“We had two very good men, and men of faith, run for president in 2000 and 2004,” [Hillary Clinton] said. “Large segments of the electorate concluded that they did not really understand, or relate to, or respect their ways of life.”
Granted, you could argue that “large segments of the electorate” didn’t respect Kerry’s “way of life,” but I don’t think for a second you could say that about Gore. If anything, they didn’t respect the “way of life” of the President he served under and you could make the argument that hurt him in 2000. What a gaffe.
Besides that, her performance was pretty awful overall. She looked spiteful at the beginning slinging her new desperate “elitist” charges at Obama (and Kerry and Gore) and when answering the other questions she looked, for the most part, like a high schooler who didn’t study for an oral exam, padding out her answers with rambling, ill-conceived bullshit.
Obama flubbed the initial “bitter” question. His answer should have been much stronger (he had to know it was coming), but he pretty much sailed from there, sounding far more presidential, thoughtful and knowledgeable than Rodham From Day One. The crowd responded to his answers much better as well.
Big advantage to Obama, especially if his team works that Gore gaffe to their advantage.
The word “squeeb” is a crude mix of squid and dweeb, and by inventing it I mean no disrespect to the squid, which in most respects is an excellent and admirable animal. In the ocean there’s almost nothing you’d rather be than a squid, one of nature’s most perfect predators — fast, resilient, ruthless, more intelligent by leaps and bounds than your average fish, and able to squeeze into impossibly tiny cracks. In the ocean, there is no hiding from a squid, I tell you.
But on land, a squid is about as useless as it gets. It’s a spineless, squishy little hunk of seafood that wouldn’t stand a chance in a cage match with a baby squirrel. It has no heart, and its first instinct when trouble comes is to hide in a cloud of its own excretions. This is why a squiddy word like squeeb seems to me to be a good way to describe the American voter during a presidential election season.
That’s especially true now, during a “controversy” like this latest flap over Barack Obama pastor Jeremiah Wright. This Wright business is a perfect example of the American electorate at its squeeby worst — panicky, gutless, acting more on reflex than thought, incapable of retaining information for more than a few minutes at a time. It’s also a great example of how the presidential election process has become more about enforcing the attitudes of a cultural orthodoxy than a system for choosing leaders. Through scandal after idiotic scandal, the election process has become a painfully prolonged, deeply irritating exercise in policing conventional wisdom, through a variety of means keeping the public in a state of heightened, dumb animal panic, and ultimately turning the election itself into a Darwinian contest — survival of the Squeebiest.
I don’t think Clinton brining [sic] up the issue of Wright was a matter of keeping the story alive. The polls show that nearly 90% of Americans already know and have an opinion about it, that’s a done deal. Rather, Clinton was belatedly putting some needed distance between herself and Wright. [emphasis added—ed.]
Jeffrey Goldberg is a self-described “erstwhile optimist” regarding the future of the Middle East and he’s penned a well-laid-out and even-keeled nutsheller for The Atlantic about the many different ways that region can head after we threw a stink bomb into the middle of it. It’s highly recommended if you need to get your head around that mess and amidst all of that good learnin’, he’s managed to tuck in a few gems like this:
Nor were neoconservative ideologues—who had the most-elaborate visions of a liberal, democratic Iraq—interested in the Kurdish cause, or even particularly knowledgeable about its history. Just before the “Mission Accomplished” phase of the war, I spoke about Kurdistan to an audience that included Norman Podhoretz, the vicariously martial neoconservative who is now a Middle East adviser to Rudolph Giuliani. After the event, Podhoretz seemed authentically bewildered. “What’s a Kurd, anyway?” he asked me.
Neowrong, time and time again. I don’t think history will ever forgive us for turning our foreign policy over to those wrong-headed fucktards.
I’m sure by now most of you have seen the video of Tom Cruise’s mindfuckerrific ode to Scientology that’s leaked onto the web (part 2 of 6 in the YouTube player below), but there’s a lot more footage from the award ceremony and accompanying crazy available. It’s the longest blowjob Tom Cruise ever got in his life and it all ends with lusty “hip hip hoorays” directed at an oversized portrait of L. Ron Hubbard. Watch it all before the litigious Scientologists get it yanked off of YouTube.
UPDATE: Oh well, that didn’t last long. All of the videos but the well known one have been pulled and this message has been added to the censored pages: “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Church of Scientology International.” See below the fold for options on downloading AVI files of the full awards ceremony.
PROBLEM CORRECTED: All six pieces available for viewing again below.
Too funny. I love it when “good” Christians talk dirty. And I love it even more when they mix up their disgust for homosexuals and Muslims into one gooey stew of stupidity.
Chris Jones, CEO and founder of Inspirational Experiences, has returned with a new show format called “Christian Nation”, which is pretty funny because there’s absolutely no change from his previous scattered, ADD-laden format. Enjoy.
Chris finds a cereal bowl in his drawer, eats some more “Dannion” yogurt, gets a hair in his eye, and tries to pronounce “archive,” but gives up quickly.
“I recently read in Mail Call all the concern about the music festival downtown and type of people it attracted, and the option of having a Christian music festival with no alcohol being served. I have a close friend who can play Christian music so beautifully it could bring a tear to the eye of the toughest of the lot, but the problem is that he only plays Christian music when he is drunk.”
