Bloodthirsty Liberal

We will be posting, but we’ll also be out voting and volunteering for Brown today.

I’m sure you’ll understand.

Almost!

Bloodthirstan was founded on 1/18/06, after a bloody war of independence from Democrastan. I wouldn’t make a big deal out of it, but four years is the duration of a presidential term. I’m here to tell you four years can feel like an awfully lo-o-o-ng time.

[Re-posting bcause why the heck not? I worked hard on this! Happy New Year, everybody!]

At Aunt Agatha’s suggestion, we offer our readers this handy calendar for keeping track of all the craziness in the year to come—illustrated with some of our favorite newsmakers:

Helen Thomas

Moamar Gaddafi

Hugo Chavez and friend

Samir Kuntar

Al Sharpton

Kim Jong-Il

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Cindy Sheehan and friend

Robert Mugabe

Harry Reid

Wassisname

Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews

Don’t to forget to circle January 18th, BTL.com’s fourth birthday! While other’s toast President Obama’s first year, you can toast in silent solidarity with us.

Well, what a year it’s been, huh?

As Bloodthirstan prepares to celebrate its fourth year of independence, we feel the need to reflect on the events and accomplishments of our last revolution around old Sol (the sun, not our uncle in Cincinnati).

Aunt Agatha’s fire-bombing of one of the left-leaning, anti-Zionist Protestant churches in Cambridge was certainly a highlight. (I’d tell you which one, but, really, who can keep straight all the left-leaning, anti-Zionist Protestant churches in Cambridge?)

Her mug shot on the cover of the Glob made us kvell:

Aggie herself is proud of her children’s social activism this year: hacking into and crashing the systems of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International was no small feat, and the little ones’ trust funds are now secure after a few wire transfers from the fundraising kitty into numbered accounts in the Turks & Caicos. Well done, Bobby! Pogo sticks and American Girl dolls for everyone, Suze!

The kids report their favorite activity this year was attending the right-wing terrorist training facility in a wooded area somewhere outside of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho (Camp Kaczynski), where they learned old summertime favorites of skipping stones, archery, and living off the entrails of a squirrel for five days while eluding capture by the ATF.

Kids, they’re our future, aren’t they?

Here in the BTL household, we are very grateful indeed for our family trip back to the Auld Sod at Castle Sangre, where great-great grandfather Owain Ethyred (The Parched) of Stratford-on-Styx held off the King’s tax authorities for eight years, a miracle celebrated in story and song (one of each).

Climbing the parapets, letting my imagination roam where it would, I could almost smell the odors and aromas of siege. (Thank goodness for the dramamine I had taken earlier for the flight!) Our children, Vlad and MaryBeth, got to take their pictures with the remains of many extinct species, whose taxidermic carcasses so clutter the place.

The castle is now a museum, but much of it was looted after the American occupation, still a sore subject in the family.

Mrs. BTL spent the year busily involved in charitable activities, as she always does, with the Westboro Baptist Church. She certainly racked up the frequent flyer miles attending all those funerals!

Next year in Fiji, Mother!

This is the time of year when we should pray for peace among all mankind. Peace through strength. Peace on our terms. Peace because the forces of evil and hatred and incitement to violence and oppression and manipulation have been routed and sent scurrying for the dark crevices and slimy places where they came from and where they belong before their exoskeletons are crushed and their guts spill out on the ground: a condition we like to call Piece in Earth.

From the people of Bloodthirstan to you and your family, Merry Christmas, if you celebrate it, and our best wishes for the coming year.

I think our Tin-Pot Pin-Ups is better, but this Charles Johnson infomercial isn’t half-bad.

From, of course, The Nose on Your Face.

Mark Steyn excepted, no one on the net influenced me as much as Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs.

There are journalists and opinion writers I’ve come to admire as much and more—Charles Krauthammer, Caroline Glick, David Warren, Rush Limbaugh, to name a few—but Johnson’s steadfast defense of Israel, written with sulphuric outrage and hydrochloric wit, his rejection of left wing cant and hypocrisy, paralleled my own evolving outlook on the state of the world. I can’t deny that his voice at LGF was a part conscious, part unconscious model for my voice at BTL.

I stopped reading him, however, more than two years ago, for a number of reasons. First, I must admit, I was tired of covering the same stories, either just before or just after he did. If we were that much alike, and he was that much bigger (and better), I’d just rather not know. Also, as a new blogger, I wanted a few of his traffic crumbs. I would send story tips, links to my posts, anything to get a shout-out or a hat-tip that would send readers my way. I was almost always disappointed, even when he did cover the story I sent him. I’m sure it wasn’t deliberate or malicious—his email traffic must number in the hundreds to thousands—but it was frustrating for me, so I gave up.

