Emergency Preparedness

I guess we should all just consider ourselves lucky that Fatboy was playing golf (surprise, I know) when the false alarm was sounded, otherwise we might have had thermonuclear war declared via Twitter tantrum. Really builds confidence in the system.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the "Leader" of the Free World

Some places refer to HRH Emperor Snowflake Fuckface von Clownstick by his given name and official title. "Respect for the office" or some such bullshit, as if he has ever shown any respect for the fucking office.

Here's reason #1,359,277 why I will never refer to him as such, ever. He retweeted that the other day, but he cries like the LITTLE BITCH that he is every time someone does something similar about him. Fuck him, and fuck his dipshit supporters that, no matter their meaningless demurrals, support this kind of nonsense as well.

There are no two ways about this -- Snowflake/Clownstick is an embarrassment to this country. He's a miserable whiny cunt, and a horrible excuse for a human being. It's going to take a generation just to get rid of the shame of having this piece of shit in charge of anything more complicated than an ice cream truck.

So. What's it gonna be, 'murka? Tired of having a disgrace run the place? Are we motivated enough to get off our lazy asses and actually show up to the voting booth next time, and every time?

I don't just blame the dipshit deplorables for putting this fucking fool in a position of power -- I blame every putative "liberal" and "progressive" who just couldn't stomach voting for her, who both-sided the choice until they lost all rational perspective, or just took it all for granted because the retard pollsters insisted she had this in the bag.

You know why they insisted that she had it in the bag? Because no rational person could conceive of a situation in which enough people were stupid enough to vote for a lifelong three-card monte huckster. It's that simple. The majority assumed that the moron minority was smaller than it actually was. No one wanted to believe there are so many dumbasses in one place, that they can't see the craven misogyny, projection, and outright incompetence that fills every pore of Snowflake's fat diaper-clad body.

I said this shortly after the election, and it still stands:  liberals who were paying attention were forced to decide whether the nation was in the process of becoming something we no longer recognized, or whether it simply reinforced what it has always been in so many respects.

Either you side with college-turd tiki-torch suburbo-nazis, or you don't. Either you side with fat militia cosplay wannabes toting assault weapons, or you don't. Either you side with a fat, dementia-addled old man who rage-tweets his dumps and routinely retweets sentiments from "white genocide" types and wishes physical harm on those who oppose him, or you don't. I don't like the window-breaking antifa types, nor do I care for the trigger-warning campus speech police. But I'll take a hundred of them every day of the week over a single one of these endlessly projecting crybaby hypocrites.

And I sincerely hope that every one of them gets what's coming to them, which is a continuation -- an acceleration, in fact -- of all the circumstances that drove them into the arms of a con man.

The Continuing Adventures of Florida Man

Good luck to everyone in Florida with one hurricane barreling through and another on its way, although there's a good chance that Irma and Jose will take plenty of morons with them.

Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

So there's a lot of cautiously optimistic crowing about the near-miss by the Democratic candidate in the KS-04 House special election to replace new CIA director Mike Pompeo. And there's definitely some good to be observed from this -- where Pompeo retained the seat by a 2:1 margin just six months ago, GOP turd-burglar Ron Estes comparatively squeaked by, 52.5-45.7%. A seven-percent margin, just six months after a thirty-point margin, is certainly noteworthy, especially for a district along the Kansas-Oklahoma border, where the spread at the top of the ticket was roughly the same. And the Goopers pushed hard on this one in the homestretch, with robocalls from Clownstick and his beady-eyed sidekick.

And yet, it must also be mentioned that in the end totals, this was eminently winnable. In the 2016 election, Democratic challenger Daniel Giroux racked up 81,495 votes against Pompeo, while in Tuesday's special election, James Thompson got only 55,310, and Estes received 63,505 votes. We all get that "off-year" and "special" elections get lower attendance, but I guess my question is -- especially given the current circumstances -- why?

Presumably every one of the 81,495 people who voted for Daniel Giroux also voted for Hillary Clinton, and therefore were dismayed by the unlikely ascension of Grampa Walnuts and his ever-changing daily word salad. If only 80% of those people could have mustered themselves to show up to something that takes just a few minutes, it would have been a yuge finger in the eye of this dumpster fire of an administration.

