Nothing To See Here
This is CBS News.
There’s nothing to write about this week as no one shot anyone for any politically motivated reason at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Family Research Council, a group that is obviously hateful for promoting traditional views of marriage and so couldn’t be the victim of a hate crime in the first place because they’re so hateful any hate would logically have to be coming from them and not from the person who shot them.
According to the Media Research Center, CBS News did not even bother to report the non-shooting at FRC that did not leave the building manager wounded when a man who was not carrying fifteen Chick-fil-A sandwiches in a backpack did not say “I don’t like your politics,” before not opening fire on the unarmed victim. Since the event never occurred, NBC’s Brian Williams was able to cover it in a mere 17 seconds. And one day after the shooting never happened, CNN anchor Zoraida Sambolin clarified the motivation of the non-existent event by proclaiming that FRC was “hate spewing hate,” so there was no question from which side of the gun barrel the hatred was emanating.
It’s clear therefore that the non-shooter, Floyd Corkins, was not motivated by any of the never overblown and thoroughly non-despicable non-overreactions to Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy‘s recent defense of traditional marriage. The gunman was only carrying those fifteen sandwiches because they are just. So. Unbelievably. Tasty!
Nor was the non-hate-crazed non-gunman inspired by the left-wing Southern Poverty Law Center, which has included the Family Research Council on a list of hate groups along with neo-Nazis and the Klan.
It would, of course, have been impossible for a gunman to have been inspired by left-wing hatred because left-wing people are loving and don’t hate anyone except those people who disagree with them who are hateful because the left is so loving that to oppose them is hateful. If you get my drift.
In other non-news, Vice President Joe Gaffe did not make any bidens this week, or vice versa. The lack of blithering foolishness from Biden confirmed that those who supported Sarah Palin for vice president remain stupid. If Biden had, for instance, made wildly offensive remarks about black people in a mock southern accent, or indicated he didn’t know which state he was in, or ridiculed a woman translating one of his rambling speeches into sign language, then, of course, America’s comedians would have been on the job making jokes about him. Instead, our comedians were silent on the matter because they didn’t want to imply that Joe Biden is an idiot, since that’s impossible because he’s not Sarah Palin. Who is obviously an idiot because she don’t forget to find out why Sarah Palin is bad and fill in the rest of this sentence later.
Fortunately such relatively minor non-stories as a man not inspired by hateful leftist rhetoric not shooting an unarmed man or Joe Biden not proving that Sarah Palin has more brains in her lipstick canister than he has in his head, were not there to obscure the fact that the Gross Domestic Product has been steadily falling, a major indicator that the Obama economy is an epic fail. Which is not happening either, since the networks went for six months without saying a word about it.
So we can just move along to something more important. Like Paul Ryan’s abs. Which, believe me, are happening!
[An extra hat-tip to the always brilliant gang at the Media Research Center, who are all over everything that's not going on!]
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Thumbnail image courtesy shutterstock / Deklofenak
Thank you, Mr. Klavan, thank you. If you weren’t making me smile, it’d be impossible not to be in a constant state of indignation that would make me very dangerous (particularly to myself and my public-sector job).
G-d, I miss Andrew Breitbart…
I’d make some additional Orwellian reference to always being at war with Oceania and such, but that would be superfluously superfluous (or something), so instead I’ll propose that we shamelessly rename our country to Pest Strip One, in the hopes that (akin to St. Patrick’s purported success with the plenteous Snakes of Blarney) we might see the current crop of Washingtonian pests be at long last finally driven (or at least forced to slither off under their own power) from our land.
Now Chris, you know that it was St. Barack that droves the snakes out of Ireland, not that Patrick guy. What are you, racist?
THAT is already driving me crazy. EVERYTHING is RACIST!!!!!!
They have no idea how that is already sooooooo old that overplaying THAT card is not going to win them diddly!
The generously compensated leadership of the SPLC needs some new donors, hence the new definition of hate group. After all, the ranks of those who can be riled into coughing up money by stories about fighting the long dead Klan are thinning.
Of course, this fits in really well with the nonstories of no wrongdoing by Holder’s nonjustice system, which is why so many “enlightened people love the pure, American-loving UN. Why does the name “George Orwell” keep popping into my mind?
