"One thing I do that you won't find anywhere else in the media: I combine satire with serious commentary. I'm going to go back and forth within a moment's notice."
Yes, I love this about Rush. And it's something I think I do in writing on this blog (unbeknownst to Rush, apparently... at least if I am to be considered "in the media"). It's a matter of expecting your listeners/readers to be pretty smart and alert... to get it. It also means you're dropping quotes all the time that people who don't get you — and probably don't want to get you — can use to make you sound stupid/crazy/evil. I love the way Rush revels in that sort of thing.
A comment over at Pam's House Blend, where they are talking about the White House adviser who apparently conflated the gay community and "the Internet left fringe" and said something that has gotten paraphrased as "those bloggers need to take off the pajamas, get dressed, and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult."
I won't attempt to summarize. Listen to the testimony before Parliament's Justice and Human Rights Committee. What has gone on in Canada is truly revolting. The procedural abuses are astounding, and to think that it was all done for a goal that is itself illegitimate — crushing offensive speech.
Why is this relevant to Americans? Because the superficial fluffily benign language of multiculturalism that comes so naturally to our rulers provides a lot of cover for the shriveling of free speech....
As Canadians have discovered, liberty is lost very quietly and quickly. And trying to get it back is slow and painful — particularly at a time when artists, universities, publishers, and others who congratulate themselves incessantly on their truth-telling courage find increasingly pre-emptive self-censorship the better part of valor.
I'm giving this post my "Obama the Candidate" tag, which means that the man needs to step past his candidate mode and recognize that he is the President.
1. The words are like one of those awful finale songs the write for "American Idol."
2. The singing is not up to your standard. Presumably, if you'd lived, you'd have rerecorded it with more of a feeling of style, varying between urgency and effortlessness, instead of continuing throughout at a medium level of strain.
So he didn't think it was good enough even to work on, let alone release. There are terrible penalties attached to dying suddenly, without putting your affairs in order. Artists, destroy the things you don't want to see the light of day:
Sony has rights to release any music Mr. Jackson recorded while under contract....
My son Jac said it in 1989 when he was 8, and my ex RLC blogs it now under the title "Obviosophobia."
And it would be obvious — yet wrong! — for you to observe that he misspelled "Obviosophobia."
Now, I'm checking up on R's blog, and I see he's into old quotes — even as he quizzes his 12-year-old son about regret. He remembers: "Someone once called my work 'beautiful but not important.'" Bearing out the truth of Jac's childhood remark, he adds "What a perfect description of this world!"
I'm very sorry not to have put up a new post yet and to have left you with the last one from yesterday all these hours. It wasn't as rude as a man wearing shorts on a plane, but it was rude of me to leave you with the image of him as you went to bed last night and then to still have him sitting here, his genitalia lightly veiled by a floppy hemline, as you rise in the morning.
Excellent. Larry also had trouble with doctors who won't give you their home phone number, people who eat more than their share of caviar at a buffet, the sound of the human voice, and the taste of food.
The episode began with Larry lighting into a guy in shorts who was sitting next to him on an airplane. Here I am on very subject of men in shorts on airplanes last April:
The guy seated next to me on the plane was wearing shorts. Presumably, he didn't recognize me (and know my anti-shorts writings), but wouldn't it have been funny if he did?
He was also wearing a t-shirt with a hole under the arm, which hole he displayed to me more than twice.
He was up to page 503 on his Stephen King novel. Those King books are clumsily thick, yet the print is quite large — to give readers a feeling of accomplishment?...
Don't wear shorts on a plane. You're in an air-conditioned environment and sitting close to a stranger. It's bad enough that your clothed thigh may touch the stranger sitting next to you. Don't wangle the naked thigh near her!
Her, I emphasize. Unlike Larry David, I was a woman sitting next to a man in shorts. Larry was also in first class. I was not. The degree of imposed familiarity was really atrocious. Plus, I think men should have more pride in their genitalia. By wearing shorts, what are you saying? Either: 1. your genitalia are too small to be in any danger of protruding beyond the hem of your skimpy garment, or 2. you don't care what happens to fall out.