What does it take to motivate people to fucking show up? Do they need a pat on the back, a fucking parade for doing the least bit of engagement to be imposed on a (hopefully) informed citizenry? Seriously, this is the same reason Obama's terms ended up being largely ineffective and ultimately derailed -- because a significant chunk of these lazy fucks don't show up for the midterms. They take it all for granted that Somebody Else Will Do It For Them, and then they're just shocked that Sam Brownback gets re-elected to gut state services some more, that the most inept con-man grifter in recent memory gets the top spot to loot and pillage to his shriveled heart's content.

I'm glad Thompson gave Estes a run for his money and made it close, and I hope he builds on that momentum by throwing in for the regular election in eighteen months, and spends that entire time becoming Estes' worst ankle-biter, tethering him to an increasingly unpopular chief executive and his nepotistic clusterfuck of an administration. And Tom Perez better stake him with plenty of money and support. That's the only way to root out the entrenched scumbags, and put an end to their hypocritical holy war.

But none of it matters if these lazy fucktards don't fucking show up. Ignorance is neither an excuse nor an option. Every single one of these dumbasses can conjure up maps and restaurant reviews and whatever the hell else they want in seconds on their phone. They can sure as fuck take a minute once in a while and check in on the world of people who run their world.

Or not, and then they can get more of the same, while it all swirls down the drain. If Tom Perez wants to send me some cash, I will be more than happy to head out to twine country and smack them upside the head. Here is the day of the election, do you have fifteen minutes to spare that day and do one thing for your country, maybe take a break from uploading pictures of your malformed genitals to Tinder?

I think we all have a touch of nihilism, and mostly I've engaged in the usual sarcastic variety, but the last 12-18 months has stripped away much of the sarcasm, and left a core of really wanting the fucking meteor to hit. And it's stupid shit like this that explains why -- because it doesn't have to be that way, because the little things do affect the larger things, because the people most likely to be adversely affected also seem to be the most indifferent and apathetic. And I'll be goddamned if I can figure out why that is.

This Week In Fuck 'em

It's always sad when a family gets busted up for no good reason, even worse when that family seems to be nice, hard-working, well-liked in their community. But again, it's impossible to generate any sympathy for this dingbat. He told you what he planned to do, and now he's doing it. You chose to believe that the arbitrary classifier of "bad hombres" was something that he either knew or cared about.

Same thing with this fool; in fact, Kraig Moss might be an even less sympathetic character than Helen Beristain. This guy is just too much. I don't want to minimize the tragedy of him losing his 24-year-old son to a heroin overdose, it's too awful to fathom. But Moss attended 45 rallies, heard all the lies, the chants, the nasty hateful rhetoric from the cheeto and the mob alike. He was down with Locking Her Up and Building The Wall. But now he finds himself betrayed on the issue that he cares about, and the whole deal is off.

We're all tired of these "what are they thinking" stories; this is just a different flavor, a close cousin to those tedious ass-spelunking expeditions the scriveners take out to Real 'murka to get the pulse o' the people. I have a feeling we're going to be seeing more of this particular flavor of buyers' remorse, of Leopards Eating People's Faces Party voters shocked and dismayed that their face is getting eaten by leopards.

(Which is unfair to leopards, who are as majestic and noble creatures as you are likely to find. Hyenas are a much more appropriate comparison to the "movement" Clownstick and his cult followers represent. Or dung beetles, if dung beetles could attack people.)

These stories are meant to elicit a reaction of either contempt or pity, but it's hard to feel either of those things for either of those people. Mostly it's difficult to know what the fuck to make of them.

Helen Beristain is an immigrant herself, married an illegal immigrant who had already been popped once. She understood the stakes, and yet she chose to cast her lot with the reality teevee clown known primarily for colorful, self-serving lies, dismal treatment of women, ripping off contractors and shareholders, and being cut off from borrowing from any of the commercial banks in New York, despite having his own skyscraper literally on the same street as some of them. Her dopey, mewling nonsense shows that she still hasn't learned anything from this.

Kraig Moss is a different breed of rube -- he quit his business, stopped paying his mortgage, gutted the interior of his house, and followed the Chump Train around the country with his stupid songs, like a dipshit hippie following the Grateful Dead in a haze of bong-water mist and patchouli oil. The old joke about cons is that in a short con, the mark gives the con man all the money he has in his pocket right then and there; in the long con, the mark goes home and sells all his shit and heads back to give the proceeds from that to the con man as well.

They're nothing but marks, and there will be more to come, and it's damn near impossible to give much of a shit. I'm honestly surprised they aren't previous customers of Chump University, because they're exactly the type.

