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You are here: Home / Sleeper Agent

Sleeper Agent

by John Cole|  November 20, 20159:50 pm| 134 Comments

This post is in: Just Shut the Fuck Up, Teabagger Stupidity

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It never stops with these guys:

Republican Rep. Steve King, while discussing on Thursday the Obama administration’s plan to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees next year, said President Obama is “filling our country up with people that will continue to attack us” and cited Obama’s upbringing in Indonesia as giving him an entirely different idea of what America should be like.

“We just should remember that, when — where we grew up is — when we were in our grade school that’s when the world was right and we tend to want to recreate that idyllic scene in our adulthood thinking that’s the best thing for America. And in my case, it is. I grew up with ‘Fun with Dick and Jane,’” said King on Boston Herald Radio. “Wonderful. But you know, while I was going on, he was going to a school in Indonesia, so his idea of America is entirely different than the idea that most Americans have of what we ought to be like, and he’s filling our country up with people that will continue to attack us.”

Earlier in the interview, King said that Obama was “feckless” and that his administration did not due its due diligence.

A.) Even assuming every immigrant is coming here to attack us, only something an idiot would assert, no, he’s not opened the floodgates, whether you are talking about legal or illegal immigration.
B.) WTF are you talking about?
C.) Fuck you.
D.) Fuck every ethanol guzzling backwoods hick who voted for you.

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Reader Interactions

134Comments

  1. 1.

    redshirt

    November 20, 2015 at 9:54 pm

    Land of the imprisoned,
    home of the scared.

  2. 2.

    JPL

    November 20, 2015 at 10:00 pm

    Remember when Obama said lipstick on a pig and the new media covered it for days. Remember when Obama gave Michelle a terrorist fist bump and the media covered it for days. Now it’s okay to call our President whatever you want and it’s perfectly acceptable. American Exceptionalism fk.. yeah

  3. 3.

    Gin & Tonic

    November 20, 2015 at 10:00 pm

    So Obama, who went to school in Indonesia, went to Harvard Law and became President, while Dick and Jane, who went to school in East Armpit, Iowa, live in a double-wide with a leaky roof, lost all their teeth to meth about a decade ago and haven’t worked a steady job since the Reagan administration.

  4. 4.

    The Other Chuck

    November 20, 2015 at 10:00 pm

    Says the guy who actually raised money for terrorists.

  5. 5.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    November 20, 2015 at 10:01 pm

    When I was a kid, we had Watergate and Patty Hearst and Ted Bundy.

    The world changed. Get the fuck over it, King, you giant fucking baby.

  6. 6.

    Jerzy Russian

    November 20, 2015 at 10:01 pm

    Christ, what an asshole.

  7. 7.

    Cervantes

    November 20, 2015 at 10:01 pm

    These are sick people whose illness destroys them — and others.

    Anyone who can regard them with special compassion is a far better human being than I know how to be.

  8. 8.

    khead

    November 20, 2015 at 10:03 pm

    I lived 10 miles from America’s largest coal cleaning plant while growing up. Gary WV. It was a Soviet nuclear target. Fuck you Steve King.

  9. 9.

    Cervantes

    November 20, 2015 at 10:03 pm

    @The Other Chuck:

    You may be thinking of the King of New York.

  10. 10.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    November 20, 2015 at 10:04 pm

    G just pointed out that we can now call him Peter Pan King — the boy who refuses to grow up.

  11. 11.

    Gin & Tonic

    November 20, 2015 at 10:05 pm

    @The Other Chuck: Steve, not Pete.

  12. 12.

    Matt McIrvin

    November 20, 2015 at 10:06 pm

    Just read a long Slate think piece by Eric Posner in which he carefully explained the psychological roots of why people are irrationally afraid of Syrian refugees being terrorists, and then blamed Obama.

  13. 13.

    benw

    November 20, 2015 at 10:07 pm

    I grew up with ‘Fun with Dick and Jane,’” said King

    and never intellectually progressed beyond it.

  14. 14.

    joel hanes

    November 20, 2015 at 10:08 pm

    @Gin & Tonic:

    went to school in East Armpit, Iowa

    That’d be West Armpit.

    The eastern half of Iowa is relatively liberal, has some black folks and the University of Iowa, and gave you decades of Senator Tom Harkin.

    The northwest corner is rural and isolated even by Iowa standards, and is unhappy about the brown-faced people that sometimes want to move into these small lily-white communities and swan around as if they were actual Americans; that portion of the state gave you Steve King. And Joni Ernst.

  15. 15.

    pat

    November 20, 2015 at 10:09 pm

    I have come to the conclusion that all republicans are horrible people. That is all.

  16. 16.

    SiubhanDuinne

    November 20, 2015 at 10:09 pm

    @The Other Chuck:

    No, that’s Peter King of New York.

    Steve King is the cantaloupe-sized calves guy.

  17. 17.

    srv

    November 20, 2015 at 10:13 pm

    Canadians impatient with the lack of details surrounding the government’s plan to resettle 25,000 refugees by year’s end will have to wait a few more days for the specifics.

    “We will have further information for you and for all Canadians next Tuesday,” Immigration Minister John McCallum said in Ottawa on Friday.

