Rick Perry Apologizes For Bernanke Remarks

Nashua, NH--Texas Governor Rick Perry apologized Wednesday for comments that implicitly threatened Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, saying they were not violent enough.

At a Tuesday campaign stop in Iowa, Perry had described the possibility of the Fed printing more money before the 2012 presidential election as “treason,” and that “I dunno what y’all would do to him in Iowa, but we would treat him pretty ugly down in Texas.” Critics pounced on what they said was an implicit call for violence against a public servant. In a follow-up speech, Perry apologized for the vagueness of his comments.

“I understand my responsibilities as a candidate for President of the United States of America,” Perry said, “and I am sorry that I fell short of the ideal of a bloodthirsty, hyper-masculine ultra man.”

He elaborated: “I should have clarified what I meant by ‘pretty ugly down in Texas.’ I mean, Ben Bernanke hasn’t killed anyone and he’s not retarded, not completely anyway, so we can’t execute him—at least not without botching an investigation first. You might have also thought that for committing treason we might elect him governor, but no dice.”

“So to level with y’all, what I meant is that we would strip Bernanke to his skivvies, chain him to a pickup truck—not my pickup, not necessarily—and drag him through the town square, where he would be branded, hung, and burned to death. Like in the good old days!”

Observers seemed mostly satisfied with the apology, though some still pressed Perry for specifics.

“It’s not enough to say he would just hang and burn the Fed chairman,” said supporter Fred Wallace. “We need to know what he would do while carrying this out. Would he sodomize him with farm implements? Spit on him while yelling ethnic slurs? I don’t know that I can support a candidate whose policy positions are so simplistic.”

Perry is set to continue his tour of New Hampshire, where he will meet supporters, shake hands and kick babies.

Fancy Boy

A number of pieces I wrote for the Washington Fancy before their launch, went online today. There's too many to take the time to cross-post them all, so one can either go to my author directory to peruse them all, or click any of the links below:

Anthony Weiner, Tired of Crude Jokes, Changes Name to Ned

DC Under Siege by Roving Segway Gangs

Bachmann Presidential Run Shocks, Shocks Nation

Mitt Romney Literally Melts Down at Campaign Stop

California's Proposition 8 to be Tried by Golden Retriever

Armageddon Strikes New York With Legalization of Gay Marriage

NEW YORK—As retribution for the New York state legislature’s legalization of same-sex marriage, New York City Friday night experienced cataclysm and biblical tribulation that left almost no survivors.

A tense vote on a contested gay marriage bill resulted in a 33-29 victory for same-sex marriage proponents. Upon the bill’s passage New York City—whose destruction many have remarked would be more iconic than that of dull and unremarkable capitol Albany—descended first into a city-wide orgy of state-sanctioned hedonism, and then into an apocalyptic inferno as fire and brimstone rained from the sky.

Such an outcome was predictable, says Focus on the Family president Tony Perkins. “We have been sounding the alarm on this for years,” he explains. “Homosexuals have been trying to destroy traditional marriage by shoving this new definition of marriage down our throats like some giant, irresistible penis. Now they have to swallow the biggest, most irresistible penis of all: God’s.”

President Obama, by contrast, prefaced his remarks with condolences for the dead. “Our hearts go out to the industrious and vibrant people of New York City,” he said. Though later on in his speech he veered to a testy defense of his own qualified gay rights stance. “I hope now you see why I don’t like to deal with these issues.”

The tumult began with the casting of the final ‘ay,’ vote, during which heterosexuals throughout the city, now suddenly compelled to leave their spouses for people of the same gender, were gripped with euphoria.

“gagas not so bad after all” read the cryptic final tweet of one BroFo2099.

A sea of humanity thereafter gathered around the Stonewall Inn to celebrate the consummation of the gay agenda with racy smiles and jubilance. Though preliminary reports described the crowd as chanting “USA,” they were in fact yelling “Ooh, it’s a-aaaaaiiiieeee!” crying out as temperatures suddenly rose, a whiff of sulfur wafted through Christopher Street, and fireballs rained down from the sky.

