I Want to Keep the Crazies Inside the Tent - and Pissing on the Sleeping Bags
I don’t have a post to go with it yet, but it’s a great title, don’t you think?
UPDATE: Ok, here’s a short post.
Usually, the debate is about do you want him outside the tent pissing in versus inside the tent pissing out. Either way, the kind of guy we’re talking about is the kind of guy who can’t hold it for a few minutes to go behind a tree.
In real life, there’s no way you’re going to let a guy like that anywhere near your tent, no matter which way he’s inclined to piss. So, this metaphor is not to be taken too literally.
Now that we’re not taking it too literally, here’s my thinking. There’s a great deal of craziness in the world. A surprising percentage of the people who give any kind of a damn about politics believe some seriously crazy things. Plenty of my people in my own family believe things that are pretty crazy. I’ve believed a few things that are pretty crazy in my time – and I think I’m really quite sane.
Precisely because I’m a naturally cautious and centrist type of person, and precisely because I do tend to measure the reasonableness of opinion in part by what kind of people find it credible, I don’t want the crazies to all be sent off to their own corners where they only have each other for company, work each other up into ever-greater heights of craziness, and become a perpetual threat to the “normal” political system. That’s the situation in a number of European parliamentary democracies, and I don’t think it’s politically wise or healthy.
By the same token, I don’t want to try to manipulate them into training their craziness exclusively on the other “team” – which is what I take to be the point about having them inside pissing out. Ultimately, that makes you beholden to the crazies, and there may come a point where you can’t tell the difference between them and you.
If they are inside, pissing on the sleeping bag, you aren’t going to get any sleep, you aren’t going to forget they are there, and you aren’t going to forget they are crazy. But you’re going to know where they are and what they are up to, and they are going to be warm and dry. (Warmer and drier than your sleeping bag, anyway.)
I don’t want to anybody thrown out of the GOP because they believe insane things about the President – and, by the same token, I don’t want the President to feel obliged to fire a guy who spent his career hobnobbing with nutters in San Francisco.
I want them inside the tent, pissing on the sleeping bags, so the sane people who are also inside the tent will yell at them to STOP PISSING ON THE SLEEPING BAGS!
If that makes any sense.
too late Noah.
you must respect teh grassroots!
….and all your sleeping bags are already soaked anyways….all you have left on your team are bedwetters.
— matoko_chan · Sep 16, 07:34 PM · #
Were you drunk when you wrote this?
— Sunny · Sep 16, 07:36 PM · #
Perhaps that was too subtle for you Noah…the bedwetters are already having night terrors over the crazies and go about in abject pantswetting fear of the low information base …..and we haven’t even gotten to the goodstuff yet.
Just wait for 2010 and immigration reform.
Now they will know why they are afraid of the dark. Now they learn why they fear the night.
—Thulsa Doom
— matoko_chan · Sep 16, 07:55 PM · #
matoko_chan: how do you know I’m not talking about you?
;)
— Noah Millman · Sep 16, 08:13 PM · #
I wouldn’t be caught dead near your tent dude…..I fled you guys, membah?
hmm….was it GW lying about hESCR, Iraq, and torture or Reynolds stickin’ up for YFZ’s patriarchy daddies and chattel slavery of women and children….or possibly the Econopalypse and the thousands of dead american soldiers and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis…..
I can’t remember.
Besides…you guyz got no sense of humor n/e more.
choose your team
money quote: “Barack Obama stripped millions of Americans of their right to not have a black President.”
sayonara, bitches.
— matoko_chan · Sep 16, 08:40 PM · #
Way to tease out a boring figure of speech for an impressive nine paragraphs. I’m not kidding. That was genius.
— Nelson · Sep 16, 09:18 PM · #
What is “Don’t shit where you eat,” Alex?
— Tony Comstock · Sep 16, 10:52 PM · #
It sort of makes sense, but more importantly—much more importantly—it made me laugh.
— Tom Hilton · Sep 16, 11:41 PM · #
Whoever “he” might be, I want him outside the tent pissing with the tent’s opening zipped shut, which is the logical action to take both literally and metaphorically.
— Loonesta · Sep 16, 11:43 PM · #
But Loonestra, you can’t cut the fringe when fringe is all you have left.
Noah needs SOME bodies in the tent still or his metaphor fails completely…..attack of the phantom pissers?
— matoko_chan · Sep 17, 12:27 AM · #
Strawman. Who pretends like it’s practical to expel crazies from any party or movement?
The problem for the R’s is that the crazies drive and in many cases run the party. Rush is out there stoking racist hatred right now and what R politician is going to say anything about it? If ANSWR types ran the Dems they would rightfully be nowhere near power.
As evidenced by the fact that TAS and Frum’s site are almost the only sane conservative voices. Include Bartlett in that. Anyone who pretends like these people are fringe on the right just isn’t paying attention – I see it anecdotally among friends and family in a big way.
Good luck with this mess you’ve got.
— Steve C · Sep 17, 02:17 AM · #
But what if the crazys kick you out of the tent?
— cw · Sep 17, 03:41 AM · #
C’mon Noah, you guyz didnt have the nads to laff Sarahpalin off the stage last summer and NOW you pretend you are going to bravely direct the teabaggers, birthers, frothing bluehairs and rabid assorted KKK rally attendees you have summoned?
This is your problem now.
YOU invited the vampires into the House so you could farm their votes…..
either stake them through the heart or burn the House down.
