Who knows all the reasons — Todd and Sarah Palin, presumably fully understand.
Listening to her, it seems like this is a combination of stepping back and moving forward. Stepping back, because it’s way too overwhelming to be Sarah Palin, political phenom, Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, and Sarah Palin, wife and mother. I don’t know that anyone can fulfill all those roles well, simultaneously. And we’re unrealistic, I think, when we assume people can or should.
One reservation I’ve always had about Sarah Palin has to do with her family. If she is stepping down because of what politics has done to her family, because of something in her family life she doesn’t want to see as David Letterman fodder, because it’s impossible to be governor, a star, and a mom to an infant … this is good. It demonstrates good judgment and priorities.
Uh, well gee. Barack Obama is somehow able to be a political phenomenon, a father and husband and the president of the freaking United States. We don’t elect people because they aren’t able to multitask, K-Lo.
UPDATE: This is not a normal person:
I thought that she still had a shot to win the GOP nomination before watching the video. Then I watched the video. Mitt Romney is popping champagne as we speak.
UPDATE II: K-Lo has been reduced to sad blubbering. Look at this:
If Palin wants to run in 2012, why not do exactly what she announced today? It’s an enormous gamble – but it could be a shrewd one.
After all, she’s freeing herself from the duties of the governorship. Now she can do her book, give speeches, travel the country and the world, campaign for others, meet people, get more educated on the issues – and without being criticized for neglecting her duties in Alaska. I suppose she’ll take a hit for leaving the governorship early – but how much of one? She’s probably accomplished most of what she was going to get done as governor, and is leaving a sympatico lieutenant governor in charge.
And haven’t conservatives been lamenting the lack of a national leader? Well, now she’ll try to be that. She may not succeed. Everything rests on her talents, and on her performance. She’ll be under intense and hostile scrutiny, and she’ll have to perform well.
All in all, it’s going to be a high-wire act. The odds are against her pulling it off. But I wouldn’t bet against it.
Posted by William Kristol on July 3, 2009 05:06 PM | Permalink
UPDATE IV: It just occurred to me that these things always occur in threes. So who’s next? Bobby Jindal, do you have a lobster fetish we should know about?
What Brent Bozell meant to say in his “letter” to Oliver Stone:
Dear Oliver:
Remember when you and I were on Bill Maher? You know, back when he was funny. You know before he said something I disagreed with about the 9/11 terrorists after which nothing he ever said could ever be funny again. In fact, he could tell that hilarious joke about Al Sharpton and the watermelon — that joke still just slays me if anyone else tells it — and I wouldn’t crack a smile. No siree!
Well, anyway, as you might recall, you and I were on the Maher show together, and it was all fun until I quoted some interview which was in some paper that I’ve totally forgotten but I swear to God I didn’t make up. In that completely unfabricated and 100 percent real interview you said you were a historian and I said you weren’t a historian, you were a socialist which is the exact opposite of a historian. You got mad and said “Am not” and I said “Are too” and you said “Am not” and so I kicked you in the nuts under the table which totally shut you up for a minute.
Well, I’m writing this letter to apologize, not for kicking you in the nuts, but for saying you weren’t a historian. You are a historian. You’re a shitty historian. Isn’t this the best kind of apology ever? ROFLOL. I’m sorry I said you were prick. You aren’t a prick. You’re a syphilitic prick. I could apologize like this all day.
Well, anyway, let me stop cracking myself up and get back to my apology. You are a historian, leaving aside that movie W which I didn’t bother to see but which I absolutely know was nothing but 2 hours of filthy liberal lies. But you’re a bad historian because you were just on Bill Maher again and you quoted that RINO Richard Nixon as saying that St. Ronald was a “dumb son of a bitch.” Nuh-uh. Reagan wasn’t dumb and to prove it I asked a bunch of Republicans who worked in the Reagan White House and they all said, to the man, that Reagan was so smart he could do the Sunday New York Times crossword in ink while blind-folded, could recite the value of pi to the three zillionth digit and even had read Heidegger’s Being and Time. In German. What do you have to say to that, Mr. Smartypants?
Best of all, I talked to Al Regnery, now that’s a real historian if there ever were one, even if he made up a story about his wife getting raped by a black burglar and even though he told a tiny little fib, when he was on Reagan’s anti-pornography commission, about the pornography the cops found in his house when they were investigating that other little fib about his wife getting raped.