    No border will be safe.

  18. 18.

    NotMax

    November 20, 2015 at 10:13 pm

    See Steve pander.

    Pander, Steve, pander.

  19. 19.

    Matt McIrvin

    November 20, 2015 at 10:13 pm

    I remember when I realized that the reason my neighbor kids didn’t like my wonderful first-grade teacher was that they were a bunch of racists.

  20. 20.

    Cervantes

    November 20, 2015 at 10:14 pm

    @efgoldman:

    Stupidity is, ultimately, inescapable.

    One can breathe rarefied air in a tower somewhere but, meanwhile, stupidity is digging up the foundations in search of magic dung.

    Comprehending stupidity may be the work of a lifetime — or several — but it’s important to try.

  21. 21.

    greennotGreen

    November 20, 2015 at 10:15 pm

    Barack Obama lived in Indonesia FOUR YEARS. He was ten when he moved back to Hawaii.
    Admittedly, he did more growing up in those four years than Steve King has done in his entire life.

  22. 22.

    Cervantes

    November 20, 2015 at 10:16 pm

    @Matt McIrvin:

    !

  23. 23.

    MomSense

    November 20, 2015 at 10:16 pm

    @Cervantes:

    I’ve been thinking that we really need to add this sickness to the DSM.

  24. 24.

    FDRLincoln

    November 20, 2015 at 10:20 pm

    Iowa is two states culturally. The eastern half of the state, from Des Moines to Iowa City to the Quad Cities, has much in common with Minnesota culturally and politically. Even the rural areas there tend to be not quite as insane and the cities are reasonably progressive.

    Once you get west of Des Moines, the more conservative it gets, especially in the NW and SW corners. These areas are much more like Nebraska or Kansas or the Dakotas politically and culturally.

    Overall Iowa is a purple state that can go either way in a national election. But there are distinct red and blue areas. Remember this state had both Tom Harkin and Chuck Grassley in the Senate at the same time. Harkin got more liberal with age, Grassley more conservative, but they kept winning.

  25. 25.

    Mike J

    November 20, 2015 at 10:26 pm

    @Cervantes:

    You may be thinking of the King of New York.

    La di da di

  26. 26.

    dm

    November 20, 2015 at 10:27 pm

    I grew up in Iowa. Admittedly, there’s a lot of pig shit up in the northwest corner, but it always surprises me that the folks up there wrapped a bunch of it up and sent it off to Washington to be in Congress.

  27. 27.

    Mike G

    November 20, 2015 at 10:31 pm

    Obama is “filling our country up with people that will continue to attack us”

    Right-wing nutjobs with guns?

  28. 28.

    opiejeanne

    November 20, 2015 at 10:31 pm

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): When I was a kid we had the Korean War, the Cold War, the Cuban Revolution (my parents got me out of bed to watch the tape of people being shot and falling into a ditch under the Bautista regime) , the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of John F Kennedy, Caryl Chessman, the Vietnam War (lost a cousin, lost a HS friend right after graduation) and any number of local horrors.
    That was the 50s and 60s.
    Not that my childhood was bad or anything, but I do remember first being terrified of Russians at age 7 and wondering what would happen when they came for us, for me.

    If he thinks that was a halcyon time his parents must have gone to great lengths to shield him from the news. (I was reading the sports page at age 9 because of a writer named Jim Murray, but I was an odd kid)

  29. 29.

    amk

    November 20, 2015 at 10:32 pm

    yet another carnival barker.

  30. 30.

    amk

    November 20, 2015 at 10:34 pm

    Isn’t this the country that has murdered/tried to murder their own white presidents?

  31. 31.

    Fred Fnord

    November 20, 2015 at 10:36 pm

    “Fuck every ethanol guzzling backwoods hick who voted for you.”

    Now, now, be fair: some of them drink methanol.

    “Earlier in the interview, King said that Obama was “feckless””

    And if there is anyone who knows feck it is King.

  32. 32.

    chopper

    November 20, 2015 at 10:37 pm

    “We just should remember that, when — where we grew up is — when we were in our grade school that’s when the world was right and we tend to want to recreate that idyllic scene in our adulthood thinking that’s the best thing for America.”

    he thinks of the world like an 8 year old. makes sense.

  33. 33.

    RaflW

    November 20, 2015 at 10:37 pm

    There is no reason to bother with Steve King. Zero.

    Move on to a topic that matters. Thx.

  34. 34.

    opiejeanne

    November 20, 2015 at 10:39 pm

    @Fred Fnord: There’s that word again: feckless. They need to look in the mirror when they say it.

  35. 35.

    Cervantes

    November 20, 2015 at 10:40 pm

    It really has very little to do with Iowa per se.

    It was California, not Iowa, that first gave us Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

    It was Massachusetts, not Iowa, that gave us Mitt Romney — and Scott Brown!

    Stupidity is universal: “No border [is] safe.”

  36. 36.

    HRA

    November 20, 2015 at 10:42 pm

    I reached my limits on these spineless selfish idiots in the news and on Facebook today. The excuses they add to their speechifying about the refugees are sickening. The point to be made is if you need an excuse to validate your opinion, then that should tell you it’s flawed.
    Thanks for the opportunity to get this off of my mind.

