"I Admit It. I Want My Reality Back"

Even more from the Twilight Zone! Nick Gillespie of Reason writes:

Back in June, Interim White House Communications Director Anita Dunn chatted up her two favorite philosophers, Mao Zedong and Mother Theresa, to some audience that has now been repurposed for Glenn Beck. Who suddenly seems less insane than sane.

I admit it. I want my reality back. I don’t know when it went missing. But I want it back.

I think reality as we know it departed sometime between September of last year, when the economy cratered, and January, when President Obama and Vice President Biden were inaugurated. Speaking of the latter man and alternate realities, here’s the latest Newsweek cover, which I spotted in a newsstand last night at San Jose airport before flying down to Western CPAC — so at least in some reality, it really is real:

I have no idea who wrote the headline on the cover — and I can understand wanting to protect that person’s anonymity, if he ever wants to work outside of Newsweek. But the article it promotes was co-written by Evan Thomas, so I guess this is damning with faint praise — for Thomas, Obama is “Sort of God”, but Biden is “No Joke.” But once you’ve used the word “joke” and the person you’re carrying water for in the same sentence, isn’t it game over for him?

Sometime last year, Newsweek morphed from being a weekly magazine about, you know, news and became a liberal political magazine found in dentists’ waiting rooms and on supermarket checkout counter shelves. But imagine the hoots that the old Newsweek would have given, say, National Review in 1989, if they ran a cover story whose giant headline read “Why Quayle Is No Joke.”

Meanwhile, the Professor writes: