30 Comments

• 1. DERP  |  February 9th, 2011 at 9:02 pm

  DERP DERP DERP?! YOU ATTACKED REAGAN?!

  THE REAGAN!

  THE REAGON WHO SINGLEHANDEDLY WON THE COLD WAR AND THE WAR ON DRUGS! ON TV?!

  DERP DERP DERP!

  AH MAN, BILL O’REILLY AND SEAN HANNITY AND THE CONSERVO BLOGS ARE ABOUT TO MAKE YOU THEIR BITCH!

  DERP DERP DERP DERP DERPITTY DERP DERP DERP!

• 2. captain america  |  February 9th, 2011 at 10:40 pm

  how was the “free” pre-regan california university system funded? if it was funded through taxes, it wasn’t really “free”. well, i guess it depends on your definition of the word.

• 3. Jon  |  February 10th, 2011 at 12:20 am

  At a time when the corporate media is so ruthlessly clamping down on divergent viewpoints in its pursuit of a total homogeneity of viewpoints, I simply cannot believe how Mark Ames gets on T.V.–it is just incredibly surreal.

  Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I must further applaud you, Mr. Ames, for possessing the courage (or rashness, I don’t know) to speak the truth on a person who is truly–as far as the supposed societal consensus is concerned–above criticism. I wasn’t alive during Reagan’s tenure (I’m 21), but I am continually shocked by how many professed Reaganites have absolutely no grasp on the most basic facts of his presidency.

  I’m not talking about feeling or sentiment; simply the objective truth. Sean Hannity identifies himself as a “Reagan Conservative”–the same Reagan who proved, to quote Dick Cheney, “deficits don’t matter.” But wait–I thought that Obama’s evil lies primarily in his propensity to spend exorbitantly, which is of course a means to the end of subverting the country from within and handing it over to a horde of brown communists?

  So, by Hannity’s logic, Obama is a Reagan Conservative. So Hannity is a Muslim Nazi Socialist? In a sane world, this inconsistency would be recognized by the public at large, and the idolatry would cease. Isn’t a basic prerequisite of worshipping someone that you should take even a cursory interest in the facts of their life? But in an insane world, in which only the mad are sane (too paraphrase Kurosawa), God Bless Mr. Ames for stepping in to take Reagan, and by extension all his deluded, sycophantic adherents, down a notch.

• 4. Toni M.  |  February 10th, 2011 at 3:35 am

  Mark, thank you for continuing to plug away at this.

• 5. brian  |  February 10th, 2011 at 6:31 am

  Thanks for posting these up, Mark. Always enjoy seeing you rip into the idiot zeitgeist.

• 6. Doug  |  February 10th, 2011 at 8:39 am

  Thanks Mark. You know how to bring it. I DVR Ratigan and speed through most of the show but always watch your rants.

• 7. I1  |  February 10th, 2011 at 1:18 pm

  Reagan and Thatcher were hired guns trained in rhetoric designed to convince the cattle a slaughterhouse was paradise. They presided over the beginnings of a thirty year wealth transfer which continues unabated. Now that the population has been totally fleeced, what to do with the carcass?

• 8. Doug  |  February 10th, 2011 at 1:21 pm

  So Ames seems to make four main points against Ronald Reagan:

  1) He was associated with the John Birch Society.
  2) He supported Botha/De Klerk in South Africa
  3) He opposed universal healthcare
  4) He ended free tuition in the UC system.

  I don’t see what’s so bad about any of these. But let’s start in reverse order:

  4) “Free education” doesn’t mean that it comes out of nowhere. Either the student pays or the government pays. In case anyone has failed to notice California is in massive fiscal crisis and looks likely to become the first state to enter bankruptcy. There is absolutely no way that the UC system could continue to indefinitely remain free given California’s fiscal shape. Had Reagan not ended the free system California would be in even worse fiscal shape and closer to the brink, which would mean higher borrowing costs, cut social services and more financial chaos. Even left-wing Europe is eliminating free universities

  You might bemoan that students lost the wonderful chance to get an education, but the value of education to the marginal student is pretty damn close to zero. 33% of college graduates work at jobs where a college degree isn’t needed, and the number of food servers with college degrees has doubled since the 80s. For the underprivileged intelligent student who’s going to become an aerospace engineer the relatively small UC student debts will be small potatoes from his increased salary, and he should, not the (predominately non-college educated) taxpayer, pay them. For the stoner student who was going to major in Africana studies has the tuition been free, but instead got a real job: guess what Reagan did him a favor.

