Slamming Keith Olbermann

I’ve been wanting to do a thorough emasculation on MSNBC’s resident nutjob. Unfortunately, it’s been more difficult than you might expect. The man is beyond parody. Its seems that just about anything that would make for a good skewering has already been done by the smirking fool–and then bragged about.

Do Liberals Ever Listen to Themselves?

I’ve got to tell you I’m a little baffled. Hillary Clinton’s own party is trying to burn her to the ground for a statement concerning her campaign and the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. I despise the woman, and all of Joe Kennedy’s foul creche of demon spawn, but give me break—and her for that matter. At this point, I’m pretty sure the reason they’re ripping on Hillary is that she broke with the sacred texts of liberal protocol and made a coherent, cogent, rational, and worst of all—on topic comment.

Conversely, we have Barack Obama whose every third word is guaranteed to cause the electoral equivalent of the China Syndrome. But yet it doesn’t. Obama has committed scads of verbal gaffes, any one of which should have been sufficient to send him to the card table with the little kids while the grownups continued the campaign. But yet they don’t.

In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’ve been waiting in vain for 57-state-gate to take its toll. It’s bad enough when Lefties have inane beliefs that could negatively impact the country; not believing the Constitution means what it explicitly says comes immediately to mind. But when the presumptive nominee for the country’s largest political party doesn’t know the difference between states, territories, and possessions, or how many of them there are, then something something is wrong in the state of Denmark (rumored to be an island in Lake Superior).

Poor George Allen, one of the most promising early candidates for the Republican nomination had his campaign crumple faster than the French army after uttering a word made up on-the-spot for comedic effect. If you’ll recall, Allen humorously dubbed a spy from a rival campaign “Macaca”, presumably to let both the spy and his supporters know that knew he was there. The non-event immediately became the event of the hour, day, week, month, and year. Strangely, the story vanished overnight after this strong contender was eliminated as a threat to the Liberal Democrat Politburo. We all know the controversy would still be raging if Allen had hung in there until now.

If the opposition and its lap dogs in the media are going to have a double standard, is it too much to ask that you at least try to be sneaky about it?

Left-Wing Wasteland

Because it’s time for another song parody. I would actually record these but the only musicians I’m friends with are Left-wingers.

sung to the tune of Baba O’Reilly

Left-Wing Wasteland

Out here on the streets
After Left-wing conceits
We push our cars to keep them moving
But we’ve got no rights
Humanity’s a blight
If we’re gone, the Earth’s improving

Don’t whine
Don’t waste your time
Finally, Left-wing wasteland

Daughter, take my hand
Let’s run while we can
Don’t look behind
It’s just Atlas Shrugging
Now the Ummah is here
Children tremble in fear
The Chosen Ones are raging
Our girls’ hopes are ending

Left-wing wasteland
It’s just a Left-wing wasteland
A Left-wing wasteland

Ted Kennedy Near Miss

For a while this morning, it looked as if Ted Kennedy had stroked out. As was to be expected, laudatory news coverage was broadcast everywhere, even on Fox News, and as fawning as the coverage on Fox was I shudder to think how obsequious and drooling the Democratic Party lap dog networks were.

As it turns out, the strokes were actually seizures and it appears the Senator will recover fully. As a human being, I am pleased. As an American I’m a little disappointed. Anything that brings an end to Ted Kennedy’s political career is a good thing for America. Few people alive today have done more to destroy this country than Massachusetts’ favorite imbiber. Just about any anti-American would have been pleased to call the Senator’s 1965 Immigration Bill punch in Uncle Sam’s throat the capstone of his career. Teddy, of course, was just getting warmed up.

I’m a passionately loyal American, but even I get exasperated at the obtuseness of my fellow citizens at times. After some 50+ years of Kennedy family antics and escapades, a significant portion of my countrymen and women still consider the Kennedy clan to be the American equivalent of royalty. The sad truth is that as long as Joe Kennedy’s horde of descendants stalk the Earth, no freedom that Americans enjoy is safe.

John McCain and Global Warming

I just watched the focus group testing of John McCain’s new global warming ad. In it he assures somebody, most likely not his own team, that he believes in global warming.

I’ll take a different tact on this just for a change. Believing in climate change is like believing in sunrises and sunsets. They all happen, have happened, and will continue to happen. It’s not all that daring just because the time frame is different. As I’ve posted elsewhere, even if true, the effects of global warming will be the slowest moving catastrophe in recent history. In one of the breathlessly panicked forecasts I’ve read we’re told that sea level will soon rise by a fraction of an inch a year. This would allow more than enough time for a responsible government led by grownups (read that ‘not liberals’) to respond. The people could evacuate entirely, move to a higher elevation, or (far more likely) postpone the inevitable by a massive spending project on a system of dikes and levees.

Even if none of this works and coastal cities are destroyed, don’t cry! Celebrate! You’re environmentalists for Gaia’s sake! You hate cities anyway. This also has the additional benefit of making the land you bought out in the boondocks, to get away from the human blight, into highly desirable beach property. You can sell it on the sly, and become filthy rich, all while hypocritically condemning the capitalist system. You know! Just like all of those people you slavishly vote for.

More seriously, few people I know seriously deny climate change. The climate has always changed, and will always continue to do so. The question is whether humans caused it. The, answer of course not. It’s an ongoing process. Well then, do humans make it worse? Probably, but only to an insignificant level. About the same way that coupling one extra boxcar to a 100-car train makes the wreck worse if it jumps the tracks. In other words, it only matters if you addicted to shame.

