Social conservatives try to make satire fun again

By Dan Brooks in lying 4 Comments

Larry Doyle, former Simpsons writer and author of an "anti-Catholic screed."

One consolation of our progressive national stupefaction is that satire might start fooling people again. Not that Larry Doyle’s recent column on “the Jesus-eating cult of Rick Santorum” is particularly subtle. When Doyle describes himself as a former “Irish-Catholic, the worst kind” and says he discovered a possible connection between the RCC and NAMBLA “after conducting some research on the internet,” we see the flapping flag of irony country. Here lies the problem of satire within an educated society: pretty much everybody is smart enough to get it. That’s good, but it also takes some fun out of the conceit that someone, somewhere, is taking the irony seriously. It’s like a practical joke that everyone is in on; we all have to just look at the cup of pee and imagine how funny it would be if someone drank it. Lucky for us, Tony Perkins cannot resist free lemonade.

Continue reading

And on to Super Tuesday

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 7 Comments

"I regard this outcome as desirable."

Mitt Romney has won the Republican presidential primaries in Arizona and Michigan, handily in the former and maybe less so in his home state. He beat Rick Santorum in Michigan by just over three points, suggesting that people whose unemployment rate stayed over 10% for most of 2011 really are worried that dudes might touch one another’s linuses. Either that, or something about a governor’s son who made up for his criticism of the auto bailout by explaining how many Cadillacs he owns just isn’t connecting with people. Meanwhile, level-twelve poop elemental Newt Gingrich beat Ron Paul up north but was beaten by him out west. Gyn’grrch will now be summoned to Georgia by Sheldon Adelson’s ritual burning of several million dollars.

Continue reading

Religion v. the religious in public life

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 10 Comments

John F. Kennedy, who turned us all over to the papists.

Like Liberace’s dry cleaner, regular readers of Combat! blog may be at risk of Santorum fatigue. I feel your pain, but at the rate Santorum is producing stunning statements, he is either going to be out of the race soon or the most historically significant president of the modern era.  This weekend, the Penn State alum and holder of two postrgraduate degrees called President Obama “a snob” for saying that all Americans should be able to attend college. He also said that John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 speech on the separation between religion and politics made him want to throw up. Even if you can’t bear to hear any more about Santorum, the Times article is worth reading for the part where Mitt Romney bonds with fans at the Daytona 500 by mentioning that several of his friends own NASCAR teams.

Continue reading

I’m alive. Is Rick Santorum still crazy?

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 1 Comment

Rick Santorum explains the three things government is authorized to do.

The surgery was a success and I am back in the Combat! blog offices, where each intern disguises his horror at my visage more poorly than the last. Seriously, I look like somebody drove a screw into my head. I feel like somebody drove my head into a screw, possibly because I have eaten nothing in the last 36 hours besides painkillers, half a cup of tapioca pudding and maybe two pints of my own blood. So the blog is going to be half-assed. Fortunately for us, Ben al-Fowlkes not only drove my semi-lucid ass home from the clinic yesterday, but also sent me this rad article about a speech Rick Santorum gave in 2008. In it, he warned his audience at Catholic University that “this is…a spiritual war” and that Satan was trying to subvert the United States of America. This man is now a front-runner for the Republican nomination for President.

Continue reading

Semi-grammatical Santorum attacks public education

By Dan Brooks in Republican Candidates 12 Comments

Pictures into which dicks with cocaine on them must be Photoshopped immediately

Rick Santorum home schools his children. That way they get the full benefit of his mastery of calculus and physics, plus his incisive understanding of history. Speaking in Ohio on Saturday, Santorum explained that public schools are “anachronistic,” having been developed in tandem with the factory system during the American industrial revolution as a means to educate workers. We’re going to ignore the problems with that thesis to consider Santorum’s argument against public schooling, which went like this:

Where did they come up that public education and bigger education bureaucracies was the rule in America? Parents educated their children, because it’s their responsibility to educate their children.

I’m going to call that an argument in favor of public schools, for several reasons.

Continue reading