May Bury

The anthropological perambulations continue apace:

If only the real Mount Airy, which has experienced decades of economic and social decline, were like the Mayberry facade, muses Mayor David Rowe. If only his city and the rest of America could return to the 1950s again.

“Now it’s about secular progressivism, not the values you get out of this book,” such as honesty and hard work, said Rowe, 72, jabbing his finger at the leather Bible on his office desk.

Ah, yes, the values, like genocide, slavery, subjugation, God and Satan using a man's life and family as a wager. Look, the Bible has many fine ideas in it, but they make up maybe 10% of the entire doorstop. Very rarely do you ever hear any of these god-bothering simps reciting the Beatitudes or even the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule, or conveying how those bedrock values inform their political decisions, and the natural repercussions of those decisions.

Obamacare was certainly flawed, but after eight years of yammering about it and dozens of symbolic votes to repeal it, the ruling party has nothing -- not even bullet points of an outline of a plan. Which means that they're either going to leave it alone or replace it with something even worse. Like, say, nothing at all. How you like them apples, Goober?

There's something ineffably sad and pathetic about towns like these, constantly trying to recapture a fictional past -- in this case, quite literally a fictional past. Many of the "Mayberry" buildings in Mount Airy are mocked-up replicas, constructed to buttress a dying tourist gag meant to preserve the ersatz legacy of a teevee show that went off the air in 1968, and whose eponymous star left town and never returned. This empty nostalgia is killing the nation, slowly but surely, especially when it's the usual bullshit about how great it was when those people knew their place and wore their pants properly.

These meatheads whine about Obama sending their jobs to Mexico, while they champion a race-baiting goon who brags about all the stuff he makes, yet he makes nothing in 'murka. They should not be too surprised to find that they've been sold yet another bill of goods, this time by someone most people saw coming up the road a long time ago.

Cheatos

I still don't place a lot of stock in the idea that Russia's hacking actually swayed the election, as opposed to simply swaying the already stupid and complicit corporate media. It's unclear that they did much more than we routinely do in any number of countries, and always have.

Fuck these people anyway, with their "sour grapes" and "crybabies" comments, because we all know full well that had there been this much of a hint of Russian interference and she had won, these exact same morons would be griping and whining to anyone within earshot about how they wuz robbed. And, you know, good job by the stenographers -- 'scuse me -- reporters in not asking them such a question. Heaven forbid anyone challenges the intellectual fraud of real 'murkins.

Who wants to break it to them that in avoiding a corrupt scumbag, they voted for a corrupt scumbag, and they're still destined to die, broke, angry, and dumb as they ever were?

Thin Skin Is In

Nothing more hilarious than an e-beef between two sorta-famous morons. On the one hand, this rapper I've never heard of needs to stop believing everything she reads in The Onion before going off on how someone needs to get gang-banged; on the other hand, it's almost pathetically charming to watch Sarah Palin act like she's the only public figure to have ever been maligned and treated rudely. Has she heard what some of the folks in her own party routinely say about the current president? Oh, that's right, as often as not, she's leading that pack.

The Beautiful People

One of the more bemusing, played-out memes in this wondrous clusterfuck of a nation is what you might call the "what's wrong with 'murka" schtick, the tired-ass notion that if only kids were beaten more, forced to pray in school, and we had the Ten Commandments posted at every stoplight, the way it all useta be, we'd be better off.

The subtext is that the reason "those people" don't know their place, whether it's uppity knee-grows or smartass teenagers, is because now you have cameras everywhere to record when nutjob cops go off on them in, say, a classroom.

The reflexive counter to that is to point out that anyone supporting that dumbass cop in the South Carolina classroom is the problem. (More to the point, I know at least two people who have been to state prison, who vocally support that dumbass school cop. Talk about complete cognitive dissonance.) And indeed, they're part of the overall problem.

But it's really people like this who are the fucking problem -- a dopey second-grader being pimped by her star-fucking parent for an assclown pretending to run for office. Why am I supposed to care what this kid thinks about anything, much less the complex issues that make up politics? They're after "publicity"? For what? There's nothing interesting about them, other than that the mother needs to do a better job coaching up her seven-year-old on what to say and how to say it, and the sign is wrong. It's MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, dummy. The AGAIN is there for a REASON, dammit.

"Reality" teevee has utterly ruined what culture this country might have had, not just because of the ubiquity of it all, but because of the genre's preening insistence on taking completely mediocre people with no discernible talent whatsoever, and putting them in front of us until we know their names and faces. They are, by the current definition, famous at that point.

