Teabagging with Rich Lowry
Life must be pretty frustrating for third-tier righties these days; for eight long years they dominated the op/ed pages, waxing hawkish and Randian as the country did the same, spreading their tiny wings in the bright dawn of the Permanent Republican Majority. Lack of real world experience or any discernible talent was no obstacle in those salad days if your politics were right; with David Brooks and Bill Kristol safely at the Times, there was always plenty of room at the Gazettes and Journals of small-town America for guys like Rich Lowry.
Lowry, of course, is merely a symptom of a much larger disease, caused by twenty-odd years of ruthless Affirmative Action for the “thinkers’ of the Right on the op/ed pages of America’s newspapers: we now have a laughably unqualified and hyperpartisan Peanut Gallery yapping in unison about some irrelevancy or the other, each day, in newspapers nobody reads anymore. Could the two be related? As righty blatherers go, Lowry never really settled on a schtick. He was sort of the Chihuahua of the Chickenhawks, cheering the wars minus the faux-intellectualism (or evocative name…) of Max Boot, bashing liberals with neither the arresting venom of Ann Coulter nor the Cheetoh-sodden “humor” of Jonah Goldberg, and glorying in the American Imperium without the taxicab “journalism” of Tom Friedman. Safely ensconced as “Editor” of America’s Shittiest Website,* National Review Online, he typed predictable screeds that met the syndicate’s word count, and the checks rolled in. Those were the days, my friend.
They ended. (Except for the checks, of course…) As the party, wars, economic policies, and the political movement he mendaciously extolled for his entire brief career lay in ruins all around him, today he was reduced to finding an “upside” to Palinmania, and the Oregonian ran it, out of pity or spite I can’t tell. You see, Rich Lowry is now a Teabagger, and doesn’t care who knows it. (Cue Gloria Gaynor….) Clearly feeling upstaged by the magnetic craziness of Glenn Beck, and perhaps fooled by crowd videos he saw on Fox, the guy who was too chicken to fight Al Franken just ordered a flattering moose-hunting ensemble from J. Crew, and is ready to battle liberals in it as soon as his Mom helps him put it on.
He gushes over the concept, which exists only under his blow-dried coiffure, of the way Sarah Palin “transformed her Facebook page into a must-read organ of conservative opinion,” and at the way she gives “them” (a Beckian ripoff term that means all non-teabagging Americans) “agita.” He goes on to gloat that the “contempt of her enemies only increases the ardor of her fans.” Well, duh, but the relative numbers of these two groups, and their relative IQ’s, could turn out to be something of an obstacle down the road, just as the stupidity of that statement makes him look like an even bigger nincompoop. But no matter.
He goes on for paragraph after excruciating paragraph waxing triumphant at the way “press bias, self-congratulatory liberalism, Christianity-hating secularism, and intellectual condescension” are all quaking in their Birkenstocks when Sarah unleashes her mighty wink, and even desperately cribs Queen Sarah’s absurd line about “11 fact-checkers” when tiredly and somewhat unaccountably bashing the AP as “liberal.” (Sort of like the crappy newspapers that run his embarrassing “column,” I guess…)
But Lowry isn’t done… You see, they make him write 750 words even when he doesn’t have a footnote worth of material. He thinks it’s great that she quit her only office of consequence halfway through, since it will free her from governing, which for Republicans only leads to disaster and corruption trials. Despite her lack of substantial ideas about anything, she’s got a “vibe” that has Lowry dancing like Tom DeLay, since we all know that thumping bass, minus lyrics, has been the only thing Republicans can use anymore to get elected. And best of all, as Lowry pretends to see it, she represents the final break between actual political discourse and the Fox-fueled reality show he’s been so anxious to see replace it, once and for all.
This pathetic excuse for a column offers its readers nothing except to show that Lowry, lacking as usual any better idea, has now hitched his little red wagon to Sarah’s star, and hopes to ride it either to the moon or continued employment, whichever comes first. As Fox would say, “I wish him well.”
*H/T: Sadly, No!
The “Chihuahua of the Chickenhawks” thing is great. Lowry is such a pitiful creature. Normally I would have a little twinge of sympathy for someone in his crumbling situation, but I can only watch and stifle a smile.
Me, too. Trouble is, there are no replacements, so he’ll be there until the last dog dies.
He may be the last dog.
Oh, I think the Pantload will last longer. All that salt and lard.
My Palin post this morning also mentioned the Fox fainting couch about the 11 fact checkers. It’s so funny when they play the victim.
But I also have “exclusive” video from inside the Palin tour bus:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv2s_Alfu4Q
Just as I often thanked Junior for screwing up almost everything so we could elect an intelligent Democrat, I want Rich and Sarah to keep doing what they do.
