Thursday, January 31, 2013

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS ETC. ETC.

Over at PJ Lifestyle (yes, they have such a thing; it's the thin end of the wedge in their drive to take over the internet, and includes funny animal videos you can awwww over without being troubled by the thought that some liberal might be enjoying it too), we have a curious listicle: "The 3 Best Monty Python Sketches (Aren’t Necessarily the Funniest)" by Kathy Shaidle. She names and provides videos of the sketches -- and lengthy, aimless, joke-killing reasons why she likes them -- but first explains how Monty Python are among history's greatest monsters and no I ain't even kidding:
But as an adult, I’ve been forced to accept that these strangers — whose work was one of the only things I believed I could ever truly depend on – all had (giant, stomping, purloined) feet of clay. 
Terry Jones revealed himself to be bitchy Bush-hater. 
John Cleese doled out self-help psychobabble while marrying and divorcing more times than even my mother. (He’s in the midst of an “Alimony Tour” and is auctioning off a career’s worth of props and memorabilia.) 
Worse, Cleese seems stupidly saddened and baffled by the transformation of his beloved London into a lawless polyglot madhouse — a transformation which is entirely the fault of the youthful culture-busting philosophy he and his liberal pals embraced. 
They’d unwittingly (or not) destroyed England in a way the Luftwaffe could have only dreamed of.
There's something perfectly, schizophrenically Kulturkampf about inviting people to watch funny sketches while you tell them how the sketches destroyed Western Civilization. Sorta reminds me of the passion of Nelson Van Alden.

UPDATE. Previous PJ Lifestyle homina-homina here. What a weird little alt-universe it is.

113 comments:

  1. calling all toasters9:45 PM

    Also, "The Funniest Joke in the World" never proved able to kill any terrorists, despite Dick Cheney's demand that the CIA extract it from the sketch.

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  2. MaryRC10:04 PM

    Also, if you're Hungarian and want to buy matches, the correct phrase is not "My Hovercraft is full of eels."

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  3. MyPetGloat10:11 PM

    "But as an adult..."

    And that's where it all falls to pieces, for Kathy is still Five Feet of Infantile Rage.

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  4. Yeah, the Luftwaffe bombings of London weren't anywhere near as destructive as a small group of people being funny. Is Kathy Shaidle angling for a Noonan, or even a Brooks?

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  5. Or being able to speak multiple languages, apparently.


    It's still improvement for Shaidle. At least she made it through this post without any slurs.

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  6. tigrismus10:42 PM

    I'm as shocked as Mr Cleese to learn there's never been violence in London before now and that youthful culture busting never happened before Monty Python.

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  7. tigrismus10:46 PM

    I blame the National Bocialists.

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  8. Megalon10:49 PM

    "They’d unwittingly (or not) destroyed England in a way the Luftwaffe could have only dreamed of."

    Pure genius. John Cleese is literally and with no exaggeration worse than Hitler.

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  9. smut clyde10:50 PM

    The "Four Yorkshiremen" is not a Monty Python skit.

    What the Pythons do is a cover version. Kathy, Kathy, Kathy.

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  10. Sir Hawkins:

    I'm OK w/ starting conservative alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Reddit, etc, but you win by taking over the real thing.



    Yeah, why bother building something yourself when you can just hijack something someone else made?

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  11. Fats Durston11:04 PM

    They’d unwittingly (or not) destroyed England in a way the Luftwaffe could have only dreamed of.

    Chalk up another victory for comedians in the dismantling of empires. Juvenal took down the Roman Empire ("A Hun before Huns were even invented"); the xiwen actors' mockery fatally weakened the Song Dynasty before the Mongols; Sauda erased the last vestiges of Mughal pride ("Puts the nadir in Nadir Shah"); Carlin, et al. defeated the U.S. empire (not the Vietnamese, of course); and Yakov Smirnov was more damaging to Soviet Russia than a thousand Chernobyls.

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  12. bekabot11:05 PM

    "Also, 'The Funniest Joke in the World' never proved able to kill any terrorists, despite Dick Cheney's demand that the CIA extract it from the sketch."

