Wednesday, January 30, 2013

STILL MORE ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WARS.

Kurt Schlichter at Breitbart.com:
If conservatives are going to be in the popular culture – and act to change it – they can’t simply ignore shows like Girls that capture the zeitgeist, even if the zeitgeist makes their skin crawl. Season two is well under way, and conservatives need to participate in the discussion.
And what sort of discussion would that be?
Think of Sex and the City, except Sarah Jessica Parker has doubled her weight, dresses like a potato sack and fancies herself the voice of some undefined generation.
Oh, that kind. I expect there's at least one clubhouse or klavern in every county where that discussion never ends.

But wait, Schlichter wants to directly engage the sheeple:
You can’t talk about Girls at the water cooler with the rest of the office if you haven’t watched it, and if you aren’t part of the discussion you aren’t injecting and modeling the conservative ideas and values that we need to advance. You can['t] criticize and critique if you’re AWOL from pop culture.
So, someone's going to say "Hey, did you see Girls last night?" and you're going to say -- let me take a line from Schlichter's essay -- "The characters seem to live in a minority and Republican-free bubble (though a black Republican (!) shows up as a character this season). There is no reference to religion – that wouldn't occur to them." Or, even better, try one from Jeffrey Lord at The American Spectator:
The America that leftist women have such contempt for... that America is sending its sons and daughters to protect those rights. To die for those rights. 
It is exactly that America that sent Tyrone Woods to fight Ansar al-Sharia in Benghazi so that Lena Dunham can sit at peace in Brooklyn with her tattoo and her sleeveless T-shirt and her wink-wink on-camera prattlings about first-times. So that Amanda Marcotte can play with her race cards at Slate.
And your co-workers will nod thoughtfully and say, "Boy, that Obamacare's pretty socialist, huh?"
You need to make sure the people around you hear those answers, but step one is to be a part of the discussion. And step two is eventually taking over the reins of pop culture ourselves.
This is the "Step 3: Profit!" of all time.
We’ll know we’re winning when we see the conservative equivalent of Girls.
How about just watching PornTube and declaring victory?

Their big problem is neatly encapsulated in this bit:
What can be puzzling is trying to figure out how Dunham actually feels about her characters – does she really understand how deluded and shallow they are, or does she (horrors) consider them as some sort of role models for her co-generationists?
I wonder if they'll ever realize that their real culture war is not with liberals, but with ambiguity.

UPDATE. Right out of the gate, commenter Spaghetti Lee:
We’ll know we’re winning when we see the conservative equivalent of Girls.

"Boys"? 

206 comments:

  1. Spaghetti Lee9:42 PM

    We’ll know we’re winning when we see the conservative equivalent of Girls.



    Boys?

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  2. mortimer9:49 PM

    We’ll know we’re winning when we see the conservative equivalent of Girls


    They already had the conservative equivalent of Girls. It was called My Three Sons.

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  3. AGoodQuestion9:57 PM

    Lena Dunham really hit a nerve with the mild innuendo of that Obama ad. And make no mistake, from someone who has both written and spoken the line "You seem like you want to come on my tits" that was pretty damn mild. But it's also obvious why it hit a nerve. They had no answer for it. She pointed out that the Republicans are giving women no reason to vote for them beyond "my husband said so", and - o the unfairness! - that's just not enough.


    The characters on Girls, from the episodes I've seen, can certainly be aggravating, but they signify a young generation to whom Schlicter's line has no appeal. They're the wrong kind of selfish.

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  4. Tehanu10:04 PM

    "doubled her weight, dresses like a potato sack..."
    So the "conservative" view of women is that they should be fashion-obsessed anorexics. I wonder how that goes over with the Promise-Keeper / Purity Ball / Quiverfull crowd where women are supposed to eschew vanity. Oh wait, I forgot about wingnut cognitive dissonance...

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  5. M. Krebs10:19 PM

    Yeah. A conservative version of pop culture is exactly what will turn the tide in their favor. Looks like a career boon is in store for Jeff Foxworthy.

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  6. whetstone10:22 PM

    We’ll know we’re winning when we see the conservative equivalent of Girls.


    "Real Housewives of Orange County"?

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  7. And the spin-off, "Good Ol' Boys."

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  8. If conservatives want to understand culture and entertainment, they might want to start by acknowledging that culture and entertainment exist. Based on these essays, these guys turn on their TVs and see only partisan politics in different shapes.

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  9. Spaghetti Lee10:31 PM

    Lena Dunham can sit at peace in Brooklyn with her tattoo and her sleeveless T-shirt and her wink-wink on-camera



    I haven't seen this much sexual resentment since they scheduled the Mormon businessmen's conference and the NFL Cheerleader of the Year dinner at the same hotel.


    BTW, this is pretty much the perfect example of "culture war = war on culture" idea. Treating some damn TV show like it's a military campaign. "How can we take this thing and twist it so that it does nothing but suit our political interests?" Weirdos.

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  10. bulletsarepeopletoo10:38 PM

    "fancies herself the voice of some undefined generation." Isn't that the pot calling the kettle black?

    I don't get it...if they "change" popular culture and turn it into the conservative version then it will no longer be popular culture, right? Also, why are they copying everything "even if the zeitgeist makes their skin crawl": wikipedia/conservapedia, Girls/conservative Girls, DailyShow/The 1/2 Hour News Hour, etc. If conservative everything is so much better why can't they come up with something original that appeals to a wider audience than their base? As it is their conservative clones are all fail.

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  11. "Why would I want to watch a show that doesn't confirm my personal political beliefs on a regular basis? Can't these women talk about the corrosive effect of gay marriage just once?"

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  12. AGoodQuestion10:48 PM

    Compiling enemies lists is the only entertainment they need.

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  13. hells littlest angel10:58 PM

    ...the conservative equivalent of Girls.

    MadonnaWhores!

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  14. LookWhosInTheFreezer11:01 PM

    Paging Dennis Miller!

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  15. Instead of facing questions of morality, the characters face questions of behavior along the lines Seinfeld parodied – who has “hand” in a relationship, or the social faux pas of the “close talker.”
    To put it bluntly, these are not the big questions that the great
    thinkers of Western civilization have pondered over the centuries.


    Unlike, say, Petticoat Junction, which addressed questions of Realpolitik in a manner so subtle and sophisticated as to make the Melian Dialogue look like a farting contest between two exceptionally dimwitted kindergarteners.

    I'd also like to note in passing that Schlichter's model for conservative participation in the discussion about Girls appears to consist largely of complaining that Lena Dunham is a repulsively unfuckable lipodemon from Obesity Dimension XXL and asking why she can't be more like that nice Claire Danes girl - i.e., skinny and blonde. Truly, we are living in an age of insightful, cogent conservative criticism of the arts rivaled only by the era of Eliot and The Criterion.