Oh, and I apologize for calling you a “lousy historian,” because you’re not a historian but a big fat liar who blasphemes the greatest President who ever lived in the history of the entire universe.
ABOVE: Lisa Schiffren suppresses gag reflex at the thought of another plate of French food
One of the abiding questions of interest to academic wingnutologists (such as the staff here at Sadly, No!) is the travel question. Why, we ask, do wingnuts travel to foreign countries? Creatures of habit, suspicious of strangers, monolingual junk food addicts and perpetual scolds, what exactly is in it for them? They wander about Rome complaining that they can’t find a Starbucks or Caribou Coffee anywhere. They return from Madrid complaining that not one restaurant served a taco salad. Imagine that, in the place that invented Mexican food, the locals eat raw ham and some kind of funny little fish called tapas.
So when I saw that Lisa Schiffren posted to America’s Shittiest Website™ from France, I could scarcely control my excitement. What news would she send us from l’Hexagone? What indignity would she report had been visited upon her by an un-shaven waiter, reeking of sweat, garlic and tobacco? How many vile shopwomen had shortchanged her? Well, kids, its better than that. Schiffren writes that the best place to eat in France is McDonald’s. Fuck the foie gras, she’s shoving another Royal Deluxe (that’s frog for Quarter Pounder with Cheese) down her craw every chance she gets.
Let’s join Lisa with her three children (Rush, Little Ronnie, and Ayn) at the Louvre:
[T]here is a lot of bad food in France — especially around tourist sites, including the great museums. I will not say what I paid for two sandwiches and two salads — all premade so unwanted ingredients could not be removed in advance — and a few soft drinks at the Louvre.
Well, certainly the best place to get a good idea of any country’s cuisine is around its biggest tourist sites. I too would be outraged if I went to a place overrun with tour buses and bought a pre-packaged sandwich only to discover that, rather than medium-rare Wagyu beef strips, artisanal goat cheese, a crisp mesclun garnish and hand-made aioli on a freshly-baked olive baguette, I got a ham sandwich on stale bread with wilted lettuce and two drops of acrid mustard. Who’d a thunk? Only the vile French could pull a stunt like that on an unsuspecting American.
And here’s another valuable travel tip from Lisa. When traveling abroad, rather than eating on the local schedule, insist on eating at the same time you’re used to eating at home:
Restaurant meals are available at very limited hours. You want lunch — it had better be between 12 and 2. Miss that and you can have a snack — but only if you are in a place big enough to have a range of restaurant types. Dinner starts at 7, no matter that you missed lunch and want a burger or a salad at 5, not ice cream or a beer.
Of course, the reason Lisa might not be able to get a burger at a restaurant in Paris at 5:00 may have more to do with where she was than what time it was. She’s in frigging Paris. You don’t find burgers on the menus in Paris any more than you can find civet de sanglier or tarte tatin on the menu at Chili’s or Applebee’s. And also, here’s a tip for Lisa. Every corner bar in France serves food, all sorts, all the time; you’re not just limited to beer and ice cream.
To explain these draconian dining hours, Lisa reaches deep into her bottomless well of nutty ideas. The reason is:
The French do not much like children
In that case, I’m amazed that French civilization didn’t disappear from the face of the earth centuries ago. But hold that thought about the French hating children for just a sec
I like the leisurely lunch as much as any journalist, of course. But not with my kids. …
She’s on vacation with her children but doesn’t want to eat nice lunches with them. Can’t you feel the love pouring from Lisa towards Rush, Little Ronnie and Ayn?
So it’s Le MacDo pour tout le monde. All I can add to this is that Lisa is clearly auditioning to be the successor to America’s Worst Mother™, formerly Meghan Gurdon, and that one day little Ayn will write a tearful memoir about how her self-absorbed mother dragged her by her pigtails through France, Le Happy Meal, her only source of nourishment, while Momma screamed at the shopkeepers who pretended not to speak English and made nasty remarks to the waiters who brought her, and overcharged her for, a bottle of Perrier every time she ordered a scotch and soda. The dust jacket will be illustrated with a picture of a young girl with her nose pressed against the window of a pâtisserie being beaten with a coat-hanger by a disagreeable woman in sweat pants and sneakers.
