Thursday, February 07, 2008

Huh?

Here's another item from the priceless "The Editorial Page" (formerly WSJ's "Best of the Web"). I'm not even sure what the heck Rosie is talking about. How in the world is her staph infection George Bush's fault?

I love the use of the psychological terminology to suggest a criminal level of violation. I love it when whiny b*tches like Al Franken, Paul Krugman, and Susan Sontag throw around this kind of hyperbole. Usually it's because they have been forced to listen to people say less than hateful things about George Bush, and, well, those things just can't be true, so the people who said them must be liars or accomplices in the vast, right-wing conspiracy, and, well, ooh! I am going to hold my breath until you make them stop!

Writing on the Puffington Host, Rosie O'Donnell makes the following case against George W. Bush:
President Bush almost killed me. It's true, and I have the scars to prove it--multiple scars that are part of the public record--you saw them in magazines and on my show, and you can see them on my blog frequently--no twelve year wait required.

It was 2000, and the Republican National Convention was on television. The whole affair felt something like a home invasion, with a chronically smirking and arrogant George W. Bush as ringleader. Not wishing to be robbed of my optimism and hope at the time--or to tumble into depression and despair--I shut off the TV and decided to go fishing.

I needed gear, so I went to the store and bought a few things, including a knife, which I used to cut the price tags off of the fishing poles.

Now, I could have stabbed myself 100 times in the hand and not managed to do the damage I did with that one poke to the inside of my middle finger. I went all out, though, and got everything--skin, ligaments, tendons, nerves. Maximum impact, including a particularly nasty staph infection that almost left me dead.

That's my personal war story from the demoralizing Bush years...

Uh, wait. This happened in 2000, right? That was still the Clinton years.

4 comments:

Jonathan B. said...

Ah, I see the problem. Rosie was joking. You may have failed to notice this because she's perhaps the least amusing, most unappealing person to ever, in the history of mankind, aspire to be a comedian, let alone somehow succeed at being hired as one. I remember watching her on VH1 like a dog watching a tennis match, wondering what in the world somebody would find amusing about her cutesy little schtick. But anyway, she was joking, and suggesting that since it was the RNC that gave her the impetus to go fishing, GWB is to blame. It's actually self-parody, I think, to give her as much credit as possible.

Alain DeWitt said...

Oh, ok. I totally didn't get that. For someone who is allegedly a comedienne, her sense of humor is easily mistaken for vitriol.

Jonathan B. said...

Well, I'm not certain I'm right. I can only hope for her sake that she's not so fargone as to be capable of unwitting and yet effective self-parody. But I agree that she's not remotely funny. A lot of comedians seem to be mistaking vitriol for humor these days, and it goes over only because they generally flatter their audiences' politics.

John Stewart works this angle well. He's basically a humorless asshole, except he does his bit in front of an audience of SoHo sycophants, and it goes over well. His material basically consists of him rubbing his eyes and saying "Whah?"

Alain DeWitt said...

Jonathan,

No. I am sure you are right. I guess it's been so long since I had to conceptualize the words "Rosie O' Donnell" and "humor" in the same sentence.

That is a great characterization of Jon Stewart. I don't watch him very often, but I wonder how successful he would have been in an era when you had to put a little more thought into it if you wanted to assassinate the character of the President.