POWIP Piece of Work In Progress – Former Abode of Dan Collins

Wolly Pokes His Head In [UPDATED]

Little Miss Attila was lending me support by fantasizing about a deep-pocketed righty donor equivalent of Soros helping me and other Lost Boy and Island of Misfit bloggers pay the rent by pounding the keyboards. She also helped by linking to my bleg. Leave it to Wolly to turn this into a flat-screen version of The 5000 Fingers of Dr. Terwilliger, which, if you've never seen it and happen to have some blotter acid lying around, is certainly worth the viewing:

Leaving aside the sweet delusion she hosts of the bench strength of all that "top-notch talent" on the right, LMA might want to acquaint herself of John Simon's response when asked if Hollywood studios had bought off a certain LA film critic:

"Why should they pay for something they can have for free?"

Why should billionaire the Koch brothers flick spare change at cicadas who are already dependably, monotonously, demagogically bashing* unions, NPR, Planned Parenthood, feminism, Al Gore, Obama, and everything else on the checklist for nuthin'? They would only do it out of charity, and I'm sure these intrepid bloggers have too much pride and self-respect to accept corporate charity.

Because, you know, they consider themselves OUTLAWS.

Or cast-offs, I forget which.

I don't have any argument regarding the relative (vertical) notchness of my talent: De gustibus non est disputandum, and all that. Still, as Wolly offers me a pretext on which to cicadize, I'm happy to oblige.

As regards "corporate charity," when it is given in exchange for services, we call that employment. Although I haven't made much of a deal about NPR, personally, no conservatives that I know have any problem with Ben & Jerry's (property of Unilever) underwriting NPR. If Bill and Melinda Gates want to, that's their business, too. On the other hand, any corporation advertising on Glenn Beck (whom I don't listen to, because I don't listen to radio or watch TV) will receive a nasty letter from Van Jones telling them to cease and desist or face a boycott. And that's their right, too, though boycotts can certainly work both ways. If one believes, with Cenk Uyger, that Obama's actually to the right of most Americans, that is the sort of gamble that one's willing to take, naturally, so I'm not complaining about that, either.

As regards unions, you'll notice that I've been careful in my many posts on Wisconsin's budget woes and Governor to stress the difference between public and private unions. The Flight of the 14 Fleebaggers demonstrated beyond a (penumbra of a) doubt that they answer first to the unions. If the AFL-CIO, the SEIU and others wish to claim that unions are unions, regardless of whether they exist in the public or private sector, and to express solidarity with the public sector, which has seen an outlandish growth in wages and benefits under the present administration, even as workers in the private sector have seen real wages and benefits diminish, in part due to policies such as ObamaCare and the blithe printing of scads of ever more worthless dollars, that's entirely their business, but I am not obliged to accept their rhetoric, even when threatened with a mouthful of bloody Chicklets. Obama wants to see federal dollars for "shovel ready" projects go exclusively to union houses--the sort that are regularly linked to the mob in cities such as Sweet Home Chicago--and damn the actual value of the goods and services realized by the public. If that makes me resentful of private unions, naturally it's because I'm not ideologically pure enough to understand how such arrangements benefit the middle class.

I've left feminism to other people, recently, as well, though on the whole I agree with Jeff Goldstein's observation that third-wave feminism is just another identity politics ghetto designed to rake all the laudable qualities of humanity (both of them) to women, while casting all the nasty ones on the shoulders of men. It takes a special kind of graduate school screwed up to believe that language itself is one vast conspiracy designed to keep vaggie down, in a world where angry, scrotemic skyscrapers rake the welkin and glower menacingly upon Guernica-drawn wimmens (to say nothing of monotony, or the Chora, pbui).

I would have thought that by now it's apparent to just about everyone that Al Gore is a charlatan (and has been, ever since he graduated from plowing his family's farm behind a government mule) of the worst sort, investing in carbon-trading scams and pretending, much against the evidence, that his famous global catastrophe scare movie is made of truth. The seaside mansions, the distracting second chakra and all the rest are embarrassments, but nothing compared with the pseudo-intellectualism and vicious avarice. Thanks for the Internet, though.

I bash Obama because he deserves to be bashed. He is a crooked Chicago fixer, a serial liar, a will-o-the-wisp, a backstabber of allies, a nurse of enemies, a believer in economic absurdities who is so hide-bound he will not credit the evidence of his senses, a juggler of false numbers and falser premises, and at root someone who loves America and Americans on condition that they change fundamentally to suit him. With the possible exception of Al Gore, no American politician (discounting Edwards, who is an ex-politician) has as inflated an ego while at the same time being as full of fail.

Invidia isn't one of my greater faults. I would be content to be paid what I'm owed for services rendered. Why Harper's Bazaar Vanity Fair chooses to subsidize Wolly's forays into inside blogger baseball, I don't know, but I'm grateful, because I'm an attention whore--which may, I suspect, have something to do with why I blog. Whether what Harper's Bazaar Vanity Fair pays Wolly amounts to corporate charity or not, I leave to you.

Sometimes, though, I wish I had the chops to be a cowboy poet.

OUTLAW!

* Stop vilifying me!

UPDATE: Wolly's Technorati profile

Dan Collins

Dan Collins is a dude who blogs. He used to blog elsewhere. Now he blogs here.

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