    That's because Cheney read it aloud several times, in an emptied, soundproofed room located far, far underground. Puzzled by the joke but not amused by it, and feeling himself a bit dyspeptic as per usual but otherwise unscathed, he decided he'd been hoaxed. (If the damn thing was no good against a man with a bum ticker — several bum tickers in a row, in fact — then what damn good was it? Answer me that.)

    Disgusted, Cheney opened up a portal to R'Lyeh and sent the joke on through. Cheney thought highly of R'Lyeh as a dumping ground in those days and and has not had occasion to change his opinion since. He is continuously surprised at the number and nature of the things a man can fit through an interdimensional gateway. He finds it remarkable. He often reflects that if people had known about R'Lyeh they wouldn't have been scared of Love Canal nor would they have needed any damn Superfund sites. He also often reflects that there is a joke which is funny, damn it, and that people who make their living telling jokes are often overpaid.

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  13. With Reddit, they've gotit built in.

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  14. smut clyde11:18 PM

    a lawless polyglot madhouse — a transformation which is entirely the fault of the youthful culture-busting philosophy

    A pedant would point out that the polyglot nature of contemporary London is the result of a number of social forces, and neither the Pythons nor their generation of comics can really be credited with instigating globalisation and British imperial policies.

    And Cleese's "beloved London"? For feck's sake, he's a Somerset lad, who's lived in the States for the last couple of decades.

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  15. glennisw11:18 PM

    I did witness Terry Jones in a Soho pub (that's London Soho, not New York) get into an argument with the bartender over the temperature of the beer. Bitchy, yes. Bush-hater? That's a virtue.

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  16. smut clyde11:18 PM

    Panning with a damp phrase.

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  17. glennisw11:20 PM

    I rather imagine that Kathy Shaidle's acquaintance with London is limited to what she sees on the TeeVee.

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  18. smut clyde11:24 PM

    Apparently this is the first time that foreign languages are heard in the hub of the British Empire, once the world's largest and most cosmopolitan port.

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  19. AGoodQuestion11:24 PM

    That was a mind-numbing experience. You could cut into my skull with a bonesaw and I'm not sure I'd feel it.

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  20. We can't be sure of that. For all we know, Graham Chapman might have forcibly expatriated thousands of Indians to the British Isles. Don't think that the BNP isn't investigating already.

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  21. AGoodQuestion11:26 PM

    Is Kathy Shaidle angling for a Noonan, or even a Brooks?
    From what I know of her, Shaidle seems to be Debbie Schlussel with an MFA.

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  22. Speaking of PJM, could they scrape the bottom of the barrel any more? Bob Owens, John Hawkins, now Kathy Shaidle? It's starting to look like an echo site - a website staffed by the rejects from another, more popular site. Question is, what the hell is the source?

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  23. Color me unsurprised - Jones is a bit of a beer snob.

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  24. AGoodQuestion11:33 PM

    I'm just gonna leave this here.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fNvi6xG-5Y

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  25. calling all toasters11:39 PM

    Stormfront Arts & Entertainment?

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  26. I thought Schlussel was ALREADY in mutherfuckin' agony?

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  27. They’d unwittingly (or not) destroyed England in a way the Luftwaffe could have only dreamed of.

    Without irony. This one earns Black Hitler triple points!

    I think I preferred Shaidle when she was yelling that Jesus hated the poor.

    (And apparently a guy she quotes, Peter Hitchens, argues both that the Monty Python troupers were phonies because there was no establishment to rebel against in 1971 [?!!!?] and that Tony Blair ruined Britain in the 90s. Nice to see American conservatives haven't cornered the market on incoherence.)

    The sad thing is, yet again, here we have a conservative who enjoys some culture (and great comedy at that), but then feels she is committing thoughtcrime – and therefore she must try to shackle it, tame it, piss on it to mark it as her own. Holy FSM, in a moment of heresy, she even admits the arts "saved her life" – but as an adult, she cannot, will not let them fill her soul or change her. If your moral compass tells you to reject Terry Jones for George W. Bush, it's badly broken.

    Like their high priestess Ayn Rand, the Kulturkampfers just don't understand the arts, and not coincidentally, human beings.

