Reviewing the memoir of a 20 year-old

Say goodbye to these, Levi, because it's the last time you'll ever...

This morning, Mike Sebba alerted me to a looming public health crisis. It seems that Bachmania, previously believed by doctors and Combat! blog’s traffic numbers to be limited to my apartment, has reached epidemic proportions. Even Bristol Palin, normally isolated from disease by geography and her traumatic experiences with all types of human affection, suffered a Bachmaniacal episode during her interview with Rob Shuter:

I think [Bachmann] dresses a lot like my mom. But a lot, a lot of women have done that the last few years. I do think it’s odd, you know, seeing people with red blazers with their hair up with glasses. I don’t know if she’s wearing glasses but you want to be hummmm, do you think that people don’t notice you’re dressing like my mom?

It is possible that people do not notice the glasses-like absence of glasses that makes other adult women reminiscent of your own personal mom, Bristol Palin, yes. But she can be forgiven her airtight watertight bricktight logic. She has a memoir to promote. And if Stephen Lowman’s review at the Washington Post is anything to go by, it’s amazing.

We should probably freak out now

I don’t know about you, but I’ve contracted Bach-mania. It attacks the brain stem, and the only cure is the electrifying charisma of Michele Bachman. Or, you know, October. For now, though, with a mere 16 months left in the campaign season, Mm-Bach is tied with Mitt Romney for President of Theoretical Future America. It’s possible I meant to type “Theocratical Felcher America,” but we’ll get to that in a second. First, I went to continue the nascent and ugly trend of Combat! blog quoting Combat! blog. Remember yesterday, when we were talking about her segment on Face the Nation, and I was like:

…large portions of this interview are not about getting caught lying, at least not yet.

Wasn’t that clever? It seemed like a cheap shot at the time—possibly even lazy—but it turns out it was a genius laser telescope peering 24 hours into the future. According to this depressingly non-surprising article in PolitiFact, Michele Bachmann defended herself against allegations of untruthfulness Sunday by lying her ass off.

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Ann Powers on “nasty art”

Is this a man who does stuff on purpose?

I’m a big fan of Tracy Morgan, so I was chagrined to hear that he said a bunch of crazy homophobic stuff onstage in Tennessee last week. Now Tracy Morgan is bad, at least for a couple of months or until some other comedian does three minutes about loving poon and stabbing his hypothetical gay son. I have not seen video of the act in question, so I can’t say whether it was funny. Initial reports suggest it wasn’t, but who knows? Morgan is not exactly a comedian who works well in precis. The moral reprehensibility, on the other hand, is visible from a distance. While Funny is ephemeral and contingent, Immoral—along with its mumbling cousin, Wrong—is easy to discern. This presents a problem, however. Had what Morgan said been hilarious—like when he threatened to get various Chicago citizens pregnant in 2007—everything would have been cool, or at least arguably cool. It would appear, as Ann Power argued in 1997, that aesthetic standards can either damn or redeem transgressive art, whereas morality is unequipped to make such distinctions. As a result, moral standards are invariably an instrument of condemnation.

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Palin bus tour leaves nation in desperate need of real talk

Combat! blog is buried in paying work today, so the interns have all been set to researching and composing while I drunkenly supervise them. That’s fine, because I think we all need a little more time to consider the significance of Sarah Palin’s bus tour. The Times’s Michael Shear sure does. From his flub in the opening sentence—do they not script these? do they lack the technology to do a second take?—to his “analysis” that the tour looks like a campaign, but Palin says it isn’t, this video reminds us why the Times will be remembered as a really good newspaper. Check out the sound bite in the middle, though, when a reporter asks Palin if she wants the press along for the trip, and she responds that she feels like she doesn’t have a choice. That’s where a dignified press corps would turn on its heel and walk away, right there. Instead we get this:

And the embed code doesn’t work. Thanks, New York Times! At least I can still count on your real estate articles about apartments in other countries that aren’t for sale. You know what the American people and their self-appointed leader need? Real talk.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdaAWFoWr2c

White Americans believe anti-white bias worse than anti-black

Come on, son, Reince Priebus.

A new survey finds that white Americans A) love to take surveys as long as Wheel of Fortune isn’t on or about to be on and B) believe that anti-white racism is now a more serious problem in the United States than racism against blacks. By contrast, African-Americans—who are more likely to actually know some black people—reported that racial persecution is still, you know, the one thing in society that white people do not get to have more of. None of this is surprising—you can tell because it’s extremely depressing. Using the same powerful sense of victimhood that made 1968 the most important summer in American history, white people have taken a hard look at anti-black racism and decided that, since the 1950s, it has declined by two thirds. Over the same time, anti-white racism has nearly tripled. This is why you must never ask white people their opinion.

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