I think maybe Obama and McCain should share a campaign slogan this cycle: We’re screwed in ‘08.

How To Impersonate a Liberal

I was out running some errands earlier today and listening to Michael Medved while I did it. Now, Michael is far from my favorite Conservative, but not my least favorite either. I didn’t hear what set them off, but I listened to a series of irate liberals call in and berate him. One went so far as to call him stupid. Ironically, in each case the caller had misunderstood Medved’s point and were railing against, not what he said, but rather what they thought he had said. Even worse, even if he had said those things, their refutations consisted mostly of ad hominem attacks and overwrought comparison of apples to oranges. To his credit, Medved answered their rants as if they were rational human beings.

Still, it all reminded me of the old joke from way back when:

Q: How do you impersonate a Liberal?

A: Spend a lot of time talking about complicated world issues that you don’t understand.

I’ve Returned

I’ll provide a brief explanation of my absence for my long-distance friends. The financial disaster to which I referred in the previous post was a good old-fashioned case of getting fired. It came as a big surprise because I was the only one following state and federal law where I was working. When I became frustrated enough to complain to the boss, I was told I was just jealous and the most egregious violator was held up to me as an example to emulate. Further complaints only got me tagged as racist in addition to “just jealous”. Finally, the day came when our new supervisor sidles up to me and tells me, with a literal wink, “You don’t have to be good, Don. You just have to look good.” I told him that, since it was a matter of public safety, I wasn’t going to cut corners or falsify documents and if things didn’t change I would report him to the authorities. In my good-natured naivety, I actually felt bad about having to get so tough with him. So, to no one’s surprise but my own, when I arrived at work the next day I was beset by management, whisked into the office, and immediately fired for “threatening to kill everyone the previous day.” I was relieved of my keys and shown the door. Truly, no good deed ever goes unpunished.

As you might expect this introduced an additional element of stress into my marriage. When we married, we were both relatively low-paid educators with similar political and social beliefs. Among those beliefs was that the necessity of a voucher system if the public education system was going to even approach functionality. As luck would have it, she took a “desperation” job with every intention of leaving the next year. It is a charter school dedicated to giving kids a “second chance”. As with every left-wing institution, the slogan is deceptive. I believe in second chances. God knows I’ve needed a few. However, to even get sent to this institution of “learning” a kid is usually on something like his 37th chance, and should have long since been in jail. My wife was of considerably higher quality than what they usually got and she skyrocketed through the ranks-and pay scale. Soon she was earning four times my income. This was when she “started growing balls” as my brother would say. The 80-100 hour workweeks were only the beginning. My lovely started gaining weight-a lot of it. By the end she tipped the scales at about 380 pounds. Even as bad as this all was, the worst part was what her constant immersion in the leftist world was doing to her. At one point she informed me that she was no longer a Republican, she was a Christian Socialist. Why, you might ask? It’s easy. She informed me that if one reads the Bible, and actually understands it, you’ll be forced to admit that Christianity IS Socialism, and that Socialism simply IS Christianity put into practice.

I decided that, since what is good for the goose is good for the gander, I would make some unilateral changes of my own. I would look for a new job, but I would be more selective and not take the first thing that came along and I would use the resultant slack time to work on my frequently neglected novel. This introduced two new forms of tension: First, my wife bitterly resented the loss of income, even though towards the end my job provided less than 20% of the family budget; Second, she feared embarrassment should my book ever be published. All the more ironic since this particular book was her idea. You see, I had been writing another book when we met. During that time, for some reason that I have long since forgotten, the works of a certain obscure author came up. I was familiar with him and my wife expressed curiosity so we obtained some of his books. She only read a few of them because she found them to be poorly written (a frequent complaint) but she did find the concepts and themes presented to be “provocative” and “stimulating”. Some time later, she requested that I temporarily abandon the book I was writing and start a new book based on similarly provocative and stimulating themes, but do a better job with the basics. Eager to please her, I agreed. Now comes the stressor. After over 3 years of writing and rewriting, researching material, extensive note-taking, a glossary, multiple appendices, and writing numerous back-stories, she announces that she wants me to abandon the project. Why? Because being associated with the story, even obliquely as the wife of the author, would be professionally embarrassing and could possibly harm her career. Naturally, I told her that after 500 pages of manuscript and nearly as many of ancillary material the answer wasn’t just “no”, It was “Hell, no!”

There is more. There always is. No doubt I could have handled things better, but then I could have done much worse. Regardless, things went along like that for awhile, then my sweetie filed for divorce. She could have handled that a little better, and she couldn’t have picked worse timing. I won’t lie, it hurt. It hurt a lot. Still, the 380-pound thing took a lot of the sting out of it.

I took the opportunity to take stock of my life, because that’s what one does at such times. For the first time in 20+ years, I had nothing to tie me to the place I was in. I decided that was as good a time as any to go back to my hometown to make a fresh start. I had left because I hated small town life, and I still do. I just have come to hate city life even more. Besides, my son and grandchildren are here and I felt an impulse to be a more involved granddad. So I moved home. It was a good decision, but I did overestimate the demand for middle-aged, overeducated white guys. I’ve been living “pillar to post” as they say for several months, but I’ve finally bagged a job. I’m looking forward to resuming blogging without having to pull punches for the sake of my ex.

Have a good one, folks.