It’s nice to know that it’s the press that’s chortling in the video below, though some uneasiness comes through. Of course its comedy, isn’t it? But it does underscore the polarization in American politics and instructive in illustrating what a person is supposed to laugh at. BTW, is Rush Limbaugh a member of the press? And if not, how does he apply?
embedded by Embedded VideoMaybe they should have played this instead.
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Total lack of class.
Amazing the semi-serious diatribe by Wanda. Stephen Colbret does it to be funny. People like Wanda do it to be mean. Mean and stupid. Not ignorant, (which is excusable given the sorry state of our media and education system), but stupid. 2 + 2 = 3 stupid. No wonder I can hear booing in the background of a room full of ardent democrats.
To put some perspective on that snippet is to remember at least one celebrity a year, for years, speaks at this dinner and bombs. More to do with speaking in front of adults that are not fans and noticing too late that what worked in front of drunken customers doesn’t necessarily work in front of drunken Masters of the Universe.
There is a fine line between humor and hostility. Ms. Sykes is so far on the hostility side that can no longer see the line.
Hey, Wanda. Stay classy now.
Well, more like a four-lane highway, with traffic going in both directions
But yes, there is a difference between humor and hostility.
It’s just that they don’t care, because they don’t have to. It will get a lot worse before it gets better, I’m sure.
And being a Progressive supporting Barack Obama means never having to say you’re sorry.
I can imagine a NAZI gathering for der Furher where Goebels or some other high ranking mucky muck made jokes about killing jews, communists, ….this is absolutely disgusting and humorless.These people are sick!
This is the Jon Stewart-ization of “comedy.” The poison-tipped arrows always fly in one direction, with occassional powder-puffs tossed the other way to “prove” they “poke fun at everyone.”
Same old model. Take a non-fact and spin it into a vicious joke. Repeat ad nauseum. And it works. Stewart, Colbert, Maher etc. did as much as anybody to destroy Bush and get Obama elected.
Really, some enterprising Republican (hah!) should look into suing them under Federal election law (double-hah) for illegal campaign contributions in kind (triple hah).
Why don’t conservatives have people infiltrate the audiences of these shows in order to boo resoundingly? That’s the kind of media guerilla fighting we need.
The truly amazing thing about this WHCD is that Wanda Sykes was chosen to speak at all! I’ve only tried to watch her routine a couple times before giving up and realizing that she is simply vulgar and unfunny. (Richard Pryor was vulgar… and hilarious.) Is anyone really surprised?
Now, I’m only 34, but… Is anything ever a surprise to anyone anymore? I can’t remember the last time something genuinely surprised me. And so far, not one thing about the last 100 or so days wasn’t perfectly predicted… by me of all people.
Rush is an easy target because he’s heavyset, quirky and easy to caricature. Sometimes I wonder whether he isn’t the designated target, or target of the month on the talking points.
The real mystery is why Rush? I think part of the answer is that the Republican Party has done a wonderful job of vanishing into the woodwork. That leaves the field clear, for better or worse, for Rush. The other half of he equation, I think, is that the Left needs a hate target of the month. The Two Minutes’ Hate of 1984 was a ritual whose understanding provided a real psychological key into the workings of the Party mindset. Between the compulsion not to confront and the compulsion to hate we have the spectacle before us.
It’s sad and not in a funny kind of way.
Why Rush? Rules for radicals… Identify the enemy. Radicalize. Isolate. Basic stuff. Until an effective conservative leader actually emerges from government, Rush will have to do. Anyone who sticks his neck out will be subject to the same treatment. See: Newt Gingrich. Sarah Palin. Dick Cheney. All three of these were effective in different ways, and each was identified, radicalized, and isolated. (I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to who voted for Obama because they feared Sarah Palin actually have to pause a second before they can identify John McCain as the Republican nominee. Amazing.)
Well… maybe that’s why the Tea Partiers might be so effective. There really is no leader to be identified – just thousands of us at local levels, in our own home-towns, working among people who know us, personally.
We are all Spartacus… Maybe, that’s why the mainstream media is so nervous about Tea Parties; no one to fix upon, isolate an destroy. Just a hundred, a thousand, a hundred-thousand people named Spartacus, too many to target upon individually.
I find it despicable that the White House Press Corps finds this sarcastic attack on Rush Limbaugh funny. Had this been a conservative humorist attacking a lefty, and calling for their getting waterboarded or kidney cancer, the outcry in the media would have been unstoppable screeching. What do you hear from the press corps? [crickets] Just indicates they see themselves as propagandists for PBO, if not outright attack dogs. Funny thing…Rush has an audience of 20 million people, more than most of them could ever dream of having.