The best we can hope for at this point is that their scheme goes awry when mom is caught on video blowing a security guard to get into a Trump speaking engagement, and the kid ends up in -- wait for it -- public school. Yes, I would like fries with that.

Dipshits On Parade

Is the Westburble Batshit Cult still a thing, and how many of these inbred assholes could there possibly be since Crazy Grampa shuffled off to the lowest ring of hell?

It's too bad they probably don't pay much attention to the internets, because as polarized as America is on most issues, aside from ISIS and child rapists, we're pretty much all in agreement on the WBC. There can't be much reward in being part of a dopey club with a couple dozen members, whose main activity is pissing on the graves of combat veterans, and thus is reviled by literally everyone else.

Even people who hate Joe Biden despise the WBC way more. They're a bunch of idiot cocksuckers; their patriarch is smoking Satan's pole and getting spit-roasted (in the porn sense) by his dark minions for all eternity. If they had any goddamned self-respect they'd pull a fucking Jonestown already. No one would miss them, and they'd get their fondest wish -- to meet their "creator", a being who apparently had nothing better to do but shit out cretins, spiteful morons who literally do nothing but defile their fellow citizens, people who have more guts and integrity in every atom of their being than the entire WBC could ever dream about.

It's just a shame no one's convinced them to do the right thing yet. In the meantime, we'll all say a silent prayer that at the next vet funeral they picket, some of the bikers who help block their view finally lose their shit and go on a rampage.

Anatomy Lesson

Here's Idaho's tax dollars at, uh, "work":

On Monday, Idaho's House State Affairs Committee debated a bill that would prevent doctors from prescribing abortion pills unless they had met the patient in person. The bill passed through committee, but only after one member asked "if a woman can swallow a small camera for doctors to conduct a remote gynecological exam."

No, the esteemed maroon in question is not in sixth grade, but is in fact 63 years of age, according to his Wikipedia page. That there's a special breed of stupid, folks. It's like he has a bet with Louie Gohmert and Steve Doocy to see who can get away with being the biggest dipshit. At any rate, nicely done, Idaho. Does this guy write his bill proposals in crayon?

Cabin Fever

The Benghazi fever can probably be cured with more cowbell, but honestly, why bother or worry? This is one of those pointless things that will convert or motivate absolutely no one; statistically, there is virtually no living human who is going to look at this ongoing handjob and say to themselves, "Self, I was going to vote for the Democratic candidate in these here midterms, but because of the vague, unfounded speculations surrounding the Benghazi attack, I'm going to go right ahead and vote against my rational self-interest, and endorse the red-assed baboon that the Republicans are running. While I'm at it, I'll just hit myself in the head with a hammer or a large rock for a while."

But hey, whatever. Look, instead of griping about the ludicrous idiocy of the House Republicans, maybe start running some viable candidates and putting some real money behind them. I mean, Darrell Issa is not really Jesus H. Christ, he just thinks he is.

Mommie Dearest

It's easy (and accurate) to pick on the spate of  "celebrity" (or used to be) mothers who write books chock-full o' "parenting" and "lifestyle" advice, usually nonsense about vaccines and toilet training. Mostly these things are just the artifacts of a desiccated cultural landscape, where wealthy, pampered dingbats can preach to the peons about lives of "simplicity" and such.

But what we really should be curious about is, what sort of moron purchases and reads these things? Who are these simpletons out there that think Jenny McCarthy has better ideas about how to raise their children than, hell, just about anyone else on the planet? How does the chick from Clueless show up on the short lists of mothers and mothers-to-be (not to be overly sexist, but I promise you, right here, right now, that no man on the planet is buying any of these books) as a repository of sound advice?

Seriously, now. The problem is not solely that this "advice" comes from people who have, for the most part, lived cosseted lives away from the working-two-jobs-to-survive, one-paycheck-from-the-street reality that most people live. It's that "living well," contra received dingbat wisdom, really does cost more. Good food and good health care, the immediate vitals, cost more. All the ancillary things that add to a quality of life -- roads, schools, jobs, activities, etc. -- those things cost more, because you get what you pay for.

This is what happens when you have a population that is willfully illiterate and innumerate. There are too many people who can no longer parse statistical data, tell it apart from mere anecdata. There are a preponderance of folks out there who cannot critically think, who are simply too lazy to read up on how many different ways the "anti-vax" legends have been debunked.

