Combat! - Page 352 of 406 - A blog by Dan Brooks

Biden uses n-word in speech to Cub Scouts

By Dan Brooks in Plutocracy August 23, 2010 4 Comments

Okay, I have abused your trust. Joe Biden did not say the n-word to Cub Scouts, and today’s Combat! blog is about taxes. In addition to being an unpopular topic for which no interesting visual images exist whatsoever, the federal income tax happens to be at the center of present political debate. It’s smack in the middle there on the micro level, as Congress will decide whether to extend the Bush tax cuts when it returns from its August recess. It’s also central on the macro level, since fear of deficits—whether founded or not, and I think it is—is the animating force behind the Tea Party* and pretty much all of contemporary conservative rhetoric.

Friday links! Point-counterpoint edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links August 20, 2010 0 Comment

In this era of internet journalism and, I dunno, social networking and stuff, it’s easy to just get one side of a story. Were it not for my ironic readings of Tea Party Nation newsletters, Ross “Defense of Racism” Douthat and World Net Daily, my understanding of world events would be entirely dictated by the New York Times and Andrew Sullivan. That’s hardly a balanced scale, and I suspect that my weighing of certain issues has been less than accurate as a result. But say what you will about the internet—seriously, say whatever the hell you want—a little digging will usually give you the mirror image of what you just learned. This Friday’s link roundup is chock full of instances when the internet refutes itself, exposing the stupidity of the self-published and smugly answering the rhetorical questions of the stupid. We’ve also got Juggalos so, you know, buckle up.

I suggest the following changes for the next draft of your shoppable children’s storybook

By Dan Brooks in advertising August 19, 2010 4 Comments

Isn't that weird, Oliver? I could swear I just said "Go inside and get us some lemonade," but here's this bitch au pair still looking at us.

If you obsessively checked the New York Times twenty times the morning, as I do right after calisthenics, you probably noticed the advertisement for this shoppable children’s storybook by Ralph Lauren, narrated by Harry Connick Jr.* “The RL Gang,” as it is titled, cleverly serves three functions: fun narrative for kids, handy shopping guide for parents, and terrifying portent of a coming consumer hellscape for the rest of us. As near as I can tell, this is RL’s pioneer effort in the field of shoppable children’s stories. I remember my first SCS, an episodic narrative about a socially awkward but resourceful duck who goes shopping for a dirt bike while struggling with memories of the duck who inexplicably left him two years earlier. It was not successful, and very few dirt bikes were sold. Given the difficulty that the form can present to new writers, I’d like to offer some helpful suggestions for the next draft of “The RL Gang.”

Close Reading: WND spat with Coulter offers clearest definition yet of “taking America back”

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading August 18, 2010 5 Comments

Ann Coulter, photographed here with Jimmie Walker for some wonderful reason

According to Ben Smith at Politico, conservative website WorldNetDaily has dropped Ann Coulter from its Taking America Back National Conference, out of indignation at her decision to speak at the September convention of gay conservative group GOProud. You should probably know that this event is called Homocon. That and the poster’s insightful assessment of Coulter as “the conservative Judy Garland” suggest that we have finally found the fun wing of the Republican Party, but WND refuses to be amused. As founder Joseph Farrah put it:

Ultimately, as a matter of principle, it would not make sense for us to have Ann speak to a conference about “taking America back” when she clearly does not recognize that the ideals to be espoused there simply do not include the radical and very un-conservative agenda represented by GOProud. The drift of the conservative movement to a brand of materialistic libertarianism is one of the main reasons we planned this conference from the beginning.

All right, but you’re not going to be getting any mimosas. Farrah’s comment is the closest we’ve come in a long time to a direct examination of what it might mean to “take back America”—a phrase that has been falling out of mouths and into microphones with increasing frequency. Somewhere in Farrah’s tangle of adverbs and implications is a clear statement about what “taking America back” means. And when something like that happens, you know that for which it is time: another Close Reading!

Ground Zero Mosque is perfect politics

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government August 17, 2010 7 Comments

Let the measured discourse begin!

Let’s quickly make a distinction about the word “perfect” above: I don’t mean “good politics,” so much as “politics untainted by any element of government.” The Ground Zero Mosque—located two blocks from the site of the former World Trade Center, and therefore separated from that hallowed ground only by the Ground Zero Chinese Takeout Place, the Ground Zero Strip Club and the Ground Zero Dunkin’ Donuts—will be built on private property. No governing body, from the City of New York City to the executive branch of the United States, can actually stop it. Yet politicians across the country have announced their opposition to its construction as if they could do something about it. One suspects that it’s precisely because they can’t.