The Big Dog’s lapdogs (media) tell us that Barack Obama has embarked on a charm offensives, defined as a “publicity campaign, usually by politicians, that attempts to attract supporters by emphasizing their charisma or trustworthiness.”
But why was this “offensive” necessary? Aren’t the lapdog media sufficiently charmed? I’d say they’re positively mesmerized by The POTUS and the FLOTUS.
Here is Mrs. Obama, beautifully accoutred and nicely airbrushed on the cover of Vogue Magazine, for the second time. (She looks lovely, if I say so myself.)
A week of fawning climaxed with a red-carpet event hosted by House Republicans, who gave the Celestial One “a standing ovation,” for visiting with them for a discussion.
The retarded U.S. Sen. Susan Collins has been regaling media with chummy inside stories about the presidential food taster. He was a no-show. So, although others around him were feasting, Obama fasted.
I’m in Seth MacFarlane’s corner, despite his smarminess. The master of ceremonies at the 85th Academy Awards managed to annoy the right people.
In “Oscars’ Hostile, Ugly, Sexist Night,” Amy Davidson, an affirmative fem at the New Yorker, kvetched over the “hostility shown to women in the workplace.” The meandering Davidson was moaning about MacFarlane’s “We Saw Your Boobs” routine (I didn’t see it), and its implication:
We saw your boobs, but that’s not even what we find attractive, so you exerted no power in doing so—all you did was humiliate yourself?
Behold the sacred boob! So now if a woman strips and a man laughs he risks accusation of impropriety. Besides, women rule the work place, toots. I know men who don’t dare greet a female for fear of an harassment suit.
Another anemic New Yorker writer whined that MacFarlane insulted those Who’re Always Ready to Receive Offense.
Snivels She Who Took Offense:
MacFarlane came off as kind of a pig, as he made fun of women for being too thin, too old, too naked. How sophisticated is it to call the pretty, popular girls sluts? I had to stand up and move away when he turned his sights on the lovely black nine-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis, nominated for Best Actress. I felt sick imagining where MacFarlane might go. So when he simply made a joke about George Clooney sleeping with her down the road, I felt my body relax.
I’ve now watched “We Saw Your Boobs.” If this is indeed MacFarlane singing, he has a better voice and is more musical than all the other warblers who “sang” last night, except for Dame Shirley Bassey, of course, who can do no wrong.
Here’s her stunning, sexy, original performance of Gold Finger
As I predicted in Annual Oscar Offal, Adel did deliver a monotone. She has no range. Barbra Streisand was appalling. And I owe you an apology. I promised no Jennifer Hudson. But someone did go primal on stage. I suspect it was Hudson.
I recall that Foxman had more to say about Mel Gibson than he had about a Seattle based Jihadist, Naveed Afzal Haq. Haq murdered a Jewish woman and critically injured five other women at the downtown Jewish Federation building in 2006.
The ADL’s website issued only the tersest of statements. It made no mention of the dead, the injured, and the Muslim. A glance at the League’s site and a visitor from Deep Space might get the impression Seth MacFarlane and other marauding Christian Cossacks like him posed the greatest danger to Jewish continuity.
As I said, I caught but a glimpse of Seth MacFarlane presenting the Oscars. He was not terribly funny, but then they never are. Don’t tell me you found any of the multiple appearances of Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg the least bit amusing.
“Family Guy” is quite cute, but this MacFarlane creation has nothing on Mike Judge’s stuff. “Idiocracy” and Beavis & Butthead are sublimely smart.
MacFarlane is certainly not inJoan Rivers’ league when it comes to impropriety. If only she were unleashed on the Oscar crowd. Now that she’s old, she gets away with speaking her nimble mind.
I laughed so loud and hard at a comment she made on her reality show with Mellisa, the insipid but loving daughter, that I missed at least two more jokes. (I would not recommend watching “Joan Knows Best?”. Like all reality voyeurism, it’s junk—and a schlep, as Rivers would say.)
Ms. Rivers walked in on a football party Mellisa was throwing for her young son and his rowdy small friends. Looking on with disdain at the grubby little boys, Rivers blurted out:
The Oscar’s self-aggrandizing crowd is too much for me to stand, not even for you the reader. There will be some unfunny shtick. A precocious crappy kid will make a debut. At least one aging actor will be honored (in 2011, the distinction was Kirk Douglas’) and retired—Hollywood performs professional geronticide on the old—and hackneyed scripts filled with loud-mouthed, humorless, self-referential hedonists will abound.
The closest I’ll come to watching the 85th Academy Awards ceremony is “Fashion Police,” a sartorial send-up by Joan Rivers. She’s the only comedian and great wit who can get men to watch a program about fashion. Like me, my husband hates all “estrogen oozing” TV programing, but greatly appreciates Rivers. And rightly so. She’s lethal.
Adel’s monotone will be G-d awful, and while we will be spared Jennifer Hudson’s primal screams, Barbra Streisand will more than make up for the reprieve.
Other than lessons lost, “Les Misérables” represents great literature reduced to schmaltzy jingles, belted out by Hollywood starlets. The lesson lost: The “Les Misérables” I read as a kid was about France’s unfathomably cruel and unjust penal system, and the prototypical obedient functionary who worked a lifetime to enforce the system’s depredations. A similar power (Uncle Sam) and its enforcers recently hounded Aaron Swartz to death.
For those who care, here are the predictions. I’ve watched none of them. I’m most likely to watch “Flight” with Denzel Washington. The film got bad reviews, but I like the “disaster film genre,” although nothing will ever come close to Airport (1970) and its sequels.
Restless—I caught it on the Sundance Channel—is a BBC One production directed by Edward Hall of “MI-5” fame. With all its faults, Restless makes you realize that any British film, even a mediocre mini-series, is better than the American equivalent, big-screen productions included. (Britain retains the edge in this department.)
“After decades of indifference from America’s infotainment industry, imagine my surprise to hear TV anchors like Megyn Kelly of Fox News allude to the killing fields of South Africa.
South Africa should be in the news every day. It isn’t. Scant few among the West’s Yellow Press care to chronicle the country’s favorite blood sport: murder. The Afrikaners, in particular—arguably that country’s founding people—are being killed off at genocidal rates with nary a murmur from the media—although the same crowd is on the scene to report on Nelson Mandela’s every wheelchair-bound move.
Soon jurist Alan Dershowitz was chiming in about ‘how dangerous’ life in South Africa was. Dershowitz even denigrated the country’s judiciary as ‘a very politically correct judiciary,’ ‘filled with people from the ANC and supporters of the ANC’; most certainly ‘not one of the finer judiciaries in the world.’
A subject that had been submerged since 1994—the ramshackle state of post-apartheid South Africa—was suddenly being raised, if in veiled terms.
The reason for the heightened awareness among the criminally comatose is Blade Runner Oscar Pistorius’ run-in with the law. The Olympian amputee killed his girlfriend, model Reeva Steenkamp, in what he contends was a case of mistaken identity. …”
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