  3) With regards to universal healthcare most people in the United States are against it. The reality of Obamacare is something that’s pretty screwed up. I won’t say much more on this point until the history plays out, but I don’t think this point is salient with all but the most leftist quintile of the population.

  2) Oh my gawd! Not apartheid South Africa. Thank God we got rid of them. Now South Africa is a wonderful, shining, safe and prosperous advanced first world nation where whites and blacks live side by side… Oh wait…

  Let me just quote someone who actually has to live in South Africa, rather than a bunch of Americans who get to live in a safe lily white suburb and lionize Mandela as the second coming of Jesus:

  “recently i was involved in a discussion with a guy that was explaining how we should understand criminals. the emphasis was on farm murders but we touched on murderers in general, rapists and child molesters. my point of view was that i did not understand them and felt that he was justifying their actions. in the end i was informed that i was smug. apparently that is the word for people that couldn’t see the point of view of the poor misunderstood murderers and rapists and molesters.

  so smug is what i am, it seems. you see the fact is i can’t understand his beloved murderers. i just can’t. i also in my smugness wonder how he can, but i think i know.

  it has to do with not being in the trenches. it has to do with not being faced with the blood and the tears and the guts and the screams…mostly the screams. it is probably easy to be nice and philosophical sitting snugly (not smugly apparently) in a nice air-conditioned office, philosophizing on the reasons people point a gun at people and pull the trigger. or worse…

  the thing is i can’t forget. i am scarred. i remember the patient lying in a pool of his own blood, looking up at me and asking, beseeching even to tell him he is going to be ok. i remember wanting to tell him that it would all turn out just fine. i even remember wanting to hold his hand because his mother wasn’t there to take care of the emotional side of things. in the end i remember not telling him he would be ok because i wasn’t sure he would. i also remember not being the mother he needed in the last moments of his life because that is what it turned out to be. after we had plough through the blood and feces floating around in his abdomen, violated by the bullet fired from the gun of someone my friend feels i must understand, the patient died. he did not die well with his mother or wife holding his hand in love. he died alone in some icu ward with adrenaline being pumped into his veins and oxygen being pumped into his lungs with a scarred doctor who felt that his time may have been better spent holding the patient’s hand rather than pouring time and energy into a futile attempt to save his life. you see the reason i can’t see the side of the killer is that the killer is still alive and has the sentiments of my learned friend to feel for him. my patient is dead and there was no one next to his bed when he died. there is no one to state his case now.
  […]
  the woman raped is difficult to examine. somehow you feel you are violating her again. you feel you are making the whole ordeal worse. they don’t resist. they are already broken. anyway, rape in our country is so commonplace, it may be the one area where i understand that my friend mat have sympathy with the perpetrator, but, sorry, i cannot. for me to examine those women tears me apart. it leaves me with a feeling that my own soul has been violated. that i am forced to do something because someone else destroyed a life. i refuse to see the point of that someone else. if that makes me smug, then smug i must be, but again i suspect i might be jaded.

  a bullet can do a lot of damage. physically i think i might have been a witness to pretty much all of it, but there is another side to the story. i remember an old man, shot in his home when he tried to defend his wife from the killers that broke into their house in the early hours, people that my friend chooses to understand. we did pull him through, but not without a massive operation and the obligatory icu time. i remember when he came to me for follow up some time later. i was so proud that he had made it. but somehow he was the shell of the man he used to be. he was alive, but broken. his confidence was gone. he lived in fear. he felt helpless because he knew he could do nothing against the lead of the people who i hear from my friend i must understand and sympathize with. but who sympathizes with my patient whose peace has been stolen from him? the smug or the jaded?

  recently i enjoyed my christmas eve over the open abdomen of a woman shot in her bed by strangers, strangers whom my friend has endless sympathy for. i did not enjoy my holiday period, but more than that, my patients didn’t either. hopefully my friend, while maybe enjoying a beer with the killers he understands so well had a really festive time. i do not understand him.”

  http://other-things-amanzi.blogspot.com/2011/01/smug.html

  Wow, sure glad Reagan didn’t manage to stop the current South African regime from coming to power… In reality by nearly any metric the blacks in South Africa are worse off now than they were under apartheid. And the whites are a lot worse off (whoever are left).