— matoko_chan · Sep 17, 03:53 AM · #
The problem is, nobody is yelling at them to stop pissing on the sleeping bags. The few that find the courage to speak up immediately apologize for questioning anybody’s God-given right to piss on sleeping bags.
— City of Evil · Sep 17, 04:40 AM · #
According to his IRS returns, from 2005 through 2007, United States Senator Barack Obama donated $53,770 to the church of Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.
— Steve Sailer · Sep 17, 04:52 AM · #
yup, he did Steve.
and dayum, the po’whittle republicans were too racewhipped to use that effectively in 2008, or you cetainly could could have won with your Sick Grandpa plus Replacement Dimbo ticket.
Why don’t you and Sarah Palin get a room?
— matoko_chan · Sep 17, 12:05 PM · #
You know Sailer….I always wanted to axe this…you are prejudiced against Oabama because he is black….why aren’t you prejudiced against Sarah Palin because she is stupid?
Sarah Palin is going to destroy the GOP…..not Obama.
She is unelectable, and the base has gone gila monster on you…..they won’t let go of her until the GOP is dead.
— matoko_chan · Sep 17, 12:14 PM · #
City of Evil sums up your problem nicely: From the spring’s spate of Rush apologies through this summer’s decision to force the author of the end-of-life counseling legislation to denounce his own program, there is no sense at all that the GOP is willing to tell people to stop pissing in the tent. Either they’re too intimidated, or they’re happy with the image this presents.
Up until this year I voted mixed party tickets; given how the GOP has dealt with 2009 I see it being several years before I split my votes again—and then it may well be to a new Conservative Party, sans the loudest fruitcakes.
— Deborah · Sep 17, 04:02 PM · #
This post, like 99% of “intellectual” conservative output, is just whistling in the dark.
— matoko_chan · Sep 17, 04:24 PM · #
If anyone is yelling at the crazies, I don’t hear them. I hear the insecure bully telling them to set fire to the tent and to set fire to all the other tents. They are not just pissing in your tent, they are shitting all over it. Get a new tent.
— bswainbank · Sep 17, 09:25 PM · #
All your wet sleeping bags are belong to us!
— Jaime from Wasilla · Sep 17, 09:27 PM · #
Right now “he’s” pissing in someone elses tent and they’re pretty pissed about it. They also know which tent “he” came from. The more you own “him”, the more pissed they are. Getting to be unforgivably pissed.
By the way, they’re tent is called the Independents.
— carsick · Sep 17, 09:50 PM · #
Hazaaah!! Here’s another way of saying the same thing. Leave all the crap in society that is “crazy” on the kitchen table. That way, everybody in house gets to smell the crap too. I agree.
— Rowland Wasgatt · Sep 17, 09:53 PM · #
Once upon a time, the occupants of a tent decided to choose a new leader. They had two people that they liked, but they couldn’t decide which one was better. Then one day, the first guy pissed all over the second guy. This should have been a warning sign to them, but the people in the tent didn’t see it that way. “Let’s not pick that guy,” they said pointing at the second guy. “He’s all wet.”
And so the first guy became the new leader. This leader seemed like a great idea at first, but slowly, over time, it became clear that this leader liked to piss on sleeping bags. At first, no one wanted to say anything. This was their leader, and they didn’t want to say anything bad about him. Eventually, though, some people in the tent started complaining about the pissing problem. “Hey, we don’t think it’s such a good idea for you to piss on our sleeping bags,” they would say. Whenever someone did this, the crazies within the tent screamed, “This is OUR tent! If you don’t like it, then you can leave!” And so, one by one, they did.
This went on for about eight years. At the end of this time, the tent leader said, “Well, it’s been fun! So long.” And he left the tent. By this time, many people considered the second guy to be too old to be their leader, and the crazies thought that he wasn’t crazy enough, so he didn’t become the new leader.
The tent now had no leader, and worse yet, it had a high concentration of crazies and wet sleeping bags. The crazies then decided that they didn’t like wet sleeping bags, and so they decided to blame the people in another tent. They tried and tried and tried to piss on the people in the other tent, but they mostly ended up just pissing on each other. They became louder and crazier, and their sleeping bags never did dry out.
And they lived crazily ever after.
The End
— Silly Things · Sep 17, 11:37 PM · #
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— cheap supra · Sep 18, 03:12 AM · #
This is a very thought-provoking post. And after reviewing all the permutations, I believe I’d like the Republican crazies to be standing in the tent flap, peeing in their own faces, with their wieners stuck in the zipper a la Ben Stiller in Something About Mary.
— Alleen · Sep 18, 05:02 AM · #
Yes,it’s the title attract me.Your post is not short.
— Chanel bags · Sep 18, 06:53 AM · #
here’s David Brooks……
Its okfine for the crazies to piss on the sleeping bags because they aren’t really pissing on the sleeping bags….they are noble populists.
See Noah?
Even David Brooks has no nads.
— matoko_chan · Sep 18, 05:51 PM · #
Why do “conservatives” always try to cloak racist actions with founders and framers?
Surely Brooks knows that elites concieved, designed and implemented the US, that Obama is the realization of Jefferson’s dream of the natural aristoi, and that George Bush Presidentsson was his nightmare of the artificial aristocracy.
Also that Andy Jackson would have gutshot Beck for a dirty seccessionist and told sarahpalin to stay home and take care of her kids.
I guess the low information base will believe this crap.
Is there IQ determined party affiliation?
— matoko_chan · Sep 18, 06:45 PM · #
As long as we are at it, let me add “pissing into the wind.” I’m sure we can work it in somehow.
— eduardo montez · Sep 20, 04:12 AM · #