For a creative writer, possession of the “truth” is less important than emotional sincerity.
ANDREW: You forgot to edit this sentence: “don’t forget to find out why Sarah Palin is bad and fill in the rest of this sentence later.”
When I do placeholding, I use bold or italicized text so I don’t miss it. You can delete this post when you are done. I don’t mind.
Cheers.
Er… far more likely it was deliberate, in keeping with his parody of the drippy style of the left. The standard publishing mark for placeholders is TK TK TK, which stands for To Come, deliberately mis-identified to make it stand out more.
Not all the columnists here write nearly as well as they think, but Klavan does.
Actually, this was a subtle joke. Possibly TOO subtle!
This goes to show far I was willing to take optimism. I presumed 40bus85 was being deliberately pedantic just so your subtlety was not missed by anybody.
After three layers of explanation, the possibility that someone is still missing it must be way, way down.
LOL! Well, you prove there’s room for one true pedant — also, that an idiot is just an idiot and ever-more-will-be-so. (You can, if you recognize it and are subtle and worldly enough, dance to that.) Hey, what the author says is irrelevant, right? You know better. Of course you do.
No, left wing bias from the LSM? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you!
It’s not that the LSM is biased, it’s just that they’re too busy. Right now, for example, they’re absolutely swamped “fact-checking” Niall Ferguson’s Newsweek cover piece, so that they and all their syncophants can relax knowing that it is all LIES. Not one word of truth in the whole thing. I only know this because of read it about a hundred times in the last two days.
Therefore, I will not write that the media and the administration can all be classified under the “Comical Ali” label. Soon they will announce that hundreds of Romney’s supporters are committing suicide in despair because the glorious campaign led by Hussein has smashed their imperialistic dreams.
“so we can just move along to something more important……”
Well, there is the comment yesterday from Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) about rape being legitimate. Gotta wonder if that is his “macaca” moment, remembering the stupid comment that sunk Senator George Allen’s re-election campaign back in 2006.
Or the recently disclosed skinny dipping episode in the Sea of Galilee last summer by Rep. Kevin Yoder (R-KS). Other Repub. Reps. and staffers went in partially clothed or fully clothed. It all earned a rebuke from Rep. Eric Cantor, the House Whip, who was on the trip. Who says we Republicans can’t have fun!
If you’re going to be a troll, try to be less unintentionally ironic. Even Akin’s gaffe is just garbling what he really wanted to say; he was not trying to legimatize rape. Both things you mentioned are distractions from the major news stories that are being minimized by the press; so you are just reinforcing Mr. Klavan’s point.
Can someone please provide a legitimate definition for “macaca”? I have no idea what that word means.
You may not know what a macaca is, and very frankly, I’d bet dollars to doughnuts Senator Allen didn’t, either. This is one of the reasons why he lost; if he’d known what the term meant, he wouldn’t have used it. It appears, if we believe the good folks at Wikipedia, that macaca is indeed a racial slur, and what’s worse, it’s a Belgian racial slur. By this, I do not mean that it is a slur directed at Belgians in particular or Belgium in general; Belgians are very nice people, people tell me, and they make great beer and exquisite chocolate, and they are the proud inventors of the French fry, for which gift a grateful humanity should always remain thankful. There is a great deal of medieval architecture in Belgium, or so I read in the travel books, and it rains a lot there as well, averaging 33.5 inches of rain a year, and it is cloudy for much of the year, so when you go to enjoy the beer and chocolate and see the medieval architecture, do not be surprised if the architecture is a bit soggy. I will venture to guess—I have never been to Belgium so I cannot say this for certain—that, given the abundance of precipitation, Belgium is, in all likelihood, a country with a significant mold problem. So, to return to our premise, and the reader will note that I managed to return to the premise in the same paragraph in which I left it, which I feel is indicative of a vast improvement in my digressionary skills; macaca is not a word you would use to describe a Belgian—it is a word Belgians used during their colonial past.
