Bristol Palin willing to dance with gay man

By Dan Brooks in Church People, Uncategorized 7 Comments

Dancing With the Stars and Bristol Palin

I want to start by saying it is grotesquely wonderful that America’s least deserving national figure has a daughter who is famous, too. Bristol Palin got pregnant during her mother’s run for the vice-presidency. Now she is a spokeswoman for teen abstinence, star of a reality show about herself, and a returning contestant on Dancing With the Stars. In other words, she is utterly irrelevant to a decent person’s life in America. Don’t think for a second that Bristol Palin is important. Yet although she is insignificant herself, she is instructive as an example of her species—like a termite. On Monday, she published this terrifyingly Orwellian argument on her blog which she apparently has. I think you’ll find its central theme gross and immediately recognizable, also like a termite.

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Friday links! Audacity of jerks edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 3 Comments

Costa Rica uses a government-funded, single-payer health care system.

I don’t know about you, but I would like to be liked. I may not be very good at it, but in my interpersonal relations I try to pander to others as much as possible. Shame and sycophancy are my watchwords. The panicked need to feel that other people like me—even when I do not like them—exerts a serious check on my behavior. Imagine how free I would be if everyone hated me. If there were no hope that anyone who knew me could possibly like me, I could act however I pleased, the way death row inmates are always filling balloons with their own feces. If I were a public jerk instead of a secret asshole, I could live a life of rare liberty, saying and doing whatever I pleased with no regard for decency or the feelings of others. Today is Friday, and our link roundup contains a bunch of people like that.

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Reviewing the memoir of a 20 year-old

By Dan Brooks in Here Is Your American Culture, Uncategorized 4 Comments

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.

Terrifying: Bristol Palin will “probably run for office”

By Dan Brooks in Class Warfare 9 Comments

Tic. Tic. Tic...

Believe it or not, I actually agree with Sarah Palin about some things. For example, we both think that the media contributes to a climate of incivility in our political discourse. We both enjoy salmon. We both make our living by producing as many words as possible on short notice. And, most importantly, we both believe in American exceptionalism. The United States is the first country built around an idea rather than an ethnic group. As a corollary to that idea, we are one of the few nations without a hereditary aristocracy. That’s why I was extremely chagrined to see this article, in which Bristol Palin announces her intention to run for public office “somewhere down the road.” Props to the nameless Combat! reader* who sent me the link via Sarah Aswell.

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Sarah Palin, ironist

By Dan Brooks in sarah palin 3 Comments

Sarah Palin does her impression of Alaska.

It’s been a while since we’ve discussed the perambulations of Sarah Palin through the American psyche, maybe because she seems to be fading, just a little, into the background insanity of contemporary discourse. Whenever someone brings her up I’m filled with fear and resentment, sure, but lately it’s rare that I find myself thinking about her on my own. She hasn’t made up a word or a fact about pending policy decisions in like ten weeks, and I almost started to forget about her. That’s exactly the kind of thing that at least one multimillion-dollar organization is designed to prevent, and now that the midterms are over, Sarah Palin has come roaring back. The original plan was to have her say “cunt” on national television—possibly to Gwen Ifill—but instead she wrote a book. And based on the passages leaked to Gawker and The Daily Beast, it’s a goddamn masterpiece of irony.

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