Palin Confuses Iraq And Iran In Hannity Interview (video)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/19/palin-confuses-iraq-and-i_n_363878.html
But RMP… That just shows that she’s “regular folks” like over at the trailer park.
Chihuahua of the Chickenhawks?
Now you’ve gone too far.
You’re mocking Alex P. Keaton, the star of President Reagan’s favorite TV show.
And remember that, when Alex went to Iraq, he was the leader of a victory there.
And look ye to Alex’s calmness, his firmness, and his concessions to the moderates :
http://nationalreview.com/thecorner/2002_03_03_corner-archive.shtml
Ah, I guess I meant a chihuahua hopped up on meth….. That there’s some crazy talk; I’m not a bit surprised.
I don’t know any of these people. Am I missing anything?
Yes, that’s a rhetorical question. Since they began sprinkling their pixie dust over the American universe, I encounter folks who sound very like them every day, too many of them to recount here. Just the other day, a women behind me at the supermarket checkstand, leafing through the impulse-purchase tabloids, sighing and clucking, turned to her husband and in exasperation, allowed as how they should leave poor Sarah Palin alone.
Then again, I live in Arizona, where the Republicans in the State legislature have decided to sell the state capitol grounds and office buildings to avoid raising taxes. Who needs TV? Ars gratia artis seems so irresponsible these days, when there’s so much pristine reality still to ruin.
You have to read a lesser metropolitan daily like the LA Times or the Oregonian to be treated to their musings, but they naturally make many TV appearances as well.
Ah, if they ever “left poor Sarah alone” she’d vanish into a puddle like the Wicked Witch.
Collateral damage …
http://bostonreview.net/BR34.6/mckelvey.php
Let’s see what’s what where the roads meet, where two worlds collide, as Jerry Lee says …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO2_LnlDdY4
Golly gee, dirigo, there’s some great insight there. This country’s been sliding towards suffering and perdition on account of people paying too much heed to damned secularists and atheistic Presbyterians like Tom Paine and Mark Twain, and now we’ve got infestations of money-grubbing godless shrinks who just want to create new disorders to beef up their own business. But now we can use proper religion to treat or even prevent the so-called “PTSD”.
Hallelujah!
Now let’s see what everybody here can do to help out. For starters, at the next choir practice at the Church Of Our Lady Of The Spirits, we’ll open up our Little Red Songbooks and we’ll all learn how to use that old-time religion to prevent new-fangled nonsense like so-called “PTSD”.
__________
Wow! I had never really heard the actual lyrics of that “song,” sysprog. I’m almost sorry to have read them now. I feel as if I need to have my eyeballs bleached.
You do know, I hope, that the Little Red Songbook isn’t the place to go, to see the actual lyrics.
For those, see
http://everything2.com/title/Onward%252C+Christian+Soldiers
No, I’m so gullible, that I did not. So much for my screen name! ;~) Thanks for the tip, sysprog.
Now that you mention it, I’m hearing other lyrics in my brain…
My indignation rests on the reporting in the Boston Review story that the VA has been nickel and diming on real mental health care for veterans, on the grounds that all our men and women need do is sit up straight and read the good book.
Sounds like a microcosm of the national health care debate, don’t it?
That story was disgusting, Dirigo, but I guess I still thank you for it. I wish I were surprised.
There’s a little sleight of hand there, sysprog.
Kendrick was not the original author of the song.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onward,_Christian_Soldiers
Well it spoils the joke to explain it, but I guess it’s spoiled anyway.
I had just assumed that everybody knew that the original words, and the original music by Sullivan, and the adoption of the original hymn by the Salvation Army, were all in and from the 19th century, way before the 20th century parody version in the IWW’s “Little Red Songbook”.
George Bernard Shaw, 1905 :
Well, we can always do with a bit of Shaw.
Being a “mainliner” I remember hearing the original in a church when I was young; and, perhaps worse than that, I attended the Massachusetts Congregational church, where, it’s said, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was first sung.
Shaw would be a solvent for that memory also, which is why I read him.
Shaw’s great for balancing bad memories; he’s the piercer of all shibboleths.
War’s carnage brings reality and doubt about God:
God, the Army, and PTSD: Is religion an obstacle to treatment?
http://bostonreview.net/BR34.6/mckelvey.php
Plan B.
When religion fails to soothe your troubled soul, perhaps the smell of oil and gunpowder, and some loud cracking noise, might cheer you up and calm you down.
Jonathan Turley :
http://jonathanturley.org/2009/11/16/you-would-be-crazy-not-to-own-a-gun-senator-propose-law-to-guarantee-gun-ownership-for-mentally-incapacitated-veterans/
I can see a torch song number, sysprog…. Who wants to lie on my piano and sing?
I never thought I’d say this: I actually miss William F. Buckley.
Ditto