… What’s striking about this clip is how closely it tracks some of the key tropes of nutroots paranoia during the Bush years. Now as then, it’s assumed that the greatest threat to the country is its own government. Now as then, the “solution” to getting the nation back on the right track involves some ghoulish catastrophic failure of national security (losing the Iraq war in Bush’s case, failing to prevent a new attack in this one). And now as then, because the president acted in a legally controversial way in one circumstance — Bush on “torture,” Obama on corporate takeovers — he’s instantly suspected of ruthless designs on the Constitution itself, irrespective of whether he actually has the support he’d need to change it.
Unfortunately, with few exceptions, Allah’s commenters do not appreciate his nuance:
It may seem alarmist, but a wakeup call is needed. It’s too bad that for most of the elites, in fact, all of them, one 9/11 wasn’t enough to change how they think.
Y’know what’s scarier than all the crazy/paranoid-seeming warnings these guys are throwing out there? That both Beck and Scheuer have track records of being right far more often than not. :-(
I would love to take comfort in the fact that Beck is just a nut job. I have found no comfort in that assessment at all. I do not know what the tipping point will be. People are just not as pissed as I am. It does keep me awake at night, because I do not know what to do to fight this president and Congress. I do not know how to protect myself and my family. I thought I knew as of last fall. After Nov. 4th it all changed.
I hate to say this, but if there is going to be another terrorist attack (however, I think that Obama is a terrorist attack)I hope it happens in Washington D.C.
We have friends there and I told them to get their animals out of there to be safe and prepare.
I hope all these evil politicians are taken out. There, I said it. I have had it. This is not what this Country was formed on and what it’s all about. If it can’t be Washington, D.C. then please let it be San Francisco.
Michelle Malkin ominously warns us to ‘[b]eware the grubby paws‘ of Barney Frank. It seems that the ‘powerful Massachusetts Democrat last week quietly introduced legislation that aims to use $1 billion in dividends paid by the recipients of government aid to provide rental housing opportunities for low-income and homeless families.’
The horror! One-fifth of the meager return taxpayers have received so far from the ongoing bailout of stupid, amoral predators might be spread thinly amongst their most vulnerable victims! Why, for half that sum, we could hire a K Street brain trust to conduct a feasibility study on the merits of forming a working group tasked with determining the benefits of appointing a committee entrusted with selecting a blue-ribbon panel charged with getting to the bottom of why we shouldn’t be doing this sort of thing at all!
Later in the Dow-Jones story Malkin cites, we learn that this modern-day Robin Hood wants to reallocate 4/700ths of the funds we’ve earmarked for well-heeled pyramid schemers to yet more paupers. Should this sort of thing continue, we’ll soon be allowing our impoverished clerks to take Christmas Day off to spend time with their crippled children.
Not-so-sMarty Peretz is displeased with Obama’s stance on the Iranian protests:
Let’s face it. The American president has not exactly been on the wrong side…. But he has certainly not been on the right side. Not with his mincing and parsimoniously petty escalations of do-nothing rhetoric.
Because as any neocon will tell you, there are two sides to every conflict; one is purely good and the other unspeakably evil — there are no shades of gray. Then, in Geddy Lee shrillo voce, neocons will insist that if you choose not to decide/ You still have made a choice. Thus by the neocons’ reckoning, Obama, who has refused to involve himself much with the conflict lest he jeopardize the protesters he actually sympathizes with, is somehow objectively pro-Ahmadinejad.
One piece I commend to you is Fouad Ajami’s op-ed in the June 22 Wall Street Journal, “Obama’s Personal Tutorial: The president has to choose between the regime and the people in the streets.”
And that is really the choice.
Yeah, yeah. Standard neocon boilerplate: the macho tone, faux idealism, barely-masked cynicism, the overflowing mendacity. Then, in his concluding, sell-a-subscription paragraph, he says something interesting:
If you don’t you’ll have to wait until the rich little essays on the Iranian revolt go on-line. They are all informative, really each and every one of them. Let me especially commend one. It is by Nader Mousavizadeh, a former student, a good friend and past assistant editor of this magazine. Oh, yes, he is also a senior fellow at the Institute of Strategic Studies in London. Nader really knows what he is talking about, unlike many of those whose attitudes are drawn from their always cool and detached temperaments. I’ve learned much from his disciplined yet morally engaged mind, from this piece perhaps more than any other.