"[C]rash blossoms" [are] "those train wrecks of newspaper headlines that lead us down the garden path to end up against a wall, scratching our head and wondering what on earth the subeditor might possibly have been thinking." Indeed, when such infelicitous headlines have come up here on Language Log, they have typically been discussed as examples of "garden path sentences."
Is it that they're doing it at all? Because they are not doing it well! Was there any new or interesting observation in this? The writing is terribly dull. I won't listen again to get the quote exactly right, but — after saying he got the Nobel Prize for not being George Bush — he says something like "I've only not been George Bush for 9 months." But he's not a 9-month-old and he's never been George Bush. Couldn't you polish that into something like "I've only been President Not George Bush for 9 months"?
And could SNL hire somebody who can actually impersonate Barack Obama? Obama has so many physical and vocal mannerisms. It could be hilarious. And it's not like when Chevy Chase played Gerald Ford without any attempt at seeming like Ford, because Chevy Chase had a very appealing and funny personal style of his own and imitating without imitating was itself ridiculous. Fred Armisen isn't doing anything.
"Saturday Night Live" is boring and lame. Giving them credit for willingness to make fun of a liberal is like giving the Nobel Prize to Obama for not being Bush. Except much duller.
Sorry. It's a cheap joke. I know. There's a difference between weather and climate, but you've got to know that poor Al is sweating out every cold snap. Every time it's not hot, it makes his scheme a harder sell.
"We're very close to that political tipping point," Gore said at the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference at the Madison Concourse Hotel. "Never before in human history has a single generation been asked to make such difficult and consequential decisions."...
"I am optimistic," Gore said. "I think there has been a very powerful recognition, not only in this country, but in many countries, that there is a linkage between the climate crisis and the economic crisis and the national security crisis that is in part derivative of the world's ridiculous over-dependence on carbon-based fuels."
Really? I would have thought that the economic slowdown was good for his cause. Less production, less carbon emissions, right? They just don't say that because it would make people mad. It's like the argument that cigarette smoking (with the consequent death from lung cancer) saves the government money. (Social Security payments and so forth.) That upsets people.
Conservative groups led by Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow and Americans for Prosperity held a demonstration Downtown that drew about 200 people, including U.S. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Menomonee Falls, who also participated in the conference's panel discussion following Gore's speech. The demonstrators worried Gore's policies would push American jobs overseas.
200, in Madison?
In what organizers said was a rarity, Gore took half a dozen questions from journalists, including one from Phelim McAleer, an Irish filmmaker who asked Gore to address nine errors in his film identified by a British court in 2007.
I love the name Phelim McAleer. It supports that theory that people go into careers suggested by their names. (All the dentists named Dennis.) How so, you ask? Phelim — that's how some people pronounce the word "film." My grandfather did. Dear old Pop.
Gore responded that the court ruling supported the showing of his film in British schools. When McAleer tried to debate further, his microphone was cut off by the moderators.
Well, good for Al for opening himself up to debate for 2 seconds. Now, quick, let's all ruin the economy some more the way Al Gore wants us to. As Obama likes to say, the time for debate is over.
ADDED: Video of the McAleer confrontation:
"Treat Big Environment the way you treat Big Business," McAleer advises journalists. Why are environmental journalists protecting the politician and not asking probing questions?
People who loved Obama The Candidate now have to face up to the fact that they elected Obama The Candidate, the Eternal Candidate. You might want him to wake up and know that now he is the President, but Obama The Candidate, Obama The Candidate... we thought that was so wonderful, and he would like you to please think it's still wonderful now?
I remember 40 years ago, when we had Richard Nixon for our President and he couldn't stop saying "I am the President." It was a ridiculous verbal quirk of his. Quite annoying. We knew he was the President. Did he have to keep rubbing it in? Did he think he could get more power by asserting that he was the guy with the most power? But we sure knew he knew he had the power.
Barack Obama is the opposite of Nixon. We feel like we need to keep saying to him: You are the President. He's not some random well-meaning good guy who's on our side. He has the power. He'd better be careful what he uses it for, but it's getting pretty annoying listening to him pretend that he's standing alongside of us observing the unfolding of history.
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