Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

We’ll be taking my thoughts and prayers to the ballot box.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

That’s my take and I am available for criticism at this time.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Second rate reporter says what?

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

It’s time for the GOP to dust off that post-2012 autopsy, completely ignore it, and light the party on fire again.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

I know this must be bad for Joe Biden, I just don’t know how.

American History and Black History Cannot Be Separated

Innocent people don’t delay justice.

You are here: Home / Politics / Glibertarianism / Trust Me- These Guys Know a Thing Or Two About Cool!

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66Comments

  2. 2.

    EconWatcher

    I stood next to the Fonzi of Freedom on the DC metro a couple of months back. He wasn’t wearing the trademark leather jacket, but had some stylish boots and a peacoat thing going. (Is that what middle-aged hipsters wear?) Anyway, if you work in DC, you tend to run into these people all the time. (The Moustache of Understanding parks in my building.)

    My question is, would you say something? If so, what?

  4. 4.

    The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik

    You know, for a reasonably liberal place like the American Prospect, it sure feels like its commenter audience is almost 95% winger.

  6. 6.

    the Conster

    Obama has made every sad Larry with insecurities completely loco. It’s fun as hell to watch.

  8. 8.

    General Stuck

    Maroons.

    Bill Clinton relished the stardom, and the wingnuts tried the same shit on him, for exactly zero gain.

    Obama in just about every way that matters to ma and pa kettle out there in the countryside, appearing as fine upstanding Christian folk. Though maybe a little Muslim on too much Fox News days. But otherwise, the Obama’s are so normal it makes the teeth hurt.

    No blue dresses with presidential semen, nor any of the other material they need to push the hedonistic sex obsessed lib wagon. So they make big fools of themselves, and set their own guy up for the same, who also happens to be VERY rich, for the same celebrity charge, when he will almost certainly appear on this or that late night teevee show, or some other ‘celebrity’ venue. They got nuthin, and have had nuthin on the Obama’s for three years plus now, and you can see Karl Roves cherub arse sticking up from being headfirst scraping the bottom of his wingnut meme barrel.

  9. 9.

    Brachiator

    The Reason gang should throw in Ayn Rand’s fur coat:

    One case in point: Mirren’s appearance in the 1999 dramatization of Barbara Branden’s book, The Passion of Ayn Rand. Mirren tells Loos: “I had read in Ayn Rand’s biography of this amazing moment when she appears at this man’s door naked except for a fur coat. When I played her … I said, ‘I think we’ve got to see it.’ It was about character, because she was highly sexual.”

  10. 10.

    AA+ Bonds

    Okay, but who the fuck writes a response of this length to something a brownshirt like Matt Welch posts

    You see, there’s a difference between “cool” as an idea and a demeanor, and “cool” as a sixth-grader might use the term, meaning just “awesome!” Matt apparently thought I was using it in the latter sense, which probably accounts for him referring to my post as “Obama-fluffing,” but this is something I’ve written about before.

    . . . seriously, do not engage

    Do not ever have this argument with a sane human, let alone a libertarian

    The proper length for this response was zero words, posted never

  15. 15.

    EconWatcher

    @Brachiator:

    Helen Mirren is a beautiful woman. (She’s the only 67-year old I can think of whom I’d call smoking hot.) But she really needs to focus her talents more selectively.

  17. 17.

    Chuck Butcher

    Good grief.

    Cool?

    I suppose the President is and Mitt is not. I do know it is a hell of a lot easier to like the President and polling reflects that I’m not alone. All that said, I really don’t know who that ad is aimed at other than people who would vote against the President anyhow and on that measure seems a waste of money (I don’t mind that).

    I am amused by the kerfuffle raised by what seem to be the same folks who were wowed by GWB’s …um package… in a flight suit on Mission Accomplished Day.

    *edit
    which I’m sure they’ve forgotten or are embarrassed by… oops, maybe not.

  18. 18.

    AA+ Bonds

    It is pretty clear that Ayn Rand never managed to sublimate her libido, because she couldn’t string together a basic logical argument and Lord knows she could neither write nor speak cogently

    AFAIK she never managed to create anything that could be described as great or even adequate except a misanthropic following who thought of quantum physics as heresy

    But it is also clear that like a great many cults, Objectivism centered around

    1) retraining people’s brains with a new bullshit vocabulary oriented toward the cult leader

    2) holding out the promise of guaranteed sex to the lonely and rejected

  19. 19.

    Brachiator

    @EconWatcher:

    Helen Mirren is a beautiful woman. (She’s the only 67-year old I can think of whom I’d call smoking hot.) But she really needs to focus her talents more selectively.