  37. 37.

    Omnes Omnibus

    November 20, 2015 at 10:44 pm

    @FDRLincoln: Wisconsin is much the same way.

  38. 38.

    Omnes Omnibus

    November 20, 2015 at 10:46 pm

    @opiejeanne:

    but I was an odd kid

    I think that most of us here were odd kids in some way.

  39. 39.

    Fred Fnord

    November 20, 2015 at 10:47 pm

    @Matt McIrvin: There’s actually a fair case to be made there. Not that it’s due to anything that Obama has done or failed to do, but because, for the 1/3 of the country which is in constant, pants-wetting fear, if there were a strong autoritarian father-figure for them in the White House, one that they respected, one that they weren’t actually terrified of, then that figure could calm them down.

    But Obama is in control (to the degree that he is) and that makes them more afraid, rather than less. And all of the leaders of their party are either out of power or are in these non-authoritarian decision-making bodies that are not reassuring in the slightest… if daddy has to go in front of a tribunal in order to whip older brother when he needs a whipping, then he’s not really a reassuring authority figure any more. So they are terrified. And meanwhile their presidential candidates are squabbling and frankly look like a bunch of morons even to the followers, so how reassuring is that?

    Basically, if Democrats ceded all power, now and forever, and the Republicans could be assured that they would always and forever be able to kill millions of people at a moment’s notice for looking at them funny, then they’d be able to relax a tiny bit and be less scared of the brown people, and therefore maybe hate them a little less.

  40. 40.

    NotMax

    November 20, 2015 at 10:47 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus

    Half were even kids.

    :)

  41. 41.

    opiejeanne

    November 20, 2015 at 10:49 pm

    @Cervantes: Saint Ronnie was from llinois. He may have been governor of the Golden State, but his policies were very different from what they had been as governor when he ran for President.
    But you are right. Lots of idiots even in the bluest of states.

  42. 42.

    Omnes Omnibus

    November 20, 2015 at 10:49 pm

    @NotMax: I will fly out there and beat you with a rubber chicken.

  43. 43.

    Cervantes

    November 20, 2015 at 10:49 pm

    @NotMax:

    !

    And on that happy note, I must away.

  44. 44.

    Gin & Tonic

    November 20, 2015 at 10:50 pm

    @NotMax: But all of us were above average.

  45. 45.

    Omnes Omnibus

    November 20, 2015 at 10:51 pm

    @opiejeanne: Ronnie left Illinois long before he became involved in politics.

  46. 46.

    a different chris

    November 20, 2015 at 10:51 pm

    @opiejeanne: Feckless, lazy, incompetent, weak, and yet at the same time an omnipotent tyrant overlord who is singlehandedly destroying the greatest nation in history.

  47. 47.

    Cervantes

    November 20, 2015 at 10:51 pm

    @opiejeanne:

    It was not the people of Illinois who first elected him.

  48. 48.

    opiejeanne

    November 20, 2015 at 10:52 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: I think that’s true, as are most of my online friends, Imaginary Friends we used to call them but I’ve met so many of them from various forums (alas, now all defunct) that I’ve stopped using that term.

  49. 49.

    Omnes Omnibus

    November 20, 2015 at 10:53 pm

    @opiejeanne: I read encyclopedias for fun.

  50. 50.

    opiejeanne

    November 20, 2015 at 10:53 pm

    @Gin & Tonic: Like Lake Wobegone.

  51. 51.

    SiubhanDuinne

    November 20, 2015 at 10:54 pm

    @opiejeanne:

    Here’s a politician who knew how to use “feckless.”

  52. 52.

    Elaine Benes

    November 20, 2015 at 10:55 pm

    @opiejeanne: Not to mention numerous airliner hijackings. I can’t count the number of times I watched standoffs play out on the tarmac.

  53. 53.

    Chris

    November 20, 2015 at 10:55 pm

    “We just should remember that, when — where we grew up is — when we were in our grade school that’s when the world was right and we tend to want to recreate that idyllic scene in our adulthood thinking that’s the best thing for America. And in my case, it is. I grew up with ‘Fun with Dick and Jane,’” said King on Boston Herald Radio. “Wonderful. But you know, while I was going on, he was going to a school in Indonesia, so his idea of America is entirely different than the idea that most Americans have of what we ought to be like, and he’s filling our country up with people that will continue to attack us.”

    Ugh.

    I grew up half my childhood overseas. I remember coming back to America in eighth grade; the first week, we had an ungraded test that was a blank map of the fifty states to fill in. I was one of the only ones there who could correctly label as many as forty-eight of them (most couldn’t come anywhere near that). By the time the same test rolled around the following year, it had all fifty down.

    That little experience went a long way towards shaping my opinion of whether being raised overseas made you any less of a gringo. And of how much proudly sheltered chauvinists like this one really know about “their” country.

  54. 54.

    opiejeanne

    November 20, 2015 at 10:56 pm

    @Cervantes: I know this. When he was governor, a lot of his policies were just about 180 from what his platform for President was. Abortion was the big shocker.

