Okay, now the guy is SERIOUSLY starting to piss me off…
He’s getting the most unhealthy, undemocratic, fawning, sycophantic, suck-up media treatment in the history of the Oval Office, and he’s whining about the ONE media outlet that takes shots at him.
WORSE, he thinks it’s appropriate to slap back.
The take-no-prisoners turn has come as a surprise to some in the press, considering the largely favorable coverage that candidate Obama received last fall and given the President’s vows to lower the rhetorical temperature in Washington and not pay attention to cable hyperbole. Instead, the White House blog now issues regular denunciations of the Administration’s critics, including a recent post that announced “Fox lies” and suggested that the cable network was unpatriotic for criticizing Obama’s 2016 Olympics effort.
YOOHOO! Princess? You are the President of the United States. You are the most powerful single individual on the planet Earth. You are Godzilla; our puny bullets are like unto stinging flies, okay? You got that?
When you yelp, you break the spell. Talking back makes you smaller.
October 8, 2009 — 7:31 pm
Comments: 30
Wiener
Because I can. Because there is no “why” in art. Because I got nothin’ again today.
My baloney has a first name…
October 7, 2009 — 5:37 pm
Comments: 30
Dan Rather listens earnestly to a banana
I’ll be honest: I don’t have any insights into Dan Rather’s lawsuit against CBS and the tossing thereof. I just wanted to draw Dan Rather with a banana clamped to his head.
I hate Dan Rather.
Hate him like Gloria Swanson hated the talkies. Always have done. There’s something humorless and plodding and mean about him. And phony. Phony as Dolly Parton’s left tit in Madame Tussaud’s parlor. Steyn said, in one of his I-wish-I’d-said-that columns,
Dan’s been play-acting at being a reporter for so many years now — the suspenders, the loosened tie, and all the other stuff that would look great if he were auditioning for a cheesy dinner-theater revival of ”The Front Page”; the over-the-top intros: ”Bob Schieffer, one of the best hard-nosed reporters in the business, has been working his sources. What have you managed to uncover for us, Bob?”, after which Bob reads out a DNC press release.
Wikipedia absurdly says of 60 Minutes, “the show pioneered many of the most important investigative journalism techniques, including re-editing interviews, hidden cameras, and ‘gotcha’ visits to the home or office of an investigative subject.”
Dude. Slash-and-burn editing and ambushing a company director before he’s had his first cup of coffee is not journalism, it’s dumb hack theater. 60 Minutes so outraged my infant sense of fair play, it pushed me down the first flight of steps from apolitical to proud poo-flinging ‘winger basement monkey.
If I had to nail the moment civility went out of modern political discourse, I’d nail it smack in the middle of Dan Rather’s massive forehead.
Rumor has it Dan put up $5mil of his own money to float this suit. Let’s hope he feels every dollar of it. Like flossing a dog’s butt with razor wire. Like shoving butter up a cat’s ass with a hot awl.
Aiiiiii…please make me stop!
September 30, 2009 — 6:06 pm
Comments: 52
Wot fink?
Iowahawk, of whom I am a huge fan-grrl, is having an art contest. At stake is a generous arts grant of thirty three dollar and eighteen cents.
These moneys, they am not good here. Our moneys are pretty color and they has a picture of a old lady in a sparkly hat.
Still…art contest. How can a weasel resist?
Okay, mine isn’t quite finished, but here’s the current draft. Yes, the full sized one is color. The contest doesn’t close until Sunday, so I have time to get this just right.
It’s imitative of the moving style of Gig and Keane and their richly evocative pity kitties. I suppose you could call it a Pity President.
In the first draft, he was licking his sore paw. But somehow, painting the presidential tongue was kind of. I don’t know. You know?
Wot fink?
September 28, 2009 — 6:28 pm
Comments: 41
Back up — here it comes!
Looks like ACORN is going to sue Breitbart and the video kidz under the Maryland law that requires consent of both parties to recording. Save this precious idea for the Museum of Dumb Moves.
I’m sure none of the defendants will have any problem making lawyer money (or even damages, since they are clearly guilty under the oddball Maryland law), and this will blast the thing into the legacy media. For a long, long time. Until perhaps the Obamacorn might be forced to comment.
Thank you, O lord, for the sheer boneheaded dumbassery of our enemies.
September 23, 2009 — 7:02 pm
Comments: 26
By popular demand…
I was going to add a snappy headline in Klingon but, sumofabitch, I don’t know any. Some geek I turn out to be.
And no, I don’t feel a bit guilty making fun of M’chelle.
We Righties were absolutely savagely insulting to Hillary Clinton in the most personal way. Her hair. Her cankles. Good ol’ Crusty the Pantsuit. She mostly deserved it, injecting her bad self and her bad politics into the presidency way over what a First Broad ought. You choose a life of celebrity politics, you hang the Kick Me sign on your back with your own hand.
(But, you know, I developed a sneaking admiration for her by the time it was all over. Baracky the Wonder Dog swooped in at the last minute and STOLE the prize she has worked and suffered and schemed for her whole damn life. And she stood there and took it. Took it like a man).
Yeah, I know. We flinch when it comes to the Obamas. It’s like nobody can imagine how to make fun of people who happen to be black without descending into the toxic racist iconography of last century.
Well, I can imagine such a thing. I can imagine a zillion heartwarming, magical ways to make fun of these people without going there.
At least, I’m pretty sure I can think up enough mockery to last us four years. Please god I don’t has to do it for eight.
Come on. You want it in big, beautiful color. You know you do.
