Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Confederacy of Assholes


I have a longer post in mind on the general topic of proud ignorance and political narcissism and sad-stupid bigotry -- yes, besides this and this and this and whatever else -- that I am way too busy writing other things to write right now. So I'm jut going to note that Matt Taibbi's Rolling Stone piece on the Tea Party is pretty freaking great. And I say this as someone who does not like how amused by his own excellence Taibbi generally seems to be, or a bunch of other things about him. But also, this. This:

It would be inaccurate to say the Tea Partiers are racists. What they are, in truth, are narcissists. They're completely blind to how offensive the very nature of their rhetoric is to the rest of the country. I'm an ordinary middle-aged guy who pays taxes and lives in the suburbs with his wife and dog — and I'm a radical communist? I don't love my country? I'm a redcoat? Fuck you! These are the kinds of thoughts that go through your head as you listen to Tea Partiers expound at awesome length upon their cultural victimhood, surrounded as they are by America-haters like you and me or, in the case of foreign-born president Barack Obama, people who are literally not Americans in the way they are.

It's not like the Tea Partiers hate black people. It's just that they're shockingly willing to believe the appalling horseshit fantasy about how white people in the age of Obama are some kind of oppressed minority. That may not be racism, but it is incredibly, earth-shatteringly stupid.


Or this:

You look into the eyes of these people when you talk to them and they genuinely don't see what the problem is. It's no use explaining that while nobody likes the idea of having to get the government to tell restaurant owners how to act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the tool Americans were forced to use to end a monstrous system of apartheid that for 100 years was the shame of the entire Western world. But all that history is not real to Tea Partiers; what's real to them is the implication in your question that they're racists, and to them that is the outrage, and it's an outrage that binds them together. They want desperately to believe in the one-size-fits-all, no-government theology of Rand Paul because it's so easy to understand. At times, their desire to withdraw from the brutally complex global economic system that is an irrevocable fact of our modern life and get back to a simpler world that no longer exists is so intense, it breaks your heart.

Condescendingly Taibbi-ian? Sure, yes, absolutely. But right is right, and even if dude kind of loses the thread in the last third of the piece, it's always bracing to see idiocy met eye to eye and engaged on its own shriek-y terms. I might've written it differently, but dude is not wrong.

I know you can't stop what's coming, and that this is what's coming for just about everything made of words, but I really hope Rolling Stone doesn't die. Someone needs to review Linkin Park records (just kidding, no one needs to do that) and someone needs to run good political writing with curses in it. Or at least someone out there needs to pay for writing like that. Otherwise I'd pretty much have to quit.

Friday, September 17, 2010

Concuss and Discuss, or Everyone Works During The NFL Season

Here is a reasonable person doing a reasonable thing. His name is Jared Allen, he plays for the Minnesota Vikings, he fucking loves guns, and he is almost impossible for me to relate to in any way. It's not just that I'm kind of meh on guns, have not been arrested for DUI even once, and have never driven Dan Orlovsky's face into the turf of Ford Field. It's that the life experiences and physical bigness and immense wealth and tremendous overwhelming love of firearms that have shaped Jared Allen's personality is as foreign to me as can be. This isn't to say that I can relate with, say, Jose Reyes's life experience -- I don't love fried meats or other Dominican delicacies, I did not grow up excruciatingly poor and then become excruciatingly rich. But man: writing about the NFL, which is mostly what I've been doing for the last two weeks and mostly what I'll be doing for the next five months, sure feels strange.

I mentioned it earlier, but I should probably have been linking to the two columns I've done for The Awl in my new role as their weekly NFL columnist. Which, like so many of my other gigs, sounds really awesome until you check out the (imaginary, in this case) pay stubs. But I love that site, love the editors, and am pretty proud of the two columns I've written for them thus far -- the first is an elaborate scene-setting given over almost entirely to making fun of Chris Berman; the second is about mirroring and reflexive unreflectiveness in the broader NFL discourse. So kind of like Peter King if you replaced his pumpkin spice latte with scotch and his love of the NFL and everyone in it with intense ambivalence. There are also predictions at the end of every column, in which I'm getting soundly out-predicted by a flipped Canadian coin and posting a winning percentage that even Charlie Morton thinks is pathetic.