That Belgium has a colonial past often surprises people. The phrase, the Belgian Empire, strikes the uninformed listener as rather oxymoronic, causing the same sort of mental whiteout you might feel when hearing the terms fat-free mayonnaise or Democratic tax-cutter, and yet, strange as it might seem, there was such a thing as a Belgian empire. Belgium had one massive colony, the present day Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is the former Zaire, which is the former Congo (Kinshasa), which is the former Congo (Leopoldville), which is the former Belgian Congo, and none of which is identical with the Congo (Brazzaville), which borders the Congo and all of the aforementioned places, but was a French colony, not a Belgian one. Movie fans will remember that Brazzaville is the place where Rick and Captain Renault escaped to at the end of Casablanca, and Brazzaville is also where, in 1944, the Free French announced that French colonies could forget about independence after the end of World War II. I’ll bet they’re still chuckling about that one in Hanoi. Those French, what great kidders they are, they just slay me! We will skip over the sorry history of Belgian imperialism, which you can read about in Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, an excellent book and one that I recommend highly, and only say that the Belgians ruled the Belgian Congo in much the same way that Tony Soprano collected outstanding loans from deadbeats, except Tony didn’t slice the deadbeats’ hands off if they couldn’t come across with the vig; King Leopold and his merry band of malevolent Belgians, on the other hand, had no such qualms about cutting off the other hand, and sometimes a nose or an ear as well, just to break the monotony.
In any such venture, of course, it helps if you can convince yourself that, by virtue of your skin color or your religious beliefs or your aristocratic station in life or your political ideology, you are a wholly superior being to the rabble you are so callously oppressing, and should not therefore trouble yourself with the suffering you are causing large numbers of people who never did anything to you in their lives. As they are inferior to you, you may dismiss them and their suffering from your mind with a contemptuous remark, and so the Belgians did just that. Macaca, as you can read for yourselves in Wikipedia, is a name derived from a species of monkey; French-speaking Belgians in the Congo, and for those of you who don’t know this, Belgians come in two handy linguistic varieties, Dutch speaking and French speaking, used the term to describe the indigenous population of their unwilling colony.
I do not know where the good Senator first heard the term macaca, or why he decided to use it to describe a South Asian, who were never, at any time, a part of the Belgian Empire, but I think I feel the revulsion of all real Americans at the sight of an United States Senator using a French racial slur to insult a member of an ethnic minority when there are any number of perfectly good American racial slurs he could have used instead. What is worse, at least from my standpoint, is that technically the Senator did not use a French slur, if by French we mean a slur in use in France, but rather a somewhat cut-rate slur from a francophone minority in an otherwise Dutch-speaking country. If we are to import our slurs, I see no reason why we must import them from the Brussels B-list when we could have gotten a slur just as good or better from Paris. No one, after all, aches to see the newest Brussels fashions or wonders what the next wave in Belgian cinema or literature will be. Let’s face it: when Georges Simenon died and took Inspector Maigret with him, the rest of us stopped caring what happened in Brussels. For most Europeans, Brussels is a place where bureaucrats congregate in large numbers like down on their luck gigolos around a rich American widow, the better to find new and more obnoxious ways of making the rest of Europe’s collective life as miserable as the Belgian climate. For most Americans, Brussels is a place associated with vile tasting vegetables your mother wanted you to eat because they were good for you. This is always a crock; my mother wanted me to eat carrots because they would improve my eyesight, and today here I am, myopic, presbyopic, and astigmatic all at the same time. I wear bifocals, too.
In any case, the misadventure of the former Senator from Virginia proves one thing above all other things…well, that’s a pretty broad statement, isn’t it, even without the blonde, so let me rephrase and say that it proves one thing almost over a lot of other things that could be just as important, but probably aren’t; if you must dis, dis American. In our politically correct times, the old-fashioned American slur will deeply appreciate the work (since the rise of PC American slurs have had no end of trouble making ends meet) and when you use the slur, everyone listening will know what you’re talking about. The tide of people calling their public libraries trying to find out what you meant will cease, which the librarians will appreciate, since librarians love political correctness and dislike having to repeat ethnic and racial slurs, and the resultant controversy will center on what you said, not on what you said and what did that mean, anyway? Clarity is a virtue, and if you must be insulting, it never hurts to be clear about who it is you’re insulting. Answering why anyone would be so stupid as to use any kind of racial slur during a political campaign, however, remains a Rosicrucian mystery and will probably remain one for as long as we all shall live.