I find it deeply disturbing that the President seemed to laugh at the “humor.”
And I find it spooky that he says “they all voted for him” and he gets applause/laughter (cheering)…and he singles out the few from Fox “who didn;t [vote for him]. But it wasn’t in good humor, though he was smiling. It was like “we’re going to find you.
Well, honestly I got appreciated the fact that the joke she told about Mr. Limbaugh wasn’t really funny and the reaction of the audience was restrained.
I really liked the string of one liners she unloaded about Vice President Biden. That was funny, the lady has talent, real talent.
She really does understand the concept of balance. I just don’t think she understands how conservatives can be humorous.
These are the professional experts on communications and comedy who have spent 30 years cursing Ronald Reagan as a mere failed B-movie actor. If you think that this is a joke I have three words that should ensure that you either never laugh again or are reduced to banging your head on the wall as you are stuffed into the strait jacket,
Liberals are hate addicts. What else do we expect?
Taken all in all, the only word for it is that of my favorite Uncle Jerry–disgraceful.
But he was going good in the thirties and forties, and wouldn’t recognize the world of today.
Don’t sell Wanda short, she is plenty ignorant too.
It does not have to be like this. Hubert Horatio Humphrey may not have been elected President but, while he was a committed partisan liberal, he was admired on both sides of the aisle.
Like Jack Kemp he was a Happy Warrior.
Mr. President, I’m going to bring you up to date on all the political jokes. – Will Rogers
I already know them all. I appointed most of them. – Herbert Hoover
Liberals have a parlor game where they demonstrate their creds to each other through coming up with witty put-downs to eviscerate their opponents.
High cruelty and shock factors bump up one’s score in this fun little game of theirs.
They have so much fun with it they mistake it for actual comedy, not realizing that outsiders to their salons take it differently.
This game does say something unhealthy about them.
Wanda forgets she’s outside of the salon, and we get a glimpse of what goes on.
Much more damning stuff’s leaked out before. Did you catch the in-crowd web traffic when Pope John Paul II passed away? Sick, sick stuff.
Just look at those three idiots at podium with the Presidential seal made me what to vomit.
I decide not to watch that video (Yes, I know it’s just for a reference). In fact, any video like that one I will not watch. I don’t want to toss my lunch just for some Angry Aggrieved Black Pols and a bunch of Limousine Liberals on the tube. They will be washed out of office sooner or later.
10. Urban B:
I’m with ya. Rule 5. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
Much like the left enjoys doing with Ann Coulter, a brilliantly adroit foil, they do the same to Limbaugh. That his financial status insulates him from the Marxist politicians and useful idiot comedians who wish they were as successful as he is annoys them even more.
It is the also the fact that Rush was in the vangarde of the Republican unmasking of so many lying Democrats and thus aided the triumph of 1994. As Shakespeare said, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions!” Rush brought battalions and consequently the Democrats will never cease in their attempts to destroy him.
Rush Limbaugh changed the political calculus in this country by giving voice, initially in the late 1980′s to things that are right and proper about this nation. He is a patriot and that is something the Left cannot tolerate. That he accomplished his rise to super nova status by using Alinsky’s rule #5..ridiculing the Democrats made their hatred intensely psychotic, for they had been in control of the House for over 40 years when he helped bring them down.
This latest event with obama and the left is another apercu into their lack of class …. but did we expect less?
Obi well understands his tactics of domination and suppression of potential majority groups; Sykes is just the Kleagel at their ACORN Klan rally and she is simply doing what the kleagels did. We are supposed to be the new slaves on the socialist plantation, be intimidated and submit. Avoid playing with her kleagel act; go for who set this up and where they get their money. We need to go after them the way our, not their, leadership went after the klan.
Rush Limbaugh found himself on the cover of Time magazine in a photograph of himself smoking a fine cigar that had been doctored to highlight sinister overtones. The words, “Hate Radio”, were emblazoned over it.
This was a direct result of the Oklahoma City bombing, when President Clinton successfully linked the atrocity to right wing militias and other forms of extremism. This did damage the militia movement almost fatally. Rush did survive the storm, but with a black cloud over his already controversial image in the minds of mainstream Americans. It was a political battle with some stakes involved – in fact President Clinton was asked after his victory in 1996 over Dole when he knew he had won that election. His answer: Oklahoma City.
Obama’s attacks on Rush and his re-evocation of this extremist theme serve very useful functions for Obama as a political hedge. Should somebody go off half-cocked again, like Timothy McVeigh, or should Tea Party rallies become “hot”, he’s positioned his chits to broadcast blame and discredit to right-wing extremism and “hate radio” all over again.
