Tag Archives: Snark

Piers Morgan, Freedom Fries, and Other Jokes That Progs Don’t Get

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Right now there’s apparently a White House Petition to get CNN jawflapper Piers Morgan deported to the that happy realm whence he came. Something to do with his flubbering commentary on Newton and the 2nd Amendment. I haven’t read it, and I certainly haven’t signed it. Because punishing idiotic speech is not what we do in America. Middle-Class Englishmen with tony accents are always welcome here, even if their understanding of American law, liberty, and culture is no better than your average working-class yob with a few pints of Newcastle in him (stereotypes: they never get old).

Unfortunately, Morgan himself doesn’t seem to know that:

Dear me, what a sticky wicket! Like to chuff one’s chips down the apples and pears! Narky! (I have no idea what I’m saying).

Now’s probably a good time to mention that none, or very few, of those who’ve signed the petition actually want Piers Morgan deported. And even if they did, almost none actually expect it to happen. Even if President Obama was terribly interested in checking the visas of European immigrants, he’s hardly like to expel a man for agreeing with him on what should be done in the wake of Newton. So Morgan need not worry. He’s got a home in the USA so long as CNN can pretend his ratings can only go up.

So why are we bitterclinging wingnuts bothering? Aren’t we just making asses of ourselves, diminishing the dialogue, making a big deal out of nothing?

Probably. But consider this:

This is what no one ever got about “Freedom Fries.” OBVIOUSLY French Fries weren’t really going to be renamed. OBVIOUSLY a Congressional resolution to rename the items on the Capitol Menu was an utter waste of a legislative session. OBVIOUSLY the whole thing was juvenile and stupid.

But what about the message that it sent? The disrespect to a valuable ally?

Every now and again, we on the right like to blow off a little steam, stick our fingers in the eye of whoever happens to be pissing us off. It doesn’t accomplish much, but it lets us find an outlet for the frustrations we suffer sharing a country with socialists and the useful idiots who love them. The French were being rather irritating back in 2002, so Congress found a creative way to remind those cheese-eating surrender monkeys that we hold them in as much contempt as they hold les laides americains. And unlike similar events in European history (War of Jenkins’ Ear, anyone?), nobody got hurt.

The effort to run Piers Morgan out on a cyber-rail is much the same. It will accomplish jack mixed with squat, but it gives us a way to be obnoxious to a man who drives us to drink every time he unbuttons the flap on his pie-hole. It reminds the triumphant progs that we are not quite dead yet. And it reminds those recalcitrant mopers who still can’t believe that Mittens lost that there are better targets for bitter japes than our fellow wingnuts.

And besides, as I tweeted to Piers:

Never let the redcoats get too comfortable.

Ride, Boldly Ride, to the End of the Rainbow

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Not one of the best starts to the week. In fact, this is one of those mornings when you feel like telling all Creation in its wonder and splendor to go screw itself with a piece of lawn furniture. Overslept, rushed, unprepared. Making it to work on time was the only triumph. Fortunately Friday was a short class, so I could let those lessons absorb today. But I think the students know that this wasn’t me at my optimum, and that smarts. They start to lose respect for you when they think you’re only using half your posterior.

But, as with everything else, this I’ll get over. Because really, yesterday was pretty good:

The first John Wayne movie I ever saw, and still my favorite. AMC ran it yesterday morning, so I watched it while I folded diapers and Nora napped. I’ve seen Rio Bravo, and while there’s nothing wrong with it, El Dorado is an infintely better picture. For one thing, the elongated first act lets the characters breathe a little before they’re rushed into battle. For another, the cast is just better. Robert Mitchum’s drunk is drunker, meaner, and manlier than Dean Martin’s whiny Borrachon. James Caan’s snotty kid who’s quick with a knife but can’t shoot (“I hit the sign, and the sign hit him”) mops the floor with whatever the hell Ricky Nelson was doing. And just I’m gonna say it: Bull is funnier than Stumpy. Stumpy’s funny because of that Walter Brennan squeak; you’re constantly expecting him to start jabbering about his piles. Bull is just as nuts, but he’s actually useful in a fight, and the one-liners are better (“That way, if I get shot, you can bring back the food”).

The poem “El Dorado” that Mississipi (Caan) quotes is a good one, too. One of Poe’s shorter and less portentously treacly works.

Interestingly, Howard Hawks directed both pictures (and a third Sherrif-holeld-up-in-a-jailhouse film, Rio Lobo), and the screenwriter for both was Leigh Brackett, who also wrote The Big Sleep, Robert Altman’s satirized version of The Long Goodbye, and believe it or not, The Empire Strikes Back.

Yeah.

