Combat! - Page 299 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

Meanwhile, inside Michele Bachmann’s head

By Dan Brooks in inside Michele Bachmann's head September 29, 2011 1 Comment

"All I wanna do is zoom-a zoom zoom zoom and a boom boom. All I wanna do is zoom-a zoom zoom zoom and a boom boom. All I wanna do..."

It’s starting to look like even though America is the greatest country in the world, Michele Bachmann is not going to be president of it. While Perry, Romney, Newt Gingrich and even Herman Goddamn Cain take turns surging in the polls, Bachman continues to be popular only with evangelicals, Tea Partiers who have been on vacation since early August and your mother’s boyfriend. It just isn’t fair, since Bachmann has been working her ass off to do the one thing that guarantees success in any political contest: making stuff up. Monday, she told an audience in Cedar Rapids (Iowa, natch) that eighties-throwback Lebanese terror group Hezbollah might be building missile sites in Cuba. Terrifying, right? No, because by now you’ve noticed that Michele Bachmann reports a suspiciously large number of threats to America that no one else seems to know about.

What is Alessio Rastani?

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media September 28, 2011 4 Comments

On Monday, a trader named Alessio Rastani told BBC interviewers that he was “dreaming of another recession” and that “governments don’t rule the world; Goldman Sachs rules the world.” It seemed like bad news. Rastani’s candor—some might call it glee—in describing how he profits from the kind of large-scale economic disaster in which we’re currently living also made it seem like a hoax. Several Twitter wags accused him of being a member of Yes Men, the group of agitprop performance artists who impersonate corporate spokespeople to draw attention to, well, the kind of thing Rastani talked about. But Yes Men has disclaimed him, and Rastani is an actual private day trader, as near as the BBC can tell. If he is a Yes Man, the organization is fielding much better actors, as this 2006 interview with a Dow Chemical impersonator suggests. That’s what a fake interview looks like. Rastani looks real, but what is he?

Perry and Romney’s log cabin campaign

By Dan Brooks in Class Warfare September 27, 2011 5 Comments

I've got Romney fever. I can tell because my temperature is 98.7 degrees.

Yesterday, Rick Perry told an audience in Jefferson, Iowa that “as the son of a tenant farmer, I can promise you I wasn’t born with four aces in my hand.” First of all, beware people who apply the word “promise” to statements of fact. Second, he was alluding to Mitt Romney’s remark in the Florida debate that “being dealt four aces doesn’t necessarily make you a great poker player,” meaning that job growth in Texas wasn’t necessarily Perry’s doing, and correlation does not amount to causation. That translation is why I’ll never be President, right there. The American people—even Republicans—don’t want to vote for someone too fancy. Contemporary conservatism is for rich people, but it’s not about rich people; it’s about the assumption, latent in every patriotic heart, that we will eventually become rich. The great contradiction of American politics is that the President should be an ordinary guy.

What does a protest do?

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse September 26, 2011 5 Comments

Demonstrators at last week's Occupy Wall Street protests object to the Euro, the Reddit logo, semiological uncertainty and running out of cardboard.

The protestors who camped out on the streets of New York’s financial district as part of Occupy Wall Street did not disrupt much. Mostly, they blended in with the other people camping on the streets of New York as part of the ongoing Don’t Have a Place to Live demonstration, which also is probably related to Wall Street. That’s what OWS is upset about, kind of. The ostensibly leaderless group convened in order to show that they will “no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%.” They did it by going down to Zuccotti Park and tolerating it in person, shortly before they decamped to tolerate it from a distance in Union Square and also before they got rounded up in plastic netting and pepper sprayed.

Friday links! Dumber and dumber until everybody’s dead edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links September 23, 2011 3 Comments

One of the great vexations of the modern age is trying to figure out whether we’re actually experiencing the dumbest generation in human history. Logic would suggest that previous generations were much dumber than us. We have ready access to iodine, for example, and we do not believe that flies emerge spontaneously from rotting meat. We all use computers. If you put Julius Caesar in front of a computer, he would have no idea whether to give it some sheep entrails or what, and he was one of the smartest dudes of his millenium. Yet the catch of the modern perspective is that we know only the most clever people from history, whereas every jackanapes currently alive is, you know, right here. The internet only magnifies this effect. It’s hard not to despair when you have real-time access to the fervently professed opinions of people who know not a goddamn thing and couldn’t put the first thing with the second if they knew two, but who can say? Probably, we’re all smart enough to know that we only seem dumb because we can see ourselves so clearly. Still, there has to be one dumbest generation in history. Maybe it’s us.