Brit Hume: Just sayin’ stuff

By Dan Brooks in Just Sayin' Stuff 3 Comments

"...for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life."

Recently, Britt Hume took material form to go on Fox News Sunday and imply that the BP oil spill was not really a big deal. “There’s a good question today if you are standing on the Gulf,” the former anchor said, “and that is, where is the oil?” In addition to baffling Juan Williams in an extremely amusing fashion, Hume seemed to be arguing that media reports of thousands of gallons of crude forming an oil slick larger than Delaware were somehow exaggerated. “The ocean absorbs a lot,” he kept saying, after pointing out that the largest source of oil in the ocean is “natural seepage from the ocean floor.” That’s true, in the same sense that the largest source of cocaine in our daily lives comes from residue on dollar bills. That doesn’t stop the plume from damaging our synapses/making us spend hours talking about what cable television will be like in the future, though.

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Friday links! Selves beyond our control edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 3 Comments

It’s a familiar story: decent person pursues his dreams but somehow gets lost along the way, achieving success and recognition but becoming, ironically and usually late in the second act, unrecognizable to himself. (Q.v. Batman, Wayne’s World.) The postindustrial, now postfinancial American economy has a way of rewarding people, not products, but the old laws of supply and demand still apply. To paraphrase Voltaire, if Sarah Palin did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent her. This Friday, Combat! blog presents links to people who gave us a little of what they were and, finding us willing, produced more and more of it until it became the totality of their being. It’s the chip in the windshield that becomes a crack, the bump off a housekey that becomes a three-day bender, the simultaneous belch and sneeze that causes you to vomit on your computer.* It’s the self out of control, which just might be relevant to our impending holiday weekend. Sit back, crack a beer, tell yourself it’s the only one you’re going to drink today, and join us for an unusually coherent link roundup—whatever we may become.

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Combat! blog is crushed. Enjoy Mose instead!

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 1 Comment

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnZumpucx28

Combat! blog is buried in a great avalanche of work today, assuming avalanches arrive at 2am when everyone is asleep yet insist on being finished by the end of the next business day. We’ll be back tomorrow, but who knows if you’ll even live that long? You should live for today, though your living should not extend beyond what you can do on the internet, and the best thing you can do on the internet today is watch Mose’s latest video. It’s the best kind of bizarre: on purpose.

Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 5 Comments

Before you get too excited, Michele Bachmann does not figure directly in the content of this post. Today’s post is about a poll, which subject poses a perennial problem in choosing a snappy header image. Polls look boring. This picture of Michele Bachmann, on the other hand, looks the opposite of boring, in that the longer you look at it the more hilarious it becomes. Try it. Are you imagining circus noises? A steadily growing pile of peanut shells? I have decided to make today’s poll part of an ongoing series, in which we examine visually uninteresting clues as to what we can know about being Michele Bachmann. I call it Meanwhile, Inside Michele Bachmann’s Head, and it’s happening now so you tacitly accept it.

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Rand Paul and the art of authenticity

By Dan Brooks in Uncategorized 1 Comment

As our unhealthy fixation on Rand Paul continues to grow, we at Combat! blog are impelled to consider the other prong of his narrative prod: authenticity. Paul and his ilk are, by their own avowal and by media announcement, outsiders—folks who feel the same way you do about the shysters in Washington because, like you, they watch ’em from afar. It’s a reform year. Two big stories dominate the news: 1) the entire country being economically, politically and environmentally fucked plus we’re losing two wars, and 2) people who cannot necessarily articulate the specific elements of #1 blaming the dang government. The trick, if you want to get elected in 2010, is to make yourself part of story #2. Hence the popularity of Rand Paul and his father, Ron, whose views are extreme but whose personae are paradoxically that of the everyman. As Meghan McCain put it, “I can’t help but interpret the congressman’s cult-like, libertarian-leaning following as yet another indicator of a growing resentment of all people incumbent and in power in Washington.”

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