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  16. chuckling11:25 PM

    ...the conservative equivalent of Girls.


    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ36S3d1CaU

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  17. hells littlest angel11:36 PM

    This conservative equivalent of Girls goes out to the Ace of Spades...

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  18. What can be puzzling is trying to figure out how Dunham actually feels about her characters – does she really understand how deluded and shallow they are


    Should we tell them that there's these things called "Director's Commentary" on the DVDs? Sure, I know working remote controls isn't a particular skill of the over-55 set...

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  19. hells littlest angel11:43 PM

    D'oh! This conservative equivalent of Girls goes out to the Ace of Spades...

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  20. glennisw11:46 PM

    if you aren’t part of the discussion you aren’t injecting and modeling the conservative ideas and values that we need to advance


    Oh fercrissakes! Now I get why they are so obnoxious - they've set themselves a mission to go out and proselytize in daily life.

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  21. It is exactly that America that sent Tyrone Woods to fight Ansar
    al-Sharia in Benghazi so that Lena Dunham can sit at peace in Brooklyn
    with her tattoo and her sleeveless T-shirt and her wink-wink on-camera
    prattlings about first-times. So that Amanda Marcotte can play with her
    race cards at Slate.,/i>

    Those fine American troops die for freedom and I say FUCK FREEDOM.

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  22. glennisw11:51 PM

    Oh, and following up on my remark, I have to say - the kind of person who thinks his role in life is to show up at water-cooler discussions about TV shows to "inject and model [political] ideas and values we need to advance" is bound to be exactly the kind of person everyone in the office runs screaming from, regardless of his politics.


    I'm liberal as hell, but I'd never in a million years assume that my discussions with my office mates about a TV show was an opportunity to model my political philosophy to them. Kee-rist, these people have a laughably high opinion of their importance in life.

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  23. whetstone11:59 PM

    Also note that the silly, lite innuendos of her ad are "tacky" and something she should be embarrassed about for her future children*... while "joking" that Dunham is unfuckably fat is a-okay. Good luck with that lady outreach, brah.

    * I'm reminded of the single best line from Roseanne, when one of her kids calls her out for making a sex joke: "you kids are our little sex jokes."

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  24. BigHank5311:59 PM

    Once you've seen one sausage-fest, is there really room for another?

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  25. sharculese12:01 AM

    So that Amanda Marcotte can play with her race cards at Slate.



    They will never ever ever ever ever get over the fact that Amanda Marcotte will not fuck them.

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  26. pukebot12:02 AM

    It never gets old. Some Konservative Kulture warrior drawing up designs from back at headquarters on how to outflank the liberal vietcong and all they can offer as an example to the boys on the front line is the equivalent of Bud Fox's three point plan to revamp Blue Star. It's better than Spy magazine.

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  27. sharculese12:06 AM

    One of the creepy, old-before-his-time interns at the american conservative had a post last week about how the characters on girls don't seem happy, therefore the show is a secret refutation of the sexual refutation.


    They cannot enjoy something unless it confirms their weirdgross prejudices.

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  28. sharculese12:08 AM

    And of course, it was okay when Reagan made the same joke.

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  29. Haystack12:15 AM

    And after everyone at the water cooler drifts back to their desks in the middle of your rant, what's your next move, sport?

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  30. BigHank5312:16 AM

    Dude, these people are like the aliens in Galaxy Quest puzzling over "historical documents". They don't understand fiction, or storytelling, or even entertainment. Their idea of a stirring tale would be a heroic young Marine back from the wars, who returns to find his younger brother struggling with homosexual urges. The Marine takes his brother to church! They pray! The Marine finds the chickenhawk assistant guidance counselor who told the brother that being gay wasn't so bad if you moved to the city, and beats him bloody, because he's a liberal fag-lover! Everybody goes to church! They pray! The women cast their eyes downward and smile, but don't show their teeth! The top marginal tax rate is cut to 25%! The end!

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  31. Bengazi? That was one of the houses in 'Paris Is Burning', right?

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  32. So Sandra Fluke is a slut for not-using birth control (for non-sexual reasons), but Lena Dunham is so unfuckable she's fucking in every show?

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  33. Did anyone ever try to option a series about Prussian Blue?

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  34. sharculese12:41 AM

    They already made Boys. It was called Entourage.

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  35. Spaghetti Lee12:46 AM

    Well, why do you think they've been stocking up on guns?

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  36. KatWillow12:53 AM

    Conservatives should ask themselves why Fox (not news) channel has the best "liberal" shows? Why O Why doesn't Murdoch have Fox make "conservative" shows that everyone will love, and quote ad nauseam, like they do "The Simpsons" and.... so many others.

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  37. KatWillow12:54 AM

    They think TV shows and movies CREATE popular culture rather than reflect (fun house mirror style) it.

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  38. MikeJ1:00 AM

    Because if it's good or popular it's actually conservative. The Simpsons are conservative because Homer and Marge are opposite married. American Idol is conservative because there is no coöperating, only a struggle to dominate, and it had American right there in the title.

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  39. mrstilton1:23 AM

    ... a-a-and then the Marine recruits his kid brother and they all go off to Boot Camp and they're surrounded by thousands of hard muscular young men stripped to the waist showing their glistening muscles as they do push-ups and then they grab huge thick ropes in their strong hands and then they're at the range with their assault weapons and they're holding on to those long steel-hard barrels and suddenly POW! KA-POW POW! And then they're off duty and go beat up a faggot.

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  40. smut clyde1:25 AM

    So Breitbart.com is aiming at an audience who find pop TV programs too difficult to watch, and need the Cliff's Notes version so that they can keep up with their colleagues?

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  41. smut clyde1:31 AM

    It is exactly that America that sent Tyrone Woods to fight Ansar
    al-Sharia in Benghazi so that Lena Dunham can sit at peace in Brooklyn
    with her tattoo and her sleeveless T-shirt and her wink-wink on-camera
    prattlings about first-times. So that Amanda Marcotte can play with her
    race cards at Slate.


    Someone died in Libya so it is outrageous that other people are doing things that we don't like.

    Contra Jeffrey Lord, I suspect that the reasons for sending Tyrone Woods to Benghazi had little to do with Lena Dunham's wardrobe or Amanda Marcotte's polemic.

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  42. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard1:34 AM

    Think of Sex and the City, except Sarah Jessica Parker has doubled her weight, dresses like a potato sack and fancies herself the voice of some undefined generation.
    Winning teh wimmins over, one insult at at time... actually, that's three insults in one sentence.

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  43. synykyl1:38 AM

    Apparently Kurt Schlichter is the Colonel Klink of the culture war.

