The Rolling Stones – Heaven from Kinamazing on Vimeo.
Listened to Laura Ingraham this morning. Probably shouldn’t have, but she’s what passes for a hard line conservative inside the beltway. Thought I should check in on the conventional wisdom.
I heard three really depressing things.
She interviewed retired Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, focusing initially on the amnesty issue. He sounded exactly like John Boehner. They’re here. Many of them have been here for a long time, they go to church, they work hard, deserve a chance, etc. She pushed him hard on the disconnect between the rule of law and well intended compassion. When he ran out of arguments, though, she withheld the coup de grace of asking what organizations he was being paid to lobby for and moved into nostalgia mode. By the end she had mollified his obvious hurt feelings about being confronted. Because she wouldn’t want to lose him as a future interview. Yuck.
In her next segment she basically declared Jeb Bush the winner of the 2016 Republican nomination. He’s raising huge amounts of money, and we need a Republican who can win. She couldn’t bring herself to mention Palin, although she expressed a yearning for the resurrection of Chris Christie. She failed to mention that Jeb Bush can’t win either. The newest polls demonstrate that a plurality of voters still blame G.W. Bush more than Obama for the current state of the economy. Can you imagine the necklacing the MSM will perpetrate on Jeb if he runs for president? Grim.
The final blow was her decision to devote the rest of her show to the Beatles, it being the 50th anniversary of their triumphant arrival in the United States. I could have lived with that, I suppose, but she and her sidekick Raymond considered who if anyone might be considered a rival to the body of work of the Fab Four. Raymond is still stuck on Sinatra, but Laura pointed out that Sinatra didn’t write his songs while the Beatles did. She mentioned the Beach Boys for their harmony, which rivaled the Beatles’, and gave a passing nod to Dionne and the Belmonts, and then, incredibly, declared, “There really is no one else.”
No one else? Huh? While she was encouraging everyone to call in with their favorite Beatles song, Raymond protested that “Imagine” is the most detestable song he’s ever heard. Laura dismissed that with, “Well, that’s Lennon.” Meaning she’s really restricting the Beatles canon to the seven years they were together. In rock terms, that’s a flash in the pan.
No one else? No Who? No Pink Floyd? No Led Zep? No Dylan? No Hendrix, U2, Peter Gabriel, well, fill in your own…
I’m not suggesting that people can’t prefer the Beatles as their Number One, but here’s a self-professed music maven (only 49 years old, mind) who has amputated from her ken all rock and roll that isn’t the Beatles, including the entire history of rock after 1970.
And, as you all know, the ultimate outrage to me is that she couldn’t even think of the Stones, who battled the Beatles head to head in the late sixties, with their own triumphant arrival to the U.S. and the Ed Sullivan stage, before proceeding to a 50 year career with a self written song output that easily outpaces the Beatles in terms of classics. Never occurred to her.
No wonder people believe conservatives are hopelessly stuck in an imagined past that bears no relation to the present. When I hear the Beatles, I hear nothing but a time capsule of a mentality that was reactive, dumb, and doomed. Like the band itself.
But Jeb Bush is supposed to be our future. We’ve had that future twice. How many more times? As many times, I suppose, as Laura Ingraham can play Long and Winding Road for her audience of hothouse-educated sophisticates. God help us.
God help us.
They’re all loons. I just can’t decide if it’s the Inside the Beltway Syndrome (IBS) or the fatal combination of an Ivy undergraduate degree combined with either a degree in Journalism or Law.
God help us all.
“When I hear the Beatles, I hear nothing but a time capsule of a mentality that was reactive, dumb, and doomed. Like the band itself.”
Thank you. Thank you. I have never liked the Beatles, even with a couple of pot head teachers I had over the years who insisted their lyrics were magical. The way things are doing, there will soon come a day when nobody will have any idea what the Beach Boys are singing about in 409 but kindergarteners will know that Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds is about LSD. Because yucky cars are bad and kill the planet, but dropping acid is quaint. It’s what people did in the olden days back before they had meth.
Glad I didn’t hear any of Laura’s show today. I cringe whenever conservatives do stuff like this, trying to be hip. It’s a lot like the gushing paeans written about Nelson Mandela: “The Beatles were so great because…uh, because they were the Beatles!” The rest of her show didn’t sound too good, either.
