Old White Guys, Episode 12,339.
On “Fox News Sunday” Chris Wallace hung out with George H.W. Bush, pitching pennies, whittlin’, and waxing nostalgic about the Other Iraq War.
You know, the one that Lil’ George Did Not Fuck Up Beyond All Hope Of Redemption.
Wallace: Why public service?
Poppy: My daddy. And mom beat us. We wuz lucky. Then I went to boarding school, and they beat us some more. Now I jump out of planes and have spent the last seven years involuntarily memorizing scenes from
"Death Of a Salesman" for some reason.
Poppy: We didn’t have any of these Joe Kennedy seminars or sessions with our kids.
Poppy: Watching my boys fuck up everything they touch makes me so very, very proud.
Poppy: We don’t think of ourselves as a dynasty. We don’t like the word “legacy”. “Feudalism”, “Satrap” and “Empire”, however, have nice, mouth-feels to them.
Poppy: I worry about dastardly attacks from terrorists, but not so much a superpower thing.
Wallace: Will Hillary win?
Poppy: I thought a few weeks ago she was a “Gimmie” as we say in golf. Not gonna vote for her, though. Nah Gah Dah.
Poppy: I get so upset about all those people who say bad things about George. I admire him for his position and guts.
Poppy: Tide’s going out and it’s his fault! Fires and stuff and it’s his fault.
Poppy: So what if the Ipsos (?) poll has me (him) 4 points down, George has guts.
So what if he’s sunk so low that for the last year he could walk clean under Nixon’s Watergate poll numbers carrying that fat-assed Cheney on his shoulders?
So what if historians are seriously wondering if his will go down as the worst Presidency in American History?
So what if he has almost single-handedly put the Bush Family Name on a par with the families of G. Syphilitic Badtouch, Gouty O’Goatblower and Senator Durdee Sanchez?
So what if he's pissed all over our…uh…sorry. What was the question again?
Poppy: I do have a good friendship with Bill Clinton. Even enjoyed playing golf with him. There is a friendship there.
Poppy: Message to old people: "You don’t have to sit there drooling in the corner!"
Poppy: The Cold War went well. Of course, actually planning for the aftermath would have probably been a good idea.
And then we get misty for that rilly, rilly excellent Other Gulf War.
January 16th, 1991: Opening salvo.
Eleven seconds later: War over.
Poppy: But we had an objective – getting Iraq out of Kuwait, not killing Saddam Hussein or conquering Baghdad -- and a Coalition based on that objective. Had we not done that, the Coalition would have fallen apart in a minute.
He doesn’t actually turn to the camera and say “Yes, I’m talking about you dickhead”.
He doesn’t really have to.
On “Face the Nation”
Bob Schieffer worked the second tier with Senator Joe “Joe” Biden.
I feel sorry for Schieffer; the Gods of Network Counterprogramming seem hell-bent on making sure that his relatively good, workmanlike interludes get buried by inferior products with Zoomier!Graffix!And!Stuff!
His style is reasonably engaging and thoughtful, as opposed to, say, Russert, who Atriot Neponset describes with micrometric precision as having a
“….style of journalism which consists of dropping out of a tree onto someone with a ten year old quote…”.
And speaking of Punkin' Haid...
On “Meet the Press”
It was really kind of sad to see Russert repeatedly dipping his thumb into the NBC spittoon and daubing tobacco juice in his eyes
just so he could stay awake during Fred Thompson's Sophomoric Soporific Soliloquy.
Moving with all the rhetorical grace of a skateboarding manatee on a Ketamine bender between explaining why getting Osama bin Laden is not very important because it is mere symbolism...and why the mere symbolism of leaving Eye-rak is so important that it would make it an Epic!Disaster!, Fred poured out three fangers of pure, cold-molasses anticharisma over Russert’s desk, making this non-reporter wonder aloud:
“WTF is this human Sleeping Draught doing in this race?”
I blame Reagan.
Twenty years ago, Reagan, Falwell, Limbaugh, Schlafly and the rest of the Bigot Brigade built a bonfire out of our country’s core values under an army of Angry White Mouthbreathers and got them all hot-in-the-ass cranky about non-existent welfare queens, dirty hippies and (winky-winky) “State’s Rights”.
And in an undulating, berserker rage, the Angry White Mouthbreathers have been reliably cooking off like a cache of old Confederate artillery shells ever since. Blasting huge, ragged holes in the serried ranks of modern American politics through which even more radical wingnut sappers like Gingrich, DeLay, Coulter and Malkin could slip and lay further waste to the very idea that comity and cooperation were -- or even should be -- possible.
New whine in old scams.
But that was long ago, and the piss and vinegar of the bilious Reagan-era culture warrior has collapsed into the uncontrollable moral flatulence and doddering mental incontinence of Republicans in the Age of Dubya.
Imagine the size of the shit-biscuit these people are having to choke down every single day.
I mean, to have finally won it all. To have finally, actually achieved under Dubya their dearest Christopathic wet-dream of One Party rule. Of absolute control over every branch of government under a Rapture-friendly, war-mongering, Constitution-razing Conservative man-child.
And then imagine frittering it all away simply because the Right has no power to outrun its own most primal instinct: their desperate, bone-deep need to always see themselves as eternal victims.
They sat atop the pinnacle of power, uncontested, and simply could not resist their basic and fatal need to bellyache without pause or reason about how terribly unfair the world is to them.