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  44. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard1:38 AM

    As if... we have always been at war with Betty White.

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  45. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard1:38 AM

    Trolls!

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  46. wileywitch1:43 AM

    In '97 I bought a tv and watched it because I didn't know what anyone in the corporate store where I worked was talking about. I didn't feel like I was missing anything so sold it. Now I watch television shows streaming and quite a few of them have more writing talent than most movies these days. I'm thinking television reception/cable might be worth it now.

    Reading through the comments over there it appears that a lot of them have stopped suscribing to cable. If that's widespread, you know what that means? More good shows that will piss them off and a few idiot wing-nuts forcing themselves to watch them for us to ridicule!

    Hurrah!

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  47. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard1:46 AM

    If you didn't get the memo, the Olsen Twins of White Nationalism renounced the hate, lured into the mainstream by some sinister Jew from Duluth.

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  48. wileywitch1:47 AM

    Don't you see it?! Don't you see it, Smut?!


    Thank Dawg you don't. Who could come back from seeing that?

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  49. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard1:55 AM

    WHOA... when did Reagan say "You seem like you want to come on my tits"?!?!!?!!

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  50. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard1:57 AM

    The Shadow can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own.

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  51. chuckling2:09 AM

    "It is exactly that America that sent Tyrone Woods to fight Ansar
    al-Sharia in Benghazi so that Lena Dunham can sit at peace in Brooklyn..."



    Ummm, isn't that pretty much the official justification for the military and its overseas adventures; so the rest of us can sit at peace at home and enjoy our constitutional freedoms? Sending Tyrone Woods to fight for cheap oil so that rich assholes can drive around in Mercedes and fling shit at young women may actually be more realistic, but somehow it jjust doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

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  52. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard2:24 AM

    Whoa, was he sent to Benghazi to fight Ansar al-Sharia or was he sent to guard the consulate? Sounds like somebody is off-message.

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  53. coozledad2:58 AM

    "Mr. Gorbachev, Tear down this third wall!"

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  54. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard3:04 AM

    Churls

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  55. smut clyde3:23 AM

    Let's try it this way around:
    The America that rightist shitweasels have such contempt for... that America is sending its sons and daughters to protect those rights. To die for those rights.


    It is exactly that America that sent Tyrone Woods to fight Ansar
    al-Sharia in Benghazi so that Jeffrey Lord can sit at peace at his keyboard banging out repetitious self-plagiarising columns...

    The whole construction works best if rights would indeed be lost if it were not for the deaths of American troops. Here, not so much.

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  56. Jeffrey Lord: Say, you know, this is some swinging singles apartment building Rec Room! You could have here many good swinging times! Which you would enjoy a great deal!

    Kurt Schlichter: It's so thought out and together!

    Jeffrey Lord: Look at you swinging girls, having such a good time, enjoying yourselves here and now!

    Kurt Schlichter: Don't mention it!

    Jeffrey Lord: My friend and I are from CPAC, even though no one can tell. We came here during the riot that always happens when Coulter speaks. We ran from it to come to Brooklyn, where your poisonous, feminazi television show is filmed to learn to speak about the black Republicans and the sleeve tattoo to our unsuspecting liberal neighbors in DuPont Circle, but, boy, we gave up many things. Among the National Reviews and Breitbarts and American Spectators, we are having cushy sinecures to write about championing conservative values like a flat tax and no abortions for whores like you in the television and also the video games - but here in Brooklyn we must be salesman for decorative bathroom fixtures. In the CPAC, we are thoughtful conservative activists!

    Kurt Schlichter: We are...unique kinds of guys!

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  57. smut clyde3:33 AM

    Which is funnier? If she understands or if she doesn't? When there's a choice of what to believe, go for the option that maximises your watching pleasure.

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  58. smut clyde3:38 AM

    "Injecting"? Now I have a mental image of these plonkers lurking around the water-cooler with a syringe of fast-acting narcotic.

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  59. Spaghetti Lee3:39 AM

    "Everybody likes jelly rolls, don't they?"

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  60. sharculese3:45 AM

    Is DuPont Circle even liberal anymore? I mostly think of it as a place where people who have strong opinions on what is the proper smart phone to own live.

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  61. smut clyde3:48 AM

    Mr Speaker-for-the-Heartland here is unable to specify whom the scriptwriter claims to speak for, but he is convinced that she fancies herself as the voice of someone.
    Totally not projection.

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  62. montag24:04 AM

    "The America that leftist women have such contempt for... that America is sending its sons and daughters to protect those rights. To die for those rights.

    "It is exactly that America that sent Tyrone Woods to fight Ansar
    al-Sharia in Benghazi so that Lena Dunham can sit at peace in Brooklyn
    with her tattoo and her sleeveless T-shirt and her wink-wink on-camera
    prattlings about first-times."

    Well, now I know what really killed Yuri Andropov. It was the sight of young Soviet citizens walking around in capitalist Levis while good socialist Soviet boys were defending their right not to do so in Afghanistan.

    Lord Jeffrey is such a wanker. Leave it to a guy that avoided the military to suddenly know all about how the military is protecting our rights. Well, Lord J., in my experience--which does include three Vietnam-era years' worth of gnawing at the ankles of brown-shoe army sergeant majors--the military hates our freedoms and thinks civilians are creeps for exercising those "unpatriotic" rights like freedom of speech and freedom of assembly and especially that one about petitioning the government in redress of grievances. The military dislikes it enough, Jeffrey old boy, to spy on citizens when they're doing those things.



    Not that an idiot like Lord Jeffrey would notice, but the military is mostly interested in vacuuming up tax dollars, not defending Lena Dunham's rights.

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  63. smut clyde5:31 AM

    Here we have young Jeffrey fulminating against popular culture and the slough of taste in which the masses can enjoy such trash.


    Also on his side: Dinesh D'Souza, who finds contemporary America to be so lost in decadence that he sympathises with the Islamic extremists who want to destroy it. Ramesh Ponnuru and his 'Culture of Death;. Bob Owens who dreams of an al-Qaeda-inspired insurgency against American cities...

    but somehow it's leftist women who have contempt for America.

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  64. Malignant Bouffant7:14 AM

    lurking around the water-cooler with a syringe of fast-acting narcotic
    Now who's projecting?

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  65. aimai7:18 AM

    Originally posted over at SteveM's and reposted here for topicality. I admit there's not enough snark in it but y'all can tinker a bit around the edges.