  1) Horrors of horrors, not the JBS. Jesus Christ Raegan is one step away from being a nazi. When you ask anyone what’s so bad about the John Birch society, they’ll immediately respond “they are an ultra-right wing organization.” The implication of course being that they want to what? Commit genocide, bring back slavery, overturn women’s suffrage. In reality if you ask people what are they specific policies they support that are so bad, you’ll get a blank stare.

  JBS has become a right wing boogey-man, with a lot of fantasy and not much reality. The thing they are primarily is hardcore anti-Communist. Yes, you know communism the movement that killed 100 million people (more than Nazism) and that 99.99% of Americans are against.

  Of course if Raegan was anti-Nazi instead of anti-Communist, Dylan Rattigan, et al. would probably treat him like a hero, like for example… Jello Biafra.

  Could someone please explain why being associated with the John Birch Society is any morally different than being associated with the Anti-Defamation League. Because I can’t see it.

  Now, if anyone is still reading this comment at this point and wondering, “Why doesn’t this weirdo shut the fuck up and get a job for chrissakes!” all I can say to you is, “Hey man, like, you should read Ludwig von Hayek-Rothbard, cuz like, he’s totally radical and shit, capitalism is totally edgy.” Sad thing is, I sell myself and my time for mere pocket change. The Kochs have so many of us suckups on their payroll, it’s getting harder, hence, I have to write increasingly bizarre insane and wordy comments like this. Someone, please shoot me.

• 9. calripson  |  February 10th, 2011 at 1:53 pm

  I am the same age and generation as Mark and I vividly remember Reagan. Mark is correct that Reagan marked the turning point in American society and history, but Mark, you don’t recall the sentiment of the time: America was completely in the dumps, economically and psychologically. America had been humiliated in Viet Nam and now watched helplessly as Iran held Americans hostage. Reagan promised toughness and faux masculinity- the antidote to Middle America’s impotent rage. Of course Reagan was a Hollywood fake, he was smart enough to limit his toughness to places like Grenada, but he had the luck of the Irish (or the stupid). He happened to be president when America’s great foe the USSR emploded and took the undeserved credit along with Star Wars” for the fall. In reality, the USSR had stopped being much of threat and much of a challenge soon after the historical inertia of Stalin’s evil greatest faded into the mediocrity of Khruschev and Brezhnev.

• 10. JoJoJo  |  February 10th, 2011 at 3:43 pm

  Whew reading through the Doug post I was seriously getting worried how this got through until that last bit. Haha! Exiled is the best thing on the net.

• 11. Strelnikov  |  February 10th, 2011 at 4:50 pm

  I will rebut Doug on the John Birch Society….the problem with the JBS in it’s most powerful phase (1959-1968) was that it was in competition with the American Nazi Party and other white natavist groups and some people started off as Birchers and moved further right (Robert Jay Matthews, founder of The Order*, being the most famous example.) It did not help that many American Opinion (JBS) bookstores had staff that were cutting the regular JBS merchandise with Nazi/Klan books and pamphlets. It also did not help that the leader/founder of the JBS, Robert Welch, saw everything as a Communist plot, including the Civil Rights struggle. Certainly the group had a lot of old ladies and young Republicans in it, but there was a subset of members who would have been better served as Klansmen, Minutemen, or skinheads. If the JBS was like the ADL, then it would be an ADL with loose ties to the Jewish Defense League. Certainly the JBS never advocated violence or racism, but it didn’t make a hard stand to keep the crazier parts of the US right out of the organization.

  ______________________
  * This was the group that robbed banks for gun money and mowed radio talkshow host Allen Berg down in his own driveway.

• 12. Dom  |  February 10th, 2011 at 5:11 pm

  What’s with the “free but not free” bunch?