  55. 55.

    schrodinger's cat

    November 20, 2015 at 10:56 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: Is that a royal we?

  56. 56.

    Mike in NC

    November 20, 2015 at 10:57 pm

    Mentioned before that I once had to go on a business trip to Des Moines in January. It was a frozen fucking shithole, so I don’t think any Syrian refugees will be looking to flock there.

  57. 57.

    scav

    November 20, 2015 at 10:57 pm

    Ahhhh, the unleashed legitimate fear and anger of the Real Heartland Christian ‘Merkan! that life doesn’t exactly correspond to what they struggled to read in 2nd grade. They want their Dick and Jane land back!

  58. 58.

    NotMax

    November 20, 2015 at 10:58 pm

    @opiejeanne

    Also too, the bombings done by Puerto Rican nationalists.

  59. 59.

    a different chris

    November 20, 2015 at 10:59 pm

    What’s happened to our page titles?

  60. 60.

    schrodinger's cat

    November 20, 2015 at 10:59 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: Heh I did that too! In fact I went through a period where I used to devour books, read three or four tomes in a week. Not that I necessarily understood everything I read.

  61. 61.

    Karmus

    November 20, 2015 at 11:00 pm

    Sounds like King really has his finger on the wingnut pulse. I wonder if Trump might consider tapping him for running (in)mate?

  62. 62.

    Myiq2xu

    November 20, 2015 at 11:01 pm

    Steve King is an agent of Emmanuel Goldstein.

    (This Two Minutes Hate has been brought to you by OFA)

  63. 63.

    Omnes Omnibus

    November 20, 2015 at 11:01 pm

    @schrodinger’s cat: Like you were a normal kid. I am betting that everyone here – even if they were popular and athletic and all that – had some serious weirdness going on in the background.

  64. 64.

    JPL

    November 20, 2015 at 11:02 pm

    @scav: What happened to Spot and did Dick and Jane ever graduate from first grade? hmmm.. Maybe Dick and Jane are still in Kindergarten.

  65. 65.

    benw

    November 20, 2015 at 11:04 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: You are The Great Brain!

  66. 66.

    Omnes Omnibus

    November 20, 2015 at 11:06 pm

    @benw: I’ve spent very little time in Utah.

  67. 67.

    Gin & Tonic

    November 20, 2015 at 11:09 pm

    @JPL: By sixth grade Dick was boning Jane up in the hayloft.

  68. 68.

    Elizabelle

    November 20, 2015 at 11:10 pm

    Got to be up early tomorrow, so can’t stay, but here’s a NYTimes article by a Pro Publica journalist, Alec Macgillis. Deserves a lot of discussion at BJ. Worth the click, and scanning the reader comments carefully.

    Who Turned My Blue State Red?

    Bottom line: the poor/those who receive benefits frequently don’t vote, and those just a niche or two higher on the socioeconomic ladder — who might not qualify for benefits and/or think badly of the work ethic of those who do — vote, frequently, for Republicans. At least in rural areas. And sometimes people who see the poor up close do witness a lot of unproductive behavior. How much is an individual choice and how much is systemic is a good question, but I don’t disbelieve several of the reader commenters.

    One takeaway: it might be a good idea to allow those on benefits who are able to bring in extra income through work to be able to do so, at least part-time, and not lose the benefits they need to survive. Right now, there’s a perverse disincentive: family loses more in benefits, especially health-related, than they could earn in the “free market”. (Which is becoming “free to be a serf”.)

    If only to kick away an objection by the working without benefits class. Some might be more sympathetic if they saw some work. It’s worth considering. Albeit, rural areas and disadvantaged communities are not teeming with jobs or transport. It’s not surprising that people who are barely supporting themselves might subconsciously fear more competition for jobs from the jobless, while simultaneously resenting them for not being employed.

    And then they vote for GOP, who won’t support the President’s job proposals or stimulus spending … Or healthcare, which promises lots of jobs.

    Author finds another nurse without empathy. This one works in a dialysis lab. Nurses are legion in stories about voting against one’s actual interests this year, aren’t they?

  69. 69.

    Omnes Omnibus

    November 20, 2015 at 11:10 pm

    @Gin & Tonic: They matured early or were held back a lot?

  70. 70.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    November 20, 2015 at 11:11 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    It must have been the long Midwestern winters, because I did the same thing.

  71. 71.

    Omnes Omnibus

    November 20, 2015 at 11:14 pm

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): It was a summer thing for me. School withdrawal?

  72. 72.

    Elizabelle

    November 20, 2015 at 11:14 pm

    @Fred Fnord: I think Obama’s a great father figure. That comes through well in his speeches, particularly after (gun) tragedies.

    The authoritarians want a father along their model though, don’t they?

  73. 73.

    schrodinger's cat

    November 20, 2015 at 11:17 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: Summers, was when I read a lot too! I would also get all my textbooks early and read them before school started. Especially history.

  74. 74.

    NotMax

    November 20, 2015 at 11:18 pm

    @JPL

    They took the Chevy to the levee.

  75. 75.

