The Cognitive Dissonance of the Modern American Conservative

I’ve long learned to skim over online comments left by wingnuts both right and left. Just as you know to steer clear of shouty-crackers schizos in the streets, you shouldn’t engage or even acknowledge extremists.

Still, I couldn’t help but respond to a right-wing whackjob the other day, who stated that Las Vegas meth-head shooters Jared and Amanda Miller were socialists because they were Neo-Nazis.

Ben Affleck Details Magazine

REVIEW: With ‘Argo,’ the Film’s the Thing

As of this writing, Ben Affleck’s Argo is exceeding expectations at the box office, which is great news; this is probably the most important film about American foreign policy, specifically our devolving war with Islam, in recent memory.  No, scratch the ‘recent.’  Make that just ‘in memory.’

Right from the start, using semi-animated storyboards and old photographs to aid exposition, Affleck ensures that both sides of the struggle between Iran and the U.S. are given a fair hearing.  As the film flitted through images, guided by an Iranian-American woman’s voiceover, I was as impressed as ever at Hollywood’s ability to condense so much complexity into a series of pithy loglines that can be instantly understood even by those with no knowledge of what Iran’s modern history has been or, more importantly, what our nefarious role was in causing the Islamic Revolution.

Dave Mustaine Crazy

Headbangers for Jesus

The entire planet officially jumped the shark in February of this year, and hardly anyone noticed! It happened when Megadeth guitarist and singer Dave Mustaine endorsed Rick Santorum for president. Tell me, in what kind of world-gone-mad does the famously debauched frontman for a thrash metal band tell us to vote for the stick-up-the-ass, hardcore conservative evangelist?

Since the script for our lives is now being written by monkeys stomping on typewriters, nothing should surprise us anymore, including the lunatic rants of a neocon headbanger. To demonstrate my point: Apparently Mustaine has gotten tired of Donald Trump and Ted Nugent hogging the demented right-wing paranoid schizophrenic spotlight, so he decided to do them one better by claiming, during a concert in Singapore last week, that the mass shootings at the theater in Colorado and the Sikh temple in Wisconsin were staged by President Obama in an effort to build support for a gun ban.

Uh-huh.

Saint Margaret of Grantham

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES | REVIEW

by James Killough  @James_Killough

This might be a controversial headline for the PFC review of Iron Lady, but fear not, I haven’t gone over to the dark side and become an ultra-right-wing Thatcherite.  It’s just my usual skewed thinking in light of the subtheme of this film: dementia and insanity, which as readers of this blog well know are as fascinating to me as filmmaking itself.

Annie Leibowitz’s portrait of Streep for Rolling Stone is still the definitive image of her.

There are parallels to be drawn between Margaret Thatcher, the longest-serving British prime minister of the twentieth century, and Joan of Arc, a saint who is a particular favorite of mine when I am making the case that almost all saints, prophets, and demigods of religions across the globe are textbook schizophrenics.

Rutger Hauer Blade Runner

Do Republicans Dream of Electric Elephants?

by James Killough

Michele Bachmann seems to have done well in the Republican debates.  It’s very early days yet, of course, but her populist extremism is something to marvel at.  Especially her extremism towards Gheys and Lesbotrons.

I was raised in a Republican household.  Most of my family is still Republican, despite my mother’s conversion to the Democrats following her split with Dad.  When I say a Republican household, it doesn’t just mean that they vote straight down the line conservative.  They are REPUBLICANS, all caps.  When we lived in Rome, my father was head of Republicans Abroad.  Before he left the advertising agency he worked for, he had worked on Margaret Thatcher’s campaign, and went on to do the Republican campaign of 1979, which swept Reagan and Company into power.  Ironically, the slogan he helped develop for them was “Vote Republican For A Change,” the same concept that helped get Obama elected twenty-eight years later.

Pumping Ayn

THE KILLOUGH CHRONICLES

by James Killough

Reading Ayn Rand is like sitting in Vulcan’s forge watching him hammer a divine weapon, but boy is it hot and sticky down there, damn is he ugly, and fuck if it isn’t noisy.

In an article today in The Daily Beast, Michael Tomansky lauded a liberal religious group for giving the Republicans a taste of their own demagogy with an attack ad on their principles, using their love of Ayn Rand as its demagogic bludgeon of choice.

Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal as the architect Howard Roark and his adulterous lover, Dominique Francon, in King Vidor's "The Fountainhead." Rand's women are never faithful, always looking for a more alpha male, like insatiable gay bottom bitches.

I am probably completely off-mark with this SAT-ish analogy, but it can be said that Ayn Rand is to capitalism what Karl Marx is to communism.  Both are religion-hating reactionaries, except it would seem to me that Marx was somewhat less unhinged, even though that Jewfro of his could have used a trim.  I am a mildly unhinged religion-hating reactionary, but I don’t have Marx’s hair, and better teeth than Rand — well, most people do.