Weinergate, Schmeinergate, Why Does Anyone Take Andrew Breitbart Seriously? [Updated]

cartoon of Anthony's Wiener stand. The 50th time I was asked today.

The Weiner-Wiener jokes go on longer and longer and never seem to come to a climax.

UPDATE: Well well well, looks like Andy BB actually got one right. One out of four is a good record–for HIM. A shame about Weiner’s taste in underwear, though. Should he resign? I don’t know, last time I looked, stupidity wasn’t illegal, and we just finished 8 years of a stupid President to prove it. Immoral? That’s between him and his wife–and the voters of his district. Anyone remember the old saw about being a liberal or a conservative? If a liberal makes a mistake and does something bad, everyone says, “See, the hero has feet of clay.” But if a conservative makes a mistake and does something GOOD, everyone says, “Hey, he wasn’t such a bastard after all!”

I STILL say it’s meant to distract us from the DEATH VOUCHERS, though.

ORIGINAL POST:
You all know what happened. For the benefit of search engines, Andrew Breitbart got a tip about a photo some college girl received ostensibly from a tweet by Anthony Weiner, congressman from New York. Actually, I’m not sure WHAT happened–the story, which I tried to get straight before writing this–has gone through several convolutions, none of which really make any sense. I mean, if he mailed it to the girl, why was the Twitter feed so important? I mean, did he tweet that picture? Or did someone tweet it to him? If he tweeted it, why did only one person of his 180 some followers get the picture? Did he Twitpic the pic? or was it a link to a pic already on the web? If it was already on the web, was it really Weiner’s wiener to begin with? And why doesn’t Anthony Weiner know if that’s his underwear? Is his taste in underwear THAT GQ?

I guess it makes sense to someone. Andrew Breitbart. You know, the guy who uploaded the severely edited video of Shirley Sherrod that made her sound like an anti-white bigot, when she was telling a story about how some farmer’s case PREVENTED her from being an anti-white bigot. The same Andrew Breitbart that web-published James O’Keefe’s creatively edited video of his interviews in ACORN offices, where he inserted clips of himself and Hannah Giles dressed as pimp and prostitute (or is that prostitute and prostitute?) supposedly getting help from ACORN hiding their income from the IRS and their activities from other agencies. You know, the James O’Keefe who was busted trying to surreptitiously sneak a microphone into Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu’s office?

Why does anyone take Breitbart seriously? Everyone already knows that he won’t question a source as long as it makes Democrats or liberals look bad. See? I didn’t call him a sneaking liar! I wouldn’t say that about him because the news media has guaranteed that he doesn’t and will not ever sneak. Stinking maybe, but not sneaking! It must be the silly season already–anything to keep our minds off the DEATH VOUCHERS that Paul Ryan is trying to replace Medicare with. That’s right Democrats, be creative for a change! The Republicans renamed your end-of-life counseling sessions to DEATH PANELS. Call this “modification” to Medicare DEATH VOUCHERS. OK, maybe someone will say, copycat, copycat, but at least they’ll be focused on it.

Anyway, I no longer want to hear about Weiner’s weiner. Let this come to a climax already. I know it’s a slow season for news and reporters are hard up for copy. But Anthony Weiner has always been a standup guy. I mean, it’s not like the story’s going to come to a head and explode in anyone’s face. Nobody was playing hide the salami.

Although the salami does look kind of hidden. (Ahem!)

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Will Sanity Be Restored? Not if WE can help it…

A screenshot from Fox News showing the Stewart-Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear snowed out--in October

And FoxNews viewers from DC swear they saw it--but forgot their names

Well, it’s not a cartoon, but damn, it’s been so long since I posted anything, I just had to post SOMETHING. First of all, my bronchitis is “mostly” gone. I feel better but my strength isn’t up completely back to where it should be. It will be by the end of the week. Thanks to my well-wishers who expressed good wishes. We won’t mention what I wish for those who wished the opposite

I DID get to the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear on Saturday. Wish I’d done more to publicize it, although the boys certainly did not need MY publicity. The subway (errrr Metro–how gay is that? –Samantha Bee) was incredible. There were lines 20-30 minutes long to buy tickets and then olive oil was spread on the riders to get them all squeezed into the cars. When the doors finally opened at L’Enfant Plaza, it was like projectile vomit as the trains disgorged their charges.

