July 2008

Jim Henley: "John McCain is the downer cow of American politics."

Recommended non-serious film entertainment: Grandma's Boy, 2006. A Mike Judge-sharp script without Mike Judge and the regular Adam Sandler cast without Adam Sandler. The setting is a heavily SoCal-ified videogame company called Brainasium. The protagonist Alex, played by Allen Covert, is a 35 year old accountant turned game designer who through various plot foolishness has to move in with his grandmother. Typical sitcom situations: (1) Alex needs to get grandma out of the house so he can get stoned and work on his "levels" for the game Brainasium is on deadline to produce*; (2) Grandma and her friends find Alex's pot and mistake it for tea--when Alex comes home they are rolling on the floor watching a Spanish-language game show; (3) child prodigy game designer thinks his long black leather coat makes him invisible; (4) pot dealer buys a lion to guard his house, etc. Can't totally vouch for this because only saw two thirds of the bleeped TV version (have GOT to get rid of this cable) but that sampling was a laff riot.

*Jeff: What's up, shitlips.
Alex: Hey, I need a huge favor.
Jeff: You're not jerking off on my dad.
Alex: Funny. No, I was wondering if you could do some of my levels.
Jeff: No, why can't you do them?
Alex: It's my roommates. They won't stop watching... porn. I can't get any work done.
Jeff: You're dead to me. Over.
[hangs up phone]
Alex: Well, Jeff's a good friend.

The fact that the New Yorker has a racist, anti-Obama image on its cover shouldn't surprise. The magazine has in the past slimed Al Gore and its editor, David Remnick, cheered on the Iraq war in 2002-3. From a Guardian article about Remnick:

He came out in favour of the war in Iraq, for instance, on the grounds of concern about weapons of mass destruction, and says now that 'I was wrong about that, totally wrong, as events proved very quickly.'

Remnick is currently defending his decision to smear the Obamas--let's see how quickly he decides he was "wrong."

Update: We are discussing this over at Paddy's.

Update 2: The headline of Gary Kamiya's Salon article on this topic is "Rush Limbaugh was right: The blogosphere's reaction to the New Yorker cover proves that the Bush era has killed a lot of liberals' sense of humor. And that's not funny." What's funny is watching Salon striving so hard to be centrist that it cites the concern trolling of a hate radio star. What's not funny was watching that image spread to every mainstream and middlebrow organ yesterday (including Salon), so that undecided voters see the media approvingly putting out the message that racial caricatures of the candidate are A-OK. Karl Rove, "unofficial" adviser to the McCain campaign, must have been cackling.