  SOCIALISM :
  Anybody can go to any university regardless of their (or their parent’s) financial circumstances. To attend, you have to pass the test. To get the diploma, you have to get good grades. All that’s needed is motivation, hard work and/or decent IQ. It’s not always easy and can get very hard for popular universities.
  Tuition, accommodation and food are free to the student. Society bears the cost in order to give equal opportunity for all.

  Bonus #1 – Meritocracy
  Bonus #2 – Both graduates and dropouts walk out scott free. No debts.

  CAPITALISM :
  George W. Bush goes to Yale and Harvard.

  Bonus #1 – He gets the opportunity to smirk at the ownership society from the oval office.
  Bonus #2 – “captain america” and “doug” ponder the meaning of “Free” on the interwebs. In their underwear, from their mother’s basement. LOL !

• 13. General Ripper  |  February 10th, 2011 at 5:47 pm

  Feeding The Trolls Dept: Doug’s medieval rant almost convinced me that Reagan was misunderstood; if only he’d run over a child like Mussolini I’d know for sure he was being victimized by history. But take a bow anyway, ’cause you’re a frickin’ free-enterprisin’ bootstrap-scholar or something, catching California’s fiscal crisis four (4) decades before it happened. Usually it’s ‘trash the tax code’ *then* ‘have fiscal crisis’ but not for Reaganite visionaries. “Law and order,” Gore Vidal noted, “Ignore one and impose the other.”

  Thumbnails: I’m still not with Mark’s toning it down for TV; he’s at his best napalming the high-octane refinery of neofeudalism, a very hard thing to finesse. I say hook ’em and skin ’em, Ames, ’cause you rock…and fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke. Smile and laugh when you’re ripping down their greedhead temples, because fascists hate that more than anything.

• 14. Eric Weidner  |  February 10th, 2011 at 5:49 pm

  Ronnie Raygun. Brings back happy memories of being a punk in DC. And unhappy memories of Iran/Contra, ignoring AIDS, Moral Majority … but he sure gave us something to sing about/against! Rock Against Reagan!

• 15. jim  |  February 10th, 2011 at 7:09 pm

  One quote sums the man up perfectly:
  “I, too, am a Contra.”

  Reagan’s legacy lives on to this day: if he hadn’t kicked all those mental patients into the street, the Teabaggers might never have existed.

• 16. ReaganSuckledStalin  |  February 10th, 2011 at 8:44 pm

  I worry for the Serengeti. Erosion of the African grasslands may someday mean there won’t be enough lions for the coming great lionocalypse.

  Every last John Bircher will be fed to hungry African lions.

  Believe it.

• 17. Joe  |  February 10th, 2011 at 11:28 pm

  @ general ripper

  I think its just that mark is a better writer than speaker. But all it takes is a little practice. 5 more rants and he will be the next Louis Black. (Except with a football neck instead of baby fat)

  Or his script is being neutered by the TV execs.

  I don’t know why he didn’t mention the cleaning out of the insane asylum and putting all those crazies on the streets. That is one of the most cruel and evil thing Regan did. And since Americans don’t seem to have any compassion anymore you can always scare people with the “now those people are roaming your streets” and “that’s what the Nazis did.”

• 18. Joe  |  February 10th, 2011 at 11:55 pm

  @ doug

  I’ll bite:
  4)-Are you against ‘free’ k-12 as well?
  -Do you want our country to be as dumb as possible?
  -If ‘liberal’ Europe jumped off a bridge should we do it too?
  -I am for taxing the rich to pay for my children’s education because I am not rich and I stand up for myself. It’s called ‘self interest’
  3)-try:this or this or this
  -obamacare != universal health care
  2)-You are arguing for segregation with a white woman rape story(Its not good trolling technique to make such a long post)
  1)-I agree. If I had 4 min I could come up with a lot worse.

• 19. The Original Libertard  |  February 11th, 2011 at 8:20 am

  Say what you will about the JBS. They had a critique of power. Maybe not one you or I would wrap our heads around but they at least knew they were getting fucked by the system.

  Ames, you must have done some media training. You don’t do that adorable lip biting thing on camera any more. A pity.