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  28. calling all toasters11:45 PM

    Shorter Kathy Shaindle: "Monty Python turned me into a newt!"

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  29. Doghouse Kitler, even!

    http://doghouseriley.blogspot.com/2013/01/jonah-goldberg-agrees-with-you-nuff-said.html
    ~

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  30. Socrates: And, upon his return, would not some of his former compatriots reject not only the true forms found above, but also in time come to reject the shadows upon the wall, and instead turn to examinations of the necessary matter that they expel from their own bodies, much as a pig or a rabbit might do? And would they not in turn proclaim that the shapes and patterns that they observed therein to be the most pure form of truth?

    Glaucon: By the dog, Socrates, you speak more truth than you intend. For I will tell you that such men are real, and not just figments of fancy. There are indeed those who do indeed venerate their own droppings and look upon them as a source of great wisdom - I have seen them oftentimes in the Piraeus. My cousin - Simonides, you know him well - has a plan to make some money off them, though I cannot say it is likely to succeed.

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  31. Spaghetti Lee12:20 AM

    includes funny animal videos you can awwww over without being troubled by the thought that some liberal might be enjoying it too)



    Nuh-uh. See, the cat keeps trying to catch the red dot and can't do it, but doesn't give up, which means it's NOT a liberal because liberals HATE SUCCESS AND ACHIEVEMENT GRR RIP SNARL


    See? Easy.

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  32. Spaghetti Lee12:27 AM

    Let me guess:


    "Self-defense Against Fresh Fruit" softened people into accepting healthy food into their lives and unable to result Michelle Obama (who is also worse than Hitler's) healthy eating Holocaust/Gulag.


    The Dead Parrot sketch was a subtle slam on Christianity. Obviously, the parrot is not an ex-parrot, but is enjoying its eternal reward in Heaven, but not to hear those godless heathens in Python tell it.


    The Slightly Silly Party was an attack on the Tea Party, 40 years in advance, to make the sheep-like masses loyal to a broken two-party system and unable to take their true conservative saviors seriously.


    Is that about right?

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  33. Spaghetti Lee12:28 AM

    there was no establishment to rebel against in 1971 [?!!!?]



    Come on, don't you remember? All authority figures, political, corporate and military alike, were on vacation from 1964-1979 until Reagan and Thatcher summoned them back.

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  34. Spaghetti Lee12:31 AM

    Well, you guys already have Conservapedia. How's that working out again? Brought down the liberal information establishment yet? Well, just checking.

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  35. synykyl12:37 AM

    The bombardment of London was bad, but at least the Luftwaffe didn't use ... sarcasm.

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  36. Don't laugh: the British epidemic of vicious fish-slapping can be laid entirely at Monty Python's feet.

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  37. Give that man a job at Big Hollywood!


    The Cheese Shop sketch predicted how lazy union workers would work to destroy Wisconsin until it was rescued by Scott Walker, the Kochs and the NRA.

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  38. Tybalt1:43 AM

    My nipples explode with delight!

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  39. Tybat1:52 AM

    By the way, I looked so you don't have to: the most recent three posts on Shaidle's are a crude slur against Africans, a denunciation of Protestants (I know she is Catholic, but... really?) and a wishcasting headline on "nuking" the Japanese.

    She's a lovely person. The day they invited her to participate in a panel on public television here was the day I stopped contributing, forever.

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  40. TomParmenter2:05 AM

    Don't mention the war.

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  41. Hattie3:11 AM

    Well, she can write, sort of. It's interesting when someone can write but not think. How is that possible? Which is another way of saying, "What is she on?"

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  42. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard3:23 AM

    PJ Lifestyle... for those who never want to leave the house!

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  43. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard3:33 AM

    Don't mock- for quite some time, Conservapaedia was the best source of information on the Pacific Northwest Arboreal Octopus, bar none.

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  44. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard3:42 AM

    Damn Cleese and his gang for inventing Polari!

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  45. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard3:44 AM

    That, my dear fellow, is the PJ lifestyle.

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  46. smut clyde4:01 AM

    The V2 program was held back for several months because of Hitler's insistence that the payload of a tonne of explosives should be replaced with litotes.

