Dictionary of National D-bags: Christian Lander

Who is Christian Lander? He is the the reason for the rant, the hero of American d-baggery in 2008, a beacon to those feeling lost in a sea of Obamamania.

Most commentators in the press incorrectly tag Lander (or as I affectionately call him, Chandler) as a satirist. Satire (as opposed to, say, polemic) seeks to correct people’s vices and follies by getting them to laugh at themselves. You might think that Lander’s send-up of “white people” practices like worrying whether or not a couple is compatible based on shared literary tastes, or gathering socially to play “kids games” is proof that he is writing satires of people who have more money than sense. Making fun of rich people who are socially aspirant has a long and venerable tradition reaching back to ancient times. From Mennipius to Juvenal, to Dryden and Swift, to The Onion, making fun of people who confuse their wealth with their personal worth has an honored place in our culture. It would also make him a traditional moral conservative, someone who believes that timeless values like modesty, charity, honesty, justice, temperance, patience, courage and fortitude are being corrupted by selfishness, laziness, smug complacency, and a falsely inflated sense of self-worth (also known as pride).

But is Lander a moral conservative? No. He is a movement conservative. What’s the difference?

Where true social conservatives decry deteriorating morals, movement conservatives in the past half century have reconceptualized values (making them “values”) in an attempt to fuse free-market ideology with more traditional d-bag philosophy. Then they give it ideological cover by appealing to people’s greed, fear and pride. By making greed a virtue and power an end in itself they reject traditional conservatism for a revolutionary critique of traditional morals. Being modest, kind, honest, just and temperate becomes a sign of weakness. Being skeptical is spun as indecision and lack of spine. They gave up dispassionate critical thinking for revolutionary zeal. They became the thing they used to hate.

Lander himself is a paradigm of this kind of d-baggery. Leaving the sangfroid of his native Canada for greener ideological pastures in the United States, Lander found himself in a graduate program in English at Indiana University. There he realized his intellectual gifts were moderate at best, and being a movement conservative he considered this someone else’s fault. (Conservatives are big on self-reliance — in others.) Having more sense than some other disaffected d-bags (VA Tech, etc.) he decided not to invest in AKs and Glocks, but rather to invest in a menial, low-paying job in Southern California, one that gave him enough free time to pursue his interests: fantasy football, getting turned down by girls, eating Taco Bell, blogging, and being a complete douche. The anti-intellectualism of his writing is covered with the emotional scars of being too dumb to compete with smart people.

It was easy for Lander to find a voice for his d-baggery: It was developed for him by his spiritual forebears from Irving Kristol to David Brooks. And it didn’t hurt that his sullen, resentful temperament and self-loathing alienation resonate with d-bags all over the English speaking world, who think they are twice as smart as they are and three times smarter than everyone else. Being vicious, voyeuristic and smugly superior to the culture that produced you is de rigueur for d-bags, so Lander only had to speak from the heart to express the Britney/Paris, reality TV, fake-tits-and-porn, post-racial, globalized worldview and its critique of “authentic” (i.e. European) culture.

But the key to his success with Stuff White People Like is the fact that Chandler does not identify as “white” — though his skin tone appears to say otherwise. Being a fan of power for its own sake and worshipping in the cult of masculinity (that is, loving anything corporate no matter how bad it is, thinking war is fun, and idolizing sports figures as heroes though they may be the biggest sociopaths on earth) is a trait common to all d-bags from all races and nations. It’s part of not being able to think in abstract terms. But instead of satirizing American’s racism by exposing it to ridicule, he engages in reverse racism by implying that racial thinking is valid but backwards. It is right to think that Negroes are inherently better at basketball than Europeans and Asians, or that Asians are better at math, or that Jews have a special knack for making money. The only difference between Chandler and the Klan is Chandler thinks racism proves that “whites” (really Europeans from north western countries like England, Germany and Scandinavia) are the degenerate race.

Racist discourse (like fascist discourse) relies on myths of purity, authenticity, and priority. “White” Americans are not just rich and foolish, they are White and therefore mixed (English? Irish? German?), inauthentic because they lack a “native” culture, and historically later than non-white, English speaking Americans with more ancient and venerable cultures — for example, Chinese Americans, Filipino Americans, Jewish Americans, Korean Americans, Japanese Americans, etc.

