This is going into tomorrow’s Washington Post reporter chat, pretty close to word-for-word:
Isn’t it fascinating that the lengthy, amplified, magnified speech of the most powerful man in the world with his big captive audience — in the magnificent room and in smaller rooms all over the country — are outweighed by one man’s headshake and silent mouthing of 2 or 3 words?
And isn’t it ironic that, right when we saw the judge’s minimalist expression that overwhelmed the President’s torrent of words, Obama was railing about the “powerful interests” that would use their great wealth to speak far too much during election campaigns?
Someday, I’m going to learn to write like this, no matter how much box wine I have to drink.
horatius
Doug,
You have it the wrong way around. It’s exactly the consumption of a lot of box wine that causes such garbage to spew out of your mouth.
DougJ
It’s exactly the consumption of a lot of box wine that causes such garbage to spew out of your mouth.
That’s what I was trying to say.
Penon
That was sarcasm, yes?
soonergrunt
I couldn’t drink enough box wine to make Alchouse coherent.
If there’s enough box wine in the world (which is doubtful) it take all of it, and I would die of alcohol poisoning before I could drink enough for it to make sense.
The commenters over there are their own special brand of crazy. Maybe that’s where all the bad wine went.
DougJ
That was sarcasm, yes?
No. What she wrote was so brilliant in its stupidity that I admire it.
General Winfield Stuck
Still not good as Death Panels for Health Care debate.
handy
I think it takes having a very dark, toxic center in one’s heart to write like this, and to keep doing so.
Sanka
You Lie, Mr. President.
You Lie.
dmsilev
Careful. The wrath of Althouse is an awful thing to behold.
-dms
handy
@Sanka:
St. Jane is really working that spot as the fifth face on Mt. Rushmore, isn’t she.
beltane
Not box wine, but brown acid. Do not take.
CalD
Evil.
BR
@Sanka:
I am so looking forward to Al Giordano’s takedown of Hamsher and her ilk. (As many of you probably know, Al has been digging into her PAC’s financial statements and may have found some good stuff.)
Cat Lady
Calling out SCOTUS seems to have created some unhinging. She’s lost her shit.
JGabriel
DougJ:
It’s not the box wine alone, one must maintain one’s self in a rarefied atmosphere as well — something a little nitrous-y.
.
Violet
Fixt.
Svensker
Lengthy, amplified, magnified….
Froggy little native boys in leather aprons. Yes. Yes, they were, and yes, I said. Yes, yes, yes.
Who knew Althouse was a member of FST?
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
If by “fascinating” he means a banal observation about the vacuousness of American political discourse, correct.
drew42
Yes, Ann. It’s called the State of the Union address. We have one every year — just like Christmas!
General Winfield Stuck
Ann writes purdy, but usually only finishes half her thought, as it were.
suzanne
Come on, everybody. Alito was obviously thrusting his tits, uh, POSING for the camera.
Wilson Heath
What the hell is wrong with her? Besides everything? Is it just the years of wine-box damage to the brain?
The Republic of Stupidity
Clearly not, Anne…
It’s how inane, idiotic, or pedantic you can be….
General Winfield Stuck
Who wants whatever Ann is having?
Martin
So, Jane’s argument is essentially that Obama is not allowed to talk to anyone outside of government without notifying her first? Really? She’s getting into birther territory…
Notorious P.A.T.
Ann Althouse. Idiot.
Spork
DougJ, no false modesty please. You managed to fool the entire BJ community for years. You have troll skills like Hoyce Gracie has Jujitsu. You can write like this, you can do better. I believe in you.
handy
@General Winfield Stuck:
Sorry, I don’t dig on shrill.
beltane
@General Winfield Stuck: Just because Ann enjoys a little angel dust sprinkled on her Froot Loops doesn’t mean you have to. That’s some marvelous beat poetry she writes, a “Coney Island of the Mindless” for the twenty-first century.
drew42
I love how Ann can never tell the difference between a genuinely insightful thought, and the regurgitation of a media narrative that’s been driven into her skull over the past 24 hours. It’s adorable.
Ash Can
They might decide to make you the newest editorial-page rising star on the spot when they read it. And you wouldn’t even have to go through the trouble of entering some stupid-ass contest.
beltane
@Martin: Jane Hamsher and Orly Taitz do bear a striking resemblance to one another.