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  47. smut clyde4:14 AM

    To be fair to Hitchens, by the time the Pythons were given their own program, they *were* at the tail-end of the "Rebellious Comics Take On the Establishment" phenomenon. Theatre censorship had stopped in 1968. The establishment had successfully re-branded by then; the alternation between Heath and Wilson governments was well in train.

    About the only hold-out of old-school establishment conservativism was within the BBC itself, which is why so much of the Python satire was directed at BBC conventions (satire on sports commentary, news reading, the 'Civilisation' series) rather than at the outside world.

    Obviously Hitchens is a douche for claiming that the Pythons were phonies because the likes of Shaidle have misunderstood their importance. And obviously Shaidle has no idea what she's talking about.

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  48. smut clyde4:23 AM

    My collection of Thorne Smith books refute you!

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  49. fraser6:40 AM

    And london was a decent, clean city filled entirely with WASP Englishmen who were not, however, part of any sort of establishment.

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  50. ... but she never got better.

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  51. I think any mention of Cheneys Love Canal belongs with R'Lyeh. Safely entombed on the ocean floor.

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  52. Derelict7:07 AM

    Off topic: Former New York Mayor Ed Koch has passed away, according to WCBS News.

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  53. Weaver7:13 AM

    Seriously? What, no love for "What have the Romans ever done for us?!", Python's caustic defence of the civilising mission of empire? Or "Why do you want to be a women, Stan?", "Splitters!", and "This calls for another motion!", their send-ups of, respectively, leftist identity politics, sectarianism, and pompous bloviating? Oh, wait, those are all in "Life of Brian". Could be a problem...

    How about "Constitutional Peasants" and it's parody of anarchist talking points? No? I suppose Dennis' political babble and riff on student protester wank ("Help, help, I'm being repressed!") is undercut by the very cogent leftist points he makes about supreme executive power deriving from a mandate from the masses and not some farcical aquatic ceremony... Ah, well...

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  54. Halloween_Jack7:53 AM

    We all know that the London Blitz was really just a plot to bring in Brutalist architecture.

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  55. Halloween_Jack7:54 AM

    The Lumberjack Song: full-frontal attack on masculinity. (And directed at Canadians, too! No wonder she's so furious!)

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  56. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard7:55 AM

    If Cheney's mom were a "Deep One", that would explain why the mofo just won't die. Heh... The Shadow Over Casper...

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  57. montag27:57 AM

    Still, I think the sketch that broke the harridan's back was the upper-class twit Olympics. I would guess, in her eyes, that was just a bald-faced attempt to spit on tradition, class structure, Rule Britannia and The Natural Order of Things. And it probably just encouraged the likes of Ben Elton.

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  58. Halloween_Jack7:59 AM

    It's no coincidence that Smirnoff made his home in that hive of scum and villainy, Branson, Missouri.

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  59. Halloween_Jack8:00 AM

    What, were they trying to kill it off completely or something?

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  60. Halloween_Jack8:02 AM

    Turns out that the so-called Jack the Ripper murder spree was really just a simple disagreement over a pub tab that got blown out of proportion.

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  61. montag28:03 AM

    That's no conundrum. It's a skill that conservative hacks nurture and develop. (Farrrrrrtt!)

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  62. Halloween_Jack8:24 AM

    Oh, Kathy. Kathy, Kathy, Kathy. She's really rocking the PJ Lifestyle beat, as with this effort, in which she relieves her self of such deathless aphorisms as "Science-fiction fans, “graphic novel” readers, and computer-game addicts rarely amount to anything, despite (or because of) the man-hours they waste fantasizing about heroic adventures." Get a job, Joss Whedon!

    And just as she spent the first part of the Monty Python post nursing the wounds of her bad childhood, here she pads out her word-count with taking swipes at some acquaintance of hers who doesn't seem to want to bask in the pleasure of her company (can't guess why) and how when she was his age she found a job in a bad recession and grar grar grar. (IIRC, she also depended on public assistance at one point, but SHUT UP.) I'm just waiting to see her take on the Kids in the Hall, because she's basically one of their characters, if not several. Don't tell me that her idea of a good time isn't hanging around in some public space and crushing heads...

