Category: The Dish

If this is all we have to be afraid of, things really aren’t that bad. I mean: attacking a military base? They call themselves terrorists? Money quote:

"We had a group that was forming a platoon to take on an army."

Quite.

Here he is gloating over his 2004 victory. He puts it all down in the end to grass-roots organizing and local volunteers. It’s an interesting glimpse of how Rove talks to fellow partisans:

Fred Barnes thinks that Republicans are now more ideologically diverse than the Democrats. I remain unconvinced. After a war this badly managed, why is there not a single serious anti-war candidate in the GOP? But Fred is smart enough to realize this:

Perhaps Republicans have become more diverse and tolerant because they are suddenly the minority party.

They are indeed acting like a minority party. A minority that gets smaller every day.

Ready for anything, I guess, just as nature made them. Some new insights into gender difference are found in a BBC study.

The Pentagon’s sloppy and self-defeating secrecy policy is enough to irritate even Gabe Schoenfeld.

More Chick-lit … on Catholicism. A reader comments:

Your short reference to the cartoons of Jack Chick overlooks the cultural phenomenon that these little hate-comics have been for many of us who grew up or spent time in the American midwest. In mid-Missouri, where I spent my high school years, we’d collect them and share with friends whenever we found one that was particularly vile (they were bound in small booklets, about 2" X 3"). Like little packets of saccharine-hate, Chick’s comics seemed to just be laying around everywhere as we grew up. I don’t think anyone has ever drawn more consecutive comic panels completely devoid of humor or compassion. As summaries of the bitterness and fear of fundamentalism, they are unmatched.

If you didn’t know that already.

A reader writes:

Kenneth Tynan, I think, was considered such an ‘odd duck‘ because of his enlightened use of vulgarity, a sensibility that would unfortunately find him without a major writing outlet in today’s puritanical U.S. Vulgarity, though, used properly, is a healthy societal tonic – and Tynan was never gratuitous in using it. But more than his vulgarity is the piercing logic with which he employs it in his writing. His journals consist of hilarious syllogisms, such as this one excusing his inability to write:

"Freud says one must forego sensual pleasure in favor of cultural achievement. Reich says cultural achievement is valueless unless one has sensual pleasure. Following Reich, I refuse to work on my book about Reich for more than four or five hours a day, and devote the rest to pleasure. This inevitably cuts down my achievement. Thus: in order to write a Reichian book about Reich, I must delay writing a book about Reich."

But Tynan was most articulate in the defense of British humor, and its tendency to indulge in vulgarity. In his New Yorker profile of Johnny Carson the  topic warranted a brief intrusion by the observer to set the record straight. Carson said that British comedians couldn’t get on his show because the network censors didn’t like that they were "obsessed with toilet jokes." Tynan writes:

"It is true that British comics sometimes indulge, on television, in scatological – and sexual – humor that would not be permitted on any American network; but this kind of liberty, however it may be abused, seems to me infinitely preferable to the restrictiveness that prevented Buddy Hackett, Carson’s guest, from completing a single punch line without being bleeped. I throw into the conversation my own opinion, which is that to shrink from referring to basic physical functions is to be truly infantile; to make good jokes about them, as about anything else, is evidence of maturity."

I wish we were all mature enough to make fart jokes more often.

If gun rights are civil rights, why would anyone feel the need to hide the fact that they own one?

Blogger Ilkka mourns the era when metrosexual men were simply assumed to be gay – while watching re-runs of Frasier.