What a blurb! Somewhere, a jealous Jamie Kirchik just sobbed into his pillow. Extra credit to Marty for the next-to-last sentence, a bitter sneer at, he imagines, Obama’s and Brent Scowcroft’s expense. But just who is this Nader guy Peretz likes so much? A glance at his essay reveals sympathetic biographical details; also, a clever — by which I mean, devious — neoconservative take on Obama’s “loss of nerve.” The essay’s not nasty enough for Commentary and it’s too smart for The Weekly Standard; but Peretz’s rag is just right. Anyway… Institute of Strategic Studies… where have I seen that name? Ahhh, the time crapsule! Yep:
A FEARFUL ACCOUNTING The International Institute for Strategic Studies has released a comprehensive report detailing the stockpile of weapons of mass destruction currently available to the Iraqi government, and projecting how long it would take Iraq to develop on other weapons of mass destruction. This report is an eye-opener for anyone who still doubts that Saddam Hussein is a threat.
Oh. Those guys. (Incidentally, Pejman’s site mysteriously vanished from blogger after the “Time Crapsule” post; IISS’s article, meanwhile, has been robots.txted for who knows how long.)
Before blaming Obama for an “emboldened” Iranian regime, Mousavizadeh concedes “[t]hat there are few lessons to be learned from the cheerleaders of the Iraq war… goes without saying.”
As the great Dolemite would say, “What the shit is this?”
I can’t think of one other country in the entire history of the world where right-wing pundits go on TV and pine for a devastating nuclear attack on their own country just so they can say they were right all along. Not even Iranian government officials, crazy as they are, sit around saying, “Y’know, I hope the infidels bomb the hell out of us just so we can expose the Reformists as a bunch of wimps.”
Like John, I’m rather enjoying the public spat going on between Steve Schmidt and Emperor Palpatine Bill Kristol. Here’s the good stuff:
William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard and at times an informal adviser to Sen. John McCain, touched off the latest back-and-forth Tuesday morning with a post on his magazine’s blog criticizing the Todd Purdum-authored Palin story and pointing a finger at Steve Schmidt, McCain’s campaign manager.
Kristol cited a passage in Purdum’s piece in which “some top aides” were said to worry about the Alaska governor’s “mental state” and the prospect that the Alaska governor may be suffering from post-partum depression following the birth of her son Trig. “In fact, one aide who raised this possibility in the course of trashing Palin’s mental state to others in the McCain-Palin campaign was Steve Schmidt,” Kristol wrote.
Asked about the accusation, Schmidt fired back in an e-mail: “I’m sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign.”
“After all, his management of [former Vice President] Dan Quayle’s public image as his chief of staff is still something that takes your breath away,” Schmidt continued.
It’s tough to know whom to root for in this fight, but if I had to choose, I gotta say I sympathize with Schmidt. Oh sure, he’s a sleazy GOP political operative who’s clearly trying to cover his ass for his own failings. But at the same time, Schmidt has actually had to, you know, do stuff in his career. He help Ah-nold get reelected in California. He was apparently the Bushies’ point man for getting Alito and Roberts confirmed. Of course, these aren’t admirable achievements, but they are achievements.
Meanwhile, what the hell has Bill Kristol ever done? Mostly he’s sat on his ass in the Weekly Standard office and advocated invading other countries. Christ, he even backed sending America’s armed forces to take down the damned Somali pirates — as though the Army doesn’t have enough wars to fight already.
The bottom line is this: imagine you’re Steve Schmidt. Imagine that you’ve worked your ass off to make John McCain into a semi-legitimate candidate for the presidency. And then imagine that this twerp from the Weekly Standard comes along and convinces McCain to pick as his running mate a crazy, narcissistic wingnut who is well known for stabbing her allies in the back and whose sole qualification for the vice presidency has been eating a moose. How the hell would you feel?
Invent a time machine and go back to June 2005. Make bets with people that in four years’ time we’ll have a black Democratic president with the middle name “Hussein.” Then up the ante by predicting that the Democrats will have 60 seats in the Senate. Then top if off by betting that one of those seats will belong to Al Franken.
I mean, four years ago, I would have been too ashamed to post such a prediction anywhere, even if I were anonymously trolling over at Red State. Times do indeed change.
(Of course, now that the Democrats have all this power, they should probably do something positive with it. Because as we’ve seen over the past four years, American opinion can change extraordinarily quickly. And there’s no way I’m going to be able to deal with President Jeb Bush and Senator Bill O’Reilly in 2012 if I don’t have a public health care plan to choose from. Just sayin’.)
