December 28, 2012
September 19, 2010
August 9, 2010
The Tattlesnake – Drunk or Stupid Edition
It’s time to play the popular home game ‘Drunk or Stupid?’ wherein contestants watch TV and decide from the public statements and general demeanor of various politicians and pundits if they are such persistent imbibers it has softened their corrupt little minds to the point of retardation, or if they are just naturally dumb as a result of ignorance and flea-bitten ideology. Of course these terms are not mutually exclusive; some of these miscreants are both drunk and stupid, but here we are gauging which mode predominates in their media appearances and what passes for journalistic efforts.
Names were picked at random from a tricorn hat while I was nursing a hangover and appear in no particular order; the obvious idiots – Beck, Limbaugh, et al – were ignored:
Joe Lieberman
Drunk. On MSNBC recently, he kept calling Gen. David Petraeus ‘Darren’ Petreaus and mispronounced, or Freudian slipped, Rolling Stone as ‘Ruling Stain.’ Of course, if you’re as crooked and backstabbing as Joe, you have to go heavy on the MD-20/20 just to stand shaving every morning.
Sarah Palin
Stupid, in the unique way only ex-beauty pageant contestants can manage. (Google Carrie Prejean and Miss Beverly Hills.) Hubby Todd is likely the drunk in the family, along with all the little Palin photo-ops, and who can blame them?
John Boehner
Drunk, with bells on. Catch the GOP Bonehead late enough in the afternoon and he’s liable to gush all sorts of hilarious head-slapping crapola while he stares bewildered and baggy-eyed at the camera, like a dripping-wet old Lothario who’s trying to think up a reasonable excuse on the spot for why he was caught skinny-dipping with the neighbor’s wife at dawn. No doubt he pours them down as he rests in his coff – uh — tanning bed every morning. There are suspicions he was born with the face he has now and had to be hidden in the attic until his body caught up to his weathered mug, but that’s just the loosest of rumors, no doubt spread by one of his many detractors.
Mitch McConnell
Drunk, on waning power. Yet another failure of modern plastic surgery, at least that form practiced in the hills of Kentucky. McConnell found the recipe for making lemons out of lemonade, and then, obviously, ate them all in one sitting. His wrinkles are embarrassed to be seen with his archaic ideas these days. Rand Paul, Mitch, Rand Paul…
Chris Matthews
Drunk, with an attractive excess of saliva and a penchant for spitting when he’s excited – and he’s usually excited about something. (Guests who sit across the table from him on his show are rumored to be armed with ample supplies of Kleenex and zinc cough drops.) He also has the drunk’s penchant for mispronouncing a word and then insisting his mistake is the correct pronunciation. (‘Chee-knee’ for Cheney, for instance.) After embarrassingly blubbering over the greatness of Junior Bush in the early part of the twenty-first century (“Americans just love this guy!”), and verbally ass-grabbing various young women on his show, as well as showing a streak of mean for Hillary Clinton that is inexplicable, he’s now steered to the left in order to boost his ratings, aping the success of Keith Olbermann, but his past follows him like the iron shackles that should be encircling the legs of the now literally heartless Dick Chee-knee.
David Gregory
Stupid. He’s an affable, ambitious yuppie who walks around with a permanently moistened index finger stuck in the air, or somewhere. ‘Dave’ thinks he’s posing a tough question when he asks John McCain to give his ‘real’ opinion of Sarah Palin. He’s perfect for NBC’s Sunday morning nod to subtle parody, ‘Meet the Press,’ but I detect a certain jealously of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert since they are allowed to present actual news segments more often than Gregory, and they don’t have to smooch pampered Washington posteriors to keep their jobs.
Candy Crowley
Stupid, but just barely, as it’s rumored she can put a double shot of 100-proof Georgia moonshine between her ample breasts and drink it without spilling a drop while doing a nude hula dance. Unfortunately, she has failed to display this prodigious talent in front of CNN’s cameras, preferring to bore her audience to tears with her tedious ‘Republican-pretending-to-be-liberal’ act. Candy is the Judy “What will we – I mean the Republicans — do to win New Hampshire?” Woodruff of her generation.
George ‘Eff’ Will
Drunk as a lord. Take him out to the ball game but make sure you have enough sturdy lifters to carry him home. Even stupidity couldn’t possibly explain some of his well-worded but gaseous and error-laden opinion pieces. The Doric columns of the Capitol building could be crumbling to dust before his eyes and ‘Mr. Will’ (as his friends call him) would write a column the next day praising the lasting architecture of Washington. A devoted acolyte of Ronald Reagan, George Eff never let ‘The Gipper’s’ sunny geriatric optimism infect him; he did, however, apparently contract Conservative Alzheimer’s from his late friend, a disease that has spread like a plague throughout the Republican Party. The symptoms are an inability to admit mistakes, a total disregard for historical fact, a whooshing sound in the ears from air continually filling a vacuum, and the necrophiliac’s tendency to romantically embrace ideological corpses.