    We Stoop To Conquer--NRO division.

    by aimai

    From the NRO mailer that lands in my in box periodically comes this amazing bit of garbled thinking. Obama won voters that no self respecting Democrat would ever have gone for--people who love JayZ, atheists, young women, non white people, people who wouldn't know a political issue like the debt if it jumped up and bit them! That's how low Obama was willing to go--he even tried to appeal to voters who previous politicians as evil as Al Gore and John Kerry refused to appeal to. How low is that? So low that after excoriating Obama and his voters NRO decides that if you can't beat 'em you'd better join 'em.

    What cultural markers is the Republican brand associated with? Two things come to mind, the aspects of life that Obama said rural Pennsylvanians cling to, guns and religion. And those are pretty good ones; the country is full of people who take religion seriously and there are a lot of people who enjoy their right to own a firearm, for reasons ranging from hunting to sport shooting to collecting to self-defense. But as we've seen, that's not enough to get a majority of the popular vote or 270 electoral votes, and there are some pretty big swaths of the country -- mostly the West Coast and Northeast -- where those indicators either don't help us or work against us.
    So, thinking of new cultural traits the GOP could attempt to adopt as some of their trademarks, just off the top of my head . . . [ellipses in the original]

    Foodies? There are a lot of folks who are passionately interested in food, in a way there just weren't a generation ago. (See Vic Matus's great article from a while back on the rise of celebrity chefs.) Why can't the GOP be the Foodie Party, the one that fights moronic dietary laws like Bloomberg's ban on 20 ounce sodas, California's idiotic foie gras ban, the ludicrous talk of the Food and Drug Administration putting even more stringent regulations on raw-milk cheeses on top of the existing ones. (For Pete's sake, slap a warning label on it letting people know about the risk of raw-milk cheeses.) We ought to be standing up to the Nanny State, and making the case that grown adults who we entrust with a right to vote, a right to own a gun, and a right to speak their minds ought to have the right to eat whatever they want.

    College-Age Drinkers: Propose lowering the drinking age to 18, on the argument that you'll see less binge drinking on college campuses if 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds can just go into a bar or restaurant and order a beer. If you're really worried about lowering the drinking age across the board, make it legal for those between 18 and 21 to consume alcohol in a licensed establishment, so that a bartender or server could cut them off if there are signs of dangerous intoxication.
    I guarantee this would make the College Republicans a heck of a lot more popular on campus. Speaking of which . . .
    The beauty of it all is that when Obama appeals to voters the NRO represents it as a bribe, when the NRO does it its merely some kind of ...inducement?

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  66. aimai7:21 AM

    This horrible commenting system doesn't allow me to block quote or even use italics!!!! All that is left to me is the shift key and some random exclamation points. I realize that you guys will probably not be able to tell where parody leaves off and reality begins (to misquote my favorite line from Moby Dick) so *the actual NRO piece begins right at the beachead with the phrase:

    What cultural markers is the Republican brand associated with?

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  67. You can['t] criticize and critique if you’re AWOL from pop culture.


    Forgive me if this has been pointed out already, but isn't the whole fucking purpose of conservative attack on modern society, especially on the public education system and heroic teachers, that they MUST keep their (physical, emotional and mental) young'uns away from any hint of liberal ideology?


    How can simple-minded--excuse me, "morally clear-headed" wingnuts intentionally expose themselves to creepy liberal stuff and not get contaminated? As in, "how are you gonna keep 'em down on the farm once they've seen gay Paree?"

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  68. aimai7:36 AM

    This reminds me of the irritating fact that the same people who reared back in horror at Jeremiah Wright's hypothetical "[Then] God damn America" were simultaneously explaining to us that God himself was damning America through various and sundry plagues, floods, and terrorist acts. It was like an infinite regression of Jeremiads on the sorry state of America's relationship with God as exemplified in some other guy's Jeremiad on the sorry state of America's relationship with God.

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  69. No contradiction, mate.


    You want your car to look as shiny and sparkly as possible (nevermind the questionable engine under the hood) so as to command as high a price as possible when the time comes to sell.


    Duh.

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  70. they think like right true propagandists, in other words.

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  71. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard7:49 AM

    Real Sheriffs of Maricopa County.

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  72. Halloween_Jack7:53 AM

    Exactly. You can just imagine the office hobgoblin popping up with a smirk when a couple of co-workers happen to be in the break room, nuking their lunches and talking about the previous night's episode: "Hey, I watched that Girls show once. That Leda Durham sure dresses like a potato sack, doesn't she?" Followed by uncomfortable silence and a soon-as-possible exit, chased by his asking the one that he has a crush on if she'd seen his pictures from the gun show that he posted on his FB page.

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  73. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard7:53 AM

    How about a heartwarming sitcom about a simple, homespun country boy from the South who decides to serve his country by enlisting in the marine corps? Conservatives would love that.

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  74. Derelict7:54 AM

    Ah, but that's the thing about conservatism: It's a moral and political system so strong and so inherently and obviously good that it crumbles on contact with liberalism.

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  75. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard7:57 AM

    But... but... scary black man.

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  76. coozledad8:00 AM

    I hit the cooler with a luer-lock
    they drifted off while I was in mid-schlock
    Uh oh. The damage done.

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  77. Bizarro Mike8:03 AM

    Marcotte had a piece where she explains some of the game. Sexually active women aren't virtuous, so their opinions don't count. Young virgins are still to unlearned in the way the world works for their opinions to count. Old crones are old and icky, lacking the grace of beauty, so their opinions don't count.



    You can see it active in Lord's comments. Dunham doesn't count because she has sex and she isn't attractive.

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  78. Adrian8:33 AM

    It's not that difficult "trying to figure out how Dunham actually feels about her characters" as she's all over the place promoting the show and talking about how she feels about her characters. It's just more fun to make stuff up.

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  79. TomParmenter8:37 AM

    It reads better if you don't know where the shift comes. The foodies thing, kind of clever, then the college drinking and you think, hey, wait a minute. The next one was going to be building up bonds with the sexually brutal.

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  80. redoubt8:45 AM

    Because "catapulting" the propaganda would break the watercooler, leading to lawsuits and OSHA involvement.

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  81. redoubt8:48 AM

    It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye freedom.

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  82. aimai9:04 AM

    Oh, those bonds were never broken--look at how quickly they deep sixed the (Anti) Violence Against Women Act. The only difference between the most rabid MRA sites and the modern Republican party is that the modern Republican party at least pays lip service to the belief that some women are Madonnas even while treating all women as whores. The MRA's don't even believe that.

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  83. redoubt9:15 AM

    And when he said it, the usual suspects accused him, and by extension Obama, of being unpatriotic.

    It's as if Carl Schurz never existed.

    ReplyDelete
  84. BBB - imagine my relief on scrolling yr link and seeing it was about Jim Nabors. My first thought was Lee Harvey Oswald or Charles Whitman. Okay - not country boys, but 'the South', 'USMC'...you see where I'm headed.