ABOVE: Don Surber in front of his newly-remodeled home
Poor Don Surber. Apparently he’s locked himself in his shack, barricading the door with various auto parts he found lying around his living room. He’s sitting in a corner clutching a .22 in one hand and three bottles of Tylenol in the other. “Obama will have to pry the Tylenol from my cold dead hands,” Surber keeps muttering to himself while pointing his rifle at the front door. Surber is certain that the FBI, the CIA, the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, CNN, La Raza and The Poca, West Virginia Department of Park and Recreation are all amassed just outside his door, heavily-armed and waiting for the signal to burst through the door, guns ablaze, in order to take away his Tylenol.
Part of the reason why we keep returning to the deep well of the blog postings of this Pliny of Poca — other than to ridicule his personal appearance through the magic of Photoshop — is just that there are only a handful of wingnut bloggers who manage to maintain that perfect balance of laziness, stupidity and insanity that Surber does. In any given post, there are general only slightly fewer errors than there are vowels.
Take the “Obama is going to take my Tylenol” post that has Surber stockpiling Tylenol and guarding this stash with the .22 that he usually employs to shoot frogs in the crick behind his house when they get too noisy. Almost everything about it is just, well, wrong.
President Obama’s administration is weighing restrictions on buying Tylenol, Excedrin and other over-the-counter medications. More over-regulation by the government. If a prescription is required to get a Tylenol, that will up the cost of health care.
Just like Don, we’re only a few keystrokes away from the FDA document detailing the proposals under consideration. Unlike Don, we’re not too busy eating moonpies and swilling RC Cola to retrieve and read the document.
Now, lookie here, here’s a fascinating little tidbit in the report. The proposals that the Advisory Panel is considering were developed by the FDA’s Acetaminophen Hepatotoxicity Working Group in a report they released on February 26, 2008. And who was President then? Not Obama. So this really isn’t a reason to take a jab at Obama. Strrrrrike One!
And is one of the proposals under consideration requiring a prescription for Tylenol or taking it off the market? Nope. Strrrrrrrrike Two!!
There are about 200 acetaminophen-related deaths each year, Fox News reported.
Does the Fox News story that Surber links report that? Not so much. It doesn’t say anything at all about acetaminophen-related deaths. Strrrrrrike Three!!!
Okay, let’s have a heart and use the Beep Ball rules used for the visually impaired. That way Surber can have one more strike before he’s out.
Are there 200 acetaminophen-related deaths per year? Let’s roll the film of the FDA report in question:
Summarizing data from five different surveillance systems, there were an estimated 56,000 emergency room visits, 26,000 hospitalizations, and 458 deaths related to acetaminophen-associated overdoses per year during the 1990-1998 period.
Batter out.
I think it’s safe to say, yet again, that this will be another year in which the Pulitzer committee will take a pass on Surber.
June 8: David Letterman tells a joke about the Palin family, forcing conservatives to divert precious blogging resources away from Obama-bashing to defend the plucky Alaskans. A trial run of the diversionary tactics the MSM will soon use to help squash Iranian freedom?
June 24: South Carolina governor Mark Sanford admits to Argentinian affair, kicking off major MSM operations against Iran’s Green Revolution.
June 26: Michael Jackson dies. Liberal media blitzkrieg is now in full swing as unending wave of Jacko chyrons effectively trample the corpse of Neda into the dust.
There are times when I wonder what, exactly, conservatives mean when they say they want to “promote democracy” in other countries. Now, via the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page, we have our answer: it involves supporting military coups against democratically-elected governments:
Hugo Chávez’s coalition-building efforts suffered a setback yesterday when the Honduran military sent its president packing for abusing the nation’s constitution. It seems that President Mel Zelaya miscalculated when he tried to emulate the success of his good friend Hugo in reshaping the Honduran Constitution to his liking.
But Honduras is not out of the Venezuelan woods yet. Yesterday the Central American country was being pressured to restore the authoritarian Mr. Zelaya by the likes of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Hugo himself. The Organization of American States, having ignored Mr. Zelaya’s abuses, also wants him back in power. It will be a miracle if Honduran patriots can hold their ground.
