Palin vs. Hillary: The Reckoning
One of the few times SNL gets seriously funny occurred this past weekend. Watch Tina Fey and Amy Poehler pretty much nail Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton, and tell me that Tina doesn’t look uncannily like Palin.
One of the few times SNL gets seriously funny occurred this past weekend. Watch Tina Fey and Amy Poehler pretty much nail Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton, and tell me that Tina doesn’t look uncannily like Palin.
Time to hark back to the days of yore, the 1960’s and 70’s, when celebrity vanity was in its infancy, an age of innocence and horror all wrapped up in a cloying “cannot…look…away…” vibe.
For your edification and amusement, our first sample. It was very nice of someone to find appropriate imagery to accompany what once never had video…
Consider that there is an entire album of this, and then crawl into a closet to die.
It seems that good pals were rivals as well, for Leonard’s friend Bill had to release an album too…gods help us all.
Again, audio with someone’s later creative efforts to dull the impact of that voice…
This means war, Shatner! Behold the power of Tolkien, wielded by Spock!
“Nice try, Leonard, but Taupin and I will destroy you and the go-go girls and hobbits!”
And once again, the devil Shatner proves his might, our eardrums and eyeballs bleeding in abject surrender. Nimoy slinks off into that closet to join us all in curling up into slowly dying balls of flesh.
I never realized that a long-dead dictator had such insight on today’s problems, until I saw his feelings regarding the end of the High-Definition War between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray (NSFW):
But now Der Führer has something to say on the subject of bloody Democratic fisticuffs. I have never seen the kind of insight into Hillary’s mind from anyone before, and it’s so very surprising. Watch and be amazed, but remember…
…both of these videos are oh-so-not-safe-for-work:
The ironies of using Hitler to make this particular commentary are too savory for me to explain, so I shall let you all enjoy its fruits on your own, but I don’t think anything else on the subject of Hillary’s candidacy need be said after this.
It seems I’m not the only one who saw Senator Harry Reid on the Daily Show this past week and was struck by how he was one of the worst interviews ever on the show.
At the very beginning of the interview, I could barely hear the man, and he seemed so very out of place on a show so rife with wit. And then he had the temerity to whine about how he was disappointed that the Democratic Majority in the Senate and House couldn’t get anything done.
Is he completely oblivious to the fact that it’s no one’s fault but the Democrats? Are he and his majority still stuck in the past where they were the whipping boys of Bush and his Republican sycophants? I would say so, as he sure looked and sounded completely whipped.
Stewart tried gamely to energize Reid, but was ultimately unable to give life to the corpse.
See for yourselves:
All right, it’s been a few weeks since I really had something to say, but this last weekend has stirred my muse once more.
By now most of my American readers will have heard the accusations leveled at Senator Obama for his alleged “elitism,” stemming from a comment he made about economics and the effects a long-term loss of opportunity have on those experiencing it:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Anyone not running for president and not living the high life can see immediately that Obama has touched on yet another truth: people with no money and no prospects get pissed off, and they need someone to get pissed off at. This isn’t exactly a revelation; we’ve all experienced this in ourselves to one degree or another.
And step back for a moment and think about this: can anyone imagine Senators Clinton and McCain having the cojones to confront an unpleasant truth like this and talk to their constituents about it like they have a modicum of intelligence?
I can’t, yet Obama did the same thing in his “More Perfect Union” speech on racial divisiveness in America (watch it if you haven’t, and see someone who hints at the courage of Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin), and in many other speeches and comments. As Bitter Jon says at his site Bitter Voters for Obama:
One of the most refreshing things about Barack Obama is his fearlessness when it comes to voicing a hard truth. It’s an ice cold glass of unsweetened lemonade: hard to swallow, but unmistakably pure. The truth is, if you aren’t bitter, you’re probably voting for someone who is going to give us more of what we’ve been getting all along. And all Clinton and McCain seem to be saying is “Let them eat Lemons.”
I may not agree with Obama on everything, but there is an edge to him, unpolished and forthright, not unprincipled and smoothed over like other politicians who appear subject to the whims of voters and media.
