Deconstruction work

First as tragedy, then as a bunch of made up shit

It's been so long now that Nooners and her ilk have been paid, and celebrated, for being professionally disingenuous that they must find it impossible to be anything else, assuming there's some reason they'd try. The requirement of speaking to a new set of circumstances in American political life has proven beyond them, and they've retreated into some stock of half-remembered schoolyard taunts, or, in Peggy's case, into a McGuffey's Reader version of an America she was, in fact, too young by a matter of decades to have actually lived through.

By the time Peggy was old enough to think about these things for herself such an America was not just dead, but had died in a collision with Reality: the Great Depression ended the debate over laissez-faire capitalism, WWII ended the debate over racial discrimination, and the Pill had ended the debate over reproductive freedom. All, that is, at least to the extent that it was necessary to accept in some degree that one was a crackpot, or worse, to cling to the contrarian view, just as one must make some sort of accommodation in being a Biblical literalist, anti-evolutionist, or reader of professional reader of pet auras. Noonan, naturally, talks the talk….

Doghouse Riley deconstructing Peggy Noonan’s “McCain: Old America: Patriotic/ Obama: New America: Do Your Own Thing."
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“And he aren‘t.”

A few paces away, I catch up with a man named Ron Saucier and a woman who would only identify herself as Mary. Ron says his problem with Obama is the integrity thing. "He exaggerates too much," Ron says. "He's not honest."

"OK," I say. "What does he exaggerate about?"

"Well, like that time he was saying he had a white mother and a white grandmother," he says.

I ask him how this is an exaggeration.

"Well, he was saying . . ." he begins. "As if that qualifies him to . . ."

Despite my repeated prodding, Ron seems unable or unwilling to say aloud exactly what he means. Finally, his friend Mary, a grave-looking blonde with fierce anger lines around her eyes, jumps in, points a finger and blurts out one of the all-time man-on-the-street quotes.

"Look, you either are or you aren't," she says.

"And he aren't," Ron says, nodding with relief.

Matt Taibbi deconstructing some demographics at a New Orleans McCain rally in “Full Metal McCain.”
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Les imbeciles de regime cowboy

George Bush went to France and Maureen Dowd got to tag along. I hope it goes better for her than their trip to Saudi Arabia did. Today’s column has a Paris dateline so she must be there. W. is making a greatest hits tour of Europe, but it’s not exactly selling out to packed houses.

A Bush organizer asked people sitting in the back of the hall to move to the front, so the empty seats would not be visible on TV.
President Bush gave the keynote speech of his European farewell tour extolling the virtues of liberty.
Paris responded with a yawn. (Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to say.)

The Dowdversion on the song made famous by Janis Joplin also recalls its cowboy poet author, Kris Kristofferson. And speaking of cowboys, for this piece Maureen breaks out all sorts of cowboy metaphors….

We are going to ignore the Movies With Maureen® potential of “blazing hostility” and go on to the faux French which loosely translates as “idiot cowboy administration.” Maureen dips into her nun-taught French one more time to use a phrase which means “No regrets.”

On the illicit rush to war, W. ne regrette rien.

Mo MoDo deconstructing Maureen Dowd’s “W. Regrets Almost Nothing.”