For those of you who are peeking through your fingers, “Just days after celebrating their first Valentine’s Day together, Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker made their relationship Instagram official on Tuesday, Feb. 16.” (Writing in the style of the NY Times) Mr. Barker rose to fame with the rock-pop-punk band Blink 182, whose most acclaimed album was Enema of the State. Ms. Kardashian is famous for reality television and for having children with alcoholic television personality and serial philander Scott Disick. Opposites attract?
Stay tuned for a special FYCE event this afternoon, 1:00 PM ET! Our own dear Cousin Matthew has live-blogged his hospital stay, in a post entitled “Food You Can Eat: Nourriture d’Hôpital (Hospital Food)”.
“Percy”, the NASA Perseverance rover safely landed on Mars, traveling 292.5 million miles to get there. Now we just need await Mars Attacks. One of our dogs, Violet Chihuahua, sounds just like the aliens.
I noticed that William F. Buckley Jr.’s great nephew was among those arrested for participation in the capitol coup attempt. As you may recall, Buckley was the suave and urbane conservative author and commentator who founded The National Review, and who famously feuded with Gore Vidal. (And who espoused ideas that are an anathema to all things good and correct.) Buckley was also the father of political satirist Christopher, who gave a recent-ish (July) interview on Trump satire in The Atlantic, a worthwhile read in case you missed it.
Here’s a fact-check of President Biden’s first month in office, made more impressive because it is from the BBC and you are contractually required to read it aloud in a plummy British accent.
Pennsylvania is in for an exciting senatorial race. Incumbent Patrick Toomey is retiring from office, and PA Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman is running as a Democrat. John is pro-weed, pro-LGBTQ, pro-$15 minimum wage. He is also a huge biker-looking dude who lives in a rehabbed car dealership. I can only hope…
In judicial news, “There’s been a sustained flow of federal judges stepping aside in the almost month since President Joe Biden was inaugurated. Most are not retiring, but taking “senior status,” in which they step back without actually stepping down, still taking cases but fewer of them and opening up their seats for new judges to come in. Since the election, 13 judges stepped back, and another 22 announced their intention of doing so in the coming months, while a few more indicated that they were retiring.” This allows Biden to fill their seats, hopefully to undo some of the damage done by his predecessor.
Now for a musical interlude:
What’s My Age Again?
I’ve Been Dazed
Friday On My Mind
Friday I’m In Love With You, Dear DeadSplinterites!
I’d love to see John Fetterman in the Senate, hangin’ with The Squad. The Christopher Buckley interview was interesting. I didn’t know anything about him. I’ve often wondered what William F Buckley would have thought of trump. He would probably have liked many of his policies but he prided himself on being an intellectual. Would he have been disgusted by the attacks on the elite, the idea of journalists as the enemy of the people? Or shifted gears like so many others in the GOP.
I take an interest in the thinking of the Rational Right (as opposed to the inchoate rage spewings from the mad Trumpenproletariat) and read “National Review” for free, online. This is where the right-wing has us on the ropes, by the way. NR and “The Daily Mail” and the “New York Post” and other right-wing organs are all free and freely available online. The “New York Times” and the “Washington Post” and even the dying husk of the leftish/populist “New York Daily News” are behind paywalls, never to be read, at least not by me.
Anyway, I was interested in what the Rational Right had to say about the passing of Rush Limbaugh. They LOVED him. Apparently William F. Buckley himself was a huge fan; he admired Limbaugh’s “courage” and his “humor”. Across the Right they all applaud him for taking advantage of loosened FCC regulations that allowed someone like him to flourish. Three hours, every single day, with few or no guests, and few or no callers, he would riff on matters of the day. He got his start in 1988 and when President Clinton was inaugurated in 1993 he shot to stardom with his relentless attacks on the godless Commie and his presumably Lesbian fellow-traveler wife. Bill and Hillary Clinton. A generation before they would have been considered corporatist Republicans with good, old-fashioned “don’t ask, don’t tell” tried and true American values, as if their marriage is something people should admire and seek for themselves. Limbaugh is widely credited with turning the House of Representatives Republican in 1994 (it had been in Democratic hands for 45 years) and in 1995 was sworn in as an “honorary member,” whatever that means. Probably about as meaningful as House Speaker Gingrich’s “Contract with America.”
Sorry, I’m in quite a ranting mood. You (all) will be hearing from me later today, as elliecoo promised/threatened above.
@MatthewCrawley, Rant away! So glad to see that you are back among us. I never considered the free vs. paywall option, but I am regularly stymied by the Washington Posts paywall. We get the Times here, so I have online access (it is a deliverable paper in our local news wasteland).
It makes sense, he was vicious and aggressive. He just dressed it up with that weird accent and pretentious vocabulary.