Sharron Angle
Drunk, on ‘Situational Lemonade’ and the Lawd. It’s tempting to dismiss her as merely dumb, but that discounts the self-righteous zeal with which she has pursued her particular form of delusional right-wing fringe insanity. For that kind of breath-taking goofiness, you need more than just stupidity, you need God working with you in one of his many ethereal jokes. Karl Marx once said that religion is the opiate of the masses; in that regard, Sharron is a bust-out junkie without a hope of redemption.
David Broder
Not merely drunk, but embalmed. The Rufus T. Firefly ‘Dean’ of the Washington Press Gang hasn’t had an opinion that makes any sense in years, but he forges on, wallowing hog-like in alcohol-induced dementia while his snide colleagues cheer him on. The Old Fudd not only sees pink elephants, he celebrates them in print and tries to inveigle his readers into stumbling with him down Wet Brain Lane. Apparently the Washington Post has been afraid to tell him he’s been dead for a generation, at least as far as any political or cultural relevance is concerned.
Rand Paul
A board-certified drunk, but nearly as stupid. Only a dedicated souse could have this many half-baked opinions and his single-minded dedication to terrible ideas of the past that have proved unworkable. Besides, he hangs out at a plush Kentucky country club and apparently doesn’t play much golf. There is only one other thing white people who frequent country clubs do, and it’s usually shaken not stirred with a hint of vermouth and consumed by the pitcher. Remember, Rand, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life.
Wolf Blitzer
So drunk you could get snockered sucking on his beard. The Blitzkrieg’s premier contribution to modern journalism – that is to say, advertising the Empire — is knowing from US intelligence sources, prior to the Iraq invasion, that Saddam Hussein had no WMD (he admitted it on a small public radio station in D.C.), yet withholding that little nugget from his CNN audience and obediently flogging WMD fear on behalf his pals in the Bush-Cheney War Room. His other offenses against reason and veracity are too numerous to mention, but suffice it to say that he’s now probably in the Susan Powter range of daily consumption, necessary to rinse the bitter taste of corporate swill out of one’s mouth, and the image of the elephant feces-spattered circus clown from one’s mind.
© 2010 RS Janes. LTSaloon.org.
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July 22, 2009
The Tattlesnake – Ear to the Ground on Health Care Edition
Questions, I Have Questions…
Your (Mostly) Obedient Tattlesnake is waiting for one of our Big Media professional interrogators, such as NBC’s David “We’ll Frame It Your Way!” Gregory, to ask one of these Congressional Republicans hyperventilating against the government paying for health care, why they accept health care paid for by government taxation. To my knowledge, not one member of Congress turns down this platinum perk of office preferring to pay for privatized health care themselves, as they think us average schmoes should do. If privatized for-profit health care is ‘the greatest system in the world,’ why don’t they avail themselves of it using their own money instead of Uncle Sucker’s, i.e. ours? (I won’t hold my breath.)
Speaking of which, when do the BM ‘journalists’ start questioning why the government ‘of, by and for the people’ should be in the business of protecting private for-profit corporations from competition? We know they’ve done this unofficially for generations, but now the merry free-marketeers of the Republican Party and Blue Dog Dem stripe are openly babbling we have to protect the health care industry from ‘unfair competition’ from a public option. Wasn’t their mantra, just a few years ago, that corporations could always do a better job at a lower price than the government? If so, what are they worried about in the realm of health care? Could it be that a public health care option would nakedly expose that lie, and the obscene rip-off that America’s for-profit health insurance system has been for the past forty years?
Beware, beware: Don’t be fooled by the retooled Harry and Louise ads featuring the loathsome couple updating their opposition to health care reform by announcing themselves now ‘for it’ as long as it is ‘bipartisan’ and not ‘political.’ This is wrong on so many levels, the Tattler’s thesaurus begs for new synonyms, but the fact that the health care industry is spending over a million dollars a day to stop health care reform, and Harry and Louise is a part of that effort, should give you a clue as to just how detrimental this industry is to the public health. When Big Medico and Big Pharma use the word ‘bipartisan’ it’s in the corporate Republican sense, as in ‘do it our way.’ What the health insurance industry wants is no public option, and a huge payday in that the taxpayers will foot the bill, at current exorbitant rates, for all of the cases the for-profits currently refuse, such as ‘pre-existing conditions.’ This means we’ll be paying for dollar-a-cap Tylenols and every expensive, unneeded procedure greedy industry types can conjure up, and they, and the hospitals and doctors in on this scam, will get their piece of the very profitable action. Without competition from a public option, health care in this country will be even more expensive, yet not work any better for most of us, it will just cost more. Under the industry no-competition plan, you’ll be able to see your terminally ill relative languish into the Great Beyond at ten times what it costs in civilized nations with single-payer universal health care coverage.