    JPL

    November 20, 2015 at 11:19 pm

    @Elizabelle: It depends on their definition of father figure.

  76. 76.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    November 20, 2015 at 11:19 pm

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): Only if Tennessee counts as Midwestern, ’cause we both did as well.

  77. 77.

    Elizabelle

    November 20, 2015 at 11:19 pm

    @schrodinger’s cat: I wish I’d thought of doing that.

  78. 78.

    Omnes Omnibus

    November 20, 2015 at 11:19 pm

    @schrodinger’s cat: See, you were odd.

  79. 79.

    Gin & Tonic

    November 20, 2015 at 11:19 pm

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): You really have to keep track of things here without the nested comments, because I wasn’t sure if you were talking about the reading or the boning.

  80. 80.

    scav

    November 20, 2015 at 11:20 pm

    @JPL: I think they finally noticed Spot was a deadweight moocher and they sold him to a puppy mill in MO. He eventually did run away and died after years of lapping Miller Light behind a local bar.

  81. 81.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    November 20, 2015 at 11:21 pm

    @Elizabelle: They want an abusive father.

  82. 82.

    scav

    November 20, 2015 at 11:21 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: Seasonal reading?! Is that possible?

  83. 83.

    opiejeanne

    November 20, 2015 at 11:23 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: So did I. I had a friend whose parents had bought that pretty set of color-illustrated encyclopedias and I would sit and read them as long as she’d let me. Were they called World Books? I can’t remember.

  84. 84.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    November 20, 2015 at 11:24 pm

    @scav: The season could easily affect what books were available. So encyclopedia during the summer, text books and school library books the rest of the year.

  85. 85.

    Omnes Omnibus

    November 20, 2015 at 11:26 pm

    @scav: Oh I read all of the time. Reading the 11th Ed. EB was more prevalent in the summer.

  86. 86.

    scav

    November 20, 2015 at 11:28 pm

    @Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: Ah, availability of type I can understand. If something kept the bookmobile down the hill, I would be reading anything including clothing tags for two long weeks.

  87. 87.

    Omnes Omnibus

    November 20, 2015 at 11:30 pm

    @Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: I had the public library about six blocks away. OTOH, the EB was just over there on the bookshelf.

  88. 88.

    NotMax

    November 20, 2015 at 11:32 pm

    @opiejeanne

    The World Book encyclopedia was one popular brand.

    Remembering now that the A&P supermarket chain used to peddle their own colorful encyclopedia for kids, a different volume for sale each week. First volume free, others 99¢ if had collected enough Plaid stamps!

    When was in later kidhood, owned a boxed multi-volume set called (IIRC) The Encyclopedia of Science which was engrossing to sit and read.

  89. 89.

    opiejeanne

    November 20, 2015 at 11:35 pm

    @schrodinger’s cat: The elementary school teachers locked up my textbooks so I wouldn’t read ahead of the class. In 3rd grade I sat outside and did math problems from the jr high book, solving for an unknown but very basic stuff.

  90. 90.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    November 20, 2015 at 11:37 pm

    @Omnes Omnibus: Generally speaking, I recall my school libraries as better than my public libraries. Mostly because I read everything remotely interesting at the public library long before, and we rotated schools every two to three years.

  91. 91.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    November 20, 2015 at 11:40 pm

    @NotMax:

    Remembering now that the A&P supermarket chain used to peddle their own colorful encyclopedia for kids

    Was that the Comptons?

    I still have my World Book and Childcraft sets. And my lunar globe that Mom got from the local World Book salesman.

  92. 92.

    oldgold

    November 20, 2015 at 11:40 pm

    Embarrassingly, I am from Steve King’s district. The same district that is going to give Cruz a surprisingly good showing in the Iowa Caucus. The key to this district is getting the Dutch Reformed Church to endorse you.

  93. 93.

    opiejeanne

    November 20, 2015 at 11:41 pm

    @NotMax: We had Green Stamps and later some other color surpassed it, Blue Chip? I remember sticking sheets of those things in the books and being disappointed that it took so many for anything really good. Probably less pain to just save up the cash for those things. There was a tv in the catalog that took about 2000 booklets to get. I think the stupid thing was worth about $200 in 1960.

  94. 94.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    November 20, 2015 at 11:47 pm

    @opiejeanne: I remember Jim Murray. I was about 10 miles from a SAC base(Camarillo) and 15 miles from a Point Mugu(a missile test base and naval air station). Oh and 40 miles from the 3rd(at the time) largest city in the country. We had walk home drills in elementary school to prepare for the Soviet attack.

  95. 95.

    Satby

    November 20, 2015 at 11:47 pm

    @efgoldman: word.

  96. 96.

    NotMax

    November 20, 2015 at 11:47 pm

    @NotMax

    Sure enough, there’s a picture of an encyclopedia volume sold by A&P on the interwebs.

  97. 97.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    November 20, 2015 at 11:47 pm

    @opiejeanne: We collected Top Value Stamps. I have no idea what if anything my mother eventually redeemed the things for.

  98. 98.

    KG

    November 20, 2015 at 11:53 pm

    For the record, King was born in 1949. That means his childhood was before the passage of the Civil Rights Act. Just, you know, for reference when he talks about an idyllic world from his childhood

  99. 99.