So it’s Jeb Bush or Chris Christie, then? Maybe they can get the guy from the evolution debate to be their running mate. That’d be a campaign for the ages. Where do I sign up to donate for that money bomb?
Remember that I didn’t make a Super Bowl prediction. Because despite weeks of expert commentary, nobody knew what would happen. Same here. Nobody knows who the Democrat or Republican nominees will be. Hillary? If elected, she’d be months away from the age of 70 when inaugurated. Candidate of millennial youth? Give me a break. Candidate of tired, broken ideas and half a century of old political ties to the ultimate power establishment. She’s a wide-hipped female cuckold who has exactly zero accomplishments to her name. Zero.
We. Don’t. Know. I suspect Jeb Bush will score low in the polls. You don’t waltz to the nomination that way. Huckabee is old, fat, and repellently smarmy. Rubio is an over-eager gold digging bride. Christie is a jerk. We’ll see if anyone percolates through the dreck to the top. Maybe no one will. In which case we will lose. Ryan’s done as a leader. So is Kantor. They sold their souls for lobbyist money. I’d look to Palin, but she quit as governor, which makes her almost as inexperienced as Obama. Not good.
Who’s left? Maybe Walker. Maybe Jindal. Lots of time left to see if there is any cream capable of rising to the top. But today, right now, nobody has any fricking idea what’s going to happen in 2016. Why we can still hope.
Good point.
Oh, hey, it’s Friday. I need to grab that movie Rush…
Sorry. I hope you know I wasn’t criticizing you or anything. It’s just, do you know how sick and fucking tired I am of no one being willing to fight for anything? And whenever you do find someone who says they’re willing to fight, it’s with the Brizoni or Helk caveat: “As long as you don’t believe in God” or “As long as you know 9/11 was an inside job”.
I like Laura Ingram. I’ve heard her show before. She sounded like a sharp broad. So why is she going soft on pro-amnesty Republicans and blowing the Beatles? Why can’t she hammer this GOP douche bag and follow up with, “Today is the 50th anniversary of a bunch of pussy, hippie, Euro trash.” Shouldn’t she know better than most of us about what we’re up against, as legions of “tolerant” progressives wished death and suffering on her as she battled through cancer? I guess this means she’s given up and is just looking out for herself. Trying to make things as painless as possible.
You may not remember I said this before, but I had knock-down, drag-out arguments with “friends” of mine in early 2008 before Obama got elected and before I stumbled upon Instapunk. They stopped being my friends b/c they never knew what a “radical rightwinger” I was (oh and they are all wise atheists, btw, not liberal Catholics). Today we know I was right about everything, but not a single one of them admit it. Instead, they grip ever more tightly to their Democrat talking points, belief in global warming, loyalty to Jon Stewart, whatever.
You know how George Washington could have made himself a king if he wanted to, but he willingly gave that power up in deference to what this nation might be? Well, we’ll need someone like that in 2016. Someone who is willing to do some illegal, unconstitutional shit in order to dig us out of this fucked up hole we’re in and be totally unapologetic about it. Fuck another McCain, Romney, Ryan, Bush, or Boner. Not going to vote for someone like that again. We have been in a war and we need someone who can at least recognize that. Not someone whose greatest priority is going on Jimmy Fallon and slow-jamming the news.
Was watching Band of Brothers with the wife the other night. Robert, do you realize how much more those men accomplished in one year than our entire, lavishly-funded military did in the year I was over there, not to mention in the…shit, what is it, decade-plus that we’ve been waging these wars? And not because Americans living in the 1940’s were intrinsically more valuable than those living in the early aughts. I served with those soldiers and they were good men. They didn’t storm Normandy or battle through the hedge rows of France but they were cooks, mechanics & fuelers who were ordered to do infantry patrols in the middle of Iraq and never bitched or complained. They were good kids, brave kids, and some gave their lives. And for what? I don’t know.
And Captain Phillips is supposed to be some inspiring movie? A rickety canoe of four half-starved Somalis with old Russian rifles hijack a gigantic freighter with about 20 strapping American men on it? You fucking kidding me?
Uh, so did you watch Rush?
Sorry I got so melodramatic. Had a bad day and night combination, there.