More to come after Obama’s press conference tonight.
Copyright 2009 R.S. Janes.
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January 1, 2009
August 30, 2008
August 11, 2008
The Tattlesnake – Double-Take On the News Edition
You Could Get Whiplash
“Somewhere between the stained blue dress and the vice president shooting a guy in the face, between swift boat lies and ‘war on terra’ alibis, the absurd became the ordinary, facts became optional and satire became superfluous.”
– Leonard Pitts Jr., “When Hysteria and Satire Meet,” The Miami Herald, July 17, 2008.
McCain the Antichrist?Huhhhh? I’m not a big fan of Johnny MacFlipFlop, but the Antichrist in the flesh? Whoa! I smell Rove: This is perhaps the only way the GOP will get far-right Christians to vote for McNasty – by convincing fringe Christopublicans his election will hasten the End Times and bring on the Rapture. Oh, brother. Or maybe Obama is the Antichrist, as Time Magazine postulates the McCain camp is trying to depict him, and the Fundies will vote for BHO to bring about Armageddon. Or maybe they’ll vote against the Antichrist, depending on which one it really is – if you’re a wingnut who believes in a Republican Country Club Jay-zus backed by his Invisible Omnipotent Dad, you certainly have a lot of figurin’ to do this election – and these are Godly folk who taint fond o’ that thinkin’ stuff much. What to do, what to do…who’s got the snakes this week?
– The Big Media Fatuous Fathead of the Week Award: It’s a squeaker, but the prize goes to Amy Chozick of Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal for devoting over a thousand words to speculating whether Obama is ‘too thin and fit’ to be president. (more…)
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Cheating death for fun and profit
The woman who said “I don’t pay taxes; the little people do” may have inadvertently undercut the level of seriousness that some people will give to the looming prospect of a theoretically higher tax rate for the one percenters in return for giving them a chance to see how people addicted to consumerism handle austerity. A thirty-nine percent tax rate that won’t be paid does sound more devastating than an irrelevant thirty-five percent tax rate, doesn’t it?
Wasn’t it established that Mitt Romney only pays about 15% in income tax? If so, how serious of a threat would it be to tell him that if the USA goes off the financial cliff the theoretical rate he should be paying will be increased and life will get grim for the people who get government benefits. Didn’t he dub them the 47 percenters?
Wealthy folks (like Mitt), after the first of the year, will be able to turn on the evening news, tune in to the nightly images of misery and drop out of the ranks of caring Christians. Those with cash register hearts will see going off the financial cliff as the starting gun for a race to exploit the rest of society in a time of hardship and suffering. Wasn’t there a Country song about chilling beers by holding it next to a cad’s heart? Did he get a job as a CBS TV reporter?
Looking forward to an apocalyptic event that coincided with the end of the Mayan calendar because it would provide excellent material for use in a column may have been just a tad immature and illogical and now that it hasn’t happened writing about how CBS Evening News has morphed from a televised version of the World News Roundup into a contest to see which reporter can be the first to get an interviewee to cry on camera seems a bit anticlimactic and mundane. If you had a buck for every time a person cried on camera this week and next on the Evening News, would you have a fistful of dollars or not?
After walking away unscathed from a rendezvous with certain death, it seems concomitant upon this columnist to inject a high level of joie d’vivre into our attempts to ridicule the arena of politics and perhaps in an year when not even Congressional representatives have to face the rigors of reelection to just focus on the other aspects of contemporary pop culture that are fun to observe.
Isn’t the yell that Wile E. Coyote gives when he goes sailing into the void a trademarked item that can’t be used without getting permission from a movie studio’s legal department?
When the fiscal cliff chapter of the political history of the USA started to unfold, didn’t Nancy Pelosi reassured Americans that she would bring up a measure in the House that had passed in the Senate last summer and thus avert a crisis? Did she forget her solution to the problem? Do the mainstream media journalists consider it rude to remind her of her promise?
How many skeptical commentators asked about how many Trevon Martin type incidents would occur in the schools if armed people are put in every school? Is it realistic to expect that the armed guards will provide the law enforcement example of baseball’s unassisted triple play with a Rambo reaction to a school shooter?
