Archive for February 15th, 2010
About that Family Guy joke from last night…
Last night, the show Family Guy had a character (the redhead in the picture here) with Down Syndrome go on a date with series regular Chris (the titular Family Guy’s son).
On the date, the girl says her father is an accountant and her mother is the former governor of Alaska.
Perez Hilton and others are saying this was an attack on Sarah Palin…but we think it’s just a joke someone on the writing staff squeezed into this bit, because the character has Down’s.
Clearly, Todd Palin is not an accountant.
The Palins are never named in the cartoon.
The storyline involves Chris dating a girl with Down’s…and like we said, someone thought it would be funny to use the roundabout Palin reference because she’s the most famous person anyone can think of who has a special needs child…and one who has actual Down Syndrome.
So, this is an instance where being angry about a cartoon is silly. You can’t always have the knee-jerk reaction to become indignant over something.
That’s when you start becoming like Muslims who riot and demand people’s beheadings over cartoons they don’t like.
So, sometimes you have to just see a bad joke for what it is.
On the show Family Guy, unlike other cartoons, the jokes are rapid-fire and random. They squeeze an awful lot of pop culture into each episode. Some of it works, some doesn’t.
This is a bit that didn’t work…but we don’t see this as offensive.
We don’t see it as funny, either.
But it’s not offensive.
Question: Is Evan Bayh going to run for President in 2012?
Here’s something that’s spinning in our heads today about Evan Bayh’s decision not to run for another Senate term: is he going to try to run for president in 2012 instead?
* It’s hard to run for President while a sitting US Senator who is being forced to vote for one terrible thing after another
* Bayh’s $13 million campaign war chest can be used for a presidential race
* He must know that every vote he has to make in this Senate, with its crazed agenda, is hurting him long term
We hope Hillary Clinton runs for the 2012 Democrat nomination, but we don’t see her challenging Dr. Utopia if he wants to try for a second term.
But, could (or would) Evan Bayh run against Dr. Utopia for the nomination?
We imagine anyone challenging Dr. Utopia will be called a RAAACIST!, for daring to run in the primary against the sitting president. Would that stop Bayh from trying?
We wonder.
Barbara Mikulski to retire?
Word’s getting out that Senator Barbara Mikulski will be retiring this year too.
Mikulski is one of the Democrats in the Senate who it’s broken our hearts to root against. We love the woman. She’s an absolute HOOT. Her loyalty to the Clintons is strong, and her friendship with Clinton in the Senate was well-known.
She was who Bill Clinton wanted Al Gore to pick as his VP in 2000, but Gore chose Joe Lieberman instead.
Mikulski would have been an interesting running mate…someone who could have brought a lot of personality and excitement to the race.
We’re glad she’s retiring so that we don’t have to root for her to lose.
All Democrats in the Senate should lose because of what they did on Christmas Eve and how they have handled themselves with their super majority.
Every last one of them.
Lose, or retire.
Pronto.
Male Statue of Liberty?
The Statue of Freedom
Charleston, South Carolina is considering building “The Statue of Freedom”, a male version of the Statue of Liberty.
It would be built at Patriot’s Point, near the naval museum they have there.
We love the idea of giant statues in cities.
Back in Cleveland, there’s a gorgeous statue by Marshall Fredericks called “The Fountain of Eternal Life” that’s a war memorial, just off Public Square. We’ve always wanted to see this enlarged on giant, Gotham-city scale and turned into the icon of Cleveland…especially in a future where the city rebuilds and turns into a prosperous model city, the way we think it could some day.
What do you think of the Statue of Freedom idea?
And giant depictions of classically hot, almost nude men in general?
It would be great at Halloween and on the Fourth of July if Charleston DID build their statue…because then, instead of women (and drag queens) getting to dress up as a sexy symbol of America, hot guys can go bare-chested as the Statue of Freedom.
And that would be awesome and patriotic at the same time.
The Fountain of Eternal Life in Cleveland, Ohio
Dick Cheney: Gay Rights Champion
There is probably nothing we do that infuriates our peers here in Boystown more than when we talk about how much we love Dick Cheney, Liz Cheney, all the Cheneys, really.
Love them.
We can’t think of a stronger supporter of Gay Rights than Dick Cheney.
Sometimes, we realize this is like one of those episodes of a cartoon where the Justice League goes to an alternate dimension and finds Lex Luthor is a hero trying to save the world, instead of an arch villain. ”Darth Cheney” does more for gay rights than Joe Biden or most Democrats do. Cheney, as a Republican former Vice President, doesn’t have to do a damn thing for gays, really. He’s not expected to. He doesn’t even have to fake support for LGBTQ issues, the way Democrats like Biden and Dr. Utopia have to. Cheney could just not talk about gays one way or the other, period.
But, yet he does.
The man who Boystown insists is so evil keeps speaking out in favor of gay rights…and it’s being noticed.
Not by the LGBTQ community, of course. They like their Cheney the way they like their Lex Luthor: bald, evil, and maniacal.
Two-dimensional.
One-note.
Well, we love that Cheney breaks the mold people try to place him in. We love that he speaks out so often and keeps the current administration on its toes. We love that he stands up for the LGBTQ community knowing he’s villainized in places like Boystown.
He does what’s right when he doesn’t have to do anything and helps people who would never say a kind word about him in all of their lives.
That’s pretty amazing.
We are so proud of Dick Cheney.
Obama statue removed in Indonesia
Well, that sure didn’t take long.
The cult of personality driving the current president suffered a blow today, now that the only known public statue of him has been removed in Indonesia.