• 20. Brian  |  February 11th, 2011 at 10:22 am

  Reagan didn’t just dismantle the social democratic safety net and cripple the unions, he turned us against ourselves. The Founders believed that government was the product of our collective will. This sentiment lasted for centuries. I argue that Reagan, more than any other single person, contributed to altering this state of mind. He told us all government in every form is evil. Instead of of focusing on corruption and good governance, we are now obsessed with the “evil” federal government (That good old Ronnie was a part of).

• 21. Nancy R  |  February 11th, 2011 at 12:30 pm

  When Ronnie fronted for GE light bulbs, when he personally drove that Boraxo 40-mule team over the carcasses of dead Commies, and even when he was Gov of that goofy dead end of the territorial imperative, people called him a lazy, good-for-nothing slacker. Well, I’m here to tell you all that he was not a slacker. He enjoyed horses, swimming, and acting. He got to play President. He napped. But don’t call him a slacker. That just makes me upset.

• 22. Jon  |  February 11th, 2011 at 6:57 pm

  @ Nancy R

  Mommy?

• 23. Wise old man  |  February 11th, 2011 at 7:56 pm

  Reagan is Lenin without walk-in cooler.

• 24. CensusLouie  |  February 14th, 2011 at 6:13 pm

  Ha ha, Dougie “The rich are tapped out” Doug strikes again!

• 25. Destro  |  February 16th, 2011 at 1:48 pm

  David Frum admits that since Reagan real incomes have declined for most Americans and he calls for income re-distribution. He says so in answering a reader on his latest blog:

  This is what he writes:

  http://www.frumforum.com/the-gops-budget-challenge

  Incomes policies per se don’t really work. They’ve been tried extensively in Europe in the sixties and seventies and always failed. What you’re really getting at I think and it’s an entirely valid point is the decline in real purchasing power of 80-90% of the country which has been going on apart from a brief interruption in the 90’s for thirty years. At bottom this is why all these market based solutions the Republicans keep advancing won’t work. Guess what. Most people can’t afford them and/or don’t have the expertise to manage them. The median income in this country is $55,000 when if it had continued its trajectory and received its pre 80’s share of productivity increases it would probably be in the 80’s. This income stagnation is not all the fault of Republicans, much of it is simply shifts in the labor market, but they haven’t exactly tried to ameliorate it. And that’s what were basically having to do…ameliorate it. That’s the flaw at the center of the whole supply side worldview. We’ve created an increasingly service based, high tech economy which depends for 70% of its GDP on consumer spending. How the heck are you going to continue growing such an economy while progressively impoverishing 80-90% of the people? Henry Ford had this figured out when he gave his workers high pay so they could buy his cars. The cracks were papered over with debt for about 8 years and the result was disastrous. The bottom line is we have to have some…duh…duh…dud…income redistribution…arghhh. This doesn’t necessarily have to mean higher wages but it could be cash transfers in kind like cheaper healthcare and transportation etc etc. I’m not sure whether its politicians being unable to explain it or the American people being too obtuse to take it in.

• 26. Bill O"cconnell  |  February 20th, 2011 at 1:06 am

  Reagan also killed 250 marines in Lebanon.
  As well as 6 Astronaughts in Challenger. When he threatened to stop their funding unless they launced imediately Ice on th wings and all.
  Iran Contra, Arms for drugs.
  October suprise, where he held americans hostage 140 days longer than they had to so they would be released on
  his Inagauration day.
  The killing of students on campus in Ohio, By stating 4 days before if these demonstration come to blood in the streets so let it come to that.
  He and Tip O’Niel short changed Social Security recipients.
  There is nothing this scumbag did that was good. PERIOD.

• 27. ASV  |  February 21st, 2011 at 9:31 am

  Hope for Americans after all?

  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/19/madison-protests_n_825616.html

• 28. Jim Goad  |  February 22nd, 2011 at 11:46 am

  Hi, my name is Jim Goad. You may remember me from the 1990s. Ah, the 1990s–those were the years, I tell ya! Well anyway, the fact that I’m trolling The eXiled’s comments section tells you all you need to know about how things have been for me since the 90s. You know that ol’ saying “FoxNews is the last refuge of lost talent”? Yup, I sold out to the right. I’m like the Dennis Miller of edgy urban rednecks. Except that Dennis is on Fox, and I sold out just for a blogging gig at Taki. But I believe I can be a Dennis Miller some day–with some hard work, elbow grease, and a lot of Koch rimming practice, Dennis, watch your back!

