I think I speak for all of us when I say please God,* let Herman Cain win the Republican nomination for President. He is delightful. Three weeks into his campaign he noted that America needs to lighten up, and he’s among the 50% of GOP candidates who can control when they talk about Jesus.
Plus, he might be the only man to make racists consider Barack Obama on his merits. After Cain got annihilated in the general, he could enjoy a beer and a chuckle at how he briefly thought he could be President of the United States. Don’t let Herman Cain become President of the United States. Already he has articulated a specific plan to wreck the government.
Feel better by disdaining Meghan McCain
Ethnic friend! Ethnic friend!
Fact: it is okay to be mean to rich people. You probably shouldn’t, since habitually being mean will make you into a bitter, unpleasant person,* but if you must contemn someone it’s better they’re wealthy. Hereditary wealth is the best. To be mean to the self-made millionaire is player hating. To be mean to someone who
received wealth (say from her mother’s brewery) and fame/a public platform (say from her father’ failed bid at the presidency) through zero work creates a pleasing symmetry. That person was arbitrarily given a life of absurd privilege, and now she is arbitrarily criticized for failing to be the kid of person who could achieve it on her own. Take Meghan McCain. Her column at the Daily Beast is a weekly anti-advertisement for a Columbia education, and her political analyses combine banal received opinion with false marverickery, like someone ordering off the menu at McDonalds. As Leon Wolf at RedState discovered, she’s ripe for parody. Always remember, though, that rich people have lawyers.
Rick Perry releases Armageddon 2: Antichrist
Kaboom! Mitt Rombama has a psychic episode.
A few weeks ago we discussed the terrifyingly cinematic campaign commercial in which Rick Perry teaches a broken America to make jet fighters again. That was back when he was the front runner and logically impelled to demonize the President. Now that the American people have gotten to know him, Perry is trailing fellow suit-mounted jawline Mitt Romney. (Ed.: Who? Who?) The two men couldn’t be more different: one is the millionaire son of a former governor, and the other became a millionaire while he was governor. Also, one of them is basically Barack Obama. In order to make clear which, Perry has produced this 59-second biopic. Props to Micky for the link, and video after the jump.
Happy Columbus Day
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bnKGhJDjOk
When I was a kid (1988–Sex & the City 2) I loved PJ O’Rourke. He wrote about politics in a way that made his Reagan-style conservatism make sense, and he was very, very funny. He wrote essays like “Ferrari Refutes Decline of the West”—in which he drives the Ferrari used in the pilot episode of Magnum P.I. across the country—and “How to Drive Fast On Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink,” and he was the first person to warn me away from women who wear either white or black lipstick. Now he sucks. In the video above, Alan Grayson explains what the Occupy Wall Street protestors are so upset about while O’Rourke whinges out a bunch of hippie jokes that would have seemed tired on Laugh-In. I’m not saying that I agree with OWS or even with the proposition that they consciously convey a coherent message, but I am saying that the things you once thought were great can change. More terrifying still, they can stay the same and you can start thinking about them differently. On Columbus Day, the holiday that is so almost not a holiday that every year I can’t decide whether to do a Combat! blog post, that sentiment seemed appropriate.
Friday links! Winning the argument edition
Back before we divided off into people who think it was founded on the Bible and people who think it was a tax evasion scheme, I was taught that the United States of America was founded on rational debate. Citizens in a democracy disagree about stuff, and the only way to figure out who’s right is to put our ideas in a metaphorical marketplace and start convincing one another. Of course, the democratic process doesn’t actually determine who’s right; it just identifies the most appealing argument. This wrinkle could potentially give an unfair advantage to those unscrupulous arguers willing to employ sophistry and fallacies, but fortunately our populace is too well-educated for that to work. I’m fucking with you—our populace is home watching Man Versus Food and coming up with race-based theories of identity. The dirtiest argumentative tactics you can imagine are on proud display in contemporary discourse, so that any particular argument is now subsumed in the larger argument between Deductive Reasoning and Whatever. It’s us against them, deductive reasoners, and they’re winning. This week’s link roundup is about winning the argument, even at the expense of obvious considerations of true and false. That’s the beauty of a democracy: if you can put some destructive idea into other people’s heads—optimally one that puts the very people who believe it at a disadvantage—you become more powerful yourself. It’s like the way Renfield keeps eating spiders in Dracula. Won’t you choke down a couple of tarantulas with me?