That’s why he targets Rush, I believe. It’s a hedge, and a cheap downpayment on what might turn into a goldmine should some anger on the right break out.
“For like the crackling of thorns under a pot, so is the laughter of fools; this also is vanity.” Ecclesiastes 7:6, NRSV.
heh, for some reason this discussion reminds me of a comment on another blog by Linear Thinker about a radio ‘personality’, one Bernie Ward, of KGO radio, San Fransicko.
Lord, would Ward go after Bush and Company.
And, all the Republican hypocrites.
Bernie, a one time Catholic priest, and recovering heroin addict, is now in prison for Kiddie Porn.
Had a big file of Kiddie Porn, and sent some messages to one Angel Baby (or some such, can’t recall the name) wanting to be whipped, among other things, for which the Good Lady called him out, to the authorities.
Jail. Prison. The Big House.
Which prompted my friend Linear Thinker, who had listened to this asshole many times, as I did too, between hunting seasons, to opine “The fate of Bernie Ward is such I have not seen a better proof that God exists.”
To which I replied. “Beats the Ontological Argument hands down.”
heheh
Thank you, Wretchard, for covering U.S. politics. You are a real national treasure, even though you’re an Australian (I have to remind myself). You have so much more insight than 99 percent of all American writers/columnists/bloggers that I read.
Please keep doing what you’ve been doing, even though there’s probably not much money in it. When you’re an old man, you’ll be able to say that you helped save Western Civilization. I know that we’ll win with people like you on our side.
Obama thinks that he can control the perception of American voters, but he can’t. His basic contempt for his country is becoming more and more obvious. We may have to wait a few years and experience some bad times, but eventually he’ll be revealed as the mean-spirited little man that he is.
I don’t remember ever seeing such a non-presidential man in the White House before. Even Jimmy Carter pretended to take his job seriously. Obama is just an actor playing President. He doesn’t even bother to act presidential.
Borking Machine gets an early tuneup.
Making Jeff Sessions out to be a clone of Gene Talmadge or Theodore Bilbo will be difficult. This is not the season for dead white males, particularly if they’re not dead yet, but Mr. Sessions can’t finesse the circumstances of his birth. He bears the names of both Thomas Jefferson, a Virginia slaveholder of no particular distinction, and P.G.T. Beauregard, the commander of the Confederate line at First Manassas who led the rout of the Union army.
Mr. Sessions received his name from his father, who settled “Beauregard” on him with the pride that a Muslim father might feel in settling the middle name “Hussein” on a son destined for big things in Washington. A reporter for the National Journal was bothered by his speech
—
The president’s farewell toast to David Souter suggests that he’s not necessarily looking for a lawyer who understands the Constitution and the meaning of an oath to protect and defend that Constitution, but a nominee who knows all the words to “Kumbaya” and wants to give the world a Coke. “I will seek someone who understands that justice isn’t about abstract legal theory or a footnote in a casebook; it is also about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives, whether they can make a living and care for their families, whether they feel safe in their homes and welcome in their own nation. I view that quality of empathy … as an essential ingredient for arriving at just decisions.”
This is an odd job description from a man who once taught constitutional law, but there’s a considerable difference between the Constitution and constitutional law. The Constitution is a remarkable document, written by learned men in the plain language that the common man understands. The modern study of constitutional law is the work of lawyers trained to deconstruct plain language in search of things the authors of the Constitution never put there. Mr. Sessions and his colleagues have thankless work to do.
• Wesley Pruden
What have you poor Americans elected! How could you let the democrats do this! Is there no shame in this world?
I am simply gobsmacked at how low and classless these people are – the idiots in the WH and the Democrat party as a whole. Simply classless and loathsome.
It’s time to re-up with Rush 24/7 and I’m going to re-up for several years this time. And maybe buy another copy of Liberty & Tyranny and give it to an idiotic liberal relative.
The Two Minutes’ Hate of 1984 was a ritual whose understanding provided a real psychological key into the workings of the Party mindset. Between the compulsion not to confront and the compulsion to hate we have the spectacle before us.
Wretchard, this sums up the last eight years in a nutshell.
Every time I think that Jonah Goldberg’s book ‘Liberal Fascism’ is over the top in terms of theme and content, something like Ms Sykes’ spew happens that makes me tip my hat to him. The distance between Ms Sykes’ words and death camps for anyone not of her philosophy is an eigth of a baby step, and anyone who denies this is part of the problem.
