Category Archives: Media

UPDATED: Dumb Distaff (Dastardly Too)

Ethics, Feminism, General, Human Accomplishment, Intelligence, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Morality, Republicans

Show me a Democratic commentator that is as studiously dumb as the Republican Lolita, SE Cupp. Cupp generally limits herself to gesturing wildly, grimacing, or portentously parroting the same mind-numbing banalities previously disgorged by Newt, Dick, Karl, et. al.

Now Cupp is getting bolder and venturing into political economy. On Dylan Ratigan’s confused, MSNBC show, Cupp insisted that when you give corporations bailout money, and they then blow the cash abroad, this is an example of the free market at work. Live with it!

I don’t want to do an injustice to the smug Republican sweetheart, so I will try to post the clip if it comes online. Please send it along if you find it before me.

If you have heard of anything resembling the caliber of Cupp’s cretinism, please post it together with a hyperlink to the story. Proof is paramount.

I want your most outrageous and hilarious clips of what rolls off the tongues of TV’s female talkers.

I’ll kick off the competition with two other examples of cerebral pruning:

Exhibit B: “How do you know there is going to be an economic recovery,” Greta Van Susteren asked GOP dummy, Dana Perino. “There always is; these things go in cycles,” squeaked the Heidi Klum of the commentariat.

Exhibit C: Together with another member of the silly sex, usually blond, Margaret Hoover forms Bill O’Reilly’s “Culture Warriors.” Some time ago she joined her host to damn the Obama administration’s decision to cease “criminalizing cancer and AIDS patients for using a substance that is (a) prescribed by their doctors and (b) legal under the laws of their state.”

According to Hoover’s calculus, once you decriminalize a drug, criminal enterprise corners the market.

Toots, it’s exactly the opposite. It’s a hard concept, but the section “THE COSTS OF ILLEGAL MARKETS,” in “Addicted To The Drug War,” may help. On the other hand, don’t hold your breath.

In order for your snippet to be posted in BAB’s Comments Section, your Brilliant Babe must be a member of the punditocracy, Democrat or Republican; She cannot be a politician. Those are the rules. Hyperlinks to your story are a must.

UPDATED (Oct. 5): Huggs hereunder feels real sorry for idiots who are rewarded for their misleading stupidity and avarice. Some of these dames have sent even sillier boys to their deaths with their warring words. Huggins commits the sin of the ages. “Job: Jewish Individualist” speaks to those. The righteous suffer; the wicked reap the spoils of their cunning and cupidity. And this you want to reward with love?

What a perversion is that?

If you wish to love the wicked, at least make sure that the righteous are rewarded equally for their good works.

Contemporary parallels to Job’s individualism are hard to come by, not least because the State has replaced God as the ultimate authority. Other than principled libertarians, nobody challenges the god of government in any meaningful way. Our Delphic oracles are the pundits and assorted self-styled presstitutes. Their Delphi is the TV on which they primp, preen and parrot party falsehoods.

UPDATE II: My Oppression Is Bigger Than Yours (Postmodernisms)

Education, English, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Multiculturalism, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

“Self-anointed Jewish leadership,” I wrote “has managed to cast Jews as a mere faction among a multicultural mob, a position Jews (being liberals) love.”

That describes Jon Stewart—who is a member of the liberal, Jewish glitterati—and his fight with a CNN reptilian brain by the name of Rick Sanchez.

FoxNews:

Sanchez said that Stewart is bigoted toward “everybody else that’s not like him.” He said Stewart “can’t relate to what I grew up with,” saying his family had been poor and he had seen prejudice directed at his father.
Sanchez dismisses it when Dominick points out that Stewart, who is Jewish, is also a minority.
“I’m telling you that everyone who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they, the people in this country who are Jewish, are an oppressed minority?” Sanchez said, adding a sarcastic “yeah.”
“I can’t see someone not getting a job these days because they’re Jewish,” he said.

I stopped watching Stewart long ago. However, I have never heard him refer to himself in other than a self-deprecating tone. In fact when, in 2005, the barbarians of the banlieusard were rioting in France, Stewart mocked his status as an “alienated” minority thus: “Do you know what it’s like to be sent to a Christian school every Passover with a hardboiled egg?” (Italians would have similar stories of “survival.”)