Richard Lowry, editor of NR, complained how liberals didn’t admit that Limbaugh was such a funny guy. Which led liberals to start posting his intentionally racist, homophobic, sexist jokes. Jokes which weren’t trying to be funny and were purely about spreading Limbaugh’s hate.
Isaac Chotiner supplied the following example of a Limbaugh joke with the right diagnosis of Lowry:
“In Obama’s America, the white kids now get beat up with the Black kids cheering.” It’s important to remember that people like Lowry like Limbaugh because of these quotes, not in spite of them.
Rich Lowry is the worst semi-human left now that Limbaugh is gone. I hate him so much & once told him that In a reply to an article he wrote about Obama & how great GWB’s war was. He actually replied but didn’t try to defend his positions, just snark.
The paywall gap is an important subject to rant about. It’s a big problem.
@Hannibal, a million thanks for your comment (perhaps the lack of links is off-putting?) Do you remember Buckley’s ubiquitous presence on the Firing Line?
I remember that he loved using $10 words. But his rhetoric was pretty fiery and ugly so I guess I’ve answered my own question. He would have loved trump. Interesting that his son doesn’t and even left the GOP because of trump.
As has been said by others more erudite than me, people like Buckley were the “polite” right wingers who simply spoke in code. So, it’s not at all surprising that they love people like Limbaugh and Trump because the polite people get to live vicariously through them.
The thing is, it wasn’t even in code. He went to the mat in favor of segregation and stopping Blacks from voting.
If anyone hasn’t seen it, it’s long but it is worth watching sometime the debate between James Baldwin and Buckley on the extent that Blacks were denied the American dream.
The following article sums it up.
https://www.salon.com/2015/06/07/william_f_buckley_and_national_reviews_vile_race_stance_everything_you_need_to_know_about_conservatives_and_civil_rights/
He was a classic example of how the right gets graded on a curve and benefit from affirmative action programs. There was nothing smart about his arguments, but the establishment club felt he was a member, so they gave him a permanent seat at the table.
Buckley benefited from a double standard that meant he could offer no proof and no valid argument for the worst ideas but never get fired, while vastly more qualified women and non whites would never get a platform from PBS or major media outlets.
Buckley was there because he was openly racist and sexist — to show other club members that their position was safe no matter how open they were.
Buckley came from money (money made in Mexican oil), and had the benefit of a private education, education abroad, and a Yale degree. He also married money. What he did not have was one iota of compassion for those other than rich white men, or the ability to “walk in another’s shoes”.
I once (OH GOD NO NOT ANOTHER Cousin Matt STORY) (and the spellcheck won’t allow me to all-cap my own username, which is a fun and strange feature)…
Yes. I somewhat recently was at a rehearsal dinner and got seated to the right of the father of the bride. “Mattie, I hope you don’t mind, but Daddy is very grumpy and you’re good with stories. Maybe you can keep him quiet.” “I love a good challenge.”
This took place in a grand Park Avenue co-op. At dinner I said to Daddy, “This food is delicious. You have an excellent chef. Can I ask you something?” “Of course, anything at all.” “I don’t spend a lot of time in this neighborhood but I’ve been to A and B [restaurants]. Do you and Mrs. X go to restaurants often? Are there any good ones here that I’m missing out on? I’ve heard that President Trump is sort of reclusive but when he was living in New York he trusted [restaurant Z]…”
That was all I needed to set my trap. “That man is a vile, odious piece of filth who has no more reason to be president than I have doing brain surgery. I have voted Republican all my life, we all do, but we didn’t vote at all in 2016. I blame it all on the decline of American public education and that Internet thing.”
“How so?”
“Because when I was growing up I—I didn’t go to one of the public schools here in New York, I boarded at [S] but even those who did were bought up to believe in America and were taught things like civics, and literature, and history, and math and science. We were all better for it. Nowadays children are fed all kinds of revisionist nonsense and ‘needs-based’ learning and computer things. To what end? When I matriculated from [S] I had to pass two exams, in Greek and Latin. Two of each, so four. Now, native-born New Yorkers can barely speak English, let alone appreciate the work of Homer or Ovid.”
“But computer coding is a language, and it’s ever-evolving.”
“And for what? To send us unwanted advertisements and further the distribution of pornography? I have no doubt that Trump finds his companions on the Internet with a credit line, did you know he’s bankrupt by the way? Up to his eyeballs with the Germans and the Russians, and they don’t play nice, take it from me.”
Just a little 2018 memory I thought I’d share.
@MatthewCrawley, and this “I love a good challenge.” is why we love you!
I used to talk at length on Jezebel and later on GroupThink about how I am the perfect wedding guest. I’ve been to probably 100, no lie. Most men shy away from them, but I love everything about them. Better Half is freaked out by them so I am a single male who likes (or liked, I guess, given the bum leg) to dance and can fill a table when there aren’t enough men available.