Why is Chandler’s racism particularly dangerous in 2008? As Charles Blow points out, racism is very much alive in the minds of voters this year. Stuff White People Like tells us if you are non-white you have the right to be as racist, intolerant, and supremacist as any conservative WASP redneck shooting up churches in Tennessee. It’s time to call a shvartser a shvartser. Chandler is telling you it’s OK to hate your enemies based on the color of their skin — especially if they’re “white”. But the buck don’t stop there chillun’. And if you laughed at Stuff White People Like, you’ll howl at the news in the Fall.

Satanic hypocrisy — Three Acolytes of our Great National D-bags

It has been thoroughly established on this blog that d-bags are that race of people who will populate the eighth circle of Hell. They are the hypocrites, the seducers and panderers, the  preachers of virtue who are themselves cesspools of depravity. They are the smug, self-righteous, selfish, and proud who feel that they are beyond the law but not beyond slandering others as lawbreakers. They seek advantage through unfair means and cry foul play when they lose to a superior opponent. They are the boastful, the braggarts, the blowhards and cowards, who prefer to use words rather than fists, but who are always spoiling for a fight.

When they do engage a fight, it’s either a suicide mission or a fight with someone weaker who they think will lose their nerve before the battle begins. In the last week there have been no less than three examples of what American d-baggery — promoted by Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter — has done to our national moral fabric.

Bruce E. Ivins worked for the past 18 years at the government’s biodefense labs at Fort Detrick, Md. Today he committed suicide rather than go to court for the charge of sending anthrax in envelopes to terrorist targets that killed five people. Mr. Ivins was the recipient of the 2003 Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service. Though some think he may have sent out the pathogen to test a vaccine he was working on, Satan knows the truth: He wanted to justify the Bush administration’s war on terror by making it seem as though American was under attack.

Anthony Hopkins (no relation to the actor) is a preacher in Mobile, Alabama who has been arrested for murdering his wife, cutting up her corpse and stuffing it in a freezer. The police were tipped off to the crime by his 19 year-old daughter, who he is accused of sodomizing. Hopkins was arrested at a Christian revival preaching the word of Jesus to the congregation of believers.

Jim David Adkisson is the ripe, evil fruit of the d-baggery that has become so popular in the last 40 years. Mr. Askisson took a sawed-off shotgun in a church on July 27th, 2008 and shot seven people in cold blood. He wrote a note that he left in his car explaining his actions. (The note has yet to be released to the public.) Knoxville Police Department Investigator Steve Still wrote in a warrant to search Adkisson’s house that Adkisson went on a rampage at the church, “because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed because they were ruining the country, and that he felt that the Democrats had tied his country’s hands in the war on terror and they had ruined every institution in America with the aid of major media outlets.”

As Knoxnews.com reports, “Still seized three books from Adkisson’s home, including ‘The O’Reilly Factor,’ by television commentator Bill O’Reilly; ‘Liberalism is a Mental Disorder,’ by radio personality Michael Savage; and ‘Let Freedom Ring,’ by political pundit Sean Hannity.”

Who is the biggest d-bag in the world today? We report, you decide.

 

Bang, bang you're dead!

Off-white d-bags

(Michelle Malkin)

It should be obvious by now that d-baggery is an American version of an authoritarian nationalist political ideology. D-baggery rails against cultural decline and decadence, and it seeks to achieve a national rebirth by exalting our great nation (and race!). D-baggery advocates unity, strength and purity both in the spirit and in the flesh. It is the unshakable belief in a strong masculine authority — a father, a leader, a Dark Lord — who must remain beyond the reproach of his children, beyond restraint, able to do whatever is necessary at any time and employ His awesome power in whatever way He sees fit, to destroy the enemy and ensure that our traditional life is renewed. He is, of course, a blond beast, one whose fair complexion shows his natural, physical superiority over the degenerate races who were rightfully conquered by our d-bag forbears and put to work making the bricks that compose our national monuments.

D-baggery is much more than just a political ideology though! It is also a lifestyle. It is a worldview. It even comes with its own science. When it looked like d-baggery was on the run in Europe after the end of the Second World War, and when it looked like Soviet era d-baggery was through with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, American d-bags rose to the challenge to resurrect d-baggery using the cast-off scraps from decolonized third world countries like the Philippines, Iraq, Ireland, and Canada. At the end of the Twentieth Century, d-baggery achieved what it had been incapable of achieving in Italy, Germany, Spain or Japan in the 1930s: a coalition of genocidal, racist, sexist, homophobic — heterophobic! — revolutionaries who are the very thing they despise! Isn’t it wonderful?

