My New Caddy.....
I recently bought a new Cadilac (sic) STS and returned to the dealer the next day, complaining that I couldn't figure out how the radio worked.
The salesman explained that the radio was voice activated. Watch this! he said.."Nelson!" The radio replied, "Ricky or Willie?" "Willie!" he continued.... and On The Road Again came from the speakers.
I drove away happy, and for the next few days, every time I'd say, "Beethoven!" I'd get beautiful classical music, and if I said, "Beatles!" I'd get one of their awesome songs.
One day, a couple ran a red light and nearly creamed my new car, but I swerved in time to avoid them. "ASS-HOLES!" I yelled.....The French National Anthem began to play, sung by Jane Fonda and Michael Moore, backed up by John Kerry on guitar, Al Gore on drums and Bill Clinton on sax....
I LOVE this car !!!!!!!!!
My response -- which I sent out not only to my friend but also to the 150 or so other people he copied with this joke -- went something like: "Sounds like a great concert. Hopefully, Michael Chertoff and Michael Brown were not running security for it."
I usually enjoy a good anti-liberal joke. Back in the day, I was a sucker for any decent Bill/Monica quip. But I thought the timing of this joke was rather odd, given the events of the last couple of weeks. We've just experienced not only right-winged ineptitude of Homeric proportions, but also a series of events that will undoubtedly result in the end of the Reagan Revolution, and conservatives are responding with . . . anti-Clinton/Kerry/Fonda/Moore/French jokes?
I've been listening to a lot of conservative talk radio lately -- both Oxycontin Rush and our local wingnut Lars Larson -- and these shows are currently full of semi-comedic attempts to blast the "idiotic liberals" and the "moronic left." Needless to say, Bill Clinton's name has come up quite a bit during these programs.
Hate him or love him, there is no doubt that Clinton's response to Katrina would have at least been presidential. The reason Clinton is often called the most natural politician since FDR is simply because he has a great mind for politics. In other words, he would have recognized the political opportunity that Katrina had to offer his legacy. Clinton understood that the only way to become a great president is to have a great crisis occur during your time in office.
Bush is obviously clueless in that regard. He has had two great crises so far, yet his approval rating is in the 30 percentile because (1) he decided to respond to 9-11 by incompetently invading and occupying a fourth-rate military power that had nothing to do with 9-11; and (2) he decided that he wasn't going to let anything interfere with his fifth week of summer vacation, even if the meddlesome event turned out to be the greatest natural disaster our country has ever faced. And how are some members of the Radical Right responding to this? With jokes about liberals.
Gerald O'Hara was Scarlett O'Hara's father in Gone With the Wind. Before the Civil War, Gerald often deferred to his wife for important decisions and was a strong supporter of the Confederacy. After the War, Gerald was so shell-shocked by the death of his wife and the defeat of the South that he never really came to grips with either event. After the South's collapse, he proudly showed Scarlett his collection of worthless Confederate War Bonds and kept saying that he must "ask Mrs. O'Hara," his dead wife, about this or that.
That's what I think is going on with some members of the Right Wing today. They simply cannot come to grips with the fact that their hero, George W. Bush, has recently exposed himself as the most inept president in American history. They are shell-shocked by this turn of events, and are therefore resorting to their pre-Katrina behavior of telling jokes about left-wingers and blaming liberals for everything.
Maybe they'll eventually come around and face the reality of our sad situation, and that reality is -- we have an idiot of the first order in the White House and this imbecile will probably be there until January 2009. But I really doubt that many of them will change their minds about Bush. After all, they've invested a lot of time and energy aggressively supporting that sonofabitch; and if the Katrina aftermath doesn't eventually change their minds on Bush, then nothing will.
No comments:
Post a Comment