The idea of W and Cheney ruining private lives (think recent attempts to attack attorneys) or using government to force people into agenda training (think anything with ‘civilian corps’ in the name) was unthinkable to any rational, intelligent adult. This administration does it regularly. And with no outcry from those who believe that everyone from the center to the right is a proven Nazi.
The genteel ‘conservatism’ of W and his father allowed the left to get to this point, to speak to your point about the desire to not confront. Neither of them would use the bully pulpit to address effectively the attacks on their administrations. As a result, the left now knows that they can be as vicious and frankly dishonest as they want without consequence (see Ms Sykes or pretty much everything by Olberman), in a way that they know will never be trained back upon them. We are now at a point that we need a conservative leader who will not ‘rise above the fray’ once elected, but rather exact retribution against the thuggishness of the current administration and its acolytes like Sykes. This leads to a future of MAD scenario existing that will temper the left’s actions and words when they are in power – or cause them to attempt to crush the center right by whatever means are necessary. Strong defense of policy and exposure of the left’s lies by W during his tenure might have prevented this from coming to pass.
Unfortunate that this is our world, but there it is.
At the outset, (in another clip) before things turn ugly, Ms Sykes refers w/reverence to
“Our First Black President,”
but slips in a jab about
“knowin he’s biracial“.
(the President did not immediately smile)
Begs the question:
What if he had run as
“America’s First biracial President”
surrounded by people with a predilection to cast aspersion on all the misdeeds, bad behavior, and bad attitudes exhibited by the Black Folk of his Father’s kind?
At least for the present, however,
Strawmen in Blackface are verboten.
Whether it’s Orwell’s fictional Oceana, the Third Reich, the Soviet Union, Al Qiada or the Talaban, Iran or any of the other countless despotisms that have poisoned this world; they all have a government sanctioned, or mandated, hatred of “the other”. America’s modern left is simply heading down this well worn path.
Wanda is a clown now among other clowns doing what clowns do best…..act like fools.
More Orwell, this time from “Politics and the English Language”—
“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. . . . Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Obama and friends are overconfident, like Chaucer’s Pardoner, in their ability to swindle and then cover their tracks with some nuanced language. Politicians like Pelosi are barely even trying to pretend that words have meanings other than what they say the speakers say the words mean.
Thuggish talk, taken straight from the jeremiads of the Rev. Wright, are the privileged and even privileged dialect of the political ruling class. The scribes, i.e. the Press Club, guffaws, somewhat nervously, at the audacity of the game.
Obama’s got the press’s cheese, and they know it. He’s humiliating them, and they can’t or won’t do anything about it. LBJ did this humiliation kind of thing in private. Obama does it in public, and every time he does it he emboldens more of the same kind of thuggishness.
Oh c’mon everyone, you’re making too much of all this. After all dissent is the highest form of patrio…wait…
never mind. Was still in a pre-Obama frame of mind for a sec.
This will ultimately backlash. They really don’t get it. Every time the left comes to power, they overreach themselves and it blows up in their face (Conservatives, by contrast, simply become seduced by power and start spending like Ted Kennedy in a liquor store…except it’s good vodka). I know they’re trying to isolate Rush make him irrelevant, but Rush’s fans will just continue to rally around him. It doesn’t matter that moderates don’t like him much (supposedly), because the Conservative counterattack will come from the massive base that Rush (with this sort of help from Obama) has rallied together.
What a great Monday go’in on here.
Doud’s illumination of obamas “biracial” composition is great. Too bad Ms. Sykes didn’t point out that being 6.25% Negro doesn’t make you anywhere close to a black. Barry made that lifestyle choice.
Too many great posts. I haven’t read a flop yet. It really is a pleasure to read well informed people.
(off camera)
was that too much a suck up?Ok we’re back from our fiftheenth commercial for American Idol and I honestly want to say that if we can keep some genuine ridicule going against obama we can make him a Mt Rusmore type monument to Marxism..without the beard..ridicule rules ..the big #5 Akinsky special.
Barry 0351/34
It’s not an act.
Senator Al Franken
Franken could definitely be elected by people who listen to Garrison Keillor & his Lake Wobegon stories. Lake Wobegon is a place in Minnesota where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average,”
Heck franken even looks and sounds a bit like Keillor.
You can tell that Keillor knows a lot of little things that add up to a well made house and home into which enter both joy and grief from unknown and unknowable directions. His politics are liberal because because. In Franken’s case the house is broken. It has always been broken. The problems are unknown and unknowable. There is no hope of ever fixing them. But he does look and sound a bit like Keillor so so.
The people
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but didn’t Wanda just announce her lesbian-hood recently?
