This diary is probably a waste of time, but since the truly deserving diarists are usually ignored, I thought maybe most of us are more interested in a time-wasting diary today. (Seriously, does a Congressional candidate have to get punched in the face around here? What's up with only 3 comments and 4 recs for a diary from TX-04 candidate Glenn Melancon? Let's not forget that there are other races to support!)
Reading the blogs over at The Huffington Post, I came across one of the funniest things I've read since our own Cheers and Jeers.
Apparently, I'm not the only one who sees Erica Jong as bubble-headed hack, but Matt Taibbi's response to yet another of her inane blog entries was classic. I think I'm in love with a guy who once interviewed John Kerry while wearing a gorilla suit!
Certainly the state of our news media today would be a joke if it wasn't enabling Bush's warmongering or the Republican assault on our Constitution. And the ignorance pundits and "experts" given airtime or column space makes one wonder if Fox News is causing our nation's collective political ignorance or merely capitalizing on it. But once in a while, you'll get a journalist who has exposes the absurdity of our politics. Once in a while, you'll see someone admit:
I’ve reached the point now where when I interview "men on the street" and they give me the same crazy answers over and over again (like "We have to fight them over there so they won’t come over here"). I really have to struggle to keep from grabbing them by the neck, screaming "What the fuck!!!", etc.
And I've long wondered who in their right mind would fall for Erica Jong's Freudian-distorting, sexually obsessed psychobabble that she tries to pass as political analysis. But Matt Taibbi does a far better job in a response to one of her diaries than I could ever dream up:
I feel compelled to respond to an article written in part about me by emigree contributor Erica Jong. According to the eight hundred year-old sex novelist, my offhand description of Hillary Clinton's arms as "flabby" means that I'm a misogynist and a sexist who is guilty of "Momism," which she describes as an "Oedipal obsession with the bad mother -- to counter a boy's attraction to his good mother." The whole of her argument is based upon my use of that one word, "flabby" -- which she argues is evidence of my typically male tendency to fixate on the appearance of female politicians. Like other sexist men, I apparently trained my monomaniacal focus on Hillary's appearance while while ignoring the paunches, liver spots and comb-overs of male politicians.
Jong has apparently never read anything else I've written.
And his description of some of the people we love to hate is just hysterical:
RUDY GIULIANI, former presidential candidate: "Virtually neckless, all shoulders and forehead and overbite, with a hunched-over, Draculoid posture that recalls, oddly enough, George W. Bush, the vestigial stoop of a once-chubby kid who grew up hiding tittie pictures from nuns." Also: "The electoral incarnation of Tommy Lee Jones' acid-bath-surviving Two-Face character." A "bottomless pit of vengeful little-guy ambition."
MARK PENN, former chief strategist for the Clinton campaign: "Penn is the Democratic version of Karl Rove. He even looks like Rove, only he's fatter and more disgusting. Up close in a forum like this, his eyes bulge out of his fat, blood-flushed head; his neck spills out of his too-tight shirt collar; and he generally looks like Jabba the Hutt, his suit bursting at the seams, with only the bowl of snackable live toads suspended at arm's length missing from the picture."
MITT ROMNEY, former presidential candidate: An "utter tool...a poll-chasing stuffed suit with a Max Headroom hairdo who will say (or won't say, for that matter) whatever the fuck it takes to get elected." Also: "When it comes to the satanic art of presidential campaigning, this lean, heavily moussed political athlete is a stone prodigy, a natural who glides through campaign events with the aid of some dark supernatural power - a tie-clad, sweat-resistant cross of Roy Hobbs and Rosemary's Baby."
And you can read the rest here.
It's just one silly diary taking down one silly talking head. God knows that idiots like Jokeline, Carville, William Kristol and everyone over at Fox News deserve the same verbal beat down. But thank you, Matt, for a great read and kickoff to the weekend!
And before everyone runs home from work, stop by and donate some of your hard-earned paycheck to Glenn Melancon, Gilda Reed, possum, Ron Shepston, Joe Garcia, or any of the other great candidates who spend time trying to gain our support!