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pKXMcfx1d8

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  63. Monty Parrothead8:35 AM

    He's not dead yet, he's only sleeping.


    What, too soon?

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  64. Doghouse Riley9:01 AM

    I was ten years old in 1974, when the Buffalo PBS station across the lake began airing the iconoclastic BBC comedy series every Friday night....

    I see recent photographs of Eric Idle and Michael Palin and give my head a shake: How can they be getting old?




    Oh, darlin', the much bigger question is how you've managed to remain ten.

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  65. John E. Williams9:13 AM

    The Lefty equivalent to the Right's attempts to grab and own the arts is this: imagine if earnest Liberals kept trying to start their own sports teams, only theirs would be based on the concepts of Everyone's A Winner, Let's Have No Roughhousing, and Safety First. Controversial calls would be decided not by instant replay but by Sharing Our Feelings and putting it to a vote.

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  66. redoubt9:34 AM

    "In PJ Media, empire defeat you."

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  67. They’d unwittingly (or not) destroyed England in a way the Luftwaffe could have only dreamed of.


    LOL look at how dumb you are

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  68. montag29:42 AM

    "... youthful culture-busting philosophy...."



    How, exactly, does one break the culture? It's not precisely fine china. More to the point, these are comedians, not Vandals. Their object may well have been to throw darts at the stodgy and the hidebound of British society, but that tendency has been part of humor ever since, well, since there was humor.


    That said, Shaidle is making a noticeable departure from previous examples. To date, the conservabots have been plotting (rather unsuccessfully) to seize the popular culture by stealth, or by force of arms, if necessary. Of course, their lack of success has definable origins--namely, they don't really understand what the fuck it is because they insist on defining it in terms of their own political biases.


    But Shaidle is making a broader, much more serious claim, that Civilization itself has been destroyed by middlebrow slapstick. Now, truthfully, I had never considered the degree to which the theatrical traditions of the English public schools held in them the seeds of their own destruction. Nor, apparently, did the BBC (and here we, silly provincials that we are, thought that the greatest danger to the BBC was Ruprecht Murdoch).


    I am indebted to Shaidle for setting me straight on this. I hadn't realized that Civilization has been in the midst of a fully-fledged collapse ever since the exploding penguin sketch.


    I promise to pay more attention in the future.

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  69. BigHank539:45 AM

    I shoot every last one of those motherfuckers I see. That's why I need 30-round magazines.

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  70. redoubt9:49 AM

    Question is, what the hell is the source?
    If NRO has the Corner, PJM is the Alley--the place you put garbage to be picked up.

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  71. BigHank539:49 AM

    Have you read much McArdle? Now that's writing without thinking.

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  72. BigHank539:56 AM

    Since Shaidle seems to think all of reality can be classified as either conservative or liberal, do you think she rates her own bowel movements? Does she keep a log? Three Gippers this week! Must watch fiber intake and avoid having a Carter...or God forbid, a case of the Clintons!

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  73. "based on the concepts of Everyone's A Winner, Let's Have No Roughhousing, and Safety First"



    Isn't that called t-ball? And then the kids move on to little league and the jerk parents show up.

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  74. bah...the women is a twiz and an insufferable bore...which is something all these wing nuts and their sites have in common...they have to band together as no self respecting lame stream media outlet would touch them because as journalists and writers they suck, they are completely befuddled by culture and they have nothing even remotely new or relevant to say...

    their entire lives are echo sites and chambers as every single one of them writes their arglebargles which all boil down to 'see what wingnut a thinks about liberalcommiefascist plot a here...i'm a badass in my own mind and here are the links to prove it...look, i'm so far behind on what's going on in the world, but here, read how I can beat this already dead horse and render it even more deader'

    they really are still striving and failing to be the cool kids in high school aren't they...and a young kathy schaidle and her dorkettes speaking only in python and sctv catchphrases isn't really hard to imagine is it? she's still doing it...just using a different sourcebook...

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  75. I was thinking along similar lines and was tempted to suggest an article for their Lifestyle section about electronic toilet seats. Would she write about how having one encourages the nanny state because there is a bidet attached with all the different type washes or would she write about how capitalism is going down the toilet because people will buy less toilet paper from the Koch brothers or maybe if poor people had them installed it would show they aren't really poor.