How put-upon and aggrieved and horribly oppressed they are, apparently because they’re not allowed to shoot Negroes and queers and uppity women from the comfort of their Barca-Loungers as it was in the Glorious Days of Olde.
Or something.
Because no matter how full their plates or long their reach, in the end they literally have no fucking idea how to govern, mediate, or do anything but gripe and grind like the losers they will always be. And now in the twilight of their failing revolution, they have no reflex left but to bark out feeble, flabby Doublewide Rebel Yelps at whoever their teevee and radio machines tell them is the scapegoat today.
This is their Hell; to re-fight and re-lose some faded, sixth-generation photocopy version of the Civil War over and over and over and over and over again.
Their Hell, and ours.
And it is in Fred Thompson that this shambling used-up army of shuffling, snuffling dupes who can’t even be troubled to remember what it was they’re mad about today, and need the Big Print cue cards to tell them who they’re supposed to hate for it most see themselves.
Themselves...plus one hot trophy wife and a sweet job on th' teevee.
Because no one running for President reflects the depleted, lazy, “Iff’n ah hit’s mah marks and sez mah lines kin ah be Prez..zzz…Zzzzzz” sense of slothy, mossy, aging-wingnut-entitlement better than
Old Uncle Joe.
On “This Week”
George Stephanopoulos first talked to Martha Raddatz via vidphone from Pakistan.
Raddatz : Quiet here, but no one knows how long this’ll go on.
Stephanopoulos: The Bushies have bet the farm on the crazy motherfucker in charge in Pakistan haven’t they?
Raddatz: Yeah, and now they get to tell us to screw off.
Here General Pervez Musharraf explains to Dubya
Raddatz: And there it is. An actual Islamofascist state – whatever the fuck that is -- armed with nukes, under the thumb of a military dictatorship, and protecting the man who orchestrated the attacks of 9/11. And in response Commander Bring 'Em On Codpiece is sending Musharraf aid and threatening to invade the wrong country. Again.
After Raddatz, Stephanopoulos tries to take little bites out of John Edwards’ ankles.
This from Atriot Culture of TrÜth, sums it all up so prettily:
Steph: you have no money
Edwards: when i'm the nominee i will have beaten celebrities Obama and Hillary and then I will beat the rich dude Romney
Steph: you remind me of karl rove why can't we unite American like we did when we all loved Rudy Guiliani
Edwards: I’m trying to unite America behind me!
Steph: that seems so egotistical -- why can't you be a good democrat and be submissive and concede the election now
Edwards: I’m sure the media would love that but I intend of seizing the government back from rich elitists
Shorter "This Week"
Stephanopoulos Why do you want to rile up the base, when Murrica wants to be united?
Edwards: Are you high on something right now? Do I need to call someone?
On ”The Chris Matthews Show”
What can one say except if some breakthrough olfactory technology ever perfects a hybridized cologne that is both Hillary-worshiping and Embarrassingly-Mancrushy :
A. They will call it “Aqua Vulva”.
B. Chris Matthews will die like Joe Gillis, face-down in swimming pool full of the stuff.
C. Unlike Gillis, Matthews will die happily, valiantly fighting off his rescuers.
9 comments:
"Because no matter how full their plates or long their reach, in the end they literally have no fucking idea how to govern, mediate, or do anything but gripe and grind like the losers they will always be. And now in the twilight of their failing revolution, they have no reflex left but to bark out feeble, flabby Doublewide Rebel Yelps at whoever their teevee and radio machines tell them is the scapegoat today."
True, dat!
Drifty,
Sometimes one comes across something akin to the most perfect sentence ever written. Willie Morris was very good at it. Eudora Welty's "One Writer's Beginings" may be an almost perfect example of it. In Memphis, at the Commercial Appeal, a music writer named Bill Ellis, used to sometimes hit it. He once wrote about a local musician's murder, and his music as ( this is not an exact quote) something akin to " His music was like listening to a fireworks parade." The sentence itself didn't make much sense, until it was taken in it's entirety to the subject, and then it was just lyrical. I'm not going to pick and choose my favorite sentences you type, but dammitall man, you've got it in spades.
And I'm not really talking about this particular posting, though it does have some great sentences.
And sir, I was honored to vote for you inthe Weblogs contest.
Dee
I too was honored to cast my votes fer you Drifty.
Most excellent post! :-)
This is a great post. True, and funny. At least twice I spewed my morning beer while reading it! Great work, driftglass.
Gosh.
I wanted to praise "Moving with all the rhetorical grace of a skateboarding manatee on a Ketamine bender" and then I hit "And in an undulating, berserker rage, the Angry White Mouthbreathers have been reliably cooking off like a cache of old Confederate artillery shells ever since." but when I got to "New whine in old scams" I just surrendered to the beauty of your rant and tears came to my eyes.
And your rants are so heartfelt and well wrought.
Just as a bonus, I will now be seeing Punkinhaid with THOSE EYES.
Not that anything would be an improvement. Except absence.
This was a tough post for me to get through. It's damn difficult to look stuff up in the dictionary when cracking up like this. "Aqua Vulva"...you're killin me!!
Petticoat Junction will never be the same for me....
Your pic of Russert finally hit home: it's Cartman. And he doesn't care about ratings, he just wants someone to suck his balls.
Thanks for all teh funny.
Now how's Lieberman going to see? You gave PH his eyes, dammit!
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