Fabius
you write: “It doesn’t matter that moderates don’t like him much (supposedly), because the Conservative counterattack will come from the massive base that Rush (with this sort of help from Obama) has rallied together.”
Do you think so? I hope so; but, I have my doubts. There is the old saying that the Republicans are the stupid party, and the Democrats are the evil one.
There are probably a lot of reasons for this. The Republicans tend to be busy working and supporting families to pay too close attention. The fact that the MSM only paints one side of the story, the left side, makes it hard work to find out the truth.
Also, the Republicans have a large base that have morals and will turn on one of their own if they run afoul. Not the dems. They will circle the wagons to protect their seat at all costs.
The Democrats play for keeps. They never give in without fighting. Who was it that blocked most of Bush’s judicial appointments? While the Republicans are still stuck in the past when there were democrats who may have disagreed with them on some issues, they were still patriots who loved their country at the end of the day. Not any longer.
So, I don’t see a massive base assembling together. On what issue – taxes? What happens when more than 50% of the country pays little or no taxes at all. Will they join this call? Or, will they think their taxes are just about right.
Or, what happens when immigrants are given the chance to become citizens and can vote. Which party will they turn to? Thanks to the dems, those earning $150K and up will have to bear the burden of paying taxes, not them. Free health care – yahoo. The dems will have an even larger base if this happens.
It is a race against time to stop this. But, if the average person does not look with alarm at Obama’s smugness, laughing as this woman makes her vulgar jokes, then I don’t put too much trust in massive assemblies of people in protest. I don’t see enough people paying attention.
I hope I am wrong.
It was Kim DuToit who summed them up: Republicans = The Stupid Party, Democrats = The Evil Party.
Bill
It’s liberal-think to be looking for the answer in the masses. The masses always do what they’re doing now, scurrying about carrying bits of dirt here and there, reproducing and the like.
We don’t know where the solution will come from, by whose hand, or when. We only know that it will. Had it not always in the past, and were it not preordained, we would have been dispatched or consigned to life in caves and under rocks long ago.
“I have never seen, more people, talked to more people, more afraid of their government in my lifetime.”
– Rush Limbaugh
He then ran some disgusting drivel of BHO proclaiming from on high, some nauseating crap about setting aside petty grievances and false promises…
Who would BHO BE without petty grievances and false promises?
Shivermetimbers,
I agree with everything you say, and I am not a hundred percent certain that the backlash I predicted will come about. But I think that it very well may, precisely because in part, Obama is creating a rallying point around Rush.
You’re right that the majority of people are running around, aware that things aren’t going well, but not paying enough attention to finger Obama as the problem. You need someone who can channel that ill feeling and direct it. Political regrouping basically requires some sort of hot button issue, and a figure or group of people charismatic enough to tell everyone else, “look what those SOB’s are doing, let’s go stop them.” That’ll be the first step (and it might already be happening with the tea parties), but after that we’ll need some specific policy proposals to put forward (’94 Contract with America style). In between those first steps (outrage and simple stonewalling of the other side, and then the proposal of positive alternatives), we’ll need a base which can both support the policy makers, and work to convince their fellow voters. It doesn’t matter that Rush might not draw independents. There’s 20 million Rush listeners who will go talk to independents for him.
If it seems like none of that’s happening yet, I’m going to try to be patient for now. We’re still barely a hundred days into the new administration, it takes time for the pendulum to swing back our way.
Of course, the amount of damage BHO will do in the meantime…
Rush then goes on to talk about Cheney.
(If only we could have had 16 years of President Cheney.)
…or be sane enough to elect him in three and a half.
“look what those SOB’s are doing, let’s go stop them.”
—
Exactly what Cheney did!
—
Looking for original quote of Cheney’s about Obama administration making the country less safe, I go to Google News, and it brings up a PAGE OF ANTI CHENEY “msm” RANTS!
Jeeze…
What a collection of trolls
I think y’all are reading far too much into that black gal’s words. There’s a whole different mindset there. She’s talking shi*t. It’s a street-wise art form and in some ways is a lot more honest than circumscribed PC drivel. She’s exultant about the current politcal drift which in a way is socially legitimizing and mainstreaming being black.
They think different, or tend to.
I lived in a barracks room with three black guys in the Army for 18 months and was put there because, being from California, there was a lot of hostility between me and the southern crackers that ran the pre-Vietnam Army.
It took me almost six months to get used to talking sh*t, part of the art being never to blow your top, never to be flat footed, always to be hassling, probing, kidding, giving people a hard time. But you know they never closed in for the kill even when they could. If you couldn’t hang with them they were just kind of disappointed. They’d look at you like, po po thing and then go pick on someone who was more fun.
