Deleted Scenes

For reasons indirectly related to this blog's consistent failure to provide me with a decent income, new articles might be few and far between for a while. Fortunately, I've been planning for just such an occasion, to the extent that keeping a list of my favorite lines from articles I started but never finished can be considered a plan.

So here you go. No attempt has been made to clear up whatever ambiguity results from the lack of context,^[1] as if that isn't obvious. Enjoy!

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A few months ago, House Republicans bestowed upon grateful Americans "a new platform to share their priorities and ideas for a national policy agenda." The site is open to all ideas—as it should be, considering the American people are paying for it—but the mission statement on the front page makes it clear that certain ideas are more welcome than others. Specifically, the following, to which the House Republicans boldly declare their commitment:

• Limited, more accountable government
• Economic freedom
• Lower taxes
• Fiscal responsibility
• Protecting life, American values, and the Constitution
• Providing for strong national security

That's right, if your solutions involve amending the Constitution to outlaw government accountability, hand-delivering our nuclear launch codes to North Korea, or earmarking federal funds for wanton and indiscriminate killing sprees, you can just take your ideas somewhere else!

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I can't say that I'm financially responsible for much of anything, but that's because I'm financially responsible enough to know I can't afford anything, so it's kind of a wash.

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These definitions reflect my view of how these terms are used by conservative pundits. I made every effort to be objective, except where I chose instead to be sarcastically hyperbolic.

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The hyphen is a sign of the impending downfall of traditional values in favor of political correctness (e.g. African-American) and gender equality (e.g. U.S. Representatives Sheila Jackson-Lee, Ginny Brown-Waite, and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz).^[2]

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I'm probably about as liberal as I am Floridian—31%, in terms of how much of my life has been spent with a Florida address—but I like calling myself liberal, for roughly the same reason I like calling myself Floridian.

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This isn't entirely an exercise in over-analyzing nonsense for my own amusement (but it's not entirely not that, either).

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I know, I know. As soon as all this happens Fox News' ratings will plummet, talk radio will cease to be relevant, and politics will be at least 80% less interesting. But we don't have to totally give up our beloved inane bickering. We'll always have sports.

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Christine O'Donnell exemplifies a problem to which conservatives are especially susceptible. On most non-Bible-related issues, the conservative position boils down to "let's sit around and do nothing and see if things take care of themselves." And from this simple idea a truly compelling philosophy has emerged, and a lot of very smart people have said and written some very smart things about the wisdom of sitting around and doing nothing and seeing if things take care of themselves. Hell, they convinced me, and I think I'm kind of smart. But the downside is, even a dumb person can learn to say "let's sit around and do nothing and see if things take care of themselves," and it's hard to tell that she's dumb because she's saying the same thing as the smart people.

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Statistics show that most Americans don't understand statistics.^[3]

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Great as Paul McCartney is, he's also responsible for the line, "in this ever-changing world in which we live in", and that's something for which I can never forgive him for.

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I'm not in the business of pointing out hypocrisy, for the same reason I don't go around discharging firearms into small containers stuffed to capacity with halibut.

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The subheading at the top of NewsBusters.org, "Exposing & Combating Liberal Media Bias",^[4] is technically accurate, but would be no less so with the word "bias" removed.

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There's a lot of nonsense out there, but at least this is enumerated.

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No hay nada que me enoja más de los tipos que les gustan gritar "¡This is America! ¡Speak English!" Esa actitud es igualmente irrespetuoso y ignorante. ¿Piensen que aprender otra lengua es fácil? ¿Piensen que inmigrantes no quieren aprender inglés? Claro que sí lo quieren, y—por lo general—sí lo aprenden.

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I don't care if it's my girlfriend running for office—if I go to her campaign website and a video starts playing automatically, I'm voting for her opponent.

1. Also, footnotes are left as they appeared in the original drafts.

2. It should be noted, however, that most conservatives do not oppose traditional uses of hyphenation (compound adjectives, certain prefixes, line-wrapping, etc.).

3. I don't have a source for that, but it's probably true.

4. That subheading, by the way, is phrased in the present progressive tense. That's right, progressive. It seems even grammar has a liberal bias.