« The Presidency and Distribution | Main | The Flawed UN » My Kind of Scum, Fearless and Inventive01 Apr 2008 01:13 pm I thought I might just quote Daniel Larison: The only thing more annoying than Joe Lieberman himself is his conceit, which many people indulge out of habit, that he is some kind of “centrist.” Perhaps if we think of the political spectrum as a series of rings surrounding a cavernous abyss (or perhaps a pit like the Sarlaac), then Lieberman and McCain can fairly be called “centrists.” I lose nerd points for needing to look Sarlaac up. Comments (26)
Well I didn't need to look Sarlaac up, but I DID need to look up the "my kind of scum" quote. I had forgotten it was from Star Wars. 
Someone needs to write a post comparing Lieberman to the little creature who resides in Jabba's belly. McCain/Lieberman '08 = Jabba/Salacious Crumb!
major nerd points. i think you need to turn in your D&D die.
You needed to look up Sarlaac? Jesus, Matt, you're slipping. And Scott, I believe Leia was Boskk(spelling?)
anyone heading to the RNC Convention in Minnesota: "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. we must be cautious."
Icky, you sent me to The American Conservative! A little heads up, please. And what's with that blog title, "Eunomia, the principle of good order". What kind of scum, fearless and inventive, believes in laws and legislation? Or was that supposed to be sarcastic? I'm confused...
Anyone at anytime in the last 7 years: "I've got a bad feeling about this" To anyone who claims the business cycle has been repealed: "I find your lack of faith disturbing" And of course, a little wisdom for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, McCain, and Clinton, Kerry, and Edwards for that matter: "Ah hmmm! Wars not make one great!"
rob!, sounds like HST. Is it?
when you looked it up you ought to have noticed that the Sarlaac is not the pit itself. The pit is the great pit of Carkoon. I am sure there is actually a good analogy for the Sarlacc in our current environment, maybe David Broder.
eriks- speak of, what is this HST you do? (sorry, couldn't help myself)
Punishment for having to look up Sarlaac includes being thrown into the Pit of Carkoon, where you will be fed to the Mighty Sarlaac. You will be slowly digested over a thousand years. Or maybe just a carbon freezing. A carbon froze Matt Yglesias would be many peoples' favorite wall decoration, I imagine.
Whoops. I'm reading The Great Shark Hunt so everything seems to take on a Thompson-colored tint. April Fools on me.
Does anyone remember the name of the bounty hunter that Leia posed as? She posed as "Boushh," a Ubese bounty hunter. "Bossk" was the Trandoshan (yellowish reptilian alien) bounty hunter who appeared in ESB.
Good call, Mr. Just Dropping By. I always wondered how Boushh's "Yo to, Yo to" could mean so many different things. Anyway, there's a quote from There Will Be Blood to use about the economy:
Jonah Goldberg as Sarlaacc - or maybe Jabba the Hut. Bush: "It's not my fault!"
Any nerd points you may have lost were totally made up for by the fact that these commenters read your posts. You are blogger to the nerds.
I recognized the quote AND Sarlaac. Ha, ha, I'm a bigger nerd than you! (I'm pretty handy with Star Trek too, but know very little about Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings--never got into either of those.)
Larison is so thoroughly conservative (even "reactionary" in his words) that his conservatism becomes a kind of an ornament to a very smart fellow who blogs. Which is why liberals are much less annoyed by him than they are by most neo-cons. There is a whole back-story to Sarlaac, but I've never met anyone who can explain the dumbest thing about it. It seems one would die of old age before you're able to live out your full digestion over thousands of years. Perhaps I'm missing something here. Star Wars strikes me as a rich universe of stories and details swirling around with some very absurd, unexplained propositions.
Colatina, it's explained: Evidence exists of a fibrous network of vessels that attach themselves to a swallowed victim, grotesquely incorporating the being into the Sarlacc's own biological system. Such immersion is accompanied by mind-altering neurotoxins which keep the victim docile. The hallucinations coaxed by the toxins suggest that the Sarlacc somehow absorbs the intelligence of all its victims, who live on in disembodied torment.
Rulial, thanks for that. Strange kind of "digestion".
Hey, it lives in a pit in the desert. It needs some kind of hobby.
It's not just Lieberman, although he is perhaps the apotheosis of misattributed centrism. It's an incredibly common fallacy among the pundit class to ascribe centrism to people who hold right wing views in some areas and left wing (by American standards) elsewhere. Lieberman is very right wing when it comes to culture and foreign policy, but he's reasonably liberal when it comes to economics. That doesn't make him a centrist, but according to the media it does. Probably because pundits themselves are in a similar situation, and centrism is the sacred ideal in the media. Of course with pundits it tends to be right wing foreign policy and economics combined with moderate social liberalism (often with a hefty dose of misogyny), but the principle is the same.
I thought your kind of scum was racist trust-fund scum. /petey
Comments closed April 15, 2008. |
Search
Subscribe to this blog by Email Books by Matthew Yglesias
Recent Comments
Recent Posts
Weekly Archives
Categories
|
Copyright © 2007 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
| 
Heads in the Sand
Yes, no blog is complete without a ROTJ reference! Does anyone remember the name of the bounty hunter that Leia posed as? I was trying to make my own reference yesterday and my brain froze like carbonite! Anyways, its going to take a lot of Bacta to get the media off their "centrist" label.
Posted by Scott | April 1, 2008 1:41 PM