I will admit to being somewhat crestfallen at the lack of loony-toons wingnuts on parade in all the reporting on the Glenn Beck event over the weekend. Somewhat crestfallen? Who am I kidding? I waited all week long to see a bunch of crazy, ignorant white people with low IQs spouting off on television about things they know nothing of and regurgitating, parrot-style, the predictable tropes and catchphrases that they’d been fed by Fox News, World Net Daily and Rush Limbaugh.

But there was so little of it. What a letdown! The reporting—and what transpired onstage with Beck, Palin, et al—was too bland to even hold my attention. I wanted to see foaming at the mouth nutcases, zany racist signs, people dressed as giant tea bags, in Confederate flag jumpsuits, etc, etc. Perhaps because signs were discouraged, the visuals were lacking, but it sure took all the fun out of the cable new coverage of the event.

But now Chase Whiteside and New Left Media have posted their take on the “Restoring Honor” event and well, it looks to me as if the job the major news channels did has been bested by the “indie” coverage of some students from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. It’s not like you couldn’t throw a rock the distance of, oh, about 12 inches without hitting an idiot, so how did the mainstream media miss these kooks and ignoramuses?

The story that’s not being examined—but should be—is is how fucking DUMB about a quarter of this country is. It’s not Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin or Ted Nugent or any of the rest of them, who are the story, they’re merely symptoms of the greater problem: 20-25% of the American population are abject idiots. That’s the story I want to see the media tackle.
 

 
Via The Daily What

 
This country is fucked up beyond repair. There’s an IQ stratification that’s as obvious at this juncture as oil and water not mixing. On one hand you have a bunch of know-nothing, pitifully stupid Republican morons who revere Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Fox News, meanness, mindless racism and IGNORANCE. On the other hand you have smart people, Democrats and nearly 100% of all non-whites. Am I missing ANYTHING?

I used to think that the jingoistic Tea bagger-types would eventually just burn themselves out and overstay their welcome, before dispersing again. I’ve revised that opinion, they aren’t going anywhere. How can a 21st century democracy function when the dumbest 20% of the nation’s electorate is cohering into such an easily manipulated voting bloc? Be afraid, very, very afraid. No good can come of this, none.

Look deep into this man’s eyes. What do you see there?

Via Charles Johnson at Little Greenfootballs. Photo by Paul Gentile

The latest in a series from Peter Bergman/Radio Free Oz.com
 

 
You don’t have to speak Mandarin in order to appreciate this scathingly funny Sarah Palin animation from Taiwan television.

It appears that Asians find Palin as ridiculous as most clear thinking Americans do. Scary thing is, the reality is so absurd it’s almost beyond satire. How much more of her shit is this country willing to swallow?

 
“Less Taxation, More Stimulation.” Yeah… right. I found this by accident today, I swear it. And you can believe me when I tell you this, because the idea of seeing Sarah Palin (or someone who looks just like her) naked is not something I’d personally find very exciting. (In fact, I’m not sure I’d find a nude, ready, willing and waiting Sarah Palin sexually enticing even if I’d spent the previous two decades in a state penitentiary… Thankfully this is not a dilemma I am likely to face in this lifetime).

Two amusing things: One, they extended the invitation for Sarah Palin to be a celebrity judge, “although no response was received” (offer her $100k next time and she might show up) and two, the strip club where this event takes place in Chicago, the Admiral X Theater, is offering to donate the proceeds from selling their “We support the Tea Party” tee-shirts to the local chapter of Tea partiers. Will they accept these tainted funds? Let’s hope so!
 

 
You’re welcome.
 
(via Unique Daily)

 
Howard Stern’s take on Sarah Palin’s audio book. Truly hilarious and definitely NSFW. You just know she’s going to complain to the media and/or try to sue him when she gets wind of this.

Thank you Ynohtna Oimefue!

