The Smell Test

So a couple weeks ago the wife decides she wants to pick out some perfume for her birthday. Off we go to the department store scent counters to see what's what. I am intrigued by the number of boutique fragrances abounding these days. Are there really people willing to part with their cash in order to smell like Paris Hilton? The mind boggles.

Anyway, passing the mens' cologne counter, my wife and I spot the boutique scent from my good friend Pee Diddly. I believe the product is called "Skid Mark" or "Taint Sweat" or some such. The missus turns and says, "Oh boy, I wonder what that smells like." Without missing a beat, I responded, "Eh, I dunno, prob'ly purple drank and an unearned ego trip," prompting a snicker from the counter girl. Who says youth is wasted on the young?

The thing is, while I crack wise at Diddly's expense, I'm not really kidding. Well, maybe about the purple drank. If Diddly drinks at all, it's not the oxy-and-tussin plastic-cup cocktails the street crowd partake of, it's bound to be something ostentatious and vulgar, to let everyone else at his table know how much money he rolls in. He'd pay 300 bucks for flat horse piss, as long as it came in a Cristall bottle.

But the other part, the inflated self-regard, I'm dead serious. The guy started as a "musician", and the examples I've heard of his efforts in that field suck dead rhino cock. I've been playing a long time, and I like a lot of different kinds of music, and I'm enough of an adult about my likes and dislikes without undue prejudice. And the guy fucking sucks at music, in a way that only a true perpetrator can. He does seem to know how to dress himself, I'll give him that. But there's an unearned smugness to the whole packaging vibe I could do without, like he thinks no one ever got laid before he came along to tell them what to consume -- or more importantly, to be seen consuming.

Yet he's turned himself into a brand, through sheer will, and moved on to other things. It's marketing 101, getting people to identify the association of the person, rather than the product and its specifics. And he's been enormously successful at it. People will buy anything, so long as you make them feel validated for it.

Which brings us to Punxsutawney Palin, slowly emerging from her campaign-imposed chuck-hole for more and dumber photo-ops. As if to prove that her stilted, aggravating turn with Charlie Gibson was no mere aberration, but only an appetizer, Palin went full-bore suck on Katie Couric. It is a stark measure of Palin's abject worthlessness as a reasonable candidate for office, when Katie Couric comes off like a justifiably aggrieved Rhodes scholar.

Couric: Have you ever been involved in any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

Palin: We have trade missions back and forth, we do. It's very important when you consider even national security issues with Russia. As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It's Alaska. It's just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there, they are right next to our state.

Certainly Fredo's stubbed-toe syntax has kept us all in stitches lo these many years, but in spite of his best efforts you can usually at least dope out the general thread of what he's trying to say in his inimitable way. But I'll be damned if I can tell what Palin is saying here. "As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go?" I honestly have no idea what that is supposed to mean.

Notice also that Couric asked her a fairly simple yes-or-no question there. Either Palin has been personally involved in diplomatic negotiations with figures in the Russian government, or she hasn't. It's a clear pattern with how Palin dodges and obsfuscates simple questions, mad-libbing her way into nonsensical blather.

COURIC: Why isn’t it better, Governor Palin, to spend $700 billion helping middle-class families who are struggling with health care, housing, gas and groceries? Allow them to spend more, and put more money into the economy, instead of helping these big financial institutions that played a role in creating this mess?

PALIN: That’s why I say I, like every American I’m speaking with, we're ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it’s got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade — we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation.

Jesus. What in the fuck is she talking about, seriously? None of these sentences mean anything. As everyone else has noted, this is that Miss Teen Vegetable South Carolina dingbat all over again, except Miss Teen Vegetable isn't auditioning to run the freakin' country. Palin has yet to give a substantive answer in an actual interview thus far, this being 0-for-2 (no, Hannity's hair doesn't count, unless you're Colmes -- and by God, why would you be that?). So she's incoherent, and she lies like a bearskin rug, which makes her an ideal successor to Bush.

And yet, her newfound fans still lurve them some Sarah. She's standing up to the librul media, babbling incoherently for all of them, man, speaking for the little guy, or the small town, or something.

Bollocks. If anything, this assumption that people who live in small-towns always speak and think in butt-simple, unsophisticated platitudes is much more condescending than what the supposed elitists conjure up.