I would check in occasionally, of course—LGF was too good, too important to ignore—but so often the posts were about technical issues to do with the blog itself, and not the news of the day. Any reader here at BTL can see in an instant that we can barely post the stories we do, let alone write code, let alone write about writing code. He had a tendency to get obsessed, it seemed to me, over things trivial or uninteresting. I preferred going elsewhere to get seeds for my own posts. I honestly can’t tell you how alike we are or are not anymore.

I have been hearing of his feuds with other bloggers on the right, but I barely care about my own feuds, let alone those of others. In any case, why shouldn’t there be disagreement and debate among conservatives? We’re trying to get this right—in more ways than one.

Then I saw this interview which Aunt Agatha brought to my attention, among the questions and answers of which appears this gem:

How do you think Obama’s doing so far?

I’ve actually changed my mind quite a bit about Barack Obama. You know how things are during an election, everybody gets hyper-partisan, and I guess I was guilty of that as much as anyone. But I’ve seen him be a lot more centrist than I ever expected during the election, based on his background, and the people that he got his political start with, you know, Bill Ayeres, Reverend Wright. If I had to go back, knowing what I do now, I probably would have voted for him.

Interesting, provocative—that’s Charles Johnson. But nonsensical? That’s new (to me).

Critical of Sarah Palin, fine (though I like her unapologetic pro-Americanism—so very unlike the Great Apologizer); wary of European conservative movements, understandable (though any reader of Steyn’s America Alone knows the strains Europe faces now and in the future, and would at least understand if not sympathize with cultural resistance to Eurabianization); skepticism about Global warming, welcome (but being skeptical about the skeptics seems to be adopting skepticism for its own sake).

Aggie and I know all too well what it’s like to be taken for paranoid schizophrenics by our friends and family for our turn to the right. I don’t want to just dismiss Johnson—in fact, like him, I’m not comfortable with labels and affiliation. I’m not a Republican, though I vote almost exclusively for Republicans now; I am a conservative, though I support gay marriage and oppose the death penalty (with less conviction all the time). I am a Zionist, but my arguments for one Israel from the river to the sea probably make a lot of other Zionists uncomfortable.

So, my admiration of Charles Johnson and Little Green Footballs has taken a hit, again, but can never fall to zero. I’m certainly not moved to go back to reading him—his million page-views a month can carry on just fine without me. And we’ll just carry on the way we have been, finding and sharing the curious and outrageous, and sharing our reactions—with significantly fewer readers. In our relative obscurity, it helps me to think I’m right and he’s wrong, at least on this point.

Men want to be him, women want to be with him.

Chris Matthews snags an exclusive interview with Nadal Malik Hasan.

Sample Q&A:

Matthews: Both “rectums” and “recta” are acceptable.

Hasan: Good to know.

You know you have to read the rest—from The Nose on Your Face.

The Balloon Boy Halloween costume, from (who else?) The Nose on Your Face.

And while we’re on the subject (also courtesy of TNOYF), the worst Halloween outfits of all time:

. Vlad the HIV Positive Vampire

. Bonzo the Wacky, Pedophiliac Clown

. (tie) Mr. Carbon Monoxide Poisoning

. (tie) Lactose-intolerant Frankenstein

. Jihad Joe (comes complete with Koran & working suicide belt )

. (tie) Peaches the Lovable, Coprophagic Puppy

. (tie) Low Self-esteem Princess (comes with eating disorder and nagging self-doubt)

. Captain Shanker

. The Scotch & Blow Kid

. Randy: Your Overage Internet Pal

. Sudsy the Alcoholic, Herpes-riddled Moose

I think of Halloween as for the kids, but here’s how I’m going to look when I answer the doorbell, a bowl full of Almond Joys in my hand:

Or is that too frightening? (The Helen Thomas masks were sold out.)

Was it Mickey Mantle who said, “If I had known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself”? The Don Johnson of Libya knows only too well what he meant.

All together now:

Blood Thirsty Liberal, mm-mm-mm.
Where Aggie and BTL
Give liberal sanctimony hell.
Where PUMAs’ sharp claws
Rip ‘part Barry’s flaws.
Mm-mm-mm.
Where common sense is found,
And judgement is sound.
Where lefties we confound,
And typos abound.
Blood Thirsty Liberal, mm-mm-mm.
Friend to the Jews,
Not that it’s hard to choose.
(Don’t you read the news?
How can’t you want Arabs to lose?)
Mm-mm-mm.
Scourge of Barack Obama,
Defender of his typ’cal white gramma,
May all the Dems end in the slamma,
So say we in our footie pajama.
Blood Thirsty Liberal, mm-mm-mm.
No columns of styrofoam here,
Our columns are terse and severe.
Our motto’s not vero possumus,
But rather it reads: “Who’s awsome? Us!”
Blood Thirsty Liberal, mmm-mmm-mmm.