The Republic of Stupidity
@General Winfield Stuck:
Uhhhhh… the hallucinations look pretty entertaining, but has modern medicine come up with a cure for it yet?
matt
Please, someone who is good at it (and can be bothered to register), place some snark here. Laziest reporting ever:
Violet
Alanis Morissette wants to remind Ann that all the wine boxes in the world don’t give her an excuse to steal other people’s copyrighted material.
General Winfield Stuck
@beltane: I used to watch her webcasts for kicks. And laughs.
The Republic of Stupidity
@drew42:
That is what you meant to say, no?
Yutsano
@Violet: Worst part? I could see her suing DougJ just for lifting her
refusequotation out then using it in a WaPo chat.Colette
I am Ann Althouse, bitchez! Fear my torrent of, um, something torrential. And torrid. Or was that tortured? Or torpid? Or turgid? Oh dear, I do get so confused. Waiter, another torr – er, martoni. Tortini. Whatever.
Colette +3
General Winfield Stuck
@Yutsano:
Man, that would be so cool. We could start a Dougj defense fund and have some our legal eagles defend Dougj and have a non stop proxy blog war with the cretins that comment on her blog.
Violet
@Yutsano:
Yep. DougJ probably wants to be a little careful with that. She’s a mean one.
freelancer (itouch)
@Yutsano:
That would actually be the most awesome and funny thing ever! LGM would probably fly one of themselves in to help DougJ pro bono. And the blogosphere reacts would be priceless. Sue! Althouse! Sue!
Ronald Wilson Reagan
@DougJ
It’s not the box wine that causes Ann to write like this, it’s her habit of making coolers out of Franzia, high fructose corn syrup and Sterno that causes Ann to write like this. It’s the same combo that Barbara Bush used to imbibe when she was pregnant with George W.
Robertdsc-iphone
I think someone would gave to mainline a 55-gallon drum of wine to write like that. But that’s all she & her ilk can come up with after the beating the GOP took last night. Own your bankrupt policies, bitches!
Yutsano
@freelancer (itouch): GWS has a point though, we have more than enough legal eagles as part of our commentariat that I’m certain would be more than pleased to lend their services to his cause should it become necessary. Plus anything that costs her money can’t be all that bad.
cleek
don’t give althouse the attention.
negative attention is still attention.
twolaneflash
It’s a bag o’wine. The box just makes it easier to stack several vintages on top of each other in the fridge. June was a good vintage.
Notorious P.A.T.
Or CNN might pick you to join the World’s Best News Team or whatever. Say hi to Erik Erikson and don’t forget us when you hit the big time.
Ash Can
@Colette: OK, I know that was a good-sized wine glass you were holding in that recent photo. But I know that when you order wine in those things they don’t get filled up even half way. What the hell kind of favors are you bestowing upon that bartender to get him to fill your glasses all the way up? And with vodka, yet??
The Republic of Stupidity
@cleek:
Indeed… that’s also the problem w/ Fox. Fox’s core audience really isn’t THAT big, in spite of what some folk like to claim. Beck draws what, a little over 4MM on a good night? That’s just a little over 1% of the population.
What really makes Fox seem like it’s everywhere is the secondary chatter… the endless parsing and repeating, no matter how derogatory. The so-called MSM does more to spread Fox’s message than Fox could ever do.
danimal
OMG, it’s been a while since I visited the toxic sewer sludge also known as Ann’s comment section. These folks are delusional. Wow.
frigg
Jeez…is “irony” too hard a notion to understand?
Again with the “irony,” … frosh railing against “irony,” never actually getting what irony is.
Check a style manual … then a dictionary. Idiot.
They just award degrees to anyone, don’t they.
Learn your language.
Notorious P.A.T.
Oh man, classic Colbert on right now.
Ronald Wilson Reagan
@Sanka:
What is it about today’s conservatives that causes them to post links to back up whatever infantile point they’re trying to make without actually reading the article they linked to. From the fine article.
Ash Can
@Notorious P.A.T.: Methinks they had Erick on because they (rightly) pegged him as an easy mark.
Ash Can
@frigg: Izzat you, Ann? Have yourself a nice pot of strong, black coffee and get back to us. kthxbi.
mr. whipple
Egg on face. Again.
Shocking!
darryl
I actually can’t even read the comments on mainstream sites like NYT blogs, anymore, because the right-wingers are so tarded. Thanks to the rise of the internet, and the Southern Strategy, a large percentage of online commentary comes from people I wouldn’t hire to drive a paper route.
