Images I wish I could sear out of my brain

But finish his stint in the TANG?

Noooooo. He was too busy partying. Heh Heh. *snort*

Oh, God, please bring back the Vagina Dentata. A nice, safe sexual nightmare image.

She's certainly nuts if she thinks Bush gives a rats ass about anyone but himself and his cronies. Now, if she'd said Bush would stage a photo-op of him breastfeeding the troops if he thought it would help his numbers, that I could believe.

It should be pointed out that all of this is in the context of smearing Hillary Clinton as not really a woman. I think Noonan has gone off the deep-end here, but her rhetorical aim is to portray Dubya as having more of a feminine side than Sen. Clinton. It doesn't do much for me, but who knows? I have given up trying to understand the workings of the rightwing psyche.

Other than that, it is a pretty weird image. The first thing that came to mind was Dubya transfigured into some kind of 150000-teated idol suckling the soldiers in Iraq. Fortunately, an old Simpsons episode came to the rescue--the one in which Apu is desperately trying to feed his octuplets from bottles attached to his body. At least it's comical rather than horrific.

I think the talking points got mangled in Noonan's fax machine. Bush is supposed to be the manliest of manly men.

PZ--
I know you're a smart guy, so I'm a little troubled that you didn't expect a priori to find world-fouling madness when you looked at the WSJ editorial page.

Noonan is part of a very disturbing cohort in American Roman Catholicism. Catholic media in the U.S. is populated by extremists who fawn over people like Noonan, Rick Santorum, Pat Buchanan, and their right-wing colleagues. Noonan is sometimes called "our lady of the dolphins" by her detractors because of her weird articles at the time when Elian Gonzalez was fished out of Florida waters. She said God sent dolphins as part of a miracle to save the little boy. This was presumably the same God who was idly watching Elian's mother drown in those same waters. Mysterious ways!

None more mysterious than Noonan.

" Frank Rich is running around with his antiwar screeds as if it's 1968 and he's an idealist with a beard, as opposed to what he is, a guy who if he pierced his ears gravy would come out."
Huh? What the heck does this even mean? Is gravy-blood part of being a "librul"? Sounds like she's also reliving 1968.

But where do the magic dolphins come in?

Sorry, P.Z., I don't know any way to clean your brain. Bleach won't work. Perhaps massive amounts of alcohol?

Other things that I'll never get out of my brain...

From TPMMuckraker - Tom DeLay!

A few weeks after departing the House of Representatives, Tom DeLay served as charity auctioneer at a fundraiser for Safari Club International, a gun-lobby group defending man's right to defend himself against unarmed animals.

"Who wants a beaver?" DeLay asked the crowd, hawking a sheared-beaver vest that a lobbyist later won for $1,400.

"Hoots," reports Roll Call's Mary Ann Akers, "and hollers followed." Probably because the crowd of hunters, hunter-lovers, and those who make their living kissing up to hunter-loving lawmakers understood that "beaver" is a slang term for vagina -- although, who knows, maybe they were super-excited about the flat-tailed, dam-building rodents.

"Everybody likes beaver, even women," DeLay declared happily, with a passion he once reserved for attacking "liberals." "The best thing about it, it's a shaved beaver!" he exclaimed -- blissfully ignorant, it would seem, of the disturbing psychosexual inference that prepubescence is somehow erotic in a female partner.

Twice this week I've gone off into disturbing reveries on rightwingers depicted as polytheistic idols. The first was Rush Limbaugh as priapus (nuff said). Now I'm picturing Bush as a thousand-teated androgynous man-goddess. If this is a new megatrend, I may need professional help (either therapy or buying a plastic injection molding setup to cash in).

Unstable Isotope: boy, do I miss those good ol' days when people just made ridiculously funny phallic references.

I'm sure Delay knew exactly what he was talking about.