Anyway, it has been fun, and as you can see I've decided to busy up the righthand column -- which did not contain nearly enough information, obviously -- with links to each of these columns and all of those to come. I will, however, probably be saving most of my NFL insights -- insights such as What Is The Deal With Jared Allen, among other pricelessnesses -- for my bylined stuff. Between The Awl column, which I have apparently decided to make a sprawling weekly exercise in cultural studies capped with totally incorrect predictions, and additional NFL writing for the Journal -- More bad predictions! Semi-gamers for the Metropolis blog! -- I'm really pushing my NFL tolerance to its limits. This is a sport I'm more fascinated by than actually interested in, and I watch the games -- and the behavior of the totally reasonable national heroes playing and coaching those games, like the 100% not DSM-diagnosable mentally ill man at right -- at a much further remove than I do any other sport. In part because the players are like strange zoo monsters, and in larger part because of its outsized impact on the broader national discourse and the terribly stupid fear-based machismo that defines NFL culture.

The sport itself is interesting to me, maybe more so than ever -- when you start noticing for the patterns of the game and the intricacies of each play, football is a fascinatingly complex (if also culturally complicated) thing. But the discourse surrounding it keeps me at arm's length -- increasingly rapt at the weird, brutish intricacy of the sport itself, but also puzzled by the combination of incautious canonization and casual loathing to which the players are subjected, irritated by the terrified gay-panic weirdness of its broader discourse, discouraged by the sheer equine scope and bellowing utterances of CBS halftime dude Shannon Sharpe's face. If this sort of insight sounds like the sort of thing you're interested in reading over and over again, with varying intensity of expression and a fairly high amount of profanity, man do I have some good news for you about your next four-plus months.

Don't Tread On Animated Bears


The Christine O'Donnell in Delaware thing makes a lot more sense when it's weird bears in overalls hashing it out. Also, a perfect object lesson in the power of a well-placed F-word for LOL FX. I got it from Jonathan Chait's blog at The New Republic.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

What To Remember, What To Forget


The idea, originally, was to get all in it today. Being that it's September 11 and all, and being that September 11 -- Giuliani Day here in NYC -- is now celebrated by insane, tragically misinformed caucasians as a national hate holiday and festival-style celebration of victory over tolerance and sophistication and insight. It's also the day I met my wife, and a day that changed my life and many other lives in many other ways. I light a Yahrzeit candle every year, and I did it again this year. The idea I had, and there was a part of me that was even looking forward to it, was to write about where I and everyone else found ourselves this anniversary, write about remembering and forgetting and all that. But I didn't go that route, as you can tell by the fact that the end of this post is in sight on your screen right now.

No, I took the day off. I took some stuff to donate to Goodwill and I bought a weird mirror at a street sale. I watched the Mets and some tennis and I went to a friends house and made dinner, got tomato sauce on myself, allowed myself to be pretentious. I did some late-summer Saturday things, basically.

There's a lot to write about, and a lot that I'd like to write about, but I finally just decided to exclude from my celebration of this de facto holiday the monster squad of sourdough-faced Staten Islanders and brute, mean-faced oldsters cheering John Bolton's walrusian sadism and Andrew Breitbart's via-satellite fuming. I haven't even looked for reports on that Glenn Beck/Palin live hate show in Alaska. I switched off. I drank some beers and ate and made jokes and listened to jokes and listened to music. I guess I saw the people who spend all their time Remembering as hard as they can about 9/11 -- all these weird unreal non-lessons and new fear-curdled bafflements -- and I realized that what they're remembering didn't actually happen, to me or to anyone else. And that what I remember is something that maybe I'd like to keep away from them, and that I'd like to keep them away from my memories.

This is an important day, for me and everyone else who was around here when it happened. Too important to fetishize, too important to cheapen, certainly too important to lie about and exploit -- doesn't mean people won't do it, people being people and all, but it's too big for that. It's too important to leave to the monsters, in that sense, but also too sacred to me -- I almost wrote "hallowed" -- for me to feel okay spending it thinking about those monsters who would make it something it shouldn't be, something far more akin to what the original monsters who perpetrated the act hped for. I suppose today was like a holiday for the ghoulish anti-Muslim protest fucks, too, but as much as I hate what they're doing I finally decided to spend this one differently. Except for now, of course. But I spent it in my own goofy process of life, rather than observing some sour, multiply wrong festival of death. And of course isn't that brave of me. But what else are you supposed to do? The world doesn't stop, for lies or truths or things big or small. It didn't then, and it shouldn't now. You remember, sure. But then you look ahead of you, and you walk.

Monday, September 6, 2010

Ulcers With Bylines: Okay, Gregg Doyel, Okay.


Most people in the world don't have to have an opinion, well-informed or no, about the sports columnists at CBS Sports. I suppose that I don't really have to have an opinion myself, although the fact that CBS is one of my regular visits when I'm doing The WSJ Daily Fix Thing means that I am at least familiar with who those columnists are. So this gives me a really uncool edge on all of you -- and it's probably more or less all of you -- who can be all, "Um, I know there's definitely Shannon Sharpe. Or Sterling Sharpe. And also I think Hugh Downs and Sherman Alexie? And is Summer Sanders still doing that blog?" It's one I would trade to you for pretty much anything. But it does enable me to have opinions on things that are transparently unimportant and none too interesting. To wit:

So CBS Sports has a bunch of columnists, more or less all of whom are at the very least Fix-usable and three of which -- the very great Ray Ratto and the very better-than-serviceable Dennis Dodd and Gary Parrish -- are pretty good. All of them have really terrible column photos, though: Parrish's gel-and-loosened-tie look is uncomfortably Frat Semi-Formal, Dodd looks like Mitch Pileggi For SlimFast and Ratto looks like a skeptical walrus. Again, it takes nothing away from any of them, and Ratto -- it bears mentioning again -- is one of the most consistently wry and wise and overall excellent writers out there who types about sports. But the picture atop Gregg Doyel's column is actually exactly right, and maybe even pretty flattering considering that the mohawked nightmare above is also Gregg Doyel. But the sour, puckered-up face Doyel is making in his column photo -- it's atop this column, which I'm going to write about in a moment -- is just so right for him. It's a picture of someone losing his train of thought mid-scold; it's a photo of the worst dad at a Little League game suddenly realizing that he has to go to the bathroom, number two, and pronto. It's pretty representative of Doyel's writing, too.

(It's worth mentioning, parenthetically, that Doyel may not actually be the worst columnist at CBS Sports. The hilariously, relentlessly anodyne Mike Freeman is just as predictable, but his dull, dutiful columns -- here's one about how the Mariners' knowing acquisition of rape-y former Rangers prospect Josh Lueke represents baseball's declining commitment to moral players -- aren't nearly as gripping as Doyel's equally dull but much more in-your-face troll bait. Also, Freeman loses points for forgetting about legendary Raw Talent Ambiorix Burgos. And one should never forget about Ambiorix Burgos, because he's presumably going to get out of jail someday)

Anyway, Doyel's an ulcer. I mean, I don't know what he's like in real life, but given how eager he is portray himself in columns as a guy who enjoys screaming disgustedly at his television it would seem unkind not to take him at his word. Of course, taking Doyel at his word would mean accepting his own self-assessment as a fearless truth-speaker, forever willing to take big names to task in near-unreadable columns that make for easy SEO-stack headlines. And it would mean ignoring the fact that he's obviously working the WWF Heel angle pretty hard -- drawing fire, drawing comments, hopefully drawing links and hits and ad-views or whatever. He shouldn't be taken too seriously.

And yet, while I sense he gets his own Heelery at a level that's probably not entirely unconscious, it's occasionally amazing to see how far he will go for a sell. The premise of the piece itself is straight comment-and-link-bait all by itself -- Doyel is "asking" Boise State to lose to Virginia Tech tonight. But even knowing that he's playing up the whole Gregg Doyel thing as per usual in the grafs I'm about to quote, even knowing that he's fishing for "Doyel UR retard!!1!!" comments on his piece -- even knowing that, isn't this a bit much?

It's nothing personal. Honest. I don't dislike Boise State or Boise State coach Chris Petersen, even if some of you in Idaho might recall a brief confrontation I had with Petersen last year on a conference call. If you're a conspiracy theorist, congratulations: There's another conspiracy for you. In addition to the SEC connection here at CBS -- plus I attended the University of Florida! -- Petersen and I butted heads, briefly, on a phone call last year ... so this year I'm getting even by rooting against the Broncos.

Problem with that theory is, I have notoriously bad phone etiquette. I also butted heads once on a phone call with Mike Krzyzewski. So the conspiracy theory falls apart there, because Krzyzewski coaches Duke and Duke beat Butler for the 2010 national basketball title and Boise State has been called the 2010 football season's equivalent to Butler, and since I once butted heads with Coach K that means I should, um ... now I'm confused.

So how about this. How about we just stick with the facts here?

And the fact is this: If Boise State beats Virginia Tech, the Broncos almost certainly will play for the national championship this season, and that's going to kill me. It's going to kill lots of fans of college football. Call us BCS snobs, call us front-runners, call us realists. Say we're stupid vestiges of the past, digging a moat around the BCS castle and guarding it with our alligator mouth and hummingbird ass.


Just say it in the comments, please. And on your blog, and on, like, Huffington Post and Bleacher Report, please. If Doyel is in earnest, he's got to be a pretty miserable guy. If he's not, then it seems like he's wasting what could be a pretty cool gig on what must be an exhausting and unsatisfying bit of play-acting. I'm starting to think that picture might be a candid.

Sunday, September 5, 2010

Get Tough: Reasonable Bigots and Others


Picking a single worst thing about the ongoing nightmare parade circling the non-mosque that may or may not ever be built some distance from Ground Zero is difficult. This, and I promise this will be the last time you read this in this post, is a credit to the awfulness of all involved -- the Staten Island bigots showing up looking to punch Bin Laden in the nose because the New York Post told them he might be there, and pleather-bound monster and serial Muslim-baiter Pam Geller, and the out-of-town cynics willing to parrot the crudest and most ignorant bigotry if they think it will win them a chance to cut capital gains taxes next year and impanel a congressional investigation of the president's "birth" "certificate." These are all bad people, doing bad things. I've already written about this at length, albeit in kind of a narrow, NYC-centric context, and I'm happy with what I wrote. I'll leave that at that for now. But I want to write about something else having to do with this. I want to write about how non-nightmares have tried to be wrong about this question -- this very-easy-to-be-right-about question -- in a reasonable, more-in-sorrow-than-in-whatever way.

To a great degree, I know, even bothering with these ambivalence jockeys is kind of missing the point. The people who have chosen to be wrong about this -- or, by dint of their own sheer and self-evident demi-retardation, had that wrongness thrust upon them -- are so wrong, so fully and offensively wrong and so cynically and dangerously wrong (and, it must be presumed, possibly both at once), that it's probably best to focus on them. But rebutting Newt Gingrich is, finally, both someone else's and everyone else's job. (He also does a pretty good job of it himself, just by being the epic barf-beast that is Newt Gingrich) And anyway, Gingrich is just kind of cheating. Him and the rest of them.

What makes it possible for the Palins and Rick Lazios and Newt Gingriches and That Construction Worker Guy On Fox News With The American Flag Hardhat to be who they are is that being right on this issue -- that is, either not being bigots or recognizing the primacy of private property rights or the exercising even a modicum of perspective or keeping out of other neighborhoods' business, or all of those -- simply never occurs to them. The people who want to be both evenhanded and blindly biased are perhaps a more interesting case, but they're also a minority in this instance, and not a terribly sympathetic one. So, yeah, let's get to talking about them.



Even as someone inclined to see pretty much everything as poignant, I find it kind of difficult to feel for these dudes so hungry to see their biases be righteous. With the exception of actual crazy people like the aforementioned Pamela Geller -- she's on the left at right, and is also the ur-bigot behind the planned September 11 anti-Park51 protest, and a woman who would definitely have sex with Glenn Beck -- more or less everyone involved with trying to get the non-mosque moved/stopped/turned-into-a-wedge-issue feels obliged to at least pretend to reasonableness. Much of this is due to the right's choice of "sensitivity" -- to the families of certain 9/11 victims, to people who don't much like Muslims but don't feel comfortable with shrieking Gellerian bigotry and, per La Palin, "families in the heartland" who can't abide the idea of a Muslim 92nd Street Y that's exactly as far from the erstwhile Ground Zero than The Vitamin Shoppe at Maiden Lane. Even Michael Goodwin -- the anonymous NewsCorp apparat whose work lies on the other side of that hyperlinked "demi-retardation" above -- makes some awkward feints in the direction of brotherhood and sensitivity in his column. It's not exactly the sort of outreach that Imam Rauf engages in -- it's less a Muslim cleric reciting the Shma and making common cause with the Islamic world's most-hated minority than a well-compensated pundit reciting the word fire in a crowded theater. But even Goodwin-ian hatchetpeople realize that they need to try to appear not to be a part of the mob. While signaling frantically to the mob in semaphore the whole time, naturally, but in the subtext rather than the headline.