This reminds me of Ralph Peters’ recent declaration that the American military should start actively slaughtering members of the American media in order to procure more favorable coverage:
Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media. Perceiving themselves as superior beings, journalists have positioned themselves as protected-species combatants. But freedom of the press stops when its abuse kills our soldiers and strengthens our enemies. Such a view arouses disdain today, but a media establishment that has forgotten any sense of sober patriotism may find that it has become tomorrow’s conventional wisdom.
Do you guys even understand what “democracy” means? Because to my way of thinking, it doesn’t involve military coups and violent censorship of the press. But that’s just me.
When Chief Justice John Roberts was in his twenties and working in the Reagan White House, he already saw the dangers of Negro “music” from the likes of Michael Jackson and Prince. How cool is that?
So, like I was saying, (mmmm, double fudge Yoo-Hoo) isn’t it funny how (glug glug) liberals are all like, ‘wah waahhh stop it!’ when America blows up Iraq and (farrrrrrrrrt-rt-t) tells its people how to live, but when it comes to (glug fart waft sniff nod smile) true imperialism — stuff like the Waxman-Markey bill inspiring other countries by example to do something about so-called “global warming” — liberals are all like, “yes, more please”. What a Double Stuf Ore — er, double standard!
In a country with more conservatives than liberals, it is puzzling — in fact, amazing — that we have the furthest left president of the United States in history, as well as the furthest left speaker of the House of Representatives.
Next up, terrified:
Perhaps people who are busy gushing over the Obama cult today might do well to stop and think about what it would mean for their granddaughters to live under sharia law.
Oh no he didn’t — oh yes he did! Not to worry though, Tommy’s about to take a whack at it like Andres Galarraga at a 55-foot curve ball:
The glib pieties in Barack Obama’s televised sermonettes will not stop Iran from becoming a nuclear terrorist nation. Time is running out fast and we will be lucky if it doesn’t happen during the first term of this president. If he gets elected to a second term — which is quite possible, despite whatever economic disasters he leads us into — our fate as a nation may be sealed.
See, Iran just started working on a plan to become a “nuclear terrorist nation” and Obama’s televised sermonettes are providing them with exactly what had been missing until now (aka Step 2). Step 1: Chant ‘Death to America.’ Step 3: Nuclear terrorist nation. In case you thought Tommy was done however, you have no idea what it takes to become a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution:
Just two nuclear bombs were enough to get Japan to surrender in World War II. It is hard to believe that it would take much more than that for the United States of America to surrender — especially with people in control of both the White House and the Congress who were for turning tail and running in Iraq just a couple of years ago.
Read that again if you need an excuse to have a drink: Tommy considers it a possibility that Iran will develop two nuclear weapons, acquire the means to get them over here (alright, I live in Germany, so over there — so long, suckers), detonate them, and that the original Party of Shrill’s response will be: well, that’s it for us (goodnight Vegas, you’ve been great!). In what kind of fucked up, bizzaro, upside-down universe would this even be considered anything better than the ramblings of a very crazy frozen caveman? (Yes, frozen.)
A quadrupling of the national debt in just one year and accepting a nuclear-armed sponsor of international terrorism such as Iran are not things from which any country is guaranteed to recover.
There would be no guarantee indeed as far as that first thing is concerned: if it were true. I wouldn’t cancel afternoon school to bury that little shit! What you say? (PDF, see page 22). Is the projected gross Federal debt by 2019 (!), 23,140 US bn, quadruple the actual debt in 2008, 9,986 US bn? Sadly, No!? But Tommy is an economist! Maybe sharia law stole his calculator.
One good thing about Tommy is that he does have a good sense of humor:
That is why [the Republican party's] internal squabbles are important for the rest of us who are not Republicans.
Ha ha ha. That Thomas, he looks just like an independent. Yeah… looks like.
Bonus points for the note at the end of the column:
EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece has been amended since its initial posting.
Probably a case of verschlimmbessert. [Thanks to cw for the link.]
