First of all, are we all just going to pretend that Mark Wahlberg hasn't done some terrible things?
(from Wikipedia: Commenting in 2006 on his past crimes, Wahlberg stated: "I did a lot of
things that I regret, and I have certainly paid for my mistakes." He
said the right thing to do would be to try to find the blinded man and
make amends, and admitted he has not done so, but added that he was no
longer burdened by guilt:)
But putting aside for the moment that AT&T decided they wanted a violent racist felon to represemt their brand, these ads are a tribute to Wahlberg's fragile masculinity.
So, even though he already would seemingly have proven his macho bona fides by punching out a bunch of robots when he gets to the lovers on the beach and says somehting about "unlimited romance," he has to toss in the line "if you're into that." Like it's important to him that the viewers understand that he does not go in for any of that mushy lovey-dovey girl stuff. Like he's afraid that his old townie friends are going to see him endorsing "unlimited romance" and say "hey, Mahky, what are you, quee-ah?" I would bet money that the "if you're into that" line was not in the original script but Marky Mark insisted on adding it.
And then he has to make sure that everyone understands that he does NOT know who the "little cartoon thing" is. The guy has four kids, no one would think it was strange that he would recognize a character from a cartoon. I have zero kids and I know that the cartoon character is named Gumball. I don't have to pretend like "I'm a grown man. I don't know anything about some dumb kids' show. I'm not a baby!"
Whatever problems I have with Senator John McCain, and they are legion, this is just sad. His mind is just gone. He seems dazed and confused and unable to understand why one person could be cleared by an investigation and another person not cleared. It's time to retire, Senator.
I mean, I don't hate those people.I don't hate the people who were alive in the 30s and 40s. I just hate how on days like this, the anniversary of D-Day, or Memorial Day, or the Fourth of July, we're supposed to venerate and worship this particular group of people just because Tom Brokaw decided they were the best people who ever lived. I guess what I really hate is the term "Greatest Generation."
For starters, they get a lot of credit for having lived through the Great Depression. Well what choice did they have? The only other choice was suicide. Ad, FYI, suicide rates hit an all-time high during the Depression, for what it's worth.
And it's not as if they chose to live through the Depression. It's not like they purposely took it upon themselves so that future generations wouldn't have to. They just had bad luck.
And a lot of people will say that us modern folk would never be able to make it through a 1930's-style depression, that we're too soft, but I would bet any money that if you had asked Americans during the Roaring Twenties whether they thought they and their friends and neighbors were tough enough to survive a great depression, they'd have said the same thing. "No, we're too soft nowadays, all hopped up on jazz and bootleg liquor, dancing the Charleston with flappers and whatnot." But survive it they did because they had no choice. You couldn't opt out except by suicide.
And they won World War Two. And thank God they did. But do you mean to tell me that they fought any more valiantly, any more courageously than the young men and women who fought and are still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan? Do you think that today's armed forces lack the valor of the WWII soldiers? To even imply that is an insult to our troops.
And after living through the horrors of war, this great generation turned around and sent the next generation into the maw of Vietnam for no earthly good goddamm reason other than their pathetic fear of communists.
And after having been saved by FDR's New Deal and after having come home from war to attend college and buy houses on the GI Bill, the second they were comfortably ensconced in the middle class, these fine Americans starting voting for right-wing Repuiblicans to make sure no one else could ever get a hand up from Uncle Sam.
And this esteemed generation fought tooth and nail against integration. They voted in scumbags like George Wallace and Lester Maddox and terrorized children of color who just wanted to go to school.
It was this generation that defeated the Equal Rights Amendment and fought every other attempt by women to claim their rightful place in society.
This generation opposed any rights for LGBT people and still does.
This generation knew first-hand the benefits of strong unions and turned around and voted for Ronald Reagan and every other anti-labor Ayn Rand-inspired creep that came down the pike because those damn liberals were giving minorities too many rights or something, I don't know what the fuck the logic was, these were not logical people. These are people who bought into the idea that giving more and more money to the already wealthy would somehow benefit regular Joes like them, or would at least stick it to the lazy welfare recipients or the pinkos or whoever they were afraid of/angry at that day.
