Category Archives: Social Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

The President Said What, Now?

6 Comments

Thoughts from Lileks on the KeisterKicker-in-Chief:

“He didn’t mean donkey,” she said, this being the only possible explanation. I shook my head. It will now be difficult to tell her not to use that word; it will now be a matter of time before my wife says, “Well, your daughter was sounding presidential today,” and it won’t be a reference to mankind’s universal aspirations. Unless you include the desire to kick BP’s tuckus, which seems fairly widespread.

I don’t know if I’ve written this, but I’ve certainly thought it. When I heard the president, my first response was, “Who is he kidding?” My second one was, “Gee, and here I thought that the purpose of getting people together to assay the facts was to determine what effective action to take. How Chicago of him to think that the only effective action is to take one’s boot off the throat of the country long enough to bury it in the appropriate fundament.”

And I, for one, haven’t been complaining about the president not emoting enough. I’ve never been interested in a president that “felt my pain.” All I’ve ever wanted is one that isn’t the cause of it.

No, my complaint is that he’s incompetent. So the all the talk about the asskickery isn’t very impressive to me. Usually, I’m glad that he’s incompetent, because most of the things he wants to do are awful, and I want them to fail at them, but this is a case where I wish that he could actually get it right.

[Update a while later]

Rich Lowry agrees with me: Mr. President, please don’t feel our pain.”

Was it Bill Clinton who started this infantilization of the American people?

[Update a few minutes later]

Jonah Goldberg isn’t impressed, either:

It’s like a Tonight Show joke.

Leno: “The president is so dorky . . . ”

Audience: “How dorky is he?”

“He’s so dorky, when he gets angry he convenes a panel of experts to tell him whose ass to kick.”

And speaking of The Tonight Show, let me reassure both editors and readers of family newspapers everywhere about my use of the word “ass.” Historian Steven Hayward reminds me that in 1979, Jimmy Carter responded to Ted Kennedy’s primary challenge by declaring he would “whip his ass.” It was one of those moments of presidential lameness that conjures the same bile of pity, schadenfreude, and heebie-jeebies one feels upon seeing a middle-aged balding dude with a long gray ponytail dancing at a rave.

As John Stewart said, the president is going to have to kick himself. In fact, if he had sufficient self awareness, he’d know that there are many reasons to do so.

[Update a couple minutes later]

The Democrats can’t put the blame genie back in the bottle. This is the kind of situation for which the Bard came up with the expression, “hoist onwith his own petard.”

[Update a while later]

Three reasons that the president should be kicking himself.

Political Commentary, Popular Culture, Social Commentary

Vampires

27 Comments

We stopped clicking for a few minutes and found a show that looked interesting, and watched it for a few minutes. Then we discovered it was about vampires.

Click.

What is it with modern culture (or even popular culture going back decades, or centuries) that is so fascinated by immortal blood suckers? I know there are lots of pseudopsychological explanations for it, but they just leave me cold. I have zero interest.

Kind of like Barack Obama, now that I think about it. And I wouldn’t deny a relationship.

I mean, parasites are parasites…

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

It’s The Thirties Again

4 Comments

Time to blame the Jews. You know the old saying that beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes right to the bone? Whoever came up with that had Helen Thomas in mind. The doddering moron should have been put to pasture years ago.

[Update a while later]

A story of two Rachels:

Rachel Thaler was a British subject. Yet not a single British journalist has ever mentioned her, profiled her, interviewed her parents or other British relatives, or published her diary in a Fleet Street newspaper – except for a single solitary mention by the great (Jewish) comedienne Maureen Lipman noting that nobody ever mentioned her, or the other victims of Palestinian terrorism.

Ah, but Israel is an “apartheid state”, and the Palestinians are the Europeans’ unending adopt-a-Third-World-pet project. I write in the new National Review (on sale now-ish) that, if old-school judenhass was a by-product of more or less traditional racism and conventional nationalism, the new judenhass advances under the cover of “anti-racism” and “multiculturalism”. The oldest hatred didn’t get that way without the ability to adapt.

What’s really frightening is how many useful Jewish idiots they have.

[Update a few minutes later]

So, should the Jews apologize to Turkey, or go back to Germany and Poland?

[Early afternoon update]

The most ancient virus to infect the soul:

Flare-ups of the virus have been common across Europe throughout the last 2 millennia, but an overwhelming series of eruptions in Europe from England through the lands controlled by the USSR, required a global intervention before the conflagration was deemed to be put out. This, of course was an illusion, since like the root burns engendered by forest fires, it only smoldered underground in the human and social hosts for decades before erupting once again in the vast Petri dish of the Middle East.

With the advent of the “Palestinian cause” becoming chic in Western, European, and Liberal circles — driven at first by Socialist Progressive romanticism in the late 1960s and early 1970s — being infected by virus has once more become acceptable to exhibit socially in certain ways. Indeed, in many circles and societies, having the virus has lately become a highly prized fashion accessory to popular academic, media, and state ideologies. It is now actually a badge of pride in many Western circles to appear at various events wearing gold-plated buboes inset with multi-faceted Kaposi’s sarcoma that contain the virus at their core. Many now believe this intellectual adornment to actually be beautiful.

In a recent mutation, the virus has shown that it can leap the blood/brain barrier and actually infect Jews — if they feel safe within their “advanced” society. The current term for this mutation is “Juicebox Mafia” in which self-styled “intellectuals” of Jewish lineage actually feel it is “intelligent” to call for a world in which it is easier for Arabs and other Islamic groups to kill Jews wholesale. This sort of strange host to the virus is replacing the previous host termed “the self-hating Jew.” The reason for the rise of the Juicebox Mafia is unclear, but it may well have to do with desires for celebrity and paychecks that exceed the desire to live.

Or maybe “intellectuals” aren’t very smart.

Media Criticism, Science And Society, Social Commentary

Going Paleo

11 Comments

Here’s an article on a retro diet.

My problem with this isn’t the diet per se (though I do like me them carbs) as the need for exercise. I read somewhere recently that there were huge health benefits to walking five miles a day. I can believe it, but who has the time? The only way I can imagine doing that is if I raised my desk and worked from a treadmill instead of a chair.

The thing that I find most irritating about the criticism (as well as in the health-care debate) is the declaration of life expectancy as a useful parameter. I don’t know what the life expectancy of paleolithic people was, but I’ll bet that diet was not a big factor in determining it. It’s important to understand that average life expectancy isn’t the age at which most people die. If it really was thirty, it was likely due to a) high infant mortality and b) a very violent lifestyle, in which the men were likely to be killed either hunting or fighting other humans, at a fairly young age. I suspect that if you manage to become an “elder” (i.e., someone in your thirties) you’d live a long time.