Center-left blogs, like Balloon Juice, Washington Monthly, Yglesias, etc, are now about the only places I can tolerate. Witness the recent Evan Bayh quote that Obama is practical and reasonable, which makes him too left-wing for America.
Evolution: untrue!
Global Warming: worldwide conspiracy among thousands of scientists.
Deep recession: we need an immediate spending freeze!
Teen Pregnancy? Let’s not tell them about condoms and birth control!
If I want to know the right-wing opinion about a subject, I just think of the stupidest possible opinion, and 80% of the time, that’s it.
Comrade Mary
Althouse has obviously been sharing the good shit with Hamhser.
Ailuridae
@drew42:
Yes, Ann. It’s called the State of the Union address. We have one every year—just like Black Wednesday!
FYP. Focus on things Ann understands.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
I dont get it. The linked post and its following comments are the biggest crock of shit I have seen in a long time.
Alito’s mumble “overshadowed” Obama? In what parallel universe of horse manure?
William Buckley could write lovely stuff, but he was completely full of shit most of the time.
You just say what you mean, Doug, and you don’t worry about whether you are going to impress the creative writing teacher. Which is all you ever need to do, right?
The Republic of Stupidity
@danimal:
And pleased w/ themselves, to boot…
Says The Dust Bunny Queen…
Really, Queenie? INCLUDING corporations?
Including foreign govts & multinationals?
One dollar, one vote?
Soooooooooo… a Middle Eastern oil company now has equal free speech rights to me?
burnspbesq
@General Winfield Stuck:
Want what Althouse is having? YGBFKM.
darryl
I teach at a middle-school/high school, and you wouldn’t believe how true that is. Half my day is trying to figure out constructive ways with this particular asshole kid who is only an asshole because he has deeply absorbed this lesson.
I sympathize with the liberal movement thinking that different teaching methods and constructs can fix things, but at the same time, I’m deeply aware that a lot of really destructive behavior comes from the abuse and neglect at home, which produces behaviors that my few hours with them can’t overcome. By the time kids get to me, when they’re 14, I’m not an engineer who can reconstruct a good life for them. At best, I’m an educational EMT who can stop the arterial bleeding and get them to occasionally sit still enough to graduate.
Worst of all, I have to practice triage. When I have a classroom of 30 kids, who have to take the statewide test in 2 months to graduate, and I’ve got for instance a kid sitting in the back row who’s been beaten so many times by his momma’s boyfriend that he can’t even respond to an older male talking to him, WTF am I supposed to do?
It’s a huge mess.
Yutsano
@Ash Can: We all saw pictures. Colette definitely has the feminine wiles Force strong in her.
28 Percent
DougJ if that is your real name it is just like you ELITES with your books and degrees and youre fancy traveling to make fun of a DOWN TO EARTH person like Ms. Althouse. You should get out of the UNIVERSITYS and experience the REAL WORLD and then maybe you would understand how it feels. Ms. Althouse and other REAL AMERICANS all know that it is a great thing when a great man like Justice Joe Alito speaks TRUTH TO POWER that used to be what you LIEBERALS claimed to stand for but now you do not even pretend. You and your “Messiah” should stop being so arrogant and try to be humble and respect what Joe the Justice and Ms. Althouse have to say they have studied and are scholars and know what they are talking about which is COMMON SENSE and FREEDOM. If you would shut up and know you’re place maybe you would learn something about it but I do nothink you will.
Yutsano
@28 Percent: Spoof or word salad? One can honestly never tell anymore.
Comrade Kevin
@Yutsano: spoof. “DougJ if that is your real name” is a dead giveaway.
Violet
@28 Percent:
Hey, look! The Wingnut Comment Generator is working again!
demo woman
@Yutsano: spoof.. Ann is a law professor and I think that the intent of the rant actually has more to do with Ann hiding under her desk with her wine box than anything else.
darryl
What I’m happy about is that unlike some countries, the US has a good community college system. When you screwed up in high school, screwed up in your teens, when you get your shit together and want to get back into a productive life, the CC system lets you do that. There are some countries, France in particular, where if you screw up as a teenager, you have very little hope later on. I didn’t get my act together until I was 23. Eventually went on to get a tech degree at a university. That’s not possible in some western countries. The US still has a system where you can have a second chance. And I like that.
Ailuridae
@darryl:
Balloon-juice is only a “center-left” blog in a universe in which being a progressive blog means rejecting incremental progress because it doesn’t exactly align with your progressive ideals. This, here, is a progressive blog.
