Is This What The Beatles Had In Mind?

The Dubster and The Hillster have something in common: both his attempt to charm the Saudis into bringing down the price of black gold/Texas tea and her crusade for the White House can be postmarked "Fat Chance, Arkansas." Today, the resident redneck for the local fishwrap wrote a funny column about The Dubster in Arabia. John Kelso has been in Texas for a little more than 30 years and he pretends to be a good ol' boy. One of his faves, Larry The Cable Guy, also pretends to be a good ol' boy. Kelso is from New Hampshire and The Cable Guy is from Nebraska. However, Kelso and The Cable Guy are entitled to their personae. After all, look at The Dubster, born in Connecticut, and The Hillster, born in Ambition and Denial. As for me, I am the Popeye of the Blogosphere: "I am what I am and that's all that I am." If this is a (fair & balanced) search for authenticity, so be it.

[x Austin Fishwrap]
Bush Holds Hands; Saudis Say "Don't Hold Your Breath"
By John Kelso

Copyright © 2008 Susan Walsh/Associated Press

If Bush wants the Saudis to pump more oil he should blow in the king's ear.

I wonder if George W. Bush would have run for president if he'd known he'd have to hold hands with a hairy guy.

Holding hands with a hairy guy is part of the Bush economic stimulus package. So far, it's not working. Last week, Bush traveled to Saudi Arabia to beg the Saudis to increase oil production, the assumption being that if the Saudis started pumping more oil, gasoline prices would go down.

On Saturday, a photo on the front page of this newspaper showed Bush holding hands with Saudi King Abdullah. But it didn't do any good. The Saudis told Bush to go pack sand and said they were already pumping enough oil.

This might have worked out better if Bush had sent King Abdullah a dozen roses. Like former NFL great and FTD pitchman Merlin Olsen always said, "Say it with flowers." Or how about chocolates? Maybe gas prices would drop if Bush had gone out to the mall and picked up some Godivas for the king. That is, until the Arabs found out Godiva was a chick who rode around nekkid on a horse.

This occurred to me Sunday morning when I took my Lexus to the Genie Car Wash on William Cannon Drive in South Austin to get it washed and filled up with $3.74-a-gallon gas. At those rates, I figure Bush should invite King Abdullah to dinner and a movie.

"He could probably go a little further," joked Kelly McDearmon, the Genie Car Wash worker who wiped down my car. "Flowers and a kiss, probably."

It's a daring gesture for a conservative family values politician such as Bush to be seen in public holding hands with a dude who could use a shave. Especially since the picture of those two clasping pinkies showed up in the paper the day after the story about California OK'ing gay weddings. That means Bush obviously cares about the American way of life being destroyed by gasoline prices.

One thing you could do to make ends meet is just quit buying groceries. Find out what stores have free samples and take the kids out to dinner there. Or you could just stay in the house with the air conditioner off. Or you could vacation in Pflugerville.

Now, I realize that it is supposedly an old Arab custom for men to hold hands. (Put another way, I'll bet you don't see Larry the Cable Guy on the Saudi comedy channel.) On the other hand, what if this is a practical joke and the Saudis are, as the kids say, punking Bush?

What if the OPEC execs got together at a board meeting and said, "I know how we can goon this dude. Let's tell Bush it's an old Arab tradition for dudes to hold hands in public. I'll betcha the dummy will fall for it, and we can take pictures of him doing that, and we can get them run in the newspaper and make him look like our stooge."

Just a thought.

[Kelso has worked for the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman as a humor columnist since 1977. Before coming to Austin, Kelso worked at several newspapers: The Manchester (N.H.) Union-Leader; The Boonville (Mo.) Daily News; The Palm Beach (Fla.) Post and the Racine (Wis.)Journal Times. Kelso has been a general assignment reporter, a copy editor, a sports editor, and an outdoor writer. His column appears thrice weekly: Sundays, Tuesdays, and Fridays in the Austin Fishwrap.]

Copyright © 2008 The Austin American-Statesman

Get an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Reader at no cost from Google. Another free Reader is available at RSS Reader.