    Elizabelle

    November 20, 2015 at 11:55 pm

    @NotMax: Couldn’t access the link. Try again?

  100. 100.

    max

    November 20, 2015 at 11:57 pm

    I remember my Big Golden books from, like, pre-school. I recall eventually encountering Dick & Jane, long after an age at which they might be useful. (3rd grade? i.e. I vaguely recall reading them in 3 minutes or something.) I managed to get out of class a couple of times so I could go continue strip mining the school library. At some point (10ish), I managed to get a bike, and then moved close enough to only have to ride a couple of miles (on my way home) to actually have access to a real public library, which I then proceeded to strip mine.

    I was kinda freaked out by Ben Carson’s thing with being assigned to read 2 books a day and write a book report. I was reading two books a day. No book reports though.

    max
    [‘Now I remember sitting in the back of the car, being dragged along on some stupid fishing trip, trying to read Orbit 12.’]

  101. 101.

    Anne Laurie

    November 20, 2015 at 11:57 pm

    That’s Steve “Pig Muck” King. Because it’s the premier industry of his district, and also a fitting metaphor for everything that comes out of his mouth.

  102. 102.

    NotMax

    November 21, 2015 at 12:02 am

    @Elizabelle

    Here’s the page it appeared on (about one-third the way down, several other volumes also pictured).

    And a Wikipedia page listing all 16 volumes.

  103. 103.

    joel hanes

    November 21, 2015 at 12:04 am

    @opiejeanne:

    (I was reading the sports page at age 9 because of a writer named Jim Murray

    I was reading the politics and Opinion pages because of a writer named Donald Kaul, who had the back-page “Over The Coffee” column for The (then-great) Des Moines Register, and whose snark I greatly admired.

  104. 104.

    The Ancient Randonneur

    November 21, 2015 at 12:10 am

    Welcome to the land of the submissive, and the home of the weak.

  105. 105.

    mai naem mobile

    November 21, 2015 at 12:10 am

    You can’t do.anything with these people. On Twitter, Obama was being blamed for the Mali incident today. There were American Special Forces sent in today but according to these fvcktards, Obama was off playing golf. Always fvcking projection from these ayss wipes. Obama will never ever do anything right for them. If Obama cured cancer, they would whine that he didn’t cure heart disease because heart affects white people more.

  106. 106.

    Elizabelle

    November 21, 2015 at 12:12 am

    @NotMax: Thank you. We had a set of kids’ encyclopedias, but those covers are not remotely familiar. Would guess ours dated from the early 60s. Art was a bit more comic book like.

    Ersatz kids’s world books, perhaps.

  107. 107.

    Anne Laurie

    November 21, 2015 at 12:14 am

    @oldgold: There are Dutch Reform bigots in Michigan, too. I was introduced to the breed as a college freshman — a dorm mate from Grand Rapids said the thing to remember about the “Reform” of the original Calvinist line was that the Calvinists at least respected intelligence, while the Dutchers demand their flock be both mean and ignorant/stupid. But self-righteous, always!

    Richard deVos, Amway founder, is Dutch Reform. I thought Erik ‘No Longer Blackwater’ Prince was, too, but Wikipedia says not…

  108. 108.

    NotMax

    November 21, 2015 at 12:19 am

    @Elizabelle

    Per the Wikipedia page, the encyclopedias were “used as a promotional hook to lure shoppers in.”

    Nigh unto impossible to imagine any chain store so much as devoting a moment’s consideration to such an education-oriented promotion today.

  109. 109.

    seaboogie

    November 21, 2015 at 12:19 am

    @FDRLincoln:

    Iowa is two states culturally

    Thank you for the elucidation on this point. When I was a kid we used to visit my grandparents in the northeast part of the state, and they seemed very salt of the earth and reasonable people, and I have very visceral good memories of the time that I spent with them there. Couldn’t reconcile those memories with the Steve King/Joni Ernst wingnuttery in evidence today.

  110. 110.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    November 21, 2015 at 12:23 am

    @opiejeanne:

    Geez, I’m glad I grew up in the 70s/80s when they would just put me in the advanced reading group. I was reading with 3rd graders in the 1st grade.

    Also, my high school library had a book return amnesty when I was a senior where you could return books without a fine. The librarian told me that they did it specifically for me because they wanted to get their books back from me before I graduated, but they had to extend it to the whole school to make it fair.

  111. 111.

    Anne Laurie

    November 21, 2015 at 12:26 am

    @opiejeanne:

    We had Green Stamps and later some other color surpassed it, Blue Chip? I remember sticking sheets of those things in the books and being disappointed that it took so many for anything really good.

    At our Bronx A&P, it was Plaid Stamps. I think it was Louie Anderson who had a riff about his working-class mom carefully stockpiling those books… Thing was, for women who spent their days trying to feed & clothe an ever-expanding family on one inadequate paycheck, those “free” stamps were a way to get “nice things” that just wouldn’t be in the budget otherwise. Kit-Kat clocks and silverplate hand mirrors, tchockes that were at least an improvement on Woolworths (speaking of extinct chain stores)…

  112. 112.

