• Hey! We're on Twitter!

  • Buy The Book!

  •  

     

    Click to Buy The Mug

    Buy The Book

Archive for September 18th, 2008

Stupidity Won’t Take A Holiday

Posted by scott on September 18th, 2008

We’re been enjoying a brief and tardy summer-vacation-in-concentrate down at the beach this week; tardy because Mary missed her ordinary break due to switching tracks at the school where she teaches, and down at the shore because I have a perverse affinity for palm trees in the fog.

palms.jpg

But even though I’m not there to collect the LA Times from our doorstep each morning and peel open the Op-Ed section with equal parts dread and masochistic anticipation, Jonah Goldberg still somehow manages to exist, thus spoiling my theory that his periodic manifestations in the newspaper were due less to poor editorial judgment, and more to my habit of gorging on midnight snacks of leftover chicken vindaloo.  Alas, there he is, still splashing spoonfuls of runny talking points onto my screen, garnished with a dainty floret of ketchup like he was a Reagan-era Lunch Lady.

jonah12.jpg

After running a brilliant and historic primary battle to defeat Hillary Clinton, the Obama campaign is now in disarray. Why?

Because I hate him!  M…O…U…S…E…!

Perhaps it’s because Barack Obama has never run a competitive race against a Republican. After all, Obama won his U.S. Senate seat in Illinois by running against Alan Keyes, a fire-and-brimstone, right-wing black carpetbagger from Maryland (or perhaps Mars) who had no real ties to Illinois.

Wow, that’s pretty harsh, Jonah.  Can’t you say find anything nice to say about Keyes?

But all I will say is that I’ve met Alan Keyes, and whatever his other flaws, he’s so clean you could eat off him.

That makes it all better, thanks.  So, anyway, you’re peeved about some ad the Obama campaign is running?

It begins with the date “1982,” a picture of a disco ball and footage of McCain in clunky glasses from his first year in Washington. “Things have changed in the last 26 years, but McCain hasn’t,” explains the announcer. “He admits he still doesn’t know how to use a computer, can’t send an e-mail, still doesn’t understand the economy and favors $200 billion in new tax cuts for corporations, but almost nothing for the middle class.” All the while it shows ancient computers and a cordless phone that looks like a World War II-era walkie-talkie.

First, the ad is dishonest.

Except for its main point about McCain’s economic policies.  But that’s not going to stop Jonah, who has a demonstrated ability to take the defining political questions of the day and reduce them to a debate about Stuffing or Potatoes, while never quite committing himself to one starch or the other.  If dragged to the Shrine Auditorium and asked to denounce a neo-Nazi rally going on inside, Jonah would stare at his shoes for a moment or two before deciding that the real outrage was the buildings Moorish details, which might send the wrong message to passersby at a time when we’re at war with liberal Islamofascists.

McCain has been one of the Senate’s leading authorities on telecom and the Internet.

In that he’s heard it exists, it’s made of tubes, and Al Gore invented it, which is why McCain labored all night at his soldering bench to produce his prototype “Blackberry,” because that’s the way you get elected President in this country.

Being chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Weisberg explained, “forced him to learn about the Internet early on, and young Web entrepreneurs such as Jerry Yang and Jeff Bezos fascinate him.”

Although, when they appeared before his committee, McCain managed to resist staring at their tits and asses while compulsively twisting his wedding ring all through the hearing.

But as we all know, McCain’s every flaw can be excused by his brutal confinement in a North Vietnamese prison, leading one to conclude that prior to his capture, he must have been the most perfect human being since Jesus to walk this earth and get divorced and graduate at the bottom of his class.

One reason McCain is not versed in the mechanical details of sending e-mail and typing on a keyboard is that the North Vietnamese broke his fingers and shattered both of his arms. As Forbes, Slate and the Boston Globe reported in 2000, McCain’s injuries make using a keyboard painfully laborious. He mostly relies on his wife and staff to show him e-mails and websites, though he says he’s getting up to speed.

Because Cindy was beginning to balk at having to stop whatever she was doing to log John onto ArcticAsses.com, SexxySnowmachiners, and I Spy Cariboutoe

Besides, by this logic, Obama is even less qualified to be commander in chief because, unlike McCain, Obama has never fired a gun, flown a plane or led men during wartime.

Or crashed a single plane, let alone five, touched off a devastating blaze on the deck of an aircraft carrier, or got captured.  All essential qualifications for the modern commander-in-chief, if America hopes to keep its recent streak of botched, lingering, inconclusive wars going.

And if the Obama campaign did not intend to mock a disabled veteran, what does it say about his supposedly “cybersavvy” campaign that they don’t know how to conduct a five-minute Google search to find out these things?

“I’m not sure, but as soon as my intern gets back from lunch he’s gonna look it up.”

Obama doesn’t know how to get outside his echo chamber. He talks about being bipartisan to hard-core liberals who like the words

Because nobody is more pleased when you sell out a political party than its hardcore partisans.

He talks about new ideas, but he merely repackages old ones.

“And wait — listen — I’ve got a totally new, completely unexpected way to attack Obama for it.  We start out with a medium shot of McCain, looking over the camera and kind of squinting.  Then he says — you’re gonna love this — he says, in sort of this confused, quavery old man voice, he says, ‘Where’s the BEEF?’  Huh?  Huh?  Oh yeah!  Just call me the new Turdblossom, baby!”