It’s sport, jokers. Fine sport.
And all the serious, portentious, self righteous do-good wowser types just don’t get it.
Not everyone lives in a mental projection.
White people tend to the most and often can’t tell the difference between the projection and the real world. And European white people tend to do it far more than Americans (except for our own euro-weenie PC lefties).
Another thing about talking sh*t is the key words mean diddly squat by themselves, it’s their context that defines their meaning. The same word can be a deathly insult in one sentence and extravagant praise in the next. Part of the difference is verbal, part sentence context, part body language and part eye contact.
But when you’re talking sh*t the big thing is to stay engaged and never blow it. You blow it by getting angry and you get angry because you are a loser in the conversatino cuz you can’t hang (stay in the conversation on an equal or near equal footing) and make your points. In other words you can’t be a worthy opponent, you’re not in the race.
When it comes to talking sh*t color doesn’t mean a damn thing though the whole game is derived from their social/cultural perceptual view. I have never had any black person I was mixing it with (having a pissing contests with) get sh*tty because I was white. I made a choice to play by their rules every time I started talking sh*t myself. It’s great sport when you know the rules (which can also shift with time, place and circumstance).
Wanda was talking sh*t and now the wowsers are taking her all literally. She probably felt like a bull in a china shop talking to all those mental projectionist honkies because they were so lame.
The same kind of derision was evident in many of the parties I went to in San Francisco in the late ’60s and early ’70s where Black Panther and other such noble savage types were strutting their stuff in front of honkies that didn’t have enough sense to pour piss out of a boot or enough balls to give them a run for the money.
What’s changed when you look at the short Wanda vid?
I’m amazed that those of us that take words literally utterly fail to understand that the majority of people in the world do not.
I can go either way. It took awhile to get the hang of it. I wouldn’t have missed it. It wasn’t just the army. I drove cable-cars, streetcars and buses in San Francisco for five years, most of my fellow workers were black and it was like old home week after the army.
It’s a different mindset but it doesn’t preclude any possibilites per se, just insists those possibilities be put vigorously.
Most white people don’t get it and it’s causing a LOT of unnecessary problems.
Understanding people like Wanda’s alternative view and the different conceptual base for their use of language does not lessen my commitment to traditional American values, the Constitution etc etc one little bit.
BTW I find that generally Asians don’t take words literally, either. They give equal footing to other cues, especially eye contact, rather like the blacks in the US, but they’re just quieter about it.
Oh yeah, it doesn’t work at all on e-mail of course where words are the only thing you have to work with and that has got all of us into trouble as we got used to the new medium. We had to learn to compensate for the lack of non-verbal cues in the conversation.
It’s a matter of weighting.
Non whites just seem to be more consciously aware of non verbal cues and weight them more than we do.
“It doesn’t matter that Rush might not draw independents. There’s 20 million Rush listeners who will go talk to independents for him.”
—
That is what Kevin James argues about the depressing demographics of Los Angeles today:
Granted, there are now more folks of questionable character than there are American Patriots, but the turnout in the last election was 12-1/2 Percent!
A motivated base would sweep the election.
…this will soon be demonstrated with the election of Carmen Trutanich for city attorney over corrupt Tony Villar Toady Jack Weiss who is now running on his Rape Kit Record despite the fact that he is primarily responsible for the scandal that has allowed serial rapists to roam free for years, claiming more innocent victims.
Bob Murphy,
I roomed with Blacks in the Army also, lived in the midst of Panther visits in the Bay area, had a Black from Oakland live with us for 2 years, and had a close friend from Brooklyn who was a black professor who wrote a book about race relations.
Despite that, I seem to be missing your point.
Hopefully I will return and re-read with better luck.
My view is that speech is speech, it is what it is, and some blacks spend their lives in jive talk land and some don’t:
See Justice Thomas, Thomas Sowell, or local resident commenter Starling!
Time can be better spent trying to convince people who are at least willing to engage in straight talk, even if it is highly uncomfortable for some.
JMO
Bob Murphy,
Spending a lot of time trash-talking has built some really impressive societies in Haiti, Nigeria, and Deetroit.
“She’s exultant about the current politcal drift which in a way is socially legitimizing and mainstreaming being black.”
—
Agreed.
But “being black” as defined is a dumbed-down, circumcribed definition of what it is to be human.
A Cultural Dead End,
to be sure.
What better proof is there of the artifice of “Being Black” than BHO, whose “blackness” and “authenticity” has been almost entirely concocted by his fevered (actually pathological) imagination?
