Friday links! Big important issues edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 5 Comments

From our friends at www.lamebook.com. Thank god they blur out the eyes, or someone might recognize this picture.

It’s Friday, and it’s not just the week that’s coming to an end. I don’t want to alarm you guys, but right now is the very last moment of recorded time. Terrifying, isn’t it? The pyramids, the rise and fall of Rome, the revolutions of the Enlightenment and the struggle against fascism, rock and roll, the Jackson 5, Friends—all that is over as of today. Everything is behind us, and we just don’t know what’s ahead. Frankly, this moment has never occurred before, so we don’t have much to go by. All I can say conclusively is that this has been a great week for hyperbole, absurd comparisons, and end-times pronouncements of all sorts. Fortunately, that’s just the kind of thing we at Combat! blog go in for. Incontrovertibly, this has been the last week in human history. Let’s all, like, gaze upon it.

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Steve King is a stupid man

By Dan Brooks in Just Sayin' Stuff 5 Comments

Hi, I'm Steve King, and I'm an American just like you. My bathtub is ringed with toasters, and I once spent 13 hours lost in a revolving door. Who else wants pancakes?

Those of us from Iowa used to lament that our Republican senator, Charles Grassley, had become the face of opposition to health care reform. Why did the most recognizable Iowan in national politics have to be a wizened elf who accused every bill of providing free abortions to immigrants and kept assuring us that the Death Panels were in there somewhere? I, for one, wished that someone else—anyone else—could serve as Iowa’s delegate to the national imagination. That, boys and girls, is why you must never wish. Representative Steve King (R–IA) has fulfilled our longings in the most ironically disappointing way possible. Sure, Chuck Grassley is an asshole, a stubborn hick whose Twitter feed read “Barb made oatmeal,” on the day his committee abandoned the attempt to reach bipartisan consensus on health care reform. But yesterday Steve King called for the overthrow of the United States government. Apparently Congressman King has forgotten where he works, along with a bunch of other important information that might otherwise have allowed him to make a useful contribution to the operation of America. In speaking to the Huffington Post, he called for a peaceful takeover of Congress similar to Prague’s Velvet Revolution, and likened the state of our country to that of Czechoslovakia under Soviet communism. “It is very, very close,” he said. “It is the nationalization of our liberty and the federal government taking our liberty over.” Which raises a lot questions, not the least of which is whether Representative King knows what that word means.

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Friday links! Spades are spades edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 0 Comment

I think this picture is what's been missing from our increasingly tedious Friday visual puns, if you know what I mean.

It’s the end of the week, and TGIFF, you B’s. Maybe it’s just the unseasonably warm weather here in Montana, but I can’t help but feel that a veil is falling away. Ours is an impressively euphemistic society, where bitter spite goes dressed in the robes of parliamentary procedure and cold depredation smiles warmly from the podium. Unlike a lie, though, the truth is there whether you’re talking about it or not, and like the gay director of your church camp, it will eventually out itself. This week was a surprisingly good one for calling things by their right names, to the point that even our usually gloomy Friday links have taken on the rosy glow of…god, I can’t think of the word. What’s that thing that’s the opposite of despair? You know, the thing that rich charlatans laugh at? I know it’s a political strategy of some sort, but I feel like it has an archaic definition, too. Ah, well—I’m sure I’ll think of it, and if I never do I’ll still have consumer electronics. In the meantime, enjoy this week’s link roundup, in which a mighty herd of telling it like it is goes sweeping across the nation, paradoxically leaving a little less bullshit in its wake.

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Narrative watch: Republican obstructionism

By Dan Brooks in Narrative Watch 3 Comments

"And now I would like to yield the podium to my colleague, whose wallet has been stolen. Somebody took it, and nobody is getting out of here until—what? You found it? For Christ's sake, Bob."

One of two narratives describes the Obama presidency, and if you tell me which one is true I can tell you which 24-hour news network you watch. Either President Barack Hussein Obama is a nouveau socialist whose cult of personality has allowed him to expand federal power to an unprecedented degree, or the Republican minority in Congress has put politics ahead of the best interests of the country and paralyzed the Hill with unrelenting obstructionism. We here at Combat! would never tell you what to believe,* but only one of these narratives has been fleshed out with a lot of scenes. Two weeks ago, Senate Republicans finally released the hold they had placed on Martha Johnson, the woman President Obama nominated seven months ago to head the General Services Administration. If you’ve never heard of the GSA, it’s probably because you are not a wholesale distributor of toilet paper and cleaning supplies; the agency’s primary task is to oversee the day-to-day maintenance of the Capitol and related buildings. Johnson was eventually confirmed with a vote of 94-2, suggesting that she was perhaps not such a controversial nominee after all. While an extreme example, she was just one of dozens of qualified applicants on whose nominations the GOP has placed holds, whether to ransom them for pet projects or out of a spirit of general dicketry. While calling the Republicans obstructionists seems unfair—they are the opposition party, after all—the discrepancy between their principled objections and their voting records is beginning to suggest that they’re playing politics, not government.

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Maybe it’s us

By Dan Brooks in widespread dumbening 6 Comments

Kids: Can you spot three spelling and usage errors in this photograph? Can you circle the invidious comparison? If you haven't been there already, I get these from moronswithsigns.blogspot.com. Check it!

Whether you read the Times or the Wall Street Journal, informed consensus has it that this country is in trouble. Our monster deficit increasingly undercuts economic growth, while our mounting foreign debts threaten to make us grad students at the table of nations, disregarded except when we’re subjected to lectures on the importance of industry. We need to stop spending money, stat, but at the same time we’ve got an economy in shambles, an infrastructure wearing through and at least two major cities (Detroit, New Orleans) half abandoned. Oh yeah—we’ve also embarked on two land wars in Asia. In this time of crisis, with a new president who rode to office as the explicit champion of  American hope, we have opted to spend the past year arguing heatedly about the particulars of a health care reform package that we never passed. In the meantime, we managed to degrade our discourse to the point where the ruling party is regularly compared to Nazis, the president is accused of not being an American citizen, and even routine political appointments are ransomed for congressional pork, at least until somebody gets caught. At our time of crisortunity, when we were faced with the chance and the obligation to remake America for the twenty-first century, we as a nation have boldly stepped forward onto our own dicks, then fallen into the cat box. Which raises an interesting political question: What the fuck is our problem?

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