THIS MACHINE KILLS LEFTISTS
Have I lost my damned mind or does that Rogaine ad they’re running actually spell the word “foam” as “foan”?
How many people did that ad go through who no longer write in standard longhand?
I mean, doesn’t the terminal cursive letter “m” have three humps?
*glances over at the invisible Greek chorus and shrugs*
That girl from those new Right Guard body spray ads is the proof of God’s existence.
One of my commenters has taken Phil Donahue’s side on the issue of why Donahue’s MSNBC show was cancelled —and that is how “cancelled” is spelt— back in 2003. But let’s be clear about that program: it was a ratings disaster. It was six months of poor returns on the investment. And, as we have learned before, the amoral market is subject to the influence of moral choices.
But what do Donahue, Bill Moyers, and my commenter say is the real reason? Politics.
That’s ridiculous. MSNBC would never cancel a show for political reasons.
Seriously, I just don’t like Phil Donahue.
Back in the early 90’s, Donahue’s producer called to invite me to appear on his program. Before the call was ended, not only had the producer withdrawn her invitation, but actually had the balls to try to use me as a talent scout for the type of person that good ol’ Phil wanted to abuse on the air.
You’ll never guess why she disinvited me.
As I say: Phil Donahue is one of the worst exploiters of degenerate filth in the past 30 years of television.
Anybody see the seditious bastard —and Majority Leader of the United States Senate— Harry Reid interrupt and then physically grab onto Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi like a common workplace molester? I was amazed, at first, to be seeing such a piece of video on Jon Stewart’s anti-Bush program, but then overjoyedwhelmed at how inappropriate it was.
More than inappropriate, it was deliberate and prolonged. I can’t understand what benefit Reid imagined might have been had in doing such a thing, but he must have because he did it.
Did that piece of reporter pool video make it on to any of the broadcast networks’ evening news programs? What a bizarre, Putin-like gesture of intimacy!
I’m enjoying this chat that Bill Moyers is having with Phil Donahue and Dan Rather and other patriotic types on my local PBS station. It’s positively lunatic.
Moyers puts it to Donahue, for instance, that Donahue’s MSNBC show was cancelled 42 days before the War for Iraq began. Coincidence, Mandrake? They think not.
Donahue’s show, as I recall, was as pansy-assed as this fucking crap that Moyers is allowed, by the grace of us taxpaying proles, to beam into my home. Maybe that’s why it got cancelled: because Americans don’t want to be told that they are wrong for believing in their country and its power to change humanity for the better. Most Americans don’t like empty cynicism and blinkered prejudice.
So, like the good consumers and customers that they are —and like I am— they simply walked away from Donahue’s commie-symp lib-shit and it vanished.
Big deal. Donahue’s one of the worst exploiters of degenerate filth in the past 30 years of television. Let him stew with Rather and the other discredited commie idiots in their conspiracist nonsense.
Pity the poor anti-war Leftist today.
He desperately craves the social relevance his mother and father may have known 40 years ago as members of a counter-cultural movement —and even has a war by which to define himself and his moment as morally superior— but there’s one thing he doesn’t have that makes his opposition safe, sanctimonious, and almost certainly ersatz.
A draft.
The hippies these days excoriate me because I have no skin in the game. Never mind they have none in it, either. Their opposition to the war is rooted in ignorance of what America does and always has done. We intervene. We export the most dangerous idea the world has ever conceived: democratic republicanism. I acknowledge this as our manifest destiny, but the anti-war Left? These people —whose very liberty to speak out against what they ridiculously believe to be a dictatorship run by international Jew finance is the proof against their own premise— are the same ones who are least prepared or interested to advocate the spread of that liberty elsewhere in the world.
Really. It’s liberty. We could not take it more for granted. But Iraqis read newspapers and make cell phone calls and buy music, fashion, and exotic foods. They are running businesses and making deals. They weren’t doing these things before. Not on this scale and with this latitude, anyway.
And the longer this new Iraq has to flower and to grow into something good and secularizing and moderating in the heart of a theocratic and ultra-violent Muslim world, the better off the whole world will be.
I don’t give a goddamn if you understand or approve of that or not. I’ll explain it to you, if you want, but I don’t give a goddamn what you think you know about our national purpose.
When have we not intervened and overthrown and battled against the enemies of human freedom? The United States is such an old hand at burning the very life out of the enemies of human freedom that I —the descendant of Confederate soldiers, sympathizers, and slaveholders— am here to tell you that it is what we do.
So love it. Because you know you can’t leave it.
If you’re done sniffing around Rosie O’Donnell’s opinion-hole, you may want to avail yourself of two other such dispenseries, Laurie David and Sheryl Crow. Their recent blog entry at the Huffington Post is, well, indispensible:
Last night Thelma and Louise drove the bus off the cliff or at least into the White House Correspondents Dinner. The “highlight” of the evening had to be when we were introduced to Karl Rove. How excited were we to have our first opportunity ever to talk directly to the Bush Administration about global warming.
Thelma and Louise? That’s certainly an interesting pair for self-identification. Suicidal criminals? Is that the theme here?