Here in Chicago, all of the crazy banners and signs with his face on them, plastered everywhere in 2008, have long ago been torn down. Mercifully, no statue of him was ever built in our city.
Indonesia erected this bit of craziness in a park…and the residents of the area objected, saying statues in Indonesia should be of Indonesians, not Dr. Utopia as a boy wearing some kind of crazy amulet playing with a butterfly.
Every day, the Kool-Aid wears off a little more.
The cult loses more members as time passes.
So, we wonder what the plan is for 2012, knowing the Kool-Aid won’t work a second time around. David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel are not good people, but they aren’t fools. The Hopey-Change Hysteria will not be an effective tool for their use two years from now.
We also don’t think they’ll be able to get away with screaming RAAACISM! at people ever again, either. People aren’t going to be bullied into voting for Dr. Utopia with RAAACISM! used as the cudgel to prevent people from voting against him. That worked in 2008…but it was a one-time use thing.
The only way we see Dr. Utopia winning a second term is if the Democrats successfully push a third-party candidate into the race and trick independents and the Tea Party crowd into throwing their votes away on a Ross Perot-style spoiler.
We see the beginnings of this plot now…and hope we can do our part to prevent the DNC from succeeding. It’s the only thing we can think of that would allow Dr. Utopia to eek out a win for a second term.
Question: What lessons can be learned from Evan Bayh's retirement?
We’re still processing Evan Bayh’s decision to retire from the Senate.
In 2008, when we campaigned for Hillary Clinton in Indiana, we heard people say many times that Bayh did not love being a Senator…anymore than Hillary herself loved being a Senator. Being elected to the Senate was something she did so she could run for President. Being a Senator was something Bayh did so that he could be Vice President or President someday himself. If Hillary had won the nomination in 2008, there’s a very good chance Bayh would be Vice President now, and run for President himself in 2016.
We don’t think the White House is in Bayh’s future anymore.
We don’t think any Democrat who voted for the Healthcare Rationing bill will be elected to higher office.
They are all too stupid to realize it, but we think that Christmas Eve vote was like a bullet in a bad movie, that missed all the major arteries but hit somewhere in the body causing internal bleeding that will indeed be fatal…but not for a while.
Those absolute, irresponsible, reckless fools all shot themselves in the head Christmas Eve and are too dumb to know it.
Supposed “moderates” like Bayh proved what a joke “Moderate Democrats” have become. They rank right up there with unicorns and hippogriffs. Delightful, marvelous things in theory…or mythology. Bayh should have stood up to the recklessness and secret meetings in the dead of night to pass that Rationing Bill.
He didn’t.
His behavior will come back to haunt him if he ever tries to run for the White House now. The man cannot be trusted when his “moderate voice” is needed the most. A true moderate Democrat would have held a press conference and told the world how wrong the Leftists who have taken over the party are for trying to ram through legislation they have not even read, in the middle of the night, before a holiday…when they think no one is paying any attention.
Moderates, if they existed in the Senate, would have put the brakes on that madness.
Bayh, and every other so called “Moderate”, was exposed for the Leftist he really is. He was unmasked on Christmas Eve.
And we wonder how much his retirement decision is rooted in the fact that he knows he gave his game away at Christmas.
Other questions we have about Bayh’s decision:
(1) Did Bayh look at the coming 2010 races and see the “unprecedented” smackdown Democrats are going to get?
(2) Did Bayh know he would lose, so he’d rather take his name off the ballot so that any future ambitions of his aren’t tarnished by that loss?
(3) Did Bayh not want to waste the $13 million in his campaign account on a losing race…and instead mark that money for a future run for Governor again or a losing Presidential bid? Because we believe that Christmas Eve vote cost Bayh any chance of ever being the Democrat nominee. If his only real appeal and value was that he was supposedly a moderate, and he proved that moderate business was all stagecraft, then what good is Bayh now? If the party wants another Leftist after Dr. Utopia, there are many more interesting and lively choices than Bayh.
(4) What Democrats are feeling really rattled today over Bayh’s announcement?
That last one is probably the most interesting question to us. Who in the Senate is sweating today after hearing Bayh’s thrown in the towel? Because if Bayh thought he couldn’t win, and Bayh had a very good chance of winning, especially with Republicans barely even trying to put a decent candidate up against him, then we wonder which of the Democrats running in 2010 is now terrified for his or her own prospects post Bayh decision.
It’s also puzzling why Bayh did this now…leaving Democrats so little time to find someone to run for his seat. He could have made this decision earlier, but waited until just a few days before the filing deadline for getting onto the primary ballot. What made him change his mind about running for re-election in just the last week or two?
Senators and party leaders get information long before it filters down to the rest of us…so what does Bayh know is coming that made him realize his re-election bid would be toast? We operate under the assumption that until he found out about “X”, he still believed his Christmas Eve vote for Rationing was not enough to doom his campaign. But, once he found out about “X”, he realized it was over for him and he decided to retire…leaving just days for someone else to get the petition signatures they’d need to be nominated by the party to run for his seat.
Could “X” in the above be related to the suicidal and insane “Reconciliation Measure” that’s been threatened for the Healthcare Rationing bill? Did Bayh learn Democrats are really crazy enough to use the “nuclear option”, knows he can’t stop them from doing this, and realizes how angry the public is going to be with Democrats once they pull this?
Is THAT why Bayh isn’t running for another term…because he knows the White House, Harry Reid, and Nancy Pelosi are poised to set off a political earthquake that will drown just about every Democrat on the ballot come the November tsunami?
SOMETHING is at work behind the scenes regarding Bayh’s oddly timed decision.
What do you think it is?