Part of the d-bag lifestyle is the mantra, “I deserve it.” Of course, the unspoken correlative to the mantra is, “and I’m going to take it from you.” Because that’s where being a d-bag becomes fun! D-bags understand law, right, and justice to be concepts affected by gravity: the bigger the social object is (e.g. Rush Limbaugh or Scooter Libby) the more the law protects their rights like a force field and the less power justice has to punish. For example, when the poor and powerless shoot heroin they are criminal scum who deserve nothing short of life imprisonment or execution, but when Rush scams fifteen doctors to get his fix of OxyContin — hillbilly heroin — he can have the case dismissed and his reputation vouched for by all his upstanding d-bag friends. Government does not have the right to tell you what kind of car you can drive, but it is obligated to provide you with cheap gas — even if that means prosecuting an unprovoked war. Scooter Libby, following in the venerable footsteps of Oliver North, not only is allowed to break the law, but is obligated to break the law as proof of his patriotism. This is what it means to be a d-bag: the privilege of doing what you accuse as criminal in others.

Though they would never admit it in polite company, d-bags love irony. And the fact that some of the biggest defenders of white, male supremacy should be neither white nor male is an irony that warms the fires of hate in a d-bag’s heart — even during the cold winter of peace and prosperity.

Bang, bang you're dead!

So when a strong woman calls another woman a slut, a bitch or a whore; when a black man calls another black man a nigger, and a cotton-headed coon then berates him for laziness; when an Asian woman calls herself a slant-eyed, slope, zipper-head and a gook, d-bags around the world raise a cheer. These are off-white d-bags. The irony is they are the beneficiaries of the liberal, uplift, social justice ideology they hate. Most off-white d-bags received special privileges unavailable to other people with whom they might be expected to identify. Clarence Thomas got into Yale through affirmative action; Ann Coulter can vote; and the Neo-Cons, denied entrance to the Ivy League were accepted to City College CUNY — a truly liberal liberal arts institution. But now that they got theirs, they are more than happy to deny the privilege to the new generation of the needy.

Can Filipinos be d-bags? Sure! Can Jews be d-bags? Absolutely. Anyone who thinks God gave them the right to dispossess another human being of his property, liberty, and life without the due process of law or ethical feelings (do to others as you would be done to) is a fundamental d-bag. But because d-baggery is a belief that might makes right, combined with the perverse satisfaction of using fraud and guile to pretend to might without actually having to work for it, off-white d-bags are paradoxically the paragons of d-baggery. They are ideological cover for the continued degradation of ethics, honesty, justice, and morality by the purveyors of hatred, fear, intolerance and perfidy.

Does this come as a shock? Is it surprising that human beings of all backgrounds might want to obliterate any history of oppression and inferiority that clings to their people or themselves? Not at all. Is it a surprise that men and women want to be able to determine their futures and chose their own fates? No. Is it hypocrisy beyond wickedness that a former revolutionary who wants to ameliorate the condition of his people would, when the battle is won, become a more intolerable tyrant the the one he deposed? Yes. But to be a quintessential d-bag, he must also publish the old lie that some citizens are more equal than others, and that war is peace.

 And here we see the terrible utility of off-white d-bags to the cause of authoritarianism: Off-white d-bags prove that tolerance and forgiveness can be shamefully manipulated by the unscrupulous who make a valid claim on our conscience for reciprocity that they have no intention of honoring.

You might be a d-bag if…

• Are you violently angry when you see someone driving a Prius? If you are, you might be a d-bag.
• When you hear people speaking in ching-chong or Mexican and they aren’t working in a kitchen, do you do your impeccable imitation of Lou Dobbs? If you do, you might be a d-bag.
•  Does it bother you when people get a good feeling because they bought something that they thought was quality, instead of just cheap? Then you might be a d-bag.
• Do you like every moment of your waking day to be hammered by ear-splitting noise, for example from a hemi V-8 engine, a blasting PA in your local sports bar, or a fart ripping out of your ass? Then you might be a d-bag.
• Do you see nature as one giant toilette for you to shit in? Then you might be a d-bag.
• Are other people means to your ends? If they are, you’re a d-bag.
• Have you ever accused a teacher, a writer, or artist of being stupid because they said something you didn’t understand? If you have, you’re a d-bag.
• Is the only reading you do in bullet points or on the ticker at the bottom of a TV screen? If it is, you might be a d-bag.
• Do you have loud, private conversations in public, either when using a hands-free mobile device or even with just yourself? If you do, you’re either a d-bag or schizophrenic. (Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.)
• Do you have a gnawing feeling that the world was once your oyster, but now the white people are getting the upper hand? If you do, you might be a d-bag.