  So, what’ve I been up to, besides beating up chicks and bashing teachers’ unions and trolling The eXiled’s comments section? Thanks for asking! Well, I’m totally into fag-bashing jokes. You know, even though I’m getting old, fag-bashing jokes are still pretty edgy. And authentic. I mean fag-bashing jokes sure were in the 90s, the edgiest decade of all. Yeah, you see, it’s all about being authentic, and edgy rednecks, they tell fag-bashing jokes. Since I’m an authentic redneck (unlike you Ames, hoo-wee have I found the smoking gun on you, just you wait!), anyway, to prove that I’m not afraid of political-correctness bullshit, here’s my homophobe comment on you. Ready? You won’t be able to handle it dude, but here goes:

  I’d never heard your voice and didn’t expect you to lisp so much.

  Oh! I bet you’d never say something that edgy and authentic! Yep, that’s right dude, I said that, and I’m not afraid either. That’s how authentic and rednecky I am. Like, I don’t give a fuck about political correctness man, me and my redneck buddies, we just don’t give a fuck. Hoo-wee!

  Now here comes the downside to this whole redneck thing. See, the other part of being an authentic redneck is that I’m a total fucking dumbshit. Not sure if I’m such a fucking retard in a way that’s authentic and cool, or if I’m just a retard, period. But anyway, here goes. Watch my retarded brain crucify you on my 1990s cross of authenticity. Oh seriously, Ames, you are so totally fucked now when you see what I dug up on you, dude. Hoo-wee! Are your ready? I bet you’re not man. No way. So, here goes:

  You were born in a rich suburb.

  Hoo-ah! Later, dude! You’re fuckin over! Take that, Ames! You lose, dude! I mean, right? You do lose. Cuz you know in the 1990s, it was totally authentic to be like me, a “redneck” punk rocker from a big East Coast city.

  See, here’s how it worked in the 1990s in my cool crowd: the rich hipsters I hung out with were such fucking retards that they tried pretending they didn’t come from nice suburbs, because that wouldn’t be authentic and edgy. So they all thought I was cool because I was authentic. That’s it, man. It was that easy! See man, those were the 90s, when retarded dumbfucks were all worried about how “authentic” they were. God, I loved the 1990s. No one loved my whiny white redneck victim act more than my hipster New York masters. Man, they loved my act! They’d be all, “Oh dude, you’re so edgy and authentic, cuz you’re like a redneck. Like a real redneck. Oo, say something that’s totally redneck and stuff, cuz from what I hear from Kid Rock, rednecks don’t give a god-damn about political correctness. Man, that’d be so edgy if you weren’t politically correct, you know? I don’t have the guts, but you, man–you’re a real redneck, you can be as unpolitically correct as you like, and it’s okay, because you’re authentic! Just like Rush Limbaugh man, totally edgy and anti-politically correct. Or Bill O’Reilly. Or Alan Keyes. Yeah, or Michelle Maglalangaglongalang–fuck yeah! They’re so edgy they’re like, ‘I don’t care about political correctness!'”

  And then I was all, “Yeah, fuck yeah, you fuckin New Yorkers, I’m totally authentic and you people are just fucking bourgeois liberals.” And the New York bobos are all, “Dude, I love it when you bash us! It’s so authentic. Do it some more, please? Like, do rednecks really beat up their defenseless girlfriends and stuff?” And I was like, “Oh man, my bobo masters are questioning my authenticity. If I want the bobos in Brooklyn to think I’m cool and authentic, I guess I better beat up a bitch.”

  So I did. How fuckin authentic is that?

  Okay, now that you’re totally fucked Ames, here’s some more of my incredible investigative journalism–man, am I the Woodward and Bernstein of authentic rednecks or what?!:

  Glad to see you’re so boldly anti-racist, seeing as you grew up in a wealthy area with a population that was less than half a percent black.

