Wednesday, December 18, 2013

WRECKERS.

IFrom his previous ridiculous columns I reckoned Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review was wrapped a little too tight, but holy Jesus, I'm still stunned by his ragegasm over an OFA tweet promoting Obamacare because it contained a picture of a guy in pajamas who wasn't Don Draperly enough to suit him.

First, Cooke tells us this is part of a pattern of inappropriate stereotypes (that is, stereotypes not calculated to appeal to Charles C.W. Cooke) foisted on him by the Obama studios:
First, we had Julia, the creepy, eyeless, vision-of-horror from Brave New World whose life was run from cradle to grave by the federal government. Then, we had Adriana, the painfully neutral and carefully ambi-racial stock-model-from-everywhere whose face became so synonymous with HealthCare.gov’s hilarious launch that she had to be replaced with a graphic plugging an 800 number.
"Julia" was a series of silhouettes used as a graphic element, and only creepy if you come from a primitive culture which has no experience of representational art. As for Adriana -- I never knew her name before, but am not surprised Cooke did; apparently enough wingnuts had Special Feelings for her that the poor model had to flee for her life -- I can see why Cooke was pained by her "carefully ambi-racial" features; he probably hears the tyrant Obama crying THIS IS YOUR FUTURE every time her pulls her picture out from under his pillow.
And now, courtesy of Organizing for Action, we have Pajama Boy, a metrosexual hipster in a plaid onesie who wants you to spend your precious Christmas days talking to him about the president’s vision for health insurance. 
Unlike your average Jehovah’s Witness, Pajama Boy has evidently managed not only to get into the warmth of your house to do his proselytizing, but to make himself a cup of hot chocolate and to get into his bedtime clothes to boot. That is to say, Pajama Boy is staying over — priggish facial expression and all — and he won’t leave until you’ve relented.
This soft-invasion fantasy is no more than you'd expect from the folks who gave you "shoving it down our throats." Indeed, the queerfear is palpable -- Cooke says this advertising model, or something he represents, brings to mind a "Queer Students Assocation," and would go for "a 'dialogue' about the evils of 'heteronormativity.'" Cooke also marks the model as a "vaguely androgynous, student-glasses-wearing, Williamsburg hipster," which means maybe he only looks gay, which is still bad enough. Also, "part Chris Hayes, part Rachel Maddow, part Lena Dunham," etc.

Cooke does not threaten to beat the model's homo ass, for he is an internet, rather than a real, tough guy, so instead he expresses satisfaction that "Twitter rather predictably exploded with derision," and that others information workers of his political persuasion endorse his sentiments (Cooke's work is one of the few places where you will read "of 'Iowahawk' fame" and know it is meant seriously). His final movement is essentially a luxuriation in the difficulties of Obamacare -- you know the style from countless wingnut thesaurus-reading contests exulting over the "train wreck," "debacle," "smoldering ruin," etc.-- except Cooke's signifiers tend toward this: "All the women were sluts; all the men were idiots; all the girls were playing extremely violent sports."

He does stick in stuff about Oscar Wilde and Evelyn Waugh and his preference for "adults' clothes," though, so you'll know he, unlike his various real and imaginary nemeses, is a serious adult.

This is where the Obamacare argument is right now. No one really expects it to go away; it will either get better or it won't. Cooke and his crew hope for the latter, indeed are actively working on preventing it from getting better, which is why most of their essays on the subject are just concatenations of slurs -- they don't have anything else, certainly not a health care solution other than the traditional Pay or Die. They don't have anything to explain or defend, and so can expend such creativity as they have on polishing their act. Which wouldn't be so bad if they had a better one.

74 comments:

  1. sharculese5:04 PM

    "He does stick in stuff about Oscar Wilde and Evelyn Waugh"


    Oh for fuck sake, did he not think through the subtext on that one or is he just counting on his readers to be illiterate?

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  2. Dr. Hunky Jimpjorps5:08 PM

    At the Cooke family compound Christmas, last call is at 8 PM and all family members must immediately return to their off-site hotel suites. The donning of pajamas is a viable threat under Castle Doctrine law.

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  3. carolannie5:12 PM

    He counts on them not having a clue who those two people are.

