Breaking news: Sarah Palin can read!

Trudeau's comic strip reacts to a preview of an upcoming book on Sarah Palin

We owe thanks to Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. Cheer them on

I am worried that if Palin and Bachmann are out of the GOP presidential wannabe list, we will then suffer the loss of comedic material of magnitude beyond our wildest imaginations.  So, support them, please ...

There is only so much Rick Perry can do for us :)

Obama, Libya, and his Nobel Peace Prize ... and more

Pictures easily convey what a gazillion words might not:

Oh the irony of being the only Nobel Peace Prize recipient to have launched missiles!  But then maybe he is Bush; on Obama and his advisers being the center-left version of Bush and his neo-conservative advisers:

So, maybe Obama deserves not the Nobel but the Oscar for ...

Do we have any alternatives?  Nope; all we have is crazies like this:

Or this one:

Meanwhile, the deficit and debt keeps growing; the mushroom cloud we need to worry about:

But, in a democracy (however weak it might be) the state of the nation depends on we the people:

So, what is the bottom line?

February a Palin-free month? You betcha!

A fortnight ago, the Washington Post's Dana Milbank wrote about the "Sarah Palin problem":

I hereby pledge that, beginning on Feb. 1, 2011, I will not mention Sarah Palin -- in print, online or on television -- for one month. Furthermore, I call on others in the news media to join me in this pledge of a Palin-free February. With enough support, I believe we may even be able to extend the moratorium beyond one month, but we are up against a powerful compulsion, and we must take this struggle day by day.

Now, the comedians take over (ht)

Sarah Palin Media Addict from Gina Gershon

Palin's America: Let's go out with a bang

Wouldn't want to find out what the worst could ever happen if Sarah Palin became the president?  Aren't you curious?  Morbidly curious?  Here is a news report just for you  :)


Morbid Curiosity Leading Many Voters To Support Palin

Gabrielle Giffords reads the First Amendment

And, the horrendous graphic with "targets" (ht) ... not that this graphic was the cause, but, politicians need to be ultra careful about their rhetoric that employs violent metaphors; it is not that difficult to imagine that some among the audience might not see the distinction between metaphors and real ...

Bush hopes Sarah Palin will stay in Alaska!

Barbara Bush's back handed compliment :) (ht)

No tweet yet from Tina Fey Sarah Palin

Quote of the day on Christine O'Donnell

Bill Maher thinks he has been laughing at Christine O'Donnell with his old clips of her appearances on his shows. If she wins, Bill Maher will have created her.

James Fallows has nothing but sharp observations about this witch Senate candidate.  Fallows writes that O'Donnell and her likes are more dangerous than Sarah Palin because:

O'Donnell has not seemed uncomfortable for one second** -- even in her most obvious dodge, about whether she really thinks evolution is a "myth." The difference is, she is a talk show regular. Among the many things wrong with talking-head gab shows, which have proliferated/ metastasized in the past generation -- they're cheap to produce, they fill air time, they make journalists into celebrities, they suit the increasing political niche-ization of cable networks -- is that they reward an affect of breezy confidence on all topics and penalize admissions of complexity, of ignorance on a specific topic, or of the need for time to think.

O'Donnell comes across as a perfect, unflappable product of the talk-show culture. Sarah Palin knows that she is bad under open questioning -- so she avoids it, speaks only to selected audiences, is interviewed only by Fox. If she were to run for president, which I've always doubted, this would make her brittle for the unavoidable main campaign. Christine O'Donnell shows that the other path can create a better, unshakably on-message product for this era.

Oh well ... how about laughing all these off with two cartoons?  I suppose at the end of it all, the jokes are really on us folks :(

Video of the day

The young woman in this video grew up to become ... the Republican senatorial candidate from Delaware :) (ht)

Poster of the day :)

How did we ever survive before Sir Timothy Berners-Lee came up with the idea of "http://" and the world wide web!
Such graphics (ht) would be so difficult to share without his creation ...

Fahrenheit 451

This picture sums up all my earlier words!

Suggestions for Glenn Beck's speech :)

Sarah "refudiate" Palin triggered an avalanche of Shakespalinisms.  Now, it is is Glenn Beck's turn as he gets ready to do his crap speech.
However, there is no such comparable creativity on Twitter :(
It can't be the case that the vacation-hating Americans are out for the month ... As Marvin Gaye sang, "what's going on?"
The best that the Daily Beast could do was .... "I have a nightmare"
The Daily Show does "I have a scheme"

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
I Have a Scheme
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

Colbert says that "Besides the date, the location, the march and the threat of assassination, Glenn Beck's rally has nothing to do with Martin Luther King Jr."

