Saturday Night/Sunday Morning TV Nostalgia

When I was about five years old, I thought this ...was the coolest dude...I had ever seen:



"We have met the enemy, and he is us!?" Wow. That would just confuse TV watchers today. Sure enough, in 1998, the state had this PSA remade almost shot-for-shot, with updated music, a new guy portraying Tennessee Trash, and without the environmentalist variation on the Commodore Perry quote which nobody gets now but which apparently was commonplace in the late '70s.

Which leads me to another bit of generational gappage. The state did a follow up depicting a couple of senior citizens doing their civic duty and confronting Mr. Trash:



When I was a kid, threatening to tell his mother got Tennessee to clean up his act. Nowadays, if Elrod and Elvira tried this, ol' TT would blow them away with the snub-nosed .38 he keeps beneath all the Hardee's bags under his seat.

And I sat through a lot of this type of thing on bitter January and February mornings, waiting to find out if I would have to go to school:

Yaaaay!! Peace in Our Time!!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090918/ap_on_re_eu/eu_eastern_europe_missile_defense_22

And this happened yesterday, the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in World War II.

Tuck in Your Sheet, Jimmah

racist n 1: One who believes that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capabilities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. 2: Anyone who is winning an argument with a leftist.

I grew up with a more or less received perception of Jimmy Carter as a kindhearted and honest man who had been an utterly incompetent president.

For many years, including my own five- to seven-year flirtation with the politics of the Left that began in high school, my subsequent rejection of those politics, and the few years I passed in political apathy, I never encountered much to make me rethink my opinion of the man. I, and just about everyone I knew, could see clearly that here was a guy "too nice for his own good," a man who, by the time I came of age, was a grandfatherly, charitable figure who built houses for poor people and traveled the world on missions of peace to brutal foreign dictators. His soft-spoken Georgia accent and his gentle demeanor seemed to be proofs of his turn-the-other-cheek Christianity, if also of his Henry VI-like unsuitability for power.

This is hardly a flattering picture. But I'm beginning to think that it's the best of all possible pictures of himself that Carter has a right to expect. Because when you start to pay attention to his record and read up on him even a little bit, that picture starts to change dramatically. Carter's history turns out to be more one of unwanted diplomatic interference (through which he has generally misrepresented the aims and aspirations of tyrants the world over at the expense of his own country), of joining the chorus of left-wing hyenas mindlessly baying at Pres. Bush and the U.S. generally over the past eight years, of acceptance of the paradigms of open anti-Semites and insulting comments about those who oppose the totalitarian inclinations of the current president. To my way of thinking, all this merits a reexamination of Carter's past and his present. A good place to start is this piece in Commentary by Joshua Muravchik. That will take you a while, but when you're finished there, you can move on to this shorter editorial in National Review Online.

All this has been quite an education for me. I no longer believe that Jimmy Carter is a bumbling good Samaritan or a quixotic missionary for world peace or that he was a prototype anti-segregationist. He's just another grasping, narcissistic left-wing ideologue, trying to shame his opponents in the current policy debates into ceasing their scrutiny and their thoughts about the Left's proposals.

It's Florida-UT Weekend!

Rep. Corrine Brown, via Six Meat Buffet:

Epidemiological Correctness Run Amuck

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius hassles NBC head White House correspondent Chuck Todd about sneezing the right way:



Yeah, but sneezing in the crook of your arm runs the risk of having the snail trail effect on your suit coat. Now if the guy had been a newspaper reporter, he probably would have slept in his suit coat the night before, but still...

It Takes a Big Man to Bully a Little Girl

It would appear that Kanye West doesn't care about Hendersonville people.

If the levies burst and Hendersonville were under water, would Kanye West lift his little toe to save all those innocent Hendersonvillians? (A purely academic question, I know, since Hendersonville, it's founders having been competent to select construction sites, doesn't require levies to protect it, and, if it did, those levies would be maintained properly and well-built to begin with, and even if they weren't, Hendersonvillians would leave once it became clear that the cat-5 monster hurricane was bearing down on Hendersonville, and even if they didn't, the mayor and governor would have some sort of plan in place to save lives, instead of doing nothing and blaming it all on Kanye West.)

Before rushing the stage, Mr. West and his girlfriend, Mr. Clean, were seen partaking of some liquid courage, as the prospect of speaking truth to Taylor Swift was apparently making them nervous.

It's interesting to note that Kanye had no particular desire to confront some other country music performers like Toby Keith, Mr. Keith having some well-publicized views about what constitutes the American Way.

The president, similarly averse to letting a crisis go by without barging in and wrestling the mic away, delivered a stinging public rebuke to Kanye, calling him a "jackass" or "knucklehead" or some other such weak epithet that doesn't even begin to cover it, but not before this little bit of unpleasantness took place: