I was racking my brain today trying to think of something to write and durned if the Atlanta Urinal and Constipation, in the person of Jay Bookman, didn't serve me up a softball to clobber. And no, this is not some sort of sado-masochistic blog. Jay is one of our resident liberals at the Atlanta paper. Over the weekend he wrote a piece of tripe about Jimmy Carter and Martin Luther King being 'Two Pillars of Peace'. Todays piece of shit is about why people hate Jimmy Carter.
I'm beating my brain, but I'm still whipped
The title. Maybe if he quit beating his brain, he wouldn't be whipped.
Many things confuse me.
That's understandable. He's a liberal. It goes with the territory.
For example, I do not for the life of me understand why some people look at Jimmy Carter and see the AntiChrist.
Actually, we look at Jimmy Carter and we see someone who was probably one of the worst presidents this country has ever had.
You mention his name and they froth at the mouth and start muttering words such as "traitor" and "disgrace," in between words I can't print here.
Dumb fuck. Shithead. Asshole. Incompetent prick. Nice thing about the blogosphere. I can say 'em.
It's weird.
What? That we think Jimmy Carter is a dumb fuck, shithead, asshole, and an incompetent prick?
I can certainly understand not voting for Carter. In 1976, the first year I could cast a ballot, I myself voted for Gerald Ford.
Which means Jay's gone completely opposite of what Winston Churchill once said: "If you are not a liberal in your twenties, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative in your thirties, you have no brain."
I can also see why people might think Carter was an unsuccessful president.
I can too. Panama Canal. Iran hostage crisis. Double digit inflation. Double digit interest rates. Malaise. Gas lines. And that's just off the top of my head.
And if you think that somebody else might have been a better choice for the Nobel Peace Prize, hey, everybody's got a right to an opinion.
Opinions are just like assholes. Everyone has one.
But hatred? Of Jimmy Carter?
I don't hate him as much as I hate Bill Clinton if that makes Jay feel better.
But as I said, there's a lot I don't understand.
And as I said, he's a liberal and that goes with the territory.
Take this strategy where we're gonna try to destroy al-Qaida by attacking its enemy, Iraq. I've really been trying to figure this one out.
Iraq is a sponsor of terrorism. President Bush said that in the fight against terrorism, you're either with us or against us. Iraq is against us. Maybe Jay missed that speech.
I even watched President Bush's speech last week, in which he explained that we have to attack Iraq so it won't give arms to terrorists.
Then what's the problem?
For a brief moment, I thought I understood.
For a liberal, that would be a very brief moment.
But then, the very next day, the president's own CIA said that such a transfer of weapons was highly unlikely.
Would that be the CIA run by a Clinton appointee (and why hasn't that bastard been replaced) that was eviscerated during the eight years of the Clinton administration?
Which confused me even more.
How is that possible?
It does remind me, though, of an e-mail I got right after Sept. 11. A reader blamed the attack on President Clinton for failing to strike back hard enough after previous terror attacks on U.S. targets.
A few goats and and aspirin factory.
If that's the case, I responded, you have to blame Ronald Reagan too. Back in 1983, after Arab terrorists killed 200 Marines sleeping in their barracks in Lebanon, Reagan pulled our troops out of the region and ran off with his tail between his legs.
He's partially right about that. I think we should have kicked some major butt after that. But then Reagan bombed Libya. Didn't hear much from Ghadaffy (only one of the many spellings, but I like it the best 'cause it ends in daffy) after that did we? He's also overlooking the Gulf War where we did kick butt. Unfortunately, we didn't finish the job and then compounded the error by electing Clinton our pussy-in-chief. He did nothing except the above mentioned goaticide and the obliteration of the aspirin factory. Oh. I forgot. He also bit his lip and felt our pain.
That didn't go over well.
What your faulty logic?
In fact, based on the guy's reaction, you would have thought I had showed him a picture of Jimmy Carter.