Anti-PC — It’s the new PC!

Nothing gets on God’s nerves like hypocrites, falsifiers, syndicators and and slanderers. And he gets really mad when you tell his worshipers their pious moralizing is in bad taste.

Back in the 60s Malcolm X said we had to call Negroes “African-Americans”. In the 70s we had to learn what “environmentalism” meant. In the 80s — the greatest decade in the history of the United States — Liberal wingnuts told us it wasn’t “politically correct” to call Barnard College a girls’ school, throw our styrofoam Big Mac cartons out the window of our cars, or create a shadow government. In the 90s we made a comeback thanks to our d-bag heroes in the House and on the radio, giants of d-baggery like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. By the time our dark lord of d-baggery was elected to the highest office in the land it had become PC to be anti-PC!

The physics of it are as simple as the plot of a Tom Clancy novel or an episode of 24. If someone thinks you are an ass for being an ass, they are an ass; if you are an ass you are an honest, freethinking, moral, courageous, hero — but only so long as you accuse someone of being an ass because they accused you of being an ass because you were, in fact, being an ass. It’s a no-brainer.

When someone tells you you should be ashamed of yourself for being such a selfish, mean, sneaky, lying, smug, irritating blowhard, they’re being PC. When you tell someone they should watch what they say about America or else they might end up in Gitmo, you’re being a patriot. Be a free thinker. When someone points out your hypocrisy, accuse them of being PC!

Wearing your politics on your sleeve (or chest)

Nothin’ says d-bag like letting your clothes do the insulting. (Thanks to the SkepTick at www.wayofthewoo.blogspot.com for the heads up.)

Once a long time ago d-bags were content to wear T-shirts that said “I’m only 2 girls short of a 3-some”, “I’m not a gynecologist, but I’ll take a look”, and “It’s not a bald spot; it’s a solar panel for a sex machine”. That was a simpler age, when the threat of communism had worn off but before Islamofascism and autism had taken its place.

Not only is it OK in d-bag America to say things that would have been condemned by our grandparents, it is obligatory to wear them on your chest as a way of identifying yourself to other d-bags.

The charm of d-baggery isn’t joining a junta, persecuting innocent people just because you think you’re bigger, or even exploiting those who nurture and sustain you to prove you’re a pimp (though those are perks). No, the icing on a d-bag’s nuttsack is the ability to insult people to their faces, daring them to fight back.

And when they do fight back, you can accuse them of breaking the rules of social decorum.

Dictionary of National D-bags: Donald Rumsfeld

Does this guy look like he’s your grandfather telling you to go to the woodshed and pick out a strong, green hickory switch that he will use to beat your ass? Or is this the face of the headmaster at an orphanage who “punishes” unruly children in the privacy of his office with the shades drawn and the door locked?

Either way, Donald Rumsfeld is a paragon of d-baggery in American history. If there were a shelf for fine, barrel-aged, smoke-cured d-bags, he would be on top. More than Robert McNamara, Rumsfeld’s predecessor in short-sighted, know-it-all militarist d-baggery, Rumsfeld brought the ignorance and the arrogance of power to new heights within the framework of all-American, apple pie eating ideology.

Rumsfeld’s main accomplishment is the Rumsfeld Doctrine, a perfect synthesis of d-bag philosophies that assures American presidents who want to wage foreign wars but on the cheap that they can have their cake and eat it too. “I deserve it” + “paying for it is someone else’s problem” = Rumsfeld Doctrine. This is also the basis of the business practice of generating “externalities” — that is, costs of maintaining capital or labor that someone else has to pay, preferably the public.

For being the sufficient and necessary cause of millions of dead men and women at absolutely no cost to himself or his conscience, we enroll Donald Rumsfeld in the Dictionary of National D-bags!

Appeasement

D-bags are fond of accusing others of being Nazis. We live for it. We also like to accuse white people of it. The difference is when we’re not accusing someone of being a Nazi, we’re accusing them of appeasement.

Winston Churchill was a monarchist, suspicious of democratic institutions, who railed against  the abdication of prince Edward. His thorough self-knowledge was an advantage when he saw Hitler’s absolutist ambitions. Churchill correctly identified how big a d-bag Hitler would turn out to be.

Then again, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Calling people fascists

Some d-bags have suggested that regular white folks like to compare people they don’t like to Hitler. That may be true, but white folks have absolutely nothing on d-bags when it comes to throwing around terms like Hitler, fascist and anti-Semite.

