Drive-Bys

Camille Paglia has dusted off the cluebat for a particularly fine game of whack-a-mole:

Whap! to the left:

Why did it take so long for Democrats to realize that this year's tea party and town hall uprisings were a genuine barometer of widespread public discontent and not simply a staged scenario by kooks and conspirators? First of all, too many political analysts still think that network and cable TV chat shows are the central forums of national debate. But the truly transformative political energy is coming from talk radio and the Web -- both of which Democrat-sponsored proposals have threatened to stifle, in defiance of freedom of speech guarantees in the Bill of Rights. I rarely watch TV anymore except for cooking shows, history and science documentaries, old movies and football. Hence I was blissfully free from the retching overkill that followed the deaths of Michael Jackson and Ted Kennedy -- I never saw a single minute of any of it. It was on talk radio, which I have resumed monitoring around the clock because of the healthcare fiasco, that I heard the passionate voices of callers coming directly from the town hall meetings. Hence I was alerted to the depth and intensity of national sentiment long before others who were simply watching staged, manipulated TV shows.

Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans? Though they claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics and lawyers (one reason for the hypocritical absence of tort reform in the healthcare bills). Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals are as a whole amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy. This is, I submit, a stunning turn away from the anti-authority and anti-establishment principles of authentic 1960s leftism.

Whap! to the right:

Having said all that about the failures of my own party, I am not about to let Republicans off the hook. What a backbiting mess the GOP is! It lacks even one credible voice of traditional moral values on the national stage and is addicted to sonorous pieties of pharisaical emptiness. Republican politicians sermonize about the sanctity of marriage while racking up divorces and sexual escapades by the truckload. They assail government overreach and yet support interference in women's control of their own bodies. Advanced whack-a-mole is clearly needed for that yammering smarty-pants Newt Gingrich, who is always so very, very pleased with himself but has yet to produce a single enduring thought. The still inexplicably revered George W. Bush ballooned our national deficits like a drunken sailor and clumsily exacerbated the illegal immigration debate. And bizarrely, the hallucinatory Dick Cheney, a fake-testosterone addict who spooked Bush into a pointless war, continues to be lauded as presidential material.

If she were a man, I'd totally do her.
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Hierarchy of Digital Distractions -- spot on!

(A tip of the cap to Mark A. Rayner for that particular giggle. BTW, dude -- Marvellous Hairy is teed up for this week. Review to follow.)
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A buddy made at Camp Blownstar this summer has taken to blogging. (I told her we'd get her.)

Meet Harper, who I may have to shoot for introducing me to Texts From Last Night....

I'm loving this one:

(403): i really wish my pants would only unzip when im sober

Oh, honey!
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Well of course he is, silly. (Then again, I'm more than a little bit prejudiced.)
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If Shari was in Pittsburgh instead of the west coast, I'd swear that second ad was written by my BlogDaddy!
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Giggle of the Day:


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Dunno about you, but I almost fell of the chair laughing.
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Ear Worm of the Day:



Why this one has been ping-ponging around the back of my brain all day I have no idea.