Why? Did he throw up or burst out laughing? Those would be two valid reactions to a picture of Jimmy Carter.
Reagan did fight back, he insisted. To retaliate for the Lebanon attack, two days later the United States invaded Grenada.
Huh? Either Jay is making this up or the guy he's debating is a moron. The one had absolutely nothing to do with the other. We never retaliated for Lebanon. We should have rained cruise missiles on the Beka'a Valley. Even I admit Reagan fucked up on that one.
Somehow, I suspect that guy's now working in the Bush White House.
Somehow I doubt that. He's probably a liberal columnist at the AJC.
If so, he has probably met White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who's another source of confusion to me.
I'm beginning to think Jay walks around in a constant state of confusion. There are drugs for that. Or maybe it's because of drugs.
When Fleischer was asked why Bush opposed a national firearms database that would track deadly bullets back to the gun that fired them, Fleischer tried quickly to change the subject:
Ari, I'll answer that question. Because it wouldn't fucking work you gun grabbing asshole. And I'll let my buddy Kim (scroll down to the 10 questions the President should ask the ATF) answer that question.
"And certainly, in the case of the sniper, the real issue is values," he said. "And that's what is at stake here. The real issue is values. These are the acts of a depraved killer, who has broken and will continue to break laws. And so the question is not new laws; the question is the actions here represent the values in our society."
Now what could possibly be confusing about that?
Values? A sniper is picking off innocent Americans, and our leaders talk about values?
You bet your liberal ass he's talking about values. What do you want him to talk about? That liberal bullshit about why they hate us? Or maybe he came from a broken home? Or maybe he grew up in grinding poverty? The guy is killing innocent people which is against the values of our society. And how did we get off on this tangent? I thought this column was supposed to be about Jimmy fucking Carter?
As I said, that's all over my head.
Is he bragging or complaining?
And finally, there's this mystery: Last month, one year after hijackers crashed airliners into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, airport security screeners confiscated 62,000 knives, 59 guns and 2,900 boxcutters from passengers preparing to board airplanes, according to the Transportation Security Administration.
Since these figures come from the TSA they're suspect. I wonder how many of the guns were real and how many were toys? And what is the mystery? And what the fuck does this have to do with anything he's talking about? Do you realize he gets paid to write this shit?
I don't get that either. Does it have something to do with values?
I don't get it either. What the fuck is he talking about?
Grenada?
We won.
Jimmy Carter?
He finally comes back to Jimmy Carter.
Somebody help me here.
Jay, I hate to have to be the one to tell you this, but you are beyond help.
And now we come to an example of life imitating art. When I used to watch Cheers, I always thought that Woody Harrelson was acting. Little did I know then, that the character he was portraying, Woody, was actually more intelligent than the real life Woody. It kinda reminds me of what Grant Tinker once said of Ed Asner: "'Ed Asner has Lou Grant's image but Ed Asner's brain". Did ya see the incredibly stupid op-ed (link via Drudge) he wrote, for, who'd a thunk it, the Guardian? Now I was thinking of only fisking the two most ridiculous paragraphs of this op-ed, but I started laughing so hard I couldn't type. In one paragraph he has:
He left out 'Give Peace a Chance' and 'Save the Whales'.
If there are any blogger wannabes who want to try out a fisk of a column, this would be a good place to start. It would write itself.
I really think we folks in the blogosphere should come up with some sort of a weekly award for the most ridiculous thing said by an actor. We could call it the BABS (Bullshit Actor's Banal Statement - or sumpin' like that - this was just off the top of my head), named after, guess who? That's right, the person who thought Saddam Hussein was the dictator of Iran. Now who would be the arbiter? I recommend, Rachel Lucas or Andrea Harris. Both of them read me and they both have more readers than I do, so Rachel, Andrea, if either of you want to pick up on this, be my guest.
Meanwhile, Woody has me laughing so hard I just gotta stop.
See y'all next week.
Posted by denny at October 17, 2002 11:33 AM