They — there are only two countries I’m eligible to run for the leadership position is if I move to Ireland and buy a house, I can — I can run for president of Ireland, because of my Irish heritage.
And because I was born in Arkansas, which is part of the Louisiana Purchase, any person anywhere in the world that was born in a place that ever was part of the French empire, if you move to — if you live in France for six months and speak French, you can run for president…
However, I once polled very well in a French presidential race. And I said, you know, this is great, but that’s the best I’d ever do because once they heard my broken French with a Southern accent, I would drop into single digits within a week and I’d be toast. I just don’t think — that’s what I think. I think the system we have may have some opportunity costs.
From Alec MacGillis’ fascinating piece for The New Republic, “How Paul Ryan Convinced Washington of His Genius:”
“I’ve literally never heard or read anything from [Ryan] that’s surprising or new,” Barney Frank told me late this summer. So why the big-thinker reputation? “Because he is being graded on a curve with a bunch of guys who jump into the Sea of Galilee because they want to be closer to God.”
Je viens d’acheter du poulet et ma voiture sent l’odeur de la liberté.
This was spoken by “Steve” during an interview with Mike Huckabee, just after eating at Chick-Fil-A to protest the backlash against the food chain for its president’s stance against same-sex marriage.
And on a completely unrelated note, here is your weekend picture, taken today at Zaitunay Bay in Beirut.
Our lazy embrace of Stewart and Colbert is a testament to our own impoverished comic standards. We have come to accept coy mockery as genuine subversion and snarky mimesis as originality. It would be more accurate to describe our golden age of political comedy as the peak output of a lucrative corporate plantation whose chief export is a cheap and powerful opiate for progressive angst and rage.
In this, the “golden age” of Facebook Likes masquerading as activism, have we fallen prey to a massive ruse? One in which progressive rage is vaccinated little by little via 30-minute doses of harmless political comedy?
It seems like we have some version of this conversation every few years: Is Jon Stewart too easy on some of his guests? Yes. Do we live in a time when people are extremely reluctant to criticize members of the American military? We do. But is it really the role of all comedy, even political and media-centric comedy, to radicalize a population? Comedy can absolutely introduce political agitation. Must it, though? Are Stewart and Colbert asleep at the wheel because they’re not more like Bill Hicks?
The Arab Spring has yet to reach the web site of the Arab League. Just like in an Egyptian election pre-2011, you can vote any way you’d like, as long as you make the right choice.