The argument goes something like this: If you’re nice to other people you’re a liar and hypocrite. Deep down people are not nice — not at all! At least I (the d-bag) am honest about being a pompous, overbearing, selfish ass, and this means I am a freedom loving Republican. If you help people you actually take away their freedom by obliging them to yourself. Because we are all d-bags deep down we all resent being helped and put under an obligation.

Now, we d-bags love power. We love conspicuous displays of waste because it shows off our power. We love torturing children to show off our power. We love putting limits on what citizens can do and say to show off our power. We especially love signing statements.

The most straightforward definition of fascism is “authoritarian nationalist political ideologies or mass movements that are concerned with notions of cultural decline or decadence and seek to achieve a millenarian national rebirth by exalting the nation or race, and promoting cults of unity, strength and purity.” And the most straightforward exposition of such an ideology can be found in the mouths of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, and Michele Malkin. But because these d-bag philosophers are Americans who love their country and hate people who don’t love it as much as they do, they aren’t fascists. No, it’s the liberals who want to help the poor, build public transportation, and protect the rights of all men and women who are the real authoritarian heirs to Hitler.

Dictionary of National D-bags: John Yoo

Our latest installment in the Dictionary of National D-bags is John Yoo, perhaps the greatest d-bag of the early 21st century.

Yoo is an Ivy educated d-bag, graduating with a BA from Harvard and a JD from Yale. But because he is “off-white” he is acceptable to white d-bags as a poster boy for Horatio Alger-style luck and pluck. Like his mentor Clarence Thomas, Yoo had all the benefits of American society but none of the guilt. This happy situation has allowed him to be the purest voice of d-bag advocacy in the United States today.

You may know Yoo for his controversial opinions on the power of the U. S. government, including his opinion that the president has the right, if not the obligation, to spy on American citizens during a time of war. (This is extremely relevant today in light of the Senate’s passage of a bill to immunize telecoms who broke the law and protect the Bush administration from people finding out exactly how far they peered into our lives. Bush “relishes” signing it.) Or maybe you know Yoo for his “torture memos” that argued the state has the power to inflict whatever pain short of death it thinks necessary on captives. These things certainly make Yoo a tyrant and a monster — but not a d-bag! Monsters are capable of integrity; d-bags think integrity is for pussies.

D-bags say they deserve to be exempt from rules that everyone else has to follow — like keeping your contracts, honoring your promises, and believing in fair play. That is why when Yoo’s man is president he says things like, “To his critics, Mr. Bush is a ‘King George’ bent on an ‘imperial presidency.’ But the inescapable fact is that war shifts power to the branch most responsible for its waging: the executive.”

But when Yoo’s man is not president he argues the exact opposite in a tone of principled integrity: “President Clinton exercised the powers of the imperial presidency to the utmost in the area in which those powers are already at their height — in our dealings with foreign nations. Unfortunately, the record of the administration has not been a happy one, in light of its costs to the Constitution and the American legal system. On a series of different international relations matters, such as war, international institutions, and treaties, President Clinton has accelerated the disturbing trends in foreign policy that undermine notions of democratic accountability and respect for the rule of law.”

You might say he’s just being a lawyer, but even lawyers can once in a while show integrity. Rather, he is the intellectual prince of d-bags, telling bald-faced lies and willfully perverting truth to justify bad people in their bad behavior. And for that John Yoo is today’s honored entry in the Dictionary of National D-bags!

NOTE TO LIBERTARIAN D-BAGS: People who think it’s OK for one party to break their promises to another party are probably the same people who will take your stuff and throw you in jail if you object.

Pastoralia

Rolling green fields, blue skies flecked with soft, white clouds, the smell of freshly cut grass in July — these are a few of a d-bag’s favorite things. But only if you can see them through the bay window of a McMansion being cooled to a barely tolerable 65 degrees. Sometimes it’s OK to look at them as they whiz by the windows of your Hummer. D-bags are not into being outside if it involves feet or exercise.

D-bags love nature, but only as it exists in advertisements for Dodge trucks, Archer Daniels Midland corporation, or Lonesome Dove reruns. Otherwise d-bags like their nature paved. But not too much! We still like the expanses of green between ribbons of gray! Nothing says d-bag like well watered and manicured lawns as far as the eye can see, preferably in a desert somewhere in Southern California, Nevada, New Mexico, or Arizona. Those green fields are our d-bag birthright as Americans. They are the promise given us by the Founders of life, liberty, and a little plot of earth (no less than six acres) with all the amenities of a city including indoor plumbing, air conditioning, satellite TV, a four car garage, and an in-ground pool in the back yard. This is why the Greatest Generation died fighting Nazis and Japs — so that each and every American can live like an absolute feudal lord on his little exurban fief.

