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Archive for July 9th, 2008

First Annual Self-Defeating Metaphor Contest

Posted by scott on July 9th, 2008

Whiskey Fire is displeased by the insipid mulligan stew they’ve been serving up over at Townhall, and is inclined to send it back to the kitchen:

Nothing illustrates the extent to which “conservatives” have so much absolute nothing going on nowadays is how hard it’s gotten to make fun of them.

Even Townhall is just plain boring nowadays. I mean, here’s Kathleen “I Like Big Fuzzy Balls” Parker talking about… Wimbledon (sigh), straining manfully (or the lexical equivalent) to infuse the proceedings with sufficient priapism

But Kathleen manages to salvage an otherwise disastrous presentation when she rolls out the dessert cart:

Though you have to admire the imagery here:

“Throughout, both men were mesmerizingly fierce and yet imperturbably calm. At crucial points they were like gladiators playing chess.”

Kind of hard to envision anything more disappointing than that, isn’t it?  Here you show up at Circus Maximus in your best toga, all ready to watch two beefy, oiled up titans slowly hack each other to death, and instead you get a couple of contemplative, egghead Hercules sitting in the middle of the Coliseum, chins resting on their knuckles like Rodin’s The Thinker, and staring silently at a chessboard for minutes at a time before finally deigning to shift a pawn.

Now maybe it was a lucky accident, maybe it was pure serendipity, but somehow Kathleen managed to construct a simile which not only declined to convey her meaning, it actually rose up and bludgeoned the rest of her sentence to death with a balpeen hammer, then dragged it down to the basement and buried it under that freezer full of trout.
I don’t know about you, but I find that inspiring.  So in the spirit of the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest, I’d like to challenge you, the reader, to craft the most heat-efficient, self-immolating metaphor, simile, comparison, conceit, synecdoche, allegory, or trope you can.  Because America needs your worst ideas now more than ever.  Look around you; we are currently at the mercy of Townhall, WorldNetDaily, RenewAmerica, and other members of the Wingnut Cartel to supply us with cheap laughs and bargain schadenfreude, and recent events have shown the importance of weaning ourselves from our addiction to foreign (and failed) figures of speech.  Write your congressman a really poorly worded letter insisting that we must drill down into our lizard brains now if we ever hope to achieve independence in lamely executed literary devices.

Join us, won’t you?  Thank you.

Jonah Goldberg Asks: Dishonest Or Stupid?

Posted by scott on July 9th, 2008

…but the mirror remains tactfully silent.  Nevertheless, Jonah goes on to bemoan the kaleidoscopic inconsistencies in Obama’s remarks about polyglot education.

“Now, I agree that immigrants should learn English. I agree with that. But understand this. Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English — they’ll learn English — you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about, how can your child become bilingual? We should have every child speaking more than one language.”

[I]t seems to me the central point is that this is either staggeringly dishonest or stupendously dumb.

As your high school composition teacher advised you, Jonah, “write what you know.”

Obama has a great gift at sounding insightful when he insipidly changes the subject to something completely different and more helpful to his cause.

“I just wish I knew how he did it!”

But, if Obama honestly thinks the argument against bilingualism has anything to do with the importance of teaching kids a second language, he really has no idea whatsoever what the argument is about.

So, changing the subject is evil and stupid?  Got it.

After all he was able to put a black religious demagogue into his magic hat and with showy rhetorical prestidigitation pull back his own racist grandmother.

Which only strengthens Jonah’s central point.
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You Got Your Jesus In My Hitler!

Posted by scott on July 9th, 2008

Over at Roy’s place, he notes that Victor Davis “We Who Are About To Watch You Die From A Comfortable Distance Salute You!” Hanson implies that the change of venue for the Democratic nominee’s acceptance speech betrays a messiah complex (although he’s slightly more subtle about it than Jonah Goldberg, whose habit of modifying every singe mention of Obamas with the words “messiah,” or “messianic” is fast becoming a tic)…

Then I noticed he has plans to move his speechmaking at the convention to a large outdoor arena, to allow the ‘people’ the right to hear him en masse. Now he negotiates to address Berliners in Kennedy/Reagan style (but weren’t they already presidents?) in front of the Brandenburg Gate? Next? No doubt the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

Roy concludes:  “At National Review, at the moment, you can see Obama compared to both Hitler and Jesus. Surely this must be some kind of first.”