Behold, the Instagram Hypocrite. A few months ago I quoted Lileks authoritatively, as I often do, to damn Instagram from the loftiest heights. Something about manufactured nostalgia and all of that. But for some reason Saturday found me loading the app onto my iPad and snapping a few pictures.

Now, I’m old enough to have pictures of me taken in the 1970′s, and these pictures don’t look like that. I don’t know if casual-retro is really what Instagram’s about (kids born in the 1990′s don’t really have any particular feeling about the 70′s anyway). What I think people like about Instagram is it’s ability to wash the color of life up or down as we choose. Blues, yellows, and reds can be toned down or up, to hone in on the reality of the something we’ve captured. It makes what would otherwise be one picture among thousands a Precious Moment, already fading away.

Besides, as the sophomores in advisory tell me, the real reason the kids are on Instagram is because their parents are on Facebook. So if we really want to kill this trend, parents, I think we know what we need to do.

The Onion Reveals its Raaaaacism

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Via The Anchoress, the Parodists of Record wrap a real story in a fake story, causing many to question their true commitment to progressivism:

The New York Times newsroom is reportedly still undecided on whether or not to print a recent letter received from Obama, in which the president threatens to kill another helpless citizen every Tuesday and “fill [his] heavenly palace with slaves for the afterlife” unless the police “stop the darkness from screaming.”

“President Obama’s letter presents us with a classic journalistic quandary,” executive editor Bill Keller said. “If we print it, then we’re giving him control over the kinds of stories we choose to run. It would be an acknowledgment that we somehow give the nation’s commander in chief special treatment.”

Added Keller, “And that’s just not how the press in this country works.”

 

Do Read the Whole Thing.

Taking Hope Behind the Barn and Killing it With an Axe.

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You know it’s the silly season when campaign insiders and journalists (there’s a difference. I just know there is) start whispering about positive jobs reports. Even hardened old cynics like myself took pause. Why, maybe there’s a chance after all. Maybe the economy has finally found its headwind.

And true to form, the numbers weren’t bad. Actually up. Still north of 8%, but maybe enough, just enough, for Obama to make his essential case, his statesmanlike I-Didn’t-Burn-the-Whole-House-Down that emerged from the convention. Romney may have to worry.

Yeah, Mitt Romney is Fry.

Yeah, no. The unemployment rate is a blip above 8% instead of three blips because 368,000 people have left the work force since last we measured. That means more people than could fit into the DNC’s stadium in Charlotte (and way more than actually showed up) have been out of work so long that they have given up and started selling crack or collecting unemployment, sitting in a pit of despair trying to determine whether smoking crack or watching The View every day better expresses what is meant by “Rock Bottom.” If we had the same workforce participation rate as we did when this “recovery” began, the unemployment rate would be at 10%. Nothing’s changed. The economy is still in the ditch, and all the wheel-spinning in the world doesn’t make the damn thing move.

Stalag 17 FTW!

Sorry, proggies, but it’s starting to look like the eleventh-hour salvation isn’t coming. The Riders of Rohan are not en route. Obama’s got nothing to run on from now till November but paranoid fantasies about Mitt Romney raping Medicare after denying it birth control, and then dressing the unholy spawn in Magic Underwear spun from Lying Paul “The Liar” Ryan’s Lies.

Which might work. But if Obama clears this hurdle, his second term is going to make Bush’s look like George Washington’s. Everything will remain exactly where it is. No one will compromise, no budget will be passed, nothing will happen. 23% approval is going to look like the top floor of the Sears Tower from where Obama will be looking in January of  2017. And the rest of us will be boiling our socks for soup.

Hope is dead. Enjoy the autopsy.

My Brain is Sluggish; it Must be Tuesday.

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It seems like the BBC is always offering New and Interesting studies that fail to be either. I don’t know if science in the UK is so devoted to AGW that there are no resources for anything else, or if the BBC can no longer tell what’s news and what isn’t. Of course, I have that complaint about almost every major news organ, and the science of every country, so please don’t infer criticism of Brits as such.

But I don’t know who thought it would be a good idea to study weather people were any happier on workdays other than Monday. Of course they aren’t. Dragging yourself from bed to commute to desk does not become more pleasant by repetition. It becomes more tolerable on Friday only because you know you’re getting a break.

And what a break it is. Frankly, I’m tired of Saturday, the Domestic Workday. I can’t recall the last time I didn’t ask my wife, “Do we have something to do this weekend?” Because even if you aren’t Running Around, you’re grouting the thing and mowing the other thing. The only good thing about Saturday is recovering from sleep deprivation.