Hehe…the only thing you missed was using the word “allegedly”.
I needed a good chuckle today.
“CNN anchor Zoraida Sambolin clarified the motivation of the non-existent event by proclaiming that FRC was “hate spewing hate,” so there was no question from which side of the gun barrel the hatred was emanating.”
When liberals and the far left decide to take a political position, anybody that has the temerity to disagree with them is called “a hater,” or is branded for uttering “hate speech.” But if you just parrot liberal talking points, well then you are standing up for freedom, don’t ch’ya know.
I don’t think that in my lifetime I’ve ever seen anything like this. I don’t think people who have had honest disagreements with liberals or Democrats (well, what is the difference, really) have ever been so villified to such an extent as they are now. It is open warfare on whoever disagrees with the far left, and their willing accomplices in the mainstream media never hesitate to pile on and keep spreading such hatred and misinformation whenever the opportunity to do so arises. “Shut them up and slap them down,” that should be the new motto for liberals.
Well, I for one have had enough. And for a president that claimed in 2008 to be a “uniter” and not a divider, he has done a pathetic job preventing his own side from spreading even more hatred and bitter bile. I sometimes think Obama won’t be happy until there is an open civil war in this nation once again. A civil war where the very cultural and philosophical foundations of this nation are in danger of being shattered. A civil war where this nation is to be converted into something the Founding Fathers would have been horrified to see, the creation of an imperial president and a destruction of federalism. We live in dangerous times, my friends, and I worry that if Obama does get re-elected, the country will be even more bitterly divided, so much so that absolutely nothing of any consequence will get done in the next four years, which means we will be one giant leap closer to bankruptcy and destruction.
We’ve all said it before, that this is the most important election of our lifetime. I would take that one step further. This is the most important election in our history. Never has so much been on the line. Never has this country been so in danger of being radically changed into a European-style social-welfare state (and we all see with Greece how that’s working out for them). Never has so much been required from all of us to stand together so that we can offer at least some ray of hope for our grandchildren. America needs us and time is fast running out.
Do we answer this call and do what’s right for this nation? I certainly hope so. Americans are not about to see this country go down the tubes in such a spectacular manner. We all need to do our part. Vote, volunteer, donate, try to convince other people that they need to send Obama back to Chicago where he belongs. The clock is ticking, my friends, and it’s time we answer the call.
“We all need to do our part. Vote, volunteer, donate, try to convince other people that they need to send Obama back to Chicago where he belongs. The clock is ticking, my friends, and it’s time we answer the call.”
Concur. This time around I’ve donated 3 times more than ever before financially, talked to 10 times more people, handed out flyers/stickers, helped with recall verification (truethevote.org), gone to rallies, gone to rally planning meetings, posted my arse off, stickered up the car, and will continue to do so.
Meanwhile our amazingly professional and unbiased media is relentlessly reporting and reporting and investigating and reporting more about a misstatement by an unknown Republican candidate for Congress. Our fearless and completely non-politically motivated President Obama has called his first press conference and seven months to discuss this serious matter very seriously. There are rumors within the professional and unbiased news media that a special investigator, a national security conference, and a UN meeting will be called to discuss the errant candidates statement.
Has the GDP been steadily falling? That statement sticks out and needs explanation with some BEA tables/charts to back it up.
The term “hate crime” is kind of silly anyway. After all, is there anything such as a “love crime”?
Now do you believe me: Everything is always about religion all the time?
Amazing how a story about a guy that was ready to commit mass murder was dropped like a hot potato when it involves one of the lame stream media heroes.
But it did.And 4 days before Andrew wrote his blog entry. There’s a whole article, and it was written just a day after the incident. . He also says CBS does cover it, granted, maybe for just 17 seconds – perhaps because the details were not fully known yet but that still contradicts his opening. To say they’re not reporting something, and then to admit to they’re reporting it, in my opinion, would be better reported as delayed reporting, rather than non-reporting.
Sent to me by a friend I mailed blog to. Andrew care to respond?
“And that’s the way it is…” to quote Walter Cronkite.
It’s always been done, we’re now more aware because of this thing called the internet where we can now communicate around The Gate Keepers.