By the time I actually made the rally location–and I admit I was moving slowly due to my energy levels–you literally could not get two blocks from the mall before foot traffic slowed to a shuffle-along. The DC police had wisely shut down several streets. My own uninformed crowd guesstimates said there was at least 150k people there and possibly as high as 300k. I think the TOTAL number of people who came to the Rally was close to the latter, but because of the difficulty getting within site and sound of the stage–and there were video feeds with huge sound systems to relay the proceedings to the further away, BUT THERE WERE THAT MANY PEOPLE THERE–that the back of the crowd was very fluid with people arriving, staying for a while, and then leaving to get a better view ON THE INTERNET. In fact, I couldn’t stay to the end because I couldn’t find a good place to both see and hear what was going on. The CBSNews paid for crowd count said 215,000. That’s a reasonable number for the amount of people who were there at any single moment in time.

It was odd to see how the news media handled it. Although pre-rally shows began at 10 am, and some people had been there since the night before, I could not find any crowd estimates on the cable news stations. It was as if nothing was going to happen. Contrast that with the ballyhoo that characterized Glenn Beck’s revival meetin’. By Sunday, the coverage rapidly evaporated after 6 am–yesterday’s news. DId they get wind of what the main point of the Rally was? That the media, fanning the flames of partisanship, is one of the major contributors to the chasm that is seen between political viewpoints today? As people, we work together everyday despite differences–Jon Stewart likened it to merging into the lanes of a tunnel–a very apt simile for someone in the NY/NJ area. Yet in politics, there is this perception of near civil war, at least the way the news media provides soapboxes to the MOST extreme elements.

Some of my progressive friends have opined that Jon and Stephen STILL missed the point–after all, the most extreme elements are all ON THE RIGHT. That may be so. But the point of the rally wasn’t to point fingers at THEM. It was to point fingers at the people on the sidelines who are busily asking both sides if they need more gasoline to put out the fire. They are no longer informing us. They’re like the reporter in Ace in the Hole/The Big Carnival who prevented the rescue of the man trapped in a cave to prolong the news story. In the movie, the trapped guy died. But now, we’re the people in the cave. Will we have a release like the Chileans? Or do we go down in the interests of real journalism?

Thanks Jon and Stephen. It was a good rally.

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Beckstianity 101–Social Justice is un-American

Glenn Beck casts stones at Jesus for being a commie Nazi for preaching social justice..

Hey, Glenn Beck also listened to Born In The USA's lyrics for the first time too.

Now I don’t like to knock a guy twice in the same week. Not that I think it’s unfair, but it always strikes me as a lack of imagination on my part. Surely there’s someone ELSE you can lampoon, Greg. Oh, of course there is–and stop calling me Shirley. But Glenn Beck, bless his pointy little head, has managed to do so.

Of course, last Thursday’s cartoon wasn’t really a mock on der Beckstein (although the text was ). Getting Eric Massa on his show SEEMED like a good idea at the time. How was Beck supposed to know that a Democrat might not be disloyal to President Obama? Or that he would think that male-on-male tickling orgies might be misconstrued as sexual in nature? Or that he would take little Glennie to task for the alacrity with which right-wing commentators and Teabaggers call everyone they don’t agree with Nazis or socialists?

OK so his counterparts on Fox News all told him so. Can’t blame a guy for trying, right?

But he also managed not only to reveal that he never actually listened to the lyrics to “Born in the USA”. I guess for the last 25-and-a-half he’s been looking at the FRONT of the album cover with The Boss’s tight-jeaned butt smiling at the camera in front of a flag, head-banging along and singing BORN IN THE USA every time it came around. Yeah, Baby, Born in the USA! And for 25.5 years he never actually “listened” to the lyrics to find out what Bruce Springsteen had to say. Well, I can understand that, sometimes even us boys from Jersey find it hard to understand New Jersey. But to ADMIT IT, as if he just found out something everyone in America already KNEW! that just boggles the mind.