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  4. TGuerrant5:18 PM

    He himself seems to have read at least part of Brideshead Revisited, though, and feels the need to quote Sebastian at length. Frankly that raises doubts about Cooke's manlitude and makes freeing his drunken teddybear from bondage our new priority.

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  5. “I think some of the funniest humor blogs are on the right. I don’t know, maybe there are a lot of funny humor blogs on the left, I just don’t know about them. … Like Iowa Hawk is very funny, and there’s a blog called I.M.A.O., which is short for ‘In My Asinine Opinion’, and James Lileks, I think is hilarious …

    - Doughy Pantload

    http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/6607.html
    ~

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  6. SKooter MC6:11 PM

    I just did a google image search of this Cooke fellow (sorry- Charles C.W. Cooke), and he sure seems to have a new Metro Sx beard thing going, along with the stylish long hair.
    I expected an old balding dude.
    For whatever thats worth. (hypocrisy? projection? no self awareness?)

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  7. Mr. Wonderful6:25 PM

    I just read--okay, skimmed--Cooke's piece. It's nice to know that someone on the right is still carrying the Clobber 'Em With Toffeenosed Overwriting And We'll Call It "Witty" banner, what with all the faux, post-O'Rourke Regular Guy stylings of Doughy et al. Bonus drollery points for a block quote of incomprehensibly specific Waugh put-downs via--what else?--Brideshead. Stout fellow, Cookie!

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  8. sharculese6:27 PM

    Cooke is the official Angry Young Twerp of the NROarchy.

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  9. mortimer20006:28 PM

    To paraphrase Fox "News" on the ambi-racial Adriana's photo: "This guy? He doesn't look American to me." And surprise! He isn't!

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  10. Mooser6:28 PM

    Even more grateful, now. If it's not linked, not even I could click it by accident. I'm fully appalled as it is, right up to the Plimsoll line. Any more and I founder.

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  11. coozledad6:56 PM

    Haha. that whole "Java Man " in a suit thing never gets old.

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  12. Really? Is it painful to be neutral? Is raciality ambulatory these days?

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  13. They can't help themselves--they truly believe that if someone is being attacked by everyone "he deserves every bit of criticism and abuse" the crowd can dish out.

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  14. AGoodQuestion7:20 PM

    Unlike your average Jehovah’s Witness, Pajama Boy has evidently managed not only to get into the warmth of your house to do his proselytizing, but to make himself a cup of hot chocolate and to get into his bedtime clothes to boot.


    Cooke has been so long in his mental bunker that he's either forgotten or never learned what photography is. "What witchery is this? Tony Romo is making a pass in my living room? Such things cannot be!"

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  15. coozledad7:21 PM

    His closet should damn well be stocked with everything a gentleman needs.

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  16. AGoodQuestion7:22 PM

    I'm sure you've been thrown out of classier joints than that one.

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  17. Does it strike anyone as significant that the right wing is still accusing women of wanting to be dependent on the government for their slut pills and babbeez and abortions but they've dropped attacking the homos specifically for getting AIDS in our ACA? I mean--you still have extreme homophobia and hysteria about AIDS and "early death" and what have you. But I have yet to see a single attack on Obama's gay voters for being happy to have health insurance even though in right wing mythos they are weak and sick and probably just longing to be taken care of by the government?


    I'm really curious about this. I'd expect the attack on meterosexual hipster guy to include some AIDS baiting but no, it relies merely on a kind of aesthetic wink and a nod.

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  18. coozledad7:23 PM

    Plover's eggs?

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  19. glennisw7:23 PM

    So now they've decided to start criticizing the stock photos and graphics of ACA messaging? I guess they don't have anything else to complain about.
    They're outraged and disgusted by an image in a Tweet? These guys are more sensitive than the Princess and the Pea.

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  20. AGoodQuestion7:28 PM

    That's a good question. Obviously AIDS-schadenfreude looks bad to non-initiates, but so do a million other things they're still doing. I'm not sure if it might cycle back into fashion, bubbling up from the fever swamps of the lower internet where it's been biding its time.

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  21. coozledad7:29 PM

    According to E.H. Gombrich, when they first showed certain Pacific islanders a photo of Queen Victoria and asked what they thought it was, they decided it was a boat.