Telling people to “just chill out.”

Many non-d-bags are subjected day-in and day-out to the pushy, rude, self-absorbed rants of d-bags. Self-righteous anger is a d-bag’s stock-in-trade. Most of the time we can get away with this because most pussies are too scared to stand up and defend themselves. But sometimes the quiet guy in the corner gets his panties in a bunch, his dander up, and his his choler high. He starts shouting something about how he can’t take it anymore, and if you really want to end this you’ll step outside. Maybe you were birddoggin’ him, or maybe he just can’t stand you saying — all evidence to the contrary — that voting for “W” in 2000 and 2004 was a good idea. Maybe you said Obama was a Muslim whose best friend is Osama a little too loud. It doesn’t matter because this pussy has just given you a golden opportunity. Tell him to just chill out!

Part of the d-bag creed is that others are not allowed to do what you are. Pussies are not allowed the privilege of anger; wimps are not allowed to invite their friends to gang up on you in the parking lot; women are not allowed to screw other men; the poor will have no perks; and laughter belongs to the strong. Showing anger when you have a good reason to be angry is losing control and a sign of weakness. Being angry at everything, and self-righteously taking your revenge on innocents is d-baggery.

Heroes

A lot of times d-bags like to tell you they are hard-nosed realists and unsentimental skeptics who coolly assess the facts and don’t let their emotions cloud their judgement. If you believe this, d-bags will surely laugh at you, and let’s face it, you deserve it. The soul of d-baggery is making someone else play by rules that the d-bag doesn’t have to follow. For the sake of enlightening and instructing non-d-bags in the ways of d-baggery, Chunque will explain heroes to the world. The difference between a d-bag hero and a traditional hero is all in the dress code. That is, a normal person doesn’t require his sentimental crap to come dressed in a uniform.

For a d-bag a hero is anyone who has the power to wreck someone else’s life but decides not to out of sheer benevolence. Alcoholic fathers, mustachioed cops on the take, anyone who saves a kitty from a tree, Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh are all heroes by this definition. Let’s make this a no-brainer: if you are man enough to use sophisticated legal arguments to defraud the powerless and waste precious resources — just because you can — but are sensitive enough to get choked up over a Mel Gibson movie like The Patriot, you are probably a d-bag hero.

The dark lord of d-baggery says that conservation is a “personal virtue“. Let’s unpack that for the non-d-bags who might read this blog. By “personal” he means domestic, feminine, and weak. An “impersonal” virtue, on the other hand, is the kind that heroes have: masculine, skeptical, rational, wasteful, outwardly directed, careless of others’ needs or safety, committed to a larger cause — the big picture — which the d-bag has impersonally decided was in everyone else’s best interests.

Sadly, it is difficult for every aspiring d-bag to be a hero by practicing impersonal virtues. (This is particularly true for d-bag intellectuals like Christopher Hitchens, Penn Jillette, and Trey Parker.) That is why there are more opportunities to be a d-bag hero at your local Hummer dealership than there are on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Puff journalism

The core d-bag philosophy is “I deserve somethin’ for nothin’”. D-bags all over the world can thank the internet for allowing folks with no talent and no intelligence the opportunity to spread their crassness like VD.

Katharine Mieszkowski has written a piece in Salon about our favorite d-bag that demonstrates how well the internet works to spread mendacity across the globe. Her interview, which comes just short of oral sex, is completely void of critical thinking. Maybe that’s why they call them “puff” pieces?

Usually a d-bag has to go to Fox News or Howard Stern to satisfy his hunger for tales of fake tits, pedophiles, and muslim suicide bombers. Thanks to the internet d-bags are now able to create their own content, and with the help of a few friends you can go from being a mid-level drone to a publishing success overnight!

Talking points

Ignore the man behind the curtain!

Developing verbal skills is too much work for a d-bag. If it’s not a no-brainer, I don’t want any part of it! What’s more, critical reasoning and/or skepticism is for pussies. If you can’t chant it, forget it! Most of the time a d-bag can solve his problems the old-fashioned way — with his fists! But on occasion some weak-ass, know-it-all egg-head will use superior logic and a stronger grasp of reality (not to mention citable sources and good grammar) to disarm a d-bag — usually in front of people who might not have the d-bag’s back should a fight break out. (For example, when the d-bag is in a room full of TV cameras. Taking advantage of a d-bag in this way is a sure sign your enemy is a pussy.) For just such an emergency, the Ivy educated d-bags invented “talking points”.