Only to be topped by his warning to the faithful. Now if you thought 25+ years of cluelessness was bad, check out the evidence of a LIFETIME cluelessness. He told his audience that if they heard the words “social justice” in their churches, they should run away as fast as possible to find some other church that did NOT believe in “social justice”, because “social justice” was nothing less than a codeword used by Nazis and Socialists! Now I’ve commented before on the peculiar form of Christianity some people espouse, the Calvinist belief that the poor are miserable, not just because they deserve to be, but because they WANT to be. Because if they didn’t “want” to be poor, why they’d just pull themselves up by the bootstraps and make a Horatio Alger success of themselves. So any talk of “social justice” actually allows them to go along, living off unemployment and welfare. This he says, in the middle of a recession where 1 out of 6 people of working age is either unemployed or underemployed. Way to go Glenn!

But the corker is that hitherto, lots of church leaders thought Glenn was the bee’s knees. Now, they’re up in arms–because if there’s one thing that Christian churches have in common, it’s preaching charity, helping your fellow man, fighting for social justice, because their founder, that #$%^&* liberal Jesus Christ, said it was important. More important than praying as a matter of fact. Even the Mormons, who most people figure on being iffy Christians–and Glenn Beck, having been raised Catholic, converted to Mormonism in his adulthood. Looks like SOMEBODY hasn’t been paying attention in church for a long long time. I mean, we all try to not listen to sermons, but usually some of what was said sinks in after a few decades of repetition. But it’s just like Born in the USA. Glenn Beck just doesn’t pay attention. He’s off in his own little world, dreaming dreams no man ever dreamed before, because they’re too #$^&*( crazy to begin with.

Well, Glenn’s finally “clarified” his statements–I think now he says he meant Big Government instead of Nazis–and apologized in the standard approved format and his faithful congregation have returned to the fold, knowing that Glenn didn’t really mean what he said, even though he did when he said it. But myself, I’ve got to wonder–does this man even HAVE an attention span?

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Swine Flu? Bioterrorism? We Report, You Decide!

If you saw the press briefing about the swine flu outbreak the other day (replayed in part on The Daily Show) in which one reporter asked if this could be a bioterrorism attack. Well, this naturally causes one to voice the question, “WTF???” Bio-frickin’-terrorism? Who the hell would have THAT kind of paranoid fantasy? Well, MY guess would be the people who believe that the USA became less safe as of January 20, 2009. You know, the ones who discovered a terrorist plot every time they needed to score some political points so they could claim they’d made us “safer” and who now claim that revealing our use of torture–that everyone already knew about anyway–had made us less safe. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Dick Cheney and Fox News. But it isn’t just limited to them. President Obama went down to Mexico City and shook hands with an archaeologist and the next day, said archaeologist> dropped dead of flu-like symptoms. DUN DUN DUHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Obama was tested and found clear of the flu virus–a good thing too, because some people may have accused him of giving the flu to the archaeologist, instead of him contracting it from one of the thousands of flu victims in Mexico City. I can see a call for closing the borders coming–keep them illegal immigrants and their flus away.

Foxy, the cable news reporter, asks if the swine flu outbreak could be an act of bioterrorism. On being told there did not seem to be any reason not to ascribe it to natural causes, she naturally assumes that since the answer wasn't no, it was confirmed that the answer could be yes...

In the world of cable journalism, non-denial is as good as a confirmation.

What I want to know is, if someone was planning on a bioterrorist attack on the US, why did they start the outbreak in Mexico? Why not New York CIty or Chicago or any other crowded US metropolis? I think the only attack here, beyond the simple microbial, is an attack on reason. But that never stopped anything in this country! Reason, schmeason, the economy is in the toilet, our leaders had authorized torture, let’s have a good old-fashioned plague to get things really going. I’m surprised no one’s said it’s God’s wrath. Oh wait a minute, Tiffany Wellsley on Republican Faith Chat tells us that it’s GOD’S LATEST PUNISHMENT OF IDOL-WORSHIP, meaning Catholic saint veneration, and ends her screed with the “silver lining” that it may do something to alleviate the illegal immigration problem. Well, there you have it–a call to close the borders. I’m not going to post THAT url–if you need to find it, google it.

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