion of the video but I feel confident in saying O’Keefe clearly wants to be the next Friday, Friday girl. Just saw a Nightline segment that said she’s now made almost 300K on the mockery.
All jamming Jimmy needs is that one youtube sensation that REALLY takes off…
Fang
Wingnutistan is basically tribal, only unlike many tribal people who had to cope with real life (famine, hunting, enemy tribes that were actively killing you, the weather, etc) these tribes are basically insulated from reality. They’re either wealthy enough to be out of touch or stupid enough to listen to the out of touch.
Wingnutistan has been creating its own reality for years, but you have to run awful fast to outrun reality. You may no longer have to fear bears or blizzards will kill you, but in the age of the internet everything is 24/7, in-your face, and accessible. So they not only took advantage of this new technology, but it also burns out their memes and tribal rituals faster, and ends up bringing that horrible reality to them.
The result is an endless 3-ring circus of memes, catchphrases, and pure dog-whistles. It’s literally all they have. It’s as if they don’t even have time to craft coherent stories anymore in these fast-moving times. So at some point the center won’t hold – or has started to break – and wingnutism is turning into a kind of button-pushing performance art. Is this really much different than Glen Beck, except Beck is somewhat more coherent?
Alex S.
What does it mean???
Judas Escargot
@Dennis SGMM:
Maybe we can all chip in and get him a glass-topped coffee table for his next birthday.
Tim, Interrupted
Shoot me.
I actually kind of liked the chorus.
kdaug
@Sentient Puddle: Gratzi. Threw in SP’s addition to the lexicon for good measure.
maus
@Libby: Yeah, he doesn’t really care how stupid he looks, he just wants the press.
jayjaybear
@David in NY: Jindal…as in Piyush Amrit “Bobby” Jindal? That Jindal?
God, he’s the under-90 IQ version of Dinesh D’Souza (Michelle Malkin is the under-60 IQ version of Dinesh D’Souza).
Tim, Interrupted
@Mouse Tolliver:
HEY! Some gay guys I know smoke in a very butch fashion, I’ll have you know. :D
That said, I’d be willing to bet that O’Keefe plays on my team and will some day be outed. My very reliable gaydar hits 10.5 when his huge schnoz and bony frame slither onto the screen.
Libby
@maus: Heh-indeed. He’s an attention whore and like all the cons who make their money on fleecing the rubes, always hoping for that one big hit that puts him into the big time.
troll mama
I don’t know.
I do know that the nutty right is highly organized in their weird way. And what I’ve noticed is that they take the criticisms leveled at themselves by…well, critics…and use the exact criticisms against their foe. It doesn’t matter that it doesn’t make sense; it distracts from the their real intention. So, for example, when we claim that Bush was a fascist (which he was), they say the same thing about our guy. Now the word has no meaning–their intent. When they rally around a vague idea like “freedom” they really advocate for slavery–a modern, whitewashed idea of slavery draped in the flag and nostalgia.
In terms of that video, when I see that skinny, narcissistic, sickly, and creepy OKeefe guy taking a pipe to a windshield with “corruption” scribbled on it, I know he workes to empower corruption (which everybody reading knows already, so I don’t know why I say it).
I just want sensible people to realize that there is no sense in pretending that discourse is possible. This is a real war, and our best weapons (reason and language) will be used against us by being rendered meaningless. So watch it. We lose by pretending anything other than this is in effect. They may be our neighbors and friends, but when we get them by the jugular and they look are helpless, doe-eyed and pure, we should remember their real nature–to make us slaves.
Pangloss
From Pam’s House Blend:
…Karen Ocamb’s “OC Republican Official Apologizes for Racist Email, Won’t Resign.” She noted that “In an Eyewitness News/SurveyUSA poll, 70% of Southern Californians familiar with the email said they found it offensive, 27% did not.”
troll mama
Sorry for the poor edit on previous post.
I’m a first timer;)
D
Well, I think he’s a pretty good dancer.
Hungry Joe
With this video, O’Keefe’s smarmy, wretched weaselosity has finally become interesting. Through sheer — what? tenacity? gall? — he has managed to slither yet again into the national, or at least, online spotlight, this time to … dance. (After a fashion, admittedly, but still.) What IS it about this creep? How has he managed it? “Fascinating,” Spock would say to the cap’n.
mark
I think Steyn is probably the best indication of the right’s decent “into some kind of inadvertent right-wing version of ‘Plae Fire'”
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/265162/land-giants-mark-steyn
Steyn argues that America is doomed because there are far too many stop signs (really!) and how this abundance of signage definitively proves we’ve all become fags because, presumably, real freedom-loving people like to get in accidents. Or something. It’s actually very hard to understand what the hell he’s talking about, but that’s probably the point
quaint irene
Thank god I’m still struggling along with dial-up, so I’m not even tempted to try and load this.
Frank Lee Mideer
I really enjoyed the video. At least, objectively speaking, if you can’t stop laughing, doesn’t that mean you enjoyed it?
Tanx fuh de laffs.
alwhite
@Hermione Granger-Weasley:
No, sadly I don’t think it ends without violence & maybe not even then. They slipped the surly bonds of earth back in W’s tenure. Black became white, up became down. Now, to keep their tiny brains from exploding, they need to amp the crazy up more and more. It never ends because they would have to admit how very wrong they have been for so very long.
Obama’s re-election will send them spinning higher & faster.
AnonGuest84
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
djesno