Details beyond the beginning of the carnage remain sketchy and contradictory. Some witnesses, sending frantic tweets and text messages from their phones, described a ghoulish figure riding a pale horse across the Brooklyn Bridge as the Angel of Death, though others insist it was merely a resourceful hipster from Williamsburg. Others spoke of giant monsters and alien space ships. What is uncontested however, is the enormity of the destruction: Manhattan’s skyscrapers leveled, the outer boroughs aflame, and millions dead.

The only known survivor was Rubén Díaz Sr., a member of the New York state legislature and the only Democratic senator to cast a ‘no’ vote, for which he says he was spared. Díaz returned to New York after the vote to get his wife, Leslie Díaz, out to safety. He would have succeeded had she not looked back at the burning city to capture some video on her iPhone and turned into a pillar of salt.

Many in the disaster’s aftermath looked to God for answers. However, when asked how He could justify the leveling of a great American city, the Lord was reticent and would only answer, “Because.”

New York’s Pride March went on the Sunday after as planned despite the destruction, and was described by patrons and planners as “even more flaming than usual.”

[Cross-posted from The Washington Fancy]

Obama Abandons Principals, at School Picnic

ANNAPOLIS, MD— President Barack Obama abruptly left a Department of Education picnic on Saturday, and in the process deserted some of the country’s most cherished principals.

The event, held at Annapolis High School, was organized as a means of celebrating American learning and wisdom and the people who help to cultivate it. After meeting with the nation’s standout students, parents, and teachers, Obama was in the middle of talking with a group of principals when his Blackberry alarm sounded.

“Oh damn,” he muttered, and then turned to the people assembled around him. “You know, I’ve got a lot to do—running the country, dealing with Republicans, you know—and I’ve got a singing lesson in twenty minutes.” He then began to quickly walk back to the presidential limousine while warming up with The Sound of Music’s “Do Re Mi,” to the bewilderment of those he had just left behind.

“I don’t understand,” said Lawson Goode, of New York City’s St. Francis Elementary School. “During his campaign he talked constantly about building up this country’s principals, but then ditches us when we become an inconvenience.”

The walk-off was not the first such incident. Obama began his term with a vow to restore the principals held in detention by rogue students of the school district established on Guantanamo Bay, yet the district itself remains under the jurisdiction of vice administrators. Tensions heightened earlier this month when he suspended one principal, Prudence Libby of Denver’s Rocky Mountain High, over inclusion of the War Powers Act in her school’s civics curriculum.

The reaction to Friday’s incident split along party lines, with Democrats largely applauding the President for his pragmatism. Said Vice President Joe Biden, “It’s unfortunate the way it played out, but being President comes with the responsibility of making tough decisions, and I think siding with song and dance over principals was the right call.” He went on to add, “Barack does an extraordinary rendition of “America, the Beautiful.” Members of the President’s liberal base voiced their displeasure, but were told to raise their hands if they wanted to be called on to speak.

Republicans meanwhile castigated the President for not doing away with principals altogether. “These are people who have no problems restricting Americans’ freedoms with arbitrary rules, such as ‘no running in the hallway,’ and ‘4th graders eat at 11:10, 5th graders at 11:15,’ for completely inexplicable reasons,” said former Bush advisor Karl Rove. “I really want to know, can we trust the judgment of someone so deferential to abstract principals?”

The President later apologized to the offended parties by way of an autographed “Yes We Can” poster.

[Cross-posted from The Washington Fancy]

Newtly Wed

Joshua Green called for a David Brooks photoshopping meme earlier this week and today tied it into the Newt Gingrich implosion. I propose an alternative.



A little obvious, but, yeah.

Sargasm

Apropos of the sarcasm post, here is one of my favorite ever Simpsons quotes, which in its fashion makes the same point I did:

The Sokal Hoax Turns 15

Michael Bérubé notes the 15th anniversary of the Sokal Hoax. While defending the cultural studies which Sokal was attacking, he concedes the larger point:

But what of Sokal’s chief post-hoax claim that the academic left’s critiques of science were potentially damaging to the left? That one, alas, has held up very well, for it turns out that the critique of scientific “objectivity” and the insistence on the inevitable “partiality” of knowledge can serve the purposes of climate-change deniers and young-Earth creationists quite nicely. That’s not because there was something fundamentally rotten at the core of philosophical anti-foundationalism (whose leading American exponent, Richard Rorty, remained a progressive Democrat all his life), but it might very well have had something to do with the cloistered nature of the academic left. It was as if we had tacitly assumed, all along, that we were speaking only to one another, so that whenever we championed Jean-François Lyotard’s defense of the “hetereogeneity of language games” and spat on Jürgen Habermas’s ideal of a conversation oriented toward “consensus,” we assumed a strong consensus among us that anyone on the side of heterogeneity was on the side of the angels.

