America, your modern GOP, Part IV....
Pat Buchanan has a conniption about Wanda Sykes' comedic harpooning of the right wing's favorite great white whale, Rush Limbaugh, at the first White House Correspondents' Dinner attended by Obama as President, and Jake Tapper sees blood in the water....
Umm, Jake, let's just define terms. Pat Buchanan is an old, white male Nazi-wannabe whose sell-by date expired in 1974, shortly after his boss, Richard Nixon, abandoned the Presidency before he was frog-marched off to prison. Pat Buchanan was never interesting as a public intellectual, never honest, and never, never, ever considered a public arbiter of what's funny.
Never.
Ever.
Pat Buchanan has all the savoir faire and general good humor of slime mold. He's not funny, nor would he know funny if funny marked his laundry in the Rotunda at noon on Inauguration Day. If the ghost of Tip O'Neill pantsed him on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Presidents' Day.
Pat Buchanan is the Official SpokesMAN of Nixon's Long-Dead Silent Majority.
So, why exactly is Jake Tapper's taking PatMan's umbrage national?
Maybe, just maybe, Jake sympathizes with Rushbo. Or, perhaps, he smells controversy, and that, my friends, is good for ratings, hits, and viewers. Or worse, he sympathizes with Buchanan.
The simple truth is that Limbaugh is just another P.T. Barnum. And Buchanan, so much like the old vaudevillian Harry Greener of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, thinks that if he can squeeze out just one more bravura performance selling the most caustic of soap, someone will notice and pluck him out of his semi-retirement as pundit and prophet and put him back into the role for which he was born--a failed authoritarian President's speechwriter.
Even MSNBC ought to have noticed that Buchanan's outside chance at reclaiming his former stature has passed him by. George W. Bush is no longer President. What little that is left of Buchanan's future glory has fled to the comfortably wealthy Dallas suburbs with reality snapping at its heels.
Long after these days are gone beyond memory, Wanda Sykes will still be funnier than Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan combined, and Jake Tapper will still be scratching his head, trying to figure out why.
Umm, Jake, let's just define terms. Pat Buchanan is an old, white male Nazi-wannabe whose sell-by date expired in 1974, shortly after his boss, Richard Nixon, abandoned the Presidency before he was frog-marched off to prison. Pat Buchanan was never interesting as a public intellectual, never honest, and never, never, ever considered a public arbiter of what's funny.
Never.
Ever.
Pat Buchanan has all the savoir faire and general good humor of slime mold. He's not funny, nor would he know funny if funny marked his laundry in the Rotunda at noon on Inauguration Day. If the ghost of Tip O'Neill pantsed him on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Presidents' Day.
Pat Buchanan is the Official SpokesMAN of Nixon's Long-Dead Silent Majority.
So, why exactly is Jake Tapper's taking PatMan's umbrage national?
Maybe, just maybe, Jake sympathizes with Rushbo. Or, perhaps, he smells controversy, and that, my friends, is good for ratings, hits, and viewers. Or worse, he sympathizes with Buchanan.
The simple truth is that Limbaugh is just another P.T. Barnum. And Buchanan, so much like the old vaudevillian Harry Greener of Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust, thinks that if he can squeeze out just one more bravura performance selling the most caustic of soap, someone will notice and pluck him out of his semi-retirement as pundit and prophet and put him back into the role for which he was born--a failed authoritarian President's speechwriter.
Even MSNBC ought to have noticed that Buchanan's outside chance at reclaiming his former stature has passed him by. George W. Bush is no longer President. What little that is left of Buchanan's future glory has fled to the comfortably wealthy Dallas suburbs with reality snapping at its heels.
Long after these days are gone beyond memory, Wanda Sykes will still be funnier than Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan combined, and Jake Tapper will still be scratching his head, trying to figure out why.
posted by Montag at
4:53 AM
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