But what about those who could never bear the thought of being mistaken for the Michael Goodwins of the discourse -- the land-grant yobs making the most noise and casting the smallest amount of light in the discourse; the sort of puffed-up, under-educated Babbitts who would never use words like discourse? Yeah, I'm talking about Martin Peretz agonistes -- Peretz being the plu-Harvard publisher of The New Republic who happens to fucking hate Arabs as much as he loves ostentatious, flex-time-to-have-sex vocabularizing. The New Republic is still a pretty great magazine, I think -- I'm biased insofar as my two best pieces of magazine writing, this and this, were both done for them -- although more despite Peretz than thanks to him. He's been wrong and nasty about the non-mosque, in his distinctive way -- it's not that he opposes a mosque so much as that he's concerned about some very ordinary things Imam Rauf said willfully misunderstanding the importance of the "Cordoba" in Rauf's Cordoba Initiative. (For example) And there's this touchingly out-of-touch bit here, from another of his nasty maunders: "Nobody knows whether the entrepreneur who wants to open a gay bar next door to the Muslim center will be permitted to do so. This is a question of fairness." The entrepreneur, here, being red-faced, coke-speed Fox News late-night host Greg Gutfeld, who is obviously very serious about opening a "Muslim gay bar", possibly to be called Ram-a-Dan, next to the "mosque." Peretz and Gutfeld are less mismatched company than either would probably think, but you see my point here: clown is as clown does.

For a more serious-seeming TNR iteration of the why-can't-we-just-compromise-and-do-what-I-want, here's Israeli correspondent Yossi Klein Halevi's better-informed and less pugnaciously bigoted take. It's not worse than Peretz's mulitple and multiply wrong takes on it -- Halevi's a better writer, and less inclined towards the sort of drive-bys (i.e. there's no need for Park51, as there are already enough mosques in New York City and besides the cultural programming will stink) that make Peretz so exhausting and strange to read. But from the subhed -- "My Friend, Imam Rauf" -- on down, it's every bit as wimpily dishonest as the ADL's statement on the matter.

First of all, Halevi and Rauf aren't actually/at all friends -- they met once, in 2001, at a symposium. And while Halevi is (generally, hedgingly) willing to admit that Rauf isn't an al Qaeda apologist -- like I said, better than Peretz -- he still manages to be really wrong about what "the mosque" even is, and to misapprehend the actual thing at issue, here. "You have dedicated your life to helping Islam enter the American mainstream. In its current form, though, your project will have the opposite effect," Halevi writes. And I'm going to quote more in a second, but this is where he loses the thread to the point of utterly misunderstanding this situation: the point is that the "opposite effect" has nothing to do with Rauf or his project. The issue is that there is NOTHING Rauf or Cordoba could do to alter Park51 that would change the response from the people leading the charge against it. You can't negotiate with Martin Peretz or Pam Geller on this. They are unappeasable, and for that reason ought not be appeased -- there is no place this non-mosque could be that Geller wouldn't call it a "Monster Mosque" and Peretz wouldn't talk about Rauf (or any other Muslim leader) as if he were Ayman al-Zawahiri. But yeah, continuing: "However inadvertently, your current plan would be understood by large parts of the Muslim world as a victory over the West. Merely adding an interfaith component to the proposed Islamic center would not counter that distorted impression. Instead, it would likely reinforce the medieval theology of extending 'protection' to Christianity and Judaism under the auspices of Islam. But an interfaith center in which the three Abrahamic faiths are given equal status would send the message that I believe you intend to convey."

Which is maybe well-intentioned, but also pretty embarrassing. Because, first of all, it wouldn't even work: it's a compromise that solves nothing -- based on some soothsaying of "the arab street," it offers to replace this guy's dream of a Muslim JCC (and what a dream) with some weird, denatured monument to interfaith cooperation. Hopefully it will still have a pool, because otherwise it sounds pretty boring. But the bigger point that Halevi misses, and what compromise-minded David Paterson and Howard Dean and everyone else in the "too close/too soon" camp miss, is that they are not in a conversation or a negotiation, but a tip-of-the-pitchfork shouting match with people for whom it will never be acceptable that a center of this type get built by this person, anywhere. The reason why there has not yet been a convincingly reasonable, tolerant argument for moving or deferring or canceling Park51 is that reason has its limits, and that there is no real tolerant way to hold an intolerant position. Cordoba Initiative played by the rules in every possible way, and seem as good a neighbor as anyone could want -- this isn't even hard to see or understand. But if you're truckling to people intent on seeing a 15-story building as towering over the 1,776-foot Freedom Tower, perspective obviously would be an issue.