Which is what I’m suffering now. School ramped up again, and my mind has been un-writerly of late. I have projects, but the narrow sliver of time granted to them rarely seems long enough to get a good look at the problem, let alone accomplish anything. Which is no doubt just laziness rationalizing itself. In any case, I missed some sleep last night, and will likely again tonight. I’m only blogging this out of guilt. So maybe I’ll just cut to a video of some puppies:

 

The Convention. Feh. I can’t even sit through pep rallies, and they’re only an hour long. Nothing that happens at a convention matters. Sarah Palin had a perfectly fine speech in 2008; it availed her nothing. John McCain’s speech was okay, if kind of a wet fart at the end. But he was still doing fine in the polls until the economy tanked. I don’t remember what the hell Obama said at his convention; does anyone? Everything Obama has ever said could, if you were only interested in the content, have come out of the mouth of any Democratic politician from the last forty years. It was the feeling of Obama that mattered, the Presence, that MLK-light timbre in his voice. The voice is still the same, but the Presence seems diminished, and the feeling, well…

Thus Do We Meme, says the people who have nothing to do but fill the internet with joke versions of paintings in the fashion of an 80-year-old woman’s botched restoration of a Spanish fresco that was only 40 years old when she was born.

I suppose all art is self-portrait.

This is going to be funny for about 15 minutes, and then it’s going to go down deep in the earth to sleep until revived for VH1′s “I Love the Teenies” webcast in 2032 (incidentally, how odd is it going to be then when talking about The Twenties, and not meaning the 1920′s?). What I want to know is, who authorized the restoration, and what bishop is chewing him out right now as a result? There were times in the Spanish past where this would have been prima facie evidence of the need for an auto-da-fe.

Frankly, I don’t know why whoever decided to “restore” The Scream bothered:

And let’s have that image cap this long and rambling post. Happy Tuesday.

Rats Forced Off Titanic

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Vessel declared “seaworthy.”

WASHINGTON – The head of the General Services Administration resigned from her post Monday, and two other officials were fired amid an investigation into excessive spending at a 2010 training conference that featured a clown, a comedian and mindreader, Federal News Radio reports.

The public was gouged to the tune of $800,000. For which, her resignation is all well and good, and one would like to see more of the bastards strung up. But 80 stacks of High Society are rat fodder compared to the multi-trillion-dollar fiscal iceberg bearing down on us. The federal government wastes more money than that every day on programs that enjoy the fulsome approval of our elected representatives.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, describes GSA’s reported expenditures as “a gross abuse of taxpayer dollars and a breach of public trust.”

Cummings’ votes on the stimulus, auto industry bailout, and Obamacare were unavailable for comment.

Why is This Person in Congress? Why?

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Today I wish to dispassionaly discuss Sheila Jackson-Lee. Sheila Jackson-Lee makes my soul despair for the nature of man. Sheila Jackson-Lee makes an argument for authoritarianism every time she opens her mouth. If Joseph de Maistre were to concoct a fictional character to demonstrate to the known universe the folly of democracy, he would have blanched at creating so obvious a caricature as Sheila Jackson-Lee.

It’s not just that she thinks Nixon was impeached when he wasn’t. Such abounds in the poorly educated. It’s that she claims this inaccuracy as a consequence of having “scanned the annals of history.” Everyone is ignorant of something; it takes a Congressperson to elevate her ignorance to an authoritative statement.

And then follows her eloquent peroration:

Because most times, no matter whether we are a divided government, which I’m arguing for vigorous take-back of the House by Democrats and the win of the president, because we have proven, in the 21st century by those who are elected by the Republicans, you can’t have an effective democratic divided government under the likes of this thinking.

Can we truly be living in a society which has repeatedly elected a Representative who expresses the most basic of political ideas (we need to defeat the opposition) with the malapropic incompetence of a beauty queen? Is there really a district of Americans that listens to this babble and says to itself “Yes, she misspeaks for me”?

Worst of all, outside of right-wing blogs, no one will even bother to point it out. If Jackson-Lee were a celebrity, or a Republican, her yammering would earn bales of laughter from society both polite and impolite. Remixes of her speech would appear on YouTube. But she’s a Democratic Congressbeing, and the media has a blind spot with regard to things they sayd. The press will ignore this in the interests of decorum and civility and sensitivity and tone. I mean, it’s not like this person has influence over how the money taken from my wallet is spent or anything.

Marky Mark Brings the Pain

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The Byronic Man lets out a vicious reductio ad absurdum against Wahlberg’s inability to tell the difference between The Movies and Real Life.

To say, “Hey, Spanish Inquisition, I got an inquiry for you – you want a Hertz Donut?”  Then when they say yes, punch them in the face so their funny hats fly off and say, “Hurts, Don’t it!?”

I mean, sure Burt Reynolds saved Sterling Archer and the rest of the ISIS crew from that Cuban hit squad, but he didn’t brag about it.