Michele Bachman is dumb, pretty, and in Congress

Who can say how many members of Congress there are? We just don't know.

Who can say how many members of Congress there are? We just don't know.

I’m  a regular Joe. I like my beer cold, my television reality-based, and my elected representatives completely opposed to the existence of government. Ever since Sarah Palin rode away on a pegasus*, there’s been a void in my life. Where’s the high-ranking government official to assure me that the government is working against me? Who’s going to protect my precious freedoms from all enemies, imagined and domestic? Why can’t Ron Paul have prettier hair?

Fortunately, we’ve got Michele Bachmann, God’s answer to a prayer that Pat Robertson accidentally said backwards. She’s young-ish, kind of pretty, and she went to law school at Orel Roberts University. She also wants an investigation into anti-Americanism in the US Congress, thinks global warming isn’t a problem because carbon dioxide is already part of the atmosphere, and urges you not to participate in the 2010 census. And she’s from Waterloo!

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Friday linktacular! Epic noms edition

Photo courtesy of the not-regularly-updated Epic Squirrel

Photo courtesy of the not-regularly-updated Epic Squirrel

It’s Friday, the Mormon Day of Atonement and, traditionally, a time for the rest of us to consider man and his relationship to the sublime. There are two ways to look at the subject: either you think some genius woke up one morning, impaled a piece of Wonder Bread on a toy robot and strode purposefully into his yard, or you think that picture is the result of several trials with different foods and different pointy things. Here at Combat! blog, we maintain the illusion of divine inspiration. Really we have to do things the hard way, though, and on Friday we gather all the various internet gems that turned out to lack the fascinating luster of, say, a child’s board game. So sit back, turn on your cell phone camera, jam a piece of melba toast down on whatever body part seems like it will best support it, and wait for the magic to happen.

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A little perspective on this socialism thing

Oh, Internet. Will your trenchant political commentary ever cease?

Oh, Internet. Will your trenchant political commentary never cease?

First of all, whoever Photoshopped the popular web meme on the left to create the much-more-popular-with-me web meme on the right is a genius—in that he has repurposed a brutally stupid image in order to indict brutality—and less than a genius in that he seems to have been unable to match one of the world’s most common fonts. Good work anyway, dude. Second of all, “socialism” is rapidly overtaking “love” on the list of words most terribly abused by contemporary discourse. Accusations of socialism have dogged the Obama administration, whose decisions to take ownership stakes in GM, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have outraged Republicans, who believe the federal government should only have ownership stakes in, um, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The GOP isn’t the only powerful voting bloc that’s concerned. Among retards, socialism has become synonymous with totalitarian government, as one attendee at congressman Brian Baird’s health care town hall reminds us. “The Nazis were the National Socialist Party,” he says. “They were leftists.”

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Nerds of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your bags of holding.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFIWUYr0n10

That’s a clip from Mazes and Monsters, the made-for-TV movie starring Tom Hanks, created to exploit the widespread (okay, pretty narrowly spread) fear that Dungeons & Dragons would make kids commit suicide and/or worship Satan. It was the eighties; everything was going to make kids commit suicide and worship Satan. Remember “Suicide Submission,” and the culture that briefly took Judas Priest seriously? The 700 Club was full of reports of kids all across America who became level 20 magic-users and killed themselves thinking they would achieve immortality, or sacrificed their little brothers to get the ingredients necessary for Power Word: Kill. It turned out that was like, two kids, but the message was disseminated nonetheless: Dungeons & Dragons will make your kid insane.

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Compare and contrast: Two more Life commercials

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WH70T721uV0

I promise I’m not going to spend the whole week on this. This morning, though, I woke up with a commercial jingle from 1988 stuck in my head, and only YouTube could exorcise it.* During my exhaustive two-minute search, I found the video above. It’s from 1981, at the beginning of the Reagan years, when America was still reeling from the economic malaise of the late seventies. And I daresay it reflects that.

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