But now the climate-change deniers and the young-Earth creationists are coming after the natural scientists, just as I predicted–and they’re using some of the very arguments developed by an academic left that thought it was speaking only to people of like mind. Some standard left arguments, combined with the left-populist distrust of “experts” and “professionals” and assorted high-and-mighty muckety-mucks who think they’re the boss of us, were fashioned by the right into a powerful device for delegitimating scientific research.

The funny thing is it did not take long at all for this way of thinking to catch on among the Right. The first place I ever read about the Sokal Hoax was in (wait for it) Slouching Towards Gomorrah, by authoritarian would-be Supreme Court Justice Robert Bork, who mentioned it regarding the Left's penetration into academia as part of a "radical egalitarian" attack on elites.

Slouching was published in 1996, the same year as Sokal's coup. Sokal is mentioned on page 269; only 25 pages later Bork declares that "the fossil record is proving quite a major embarrassment for evolutionary theory" and goes on to quote Intelligent Design huckster Michael Behe as an authority. The juxtaposition speaks for itself.

Femail

Unlike yours truly, Jack Shafer is breaking up with his Hotmail account of over twelve years in favor of Gmail:

Like all relationships, Hotmail and I had devolved into a love-hate-coexistence groove. I hated the fact that Hotmail put limits on how many e-mails I could store without paying. I hated the limitation on the size of files I could send. I suspect that Hotmail hated me because I wanted all she provided and more but wasn't willing to pay.

Be sure to read to the end to find out how Hotmail's taking it all in stride.

In-YOU-end.... Oh.

Jeff Goldberg's got a lot of good things to say about the increasingly sick arms race going on between the TSA and potential terrorists. A few of the quotes he uses, however, scream of entendre:

Here is what President Obama, speaking in Lisbon, had to say about the furor over intrusive and humiliating airport security procedures: "...(I)n the aftermath of the Christmas Day bombing, our TSA personnel are, properly, under enormous pressure to make sure that you don't have somebody slipping on a plane with some sort of explosive device on their persons."

But, unfortunately, the threat comes not only from explosive devices on people, but in people. Our country has not yet experienced the terror of a cavity bomb -- a bomb inserted into the rectum or vagina of a suicide terrorist -- but this is what experts, in and out of government, fear is coming....

Three experts I spoke to this weekend -- two of whom are currently serving in government in counter-terrorism capacities -- believe it is only a matter of time before the technique is tried here. "We have nothing in our arsenal that would detect these bombs," one told me. "There is no taboo that we can see against this technique. Suicide is suicide, it doesn't matter how gross it is."

I know I risk forfeiting intellectual credibility I probably don't have--credibility credit, shall we say--but as an unreformed schoolboy who never saw a bad pun he couldn't appreciate, I felt I had to say something.

The Genealogy of Emails

Funny, but very true:

There are some warning signs that you might have a bad e-mail address. First, is it oddly specific, but does it end in a number? You probably need to rethink your life. Anything along the lines of NobodyLovesTheCircusMore5 or ClevelandMortThePirateHunter7 is just a cry for help. The people who own these e-mail addresses clearly felt that they had their lives well in order until they noticed that NobodyLovesTheCircusMore was taken -- four times. At Hotmail.

My old email address falls roughly within these parameters, being based of all things off the 90s puzzle game Myst. Mostly I picked it because it sounded neat, and an unrelated number was en vogue at the time.

I hold onto it now for a few reasons: many of my friends and family already have that as my contact and switching is just mildly inconvenient. It's also a good way to separate personal and business mail. Finally, I have a peculiar loyalty for it--fifteen years of providing email under the same goofy name is not casually tossed aside.

h/t Ezra Klein

Cat-alyst

The spontaneous outbreak of good taste by the American public regarding Garfield provides an ample opportunity to bring renewed attention to internet anti-Garfield humor. These are all fairly well-known, but I believe it would be a public service to bring them all together.