    I'm thinking this must have been the C.W. Cooke Islands..

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  22. mgmonklewis7:30 PM

    I know I shouldn't be surprised anymore, but Jeebus, what is the wingnut obsession with sex and gender in everything? Does any normal person have a reaction like that, all foaming rage and anxiety, when looking at an effing model in an ad? Good lord, show them a catalog from JC Penny, Land's End, or Eddie Bauer, and you'd need elephant tranquilizers and four-point restraints to reel them in.

    Has anybody told them that every time they have a shrieking meltdown like this, they're just pulling back the curtain on the squalid little psychodrama of their lives? Do we need to stage an intervention?

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  23. Gromet7:31 PM

    Shorter Cooke: "Helping people is awful, and we should only use stock photography of very white models while we're at it."

    Good to know, though, that he fantasizes he lives the manliest life there is: that of the digital-media Art Director.

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  24. mgmonklewis7:33 PM

    Fortunately, you would never need to worry about Tony Romo completing a pass in your living room.

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  25. redoubt7:54 PM

    And popped collars.

    But he has to keep moving, lest a jealous Jonah sit on him.

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  26. tigrismus8:00 PM

    It was a pretty big miscalculation to use Cooke's place for the photo shoot.

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  27. Spaghetti Lee8:03 PM

    I think the two middle initials are giveaway enough. Also a nice touch that it's 'C.W.' aka "the channel where wealthy white teenagers overreact to things."

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  28. coozledad8:03 PM

    It's from their martial arts tradition. With very little training, several people can protect themselves from a single prone person by kicking them in the face.

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  29. Gromet8:06 PM

    Huh. Well. It could just be that there's been no AIDS-related death in the news for more than decade, so the revulsion ain't what it used to be? Whereas fears of miscegenation and limp-wristedness evidently keep on giving...

    And this might be over-indulgent of me, but maybe there's a shred of humanity at work. It's one thing to rant about how gay people kissing each other is ruining you and America -- but it's another thing to use AIDS in that rant, now that it's "cured." Deploying it would mean deploying the image of a lesion-plagued 25-year-old gasping through pneumonia -- and doing so to illustrate Justice. That's only possible when there's no cure (and you're a huge A-hole), so there's no other way AIDS can end; but you'd have to be utterly inhuman to uphold that image of Justice when there is a cure, as you'd be implying we might justifiably withhold it.

    I'd suppose rightbloggers content themselves to remember AIDS was cured by a legion of straight white men in
    labcoats (and I think one French guy and an Asian guy), so the degenerates owe their very lives to the civilization they're trying to destroy
    (etc etc). It's part of the secret mythology, possibly, of the White Man's Burden.

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  30. Spaghetti Lee8:09 PM

    who wants you to spend your precious Christmas days talking to him about the president’s vision for health insurance.

    ...And wouldn't you rather listen to your conservative uncle talk about how he knows a guy whose kid was flunked for saying 'Christmas' in class? Priorities, people.

    Pajama Boy has evidently managed not only to get into the warmth of your house to do his proselytizing


    Geez, watching TV must be a living hell for Cooke. "Geckos can't talk! You can't magically enter the Rocky Mountains through a fridge! My God, has the whole world gone mad?!"

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  31. Spaghetti Lee8:20 PM

    his preference for "adults' clothes," though, so you'll know he, unlike
    his various real and imaginary nemeses, is a serious adult.



    Shit, the world really needed a George Will mini-me, didn't it? Does CCWC lounge around home in a damn three-piece suit or something?


    I actually vaguely remember a '12 Election profile of Paul Ryan that talked about how he slept under his desk in his shirt and tie, etc. which I'm sure was supposed to be all blue-pail lunch-collar rah-rah, but it made him sound more like every white-collar ass-kisser who works unpaid overtime just to lord it over his colleagues. I bet Cooke is That Guy at the NR office, and there's a hell of a lot of competition for that role.

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  32. MBouffant8:34 PM

    I usually try to complete my passes in the bedroom (if only for comfort) but to each their own.

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  33. Spaghetti Lee8:35 PM

    "How dare you be so ambiguous! How will we know where to put you?"

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  34. MBouffant8:36 PM

    What they think democracy is/should be.