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  76. E's pining for the fjords.

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  77. The_Kenosha_Kid10:23 AM

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfl6Lu3xQW0


    This video needs to be here, right at the top.

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  78. XeckyGilchrist10:25 AM

    They’d unwittingly (or not) destroyed England in a way the Luftwaffe could have only dreamed of.

    Yikes, don't let Hermann Böring hear about this.

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  79. XeckyGilchrist10:41 AM

    "Puts the nadir in Nadir Shah"


    Brilliant.

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  80. DocAmazing10:50 AM

    Does she keep a log?
    Nothing like a fresh specimen...

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  81. One wonders if Kathy would find "Election Night Special" quite so funny if she realized she's a SUPPORTER of America's very own "Very Silly Party"...

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  82. glennisw11:07 AM

    the transformation of his beloved London into a lawless polyglot madhouse
    Has this idiot been to London lately? I can assure you it's not a lawless madhouse - we spent Christmas in the East End - living in luxury and fine dining. The East End used to be a slum, now it's hip and posh. Despite the current austerity, London is doing quite fine, thank you.

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  83. I want to wipe my ass with this comment. No, wait ...

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  84. slavdude11:36 AM

    And the Book Shop sketch was a prophecy of the coming of George W. Bush and Sarah Palin.

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  85. In fairness to Cleese, I think he was referring to Boris Johnson.

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  86. tinheart12:58 PM

    I'm OK w/ starting conservative alternatives to Facebook, Twitter,
    Wikipedia, Reddit, etc, but you win by taking over the real thing.


    For all my nutty relatives, please go to the conservative alternative to Facebook so I don't have to read the ridiculous crap you post off of WorldNetDaily or wherever the hell it comes from.

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  87. tinheart1:01 PM

    Excuse me if this hasn't been mentioned before, but wasn't John Cleese the most conservative member of the Pythons? I think he'd be surprised to find himself turned into a liberal.

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  88. Halloween_Jack1:36 PM

    Yeah, if he's still involved with CAMRA, then he's probably dead fucking serious about beer temperature.

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  89. It wa a direct assault on the young Mitt Romney. Also the Koch brothers.

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  90. John D.2:03 PM

    He is an Ex-Koch!

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  91. Fats Durston2:22 PM

    How, exactly, does one break the culture?


    Wogs get to do it, too?

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  92. Worse, Cleese seems stupidly saddened and baffled by the transformation of his beloved London into a lawless polyglot madhouse — a transformation which is entirely the fault of the youthful culture-busting philosophy he and his liberal pals embraced.
    I am not surprised that the money laundering capital of the world, where various shady dealers go to live in style near their ill-gotten gains--driving the price of housing out of all reach of ordinary people--until they escape earthly justice one last time by falling face forward stone dead into their poached eggs, is a "lawless polyglot madhouse".
    See also "Libor scandal."
    If London is lawless in any other sense (and I would bet my whole hedge fund, if I had one, that that is not the sense that Shaidle means) it is because the government has been so busy about the work of making it illegal and humiliating to be poor, in order to punish the poor at every turn for disturbing the complacency of their betters. The proliferation of stupid and petty and discriminatory laws will tend to produce "lawlessness," oddly. Blaming 1970s liberalism via Monty Phython for this artifically induced "lawlewssness" is a new departure from the tradition of blaming the West Indians, who, just by the way, were getting beat up on the streets by English teddy boys 20 years before Python was even dreamed of. Those perpetators came out of a long tradition of mostly petty criminality not noted at any time for its liberalism.
    But to point out all this would seem to imply the possibility of taking this stupid pig-ignorant smear as an argument in good faith, instead of what it is: something to include in the portfolio part of the application for some wingnut propagandist sinecure.

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  93. "Michael Palin made a career out of traveling among brown people..."

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  94. He was the oldest, certainly.

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  95. TGuerrant3:20 PM

    The. Larch.