September 21, 2009 — 7:39 pm
Comments: 41
Wait…we voted for whut??
The squishy middle elected Obama, because the squishy middle elects all our presidents (us partisans on the outer banks, we just decide how big or small the margin is).
The squishy middle is watching that nice young man they voted for morph into a crabby old party pooper.
Oh, this is fun…
September 16, 2009 — 7:54 pm
Comments: 12
Time for your medication, honey
I’ve been avoiding writing about the NHS. Health care, in all its ghastly detail, is so effing boring. And I’ve never been sick in either country. You never really know a system until you’ve depended on it.
But I’m the only one in my circle who has lived with no insurance, and under Blue Cross and under the NHS, so I feel obliged to weigh in. Even if much of my experience of anyone’s healthcare system is as an interested bystander.
First off, the NHS isn’t that bad. The horror stories you read in the Daily Mail — beloved of the Drudge Report — represent the worst failures of the worst doctors in the worst hospitals viewed through the jaundiced lens of a sensationalist media. If you took the worst failures of the worst doctors in the worst hospitals in the US, I’m certain we could match them wrong-kidney for missed-diagnosis. The truth isn’t in the outliers. The NHS is pretty good for most people most of the time. HOWEVER…
The NHS is pretty good, but it’s not quite good enough. The real picture isn’t in individual horror stories, but broader averages. As Theodore Dalrymple says, “Britain’s hospitals have vastly higher rates of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (a measurement of the cleanliness of hospitals) than those of any other European country; and survival rates from cancer and cardiovascular disease are the lowest in the western world, and lower even than among the worst-off Americans.” (Incidentally, Theodore Dalrymple — AKA Anthony Daniels, MD — is a god. Google him and read all 92,500 hits. Do it now, Mister!).
They aren’t actually proposing an NHS, so comparisons aren’t all that meaningful. Not all government-run health systems are the same; some work better than others. The NHS was a bottom-up restructuring of public health, for better or worse. What Washington hopes to do is impose a bunch of new bureaucracy on an existing public system. It’s less “reform” than a controlled demolition. Like being nibbled to death by ducks.
The current US system is already a de facto universal solution. The old have Medicare, the poor have Medicaid, the rich live like kings amongst us and most of the rest have insurance through work. As armybrat and Bob touch on in the comments to the previous thread, nobody gets turned away for acute care, regardless of their ability to pay (which is one reason the system is so expensive).
So the main problem we have is middle class people who are uninsured (or underinsured) and have an unexpected or pre-existing serious, chronic medical problem. How many people are in that spot? I don’t know, but it sure as HELL isn’t 47 million. And fixing it sure as HELL isn’t worth completely shattering what we have now.
Because the US has the best medical care in the world. We get hammered all the time with how “broken” our system is. It isn’t. We have fabulous medical care — innovative, experimental, enthusiastic and scientific as shit. It’s just that not everyone has sufficient access to it. That’s a much narrower problem than the one Washington wants to “solve”.
Theres a lot more to public health care, of course. The cost of our existing programs, necessary taxes, more intrusion in our private lives, “death panels”, malpractice law, illegals in the system. But I’ve already bored myself stiff. And I’d really rather spend my time Photoshopping Obama’s head where no Obama’s head has gone before.
September 8, 2009 — 6:22 pm
Comments: 15
PleaseOHpleaseOHPLEASE rename the health care bill after Ted!!!
Ohhhh…that would keep me busy for WEEKS.
He liked a good Chappaquiddick joke, did he? Let’s send him out with some!
Slogans? Anyone?
August 28, 2009 — 10:51 am
Comments: 37
Rot in hell, monster
For once in my miserable life, I wasn’t going to go there. Though there are so very many things to dislike about Ted Kennedy, I knew other people would mention them all today, and I don’t need the karma. But nobody’s quite nailed the thing that bugs me.
It’s the way Mary Jo Kopechne died. I mean her literal, actual last moments on earth. She almost certainly lived for some time on air trapped in the car. Maybe hours. The diver who recovered her body found her kneeling with her hands against the seat and her head in an air pocket.
Hours. In the pitch dark and cold and wet, breathing up her last, stale, warming scraps of air. Waiting for help to come. Help would surely come, wouldn’t it?
Ach. Makes sweat prickle along my hairline. I got stuck under an overturned canoe once, trapped (ironically) by my life preserver. I had an air pocket, too. It started to taste very bad very fast. My breath sounded like it was blaring out of a PA system into a high school gymnasium. I was under there five minutes, max, and I still have dreams.
No, I doubt Kennedy left knowing she was trapped alive. But I don’t see any evidence that he was particularly troubled by the idea, then or ever. He walked away from the accident and never reported it. Pulled a few strings, observed a few formalities and got off with a six-month suspension of his driver’s license.
Not five years later, Kennedy was screaming “is there one system of justice for the average citizen and another system for the high and mighty?” over Richard Nixon’s pardon for…whatever it was Nixon was supposed to have done. Without, apparently, feeling the slightest twinge of irony or embarrassment. Or anguish. Or self-awareness.
He named his dog Splash and wrote a book about him. He didn’t seem to have any idea there were subjects he should avoid. Or remorse he ought to feel. And nobody around him saw fit to tell him. Not that you can order someone to feel shame.
To them, Chappaquiddick was an unfortunate accident that happened to Ted Kennedy’s presidential hopes.
That’s monstrous, and all the good-deed-doing in the world can’t make it anything else.
August 27, 2009 — 7:25 pm
Comments: 36