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  35. coozledad8:38 PM

    There are adult's clothes and playing at adult's clothes. The latter are too often some Brooks Brother's looking crap, and the former are sort of like adult diapers. Something is going to dribble on them.


    My wife points out that David Vitter falls in both of these categories.

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  36. MBouffant8:45 PM

    "Conventional Wisdom"

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  37. XeckyGilchrist8:55 PM

    This would be my bet. Gromet's notion is appealing but I just can't see compassion - even that calculated a version of it - being much of a motivator for the brethren.

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  38. Meanwhile, here in the real world, uninsured families have to hold fundraisers to pay for medical care. Damn, I hate conservatives.

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  39. No competition from Jonah- he breezes out of the office at 1PM to hit Applebee's for a "pick-me-up" cheeseburger, then calls in to say he's on assignment, so one of the interns should finish up his latest post.

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  40. Cooke (the extra "e"...) knows enough to ape civility here, but I imagine the comments will degenerate into full-on bloodlust.

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  41. It's also evidence that there is a single hive ass out of which they pull their talking points. Damn, Cooke, a professional writer, couldn't even come up with something original. Tyranny of cliches, indeed.

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  42. TGuerrant9:24 PM

    I think you've just pinned the tail on the donkey who confused poor David Brooks so badly about Applebee's having a salad bar.

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  43. MBouffant9:28 PM

    Betting his boarding school name was more like "Piggy" or "Stuffy."


    (Actually betting he never came near a public school & moved here to become the toff he could never be at home.)

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  44. Chairman Pao9:36 PM

    "Cliched Warbling"?

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  45. Budbear9:51 PM

    ""Julia" was a series of silhouettes used as a graphic element, and only creepy if you come from a primitive culture which has no experience of representational art."

    Well, those silhouettes were black after all. That's certainly a source of horror and creepiness for the NRO tossers.

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  46. Budbear9:58 PM

    Conservative Wanker?

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  47. Budbear10:04 PM

    Yeah, they are just a trunklful of low-rent spite mongers, aren't they?

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  48. I have been to more than one of these in the (very) small town my father lives in. It's wonderful that the community comes together like that to help out the worse off among them but in a poor county in which 1 in 5 have no insurance whatsoever, 1 in 4 kids live in poverty and unemployment is 12%...there's only so many spaghetti dinners to go around to pay for $20,000 cancer treatment bills.

    You'd think that given their plight maybe they'd vote for representatives who support health care reform or jobs programs or social safety nets, but no; apparently they're a little too busy focusing on gun rights, anti-immigration, and smaller government to be bothered.

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  49. I noticed you didn't link "Iowahawk", and I thank you for it.


    First, as a native Iowan, I apologize to everyone.



    Second, I'm surprised he's still alive to link to. I would have thought he'd have choked on one of those bags of salted dicks by now.

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  50. Indeed, their carefully-constructed pigeonhole array of hatred was thrown into chaos.

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  51. Spaghetti Lee10:56 PM

    He looks less like a pundit and more like Jason Sudeikis playing a pundit on SNL.

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  52. marindenver11:01 PM

    Nice!

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  53. so instead he expresses satisfaction that "Twitter rather predictably exploded with derision,"


    Yeah, libs, refute those substantive arguments, if you possess the erudition. #socialism #kickdownkissup #whatareallthesetictactoeboards

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  54. DocAmazing12:07 AM

    Gin?

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  55. Spaghetti Lee12:16 AM

    Scotch, doctor. He sees himself as the real-world Don Draper, after all.

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  56. It's even better when you go into the comments, where half the people are just telling fag jokes. "Jokes" might even be a little inaccurate; many of them are just calling the model a sissy. One guy seems disappointed that he didn't get a female model he could masturbate to. Another one goes into some weird divergence about flat-chested girls. Are these people all fourteen?


    (And don't even get me started on that "ambi-racial" line. Fellas, you could be a little more subtle)

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  57. That line stunned me a little, too. Truly, the biggest problem in advertising today is that there just aren't enough Caucasian models.

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  58. stepped_pyramids1:18 AM

    She's Hispanic. She wasn't made in a lab by liberal race scientists, she's a person like millions and millions of others. What a bigoted piece of shit this guy is.

