Back 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.

“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:

[rated NSFW]

One of the things I love about GOOMF is the deliberate graphic overload, which is barely an exaggeration of the number of shiny bells and whistles that often clutter up the screen on SportsCenter. It’s impossible to catch all of the silly headlines that scroll by on the bottom-margin news ticker and pay full attention to the characters’ dialogue in a single viewing; if you don’t have time for multiple viewings of the clip, I transcribed them all here for your quick reading convenience.

For the slightly more serious-minded, the style being parodied in this video was recently the subject of a trenchant article in The Atlantic by Patrick Hruby, entitled “The SportsCenter-ization of Political Journalism.” The jist:

Turn on ESPN. There are score tickers and headline crawls, slick graphics and constant teases for upcoming stories, everything creating a sense of urgent immediacy. Now switch to Fox News. Visually speaking, it’s the same eyeball-grabbing formula. (Well, replace scores with stock prices, and garrulous sportscaster Chris Berman with a frosted blonde news babe). This is the SportsCenter-ization of the news, in which coverage of Washington — and the world, really — apes a glossy entertainment product dedicated to spectacular touchdowns, gee-whiz statistics, prefabricated drama, insta-debates waged by a nattering, revolving-door athletic punditocracy and the very latest updates on Brett Favre’s various bodily appendages.

If the Broncos beat the Patriots later today, watch tomorrow for Fox News to start ginning up a Tim Tebow write-in campaign for the remaining GOP primary states.

OMG, listen to what he says to Obama during the applause!

Really, I am flabbergasted. That is just plain inappropriate, and I can’t imagine what possessed him to say it. I know Biden is prone to gaffes, but this is major. Think about it: after scratching and clawing through the fetid political muck for well over a year, Obama signed the historic health care reform bill into law, and Biden says it’s “A big fucking deal?”

No I say, NO! Ho-ly FUCKING shit, it is a HUGE fucking deal! I mean, fuck me running, that is ass-kickingly goddamned big. Suck it, FOX News punditiots, because Yes We Did! This long-overdue victory for the sane majority and the good of all Americans is, quite simply, tits.

Of course, it would be way better if we’d got single-payer, or at least a public option. Then I would set off all seven of George Carlin’s words, lighting up the blog post like magnificent fireworks of profanity. For now I’ll take what I can get — I’m a reasonable man (which is more than I can say for the teabagging cretins who tried to thwart the bill).

As for Vice-President Biden, be more careful next time. I don’t want to hear any more of that kind of egregious understatement out of you.

Another reliable fake-news tonic for the real news during 2009 has been, of course, The Onion. In my opinion, The Onion’s video segments are a bit of a hit-or-miss proposition, but one subset of them cracks me up pretty consistently: “In The Know,” which sends up the kind of four or five-way pundit scrum the cable news outlets so adore.

A fine example is number five on my top ten videos of 2009, “In The Know: Giant Money Hole,” which festoons the economic bailout in absurdity.

For a moment there I began to think it was running on too long, but then my giggles returned. It’s a fine line, but there’s a second layer of comedy when you keep over-extending a metaphor just to see how many versions you can think of.

Agree? Disagree? Comment. Discuss.

This particular Twitter meme has been such fertile ground for me that I’m going to report my own contributions, instead of picking out favorites tweeted by others. Then I’ll open it up to submissions of further silliness in the comments.

1. Curious George and Daddy’s Browser History
2. Little House on the Auction Block
3. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. When Are You Going to Get a Fucking Cell Phone?
   
4. Freaky Friday the 13th: Jason Learns to Appreciate His Mother
5. Frog and Toad Are Friends With Benefits
6. Island of the Blue Dog Democrats
7. Everybody Poops (But only Rush Limbaugh Does It Into a Microphone and Calls It Political Discourse)

If I come up with more that I like, I’ll add them here (and on my Twitter page, of course).

How about it? You guys got any good ones burning a hole in your keyboard?

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:

All week, the Obama administration [has] bent over backwards to avoid questioning the legitimacy of the Iranian regime. In this, Obama became a de facto ally of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Although Obama finally spoke about the protesters–”the whole world is watching,” he said–he never expressed real support for them…

“On several occasions, I’ve had supporters of Mousavi say we need President Obama,” reported CNN’s Reza Sayah, from Tehran. When Wolf Blitzer asked Sayah directly whether the protesters want Obama to speak out in support of their cause, Sayah responded: “I think they do, but they’re realistic.”

“Realistic” about the weakness, about the foolish and counterproductive “realism,” of an American president. How sad.

You know how they say it’s always a good in a critique to start off by praising something, or saying something positive? I’m subscribing to that theory, because you do have one statement in there that I fully agree with: “How sad.”

Of course, on the question of what is sad, as well as on every other point in this excerpt, you are absolutely and unambiguously fucking wrong. What is sad — distressingly sad — is that you two reactionary neocon fuckwits are so goddamned far down your ideological rabbit holes that when a human tragedy is unfolding in front of our eyes, you immediately try to exploit it for a few cheap political points. Way to win hearts and minds, assholes.

Obama’s statements are foolish, you say. Counterproductive. Counterproductive? Are you fucking serious? OK then, as long as you’re caricaturing yourself, tell us: what would you have him do? Drop the 101st Airborne in there led by Bruce Willis and save the protesters? Point a few cruise missiles at ‘em, maybe fire one across the bow? Have Obama dress in green, complete with face paint, and wave a saber over his head at a special Rose Garden press conference? Well keep it in your pants, you ridiculous jerkoffs, because it ain’t gonna fucking happen.

Were you not suffering from such serious rectal-cranial inversions, you might be aware that (as I mentioned yesterday), we’ve had a few mishaps with Iran in the past. Mainly this one time in 1953 when the CIA had this thing called Operation Ajax, in which we overthrew their democratically-elected leader and installed The Shah? The guy who was a brutal dictator but who gives a shit because he let our corporations tap Iranian oil reserves? Until 25 years later when the people rose up and ousted him, rallying behind the leadership of the current cabal of Islamic fundamentalist nutjobs who have governed the country ever since? The ones who staged a nakedly bullshit sham election to keep themselves in power? The ones who are sending their cops and militia thugs out into the streets today in a bloodthirsty, murderous crackdown against their own people?

See, if you weren’t so hellbent on discrediting Obama at any cost, you might be sentient enough to realize that Iranian ruling junta’s discrediting of itself is accelerating with each blustery protestation of legitimacy, each day of popular unrest, each desperate act of violent suppression of the will of the citizenry. You might even be able to see that perhaps the ONLY WAY Ahmadinejad and the council of imams might regain some credibility is if their fanciful and desperate accusations that the United States and its allies are acting to foment revolution were TRUE.

Why are Mousavi supporters saying they wish they had Obama to intervene, but are “realistic” about it? Because they’re not fucking idiots. They know all of this stuff that I’ve been talking about here. Do I wish we could do more to help them? Of course I do. But unlike you two punditiot troglydytes, I am realistic (there’s that word again — bummer how the real world always gets in the way, huh?) about our track record of installing governments in countries other than our own.

So do us all a favor and just be happy with your honorary PhD’s from STFU. And practice what they teach. Otherwise you start spouting that “Obama is a de facto ally of Ahmadinejad and Khamanei” horseshit, which leads the non-punditiot population to the logical conclusion, “Hayes and Kristol are de profundis assholes.”