Palin supporters rewrite Paul Revere Wikipedia page

By Dan Brooks in sarah palin 2 Comments

Combat! blog occasionally experiences Quantum Leap-style transports to the recent past, in which, through the magic of the internet, our attention is whisked away to some story that happened a week ago, and we must watch helplessly as events unfold without our being able to influence them. You know, just like the show Quantum Leap. More often than not, the center of these events is Sarah Palin, probably due to our original traumatization watching Joe Biden completely fail to call her a cheap courtesan during the 2008 Vice Presidential Debate. I still don’t understand why that didn’t happen, but the point is that you might remember when Sarah Palin mis-described the legendary Midnight Ride of Paul Revere last week. Before you go jumping down her throat, remember that Palin only made that mistake because she cannot think. The important thing is not whether the self-appointed president of Real America can accurately describe well-known events from the nation’s history. The important thing is whether her supporters can alter Wikipedia to make her remarks appear accurate afterward.

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Palin says national bus tour not about publicity

By Dan Brooks in Just Sayin' Stuff 4 Comments

"I wish I could stop thinking about me, too! (Cat sound)"

Good news, you guys: the One Nation Bus Tour—a multi-state junket that began in Washington, DC and will conclude in the quadrennially-significant state of New Hampshire at some unknown point in the future—is not about Sarah Palin or publicity, despite Sarah Palin having publicly announced it to reporters before her bus disappeared. If the lamestream media wants to act like the former vice presidential candidate’s trip up the east coast in a bus with eagles and primary source documents painted on the side of it is a campaign tour, that’ll just be the sort of bullshit they pull. As she explained to Greta Van Susteren:

I know that many of the mainstream media are looking for kind of a conventional campaign-type tour. And I’ve said from the beginning this isn’t a campaign tour, except to campaign on our Constitution.

Okay so, um, is a campaign tour, then? When you say you’re campaigning on something, you are still campaigning—even if, as Palin elaborated, all you want to do is “highlight the great things about America.” That’s like Dick Clark saying that really it’s about New Year’s Eve. Even more belying promotional video after the jump.

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Close Readings: Sarah Palin’s view of expertise

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 5 Comments

"Are you going to stand there babbling about what carbon does, or are you going to get the first woman president a fuckin' Jamba Juice?"

There is much to enjoy, guiltfully, about this review of Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin, the tell-all book by former staffer Frank Bailey. Memoirs like his threaten to become an ugly micro-genre of an already ugly mini-genre, but there is something in the essential sameness of Sarah Palin Stories—the pride in ignorance, the deceptions of others en route to self, the different supporting characters in the same vexed orbit around our heroine—that suggests a form whose themes transcend detail. They’re like Sherlock Holmes stories. As Holmes was to Victorian London and solving crimes, so is Sarah Palin to suburban America and being a mindless church bitch. What I’m saying here is that I think here oeuvre is more than genre work. That’s good news for Close Readings, which received from Stubble yesterday this wonderful gift:

Remember: amateurs built the ark. Professionals built the Titanic.

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Verizon Thunderbolt will empower, baffle you

By Dan Brooks in advertising 1 Comment

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXkqpul38wE&feature=player_embedded#at=12

 

I have watched this advertisement for the Verizon Thunderbolt several times now, and all I can say about the actual phone is that it looks hard to charge. Those of you who have seen The Daily Show or a Shia LaBeouf movie in the past three months will recognize this latest in a series of tone-deaf Verizon commercials that present the smartphone as an alien product that smashes trees and evokes submissive awe in rural people. Like that spot—in which a young man waits eagerly for his new phone to arrive and, once he actually gets it, decides to hurl it as far away as possible—this commercial manages to capture my two main fears about any new smartphone:

1) I have to charge it for eight hours every 16 hours.

2) It may provide evidential proof that I am some sort of douchebag.

I don’t think I’m alone in this.

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Dept. of Finally: Obama points out that Sarah Palin knows little about tactical nuclear warfare

By Dan Brooks in Rhetoric 3 Comments

"This question will obviously require further research, and I'm just spitballing here, but could we—using advancements in technology—eventually make the nuclear weapons atomic?"

First of all, I’d like to apologize for how long it took us to get the Department of Finally up and running. It’s been the first thing on our agenda since the inception of Combat! blog, but you know how it is, what with the Department of Planning, the Department of Eventually, the Department of Interrupting, the Department of Penultimate, and the Department of Dragging Out Jokes That Only One of Us Finds Amusing all clamoring for our attention. Now that that’s taken care of: President Obama took advantage of the Combat! news blackout Friday to dismiss Sarah Palin’s criticism of his nuclear posture. “I really have no response. Because last I checked, Sarah Palin’s not much of an expert on nuclear issues,” the President told George Stephanopoulos, who immediately began hooting and running around in a circle while pawing at the air before sitting down, straightening his tie, taking a deep breath and then shouting “Oh, snap!” directly into the ear of Michelle Malkin. “If the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff are comfortable with it,” Obama continued, “I’m probably going to take my advice from them and not from Sarah Palin.”

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