On issues of this sort, Peretz can usually get some equally verbose support from TNR's chief literary critic, Leon Wieseltier. Wieseltier generally spends more time calling out antisemites and lambasting contemporary philosophers than he does getting his hands dirty on matters like these, which I guess is fine. Wieseltier is a long sentence, Great Big Idea guy, but his eloquent defense of the mosque is surprisingly, bracingly simple in addressing the myriad complexities -- and the few, integral simplicities -- of this conversation. This right here is just good:

There are families of the victims who oppose Cordoba House and there are families of the victims who support it. Every side in this debate can invoke the authority of the pain. But how much authority should it have? I do not see that sentiment about the families should abrogate considerations of principle. It is odd to see conservatives suddenly espouse the moral superiority of victimhood, as it is odd to see them suddenly find an exception to their expansive view of religious freedom. Everybody has their preferred insensitivities. In matters of principle, moreover, polling is beside the point, or an alibi for the tyranny of the majority, or an invitation to demagogues to make divisiveness into a strategy, so that their targets come to seem like they are the ones standing in the way of social peace, and the “decent” thing is for them to fold. Why doesn’t Rauf just move the mosque? That would bring the ugliness to an end. But why don’t Palin and Gingrich just shut up? That, too, would bring the ugliness to an end.

I know this whole thing has been something of an August non-story, blown up to gargantuan size by the worst kinds of cynics and some blinkered, shameful simpletons. But I feel like my earlier argument -- that opposition to Park51 represented a misunderstanding and underestimation of New York City -- kind of feels insufficient now, as the story has expanded and the depth of the misunderstandings and underestimations of those who have kept this an issue have come into sharper focus. It's not a surprise when Palin and Gingrich and USDA Prime kooks like Pam Geller say idiotic, intolerant things -- they always do, for one, and I see no real reason not to take them at their word when they claim to believe their own words. But seeing how hard smart people are willing to work to make this simple issue seem complicated -- and to make their own essential cowardice appear reasoned and reasonable -- keeps on surprising me.

Wieseltier points out that Islam is no more "a religion of peace" than Christianity or Judaism -- that is, not one at all. Which, I have always thought, is precisely why we have a public, secular religion grounded in the rights enumerated in the constitution. Our common secular faith's health, and the strength of our national soul, is reflected in the citizenry's devotion to those rights -- not just for themselves but for all, not merely when flattering but always. I am interested, and a bit afraid, in seeing just how well our single real shared faith weathers this test.

Stars and Snipes: Your All-Beef Appetizer For A Massive Not-Ground Zero Non-Mosque Post Ahead


That headline was basically an excuse for the picture you see at left. If I am going to write about the Not-Ground Zero Non-Mosque again -- and spoiler alert, I am going to do that, and at length -- I think that I owe my notional readership the courtesy of not running a picture of Rudy Giuliani's dyspepto-weasel mug or Newt Gingrich or whoever next to it. So take in the goodness. Take in the Harrelson, and get some Snipes bicycle shorts up in you, too. They may hate us for our freedoms, but can't nobody hate on what's at left.

Also, have you seen that movie recently? There are dairy products made that year that have dated less egregiously. Also, for a movie that's ostensibly about exploding stereotypes and male friendship... nice stereotypes, nice terrible male friendship. Tin Cup Shelton gets the gas face.



It's a toss-up, with that video, what is more jarring: the fact that Serch just starts dancing pretty much whenever, or that MF Doom used to be me-level skinny. Also, how bold were these guys to diss Hammer and racists? That shit, that right there, is absolutely why 3rd Bass is remembered as one of the bravest and most wince-inducing groups in hip-hop history. Which, um, brings me to my point?

Maybe, I don't know. I think I'm actually just going to go with a whole new post, here. Anyway, enjoy Serch's dance moves for now. It must've been a white guy who invented all that.

Thursday, September 2, 2010

Governor Jan Brewer (R-AZ) Is A Tim & Eric Character


So, let's see: blaze-orange, prone to strange breathing and gestures, wince-inducing in the extreme. I know she's an actual person, but Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is also clearly a sketch comedy character. A character from the most bigoted and depressing sketch in a half-century, sure, and one whose shocking inability even to marshal the idiot buzzwords of her movement's own lobotomized lexicon is frankly sobering. Also she kind of looks like a draggy Frank Vincent. Also kooky enough and unready for prime time enough to make Sharon Angle look like Barbara Jordan. But also, and finally, and most importantly, a character in a comedy sketch.

I'm not mad at her. She's just doing what she does, what she was born to do. Pumpers like to pump, man. Sometimes it's that simple.



Great job.