Which got me reminiscing in the comments about that old Saturday Night Live bit, “What if Superman had landed in Germany as a baby?”  Or, to roll the NRO way, “What if Jesus hadn’t been born in Bethlehem, but in Berchtesgaden?”

“Ah, obergruppenfuehrer Christ, I see you’ve solved the problem of our shortage of Hutzelbrot and herring for the Nuremberg Rally! Excellent work, as always. Herr Speer says you’re quite the miracle worker…”

Conrad’s “The Groin of Darkness”

Posted by scott on July 9th, 2008

Over at No Quarter, the inhabitants linger on the veranda as the sun slides behind the serried rows of rubber trees, sipping their gin and quinine water and shifting restlessly in the creaking wicker as a taunt, dusky-fleshed native man saunters insolently by.  “If only,” they think, “for just one mad, magical night of feral abandon, he could be…White Like Us!

I have been following the furor over Barack’s reticence to provide a bona fide copy of his birth certificate with some interest.  I have a different take.  I think the genuine certificate shows his race as “White.”

Let’s face it, Obama is not some kid from the hood. He was raised as a privileged guy by white grandparents (from Kansas no less)

Nothing says The Social Register like the ability to trace one’s pedigree back to Wichita.

He was an undercover white guy with beautiful chocolate skin, and no one realized who he really was.

Uh, yeah.  I think this is the part where you’re supposed to break into a chorus of “I Don’t Know How to Love Him.”

At Columbia, he fell under the tutelage of liberal white mentors and he accepted their value system while learning how to use his outward African appearance against both blacks and whites.

ultimate_nick_fury.jpg

NICK FURY:  Mr. Obama, I want to talk to you about the Avengers Initiative!

OBAMA:  But…I have no super powers.

NICK FURY:  On the contrary, Mr. Obama.  Your skin — as smooth as velvet, as deep and rich as milk chocolate — is the deadliest weapon known to man!

Obama could have gone any place after Harvard Law, but he chose to go back to Chicago, where concentrations of highly politicized, working class blacks awaited a charismatic leader. … Kind of like an old style Soviet illegal (e.g., someone who hid their past and made people believe they were something else) building his cover before conducting operational activity. He marries a well-educated radical black lady who comes to realize who he really is, a white boy “reverse passing” as black. But she also comes to realize the potential for power in this.

In Wright’s church, Obama…was looking around and figuring out how to use his blackness to fool the suckers around him…Perhaps he began to identify with them a bit, but he never lost sight of his superiority over them and how this allowed him to unwittingly manipulate them. Just like an old style Soviet “illegal.”

My God, man!  Do you realize what you’re saying…?!  Barack Obama has stolen his entire presidential campaign from the 1977 Charles Bronson movie Telefon!

Now, between black pride and white guilt…

…lies Obsession?

…he’s faked them, and us, out. He can even allow himself the luxury of arrogance in claiming that he can redraw the political map because all blacks will vote for him.

Far fetched? Perhaps, but this explanation makes a bit of sense when you add it all up. Why is he hiding his grandmother? Why does he totally disown his mother and grandparents and write a book about his father, a bigamist who deserted him as an infant, as an inspiration for his life? And now, with the Presidency in his grasp, he resurrects his Kansas grandparents, his single white mother, and says nothing about his absentee, polygamist Kenyan father. Can you say, “bamboozle?”

Can you say, “Sir, this is Blockbuster.  Are you aware that your copies of The Manchurian Candidate and Mandingo are eight weeks overdue?”

Well, in a situation like this, there’s only one person to call:

h/t Memeorandum