I read on, and thought Ms. Nooner was making uncommon sense on the flag-burning amendment, until I hit the sentence emphasized below:

The flag burning amendment is a bad idea, and will not prove, in the end, politically wise or fruitful to any significant degree. Three reasons. One is that the American people can sense, whether they support a constitutional ban or not, that they're being manipulated. They know supporters are playing with their essential patriotism for political profit. They know opponents are, by and large, taking their stand for equally political reasons.

What the F***?

Perhaps massive amounts of alcohol?

I just got back from Drinking Liberally. It didn't take massive amounts -- I'm a pantywaist -- but two beers was enough to rebalance the cerebral cortex.

One of the lovely surprises about reading 'blogs is that an awful lot of people who write for free write vastly better than people who get paid for it.

Unfortunately, Noonan is an example of how low a standard that can be. It's not a question of agreeing with her positions--if someone on the Left wrote like that--the mixed metaphors, the ridiculous statements put forth as fact (No one in America thinks she's [Hilary Clinton] a woman.), the grandiose, abstractions stated as eternal verities--she'd still make you gag.

But if she was a Liberal with those writing skills--Lord, who'd hire her? She's be a school secretary who wrote bad poetry on the side.

Why are you torturing yourself by reading the WSJ opinion page? It's nuts!

Just a few weeks ago they were claiming that tax cuts were soaking the rich! They live in bizarro world.

Seriously, save yourself some major mental anguish and stick to the WSJ news section. I used to read the WSJ opinion page to "track the enemy's movements" but found it just isn't a rewarding use of time. The stuff they say is so crazy and the only people who take it seriously are already hopeless. No point even arguing with the crackpots.

This Noonan editorial is a perfect example. Do you really want to get in a discussion of which politician would "breastfeed" the military? It's just crazy talk!

Why are you torturing yourself by reading the WSJ opinion page?

Look, I'll lay it out clearly:

i, The brain itself feels no pain.

ii, The death of brain cells spontoneously committing suicide at the stupidty of an WSJ oped causes no pain.

iii, It's only torture if the amount of pain is at a level consistent with major organ failure.

Now, do we have that clear?

What the heck does this even mean? Is gravy-blood part of being a "librul"?

Gravy, as in gravy-train, as in making a lot of money without doing much work, i.e. being in a position of undeserved privilege. Used here to insinuate that the editors of the Times, despite thinking of themselves as heroes of the underclass, are acutally your basic rich, white, male elite.

Or maybe there's an actual trend for journalists to inject condiments under their skin as a fashion statement and convenient source of protein. Who knows.

She's got the wrong protrusion. Bush wants the military to suck his dick, not his teats.

Now, if she'd said Bush would stage a photo-op of him breastfeeding the troops if he thought it would help his numbers, that I could believe.

You know, I see no evidence whatsoever that Bush actually cares about his poll numbers at all, despite occasional claims to the contrary. What the country (as a whole) thought about the Iraq war didn't matter when his numbers were good, and it still doesn't matter when his numbers are bad. Much the same can be said about a lot of his domestic policy.

And everybody praises him for being such a steadfast and unwavering leader. How come the Democrats can't come up with somebody who's as much of a resolute asshole, but not a moron? There's got to be somebody.

I'm sure George Bush would let the army suck an appendage, but I don't think anyone should mistake that for nursing. Bush is the guy who, after all, threatened to veto the bill to send body armor to Iraq for "technical reasons."

Yes, anyone should expect madness on the WSJ editorial page. Still, usually it's just poor arguments coupled to bad mathematics crazy (the poor used to pay $1, and now pay $0, so old taxes were INFINITELY HIGHER than their new taxes, while the rich used to pay $500 million and now pay $250 million, which is clearly a much smaller cut percentagewise). This is more Necronomicon, book of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred crazy.

This is more Necronomicon, book of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred crazy.

Ever wonder at the difference between liberal and conservative blogs? On most conservative blogs, they wouldn't get the distinction.

Noonan's a certifiable Looney Tune. I'm suprised Warner Brothers doesn't own copyright on her...

Dubyadubyadubya... Dah Dat's All Folks!