Worst of all, this is what happens when you have a swath of people out there who can barely find their intemellectual asses in a dark room with both hands and a flashlight, but will hang their hopes and opinions on someone they've heard of, some D-lister who was on that show a million years ago, or who used to be famous for showing her tits. (Five years ago, my response to Surgeon General McCarthy would simply have been, "shut up and take your top off," but she's been so heavily sculpted and botoxed at this point, it would be like looking at a plastic fuck doll.)

Really, much to the chagrin of this bullshit "parenting and lifestyle" industry, you do not need a parenting book at all. Maybe good old Dr. Spock if you really must, but so much of it is just common sense. Apparently Voltaire was an optimist on that count.

Having children is one of the things humans do better and more than just about anything else they do; rearing children is simply a matter of considering their interests at the same or higher level than your own. Looking to some useta-be-famous name for help is just a failure of attention and thought.

Idiocracy

Remember, the premise of the prescient classic Idiocracy was that morons would outbreed smart people. Folks, I give you Exhibits A through Z. These people should get no jail time, but be forcibly sterilized.

Same Old Trip It Was Back Then

In the week since Philip Seymour Hoffman's untimely demise, I find myself taken aback by two entirely predictable sentiments:  one, the obvious sadness of a vibrant talent squelched in its prime; and two, the small but noticeable segment of know-it-all commenters around the internets who feel comfortable in judging Hoffman's final actions.

Perhaps we've all become inured to the jabber of various internets morons, but still, one holds out hope that once in a great while, some of these bozos find occasion to do something more productive, like jerking off, or eating mayonnaise straight from the jar. But of course, there's always a pocket of dipshits who can feign outrage and indignation over any little thing, no matter how little it actually affects them.

People are welcome to agree to disagree over whether addiction is a clinical or a behavioral disease; perhaps, like homosexuality, there are different factors of causation. So for some it may be biological, some environmental, or some combination. The idea that complete strangers and onlookers can somehow intuit what Hoffman's problem was is ludicrous. Hopefully, given the man's body of work, everyone can at least agree that this was a man of prodigious talent and artistic courage, given that he had very few true commercial successes -- indeed, for the most part, commerce did not seem to factor into most of his role choices.

It's a common trope that the "artistic temperament," as it were, leaves one more open to issues of substance abuse. You can probably chicken-egg that one to the end of time, trying to figure out which is causal or effectual. I can tell you firsthand, from my long-ago years of slugging it out as a dive-bar musician, that it's not always as simple (as opposed to easy) as it might appear. A touring musician's life is certainly not torture, but it's also not a picnic, and a steady diet of fast food, alcohol, speed, and random women can, to say the least, be dissociative after a while.

For a successful stage and film actor, it must be several orders of magnitude past what I saw and experienced in my decade on the road. Film shoots, from what I've always read, are intensive, weeks or months of long days, frequently in strange locations, hours of tedium in between short bursts of activity. And any time you're on a stage, in front of an audience, your task, whether you're an actor, musician, or cat juggler, is to get a roomful of (possibly hostile or at least indifferent) complete strangers to like you.

Like most fans, I feel sad for the brilliant future work we will no longer get to experience from Philip Seymour Hoffman, just as I wonder what sort of magic Jimi Hendrix or Randy Rhoads would have produced had they not died tragically young. And fortunately the dumbass detractors seem to be a minority, albeit an obnoxious one. Sometimes it's just best to murmur a hope of peace for Hoffman and his family and friends, and move along, and hopefully one day those folks will find something better to do than piss on someone's grave for no good reason.

Crime and Dumbishment

You know, I was going to sarcastically/rhetorically ask if Aaron Hernandez is, like, borderline retarded or what, having pulled off the easiest-to-solve crime since a herd of goats all suddenly had Louie Gohmert's DNA on them.

But then I recalled, "Oh yeah, Hernandez was a Gator, and a teammate of Tebow's at that!" Which automatically makes him the sort of guy who needs mnemonic devices to get his underwear on in the right direction. Brown in back, yellow in front, and all that.

Seriously though, you read the breakdown of this crime, and the trail of breadcrumbs and derp left for the cops to follow, and you come away wondering if Hernandez, or anyone in his Connecticut onionhead posse, ever even heard of Law & Order, or CSI, or fucking Mannix for chrissake. It's as if these people have never seen a movie or teevee show or read a goddamned crime novel, like ever. No, let's all text each other, and go pick up this poor cuss at 2:30 AM with his sister watching, and take him back to where there's a bunch of fucking surveillance cameras. Because no one tracks phone calls or films shit anymore, amirite?