First there is the Garfield Random Panel Generator, which operates on both the Kuleshov Theory and the Garfield is Funnier Out of Sequence Theory, both of which are true and well-documented.

Next is the Garfield silencing. It's pretty self-explanatory; by removing Garfield's thought bubbles the strip becomes "an oddly surrealist comic."



Along these same lines is Realfield, which turns Garfield into a realistic looking pussy cat, and Garfield Minus Garfield, in which he is removed entirely. This latter approach warps the increased focus on Jon, taking him from just a lonely guy that talks to his cat to a desperate sack that holds disjuointed discourse with himself.



Interestingly, Garfield creator Jim Davis approves of the treatment, going so far as to allow G-G's "creator" to publish a book collection of his alterations. More money in the bank, I'm sure.

Finally there is Lasagna Cat, which must have required an absurd level of time and resources to realize. The concept is brilliant in its simplicity: re-enact Garfield strips with live-action performers and a laugh track and rimshot for the "funny" parts, followed by a surreal music video remix and a potshot at Jim Davis. One of my favorites:



The effect is really quite astounding. As one of the silenced Garfield commenters notes, "Garfield, traditionally one of the worst comics ever, has become the greatest comic ever." The only other comic strip perversion I can think of that achieves a similar level of realized-humor-by-degradation is the Nietzsche Family Circus.

What You Think You Saw You Did Not See

There's a famous experiment, carried out in the 1910s and 20s, which helped establish some of the ideas that underlay film editing. Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov took footage of a man and juxtaposed it with a soup bowl, a girl, and a little girl in a casket. The audiences raved about the quality of the acting, even though it was actually the same shot, repeated each time. The way their minds processed the sequence of images linked them intuitively. This unconscious act of linking unrelated but sequential images is known as the Kuleshov Effect.

The posters of this video claim it to be the original footage. I've no idea if it is (probably not), but it does a good job of illustrating the effect:



I tell you all this in order that you may understand why Swampland's front page--for the moment--is so funny. Scroll slowly and look at the pictures:



The plane(!) was in California, Obama and Grand Imam Ali Mustafa Yaqub were in Indonesia.

National Mallrat

One needed only step into an arriving Metro train this morning to know something major was afoot. Almost no one got out, and--nearing if not exceeding capacity--we took on more people with every stop. The Tea Partiers, ever so fond of Hitler analogies and now familiar from their own rally with such conditions, might call the coziness Auschwitzian.

I arrived at the National Mall around 10:45 or so, off of 7th Street. I thought I saw some Tea Partiers--as indicated by 'November is Coming'-type signs--hanging at the edge then. This one in particular expresses a common Tea Party grievance, although with much more cleverness than I've seen them capable of.


Now "at" the rally, I took a left, into the Henry Park area of the Mall, to get as close as I could. I pushed among what was already a packed crowd and got maybe a third of the way to the stage, at which point most of the crowd's forward movement dropped off. Knowing I didn't want to stand in one place for four hours I squeezed out left onto Madison Drive and went as far as I could go before getting stopped at the VIP zone.

I must halt my narrative in order to describe myself. I was Mormon-clad: black slacks, white short-sleeved collared shirt, tie. (The tie was red.) I did this in order to more credibly sell the sign I was carrying:



Up until this point, and with almost no exceptions after, everybody who saw me and my ridiculous sign "got" it. Most would chuckle, guffaw, take a photo; my sign must have been photographed a hundred times over the course of the day.

I stayed in character throughout, thanking people for their interest in abolishing such an unnatural and disgusting practice as the marriage of the elderly. One old man told me he was already married.

"You should be ashamed of yourself," I said. He laughed. Almost all of those I talked to laughed.

But as I stood at the attendee boundary, probably looking at someone else's goofy sign, a young woman came up and punched me in the chest and stomped off. I stood there agape and slightly wounded in esteem. (In the past two weeks, mind you, I've been almost mugged and nearly job scammed. I'm getting a bit sensitive to these violations of my space and identity.) 'She must really like old people,' I said to no one in particular. A minute or so later the girl returned with her friend and hugged me and apologized profusely for not having read my sign in full.

