When I'm asked what my favorite cover is, I usually say
The Residents' "Viva Las Vegas." But this will also do.
• Unlocked for your pleasure at Roy Edroso Breaks It Down: “First Projects from Ben Shapiro’s Family Entertainment Company Revealed.” Yes, the pint-sized pundit actually claims he’s got $100 million lined up to challenge Disney, from which he expects to receive waves of apostates because Disney is “woke.” Since it’s obvious what kind of unwoke entertainment Shapiro fans would approve, I felt free to provide some likely synopses.
I’d love to give you folks some more freebies, but my crazy new plan is to suggest you pay to read what is, after all, a paid publication meant to insulate me and the missus from crushing poverty. It’s got everything: Five-day-a-week delivery, a lively mix of politics, humor, and arts journalism, a comically low price point ($7 a month, or 35 cents an issue), and above all me, God’s Lonely Man. It’s almost profligate not to subscribe! Get in there, my friends.
• I have to say that Sarah Palin’s return to American politics is rather like the later iterations of the Dennis Miller Show -- there’s a feeling of superfluity about it. The polity she helped destroy 14 years ago is such chaos now, I can’t imagine her wingnut Kabuki can break through the uproar. But it appears some of the conservative brain trust think she’s worth investing in:
Sarah Palin gets national endorsements, as Nick Begich keeps racking up local Alaskan endorsements
Since announcing that she’d like to be named Alaska’s next member of Congress, Sarah Palin has won the endorsements of political luminaries, such as former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and former President Donald Trump.
Her closest competitor at this point, businessman Nick Begich, announced more endorsements from influential Alaskans: Rhonda Boyles, the co-chair of the 2020 Alaskans for Don Young campaign, [and former Governor Hickel staffer] Barbara Haney of Fairbanks.
Don’t it figure? People who would actually be represented by this person, who quit the governorship to focus on her career as a public nuisance, are not as keen about electing Palin to represent them as are other non-Alaskan political clownshows who have no interest in Alaska’s representation but could always use a hand dumbing down democracy.
When in 2011 she seemed to withdraw entirely from politics I thought about the disappointment of her followers:
She was as close to a new Reagan as the Tea Party people had -- simultaneously sunny and impenetrable, a great grinning billboard behind which they could safely wreak their bitter vengeance on the hippies, ethnics, and paupers on whom they blamed the modern world. How long will it take for them to move on, and where to? And -- here's a strange thought, coming from someone who expected to see her crowned [the 2012 GOP nominee] -- whether they did or not, are there enough of them that anyone will notice? Or was the whole idea that battalions of backwards-looking, flintlock-shouldering patriots marched with her just a scam as well? That would seem the cruelest thing for them to find: that they were doomed all along, and had only seemed close enough to victory to yearn for it because hucksters found profit in telling the world that they were.
As we now know, her true successor was Trump, whose career suggests that all the scam needed (along with some outside assistance) was an avatar with as little interest in actual public service as she had, but with a slightly more butch aspect that would convince the rubes he would in fact bring pain to everyone they hated. Maybe if, when she was questioned as turkeys were slaughtered behind her in 2008, she’d thought to run back and smear her face with their blood and tell the interviewer that was what she planned to do with her enemies, history would have gone differently.
Anyway: We'll always have Going Rogue.
No comments:
Post a Comment