And this was in Bahhhston, did a terrorist incident happen there just weeks ago that was tracked and solved within hours, or did we all fucking dream it?

Jesus, and people give Tebow a hard time about shit. Tell you this right now, folks -- there's no fucking way Tebow isn't at least 50 IQ points ahead of a drooling moron like Hernandez. Cops live for stupid criminals, because they make the job that much easier. Hernandez just made their year.

And from the football side of things, I've been watching the game pretty regularly for going on 40 years now, and I don't know if I've ever seen such a radical reversal of fortune hit a team so suddenly. This time last year, the Patsies had a dream tandem of tight ends in Hernandez and Rob Gronkowski, had dumped a ton of money on both to compensate them for their all-world stats, and looked set at the position for years to come.

Now Gronkowski is coming off of his fifth surgery in the last eight months, has a steel plate holding his forearm together (that had to have an infection cleared out of it), and now his back's jacked up. And Hernandez' terminal case of the stoopids looks to have him incarcerated for the next 20 to life.

Which leaves the Patsies with a bunch of scrubs and Tebow as their best options at TE. If someone wrote any of this in a movie script, it would be rejected as bullshit.

Oculingus

Not to make too much of a meaningless trend, or to get too misanthropic, but I kinda hope that the fear-mongering over the "trend" in eyeball-licking is real, that it really could cause eye herpes and blindness. The planet is overcrowded enough as it is, and can't start shedding morons too soon. Twenty or thirty years ago, these idiots would have been pulling vending machines on themselves, or riding shopping carts down steep flights of concrete stairs.

Raising Arizona

You can't help but appreciate when life imitates art. This is precisely whence comes the saying that stupid people shouldn't breed.

Child Abuse

So PZ Myers writes a perfectly nice, reasonable, and eminently sensible "Yes Virginia" type post, publicly directed toward a young, brainwashed little girl who needs to revisit the smug all-purpose question that Jebus-Rode-A-Dinosaur Creation "Museum" huckster Ken Ham taught her to ask. Ham taught the little girl to ask "Were you there?" in response to any information presented to her that doesn't jibe with her programming (except, presumably, biblical narratives).

Naturally, no good deed goes uncalumniated:

I had to tell you that my friend wrote on Ken's Facebook page that she knows Emma and some guy... sent my friend a PRIVATE message blasting Ken and Emma (how sweet). I didn't see the message because I didn't want to...

And so another generation arises to drink the kool-aid, and perpetuate a stunted, shriveled intellect, and waste their most precious gift of all -- the capacity to learn.

Oprah, Mencken, Mencken, Oprah

So, who wants to break it to Miss Thang that a nation of slack-jawed rubes, that has basically spent the last decade watching has-beens and never-weres sort their sock drawers on the teevee while their pockets were picked and their jobs sent to Shenzhen, is exactly dumb enough to put Sarah Palin in the White House?

Never put anything past the 'murkin public, dearie. Not only is there an abundance of assholes ready and willing to cut off their noses to spite their faces, they also seem to think that noses grow back after you cut them off. Still not sure whether that is better or worse than people waiting for Oprah to tell them what to do or read, or for Barbara Walters to tell them who the "most fascinating" people are (an annual exercise in tedium that somehow manages to exclude even marginally interesting people as a general rule).

It never ceases to be a source of amazement/amusement to me, the people who we choose (or have chosen for us) to dictate the tastes and tempo of what passes for cultural discourse. Oprah's preening dismay at La Palin would have more credibility if, you know, she hadn't had Palin on to pimp Going RougeRugRogue last year, and again with her bohunk pincushion daughter just a few months later. If you aspire to be a tastemaker, start by learning to tell the difference between soup and wastewater.

Update: This guy, who bravely took a bullet for the rest of us and read Sarah's latest two-ply scrawl, hits the nail right on the head: "There is no historical analogue in the political history of the United States because Palin is not a politician. She is Oprah for another segment of the country."

He's right. And fortunately, Palin is just smart enough to realize this, and to realize that she can make Oprah money doing that, rather than Obama money dicking around in politics. Which is a good thing, because America is just dumb enough to vote for her, given half a chance. Let the wisdom of fools trump the spiteful foolishness of mobs. Or something.