Bob Murphy,
Thanks for that perspective. When I first got out of the Navy, I worked in construction as a laborer in Brooklyn to help pay for school (the veterans educational assistance program – VEAP, came to $8,300 total, and was paid out over time. So, it was not a whole lot).
During this time, I worked with a lot of the local folks who were from the neighborhood where we worked in and were black. What you write about, people just talking sh*t, brought back memories.
–it’s called “argot” –i think it comes from, “many identity groups argot they own language”. i know we duz down souf hyar. when we head up to the far north, that is, Amarillo, the argot gets ear-bending. the high plains side-lateral extension heard up thataways can’t really be replicated, thank goodness.think, miss jane from the Beverly Hillbillies with a Marlboro in her mouth.
BM, there’s a word for people who live their lives like that, and cultures/subcultures that promote said living, WRT language.
Dishonest.
#48 Bob Murphey
With all due respect, I cannot go with this. If “talking shit” was the intention, then somewhere along the line accepting an answer that was also “talking shit” would be part of the process. Anyone who is not black, saying anything even mildly critical of anyone or anything that is black; or even saying something about another subject entirely that only a wild-ass whacked out non sequitor interpretation could be construed in someone’s PC mind as being critical or an insult is doomed to be deemed a racist and a bigot automatically. There is NO two way in that kind of conversation, and therefore we have to take it seriously. This is what this Sykes woman believes. This is what The Lightworker considers to be humor, and therefore he believes to some extent. The difference between talking shit, and threats and insults, lies in whether both parties will accept the shit.
This just helps clarify the rules of the game for anyone who is melanin deprived and/or inclined to love the country under the rule of law and the Constitution.
What I find telling is that yes, the Correspondent’s Dinner is a “roast”. It is a roast of the president by the press, and he returns what he gets. Leaving aside both his apparent inability to speak without a script, and his notoriously thin skin; it is unique for the correspondents to spend their time roasting the president’s political enemies for him, and then for him to emphasize the short leash he has the press on, and threaten those who are off the leash.
Oh Brave New World that has such people in it.
Subotai Bahadur
ps. For the record, Your Humble Servant is not of melanin-deprived ancestry.
Doug and S.B., you’ve hit the nail on the head.
This “jive talk is something we should all tune into” is the biggest load of crap I’ve ever seen here.
I’M not the one who needs to bend and change, it’s people like Ms Sykes who need to give up their defective language patterns and culture (and YES, they are defective) and join the rest of us grownups who believe in straight and productive talk. We’d certainly be a more productive society, and a more honest one.
If we keep making excuses for that crappy level of communication, it drags down the whole society.
Not to mention enabling the bad guys to pretend real physical threats are just a joke, up until such time as the threats are made manifest.
Let us not be duped here.
“There is NO two way in that kind of conversation…”
—
The Heart of the matter.
(Should have expected someone w/o Melanin Deficiency would be first to get to it.)
Buddy struggles, but fails, to make a connection between Simian “speech” and the rest of us.
I’m still torqued about this……….
Imagine, BM, a white comedian saying:
“Well, I’ll consider you to be a white guy, Mr President, up until the time you screw something up, at which point I’ll call you biracial”.
But you can’t imagine that, can you. Because it wouldn’t be the cause of laughter and applause, but of shocked gasps and the comedian being torn limb from limb.
No amount of excuse making or lame notions about argot or cultural differences can hide this elephant in the room. This is why her words cannot be tolerated. Because when bad and ugly words come from ANYONE, they must be treated equally without regard to the speaker’s race or gender or anything else, and not given special consideration on that basis. A redneck bashing blacks and threatening to kill his political enemies is wrong. So too are the words of Ms Sykes, subculture be damned.
By your line of reasoning, it would be perfectly OK for some white guy to joke about lynching a black liberal talk show host. Hey, after all, I’m sure I can find someone who believes that in the white guy’s subculture in his little neighborhood, he doesn’t really MEAN it, he’s just talking shit, right?
Of course it’s not alright. And MS Sykes words must be judged by EXACTLY the same standard. If you can’t understand that it all falls apart if that isn’t the case, I recommend a few courses in logic.
When I live in a society that condones her language but would destroy me for using the exact same (not that I ever would), I have every right to be concerned, and every right to respond in a defensive way. I take her ‘humor’ and the response of the room as a direct and real threat to me financially, politically, and possibly physically.
I cannot ever trust you, BM, or any other apologist to determine what is PUPORTED to be mere joke or cultural quirk and what is a real threat. I will always reserve that right to myself.