    ReplyDelete
  85. aimai9:50 AM

    If she doesn't hate her characters for being, shallow, sex obsessed, and dressed "like a potato sack" then I think her feelings are going to be dismissed as, basically, wrong. Whether that is because they think that all popular culture should be didactic, like a horn book for the horny, or because they think everyone covers their basically evil nature by enacting Condemnation as a public show is unclear. But remember these are the same people who used to read Playboy for the articles and now watch youtubes of gay pride parades as "research."

    ReplyDelete
  86. "Ward, I think you were a little strict with Wally last night."

    [AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

    ReplyDelete
  87. This horrible commenting system doesn't allow me to block quote or even use italics!!!!


    And to think, Americans have died in Benghazi to protect our freedoms!


    (By the way, even though it's not obviously documented, you can use HTML tags: <i> and <blockquote>.)

    ReplyDelete
  88. Four; I remember the days when Sex and the City was a byword for irresponsible hedonism and mass-market vulgarity, to be abused by all intellectually respectable people as no TV series ever was abused before or since. Some people just don't want independent young single women in their entertainment.

    ReplyDelete
  89. Big Hank53--are you sure you're not a writer for Bill Whittle's Declaration Entertainment? That would just be up his, er, alley.

    ReplyDelete
  90. Honestly, I find Lena Dunham somehow slightly grating, and encounter enough artisanal mayonnaise-crafting hipsters in real life without subscribing to HBO. Do I have to turn in my "Proud Liberal" suspenders now? Oh, wait, no, I'm on the side** that acknowledges that cultural tastes and preferences exist independently of polemical political tribalism. Whew.


    **Yes, I'm self-identifying with a side that is aware that it's not always about sides. Ironic, isn't it? Now where did I put that jar of mayo?

    ReplyDelete
  91. how true! 'tis like our own edmund burke's, a philosophical enquiry into the origins of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful, or no fatte chicks.

    ReplyDelete
  92. BigHank5310:34 AM

    What's wrong with Sex and the City or Girls or goddam Murphy Brown, if you can remember that far back?



    Female agency, that's what.

    ReplyDelete
  93. that water cooler conversation would have never happened if the rest of the office were armed.

    ReplyDelete
  94. glennisw10:46 AM

    I do love the idea of Republicans revamping their image by championing the right of freedom-loving everyday Americans to consume fois gras! That'll appeal to a lot of their base!

    ReplyDelete
  95. 4jkb4ia10:59 AM

    I think Douthat already wrote what had to be said about the topic of this post, but we can assume that Breitbart readers do not read him because he is polluted by the evil NYT.

    ReplyDelete
  96. 4jkb4ia11:01 AM

    I got up late for the Hagel hearing, but people seem pretty confident because there's no liveblog going on memeorandum right now.

    ReplyDelete
  97. Budbear11:02 AM

    "Ward, I think you were a little rough on the beaver last night"

    ReplyDelete
  98. We can thank soldiers for their service without pretending that our freedom is dependent on it. Exactly which military adventure since WWII was necessary to keep us free?

    ReplyDelete
  99. KatWillow11:33 AM

    Now, that would probably be a big, MONSTER hit!

    ReplyDelete
  100. KatWillow11:47 AM

    Slightly OT: re conservatards insistence that if everyone was armed there would be less shootin'. Someone should advise them to watch one of those non-Leftwing-propaganda movies or TV shows often referred to as "Westerns". Lotta shootin' going on in them.

    ReplyDelete
  101. Bingo. I've made this argument myself before. I mean, I definitely think shows like "Will and Grace" normalized homosexual friendships/relationships/people to a certain extent, but the fact is that America was ready to let "W&G" into their homes. Did the average person give as shit that there was a show about two gay dudes and their best friends on TV? No.

    ReplyDelete
  102. To be scrupulously fair to Schlichter, Dunham's character apparently says "I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice of a generation" at some point. I think she was making a joke of some sort, though.

    ReplyDelete
  103. I guess it doesn't occur the author that some of the women fighting and dying for our freedumbs might also be leftist. Not everyone in the military is conservative.

    ReplyDelete
  104. Instead of facing questions of morality, the characters face questions of behavior...these are not the big questions that the great
    thinkers of Western civilization have pondered over the centuries.


    Yeah, if you're willing to forget about Aristophanes, Moliere, Shakespeare, Proust, Jane Austen, etc.

    ReplyDelete
  105. "What can be puzzling is trying to figure out how Dunham actually feels about her characters – does she really understand how deluded and shallow they are, or does she (horrors) consider them as some sort of role models for her co-generationists?"




    I imagine she feels about them the way most comedy writers feel about the characters they create--that they are funny and flawed. Really, really flawed. It's where the comedy comes in, folks.

    ReplyDelete
  106. Bitch Lowry12:15 PM

    When it's Sarah Palin with the wink-wink on camera, it's a whole different story, complete with starbursts and the conservative creaming of the pants.

    ReplyDelete
  107. BigHank5312:15 PM

    If I thought there was even a shred of a chance they'd ever pay any
    money, ever, to anyone except themselves, I might actually turn out
    something and shop it to them, because it's hard to imagine anything
    more satisfying than taking an asshole's money away from him. Here's the
    arguments against doing that:

    1. It would be morally repugnant.
    Not as morally repugnant as writing climate change denialist articles
    for Exxon, but still not really a positive thing.

    2. Declaration
    Entertainment, and people like them, won't buy a script. They'll try to
    get it for points, and probably points of net, not gross. So the writer
    wouldn't get paid until the thing got made and showed a profit. HA HA HA
    HA.

    3. Head on over to their site and find the trailer for "The
    Arroyo", and tell me what you think about the production values. They've
    had almost six months to work on the film since they released that
    trailer, but they're not talking about progress. The video's nice, but
    with cameras under $1000 that's the cheapest part nowadays. The sound's
    not good. There's a heavy with what looks like a single henchman. The
    characters aren't introduced. It's the best ninety
    seconds of footage they made, and after you've seen it, you don't need
    to see the movie. That's the kind of "storytellers" they are.

    ReplyDelete
  108. These people don't seem to grasp that conservatism is, by definition, well.... um, conservative, and therefore it is never going to be a reliable source of the excitement and entertainment people crave. They're never going to win this one.

    ReplyDelete
  109. Given that Aristophanes' work is rife with homosex, uppity women-folks, and déclassé fart jokes, I imagine that most Serious Conservative Aesthetes would like nothing better than to forget about him.

    ReplyDelete
  110. Oh, thank God. I thought I was the only one.