    Elizabelle

    November 21, 2015 at 12:27 am

    @NotMax: Saw that. It is sad.

    I loved our kids’ encyclopedias. Probably why I’m pretty good at Jeopardy now; picking up the odd but memorable fact. (Note: Jeopardy prowess is declining, because I don’t follow TV/popular music culture …)

  113. 113.

    joel hanes

    November 21, 2015 at 12:29 am

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Ronnie left Illinois

    and spent a while in Iowa as a radio announcer; Des Moines, IIRC …

  114. 114.

    NotMax

    November 21, 2015 at 12:31 am

    @Elizabelle

    because I don’t follow TV/popular music culture …

    Pretty much what sapped enjoyment of the Sunday NYT crossword for me.

  115. 115.

    joel hanes

    November 21, 2015 at 12:33 am

    @Elizabelle:

    Jeopardy prowess is declining, because

    … the standard of play has risen enormously. When I was an obnoxious know-it-all sprout, the competitors on TV Jeopardy were pretty cluless. Average people, salt of the earth.

    In this new post-Ken-Jen world, I wouldn’t last a round.

  116. 116.

    joel hanes

    November 21, 2015 at 12:42 am

    @max:

    public library, which I then proceeded to strip mine.

    Mine would only let me check out 12 books at once.
    Really, that was all the baskets on my Schwinn would hold,
    but I’d have taken more if they’d let me.
    Twain, Ray Bradbury, Poe, Asimov, Clarke, H.G. Wells, RAH, Ben Hur, Jules Verne, DeFoe, Sturgeon, Treasure Island, Altsheler’s Henry Ware books, Silver Chief Dog Of The North, The Enormous Egg, On Peppermint Street, Gone Away Lake, all the Lois Lenski books.

  117. 117.

    Mike J

    November 21, 2015 at 12:42 am

    @joel hanes:

    When I was an obnoxious know-it-all sprout, the competitors on TV Jeopardy were pretty cluless.

    You know the NTN trivia machines that sit on bars across the country? I had the high score for several straight months when I was product manager to put it online..

  118. 118.

    opiejeanne

    November 21, 2015 at 12:52 am

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): By the 4th grade, three teachers cobbled together a reading group for 4 of us, against the wishes of the school but we were all so bored by the reading text for our grade that they had to do something. I think the 3rd grade teacher sat me outside for math saying something about me being disruptive in class. I still have the nasty remarks he wrote to my parents about what an immature, self-centered thing I was, on a near-perfect report card. I never did get straight A’s. There was always one class that I couldn’t be bothered to figure out beyond a B.
    My best friend was Syrian. She and I spent almost every spare hour together from 2nd grade until she moved away in the 5th grade. Then we wrote to each other all through HS, until we were in college. I need to call her. I have very fond memories of her mother and grandparents and great uncle.

  119. 119.

    opiejeanne

    November 21, 2015 at 12:55 am

    @joel hanes: Lois Lenski! I have Berries in the Scoop. My aunt was a librarian so at Christmas she always gave us books.
    The local library had a 3 book limit for kids, but Dad could take out a dozen and I would read what he checked out. He liked SciFi, so I read a lot of it.

  120. 120.

    J R in WV

    November 21, 2015 at 2:02 am

    I was 11 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I went into the basement and opened the door to the crawl space, got a pick, a shovel, and a wheelbarrow, and started digging.

    After I got down 8 or 10 inches, it turned from dry hardened dirt to really hard ridge-top cap-rock sandstone.., I chipped off a tablespoon sized lump every third swing of the pickax. After an hour I had enough to shovel into the wheel barrow and roll out of the crawlspace and dump over the hill.

    By the time the crisis was over and done with, I had about 7% of the room a shelter would have taken. Years later, after serving in the Nuclear Navy and such, I came home, to find my Cuban Bomb Shelter converted into a wide spacious concrete paved place for a new furnace and water heater.

    The plumbers used an air compressor, a jack hammer, and a little Terramite kind of excavator to remove the broken rocks. It probably took them all day to finish removing the rock and dirt to make room for the new furnace.

    What a difference a decade makes! and the interest of Mom and Dad in getting a new furnace that wasn’t upstairs in the way of placing a new washer and dryer! But as it turned out – we didn’t need to hide from nuclear fallout, much less atom bombs incoming.

    And the Republicans, while they may very well use nuclear arms on the middle east, they won’t be dropping them on cenrtal Appalachia, where I live. We hope to visit Paris at the end of an archaeological tour next spring. I’m not about to let terrorists chase me away from one of the most important cities in the western world!

  121. 121.

    mclaren

    November 21, 2015 at 3:17 am

    Actually, the people most responsible for “filling our country up with people who are going to attack us” are..

    …(wait for it)…

    …white people.

    Anybody noticed that all the mass shootings are done by people who are white? Whitey white whitey whitey white?

    The number of people who have died in mass shootings in America since 2001 vastly outnumbers the people who have died from terrorist attacks.

    So let’s face facts, folks: if you want to be scared of people who are violent extremists, people who are likely to do harm to you and your loved ones, dangerous scary folks with an unusual propensity for murdering large numbers of people, then you’d better be prepared to get scared of white people.