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Glenn-Livid
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election Fox News

The Constitution is not an amendment to the Bible!

Which is why John Hodgman suggests that we ditch the "Con"stitution, and move to a more optimistic title even--the "Pro"stitution :)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
You're Welcome - Constitutional Crisis
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Mosque-Erade
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

And Colbert exposes the problems with the freedom of religious belief and expression that the Constitution Prostitution guarantees :)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - Weapon of Mass Construction
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election Fox News

On the anti-mosque hysteria

Christopher Hitchens swings a mighty bat even when he is not well when he points out that:

Where to start with this part-pathetic and part-sinister appeal to demagogy? To begin with, it borrows straight from the playbook of Muslim cultural blackmail. Claim that something is "offensive," and it is as if the assertion itself has automatically become an argument. You are even allowed to admit, as does Foxman, that the ground for taking offense is "irrational and bigoted." But, hey—why think when you can just feel? The supposed "feelings" of the 9/11 relatives have already deprived us all of the opportunity to see the real-time footage of the attacks—a huge concession to the general dulling of what ought to be a sober and continuous memory of genuine outrage. Now extra privileges have to be awarded to an instant opinion-poll majority. Not only that, the president is urged to use his high office to decide questions of religious architecture!
Nothing could be more foreign to the spirit and letter of the First Amendment or the principle of the "wall of separation." In his incoherent statement, Foxman made the suggestion that it might be all right if the Cordoba House was built "a mile away." He appears to be unaware that an old building at the site is already housing overflow from the nearby Masjid al-Farah mosque.

Fellow Indian-American, Fareed Zakaria, is disgusted with the ADL's statement and has returned their honors from four years ago for their "Hubert Humphrey Award for First Amendment Freedoms":

I hope the Palins, Gingrichs, and Foxmans will lower their rhetoric right away ... else, here is one possibility: Ramadan begins on August 12th, and this unnecessary attention on a proposed Islamic Center in New York could easily become the topic for inflammatory sermons from some of the imams in Iran and Iraq and Saudi Arabia and ... who are always looking for a good fight portraying the US as the satan ... and we want to provide them with more ammo?

Shakespeare + Sarah Palin = Shakespalin

Ever since Sarah Palin invoked Shakespeare's name to defend her usage of a non-existent word, refudiate, the web and Twitter has been all the more an exciting place with creative "Shakespalins" :)
Here are a few that I liked about the Bard of Wasilla:

ellagreeneyes  "Wherefore art thou Romeo? I'll try to find him and bring him to ya."
adn_jomalley "The lady doth refudiate on Twitter"
TheRealSucrerey O mighty Palin! dost thou lie so low? Are all thy Bushisms, panderings, dunders, idiocies, Shrunk to this little tweet?
PDXp2b Et tu', Webster's?
french7 "By the winking of her eye, something stupid this way comes."
AgentM83 Now is the winter of dis continent
linc0lnpark: To be Governor, or not to be Governor; a book deal is in question.
cruzi Why then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either truth nor lies, but Faux News makes it so     
geekjokes Plumber Joe, Plumber Joe, where for art thou Plumber Joe
zaoelpis What fools these voters be!

An OMG edition: Sarah Palin

TPM via Slate:

"Well, then what the federal government should have done was accept the assistance of foreign countries, of entrepreneurial Americans who have had solutions that they wanted presented. They can't even get a phone call returned, Bill. The Dutch—they are known, and the Norwegians—they are known for dikes and for cleaning up water and for dealing with spills. They offered to help and yet, no, they too, with the proverbial, can't even get a phone call back."
—To Bill O'Reilly, Fox News, June 15, 2010.

You know, maybe it is time for that Stephen Sondheim classic:

The politics of the libertarian mob

Democrats were day-trading, Republicans were divorcing. We were all individualists now.

A wonderful line from Mark Lilla's essay in the NYRB, which has a neat title: "The Tea Party Jacobins."  Lilla is a professor at Columbia, after quite some time at Chicago.  More than anything else, Lilla is a faculty who is comfortable in both academic and journalistic domains--a trait I admire and look up to.
What is Lilla writing about there?

A new strain of populism is metastasizing before our eyes, nourished by the same libertarian impulses that have unsettled American society for half a century now. Anarchistic like the Sixties, selfish like the Eighties, contradicting neither, it is estranged, aimless, and as juvenile as our new century. It appeals to petulant individuals convinced that they can do everything themselves if they are only left alone, and that others are conspiring to keep them from doing just that. This is the one threat that will bring Americans into the streets.
Welcome to the politics of the libertarian mob.