Obama’s reaction to the “black dyke” (Hitchens’ description, which must be alright since it’s just jive-talk, right?) was just as accepting as it was to all those sermons he listened to from Reverend Wright. Makes you really really wonder where exactly his moral compass points.
doug, no, really it’s no struggle at all for me to miss people’s points.
Not everyone lives in a mental projection.
Agreed. 70% of blacks don’t believe that the government created HIV to kill black people.
And about two-thirds of Americans don’t believe that the American government orchestrated 9/11.
And I’m sure a lot of people didn’t hear Rush Limbaugh say “I hope America fails” like Wanda Sykes evidently believes she did.
So about two-thirds of Americans of various races appear to be pretty even-keeled on the whither-black-helicopters front.
The problem is, 100 million people so loosely tethered to reality is a big honking (not honky) problem.
White people tend to the most and often can’t tell the difference between the projection and the real world.
Studies? Statistics? Or is asking for bonafide evidence as opposed to generalizations a little too projection-y for this conversation?
Hey, Bob, I don’t doubt that at least one side believes it’s just a culture thing and no big deal. But Subothai Badahur called it … it’s not barbershop smack when the other side isn’t given license to smack back … when it’s a monologue, not a dialogue. (Anyone want to venture what would have happened if someone had tried to reciprocate the sh*t with a lesbian joke about Wanda?)
At best, Sykes’ patter was just low-class rude riffing. But there’s still the possibility that it’s worse — pee-on-your-lawn bullying.
The black equivalent of, “I drink your milkshake.”
that’s a helluva ref, bogie wheel, considering –
Youtube search past White House Correspondent Dinners- I’ve watched them. Traditionally, it appears that the President makes fun of himself- he shows off his ability to go in front of a press that rips him to shreds and joins in- that is what makes it funny. Obama took the opportunity to rip into everyone but himself. Perhaps because the press is on his side, instead of being funny they just engaged in some mutual pleasing.
Pretty Wild, Teacher:
You remind me:
W’s strongest area by far.
(I’d still like to see Pelosi’s daughters movie of W’s first run.)
…and Obama’s weakest by far.
Doubt we’ll see too much commentary on that aspect in the MSM, however.
Wasn’t aware of the Dyke angle until reading Nahncee.
Reminds me how in Teresita’s eyes, Joe the Plumber saying he’d not raise his kids around them made him the lowest form of life, and that it tarred the entire backwards view of the GOP perspective.
At the same time all the “respectable” media and all were doing their very best to trash Ms California’s life, Palin-Style for stating her position on Gay Marriage, which just so happens to mirror BHO’s.
…but, as they did with Clinton several times, the left knows he’s not serious, just politician talk as rev Wright said, so he gets a pass while she is tarred and feathered.
Nothing wrong here:
Joe’s the only thing wrong.
(likewise when they trashed Mormons and ruined private businesses because they lost an election in CA.
Fear not, lefties, the Courts will set things “straight.”
I think it is a perfectly valid sentiment not to want kids around the likes of Sykes and a multitude of others that think they have a right to shove whatever they want down everyone else’s throats.
Just as no decent person would take their young children to be exposed to Wright’s Racist Hate Mongering.
If Barry only knew.
But luckily he doesn’t have a clue.
Again.
Jamiel Shaw’s family sues sheriff over release of alleged killer
The family of slain high school football star Jamiel Shaw II is suing the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, alleging that the department was negligent in releasing Shaw’s suspected killer from prison despite his illegal immigrant status.
The lawsuit, filed Friday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, names Sheriff Lee Baca as a defendant and alleges that he “knew or should have known that they were releasing a convicted felon and illegal alien with an extensive history of gang violence into the Los Angeles community to perpetrate killings against African Americans.”
Shaw, 17, a running back who was recruited by Stanford and Rutgers universities, was gunned down in March 2008. Prosecutors allege that Pedro Espinoza, a reputed member of the 18th Street gang who was in the United States illegally, killed Shaw. Espinoza, 19, had been released from jail a day before the shooting, after serving time for an earlier offense.
Habu/22; re ‘ridicule’, see Arthur Syzk here.
WWII cartoonist, you’ll recognize the style if not the actual work –anyhoo, there’s a good quote from the lit ‘on ridicule’, which i’d paste here but the site won’t let me copy w/o permission. but go look –shines light on the topic, the peculiar nature of the ‘un-roast’.
I think a new low has just been reached. A really classy, dignified man would have had a stone cold expression on his face and Wanda would have known that she was henceforth persona non grata at any White House or high profile administration event.
The MSN did not give this exposure at all.