    White people who marry other white people and have white children are the group most directly involved in “filling up our country with people who are going to attack us.”

    So I propose that senators and congressmen draft immediate legislation to stop white people from getting married and having kids.

    …It’s the only way to be safe, after all.

  122. 122.

    Matt McIrvin

    November 21, 2015 at 4:20 am

    @Fred Fnord: Posner’s complaint was that Obama acted mean to people who were scared of orphans, and that his response after the Paris attacks was “less than forceful.”

    So, yeah, you got it in one.

    Bush could urge compassion for Muslims after 9/11 and get away with it because he was a white Republican and therefore served as an adequate daddy figure. I’d say it was because he was getting his war on for some good old revenge, but, really, Obama’s ongoing bombing of IS-controlled territory would serve the same purpose if a white Republican spun it that way.

  123. 123.

    Matt McIrvin

    November 21, 2015 at 4:33 am

    @Elaine Benes: Planes getting blown up, too. I don’t think most people remember any more how many airliner bombings there were in the 1980s. Lockerbie was just the most spectacular–I had a friend who had been scheduled to go on that flight, another one who lost friends on it. A lot of the screening procedures and questions about baggage handling at airports are in response to those incidents, not to 9/11.

    I was just thinking when the report came out about the Russian airliner that I hadn’t heard of one of those bombings actually succeeding in a long time. al Qaeda tried to bomb airliners many times from the 1990s onward, but they were all unsuccessful except for their first attempt, which killed one guy on a Philippine airliner in 1994. Some Chechens did manage to take down a couple of Russian planes in 2004.

  124. 124.

    Matt McIrvin

    November 21, 2015 at 4:40 am

    @mclaren:

    Anybody noticed that all the mass shootings are done by people who are white? Whitey white whitey whitey white?

    Not all of them. The Virginia Tech shooter, one of the worst, was an Asian guy; the first Fort Hood shooter was actually an Arab Muslim radical.

    Most of them, though.

    And they’re essentially always men.

  125. 125.

    delk

    November 21, 2015 at 5:37 am

    Yeah, I want to recreate that idyllic scene of nuns wandering all over slapping the shit out of you for no apparent reason.

  126. 126.

    Hawes

    November 21, 2015 at 8:51 am

    He seems to be describing the 1940s-’50s.

    Wasn’t that when we brought a bunch of Nazis into the country? The ones who were bombing London?

    Good times

  127. 127.

    Bobby Thomson

    November 21, 2015 at 9:06 am

    @Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism: literally. Did you see the focus group where Trump was described as “Mom’s abusive boyfriend?”

  128. 128.

    Bobby Thomson

    November 21, 2015 at 9:08 am

    This is a twofer. Dick and Jane lived in a world that was . . . homogeneous.

  129. 129.

    grandpa john

    November 21, 2015 at 1:24 pm

    @chopper: MY grade school years was during WW 2 and I remember rationing , Air raid drills, casualty reports and a lot of other shit that was far from being Shangri la my high school years involved the korean War and more casualty reports and other shit that were not paradise.
    I pray daily that my 2 week old great granddaughter will grow up in a a world that has finally awoken to realize that living in a massive delusional world of ignorance and stupidity should be the exception and not the ruke

  130. 130.

    Ella in NM

    November 21, 2015 at 2:02 pm

    John, take a look at this post on Facebook that my Aunt shared. It explains the reason these people think that no Muslim, no matter how nice, is EVER to be trusted because Islam and it’s followers are the religious equivalent of the Manchurian Candidate.

    https://www.facebook.com/jerry.reid.35574/posts/1648264122123687?fref=nf

    This kind of SHIT is so hard to fight. For every answer you basically get the response of “they’re just waiting, being quiet, trying to trick us that they are one of us and then they’ll take over our country.”

    We are not only being ruled by a nation of dumb-fucks, their scared, frightened little brains won’t let them learn anything else but dumb-fuckery.

  131. 131.

    Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)

    November 21, 2015 at 2:31 pm

    Even assuming every immigrant is coming here to attack us, only something an idiot would assert, no, he’s not opened the floodgates, whether you are talking about legal or illegal immigration.

    Yeah, well, see, you’re talking about “facts” and things that are “true” and shit like that. None of that means anything, though, since it feels like President Obama is “flooding the country” with immigrants. It might not be true, but it sure as hell is truthy, and that’s all that counts here. Does it feel true? Then it is!

  132. 132.

    Tehanu

    November 22, 2015 at 12:18 pm

    @opiejeanne:

    “Feckless” is just the word they use now instead of “uppity.”

  133. 133.

    Phoebes in Santa Fe

    November 22, 2015 at 12:20 pm

    @Matt McIrvin: Anyone remember the airport shootings in the 1970s? Grim attacks in Athens, Rome, and a few other cities.

Comments are closed.

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  1. A Nation of Scaredy-Cats | From Pine View Farm says:
    November 20, 2015 at 11:28 pm

    […] I am ashamed of my country and of watching a political party that both panders to and stokes hate. […]

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