And no, I haven’t watched Rush yet. I was overruled at the movie picking. I picked the Counselor before I saw your recommendation for Rush, which led to me losing my movie picking privileges. The missus struck out with her choice over the weekend, though, so now it’s my turn to pick again and Rush is up next.
The Counselor? !!!!! You’re lucky you have any movie picking privileges left. Can’t say I read reviews, but I did read the first lines of multiple reviews. They all included the word suck.
Rush does not suck.
As I told you directly, this post bummed me out and I just scrapped my initial response before posting. Something like “even I, the eternal hopeful, am losing hope…”
Well, you were right, low was just part of the curve. Your power of prediction is normally so dead-on, but as you point out above, we just don’t know about 2016 yet. The primaries process will shake everything up, and there’s got to be a name out there that we haven’t heard and raked over the coals yet. Right?
Not Pink Floyd, whose work after “Wish You Were Here” became ‘political’ and dismal, but Dylan has many time over the accomplishment of the Beatles.
Longevity isn’t enough, though. Otherwise Arrowsmith would be great. Or Three Dog Night. Or Chicago.
Damn it I am not a “9/11 was an insider job” guy. There are nuances that we members of the Science and Technology Information Brokerage system happen to know about. But I *don’t want you* to believe me. I only want to be correct. And correctness does not depend on your opinion(s). At all.
Beside the point.
The issue here involves the death of America. As you know there is a lot of debate about when life begins. But did you know there is an equal or greater debate about when life ends? I mean when you have a person in a vegetative state that is reliant upon life support systems to continue breathing are you dealing with a living person or a dead one? This is relevant because America is on life support and is, for all intents and purposes, dead. I mean, there may be some involuntary twitching and when you wave your hands in front of those glazed eyes you can almost swear that you see a flicker of awareness. But that is just your hope clouding your better judgement.
Hope has a way of clouding judgement. Obviously.
Anyways. You don’t defend the dead, you bury them. But maybe you want to pump more energy (more of your life) into sitting bedside, holding that tired lifeless hand in yours, praying that America will come out of it? If it were only a coma, if it were only a drug-induced sleep, then maybe there would be a reason to hold on.
Nope. Funny how nope rhymes with hope. Maybe funny isn’t the right word here….
I know one thing that is not funny: My health insurance premiums. And my federal tax obligation. And the fact that sales tax has eclipsed 10% in my town. And the fact that the poor are growing restless and more numerous. This is what happens to a body (politic) when it is on life support – it starts to get bedsores and festering wounds and smell like a geriatric ward. And that is a dangerous way to smell when you are surrounded by enemies.
Did any of you think that we had any allies left? Did you think that we *ever* had any allies? Maybe I am bad at history but I learned that America is a totalitarian dictatorship bent on world domination through some thing called a “petrodollar.” Where did I learn that? College.
Dead. No one is coming to help us. Terminal. The end.
Oh stop it. There’s no 9/11 conspiracy theory that includes a coherent narrative of what happened. There isn’t one because it’s impossible. I will not engage in debate with you about it. Believe what you want to believe. Just know that it’s not science driving you. It’s your own need to believe in a worldview that justifies all your own eccentric decisions.
See my “Time to Move” post. It’s relevant.
Here is a prelude to 2016.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOl1mKjyagc
Too much.
“The Counselor? !!!!! You’re lucky you have any movie picking privileges left. Can’t say I read reviews, but I did read the first lines of multiple reviews. They all included the word suck.”
I will not argue with you nor the first lines of those reviews you read. I’d only advise someone to watch it if they aren’t sure whether or not getting involved with a South American drug cartel is a good idea. Or if they’d like to watch the most awkward and not-sexy intimate scene ever. Or if they enjoy dialogue scenes that aren’t half as clever as the writers thought they were and go on for twice as long as they should.
That’s a long way of saying I can’t think of anything positive to say about it aside from the lesson of not working with South American drug cartels. Which hopefully everyone here already knows.
My wife asked, Where’s the Like button? Never seen a better act of falling on the sword.
Go see Rush. Make your sword gleam again.
Catching up at work after surviving Snowpocalypse 2 down here, but wanted to check in quickly and let you know we watched this during our break and both enjoyed it a lot. Thanks for the recommendation. Neither of us knew anything about Hunt or Laudable beforehand and were spellbound. Lauda is certainly one tough sumbitch.