Sometimes I am seated next to (the tables are always circular, I don’t know why, but it’s polite to engage the person on your right first) a very grumpy attendee who has insights to share. If there’s no assigned seating it’s a free-for-all. I don’t recommend it, when I throw dinners I try to seat people who don’t know each other very well next to each other, and gay or straight, married or not, I try to separate couples and seat boy/girl/boy/girl. Oddly though both of us are gay men we often have a surplus of women.
What was the point of this? Oh, loving a good challenge. Yes. So sometimes I get seated next to a persnickety older female relative who is invited for whatever reason. I engage.
“This roast beef is delicious, isn’t it? So juicy and moist…”
“It’s not roast beef, it’s brisket. This is a Jewish wedding and it’s one of the most awful days of my life. [We were a table of goyim.] To think of poor [bride] marrying into this. Her mother tells me she’s going to convert, so they can raise Jewish babies. Just what the world needs.”
“Well…are you Catholic? Yes? A Jesuit once told me that God has put us on earth to delight each other, and it’s our own fault when we—don’t. Wars, for example. Murders. Opposition to inter-faith marriages, maybe. [Groom] seems to be delighting [bride] and we have so little time on earth, we should be happy, don’t you think?”
“Not with a Jew.”
“Oh, come on. They opened the dance floor. Do you want to dance with me? This is ‘Just the Way You Are’ by Billy Joel, who’s Jewish, and it’s a lovely song.”
Oof. Why invite an antisemitic relative to a Jewish wedding? Why would she attend?
I was somewhat baffled by the people I was pushed into inviting to my wedding, but because I was in my early 20s, I let our families push us on the guest list. If we did it again today, we’d probably invite half the amount of people with a lot less family and a lot more friends.
I just got to this comment so sorry for the late reply. The bride was marrying down, in a way. Her family had tons more money than the groom’s had, I was led to believe, and the anti-Semite was a close family member. So the bride’s family decided to throw a big, showy wedding to show the groom’s family what was up. The groom’s family insisted on a Jewish wedding, or at least a non-denominational one, which disappointed the bride’s mother, who would have held it in St. Patrick’s Cathedral with 2,000 guests if she had her way, so they went all out. The ceremony was conducted at the bride’s family’s Long Island Sound waterfront house/estate, under a chuppa, as is Jewish tradition. When I was seated I turned to my neighbor and observed, “I’ve been to other Jewish weddings and the chuppa is not usually so…decorated.”
“That’s the bride’s mother trying to make a point. I know, it looks like a circus tent. It’s not preferred but it not…non-kosher. I don’t envy [groom] putting up with this batty nonsense for the rest of his life. I’m [bride’s cousin]; my father is her mother’s younger brother. Maybe we’ll be seated at the same table and we can talk more.”
It was a really fun wedding. At some point the men all got up and danced the hora around the married couple who were lifted up on chairs. The liquor flowed, generously. The house had a separate guest house, more like an inn, and I got booked into that so I could be at the breakfast the next day. At breakfast I got seated next to a cousin of the groom. “Tell me, do you often eat caviar and blintzes at breakfast?” “This verkakte family thinks we’re all Russian Jews that just got off a cheap flight from Moscow. We’re Sephardic, and we’ve been in New York since the 1880s. This is as strange to us as it must be to them. But they’re paying for it, so eat up.”
Rich people are crazy.
That article about federal judges is welcome news that I had missed. Thank you for posting that.
@MemeWeaver, I too was happy to see that…a bit of tit for tat, restocking the bench with qualified persons and non-trumpians!
have they come up with a name for the mental illness that causes people to want to be involved with kardashians yet?
(okay in kanyes case its probably a whole pile of mental illnesses)
“Narcissism”?
i dunno….hard to make everything about you when you are around them
Kanye made it work for longer than anyone should have.
This broke my brain:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/2/18/2016784/-Donald-Trump-s-most-fervent-supporters-are-ready-for-him-to-become-the-19th-president-on-March-4
It’s broken now.
Obviously, broken brains can still be active…
Not mine. I now have to drink enough to erase the memory of the last hour. Yes, it’s 11:35 AM, what’s your point?
No point offered. I’m with you.
Whoa, blast from the past. Travis Barker was my biggest celebrity crush when I was 12. Gotta say, still find him a little attractive, though I don’t think I could tolerate listening to Blink-182. Man, my 12 year old music taste was… questionable. (Why yes I did also listen to Korn and Limp Bizkit. Sigh.)
i still have a soft spot for the transplants
Same.
I completely forgot it’s Fur Face Friday! Sorry everyone.
https://backtalkvillage.blogspot.com/2021/02/fur-face-friday_19.html?m=1
Ahh, Mars Attacks. I do so enjoy that movie.
The first time my mom say Star Trek Beyond and we got to the end scene with the Beastie Boys song, she was like “wait are you fucking kidding me? this is the plot of Mars Attacks!!!!”