    Agreed on almost all points. Mirren is great enough an actress to pull of a good Rand. She’s got the background for it as well. Her father, Vasiliy Petrovich Mironov, was of Russian origin, and later changed his name to the more Scottish sounding Mirren.

    @General Stuck:
    RE: because she was highly sexual.”

    So are shithouse rats

    Hah! Point noted.

  20. 20.

    FlipYrWhig

    I can see the big Republican meta-strategy shaping up. It’s going to be Romney As Fifties Dad. He’s not a barrel of laughs, but he knows what’s best, and he’ll whip you into shape, so stop carrying on, go put on a clean shirt, and sit up straight.

  21. 21.

    Steve in DC

    @EconWatcher

    I tend to avoid talking with famous people in DC. I’ve had more than my fair share of being forced to deal with politicos because of work to find dealing with them anything but obnoxious. I did run into a drunk as hell Chris Hitchens at a PNC bank once, he was pretty upset.

  25. 25.

    Corner Stone

    @Steve in DC:

    I’ve had more than my fair share of being forced to deal with politicos because of work to find dealing with them anything but obnoxious

    Do you continue to serve them drinks on those fabulous silver trays you carry round? Or do you cut them off and start bringing round the warmed over pig-n-blankets?

  27. 27.

    Jay C

    @Brachiator:

    At first read, I thought your comment read:

    “The Reason gang should throw UP in Ayn Rand’s fur coat”

    I think my version works just as well…

  28. 28.

    Steve in DC

    @Corner Stone

    I worked at the Pentagon and I currently work for an NGO that gets a ton of our funding through USAID, is part of the Bush HIV/AIDS initiative and gets Gates money. Fundraising and going to the hill is a thing we have to do. Dealing with these people on global initiatives is a thing we do as well.

    That’s kinda why we have an office in DC, better access to politicos.

  31. 31.

    Forum Transmitted Disease

    That’s kinda why we have an office in DC, better access to politicos.

    @Steve in DC: Oh. I thought it was to push GOP propaganda in the form of concern trolling, because that’s all you’ve ever done here.

  32. 32.

    AA+ Bonds

    Excuse me if I implied above that the amused response of the philosophical disciplines to Rand’s work resulted from her glaring and basic mistakes when attempting to outline the arguments of seminal Western thinkers like Spinoza and Kant

    I meant to say it happened because of a gigantic Communist conspiracy that continues to this day

  33. 33.

    burnspbesq

    @EconWatcher:

    “Helen Mirren is a beautiful woman. (She’s the only 67-year old I can think of whom I’d call smoking hot.)”

    Catherine Deneuve is 68.

  34. 34.

    burnspbesq

    This is going to be a wild one. Bucknell and Colgate are tied 5-5 after the first quarter.

  35. 35.

    Steve in DC

    @Forum

    I’m hardly GOP. I just don’t delude myself that there is a shred of difference between well off socially liberal democrats and the guys actually running the GOP. The GOP is mainly willing to troll social issues for votes, but if you think the rich feminist lawyers in DC that support the blue team give one rats ass about the middle class you’re smoking crack.

    I detest all of them.

  36. 36.

    Calouste

    You know, that leather jacket reminds me of a documentary I once saw about the early days of punk. They interviewed Siouxsie Sioux (who was a really early trendsetter) about clothing in those days and she commented on the leather jackets they wore in the early days that they weren’t cool at all. They got them from second hand stores and people had originally worn them to keep warm while going to work on their mopeds and stuff like that, and they got really naff designs.

  38. 38.

    Cato

    Yup. Obambi may be “cool”, but what we need now after being led by the biggest celebrity in the world for four years is serious man, not a song and dance act. Obambi tap dances and sings show tunes while the economy burns.

  39. 39.

    Steve

    @burnspbesq: I kinda like how you don’t even bother to mention what sport it is, knowing by this point that no one else will care about it anyway.

  40. 40.

    David Koch

    BTW- I don’t care what you think of Obama’s job performance, but this is COOL. Period:

    Sure, Obama could rape a nun on TV and Cole would defend him.

  42. 42.

    opie jeanne

    I hang out on a baseball blog and Matt Welch hangs out there too, and it’s all I can do to be civil and keep the subject on BASEBALL!!! We try not to talk politics there but he and one or two other guys make political comments, and most of us remind them to take it elsewhere.

    We have an annual meet-up in Vegas for the blog, and Reason had their convention/lecture/discussion series the same week. I can’t believe people paid that kind of money to go hear these idiots. $495 single, $795 couple. Wouldn’t that be a fun date?

    http://reason.com/blog/2011/07/03/celebrate-bastille-day-at-free

    The very first discussion listed is “Selfishness: Virtue or Vice?”

    I have to ask, didn’t any of these people go to kindergarten, or Sunday School?

  45. 45.