If Fox News reported that its viewers were exceptionally well informed and that the concept of “the dumbing down of America” was part of a bogus Liberal conspiracy theory, and their viewers believed them; would that be an example of the Epimenides paradox? Why is it that every time we hear the expression “I saw it on Fox News,” we think of the title of Ross Thomas’ mystery novel “The Fools in Town are on our side”?
Traditionally Ann Coulter used to use crazy talk to divert attention away from George W. Bush when the liberal criticism of him was getting intense. Apparently the Republicans asked Wayne Lapierre to substitute for her recently when they wanted to turn a discussion on gun control into ideological gridlock.
When we heard of the investigation into the incident on TV that involved David Gregory holding up an extra capacity ammo clip, we were reminded of the time back in the Sixties when a New York City local news anchorman (Jeraldo Rivera?) was arrested on camera by someone dressed like a NYPD cop for holding up a roach (ie a marijuana cigarette) while he was on the air. Who was that journalist? What happened to that case? Maybe if that on air personality is still serving time for that stunt, he can truly report that (for him) the Sixties still have consequences and aren’t over yet.
On one episode of the popular Sixties TV series Star Trek, the crew of the Enterprise was told that when the 21st century arrived massive land wars would be obsolete and that wars would be limited local struggles called Bush Wars. Is that sound byte on Youtube? If so we could write a column about that sometime during 2013.
If the World’s Laziest Journalist is going to relegate politics in the USA to the back burner, we could concentrate on other topics. We might even shift our tendency to post on early Friday morning (PST in the USA) to a different day and time. Maybe that would permit more readers an opportunity to skim our offerings?
Some cynics might suspect that a shift in emphasis away from politics to more of the “let the good times roll” reports might just be an excuse for this columnist to make the task of writing the columns more like an excuse to go out and have fun. Watching a lava lamp and being inspired to write heavy philosophical think pieces might have been appropriate before the arrival of the last day on the Mayan Calendar, but now that we have cheated death isn’t every sandwich going to be a treat? Didn’t a famous musician, after he learned he had a very serious health problem, advise people to “enjoy every sandwich!”?
Perhaps we should write a column about the old movie serials where a Hero (such as The Shadow as played by Victor Jory in the 1940 serial series) shrugs off a brush with certain death and plunges ahead with life in next week’s installment. Will the saga of the post economic cliff America be a similar story line?
If a person rolls his car and winds up lying on a remote highway with a bunch of broken bones there are two ways to react. One can either say: “Oh dear, this means a long stay in the hospital” or he can exuberantly exclaim: “I’m still alive!” We think that T-shirts that say “I survived the Mayan Apocalypse!” might sell well. With or without an augmentation to the bank account, this columnist thinks that all the members of the Mayan Apocalypse Survivors Association should make a concerted effort to make 2013 an enjoyable experience.
Yes, we realize that the suspension of unemployment checks is a serious economic situation, but if people who encounter that problem overcome the challenge just think of how baffled and aggravated the rich people, who expected to see soap opera existential crises every night on the evening news, will be. It will be just like in the movie serials. When 2012 ended it looked like “curtains” for sure, but when 2013 begins the financial cliff (except on Fox) will be No Big Thing (NBT).
If, somehow, the unemployed workers, manage to adopt a Zen existence that isn’t dependent on a weekly paycheck, just think how incensed that will make the capitalists who are counting on seeing the victims of their strategy suffer extensively. It would almost be as if the victims refused to suffer just out of spite.
Back in the Eighties there was a spate of self help books that advised people to cut back on their standard of living and retire at a young age. Perhaps some of the people getting their last unemployment check next week, should buy some used copies of those books this week?
After a few moments of contemplating what would make a good topic for a more feature oriented column, we realized that it might require a great deal of fact finding to produce a good trend-spotting column. On the other hand, the obvious absurdities in politics are so readily available and the mainstream media makes no effort to point them out and so such columns full of “these columns practically write themselves” material need very little effort to produce, so maybe we will just slowly transition into some of the alternative topics.
Do the places that sell marijuana for medicinal purposes make extra profits by selling such periphery items as lava lamps? Are T-shirts featuring a famous rolling paper logo still being sold? Do the pot clubs sell those rolling papers? Do rock concerts still include light shows? When is the Jefferson Airplane going to release a new album?
Was it George Carlin who first said: “If you can remember the Sixties; you weren’t really there.”? Shouldn’t the closing quote for this column be something more intellectual such as Nietsche’s quote: “ . . . when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.” (We preferred to use the Wile C. Coyote howl of despair, but, alas, it was not to be.)
Now the disk jockey will play “Rescue me,” “Cry me a river,” and “Sea of heartbreak.” We have to go find a good VHS tape to play on New Year’s Eve. Have a “ . . . but what if an armed guard had been there” type week.