Showing posts with label unwashed masses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unwashed masses. Show all posts

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Cutting Edge Political Humor

Humor used skillfully cuts with the fineness of a scalpel and exposes the absurd to the full light of many suns. So it is today with A.B. Hinkle and Mark Steyn, both writing on Obama, the State of the Union Speech, and the conjoined beliefs of the left that government is the answer to all problems and, if the unwashed masses don't get it, then the answer is to explain it to them better. First up is Mr. Hinkle, giving voice to the unwashed masses:

This is a complex issue, and the longer it was debated, the more skeptical people became. I take my share of the blame for not explaining it more clearly to the American people.

--Barack Obama, State of the Union.

There's a lot in the bill that people are going to like. It's just a question of understanding it.

--ABC's Cokie Roberts, Dec. 20.

What are the immediate plans for recalibrating the message or intensifying the message to explain better to the American people what you're trying to do?

--Question to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Jan. 20.

It mighty big of man with nice voice to take blame like that. Him not need to. Head honchos not often take blame. Most times after big screw-up, head honchos say they have "full confidence" in someone who work for them -- right before pushing someone off edge of cliff, or letting someone twist "slowly, slowly" in wind, like tricky Nixon guy did with man who ran FBI.

Man with nice voice not like those other head honchos. Him bring change to Washington already, see?

But him right. Him not explain health care good. Use too many big words. Say too many compound-complex sentences. Confuse American people. American people not want that. American people want simple explanation. Simpler the better.

Me feel kind of sorry. It must really get on nerves for man with nice voice and people on his side, like lady on TV and cheerleaders in White House press pool. Why can't lamebrain American people get idea through thick skulls? Them not know how to make choices in own best interests! Need enlightened leaders to make choices for them. (Enlightened = smart. Me look this up in thing called "dictionary." Dictionary good! Try sometime!) . . .

I wonder if Hinkle is any relation to Mongo from Blazing Saddles.

At any rate, next up is Mark Steyn, who notes the mind killing, soul numbing verbosity of our Talker in Chief on his way to pointing out that, for Obama and the far left, there is but one answer to all life's problems - more government:

The world turns.

In Indonesia, the principal of a Muslim boarding school in Tangerang who is accused of impregnating a 15-year-old student says the DNA test will prove that a malevolent genie is the real father.

In New Zealand, a German tourist, Herr Hans Kurt Kubus, has been jailed for attempting to board a plane at Christchurch with 44 live lizards in his underpants.

In Britain, a research team at King’s College, London, has declared that the female “G-spot” does not, in fact, exist.

In France a group of top gynecologists led by M. Sylvain Mimoun has dismissed the findings, and said what do you expect if you ask a group of Englishmen to try to find a woman’s erogenous zone.

But in America Barack Obama is talking.

Talking, talking, talking. He talked for 70 minutes at the State of the Union. No matter how many geckos you shoveled down your briefs, you still lost all feeling in your legs. And still he talked. If you had an erogenous zone before he started, by the end it was undetectable even to Frenchmen. But on he talked. As respected poverty advocate Sen. John Edwards commented, “After the first hour, even my malevolent genie was back in the bottle.” . . .

Heh. Even Saul Alinsky recognized the value of humor in Rules for Radicals. But as we see, it is a sword for all to brandish. And as Obama and the left become carcatures of themselves, the humor nowdays practicaly writes itself.

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Saturday, January 23, 2010

Ignorance Is Fleeting


“You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time.”

Abraham Lincoln, September 1858, Speech in Clinton, Illinois



This from Mark Steyn on the travails of Obama:

So what went wrong? According to Barack Obama, the problem is he overestimated you dumb rubes’ ability to appreciate what he’s been doing for you. “That I do think is a mistake of mine,” the president told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. “I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we’re making a good rational decision here, then people will get it.”

But you schlubs aren’t that smart. You didn’t get it. And Barack Obama is determined to see that you do. So the president has decided that he needs to start “speaking directly to the American people.”

Wait, wait! Come back! Don’t all stampede for the hills! He only gave (according to CBS News’s Mark Knoller) 158 interviews and 411 speeches in his first year. That’s more than any previous president — and maybe more than all of them put together. But there may still be some show out there that didn’t get its exclusive Obama interview — I believe the top-rated Grain & Livestock Prices Report — 4 a.m. Update with Herb Torpormeister on WZZZ-AM Dead Buzzard Gulch Junction’s Newstalk Leader is still waiting to hear back from the White House.

But what will the president be saying in all these extra interviews? In that interview about how he hadn’t given enough interviews, he also explained to George Stephanopoulos what that wacky Massachusetts election was all about:

“The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office,” said Obama. “People are angry and they’re frustrated, not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years but what’s happened over the last eight years.”

Got it. People are so angry and frustrated at George W. Bush that they’re voting for Republicans. In Massachusetts. Boy, I can’t wait for that 159th interview.

Presumably, the president isn’t stupid enough actually to believe what he said. But it’s dispiriting to discover he’s stupid enough to think we’re stupid enough to believe it. . . .

Americans may, by and large, be politically ignorant. And true, they voted for Obama and the snake oil he was selling as our corrupt MSM spared no effort to insure that they would be kept in ignorance. But Americans are not stupid. A year on, they can take stock for themselves. So long as the democratic process remains not yet wholly corrupted by vote fraud and selective recounts, they will take revenge. And as Obama's crashing poll numbers (and the crashing ratings number for liberal media) would seem to indicate, once Americans have seen the artifice, they really get a little annoyed at still being treated as idiots.

This is a real problem for far left ideologues, since at the very center of their world view is a heartfelt belief in the superiority of their intellect and, thus, both the absolute truth of their cause and the necessity of imposing their will. It is a paradigm that will never allow the ideologue to realize that they might be wrong. As we see it being played out by Obama, if the voters don't agree, that can only be because they don't understand. Left wing ideologues conflate the temporary ignorance of an electorate that voted them into office with a congenital stupidity that only exists in the arrogance of their imagination.

No matter. By all means Mr. President, talk on, talk on.

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