Eeny, meeny, miny, moe: whose side am I on here? I’ll go with the the Jew, just because he’s brainier than the other oaf. I’m glad Rick is gone, but look who the dog dragged in instead: “Put evil and supercilious together and what do you get? ‘Parker Spitzer.'”

YAWN.

UPDATE (Oct. 2): THE STEWART INSTITUTION. I’ve changed my mind about this weighty matter (NOT) currently occupying the debtor nation’s news headlines: I’m now on the side of Sanchez. I believe that the ratings for his “Ricks’ List” show were good (for CNN, at least). Why fire him if this is the case? Besides, a slight against Jon Stewart: Is that enough to get you fired? Perhaps I’ll change my mind again, as is my wont when such a hugely important issue is at hand.

Ridiculous, isn’t it?!

UPDATE II (Oct. 3): ALEX AND THE POSTMODERNISTS. Young Alex is a long-time friend of BAB and contributor to my blog. His trials and tribulations are familiar to this writer. I have known Alex to be brash, on occasion. But he is nothing like the typical millennial I’ve described in “Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult And Dispensable,” and who I encounter in my professional dealings. These are horrible, hubristic youths, egged on to heights of narcissistic grandiosity by their infatuated, errant and idiotic (naturally) elders. In another age, in another time, Alex would be a leader. I find his plucky attitude towards his cretinous tutors to be inspiring. Older men participating on this blog should support this young man, and any like him.

For heaven’s sake Alex, when do you complete your interminable degree? The sooner you qualify and go out and do what the dead wood can’t do; the better you’ll be. You’re mired in an intellectual cesspool.

Alex asked about critical race theory, an artificial, political construct with which the postmodernists in the academy rape reality, art, literature and music and roger western culture, in general. We’ve discussed these matters before, so I am reproducing an earlier blog post titled “Avoid The American English Department”:

It is old news that the academy has been contaminated by postmodernism.

For example, academic historians and their acolytes have worked overtime to replace the impartial, non-ideological study of American history and its heroic figures with “history from below.” This postmodern tradition regularly produces works the topics of which include, “Quilting Midwives during the Revolution.” Or, “Hermaphrodites and the Clitoris in Early America.”

As you well imagine, the libidinized annals of the “Hermaphrodites and the Clitoris in Early America” is not flying off the printing presses.

The deconstruction of fields of study has engulfed universities, not sparing the hard sciences. Women’s Studies courses and English departments are most likely to be littered with the ideology’s lumpen jargon. There, text is routinely deconstructed and shred. Subjected to this “academic” acid, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and T. S. Eliot are whittled down to no more than ruling class oppressors, their artistry reduced to the bare bones of alleged power relationships in society.

Easily the worst offender is the American English Department. Phyllis Schlafly wrote the following in “Advice To College Students: Don’t Major in English”:

“In the decades before ‘progressive’ education became the vogue, English majors were required to study Shakespeare, the pre-eminent author of English literature. The premise was that students should be introduced to the best that has been thought and said.”

“What happened? To borrow words from Hamlet: ‘Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.’ Universities deliberately replaced courses in the great authors of English literature with what professors openly call ‘fresh concerns,’ ‘under-represented cultures,’ and ‘ethnic or non-Western literature.’ When the classics are assigned, they are victims of the academic fad called deconstructionism. That means: pay no mind to what the author wrote or meant; deconstruct him and construct your own interpretation, as in a Vanderbilt University course called ‘Shakespearean Sexuality,’ or ‘Chaucer: Gender and Genre’ at Hamilton College. …”

“Twenty years ago, University of Chicago Professor Allan Bloom achieved best-seller lists and fame with his book The Closing of the American Mind. He dated the change in academic curricula from the 1960s when universities began to abandon the classic works of literature and instead adopt multicultural readings written by untalented, unimportant women and minorities.”

“Bloom’s book showed how the Western canon of what educated Americans should know – from Socrates to Shakespeare – was replaced with relativism and the goals of opposing racism, sexism and elitism. Current works promoting multiculturalism written by women and minorities replaced the classics of Western civilization written by the DWEMs, Dead White European Males.”

“Left-wing academics, often called tenured radicals, eagerly spread the message, and students at Stanford in 1988 chanted ‘Hey hey, ho ho, Western civ has got to go.’ The classicists were cowed into silence, and it’s now clear that the multiculturalists won the canon wars.”

“Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton have been replaced by living authors who toe the line of multicultural political correctness, i.e., view everything through the lens of race, gender and class based on the assumption that America is a discriminatory and unjust racist and patriarchal society. The only good news is that students seldom read books any more and use Cliffs Notes for books they might be assigned.”

[SNIP]

In its December 12, 2008 issue, the Times Literary Supplement has some fun at the expense of a pompous graduate of this pathetic tradition. The incomprehensibility factor, as they call it:

“Once the habit of writing comprehensible English has been unlearned, it can be difficult to reacquire the knack. Here is an example of a sentence which purports to be written in English, but which, we propose, is incomprehensible to all but a few. It is taken from Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting time and space in narrative fiction by Hilary P. Dannenberg”:

Historical counterfactuals in narrative fiction frequently take an ontologically different form in which the counterfactual premise engenders a whole narrative world instead of being limited to hypothetical inserts embedded in the main actual world of the narrative text.

About Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park Dannenberg the dolt writes that it “undertakes a more concerted form of counterfactualizing, in which both the character and the narrator separately map out counterfactual versions of the concluding phase of the novel’s love plot.”

In studied contempt, the TLS marvels that Coincidence and Counterfactuality “is published by the University of Nebraska Press. Just think: someone read the book and endorsed its publication, someone edited it, someone else set it in type, designed a cover, compiled an index, read the proofs—yet hardly anyone can understands what’s in it.”

Now that’s good, clear English everyone gets.

A good friend of mine, also a fine and successful novelist, relates this amusing incident:

“I once got hired by the U of Chicago to edit their academic press. The manuscripts were atrocious. I could not understand what was written, and used a red pen heavily in the margins of the manuscripts. After my corrections arrived, I was fired immediately. They told me I was not ‘intellectually sophisticated’ enough for the job. To which I replied: ‘You’re right: Fuck you.'”

Would I have, like my friend, responded so confidently and cleverly, as our reader suggests? I don’t think so. I’d probably become defensive, and return an analytical evisceration, which would have been wasted on the these literary offenders. My friend’s repartee is much more effective: it’s economical and intellectually apt, given its targets.

O’Keefe Antics, Again

Journalism, Media, Republicans

Among the many dumb things Republicans have given us (read “GOP and Man at Yale”) is a brand of tease “journalism” headed by Hannah Giles, a well-connected, monosyllabic, Town-Hall tartlet, who partook in an ACORN-exposing (tush-wagging) operation. Her partner (he played the pimp) was James O’Keefe, who, it transpires, is even dumber than Hannah.

O’Keefe’s latest antics include a “plot”

to embarrass a CNN correspondent by recording a meeting on hidden cameras aboard a floating “palace of pleasure” and making sexually suggestive comments, e-mails and a planning document show.
James O’Keefe, best known for hitting the community organizing group ACORN with an undercover video sting, hoped to get CNN Investigative Correspondent Abbie Boudreau onto a boat filled with sexually explicit props and then record the session, those documents show.
The plan apparently was thwarted after Boudreau was warned minutes before it was supposed to happen.

MORE TO MAKE YOU YAWN HERE.

Growing GOP Menagerie Of Morons (The Bristol Bump And Grind)

Ethics, Media, Morality, Pop-Culture, Relatives, Republicans, Sarah Palin, The Zeitgeist

I have long argued in this space that Republican women, with two exceptions, are either vulgar or vacuous, and sometimes both. We’re approaching a critical mass of evidence.

Bristol Palin is yet another exhibit in the GOP menagerie of morons. Granted, she is not a Republican, but she is closely allied with a prominent GOPer. With respect to Bristol’s bump and grind routine on “Dancing With The Stars,” allow me to apply a line often applied in such emergencies by the one-and-only Joan Rivers:

Bristol, I don’t need to see your v-gina.

At the same time that Bristol bared her chubby thighs, Katherine Schwarzenegger—who, like Meghan McMoron, is indubitably a Democrat at heart like her parents— used the celebrity of her mom and dad to launch a career in “journalism.” More bad, banal books to crowd out the good.

Still, as contemptible and unethical as this celebrity career path is (a path trodden by the silver-haired, silver-spooned Anderson Vanderbilt Cooper), you have to admit that young Schwarzenegger looks like a sweetie (and ever-so pretty) compared to her Republican cohort.

For grotesque, nothing beats Meghan McCain and her appendages.