You just know that the good times are gonna roll when a post at Big Andy Brietblart’s Group Blob and All-Night Buffet-Style Wingnutateria starts off like this:
I’m sure that I’ll get some heat for this, but I feel it is timely to say …
When wingnuts apologize before they’ve even opened their mouths, it usually means they are about to blow a load of spittle-flecked nonsense about some sodomy-fueled conspiracy of Hollywood Jews, or about how they wouldn’t mind making abortion legal but only for black women, or about how an army of Pedros is going to force all groceries stores to label snack foods only in Spanish in order to starve conservatives to death. (”¡No más Cheetos para ti, gringo fascista!“)
But here our pre-apologizer is Steve “Don’t Call Me Gay Just Cuz I Look Gay” Crowder, so it’s not really hard to guess what Steve wants to get off his smooth (”Thanks, Nair for Men!”) chest:
Folks, it’s okay to find flamboyant homosexuality funny. Somewhere along the “common sense line,” people have started to equate the ability to find the humor in life with hate speech.”
Minstrel shows are da bomb! Free Julie Myers. Resyndicate Amos ‘n Andy! And then let’s tell a few nigger jokes. They are crowd killers, I tell ya! Particularly where the people in the joke are named DeWinston, LaTasha and LeNoleum. And people who don’t think these jokes are the most hilarious ever, well, they just have some thick liberal PC stick up their butts. (Steve pauses for a moment and wonders how bad a thick stick up his butt might really be, at least with a thick coating of some of that Olay Regenerist he keeps on his nightstand.)
Let me be the first to say it. My name is Steven Crowder and …
Notice how Steve demonstrates his devotion to the writer’s craft with his understated solicitude for readers who might be too stupid to understand that the byline on his post is his actual name and not that of someone else.
… I happen to find blatant gayness funny. I mean really funny.
Talk about teh tea kettle cozy calling teh doily lavender.
I can remember my first “gay encounter” as a child. I was watching the Macy’s parade on Thanksgiving morning. Al Roker was interviewing Richard Simmons. As nothing more than a wide-eyed four-year-old, I was completely vexed [sic]. Here was a man on my television set, complete with chest-hair and quadriceps fuzz. He was just…“off” to me for some reason. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until the light bulb in my underdeveloped noggin turned on. “Hey Dad,” I asked. “Why does that man act like a woman?”
Is it just me or does anyone else also think that a four-year-old who notices “quadriceps fuzz” will be, a few years later, going fappity-fap-fap-fap over a Marlboro Man ad he tore out of a magazine?
To a straight man, the notion of walking around as a coiffed, waxed, nail-polish wearing, lispy dude is uproariously absurd. As people, we find absurdities funny. That’s our first step in making sense of them.
The whooshing sound you hear is the overcompensation blowing out Steve’s taut, baby-smooth, alabaster butt cheeks. (”Oh, noes! Must laugh at the gay or those feelings will start washing over me again.”)
For example: If right now a duck were to walk into your room wearing pajamas, you’d most likely laugh
Oh, not just laugh — I’d double over and piss my pants, Steve. That is the funniest thing ever, at least since rubber chickens. God, you’re killing me, Steve. Stop it. Please.
Because in your mind, there is no place in the natural world where ducks are seen wearing pajamas.
Thanks for clearing that up. (Do they pay you by the word at Andy’s Maison de Conneries?)
The same applies to blatantly gay men in rhinestone tank-tops and hot-pants. Nowhere in the straight man’s natural realm does that occur, and so the absurdity of it is funny.
But not as funny as someone who looks gayer than a night club in Chelsea at 3 a.m. trying to butch it up, lower his voice an octave and tell a fag joke without any words that have ethes in them. Now, that is funny.
Even so, if this were the kind of blog that would permit posts about a certain kind of reprehensible list, I’d so put Steve on my conservative guy version of that list, but we’re not, so I won’t.
The phrase ‘Sanford & Pun’ represents a rare, minimalist form of multiple-entendre, seldom encountered in the wild and so far unnamed. Another one, honoring TV pseudoeconomist Amity Shlaes, appeared here not long ago, regrettably in a hedged, lengthened title that was swapped in at the last moment in case ‘people didn’t get it’ — the kind of overthinking that, if brevity is the soul of wit, is wit’s Ausch. ‘Amity & Irony‘ is now the second best out of an oeuvre of three, while the really funny one is banked for later deployment.
Because yes, if ‘getting it’ were the point of humor, then today I might have said, “Hey, they posted the new schedule at the planetarium. Let’s get fucked up on drugs and catch Laser Dane Cook.” On the other hand, since the form in question is a way of explaining a joke into being — i.e., it is to actual-funny like licking a bouillon cube is to trying the soup — here’s what a diagram of it would look like, if there were any such thing as diagrams for experimental jokes you make up.