 
According to the Salt Lake Tribune, a Costco in Salt Lake City took tomatoes off its shelves last week in preparation for Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” book-signing appearance at the store. A man was arrested on Dec. 7 at a Palin event at the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., for allegedly throwing a tomato at the former Alaska governor, and Costco management was “determined” to avoid a repeat. Helen Rappaport, a Democrat, was happy to browse the nearly empty aisles of the big-box giant while other shoppers clustered around the Palin event area, but she was puzzled as to why she couldn’t seem to find any tomatoes:

No tomatoes? At Costco?

As she was leaving, she noticed a man with a store manager’s name tag and asked him why they had no tomatoes. He informed her the store did have tomatoes, but they were taken off the shelves for a few hours.

It turns out that Palin had been pelted with a tomato at an earlier stop on her book tour and the management at the Costco was determined it wouldn’t happen here.

No word on whether eggs, watermelons, apples or other potentially useful foodstuff projectiles were available during the Palin event.

Cross posting this from Brand X

 

 
(via BuzzFeed)

 
As readers of this blog know, I’m a big fan of Matt Taibbi. No one, save for Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert, comes close to his ability to hone in on the very essence of a political issue and then lacerate the guilty parties with the flick knife of his prose. What an amazing writer. It’s all A game with Taibbi, but he’s especially on point when he writes about Sarah Palin. Sample some of the goods from his most recent column at True/Slant:

Sarah Palin is the Empress-Queen of the screaming-for-screaming?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s sake generation. The people who dismiss her book Going Rogue as the petty, vindictive meanderings of a preening paranoiac with the IQ of a celery stalk completely miss the book?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s significance, because in some ways it?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s really a revolutionary and innovative piece of literature.

Palin ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù and there?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s just no way to deny this ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù is a supremely gifted politician. She has staked out, as her own personal political turf, the entire landscape of incoherent white American resentment. In this area she leaves even Rush Limbaugh in the dust.

On the small matter of Palin’s aptitude for the presidency:

Most of the rest of the book just catalogs her Gump-esque rise to national stardom (not having enough self-awareness to detect the monstrous narcissistic ambition that in reality was impelling her forward all along, she labors in the book to describe her various career leaps as lucky accidents or mystical acts of Providence) and the seemingly endless parade of meanies bent on tripping her up along the way. The book is really about her battles with these people, how much they did and do suck, and how difficult and inherently unfair life is for a decent hardworking American gal who just wants to live life, serve God, and try to be president without being bothered all the time.

Viewed through the prism of this particular brand of insanity (Palinsanity? does that work?), Katie Couric?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s notorious Palin interview last year really was a cheap shot. After all, Katie was trying to nail Palin ?¢‚Ǩ‚Äù which is mean! Who among us can?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t sympathize with the experience of being sandbagged by some slick professional rival who catches you in a moment of weakness and, instead of lending a helping hand, drives a fireplace poker through your eye?

You?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢d have to be thinking about the broader picture, about the fact that the president of the United States ought not to be a drooling yahoo whose two favorite Supreme Court cases are Roe v. Wade and Roe v. Wade and who thinks living near Canada counts as foreign policy experience, to not see what an asshole Katie Couric was being. And that other reality, the reality where one worries about a national political candidate having the brains of an innertube, is less immediate than the five-foot airspace radius around the Palin bobblehead. It?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s harder for the average person to connect with, I guess.

Sarah Palin, WWE Star

BWAHAHAHA. Fox News accidentally shows a copy of the Palin parody “Going Rouge” while discussing said Right Wing Idiot. Baby Jesus is laughing too!

(Fishbowl LA: Fox News Accidentally Promos ‘Going Rouge’)

(Going Rouge, the Book)

 
AlterNet picked up this pretty spot-on paragraph from WhiskeyFire. Damn hilarious.