And they've learned nothing. They have seen first-hand the destructive results of this right-wing stupidity and they have learned nothing. Now they're retired and they have nothing better to do than ingest a steady stream of Hannity and O'Reilly and whatever other hateful pricks are on TV and radio and vote for a monstrous imbecile like Trump because they think that Mexicans are the reason their no-good son-in-law can't get a job and that Muslims are forcing eveyone to bow to Mecca and wear a burqa and the black people are sucking off the government teat and ny God no one better take away thier Social Security and Medicare!
So fuck this "Greatest Generation" bullshit. And fuck Tom Brokaw.
So I am 99.9% sure that the column that was making its way across the Twitterverse yesterday about the woman envying the lives of the Handmaids on The Handmaid's Tale is satire.
Right-wing radio host Jesse Lee Peterson spent a portion of his show yesterday again praising President Trump as a white savior sent by God to save America. Peterson heaped praised on Trump for shoving aside the prime minister of Montenegro at a recent NATO summit so that he could stand in front of the group of assembled leaders.
“He goes overseas and those little weak ones try to get in front of him
during a photo shoot, he pushed them out of the way,” Peterson rejoiced.
“White power. White power! I’m loving it.
“We are so fortunate to have President Trump. It looked like God had
given up on us with Obama,” Peterson continued. “I had to get on my
knees and God heard my prayer … And then the Lord said, ‘Be cool, Trump
is coming. I will send my son and he will save you.'”
Okay, now I have some words. His son? HIS SON? You do know who his son is, right? I mean, you're a reverend, you have to know who God's son is, right? It's this guy:
Also, the Lord said "be Cool?" Not "fear not" or "peace be with you" but "be cool?" God's up on his 20th Century slang is he?
And I know I've said this before, but I'll say it again - if you talk to God, that's prayer. If God talks to you, that's schizophrenia.
“Isn’t it beautiful to see white men and women finally standing up?” he
said. “It’s so refreshing, because if white people give up completely,
it’s over for the country. It’s the whites who make things happen.
Blacks and Mexicans don’t make things happen.”
Today, while browsing through Twitter, in between arguments about whose Memorial Day Tweet was the tackiest and Chuck Woolery defending himself from charges of anti-Semitism by saying "hey, you know who else is a Jew? That Bernie Sanders! (Hashtag #Jew, I kid you not.)" I discovered something. Dennis Prager is still around. And someone is paying him to write stuff.
Okay, first of all, I can't really think of a single prominent conservative that has "attacked" Trump. Well, maybe Joe Scarborough, although he sure as hell fluffed him during the campaign. Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and bet that Prager doesn't name any of these so-called "anti-Trump comservatives" anywhere in his column.
Trump is too far from their ideal leader for some conservatives to support him.
When people you know well and admire, and who share your values, do something you strongly oppose, you have two options:
(1) Cease admiring them or (2) try to understand them and change their minds.
Or you could grow the fuck up and realize that you don't have to agree on everything to be friends? Or you could publicly denounce them and excise them from your life? Or you could maybe take a moment to consider that maybe you are the one that's wrong? Honestly, there are way more than two options.
In the case of my conservative friends who still snipe (or worse) at
President Trump, I have rejected option one. The reason — beside the
fact that I simply like many of them — is what I refer to as “moral bank
accounts.”
Every time we do good, we make a deposit into our moral bank account.
And every time we do something bad, we make a withdrawal. These
conservatives have made so many deposits into their moral bank accounts
that, in my view, their accounts all remain firmly in the black.
Well, as we like to say here at the Daily Irritant, name one. Name one positive thing that any of your conservative friends has done.
That means my only choice is option two. But to try to change their minds, I must first try to understand their thinking.
I have concluded that there are a few reasons that explain
conservatives who were Never-Trumpers during the election, and who
remain anti-Trump today.
Oh! Oh!~ I know! Is it because they realize that Trump is a walking personality disorder with neither the experience, intelligence nor temperament for the office?
Or wait, wait, is it because their suspicions about Trump's inability to do the most difficult job in the world were confirmed by his laughable performance so far?
The first and, by far, the greatest reason is this: They do not believe
that America is engaged in a civil war, with the survival of America as
we know it at stake.
Oh. Okay, I was never going to guess that. But in all fairness, you didn't tell me that the mystery took place in 1862.
While they strongly differ with the Left, they do not regard the
left–right battle as an existential battle for preserving our nation. On
the other hand, I, and other conservative Trump supporters, do.
Ooohhh. so the problem is that they aren't paranoid or delusional enough?
Or is it that they don't understand what Trump's supporters get instinctively, that this could be their last chance to turn this country back into a Jim Crow, theocratic white man's paradise?