We asked Mr. Rove if he would consider taking a fresh look at the science of global warming. Much to our dismay, he immediately got combative. And it went downhill from there.
We reminded the senior White House advisor that the US leads the world in global warming pollution and we are doing the least about it.
Oh, for shit’s sake! You know who’s to blame for this? ABC News. When they had Leonardo DiCaprio interview Bill Clinton for Earth Day in 2000, every celebriturd who ever slouched toward Hollywood thought he was the next Katie Couric.
In his attempt to dismiss us, Mr. Rove turned to head toward his table, but as soon as he did so, Sheryl reached out to touch his arm. Karl swung around and spat, “Don’t touch me.” How hardened and removed from reality must a person be to refuse to be touched by Sheryl Crow? Unfazed, Sheryl abruptly responded, “You can’t speak to us like that, you work for us.” Karl then quipped, “I don’t work for you, I work for the American people.” To which Sheryl promptly reminded him, “We are the American people.”
What an appallingly narcissistic pair of idiots. Sheryl Crow can touch my monkey ’til the cows come home and pigs dare to fly, but she’s not Karl Rove’s study hall tutor. Who the fuck does she think she is? Rove’s obligated to stand there and subject himself to a lecture from a couple of ill-informed shoe-shoppers and face-painters? What?!
It’s a real sickness in the heart of American culture when the merest sort of celebrity is regarded as any sort of moral authority merely because of his or her celebrity. Look at someone, indeed, like Rosie O’Donnell: a mediocre comic and actress who’s enjoyed a second career as a professional lesbian/adoptive mother/dessert topping nutjob. It is difficult to bear the thought that her recent pronouncements on the physics of steel were heard and believed by possibly millions of people.
Celebrity doesn’t make you an authority on anything but narcissistic behavior. And, perhaps, the thing that made people like you in the first place.
Had this been an actual emergency…
Has television always propagandized us? Probably. It was selling us cigarettes and soda pop from the start. Making money for somebody.
But if we’ve been getting sold things, then we have also been getting sold opinions and perspectives and agendas. I don’t know when it started, but I know that I can end it for myself. I would like to believe I can, anyway. And I often succeed. Any time not spent in the thrall of the televised scavengers, pimps, and whores that constitute network news is time well spent.
Because when the news doesn’t go to sleep, it goes mad. When there is no end to the broadcast day and there is no cold and eerie recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the test pattern never does come, foolish things start to happen and reason breaks down.
Remember that most of what Americans know of the War for Iraq is told to them by the very same companies, networks, management, and journalists that are exploiting the recent massacre in the city of Blacksburg, Viriginia. Or exploiting the carnival of Anna Nicole Smith’s life and death. These people know neither proportion nor context. They’ll tell you about a bombing in Baghdad that killed five people, but won’t tell you about the five million people whose lives are slowly but surely improving now that they no longer struggle under a dictatorship.
I do not trust their judgement since their only motive is to make a profit.
Reject television news. Only read the news. And pick lots of different sources. Range around. Don’t be dictated to or manipulated by these people. They are the enemy of a thinking populace.
Mary at The Left Coaster links to this story in yesterday’s Washington Post about predators and the people they make mortgage loans to. The lead sob story (emphases mine):
Jeffrey Taylor and his wife bought their dream home in Purcellville for $538,000 last August. Now they have to sell it because they are getting divorced and neither one can afford the mortgage alone.
The most they could get for it was $430,000. After paying all the real estate commissions and taxes, they will still owe the bank $118,000.
“Five months later, I lose $100,000,” Taylor, a high school teacher, said. “I don’t think I can take $100,000 into the stock market and lose it faster.”
I realize that I am a lower middle-class kinda guy, so maybe I don’t understand mortgages that large. I mean, that’s just a lot of damned money.
But —wait a minute. This guy’s a high school teacher?
Even if he and his wife had not decided to divorce, they were not happy with their mortgage. They were not paying down the loan at all because it was an interest-only loan.
With an annual salary of $70,000, he does not have enough money for his share of the amount he and his wife will end up owing the bank. So he has asked the bank to forgive the debt, despite the tax implications. If the bank chooses to demand a check, he said he would take out another loan to cover it.
“This has destroyed me,” he said.
Is this guy serious? Even if his soon-to-be-former old lady was matching his salary, there’s no fucking way they should have ever come within a mile of signing on to a mortgage of that kind and size. Are they mad?
Of course, you know whose fault it is. It wouldn’t be the morons who just had to have their dream home; it’s got to be the lending institutions that forced them to put themselves into that kind of debt.
Outrageous.
No, no. Of course not.
Well, maybe.
Uh. Let me ask you this: will saturation coverage of a disgusting psychopath’s mediacentric suicide message and the massacre he perpetrated make me have less respect for commercial news in this country?
No. My respect for their profit-driven shitfest cannot be lower.
See how it works? I can’t even check my fucking e-mail account without running across Big Media’s sick-ass nonsense.
Here, MSN. Try this question: “Does this blog make my ass look fat?” Or, how about: “Are there any other ways to manipulate the American public for our personal gain?”
Immoral fucking people. That’s what we’re dealing with.