Talking points are easy to remember. They often come in “bullet” form. This is why so many d-bags use Powerpoint to write instead of English. And more importantly, you can get them freshly updated every day from Fox News. No more worries! When someone starts asking embarrassing questions you can’t answer, shout them down with your talking points! Problem solved. It’s a no-brainer!

No-bid contracts

Every d-bag has a god-given right to freedom, and by freedom I mean driving a giant SUV. In order that we may form a more perfect union of consumer and consumption, our leaders — federal, state and local — took it upon themselves to make sure that no American would ever have to share his or her personal space on public transportation.

But freedom isn’t free. The price for freedom these days is just over $4 a gallon, and the end isn’t in sight. However, d-bags of all walks can feel triumph in the announcement that the largest American oil companies might receive no-bid contracts to drill for oil in Iraq. This accomplishes three key d-bag objectives:

• It proves that you can tell a bald-faced lie for years and get away with it
• It shows that having a solid pair of stones and never admitting defeat will, in fact, enrich you in the short term
• It shows that power is the ability to buy — and keep — politicians, news outlets, talking heads, government offices and private militias. (I am referring, of course, to Blackwater Mercenaries Inc.)

Join the revolution! Corruption is good for America, because I deserve it!

Principles

Take a principled stand. You can always change your mind later.

What makes a d-bag special, different from other kinds of mortals, is their deep insight into Truth. It is because they say it’s so, and not because it corresponds to to any coherent set of facts. Sometimes this attitude is described as post-skeptical, or post-ironic. Sometimes it’s just post-rational.

David Brooks of the New York Times editorial page has changed his mind recently. He said in an op-ed piece today that the future of conservatism lies not in the country club, but in Sam’s club; or in non-d-bag terms, after winning the battle of ideas, lowering taxes and drastically widening the gulf of wealth between the conservative masters and their conservative lackeys, the lackeys are in revolt. The solution is to “rebrand” Republicans specifically and conservatism generally as friendly to the lackey. What one man calls updating the cause, another man might call finding a new way to pander to useful idiots.

Martin Crutsinger, a columnist for the Associate Press (a.k.a. the d-bag daily) has published a news item today with the triumphant headline “Economic stimulus payments send after-tax incomes soaring by largest amount in 33 years.” Because the AP isn’t ready to acquire the same reputation as Fox News, Curtsinger is compelled to add in the body of the piece the belief of economists that “the boost from the stimulus checks will be only temporary and once the checks are spent, the risks of the economy falling into a deep recession will increase.” But who reads an entire article these days? The headline is what shows up in news feeds on Yahoo and AOL, and that’s all a d-bag needs to know.

Here’s Chunque’s prediction. The economy will continue to “improve” (as will the “situation” in Iraq) until January, 2009. If Obama becomes president both the economy and Iraq will spontaneously and completely fall to pieces; however, if McCain takes over the reigns of government conditions will continue to improve until every Sam’s Club shopper can afford a McMansion on a ten acre plot with two hummers in the driveway.

D-bags in the news: Antonin Scalia

Justice Scalia is most well known for his “strict constructionist” approach to judicial interpretation of the constitution, and his well-connected hunting buddies. Both make him a paragon of d-baggery, but the decision handed down today in District of Columbia v. Heller proves Scalia is one of our leading d-bags.

Though law is generally a subject that bores the majority of d-bags, your loving Chunque will attempt to navigate the complexities of the decision to point out where and how Scalia defended d-baggery in our name. In reference to the text of the second amendment of the constitution that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” Scalia wrote, “all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.”

Scalia’s self-professed strict constructionist method is meant at root to cripple judicial activism that offended d-bags in the 50s with decisions like Brown v. Board of Education that overruled the idea that racial segregation in the US is law. If the founders didn’t write it in the constitution it takes an act of Congress or a constitutional amendment to update the document for our times. The Constitution of the United States of America is not a living document. So for Scalia to write that the word “arms” in the second amendment might include howitzers or laser beams (or semi-automatic handguns) are not protected by the constitution — until he changes his mind, at which time it is not only good policy, but sound jurisprudence, for the Justice to ventriloquize the founders.

For making up rules to which others must adhere while reserving the right to break them yourself, we salute Antonin Scalia as our d-bag of the day!