    Mnemosyne

    @Cato:

    Obambi may be “cool”, but what we need now after being led by the biggest celebrity in the world for four years is serious man, not a song and dance act.

    Yes, Mitt Romney is far too serious to sing or dance in public. Good one.

  46. 46.

    Tony J

    Well, it’s the odd thing isn’t it?

    After decades of American Presidents being viewed by the outside world as either insane, corrupt, sleazy, boring or a mix of all of the above, America finally has a President that can actually – be – cool, without having faux-cool thrust upon him by a deeply uncool MSM. Imagine how effective a President like Obama could be on the foreign stage if his every move wasn’t first run past the shredding bombardment of “How will the GOP and the Media undermine this?” discussions focused on domestic American politics, which are, as you all keep on telling – and showing – me beyond insane.

    We ferrin types know the difference, and it’s pretty striking. Chalk this up to another victory for the Power of Money over Country.

  47. 47.

    jl

    I for one think that getting publicly confused over the different meanings of ‘cool’ is an excellent use of the Reason Magazine editors’ time.

    The communist glibertarian Cole is clearly using this supposedly miserable lefty blog to secret code signal them that they are making fools of themselves. That’s right, Cole is secretly coaching them, giving them aid and comfort!

    Wake up sheeples!

    /snark (added just in case, but it would be ‘cool’ if Cole chewed me out for this comment.)

  48. 48.

    Heliopause

    this is COOL. Period

    Yes it is, but most of the cool is flowing from Nichelle Nichols.

  49. 49.

    Chuck Butcher

    so the troll is here to tell us that the guy whose stands depend decade, yearly, monthly, weekly, and sometimes daily on whatever is convenient is the “serious man.” The stand we can be sure of that he’s serious about is that he is entitled to be President.

    There is the matter of someone using the name of a Roman… suppose Roman culture/politics embodies their ideals? Hmmmm

  50. 50.

    jl

    Also, Welch apparently did not read his Huck Finn very carefully in HS:

    Here is Huck Finn’s alky no account bum pappy talking:

    ” And to see the cool way of that n*gg*r why, he wouldn’t a give me the road if I hadn’t shoved him out o’ the way. I says to the people, why ain’t this n*gg*r put up at auction and sold? that’s what I want to know. ”

    So, there you have noxious inappropriate ‘cool’ness bothering upstanding drunks, with a proposal for an innovative free market solution, and Welch missed it.

    And finally, just reminded above, how, the more things change the more they stay the same, from Huck Finn:

    ” Whenever his liquor begun to work he most always went for the govment”

    /addsnarktaghere

  51. 51.

    Steve

    @burnspbesq: Well I wasn’t intending to put down the Patriot League, that’s for sure. As a Big Ten alum I consider all those little schools to be irredeemably precious. Like, squeee.

  53. 53.

    burnspbesq

    @Steve:

    Those schools actually still have student-athletes. Colgate has had at least one year recently where they had a 100 percent graduation rate.

  54. 54.

    FlipYrWhig

    @burnspbesq: I wish we could separate “college sports” at the bigtime level from colleges. The two have so little to do with one another, and millions of dollars get pumped into the sick system never to be shared with the actual athletes producing the value in the first place. It’s toxic. College students playing sports against each other is great. Colleges hiring short-serving ringers to play against other colleges’ short-serving ringers is grotesque. YMMV, and to most of the rest of America, it Vs a hell of a lot.

  55. 55.

    The Sailor

    @Brachiator: “Mirren is great enough an actress to pull of a good Rand.”

    She would have to stand in line after all the wingnuts are finished.

  61. 61.

    Mnemosyne

    Also, too, why is this thread generating ads for gay cruises?

    Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

  62. 62.

    Villago Delenda Est

    That photo is parsecs beyond cool. I mean, the only way it could be enhanced is if Leonard Nimoy AND Tim Russ were both in the photo with the two of them, with ears on.

  63. 63.

    The prophet Nostradumbass

    What that leather coat reminds me of is Bernie Koppell as Siegfried in “Get Smart”.

  64. 64.

    Ronbo

    Cool? Huh, here I am thinking that an improving economy would be cool.

    Yes, I know, it is failing slower than it was failing – but it is still falling. 44,000,000 Americans will be unemployeed on election day. Some people are genetically gullible.

  65. 65.

    Ronbo

    @Mnemosyne: Why is it that bigotry still abounds? Not that there is anything wrong with that? It’s still bigotry. Imagine yourself saying, why does this generate black ads. Bias runs deep.

  66. 66.

    Kolohe

    For almost a century now, Nixon excepted, the cooler person has always won any given Presidential election. I don’t imagine this year being any different.

    Which, as an aside, shows how really bad Michael Dukakis was – he made *George Bush Sr* look cool.

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