Posts by Amanda Marcotte
May 19, 2009
George Will will grump your ass right into your car
By Amanda Marcotte | Posted on May 19, 2009
Matt, while utterly denouncing and mocking this George Will piece about transportation, doesn’t do enough justice to how truly terrible this piece celebrating pollution and the destruction of our planet one commute at a time.* Also, and I know Auguste will be pleased by this, Will includes Portland in the list of cities that every conservative should consider during the Two Minute Hate. I can’t wait until Austin gets nationally noticed.
Anyway, the column is fact-free and hateful, and Will’s arguments about the environment come exceedingly close to “I’m going to die before it gets really bad, so fuck you all,” but on top of all that, it’s an offense to language and writing as an occupation. Witness the first paragraph:
You might think the Department of Transportation would be a refuge from Washington’s inundation of painfully earnest and pitilessly incessant talk about “remaking” this (health care, Detroit) and “transforming” that (the energy sector, the planet’s temperature). Transportation, after all, is about concrete practicalities—planes, trains and automobiles, steel, asphalt and concrete.
April 29, 2009
You don’t need to eat a veggie burger to be grossed out by poo lagoons
By Amanda Marcotte | Posted on April 29, 2009
In the comments of this post about the swine flu, I was accused of attaching a vegetarian agenda to the issue, which is a hard accusation to deal with because what angle do you take? I went with, “That was a joke,” because it had the benefit of the truth—-I mentioned vegetarianism only as a reaction to the disgusting pictures of the results of the CAFO that’s close to the site of the first major outbreak of the swine flu. But it does make one think about what’s so wrong about so-called “agendas”.