Ailuridae +2
Ailuridae
@28 Percent:
New Rule, please. Doug can’t spoof within his own threads.
Mark S.
@28 Percent:
Gotta be a spoof. If not, 28%, you do know what Althouse does for a living, don’t you? She works at one of those UNIVERSITYS.
darryl
The corporations as persons argument…I recommend you all watch a movie, it’s available online, I think called The Corporation, which outlines the horrible negative consequences of that. Corporations are required to do what’s the most financially beneficial thing, with no other considerations. In an actual human being, subjugating all other motives to the profit motive would be considered psychopathological. So our system encourages psychopathic entities. It’s a large part of how fucked up we’ve gotten, though the fix isn’t clear.
DougJ
I’m not 28%. I gave up my alternative identities when I became a poster.
Notorious P.A.T.
Thank you, 28 Percent. I quite enjoyed that.
Ailuridae
@darryl:
Agreed but the system in a lot of other Western nations is more vicious than that, I think. In a lot of nations outside of the US the decision to allow a student to pursue a profession or even a non-trade college degree seems to be made in the early teens.
I had a lot of friends who basically got their shit together academically as juniors, had three semesters of solid school work and good scores and went on to good but not great schools back in NY. At 15 or 16 elsewhere after spending the equivalent of junior high getting stoned and skipping class those kids are straight up fucked.
Ash Can
@DougJ:
So is that what happened to BIRDZILLA? Dang.
donr
To my great amusement, Eugene Volokh thought that Althouse was spewing forth great wisdom here. I know that Althouse usually writes nonsense – but from now on my rule of thumb is that when Volokh links to her, she must be writing more nonsensically than usual.
Midnight Marauder
@28 Percent:
You make me smile. And just to complete the word salad, let’s take a look at all the “randomly” capitalized words (who knows? maybe this is like wingnut National Treasure or something):
@DougJ:
Dubious.
+4
danimal
@DougJ:
Except an occasional BoB comment, right DougJ?
Paul
Yes, Ann, Justice Alito was like a strapping young David taking down President Obama’s fearsomely long-winded, electioneering Goliath. Or something. As usual, I can’t figure out what her fucking point is.
sab
I’m a mid-western accountant who leans progressive (although accountants are all supposed to be Republican tea-partiers.) The ten-key calculator hasn’t fried my brain completely yet, because I still remember by college econ courses where Keynes not Friedman was the heavyweight.
I was pretty wowed by Obama’s SOTU address, although I’m an Obama supporter so I’d pretty much heard most of this before and wasn’t surprised by anything, because the guy is nothing if not consistent. He pretty much laid out his general program that he has been supporting forever.
I was really excited at work because my Independent/Republican teaparty boss was really impressed with the speech. He didn’t vote for Obama, but he felt that the President addressed a lot of his concerns, which is unusual in his experience.
He listened to it in the office and went home late because he didn’t want to miss any of the speech.
I tried to listen to the speech on the internet and had to switch to my bedroom radio because of the heavy traffic.
People are listening to this president. Maybe we should get his back for a while and support him, instead of sniping in the background.
Ronald Wilson Reagan
@28 Percent:
Another one who apparently doesn’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re” or between Joseph Alioto, who was mayor of San Francisco when I was governor, and Samuel Alito, a current associate justice of the Supreme Court who was one of Ed Meese’s boytoys during my administration.
Now normally I don’t have a problem with that sort of thing, I mean I invited Roy Cohn to the White House and despite what he thought everyone knew that he was queer as a three dollar bill, and I got along with Terry Dolan whose work with NCPAC helped me get elected in 1980, but there was something about the relationship between Alito and Meese that really creeped everyone out. It’s hard to describe exactly what made it so creepy but I’m going to try. Remember the TV show Leave it to Beaver? Great show. OK, now imagine if you found out that Eddie Haskell and Fred Rutherford were in an erotic relationship and had some sort of Leopold and Loeb thing going on as well. Gives you the chills, doesn’t it? I guess that Alito has some sort of thing going on with Tony Scalia, who we used to call “Fat Tony” these days, but I really don’t want to know what it is.
Anne Laurie
@Wilson Heath:
She’s a lawyer who gets paid to teach Constitutional law to would-be lawyers. When the President smacks around The Most Important Serious Lawyers in the Whole Country, he’s making Ann’s role models look like the bought-and-sold insects they are, which materially interferes with Ann’s commercial goals.