That is why, after vigorously opposing Trump’s candidacy during the
Republican primaries, I vigorously supported him once he won the
nomination. I believed then, as I do now, that America was doomed if a
Democrat had been elected president.
Oh, of course. Gosh, we still may never recover from the growth and prosperity of the Bill Clinton administration, or Barack Obama's righting of the economic ship. Hopefully, another Bush-style recession can save us!
With the Supreme Court and hundreds of additional federal judgeships in
the balance; with the Democrats’ relentless push toward European-style
socialism — completely undoing the unique American value of limited
government; the misuse of the government to suppress conservative
speech; the continuing degradation of our universities and high schools;
the weakening of the American military; and so much more, America, as
envisioned by the Founders, would have been lost, perhaps irreversibly.
Oh, yeah. It would be awful if all thoise things that never happened at all even once were allowed to continue to, um. . . happen?
Can you give one example - just one - of the government suppressing Conservative speech? No, you can't. Because it never happened.
Can you give a single example of our military becoming weakened? No, you can't. Because it never happened.
And how many Democrats are pushing for European-style socialism? Even if you caount Independent Bernie Sanders, that's one. You think friend-of-Wall-Street Hillary Clinton was going to push for socialism? I wish! And before you spit on European socialism, I suggest you travel a bit in Europe. Because I've been a few times and people seem perfectly happy there. If European socialism was so dreadful, the citizens of these democratic countries could easily vote to replace it. The fact that
The “fundamental transformation” that candidate Barack Obama promised in
2008 would have been completed by Hillary Clinton in 2016.
And by "fundamental transformation," you mean more people now having the ability to see doctors and get medicine. Because that's really the biggest change I can think of from the Obama Administration. Oh, my God, what if Hillary had completed this? What if even more people got access to doctors? And medicine?
To my amazement, no anti-Trump conservative writer sees it that way.
They all thought during the election, and still think, that while it
would not have been a good thing if Hillary Clinton had won, it wouldn’t
have been a catastrophe either.
Wow, that really sums up Hillary Clinton in a nutshell. Wouldn't have been great, but not terrible. As opposed to electing a narcissistic man-baby conspiracy theorist with the attention span of a gnat.
That’s it, in a nutshell. Many conservatives, including me, believe that
it would have been close to over for America as America if the
Republican candidate, who happened to be a flawed man named Donald
Trump, had not won. Moreover, I am certain that only Donald Trump would
have defeated Hillary Clinton.
So you'd rather have a senile sociopath with serious impulse control leaking classified information all over the globe than a dull, middling centrist who might do what, nominate a judge who would uphold Roe v Wade?
In other words, I believe that Donald Trump may have saved the country.
And that, in my book, covers a lot of sins — foolish tweets, included.
Really. This guy?
This is the guy you think is going to "save America?"
Not this guy:
But this guy?
The Never Trump conservative argument that Trump is not a conservative —
one that I, too, made repeatedly during the Republican primaries — is
not only no longer relevant, it is no longer true.
Really? He became a conservative in 6 months? And you think this mercurial, capricious nature is a positive attribute?
Had any Never Trump conservative been told, say in the summer of 2015,
that a Republican would win the 2016 election and, within his first few
months in office, appoint a conservative to the Supreme Court; begin the
process of replacing Obamacare; bomb Russia’s ally Assad after he again
used chemical weapons; appoint the most conservative cabinet in modern
American history; begin undoing hysteria-based, economy-choking EPA
regulations; label the Iranian regime “evil” in front of 50 Muslim heads
of state; wear a yarmulke at the Western Wall;
Um. . .
I'm not really sure why you get bonus points for knowing the proper headgear to wear to one of Israel's holiest sites, but if you're giving out these points, you gotta give 'em to the last couple guys too.
Also, I don't know why you get any points for appointing the judge that Heritage and the Federalsit society told you to appoint. I mean, contrary to what Mitch McConnell may say, appointing judges is just part of the president's job. And when your party controls the Senate, it's not even a challenging part.
And why anyone gets any points for removing rules that keep the air breathable and the water drinkable and keeps rivers from catching fire is beyond me.
And you neglected to mention that he also appointed the least qualified cabinet in history.
Anyway, it goes on for a while and I have to turn in, but let me just note for the record that nowhere in this ridiculous screed does Prager mention a single "anti-Trump conservative." So I win that bet!