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  96. Gromet3:28 PM

    Zounds, that Shaidle! Just this:

    We hear all the time from satirists that tyrants cannot bear being
    mocked, and therefore with enough well-aimed spoofs and SNL sketches, we
    can bring down the powerful. Chaplin’s The Great Dictator, to cite just one example, proves this self-congratulatory theory to be absolute bosh.


    Has ANYONE except Shaidle ever walked the Earth thinking, "After Munich, civilization's only chance to prevent war was the October 1940 release of an American comedy. Entertainers assured us this would work; Hitler would return Poland and resign. But to the world's dismay, the movie failed, and millions died in the resulting tragedy -- a tragedy that stretched on until the 1970s, when Monty Python finally completed the destruction of England."

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  97. ADHDJ3:32 PM

    Actually the Celts sort of believed this -- that because biting satire could destroy someone's social standing or legitimacy to rule, it was a form of black magic, with all sorts of laws about when you could fairly or unfairly write a "magic diss track" about somebody.

    "There were essentially three major categories of satire... the aircetal aire could be more aptly described as premeditated satire. It consisted of 10 levels of severity. The first level of aircetal aire
    was a poem composed but not spoken; i.e., kept to one's self.
    Apparently even thinking ill in the poetic sense could have its damaging
    effect. The eighth level or full satire identified the victim by name. In
    between there were levels where "we all know who I'm talking about" or
    "if the shoe fits" type of satire was performed in public. The most
    damaging type was the 10th level which could raise blisters on the face
    of the victim (enough of a blemish to cause a king to loose the throne)
    or even cause death. This 10th type called glam dicend often involved an elaborate ritual, being a type of magic."

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  98. TGuerrant3:38 PM

    He's long been an active supporter of the UK's Liberal Democrat Party, expressed support for Obama, and for Keith Olbermann, he penned this Ode to Sean Hannity:

    Aping urbanity
    Oozing with vanity
    Plump as a manatee
    Faking humanity
    Journalistic calamity
    Intellectual inanity
    Fox Noise insanity
    You're a profanity
    Hannity

    So no matter how often Basil displayed his innate superiority over Manuel, Cleese must be a bit of a disappointment to conservatives.

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  99. TGuerrant3:39 PM

    David and Bill must be bereft.

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  100. smut clyde3:51 PM

    I disagree with this comment and would like to erect a Nithing Pole in its direction.

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  101. Halloween_Jack4:33 PM

    I think that that assumption might be because, at least for a while, he had the reputation as the most commercially successful of the Pythons. In addition to working more or less constantly, he used to have a company that made business training videos, featuring not only himself but Dawn French and Hugh Laurie, among others.

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  102. BigHank535:29 PM

    Why? Did his death cost them money?

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  103. So PJ Lifestyle is now home to Four Feet Of Seething Resentment And Self-Loathing Kathy Shaidle. Quite a 'get'...

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  104. JennOfArk7:57 PM

    As the bright shining stars of conservatism move up the food chain (Virgin Ben to helm Big Dead Breitbart, Dana Loesch and Erik Erikson to CNN, etc.) they have to dig ever deeper to fill the backbenches. They can plumb depths of stupid that you or I could not even imagine.

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  105. JennOfArk8:01 PM

    So...the Kochs are the Pirahna Brothers?

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  106. Does she keep a log?


    A log log, as it were?

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  107. How different history might have been if the Luftwaffe had dropped satirists in Britain.

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  108. I really thought she'd at least give the Pythons some credit for the way the Postman sketch exposed the moral lassitude of unionized public employees.

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  109. bekabot5:50 PM

    Oh, well, you know how these things go. You get all caught up in the Necronomicon, which is darned engrossing, while the hour gets later and later and your gaslight sputters. Nodding over your book, you drift off into a dream, all the while stealing fugitive, half-waking glimpses of eldritch print. Absentmindedly, you begin to mumble the words you are reading, while the gaslight spits and the shadows gather. Your horrible realization comes just at that moment when you finally pass into slumber...for the last time. For alas!! You have had since childhood the unfortunate habit of talking in your sleep!! Oh Noes!! Cthulhu Fthagn!! Which is the end of the story, but the moral of the story is that things don't always end up where you expect them to be.

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