    ReplyDelete
  111. witlesschum12:25 PM

    Everyone knows that Tyrone Woods specifically chose to join the military to make sure tax rates on those making over $250,000 a year were not raised, that gays could not get married, GE's stock price remained high, abortion banned (for the poors) and that every bankster on Wall Street could swim peacefully in his money vault.



    And why, pray tell, are is culture mumble, mumble brigade of wingnuttery not studying what Felicia Day did to make The Guild and posting a sitcom about four young conservative dudes working at the American Enterprise Institute and looking for love in the big city every week at Breitbart.com? I guess because that would involve a fair amount of work and they're not really delusional enough to think anyone wants to watch that, much as they might pretend otherwise in print.

    ReplyDelete
  112. Injecting-schmeckting. "Modeling"? (That nanny-state term for inculcating in our virile American youth the feminizing values of political correctness...) How does he intend to "model conservative ideas" by gabbing about Girls at the water cooler? Oh, right--

    "See what I'm doing, my fellow Americans? By chatting instructively about the corrupt morality of Girls, I'm embodying and demonstrating the conservative principle of protecting freedom by correcting your faulty conception of it."

    ReplyDelete
  113. sharculese12:37 PM

    All of them. Including the ones that didn't end well or were just generally incomprehensible.

    ReplyDelete
  114. Agree, but you can mitigate #1 by writing it as satire. They'd never notice. If anything you get notes like, "We love that the liberal college professor is having an incestuous relationship with his mother. But we don't want to alienate our demographic. Can he be a cannibal instead?"

    ReplyDelete
  115. My wife and I spent a romantic valentines day at a hotel in Du Pont Circle and environs (I was in grad school at U of MD and my wife was back in GA most of the time). I was living with my Grandmother in Baltimore and the first thing she said when I told her where we were staying was, "watch out for the homosexuals." So yes, Du Pont Circle: still liberal.

    ReplyDelete
  116. bekabot12:56 PM

    Well, okay. These are people who have a right to think what they think, which is that culture can be faked. They've managed to fake commentary, radio, whole organs of opinion; so why shouldn't they think that culture is "culture" and be turned out complete with "footnotes" and "research"* like a Crown or Regnery "bestseller"? All their experience inclines them to think that it can; even more, that it should. All their history tends that way.


    They're still gobsmacked with astonishment that they couldn't fake an election and get their "candidate" elected "President", and this sudden fascination with "culture" as opposed to the more traditional conservative simple open fakery is an artifact of that gobsmackedness. They've run into a roadblock, is the way they see it, like Wiley Coyote in a Road Runner cartoon, so, now, again like Wiley Coyote, they feel the need to send away to Acme for something that will save the day.


    All the same, the question of whether or not culture can be forged, a la the three-dollar bill, is a matter of opinion. Personally I don't think it can be, but only time will tell.


    *'Should we tell them that there's these things called "Director's Commentary" on the DVDs?' — a good question, but an incidental one, for the reasons I have tried to outline above.

    ReplyDelete
  117. HogeyeGrex12:58 PM

    You need to make sure the people around you hear those answers


    So they'll know better than to be around you in the future.

    ReplyDelete
  118. sharculese12:59 PM

    does she (horrors) consider them as some sort of role models for her co-generationists?

    Who can forget the first rule of Wingnut Politics and the English Language: Always use something like 'co-generationists' when a word that people actually fucking use, like 'peers' or 'contemporaries', will do.

    ReplyDelete
  119. Shakespeare too. That guy could write a fart joke that really makes you think.

    ReplyDelete
  120. Now, that would probably be a big, MONSTER hit!


    Edited that on your behalf, as the kids say.

    ReplyDelete
  121. redoubt1:13 PM

    Some might even have same-sex partners.
    (Which will break their brains when they find out.)

    ReplyDelete
  122. blondie1:38 PM

    Conservatives, you want to "win" at culture? Make your message generally appealing to the public. Good luck with that.

    ReplyDelete
  123. Bitter Scribe2:01 PM

    I really don't understand why these guys want in on pop culture so much. They already have all the talk radio mouth-breathers...isn't that enough?

    ReplyDelete
  124. Some guy2:01 PM

    Not attractive? Th'hell?

    ReplyDelete
  125. satch2:07 PM

    I'm a soon to be sixty six year old guy who also don't have HBO, so I had no idea who this Lena Dunham person was until the wingnuts started nattering on about her, but why can't they just be satisfied that a young person who seems to be hard working enough to create her own show that provides jobs for actors, writers, set designers, craftspeople, and the rest of the support staff required to put a show on HBO. Oh, right... it's not enough that she's a Job Creator, she's gotta have the right attitude, values, and point of view to satisfy the right wing cultural gatekeepers. Y'know what... fuck these people. These ever so culturally underrepresented and put-upon fragile flowers do have their content. Anything done by Don Bellisario in the last thirty years: Magnum PI, Black Sheep Squadron, JAG, and the NCIS franchise (which couldn't exist without Guantanamo Bay as a threat to use against suspects who all seem to be wannabe terrorists) should keep the military pedestal polishers happy. And Blue Bloods, which has a saintly, morally upright, Thomas Aquinas spouting Police Chief of New York City (Tom Selleck) and head of a family of incorruptible cops (and a prosecutor) who live their Catholic family values day in and day out. If the wingers want more, let 'em step up, make the pitches, write the pilots, cast the actors, and see how they shake out. Otherwise, just shut up.

    ReplyDelete
  126. yeah good point. maybe our illustrious host can comment?

    ReplyDelete
  127. A friend of mine years ago invented a game called "Name That Tune, Mister Spock," in which song titles were given elaborate, technically-correct form. Thus, "Orange Pekoe Brewed Extract Intended for Dyadic Consumption" = Tea For Two, etc.

    ReplyDelete
  128. I'll just leave the phrase "A face made for radio" here.

    ReplyDelete
  129. she's a cutey.

    ReplyDelete
  130. Of course, "co-generation" doesn't apply to wingnuts, since they produce heat without light.

    ReplyDelete
  131. I do agree her ink is kind of terrible and scribbly, but I do love how she can be unfuckable and oversexed at the same time.

    ReplyDelete
  132. cal promo2:28 PM

    I am only qualified to comment on who is and is not fuckable and that girl is totally fuckable. Saw a pic of her stark naked eating a birthday cake - yeah, that works.

    ReplyDelete
  133. AGoodQuestion2:52 PM

    Well, good for them. I hope they can still draw a crowd now that they're out of the klaverns.

    ReplyDelete
  134. aimai2:58 PM

    And a little bit with a dog.

    ReplyDelete
  135. AGoodQuestion2:58 PM

    I do. It's a disheveled, tangible kind of beauty but it works for me.