Hillster, Ave Atque Vale

To paraphrase Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, where in Hell is The Hillster from: Illinois, Arkansas, New York, Pennsylvania, or — today — Kentucky? The correct answer: the State of Unreality.

While pondering this existential query, consider Sparky, The Wonder Penguin, in this week's "This Modern World." Stick a fork in The Hillster, she's done. If this is (fair & balanced) political realism, so be it.

[x This Modern World]

Copyright © 2008 Tom Tomorrow
Click on image to enlarge.

[Political cartoonist Tom Tomorrow, aka Dan Perkins, draws a weekly cartoon, "This Modern World," that appears online in Salon, and "WorkingforChange.com," as well as in dozens of alternative newspapers across the United States. He won the 1998 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award for "This Modern World." Tom Tomorrow has penned six books, including, When Penguins Attack!, Tune In Tomorrow, The Wrath of Sparky, Greetings from This Modern World, and The Great Big Book of Tom Tomorrow.]

Get an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Reader at no cost from Google. Another free Reader is available at RSS Reader.

Kamiya Had Me At "Batshit Holy Men"

The Geezer is surrounded by pulpit-pounding wackos: John Hagee, Rod Parsley, Bob Jones, Pat Robertson and the rest are one step away from tatooing "LOVE" on the fingers of their right hands and "HATE" on the fingers of their left hands. What would Jesus do? If this is (fair & balanced) repudiation, so be it.

[x Salon]
Psycho Christians And The Media
By Gary Kamiya

Why the press gives McCain a pass for consorting with batshit holy men, but condemns Obama to talk-show hell for the same sin.

John McCain has some seriously screwed-up holy men surrounding him. First, there's the Rev. John Hagee, a hate-monger and certifiable loon who believes that Hurricane Katrina was God's judgment on New Orleans for planning a gay parade, calls Catholicism a "false cult system" that conspired with Hitler to exterminate the Jews, and believes that America's divine duty is to destroy Iran. Then there's the Rev. Rod Parsley, who garnishes his bigoted theology by calling Islam "the greatest religious enemy of our civilization and the world" and saying that Muhammad was "a mouthpiece of a conspiracy of spiritual evil."

These psycho Christians make Robert Mitchum's sociopathic traveling preacher in "The Night of the Hunter" (the guy with "love" tattooed on one hand and "hate" on the other) look like St. Francis of Assisi. They are undiluted bigots who espouse beliefs just as twisted as those promulgated by the Rev. Louis Farrakhan -- and far more toxic and extreme than those held by Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Yet, as many media critics have noted, no major-network interviewer is demanding that McCain denounce Hagee or Parsley, as Tim Russert infamously demanded again and again that Obama do of Farrakhan during a prime-time debate. No cable channel is ranting 24/7 about McCain's failure to disavow these extremist bigots, and speculating that his ties to Hagee and Parsley could cost him the election. Considering that McCain desperately needs Hagee and Parsley to deliver votes in key states like Ohio, this is no small matter.

It's true that neither Hagee nor Parsley was McCain's pastor and personal spiritual advisor, as Wright was for Obama. Obama's personal relationship with Wright raised more legitimate questions than were raised by McCain's actively seeking Hagee's endorsement. But especially during the second, more serious outburst of Wright-hysteria, after Wright went off the reservation at the National Press Club, it was obvious that the story had really shifted to Wright, not Obama. The brouhaha was a media ritual, in which Obama was required to sacrifice an unseemly political ally as a kind of campaign station of the cross. Obama had already given his now-famous speech about race in Philadelphia, and no one seriously believed that he shared Wright's views. In any case, even if Hagee and Parsley had been McCain's pastors, it's hard to imagine that the media would have attacked him as relentlessly as it has attacked Obama over Wright and Farrakhan.