[POP CULTURAL REFERENCE (proper noun) | linking term | (name of metaphor or fallacy to be invoked)]
It is an architectonic improvement — whether or not an actual one — over the classic ‘perfect headline,’ as in the following real and invented examples:
Question for the theologians: Would Photoshopping in tears of blood count as ‘a malicious desecration’ of ‘an iconic representation of a mother’s love for a special needs child’? Or would that be a sign that Our Lady of Wasilla is a legitimate Marian apparition?
I don’t find anything funny about the Sanford affair. It’s the mom in me thinking about four handsome boys on Father’s Day weekend abandoned by their stupid, selfish father, who was busy tanning with his mistress in Argentina. Heart-breaking. Yes. Nauseating. Yes. Maddening. Yes. Funny? No.
Sometimes we imagine life at the Malkin house as most there must know it: the long hours of tensed breaths and sneeze-covering, of flinching at the cuckoo clock and the the doorbell; the tedium of suspense. It must almost be a relief when it finally breaks, when with panic and chair legs and sawdust and spraying crockery shards, it’s one long screech and crash windmilling up and down the stairs and around the corner from the kitchen to the den, slashing the black leather sofa with a bent lawnmower blade, tantruming with arms and legs, heaving the burning dog bed into the pool.
Robert Bidinotto weighs in on the moral transgressions of Eliot Spitzer that the media continue to ignore.
And my friends at The People’s Cube, who lampooned Operation Corner Office two years ago, have the photoshop of the day:
Then the horror as Michelle returns to her senses, flinging away the teeth-stripped live electrical cord with which she was menacing the salt water aquarium. Then the tears. And then, as you watch, there comes the change, like clouds closing over the moon — like a queasy seismic bump, unfelt but sensed — and the moment of self-recovery is past. Michelle looks around with a Popeye squint and a bold chin, swelling with spite at the unfairnesses the liberals were hypocritically getting away with in maliciously making conservatives feel bad for going on so-called berserk rampages — as they would certainly try to do. And yet they would hypocritically whine if attacked for exactly what they would attack you for!
As usual, she affirmed, they go around blaming others instead of admitting their own exact same things. Like, excuse me, we will be happy to talk about so-called ‘right-wing extremism’ as soon as the left takes responsibility for left-wing terrorist heroes like Bill Ayers, James Van Brunn, and Islam, and stops pointing the finger at so-called ‘right-wing extremism’ — because it is laughable to say that we are pointing the finger when look at them doing it, with their lies, accusing us of so-called finger-pointing, over there.
Which they will not stop doing, she orated, for while conservatives eschew moral relativism and take responsibility for our actions, it won’t be our fault if we’re forced to do something we know is wrong, because liberals deny any responsibility for our actions. Oooh, oooh, if conservatives even dare to say anything against their fascist tryings-to-destroy of conservatives just for living, they will unfairly lie that the real liars are us and the real destroyees are them — lying with their opposite lies and their backwards accusings of up-is-down lying, scheming with their unfair partisan lackeys and bosses in the worldwide left-wing biased MSM and also US government, until we are forced to destroy them by any means necessary, i.e. preemptively. AND NOW LOOK WHAT ME-THEY MADE THEM DO I THIS TIME!
Update 10:05am Eastern. Fox and AP say resignation will be effective Monday.
Update 10:12am Eastern: New word via Derb – Spitzenfreude.
Update 10:16am Eastern. Speaking of Spitzenfreude, Lone Star Times photoshops The Playas’ Ball.
Update 10:30am Eastern. Allah’s on Spitzer Watch. CNBC apparently got the scoop that the actual resignation will come down at 11:00am…now closer to 11:30am.
Update 10:46am Eastern. More Spitzenfreuder from the brilliant Iowahawk.
Update 10:56am Eastern. There’s an O.J.-like media swarm outside Spitzer’s high-rise apartment. In Albany, Republican State Senate majority leader Joe Bruno called on NY to move forward and prepare for transition.
Update 11:13am Eastern. Watch the “Apartment Stakeout Cam” at FoxNews.com.
Then weary, dreamless sleep, and another few long hours of putting on socks to slink to the bathroom so that your feet don’t slap on the floorboards, and whispering to the dog not to bark — and then a change in the air like a thunderstorm arriving, and the scream rises again.