Of course, she also has a blog where she posts semi-coherent rants & videos of herself getting drunk for the enjoyment of as big a bunch of right-wing fringe psychotics as you’ll find this side of the Freepers. But when Ann heckles President Obama for speaking unkindly to ‘The Nine’, just picture Obama recycling the classic vaudeville rebuttal: “Hey, lady, do I come down to the truck stop and criticize YOUR work?”
Ripley
DougJ, I thought the liquor thread was finished. No? Garcon, another box then!
Wile E. Quixote
@Anne Laurie:
Oh my God, so many people I’d love to hear him say that to. Sally Quinn, Peggy Noonan, Maureen Dowd, Ross Douthat, Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman. The list goes on.
Yutsano
@Anne Laurie:
It just occured to me “The Nine” could sooo be a Grisham novel title!
Batocchio
So is Ann still pretending not to be a conservative these days?
kay
I didn’t bother to read the rest.
The President’s audience isn’t captive at the SOTU, and you certainly aren’t captive in your living room when he’s speaking.
And even if we were were captive, we’d be equally captive to Justice Alito’s editorializing, right, because the President and the judge were in the same room?
All of her “insights” are like this. They don’t even pass the objectively true test.
From the moment both Roberts and Alito were nominated, conservative lawyers have promoted and fluffed them with these over the top declarations of their brilliance and decency. Besides the blatant, groveling boot-licking aspect, it always strikes me as defensive.
Alito churns out a lot of pages. I would think his work would speak for itself. I don’t know why he needs a cadre of volunteer PR people.
kay
“He was a notable no-show when President-elect Obama and Vice President-elect Biden accepted Chief Justice John G. Roberts’s invitation to pay a courtesy call on the court. Alito was the only member of the court not to attend the afternoon event, even though he had been at the court in the morning. He has not explained why he was absent.”
She’s always wrong. Justices don’t have to attend SOTU addresses either, and often don’t.
If Alito was a “captive”, he turned himself in.
Ash Can
@Anne Laurie:
Remember November
@The Republic of Stupidity:
Not the foreign companies, per se- but a US company with foreign subsidiaries- that’s where it gets sticky. Real sticky like an airport bathroom wide-stance stall.
ricky
I think you have done Althouse a serious disservice. After at least another carton and much comtemplation she realizes she wrote like a box of rocks and has made a correction. Serious readers should revisit.
Alan
@Paul:
As she typically does, she’s applauding the Right for being correct about, well, everything. And coming from her–a liberal–that means a lot (to her). Her point is she’s brilliant. And if you don’t see that you must be an idiot.
She’s the Ellsworth Toohey of the Right. She never actually makes a point. And the Right loves her for it.
master c
I read Althouse and the comments. I love it. It is safer than arguing with family members. I dont want to just read people who agree with me. She has a loyal following who HATE Obama [different than
firebaggers] and I am so in the tank for him, I want to hear WHY
they hate him. Cant decide if she is for real or not. Why would someone vote for him and then declare only months later Obama “lost me”? She throws out the red meat like a champ! Where did 28% go?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@sab:
What a lot of people miss is that while Obama has progressive elements to his outlook and program, in a lot of other ways both public and private he is actually a classic midwestern small-c conservative. There isn’t much room left in the GOP for those folks, with their emphasis on modesty, prudence and thrift. If you are an Eisenhower conservative, these days you have to be a Democrat. It is no accident that of the two national party nominating conventions back in 2008, the one which had an Eisenhower grandchild give an speech was the Dem convention in Denver, not the GOP convention in MN.
Obama comes across like more of a liberal than perhaps he would be otherwise, because a Keynesian stimulus policy is what these times demand. But it is obvious which party has the real fiscal conservatives in it, and it ain’t the GOP.
Comrade Dread
Personally, I think his SOTU speech should have been:
“We’re fucked. Thank the 535 people sitting in this room. If you need me, I’ll be in France.”
maya
To really appreciate Ann’s total fachisnation with judge Alito you need to go back to this post from 2005 about what alito means in Italian.
So there we have it: she was either complimenting Alito for silently bringing a breath of fresh air into the stagnant American political scene, or, she was noting the profound effect bad breath can have in a closed room. It’s our metaphor!
Pure genius.
Church Lady
@Ash Can: Not a professor. A “lecturer”.