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  59. mrstilton2:40 AM

    Aristocratic, anyway. A scouser or cockney visiting Indianapolis has only to open his gob, and he's taken for a duke.

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  60. Spaghetti Lee2:52 AM

    One of my corniest high school memories is when my English teacher had a 20-something British friend of his come in and lecture on Shakespeare, and our teacher used his accent as a selling point-especially to the girls.

    Hicks we may have been, but in our defense, it was the height of Pottermania, and I imagine it would only be a bigger selling point in the era of Cumberbatch and Hiddleston.

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  61. smut clyde5:13 AM

    And here I was, thinking that the rightwing was all post-racial and colour-blind. But apparently not.
    ...Really, "ambiracial"? Greek prefix + Middle French root? BARBARISM.

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  62. smut clyde5:16 AM

    Heliotrope socks? A scarlet cummerbund?

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  63. You missed this one . . . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AV1D8Odv70

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  64. Ellis_Weiner9:55 AM

    Reminds me of when an audience member rose to ask Geo. W. Bush a question, and began with, "I work three jobs--" and Junior interrupted her by saying to the audience, "Isn't that great?"

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  65. satch9:58 AM

    "It seems like a lot of those British-expat conservatives owe their
    paycheck to the fact that most Americans assume anyone with a British
    accent is intelligent."


    See also: Blair, Tony


    During the runup to the invasion of Iraq, I was heartened by news that Blair was having discussions with Bush, naively thinking that maybe Blair could talk some sense into him. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Blair was almost as big an evangelical wingnut as Bush was.

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  66. Matt Jones10:16 AM

    "Then, we had Adriana, the painfully neutral and carefully ambi-racial stock-model-from-everywhere whose face became so synonymous with HealthCare.gov’s hilarious launch that she had to be replaced with a graphic plugging an 800 number."


    You'd think the NR would have the decency to not bring Adriana up, given that her photo was pulled because the administration was worried about the NR's "salt-of-the-earth" base escalating from online harassment to something worse...

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  67. StringOnAStick10:54 AM

    That's the approach I'm going to take while visiting my ultra-winger parents for Christmas this year; a hotel is a great place to escape from the daily Fox News rage-athon.

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  68. whetstone2:31 PM

    My former National Review colleague Dan Foster once rather depressingly suggested to me that The Big Bang Theory’s
    star geek, Leonard Hofstadter, was far from the loser that he needs to
    be for the joke to work, but instead the “voice of our generation.” One
    need only look at MSNBC for examples of this. The strapline du choix over at 30 Rock is “#nerdland”; the native tongue is the cretinous lingo of the graduate school; this season’s style is Earnest Ph.D. Candidate No. 6.


    Charles C.W. Cooke comes to this view honestly, having studied Modern History and Politics at Oxford, where he learned such not-cretinous not-nerdy vulgarisms as "du choix." Maybe he thinks "choix" means "chicks."

    Charles has broadcast for HBO (Real Time with Bill Maher), the BBC, MSNBC, CNBC, CTV, ABC, Sun News, and CBS.

    Clearly where he learned to be contemptuous of the nerd-turds on MarxSNBC, though not so contemptuous to describe himself as having broadcast for them. Notably missing is Fox News. I do not know if he has actually served as one of their talking heads, but I'd recommend losing the du choix shit and telling them that "University of Oxford" is "Ole Miss."

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  69. realinterrobang7:30 PM

    Dear g-d, he's a real life Mr. Gradgrind. He probably objects to flowered rugs, too...

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  70. realinterrobang7:35 PM

    *sigh* You think you're joking. I went to high school with the embryonic forms of these people (which is why I'm scarred for life and hang out here), and I had one friend who happened to be half-Spanish (as in his father was from Spain) and half-Croatian, and he drove the bigots nuts. They called him every ethnic slur in the book because they couldn't figure out which one was the "right" one...

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  71. brandonrg9:58 AM

    Caucasian is the proper default, so obviously any deviation from that standard is intentional and is meant to stick it to whitey.

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  72. brandonrg10:06 AM

    Rich Lowry has a degree in literature from UVa. I'm pretty damn sure he's read stuff like The Bell Jar himself.

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