national miscourse

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Top 10 Videos of 2011: 5. “Tiger Woods Fails to Qualify for Sex with Dive Bar Waitress”

January 14, 2012 | Comment

5Back in January of 2011, the reliably hilarious satirical web site The Onion branched out into broadcast TV. Onion News Network was renewed for a second season and can be seen on IFC. A second show, Onion SportsDome, appeared on Comedy Central but was cancelled in June. SportsDome can’t be called a total loss, however, because it produced at least one terrific segment which has continued as a weekly feature on the web.

GOOMF masthead

“Get Out of My Face” (often referred to by the delightful acronym “GOOMF”) is a brilliant parody of the dick-swinging, rapid fire sports pundit barking match shows which have become a staple for ESPN — ones like Around the Horn and Pardon the Interruption.1 The Onion’s first installment of GOOMF appeared in the summer of 2011, and it laid me out laughing: Read the rest of this entry »


Rape With an R

February 3, 2011 | Comment

Over the last year or two, my most oft-considered theme on this blog may well be the vital necessity of humor to cope with the world around us. As the adage goes, sometimes there are no words — no literal words, that is. No direct response. There is first the intermediary of wit, whose words are oblique enough to make the matter minimally tolerable. Without this humorous buffer, my unfiltered response would be nothing but screams of rage and despair. That might be cathartic for me, but it would definitely not be constructive. To put it another way: if you ask me a ridiculous question, you’ll get a ridiculous answer.

Titian-Lucretia

“Sorry Lucretia, no way is that covered.
I mean… you were already naked.”

For the last decade plus, the agenda and tone of the exchange in Washington (or as I call it, our national miscourse) has been set by the Republicans, largely via their hyper-successful media arm at FOX News.1 As the feckless Democrats stood by, the effective GOP creed has degenerated from Bush-era exclusionism (“We are the party of patriotism; we don’t work with Democrats for the same reason we don’t negotiate with terrorists”) to reactionary, teabagger-style xenophobia (“If it has Obama-cooties on it, KILL IT!”).

Yesterday, the trusty comedy filter The Onion produced what struck me as a perfectly timed all-purpose riposte, headlined “Republicans Vote to Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That Would Destroy Asteroid Headed for Earth.” Unfortunately, it turns out that even this wasn’t quite enough to address the day’s most egregious Obama-phobic extreme: the new GOP majority in the House, as part of their absurdly childish insistence on a do-over of the health care reform act, have declared it necessary to redefine the crime of rape.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I wondered. Read the rest of this entry »


Life, Liberty, and the Denial of Benefits

October 16, 2009 | Permalink

Over at Scholars & Rogues, Rick Herschlag has spun out a post so good it gave me one of those moments of “damn, I wish I’d written that!” What’s the word for that — writeolization? Pen envy?

I want to keep the health insurance I have—which is no health insurance. I was dropped when I had a heart attack. My insurance company called it a preexisting condition, and they were right. Heart attacks have been around a very long time. The important thing is that I treasure my insurance company’s free market right to maximize profits at all moral and ethical costs. I would willingly die defending that right. And now, finally, I may get that chance.

Read the rest of this entry »


Bursting from the Blogroll: Darren Hutchinson Hits the Reset Button

September 18, 2009 | 1 comment

Keen observers of detail may have noticed that my blogroll has grown, and indeed expanded into four categories. I’ll go into detail about this in a forthcoming post (or perhaps even a dedicated page) soon. Right now I’d like to draw your attention to a particularly astute post by a potential new blogroll-ee.

Darren HutchinsonOver at Dissenting Justice, Darren Hutchinson makes a clear-eyed case that the current charges racism in the political health care clusterfuck are acting as a smoke screen:

I am a law professor who teaches Constitutional Law, Civil Rights, Race and the Law and other areas related to equality. I have spent nearly two decades researching and writing about race relations and public policy. With respect to the rightwing attacks on President Obama, however, I find the issue of race largely uninteresting. Read the rest of this entry »


Do Yourself a Favor and Shut the Fuck Up

June 20, 2009 | 2 comments

How is it that I still occasionally think that I’ve seen it all? Specifically, with regard to the reflexive disingenuousness of partisan political idiocy? My hope for the reformation of our national miscourse keeps feeling more and more audacious.

At this point I feel compelled to alert you, my esteemed readers, that the remainder of this post will contain expressions garnished with no small amount of profanity. If this does not suit your taste, I hope that you will keep in mind that 1) you were alerted beforehand, and 2) it’s my fucking blog.

As I was saying… today’s attempt to make my head explode comes courtesy of Stephen Hayes and William Kristol at the Weekly Standard:
Read the rest of this entry »


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