  Oo! Ames! I busted you man! Yeah, am I a fucking awesome redneck journalist or what? Do I know how to use a fucking google search engine, huh? I mean, I did bust you, right? Didn’t I? I mean, like, all the retarded suburban hipsters I used to hang out with in the 90s used to pretend that they didn’t come from the suburbs. And also, from what I hear, like, it makes you a hypocrite if you are leftwing but you grew up in a nice suburb. It does make you a hypocrite, right? That does totally nail you, doesn’t it? Cuz in the 90s, among the punk rock crowd who thought it was cool that I’m a redneck, among them it really, really mattered. So I’m assuming…I mean…

  Wait, fuck. Hold on. Someone just handed me a memo. Dang–you already wrote about this, Ames? Goddamnit. Why aren’t you a dumbfuck like me and my retarded aging hipster friends? I guess it sucks to be an uneducated redneck dumbshit like me, because one of Taki’s interns– someone way more middle-class and less authentic than I am–just handed me this memo that, like, apparently you already wrote all sorts of shit about coming from a wealthy suburb called Saratoga. That you wrote about it in both of your two books. And you wrote about it in all sorts of articles.

  Fuck. Now what’ll I do Ames? I was sure that I was the Woodward & Bernstein of rednecks. Authentic rednecks too. Seriously man, I’m so authentic that I live with like 88 percent black people and you only have half a percent of a black person. That makes me, like, 188 times more authentic than you are.

  So, like, hey, just wondering–like, you think I’m pretty cool now? I mean in an fringy authentic way? Ames? Hey, are you listening? What the Hell, man? Don’t you wanna debate?

  Look man, between you and me, I just do this right-wing thing because I’m an easily-duped dumbfuck waterboy for richer, more sophisticated people who use me. See, back in the 90s, my bobo exploiters wanted me to be all edgy and rednecky and shit. They thought it was entertaining, they liked bringing me to parties and having me do my redneck act. Then I went too authentic and I went to jail, and they were like, “Whoa, dude, you’re way, way too authentic. We didn’t really think you’d beat up a chick, man. We just wanted you to write about it and shock our bobo readers, not actually do it.” And I was like, “But you guys said…I’m authentic, man!” Then I got out of prison and saw that the only hipster bobos who still talked to me were like, “Dude, the Kochs think you’re so edgy and authentic, they appreciate your redneck act. Rednecks are totally under attack from liberal elites and stuff, dude. So the Kochs asked me to ask you, Jim Goad, to promote free markets and deregulation and be all, ‘Hey, government, you can have my redneck manifesto when you tear it from my cold dead authentic fingers.'”

  That’s how they roped me in. And I totally fell for it. Then they were like, “Jim, you’re so great, and so authentic, hell you even live with 88 percent black people. Why don’t you attack Ames, man. He’s been trashing the Kochs and all of us libertarians. Ames is against freedom, man. You can totally nail him, you can do it, Jim!” And I was like, “But Ames is a way better writer than I am. Lemme see…what’s the best way to nail someone on the left? Hold on, lemme get into my 1990s time machine and see what brilliant things we said back then to totally nail liberals, back when I mattered…Bingo! I got it! I’ll say that Ames is totally hypocritical because he grew up in Saratoga! Nobody ever thought of that, but I did, because I’m an authentic redneck who doesn’t care about ‘political correctness.’ Seriously, cuz like that’s how it worked in the 90s, dude!”

  Anyway, yeah. Fuck you Ames for already writing about Saratoga. How did you think of doing that? I really thought I nailed you on that one. I mean seriously, I looked you up and found out you were born in Saratoga. Then I did some awesome edgy research and found out Saratoga is a rich place with almost no blacks. And I was sure I nailed you! I was sure you’d hide it like all the bobo dipshits I knew in the 90s. Damn you, Ames! Daaaaaammmmmn you!!! I mean, what the fuck does this mean for Jim Goad? Like, that does this mean I actually have to defend my union-bashing now? Fuck you, Ames. Take me back to the 90s, please! Help, Mr. Wizard!

• 29. Victorvalley Villain  |  March 2nd, 2011 at 7:02 am

  So.Much.Win.

• 30. Mike Z  |  March 25th, 2011 at 6:36 am

  this reagan fella sounds kinda dickish

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