The media's double standard is all about deference to perceived mainstream norms, and tiptoeing around the Christian right. Despite their cartoonish views, the media treats Hagee and Parsley as quasi-mainstream figures, which makes McCain's relationship with them non-newsworthy. The dirty little secret of mainstream American journalism is that it operates within invisible constraints that conform to some imagined Middle American consensus. The issue isn't that journalists share Hagee and Parsley's views so much as that they know that they are widely held, which makes them reluctant to acknowledge how truly outrageous they are. After years of nodding at the whacked-out likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the media has, to borrow Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous phrase, defined right-wing religious deviancy down. More or less "orthodox" Christian-right insanity, of the sort espoused by Hagee and Parsley, is familiar and normal, whereas black-church radicalism, with its ties to left-wing liberation theology, is not. In 2000, 45 percent of the population told Gallup they were either born-again or evangelical Christians.

The question of "newsworthiness" is one of the blind spots of conventional journalism. Since right-wing religious leaders have been endorsing conservative Republican candidates for decades (Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell endorsed Ronald Reagan; Pat Robertson endorsed Rudy Giuliani; a small church in North Carolina kicked out members who voted for John Kerry), when another one does it, it's a dog-bites-man story. Mainstream editors and reporters pose as hard-bitten realists, but they are in fact reluctant to deviate from pack thinking. For the media to suddenly go after McCain on Hagee as hard as it has gone after Obama on Farrakhan and Wright would represent, in their eyes, a "controversial" rejection of the way things have always been done.

This echo-chamber effect, in which a story is a story because it has been a story before, highlights the critical importance of precedent. From the beginning, the media didn't go hard after extreme figures on the religious right because those extreme figures have major constituencies. The taboo against criticizing Christianity also plays a crucial role: Extreme, even demented beliefs are seen as untouchable so long as they are part of what is seen as mainstream evangelical Christianity. Of course this taboo does not extend to criticizing left-wing Christianity, à la Wright. If some public figure said that the earthquake in China was caused by the wrath of Zeus, who was offended because women's rights had reduced the number of compliant virgins available for him to deflower, any politician who consorted with him would be forced to repudiate him. But Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, John Hagee and other such figures have said essentially the same thing and gotten a pass. Afraid of coming across as arrogant elitists who don't understand or respect the faith of "real" Americans, the media has pulled its punches on the Christian right for years.

Patriotism and Islamophobia also contribute to the blank check handed to the religious right. Hagee and Parsley may be barking mad, but they wave the flag and denounce Islam. In the age of George W. Bush, that qualifies them as solidly in the American mainstream.

In fact, the media's failure to subject Hagee and Parsley to the same scrutiny that they have given to Wright and Farrakhan is closely related to its colossal failures in covering Bush's "war on terror." The media failed in the run-up to the war in Iraq in large part because, under the patriotic pressure of 9/11, it followed the wartime norm of swallowing the administration line. Its shortcomings with Hagee and Parsley reflect the same internalized self-censorship.

One could argue that neither McCain nor Obama should be subjected to this "gotcha" game in which the media demands that a candidate prove his character and values by publicly excommunicating a problematic political ally. But the fact is that political news coverage today is driven by sensationalism, and candidates are subjected to simplistic tests, and that's not going to change. So if Obama is forced to answer for Wright's off-the-wall black nationalist Christianity, it's only fair that McCain should be forced to answer for Hagee's even more off-the-wall Christian right looniness as well.

Yet the coverage has been anything but fair -- not just because of the media's fear of going after nutty Christians, but because everything about Obama is unprecedented and therefore "sensational." He's not only the first-ever black presidential front-runner, but the first to confront a loose-cannon black pastor who said, "God damn America." It bleeds! It leads! Tear up the front page! Call in the pundits to opine! By contrast, McCain's mealy-mouthed half-criticisms of Hagee's outrageous statements, and Hagee's transparently disingenuous apology for attacking Catholics, are so familiar as to be sleep-inducing. There's practically nothing that McCain can say or do that can make news the way that Obama does just by walking down the street.