    ReplyDelete
  136. aimai3:01 PM

    I totally get that--because its a significant part of the fantasy that men must/always/get/to/choose that a woman who gleefully chooses her own sexual partners and the when, where, and why of it is an ugly whore. Being oversexed and sexually successful makes her ugly. Being oversexed makes her ugly. Being sexually successful and implicitly rejecting any given conservative male by being able to choose for herself makes her downright toxic. If not now then later, for sure--wasn't it that ol' sexpot John Derbyshire who told us that women after 18 or so were by definition not sexually attractive?

    ReplyDelete
  137. aimai3:04 PM

    I wish to recommend my new personal favorite in the Sexy Girls With Personal Agency sweepstakes: Lost Girl by Canadian ("yes, we can show nudity on TV") TV. Talk about AC/DC and anything goes! They put the Grrrrr back in Grrrrrl power.

    ReplyDelete
  138. aimai3:06 PM

    Never watched her except for the infamous "vote Obama" ad. But god damn I'll defend any plump female auteur's right to autority for the sake of my plump daughter.

    ReplyDelete
  139. Doghouse Riley3:18 PM

    Celibacy confers the right to set impossibly high standards. Especially the involuntary sort.

    ReplyDelete
  140. HogeyeGrex3:21 PM

    Funny, that doesn't look like a Play-Doh and bacon Fleshlight.

    ReplyDelete
  141. slavdude3:27 PM

    Wait a minute.... Wasn't it conservatives who got the drinking age raised to 21 in the 1980s?

    ReplyDelete
  142. "See the hepcat? See her crib?"

    ReplyDelete
  143. Too bad he's not the Sgt. Schultz.

    ReplyDelete
  144. MikeJ3:54 PM

    I don't think the two are mutually exclusive.

    ReplyDelete
  145. BigHank533:58 PM

    I tried the pilot a couple of weeks ago, and...eh. The show's perfectly good, and probably better than average in the Plucky Supernatural Girl Detective genre. It just turns out I don't seem to have any interest in Plucky Supernatural Girl Detectives this winter. Maybe when the weather warms up...

    ReplyDelete
  146. smut clyde3:58 PM

    a horn book for the horny


    I am imagining a world in which "Slate" is called "Horn-Book" instead.

    ReplyDelete
  147. smut clyde4:02 PM

    Just one little abduction and MB will never let me forget it.

    ReplyDelete
  148. Well, no shit. Her character is a young writer who rarely manages to write anything, and at the time she says that line she is 1. begging her parents for financial support and 2. stoned out of her mind. The only way to think that line is a serious statement by Dunham is to not watch the show.

    ReplyDelete
  149. MikeJ4:27 PM

    Exactly how I felt. I could see the appeal but meh. Which is almost as frustrating as wanting to hate a show that's relentlessly stupid by enjoying it anyway.

    ReplyDelete
  150. Jay B.4:28 PM

    What the fuck do you have against artisanal mayonnaise? Aioli or death, reactionary dog!

    ReplyDelete
  151. "I struggled against the legislative restraints on behavior and those same restraints emerged victorious" RIP Spy Magazine!

    ReplyDelete
  152. whetstone4:39 PM

    This is what I thought of when I read "we'll know we're winning when we see the conservative equivalent of Girls." They won't ever see that because they don't allow any wrongthink.

    The conservative equivalent of Girls would star sexpots (have to want to see them naked!) with no self-confidence issues (can't show weakness!) who are always successful (because conservatives always are!) and who never ever stray or do anyone wrong, which basically obviates any dramatic structure or humor.

    I think that leaves you with Charlie's Angels.

    ReplyDelete
  153. If I acknowledge that Sex and the City got a lot of unfair heat for having female characters with agency, can I still dislike the show for depicting those women with agency as really shallow and obsessed with rich guys and expensive fashion products and living in a Manhattan yuppie fantasy world, and presenting those as basically good things? I have to admit that I only managed to watch maybe three episodes before giving up, and if my impression was wrong I'll be relieved, because it drove me crazy that everyone loved that shit so much.

    ReplyDelete
  154. Born in Duluth, but all good Minnesotans know that Bob is a Hibbing boy.

    ReplyDelete
  155. Jay B.4:54 PM

    I think that leaves you with Charlie's Angels.


    Without the lesbian subtext.

    ReplyDelete
  156. Tudor Jennings4:58 PM

    Isn't 2 Broke Girls about strong independent women, setting up in business for themselves in a capitalist venture and bettering themselves, rather than looking for handouts or marrying a rich man and becoming a home mak...... oooohhhhhh......

    ReplyDelete
  157. Well, Sex and the City kinda spoiled that agency by having the lead character endlessly obsess about men.

    ReplyDelete
  158. No, that's 2 girls 1 cup. The apotheosis of capitalism.

    ReplyDelete
  159. Say that three times and you'll summon Paglia!

    ReplyDelete
  160. Susan of Texas5:38 PM

    Or every Hallmark Christmas show ever made. I saw part of one in which the hero wore a cross, the heroine lived her Christian values, and the basic plot revolved around a hotel that was from a Thomas Kinkade painting. (Literally.)

    So your basic conservative movie leaves out all the inconvenient hatred of gays, minorities and women, all the paranoid fear-monging, the spiteful anticipation of the defeat of their enemies, and the gleefull war-monging.

    By the way, Girls is produced by rightwing darling Judd Apatow. If they hate the show so much they should have a word with him.

    ReplyDelete
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    ReplyDelete
  162. coozledad5:56 PM

    Don't let that incandescent star? commit fellatio upon my person.


    Hey Ellis, I still have my copy of DOON!

    ReplyDelete
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    ReplyDelete
  164. wileywitch6:16 PM

    0, and the Cold War with it's secrecy and paranoia was quite opposed to freedom.

    ReplyDelete
  165. The only thing I enjoy more than watching conservatives dudes rage about how terrible it is that women are free and enjoying it is being the prime example of someone whose happiness demonstrates All Wrong With The World.

    ReplyDelete
  166. Don't ever change, Amanda.

    ReplyDelete
  167. I love how they cannot understand how there are guys in the world who can get a serious and most effective boner for normal looking, flawed women because sexuality is wonderful and complex thing that in actual practice defies the conventions with which conservatives suffocate themselves.

    ReplyDelete
  168. XeckyGilchrist6:59 PM

    They're working on it. It's that whole "polish our shoes, not get new shoes" or whatever horseshit they've been gabbling about lately. It's never worked - my favorite example was Dumbya sending Karen Hughes around to foreign countries to talk slowly and clearly and explain just how awesome it was that we were destabilizing all of Central Asia and surroundings, if only you'd listen.

    ReplyDelete
  169. Is Dunham the ventriloquist?