Also, let us not overlook the blatant hypocrisy of two very well-heeled multimillionaires accusing someone of Obama’s modest income and bootstrapped origins of being out of touch with mainstream, working class Americans.
I applaud him for this, and I can see that come November, this race will boil down to one thing: whether people are so fed up with the direction of this country that they finally take a true interest in debating actual, important issues that hearken back to the debates of the Revolution and our very reason for sundering our ties to Great Britain all those years ago, or whether they lack the energy to rise up and break the hold that television and sound-bite pundits have over them, sinking us further into the moral, social, and economic quagmire in which we now reside.
I hope it’s the former, and I mean for my words here to push for that, but my hope remains dim.
As an aside, please enjoy Obama himself pointing out McCain and especially Hillary’s peacock feathers in this highly entertaining speech he gave on Sunday in Steelton, PA. Especially amusing is the reference to Hillary in a duck blind.
As a long-time subscriber to John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Dickwad Theory…
…I foolishly allowed this blog to get off the ground with barely any limits on viewer comments other than moderating all comments before they’re allowed to go live on the site.
Not long after I started the site and allowed search engines to crawl it, I began to get spambots trying to fill the comments of one particular post with utter gibberish. Interestingly, the only post to get spammed was my article on Astana being denied a Tour de France bid. A few of those spambot comments had usernames with Cyrillic characters. With the mention of Astana and Cyrillic lettering, I would assume Russian spambots are cruising my site.
But, speculation aside, in order not to have to moderate multitudes of spam comments every day, I now require that anyone wishing to comment register on the site. I’m sorry to have to do this, but it will also prevent other abuses of comments, like the aforementioned Dickwads trolling my more inflammatory posts.
So, for those of you beyond my family and friends (should you actually exist) who read my little opinion and newsbites, I apologize for the minor inconvenience, but I don’t tolerate bad behavior on any sites or forums under my care.
Now back to your regularly scheduled rants…
Utter happiness, I’d say, if you love the varieties of sweet ambrosia that can be found in any pub in Belgium.
Jupiler is building a pavilion completely out of beer crates near the Atomium, in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Brussels World’s Fair, Expo ‘58.
There is no finer font of liquid happiness in the world than the land of my forebears. Drink it whenever and wherever you find it.
If this article on ridiculous school policies and their unintended consequences weren’t published by the New York Times, I’d swear it was from The Onion.
Does anyone else see the blatant irony and parallel to drug prohibition? Visions of Candy-Free Zones and Zero-Tolerance expulsions are running through my head right now at a fevered pace.
While I don’t know if the Ferraro fracas is so much to get worked up about, Olbermann takes the time to castigate Hillary for other failings as well.
At this point, with the Republicans trying to game the Democratic nomination, her growing unpopularity, and her stupidity at suicide-bombing her own party, it’s time for her to take the high road and step back.
Unlike Keith, I think it’s already too late for her, and now she’s just causing strife and attrition within the Democrats that will only lead to President McCain, a far worse prospect than President Obama.
Larry David hits the nail on the head in a column for The Huffington Post. He helped me figure out why it is I think Hillary Clinton is so very wrong for the presidency: she wants it far too much.
And then he proceeds to explain in two sentences the essential difference between her and Obama, and at the same time ask the question we should all be answering:
“How is it that she became the one who’s perceived as more equipped to answer that 3 a.m. call than the unflappable Obama? He, with the ice in his veins, who doesn’t panic when he’s losing or get too giddy when he’s winning, who’s as comfortable in his own skin as she’s uncomfortable in hers.”
He must see the same things in Hillary that I do, for though his comments made me laugh, they have such a truth about them that it makes me sad as well:
“There have been times in this campaign when she seemed so unhinged that I worried she’d actually kill herself if she lost. Every day, she reminds me more and more of Adele H., who also had an obsession that drove her insane.”
Read Larry’s comments. The article is very short, with the kind of brevity I strive for.
What was going through the minds of voters in Rhode Island, Texas, and Ohio, I don’t know, but they must not actually try to watch and listen to the candidates. Unless Rush Limbaugh’s exhortation to Republicans actually had an effect?