The most unbelievable thing about Going Rogue, by the author-function “Sarah Palin,” is that it’s supposed to be self-serving. The problem a self-serving narrative about Sarah Palin confronts is that it’s about Sarah Palin, whose entire life, it appears, consists of worse and worse attempts to create self-serving narratives explaining away bigger and bigger fuck-ups. Going Rogue’s burden is that it must claim to be the definitive, encyclopedic explanation, the final excuse, for a long history of failure begat by failure; it’s an epic of failure, if you will, and if the goal here is some kind of ultimate vindication, well, it is monumentally unsuccessful. Going Rogue is, at bottom, the story of every one of Sarah Palin’s projects ending in grotesque catastrophe; it is only self-serving in the sense that these catastrophes either prove benign or turn out to be some other schlub’s fault. If everything I knew about Sarah Palin came from this book (and basically it does), I would say her life has been like a play in which a deus-ex-machina descends at the end of every act to bestow peace and harmony, except the deus forgot to put on pants and everyone’s just standing around going “uhhhh…” and then the lights go out and the scene changes.

It’s my favorite review yet!

(WhiskeyFire: Return After Reading)

 
As mentioned earlier on Dangerous Minds, OR Books will soon be releasing as a possible antidote to Palin’s own Going Rogue, “Going Rouge: An American Nightmare.”

Sarah Palin has many faces: hockey mom, fundamentalist Christian, sex symbol, Republican ideologue, fashion icon, ?¢‚Ǩ?ìmaverick?¢‚Ǩ¬ù populist.  But, above all, Palin has become one thing: an American obsession that just won?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t go away.  Edited by two senior editors at The Nation magazine, this sharp, smart, up-to-the-minute book examines Palin?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s quirky origins in Wasilla, Alaska, her spectacular rise to the effective leadership of the Republican Party, and the nightmarish prospect of her continuing to dominate the nation?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s political scene.

The Robert Greenwald-directed commercial for “Going Rouge” follows below:

 
Spotted today in NY Mag, an update on the certainly-fascinating David Morrill:

What would you suggest as a fair price for a Sarah Palin?¢‚Ǩ‚Äúautographed Xbox?  Nope, too low.  The correct answer is no less than $1.1 million, says some Canadian guy.  David Morrill, a resident of Alberta, drove over 4,000 miles to meet Sarah Palin this summer at the Governor’s Picnic in Alaska, where he secured the signature of the soon-to-be ex-governor on his Xbox 360.  He then went home, put the thing on eBay for $1.1 million, and waited.  But nobody wanted to pay $1.1 million for something with a top value of maybe $500, assuming a maximum affinity for both Xbox and Sarah Palin. Regardless, it doesn’t matter to Morrill because he knows, in his heart, that someday, someone as out of touch with reality as himself will meet his asking price.  So he just keeps putting it back on eBay, again and again, for $1.1 million.

Oh, and NY Mag mentions as well that Morrill also happens to be, no kidding, the world’s greatest harp rocker.  Watch in amazement, and appreciation, maybe, as he plucks away at Nirvana’s “Rape Me.”  That’s what heaven sounds like?

 
Bonus I: Morrill Explains Why His XBox Was De-listed From E-Bay

Bonus II: Morrill Plays “Hurt”

The Cult of Sarah Palin Finds Its Most Devoted Member

 
This brings back memories of National Lampoon’s Bored Of The Rings!

Editors from the progressive magazine The Nation are pulling together a book to be released the same day as Sarah Palin?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s with a similar title and cover mocking the former Alaska governor?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s memoir.  The book titled ?¢‚Ǩ?ìGoing Rouge: Sarah Palin an American Nightmare?¢‚Ǩ¬ù is edited by Richard Kim, a senior editor at the weekly magazine, along with The Nation?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Executive Editor Betsy Reed.  The book?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s cover displays a picture nearly identical to the photo chosen for the cover of Palin?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s own ?¢‚Ǩ?ìGoing Rogue: An American Life.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù  In both pictures, Palin is wearing red behind a cloudy sky, though the background of ?¢‚Ǩ?ìGoing Rouge?¢‚Ǩ¬ù is dark and gloomy with a lightning bolt come down over Palin?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s left shoulder.

(via Politico)