Dictionary of National D-bags: Rush Limbaugh

Like the dark lord of d-baggery, Rush Limbaugh has made a career of teaching Americans how to be complete and utter d-bags. To non-d-bags, Limbaugh is offensive in every possible way: he is a pompous college drop-out whose failure and inability to fit into any respectable profession left him fit only for talk radio, but his success in appealing the the basest hatreds and fears of his audience has enriched him while impoverishing the national spirit. He is liar and a scumbag in addition to being a d-bag, whose absolute misrepresentation of the truth is a badge of honor for him and his listeners.

Limbaugh’s crusade against intelligence and rational thought is legendary to American d-bags, who have given up every pretense of their God given gift of free thought by calling themselves “ditto-heads”. His pioneering anti-intellectualism is the cornerstone of contemporary d-bag philosophy. If you can’t learn it before you drop out of college it must be destroyed by the storm troopers of mediocrity!

Limbaugh’s mocking of the weak and vulnerable, those who have made bad life choices and those who ended up on the wrong side of the law is made more poignant in the hearts of American d-bags because Limbaugh is himself overweight, slovenly in body and mind, a drug addict, and displays an unmistakable, criminal mentality. He is proof that power comes not from virtue but from crass, material force.

Limbaugh has taught us that he, like we, deserve it, not out of merit, but just because we say so. If the proof is in the pudding, he shakes his bowl full of jelly and defies The Good to prove it differently. 

For redefining what it means to be a snivelling, craven, hypocrite d-bag we salute Rush Limbaugh, the face of American d-baggery!

Free markets

Ask any d-bag — they’ll tell you that America is great because we have free markets and free markets make you free.

This is not the kind of simple categorical mistake the uneducated make when they assume that because a word reoccurs in two different contexts that it has the same meaning both times (e.g. that hamburgers are made from ham). Many of the most well educated d-bags are convinced that there is a direct correlation between free markets and freedom. In fact, two of the most well renowned economists in d-bag circles are Nobel laureates Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman both of whom argued that the only way to preserve political freedom is to guarantee free markets.

In the “reality-based” world, whose logic is different from d-bag logic, people are greedy and selfish, but occasionally touched by noble impulses to serve their community even if no benefit redounds back onto themselves. In this world there are many ways people express themselves in society. That includes their economic choices, but it is not limited to economics. They also participate in politics and occasionally in the arts. In the reality based world, freedom is more than the ability to choose between hoagies, grinders and subs; rather it is the ability to reflect on who you are and cultivate who you want to be.

In the d-bag world, nothing is done because it contributes to something greater than yourself; everything is done because it reflects and expands your personal power. For d-bags this is a zero-sum game. In addition to the free market mantra, derived and perverted from Adam Smith’s idea of enlightened self-interest that greed is good, d-bags add the maxim that envy is also good. That means if someone is doing better than you, and you can’t join them, beat them. (This is the root of many d-bag rants against “liberal elites.”) How does this effect “free” markets? In the first place it makes them impossible in the practical, “real world”. D-bags’ envy makes them secretly hate competition, especially by a smaller, weaker competitor. Their envy is tied into a veneration for power, and consequently you will notice d-bags are fond of monopolies and monopolistic practices (Wal*Mart), corporations, and gross displays of hubristic excess. but it gives ideological cover to government hating d-bags who would restrain activities in other areas of life (politics) from putting curbs on excessive behaviors. It’s a beautiful paradox: if you keep me from selling myself into slavery, you have taken away my freedom.

More to the point, free market fundamentalists confuse politics and economics on purpose so that an anti-democratic institution like the corporation can pretend (through myth and legal fiction) to be a free actor in a free market while denying its employees the freedom to also participate in markets or government (to take only one example by busting unions). Democratic institutions (like government) are not necessary for the functioning of corporations — just look at China. But free markets cannot exist, let alone function, without democratic government standing prior to it — not the other way around.

D-bags hate the farmers’ market, which is where beneficiaries of a free market might hang out, and which, ironically, is the nostalgic symbol of free markets for most free marketeers. Why? because it’s symbolic value of moderation and self-restraint, two virtues strenuously avoided by d-bags. But also because the farmers’ market is only made possible by the indulgence of governments (local and state) and consumers that protect them from unfair competition. Governments grant them space in public places, and consumers shop there from ethical impulses rather than purely economic ones. This is heresy to free market d-bags. Something that is not crassly self-interested must be punished by the state in the name of fair competition — in complete defiance of the creed of free markets. And aesthetic or political attitudes that do not reverence the authoritarianism that lurks behind the mask of “free market” ideology must be crushed.