Instead of the old Jacobins, who were leftist radicals, Lilla says we have the new Jacobins.  How different are these from the old?

When the new Jacobins turn on their televisions they do not tune in to the PBS News Hour or C-Span to hear economists and congressmen debate the effectiveness of financial regulations or health care reform. They look for shows that laud their common sense, then recite to them the libertarian credo that Fox emblazons on its home page nearly every day: YOU DECIDE.

Lilla has a point when he notes that the new Jacobins prefer:

the company of anti-intellectuals who know how to exploit nonintellectuals, as Sarah Palin does so masterfully.¹⁶ The dumbing-down they have long lamented in our schools they are now bringing to our politics, and they will drag everyone and everything along with them. As David Frum, one of the remaining lucid conservatives, has written to his wayward comrades, “When you argue stupid, you campaign stupid. When you campaign stupid, you win stupid. And when you win stupid, you govern stupid.”

So, where is this heading towards?  Lilla thinks that the Tea Party itself might dissolve soon, as much as a float is taken down after the Homecoming party!  But:

Now an angry group of Americans wants to be freer still—free from government agencies that protect their health, wealth, and well-being; free from problems and policies too difficult to understand; free from parties and coalitions; free from experts who think they know better than they do; free from politicians who don’t talk or look like they do (and Barack Obama certainly doesn’t). They want to say what they have to say without fear of contradiction, and then hear someone on television tell them they’re right. They don’t want the rule of the people, though that’s what they say. They want to be people without rules—and, who knows, they may succeed. This is America, where wishes come true. And where no one remembers the adage “Beware what you wish for.”

I wish Lilla had phrased something else in place of "libertarian mob" because true libertarians like the intelligent folks at Cato or Reason are not quite thrilled with the Tea Party folks' anti-intellectual ranting.  And, to a Libertarian Democrat like me, well, this nutcase mob is not anything like our idea of why we like the libertarian streak in our politics .... But, that is my only quibble :)

Quote of the day

The modern American typically relates warmly to the use of English to the extent that it summons the oral — “You betcha,” “Yes we can!” -- while passing from indifference to discomfort to the extent that its use leans towards the stringent artifice of written language. As such, Sarah Palin can talk, basically, like a child and be lionized by a robust number of perfectly intelligent people as an avatar of American culture. And linguistically, let’s face it: she is.

Complete essay here.  ht

"The rot set in with Ronald Reagan"

The best articulation, yet, that I have come across of the state of Conservatism in America:

Traditional conservatives disdain populism and respect knowledge. They believe in balancing the government’s books. And they are pragmatists who are suspicious of ideology. Reagan debased all these ideas – and modern American conservatism is still suffering the consequences.

Rachman writes how this Reaganism has led to Sarah Palin:

The most damaging idea propagated by the Reagan myth is the cult of the idiot-savant (the wise fool). You can see it in the very first line of Dinesh D’Souza’s admiring biography of Reagan, which proclaims: “Sometimes it really helps to be a dummy.” Mr D’Souza recounts numerous stories in which intellectuals – even conservative intellectuals – disdained Reagan. They scorned his tendency to spend cabinet meetings sorting jelly beans into different colours, and his taste for flaky anecdotes. But, Mr D’Souza concludes, the “dummy” was right and the pointy-heads were wrong.
A dangerous chain of reasoning flows from this popular version of history. Reagan was apparently stupid and often startlingly ignorant – but he was vindicated by history. Therefore, goes the theory, ignorance and stupidity are good signs. They show that a politician is in tune with the deeper wisdom of the people. Once you start thinking like that, it is but a short step to Sarah Palin.

Meanwhile, within the storehouses of knowledge--in academia--postmodernism, in a way, legitimized such bizarre descent into stupidity by championing an argument that every interpretation is equally valid.  The idiot savant of Reagan-Bush-Palin is similarly reflected in the challenge in the public domain of how old the universe is, or natural selection and evolution, and even in the fantastic growth of the conspiracy theory industry.  The joke is not on Reagan or Palin, but on us in academia :(

Hmmm.... that was a digression :)  Rachman concludes:

The real Reagan was, in fact, rather more pragmatic than the “Reagan myth” that sprang up after he left office. Real Reagan was willing to raise taxes in extremis, and became a firm believer in arms-reduction talks. Today’s American conservatives, who claim the mantle of Reagan, would regard these ideas as treachery and weakness. Reagan was ultimately a successful president. But he left behind a poisonous legacy for the conservative movement.

Tina Fey calls it quits!

Click here