Meghan McCain triumphantly returns to television

By Dan Brooks in Class Warfare 6 Comments

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNCiktGvKVI

Meghan McCain has overcome setbacks in her life—her father not being President, her increasing resemblance to the animatronic mask Arnold Schwarzenegger wears in Total Recall—but those setbacks have only made her stronger. Now, her political acumen and magnetic personality nepotism has earned her a talk/reality show on Pivot, the network for millennials. Somehow, she has named it Raising McCain, a title that encourages even viewers her own age to think of her as someone’s kid. But maybe that’s the point. Besides setting up Paul Begala, Me-Mac has contributed exactly zero ideas to American discourse. From a certain uncharitable perspective, she embodies the confidence of a generation. As Daniel D’Addario complains in Salon, her insistence that she is a pundit “is the hauteur that only a millennial could possibly possess.”

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Close Readings: Meghan McCain says stupid is worse than mean

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 5 Comments

“Everyone here is stuck up, no one has any watermelon, the copy machine doesn’t make sense…”

Yesterday in Virginia, Vice-President Joe Biden criticized Mitt Romney’s plan to “unchain Wall Street,” warning that “he’s going to put y’all back in chains.” He said that because he is Joe Biden and there were black people in the audience. Presumably, he was referring to Romney’s actual talking point about unshackling the economy, and he meant that all the members of the audience would be shackled, not just the black ones. The slip hardly lived up to his Bidentity as an unstoppable gaffe machine, but daughter of person who was almost president Meghan McCain jumped on it. Props to Ben al-Fowlkes for the link. Joining Mac & Gaydos on Arizona’s KTAR [boinging sound,] McCain called the Vice-President an “idiot.” Her point:

I’m so sick of this BS from [Biden]. I can’t stand Joe Biden because I think stupid is worse than being mean. I just think any insinuation that in America we’re going to go back to slavery times is delusional. It’s ridiculous and it’s ignorant…If I were Obama I would’ve never picked Joe Biden in the first place.

First of all, Meghan McCain, if you were Obama people would not ask for your opinions, because you wouldn’t know your dad. Second, is stupid really worse than mean?

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Feel better by disdaining Meghan McCain

By Dan Brooks in Invective 7 Comments

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.

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Narrative watch: Obama isn’t angry enough at BP

By Dan Brooks in Narrative Watch 1 Comment

Whatever you do, do not accidentally type "DP spill" into Google image search. I cannot emphasize that enough.

As the Gulf of Mexico slowly fills with crude oil and burned-off dolphin faces, forcing executives of British Petroleum to move their extra houses to the Pacific coast, an increasing number of Americans are putting the blame squarely where it belongs: on President Obama’s emotional experience. At least that’s what the news tells me. While attempts to cast the Deepwater Horizon spill as Obama’s Katrina foundered on the rocks of that makes no goddamn sense at all, the narrative that the President has displayed insufficient anger at the disaster has found a lot more traction. “Since The BP Oil Spill Began, President Obama Has Been Trying to Convey Presidential Action and Concern; But Is He Showing Enough Emotion?” CBS News asks.* Aside from the baffling meta-semantic demand that the President “convey Presidential action,” CBS pretty much captures the signature elements of the narrative. First, the President can’t really do anything. Second, if he doesn’t act more pissed off, people are going to think he doesn’t care. It’s an argument that presumes that Obama’s response to the disaster is reasonable, and also that people are too stupid to recognize it as such.

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Friday links! Reality gap edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 1 Comment

It’s Friday, which means we’ve come to the end of Week Two of the cessation of American liberty. I don’t want to jinx what has thus far been a remarkably low-key totalizing of government control, but I’m kind of disappointed. I guess I expected to be working in a salt mine by now, or at least be typing this with a brown-shirted ACORN volunteer reading over my shoulder. Where’s my unsupportable tax burden? Where’s my own personal bureaucrat to accompany me to the grocery store and make sure I don’t exercise my right to choose? It’s almost as if the dire predictions of half the country were based on an entirely different reality—one that threatened to come crashing into our dimension, but at the last moment got sick and decided to stay in the astral plane. This week’s link roundup is loosely dedicated to that alternate universe, where the federal government is still trying to put radios in our brains, the country longs for a second chance to vote for McCain-Palin, and all manner of useless celebrities influence our daily lives. Won’t you join me for a glimpse of the world that never was, population: half of us?

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