I find it slightly repugnant that she seemed contrite only for punching the 'wrong' person, but regardless I take considerable pride in having been her target. To be taken seriously is the highest compliment an ironist can be paid.

I wandered back up Madison and passed by some honest-to-god Socialists selling books with Malcolm X speeches and their newspaper, the Militant. Movement conservatives will probably point to this as "evidence" of the rally's "true" radical nature, and yeah, these kinds of groups tend to show up at big liberal events. But their earnestness was (radically?) at odds with the festive atmosphere of the event, hardly representative. And anyway, Malcolm X and Socialism are not nearly as scary as conservatives would have us think.

I ended up settling on the other side of 7th, and shortly thereafter the rally proper began, with immediate difficulties. Several of the participants were so enamored of their own cleverness that they refused to put their signs down. This was a problem, as our only glimpse of the stage up front was provided by several large screens that these clever people and their signs were blocking.

"SIGN-DOWN! SIGN-DOWN!" We chanted, to mostly good results.

The speaker system was also incredibly inconsistent, either too quiet or not on at all.

"LOU-DER! LOU-DER!" Thus did we rally to restore volume, with less success.


The exchange between Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert went fine. So did a pretty funny sketch about the crowd count issue I mentioned earlier, in which the Daily Show crew had audience members at the very front count off and state their ethnicity, in order to get accurate numbers and demographics. But by the time Father Guido Sarducci's (yeah, I didn't know who he was either) fake benediction came around the volume was on the fritz again, and I was getting restless--even after the police fulfilled our request to "Tear down this fence!" and gave us more space on the grass--and so I spent much of the rest of the time wandering around.

Around this time Jon Stewart started bringing out musical guests. His first: Cat Stevens, a.k.a. Yusuf Islam, who blamed Salman Rushdie for the fatwa put out on him. How the hell could Stewart and his crew, famously exhaustive in their research on news figures, invite Stevens without considering this very well-known latter fact?

Stevens played "Peace Train," interrupted by Ozzy Osbourne with "Crazy Train." Get it?

Shortly thereafter I saw some Truthers. Truthers, those cultish malcontents whose skepticism would make David Hume facepalm. A whole two of them, at this street-cramming and ostensibly moderate gathering. Amid the surrounding wackiness, I would say the joke was on them. Much more aware of their surroundings was the group of Communists hawking their wares a block away from the rally's epicenter. "Barack Obama is not a Communist, but I am, and I think you should be too!" the very good-natured barker said while distributing literature for the Revolutionary Communist Party. Again, these types are fringe and disproportionate in both number and impact. I mention them in fact because they were different and interesting.

Eventually I settled down at the Mall's southern edge off of Jefferson Drive, to hear the last Stewart/Colbert segment, and Stewart's closing speech (much more on those later). Once it was all done, almost exactly at three o'clock as scheduled, I wandered around a bit to look for my friends. I left a half hour afterward, a drop in a sea of other departing rallygoers that covered 7th Street as far as one could see. Only then did I realize how crazy the Metro would be. I bypassed the Navy Memorial and went further and tried the Convention Center and Chinatown, but they too were hopelessly congested.

Outside the Convention Center stop there was a fight about to break out between two middle-aged gentlemen, serious enough that a cop to had to intervene. A passerby noted the incongruity: "Come on, man, this was a peace rally!"

I ended up walking an alphabet of blocks to the U Street Metro station, where I stepped into a train car as sardine-spaced as that this morning. It's entirely possible that the people on it were the ones with whom I would have been in line at my previous stop a half an hour before.

Coming Soon

Apologies for not having posted anything yesterday. I spent the day at work and the afternoon and evening at a wedding, which prompted me to pen a few free form verses about the occasion. I hope to finish them and have the poem up today.

In the meantime, here is How the Empire Strikes Back Should Have Ended:

Cereal Authors

Reading Christopher Hitchens' autobiography, and especially the chapter on his friendship with Martin Amis, reminded me of this bit of brilliance from Tom the Dancing Bug from a few years back. (The image won't size properly and I'm pressed for time, so you'll have to settle with a link).