    ReplyDelete
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    ReplyDelete
  171. Expressing first the caveat that there is nothing on the internet so useless and boring as anonymous/pseudonymous men commenting on the perceived fuckability of famous women, I will say that, yes, Lena Dunham is pretty.

    ReplyDelete
  172. FlipYrWhig7:58 PM

    Burke on boobs: "Observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most
    beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; the
    easy and insensible swell; the variety of the surface, which is never
    for the smallest space the same; the deceitful maze, through which the
    unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix or whither it
    is carried." _On the Sublime and Beautiful_, Part III, Section 15.

    ReplyDelete
  173. Big_Bad_Bald_Bastard8:25 PM

    Unless Obama's socialist agenda is repealed, those girls will never have cups of their own.

    ReplyDelete
  174. Spaghetti Lee8:39 PM

    but why can't they just be satisfied that a young person who seems to be hard working enough creates her own show that provides jobs for actors, writers, set designers, craftspeople, and the rest of the support staff required to put a show on HBO.



    Not to put you down too much (you make a good point) but one thing that people who hate the show often bring up is that all four female leads are the child of someone famous. Personally, I don't care (people are shocked by nepotism in Hollywood) but it feeds into the '20-something hipsters who have never worked a day in their lives' stereotype.

    ReplyDelete
  175. Sgaile-beairt9:26 PM

    yr wig it is a powderd one i trow??

    ReplyDelete
  176. Sgaile-beairt9:27 PM

    exit followd by a bore....

    ReplyDelete
  177. BigHank539:27 PM

    In his defense, you were only half-way through stuffing him into the wetsuit when he woke up.

    ReplyDelete
  178. Sgaile-beairt9:48 PM

    nerd=terrorist fist bump!! ((& they are always ready to deal death deserve it or not o_0 )

    ReplyDelete
  179. Yeah, I've also only seen her in that Obama ad, which, frankly, I found
    cutesy and grating rather than cute and clever. And though nothing I've read about Girls - positive or negative - has suggested it's a show that I would enjoy very much, I'm hard-pressed to summon up any outrage that HBO has decided to air Girls rather than a "more deserving" show about a white, middle-aged lone cannon cop whose loose-wolf methods give his captain ulcers but GET RESULTS, DAMN IT!

    ReplyDelete
  180. Sgaile-beairt9:52 PM

    only if they get eaten by chupacabras.....

    ReplyDelete
  181. bekabot10:37 PM

    "Personally, I don't care (people are shocked by nepotism in Hollywood) but it feeds into the '20-something hipsters who have never worked a day in their lives' stereotype."

    Sure, but it still doesn't make any sense. Conservatives are supposed to be in favor of nepotism. Conservatives are supposed to believe that talent is mostly genetic, and some of them seem to take that proposition seriously. Adam Bellow wrote a book in praise of nepotism, and the thing runs to 576 pages. He may have kept his own tongue in his cheek throughout every last one of those pages, but he couldn't have answered for those of all his readers. It may be annoying to observe hereditary privilege in action, but if you believe it's the order of nature, it's foolish to yowl about it. You're supposed to find your evolutionary niche and keep to your place instead.

    ReplyDelete
  182. Well, my oblique pettiness over Budbear stepping on my joke has certainly "gone down" an interesting path. And here I thought I was just being small-minded.

    Hey Ellis, I still have my copy of DOON!

    ... Holy shit, that Ellis Weiner? Not that I've encountered a passel of Ellis Weiners, or anything ... Oh, you know what I mean.

    ReplyDelete
  183. "Dammit, McGonigal! Did you really have to empty out the laser printer again?"

    "That paperwork's not gonna file itself in triplicate, sir."

    "What the ... [SWIGS FROM MAALOX BOTTLE] ... It only needs to be filed in duplicate."

    "I keep extra copies in these shoeboxes just in case they lose one ... because that's just how I roll ... with justice."

    "MCGONIGALLLLL!"

    ReplyDelete
  184. Hell, the Civil War was the last time American soldiers directly fought for American's freedom. The World Wars were much more about helping allies (WWI and European Front of WWII) and clobbering an empire that made a bad mistake in preemptively striking us (Pacific front of WWII).

    ReplyDelete
  185. TURN IN YOUR BADGE AND YOUR STAPLE REMOVER!

    ReplyDelete
  186. DocAmazing1:10 AM

    You can’t talk about Girls at the water cooler with the rest of the office if you haven’t watched it


    Back in the mid-1970sm the avant-garde band The Residents had a poster advertising their EP Duck Stab! that read, "You can't talk about The Residents' music if you haven't heard it, and ignorance of your culture is not considered cool."


    The difference between The Residents and Schlichter (besides forty years) is that Schlicter is far more obscure and inaccessible.

    ReplyDelete
  187. Puzzled3:28 AM

    What's the obvious reason?

    ReplyDelete
  188. Aimai7:06 AM

    it gets better as the season goes on. About halfway through season one it starts to reveal a. Good underlying plot. But I will sorrowfully admit that the dialogue makes Buffy the vampire slayer sound like Shakespeare. The characters communicate in a series of impoverished , low rent, Internet style quips and insults which are totally forgettable.

    ReplyDelete
  189. geraldfnord8:00 AM

    As a good liebrul, I try to watch out for the homosexuals---we should all watch out for each other.

    ReplyDelete
  190. BigHank5310:01 AM

    Okay, thanks. I'll give it another try.

    ReplyDelete
  191. BigHank5310:08 AM

    Nepotism isn't for girls. They'll use it all up, just the gays are doing with marriage.

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  192. Oh, looks like it didn't take <sarcasm>, either. Anyway, I have no idea. <i> works, and <em> doesn't.


    There was once at least one HTML-parsing program for the blind that interpreted <i&gt as marking italicized titles, while <em> indicated italicization for (surprise, surprise) emphasis. I just got into the habit of making the distinction, even though it's probably no longer necessary.

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  193. JennOfArk12:13 PM

    Yeah, it could have just as easily though less provocatively been called First World Problems.


    But it did have some good moments, like the time Samantha tried to dye her bush and it turned Bozo orange.

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  194. bekabot4:31 PM

    That's a good point. It's such a good point that you make me wonder whether some of the fury of the righteous which gets directed at this show isn't due to the fact that all the leads are female. Nobody bitched when Charlies Sheen took up acting. Nobody crabbed when his brother did the same. Nobody thinks that Michael Douglas had his career handed to him in a big picnic basket — at least, nobody thinks it and says so. Hmmm...

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  195. fraser1:25 PM

    Or the pie fight scene in the original draft of Julius Caesar that kicks off with him saying "So Brutus, have you et tu?" But then he rewrote it.

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