Veggies Fill Bill
He used to be an unapologetic steak man,
And he’d eat anything that came from a fry pan.
But these days Bill Clinton
I watching what he’s eatin,’
Ever since he turned into a vegan.
Month: August 2011
Lieberman Likes to Get Jiggy on the Sabbath
If I may come close to the edge, as I say in the book, the rabbis, in all their brilliance, did create, oh, a couple of thousand years ago, one of the things that should happen on the sabbath is that husbands and wives are to be together, sexually, just in case you missed that during the week.
— Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), talking to NY1 about his new book, The Gift of Rest: Rediscovering the Beauty of the Sabbath, and grossing out all of us with the image of him doing the dirty on Saturdays.
Bushies Pounding on Perry
Rick Perry’s an idiot, and I don’t think anyone would disagree with that.
— Former Reagan-Bush adviser Bruce Bartlett, in a CNN interview.
Rick Perry Has an ‘Elmer Gantry’ Problem
It would be understatement to say I’ve not been a fan of Rick Perry for president. His shoot-from-the-lips style conveys thoughtlessness. Additionally, the suburbs won’t put Elmer Gantry in the Oval Office: Perry can’t permit voters to conclude he sells his faith more than he lives it.
— GOP consultant Alex Castellanos, on the newest presidential candidate.
The Tea Party’s March of Folly: Idiocracy, Here We Come
In her Los Angeles Times column on Thursday, Meghan Daum made note of the rise references in political commentary to the movie “Idiocracy,” a 2006 burp-and-fart, sci-fi political comedy set 500 years in the future, written and directed by Mike Judge, the creator of the animated series “Beavis and Butthead” and “King of the Hill”:
And it was no accident that Republican fatcat operatives recognized these dumbasses as suckers whom they could easily dupe into believing that it was the government, not big business, that caused the financial collapse in 2008; that tax cuts create jobs; that corporations are people; and on and on — or that a mild-mannered DLC centrist Democratic president who happens to be black is actually a terrifying Kenyan anti-colonialist Marxist Muslim Nazi fascist illegal alien
References to the film seem to be everywhere, and not just in op-eds penned by cranky columnists (I mentioned it in a column last year about public spaces being sold as advertising space). The latest issue of the Economist has an article about the business-sabotaging effects of the battles in Washington, headlined “American Idiocracy.”
A recent blog post on the Psychology Today website was headlined “Idiocracy: Can We Reverse It?” Meanwhile, it’s popping up in causal conversations, Internet comments and, most notably, on Twitter, where it often appears as a hashtagged topic…
Daum suggests that the movie has been given a second life — it bombed at the box office — because are behaving like idiots. She cites the sexual antics of Arnold Schwarzenegger on the right and Anthony Weiner on left, as well as “a Congress that gets the nation’s credit rating lowered thanks to toddler-like stubbornness over an issue that many of its members barely seem to grasp?”
Daum’s hope is that interest in “Idiocracy” and the shock of recognition of that society is being driven toward the future it predicts will give pause to partisans on both sides and bring them to their senses.
“Maybe it’s naive,” she writes, “to think that ideological opponents can be brought together by a common fear of mass stupidity: Call it idiocraphobia.”
But, see, the problem here is not naivete. The problem with this analysis is a reflexive reliance among media types on the equivalency meme: both sides are equally guilty, equally bad. A pox on both your houses.