By incessantly attacking Obama as strange and scary, which is certain to be his strategy, McCain will be tapping into this already existing media bias toward sensationalism. His and Bush's outrageous charges that Obama is an "appeaser" are intended to play into this, and much worse is sure to be coming (get ready for a revival of "he's a Muslim" smears from proxies who can be disavowed). Whether the press will be able to find the backbone to reveal the cynical emptiness of those charges, and bring aggressive scrutiny even to the old, familiar, patriotic, war-supporting, flag-waving ethos represented by McCain, may go a long way toward determining who our next president is.

[Gary Kamiya is one of the founders of Salon and was its executive editor. Now Kamiya is a Salon writer-at-large.]

Copyright © 2008 Salon Media Group

Get an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Reader at no cost from Google. Another free Reader is available at RSS Reader.

A "VERSUS" Medley

Today's "VERSUS" offering was a repeat of Marcy Shaffer's brilliant rendering of John Newton's "Amazing Grace" into a paean to The Hopester's speech on race and race relations in the aftermath of the firestorm surrounding his former pastor, The Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright. If only Jeremiah Wright had an ounce of John Newton's faith and insight. But we don't live in a perfect world. O, yeah...

In search of an alternative to a repeat "VERSUS" parody that ran in this blog on April 16, 2008 ("Simply, Amazing"), a new (to this blog) item came to the fore: a medley of some of Marcy Shaffer's brilliant past work. So, in lieu of a repeat of "Raising Race," click on the link below and listen to Shaffer's words from the VERSUS site. (While you're there, you can listen to "Raising Race.") Marcy Shaffer turned away from her legal career to write parodies in October 2005. You go, girl! If this is (fair & balanced) appreciation, so be it.

[x Versus]
THE VERSUS OVERTURE — VERSUS Parody Medley
By Marcy Shaffer, Parodist

CIRCLE OF LIES, to "Circle of Life" (Music by Elton John/Lyrics by Tim Rice): Gary Stockdale - Lead Vocal, Background Vocals; Janis Liebhart - Background Vocals [about the Bush Administration]

ANOTHER BEEF, to “On the Street Where You Live” (Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner/Music by Frederick Loewe): Janis Liebhart – Lead Vocal [about food safety]

FOR THE NORTH POLE, to “Copacabana” (Music by Barry Manilow/Words by Bruce Sussman & Jack Feldman): Tony Jones – Lead Vocal; Mary Harris – Background Vocals [about global warming]

MALAY RIDE, to "Sleigh Ride" (Music by Leroy Anderson/Lyrics by Mitchell Parish): Janis Liebhart - Lead Vocal [about consumerism]

GUANTANAMO!, to "Camelot" (Music by Alan Jay Lerner/Music by Frederick Loewe): Gary Stockdale - Lead Vocal [about Guantanamo]

ODE TO JOIN, to Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125 - Finale (Composed by Ludwig van Beethoven, based on "Ode to Joy" by Friedrich Schiller): Angie Jarée – Lead Vocal, Background Vocals; Janis Liebhart – Lead Vocal, Background Vocals; Guy Maeda – Lead Vocal, Background Vocals; Victor Zharkov – Lead Vocal, Background Vocals [about democracy in America]

PARTITION!, to "Tradition," from Fiddler On The Roof (Music by Jerry Bock/Lyrics by Sheldon Harnick): Janis Liebhart - Lead Vocal, Background Vocals; Gary Stockdale - Lead Vocal; Background Vocals [about Iraq]

Greg Hilfman - music director

[The co-producers of VERSUS wrote:

So many wrongs. So little time.

Thus the genesis of VERSUS. Born of the conviction that musical parody is mightier than PowerPoint, VERSUS is an equal opportunity skewer-er of the ruthless, the truthless, the reckless, the feckless.

VERSUS parodies are written by Marcy Shaffer, whose professional writing experience includes television, film, lyrics, verse and … musical parody. The parody lyrics on the page become the audio of VERSUS courtesy of some of the best musical talent in the business.

VERSUS is co-produced by Russ Meyer, a private equity veteran whose industry expertise includes financial services as well as entertainment.]

℗ © 2006, 2007 RMSWorks LLC. Lyrics © 2005, 2006, 2007 RMSWorks LLC.

Get an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Reader at no cost from Google. Another free Reader is available at RSS Reader.