Rosie basically defends Rush. If what Rush did was so bad, how can we tolerate the Swedish Chef?
Here's Rush defending himself, bringing up Sid Caesar and Mickey Rooney in "Breakfast at Tiffany's."
Back in the old days, Sid Caesar, for those of you old enough to remember, was called a comic genius for impersonating foreign languages that he couldn't speak. But today the left says that was racism; it was bigotry; it was insulting. And it wasn't....
Have you ever seen the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's?... Then somebody needs to call Mickey Rooney and say, "Pal, that movie is very popular. You don't know how much of Chinese, Japanese culture you destroyed." They had Mickey Rooney playing, I forget whether it was a Japanese or Chinese character, complete with the buckteeth and the fake phony accent. I mean it's one of the greatest movies reputed of all time, Audrey Hepburn, George Peppard, any number of people in that movie.
ADDED: I must say, I never found the Swedish Chef funny. It's just about laughing at the sound of a foreign language. Pretty low humor. I think the criticisms of the humor are overdone and obviously politically motivated.
AND: In case you didn't listen to the Rosie clip, Rosie's defense of Rush is interesting because she herself was savaged for imitating Chinese speech. That was back in 2006. Here's Michelle Malkin attacking her — mainly for hypocrisy. Malkin's point is: Don't ever go PC on conservatives, now, because you yourself were not PC.
“You keep asking these presentist questions,” said the Kenyan-born, British-accented historian.
Kenyan-born...
“As the immortal Marisa Tomei said in 'My Cousin Vinny,' ‘That’s a f----- up question!'” Morris said, relishing over the word as network censors bleeped him out.
“You cannot pluck people out of the past and expect them to comment on what’s happening today,” he continued.
Yeah, it's a fucked up question, but I bet Doris Kearns Goodwin would answer it. I mean, she'd whip out a juicy anecdote that would seem to answer it. Come on, Edmund, cast off your Kenyan-born, British-accented attitude and play the media game.
“I can only say that what he represented in his time is what we hope for in our presidents now, what we look for in our presidents now and what we’re increasingly disappointed by. He understood foreign culture, recognized the dignity of the United States. He was forceful yet dignified. And what I really feel these days is, we’ve become such an insular people.”
Good evening... this is my last broadcast. Yesterday, I announced on this program that I was going to commit public suicide, admittedly an act of madness. Well, I'll tell you what happened: I just ran out of bullshit. Am I still on the air? I really don't know any other way to say it other than I just ran out of bullshit. Bullshit is all the reasons we give for living. And if we can't think up any reasons of our own, we always have the God Bullshit. We don't know why we're going through all this pointless pain, humiliation, decay, so there better be someone somewhere who does know. That's the God Bullshit. And then, there's the noble man bullshit — that man is a noble creature that can order his own world. Who needs God? Well, if there's anybody out there that can look around this demented slaughterhouse of a world we live in and tell me that man is a noble creature, believe me, that man is full of bullshit. I don't have anything going for me. I haven't got any kids. And I was married for 33 years of shrill, shrieking fraud. So I don't have any bullshit left. I just ran out of it, you see.
More from Morris the Cat Kenyan:
Morris went on to criticize the American people, who he said “are insensitive to foreign sensibilities, who are lazy, obese, complacent and increasingly perplexed as to why we are losing our place in the world to people who are more dynamic than us and more disciplined.”
So... like... the terrorists? They do maintain more slim and toned bodies. Man, he just came out and called us fat! He ran out of bullshit!
UPDATE: My original link goes to Politico, which records Morris as saying "That’s a f----- up question!" But here's the video and, although the bleep is there, it seems that Morris said "That’s a bullshit question!" That would correspond to what Marisa Tomei said:
Strangely, I was motivated to call bullshit on Morris and go on to discuss "bullshit" in that other movie ("Network").
With health care politics raging, it's refreshing to debate over something — anything — else, and here, John Hinderaker has just listed a bunch of controversial things he feels like asserting are true. (Via Instapundit.) I'm going to respond to the items that it amuses me to respond to.
* Much as Bob Dylan was the most authentic spokesman for his generation, Taylor Swift is the most authentic spokesman for hers.
During the first half of the concert, after singing "Gates of Eden," Dylan got into a little riff about how the song shouldn't scare anybody, that it was only Halloween, and that he had his Bob Dylan mask on. "I'm masquerading!" he joked, elongating the second word into a laugh. The joke was serious. Bob Dylan, né Zimmerman, brilliantly cultivated his celebrity, but he was really an artist and entertainer, a man behind a mask, a great entertainer, maybe, but basically just that—someone who threw words together, astounding as they were. The burden of being something else — a guru, a political theorist, "the voice of a generation," as he facetiously put it in an interview a few years ago — was too much to ask of anyone.
But no, it's not a trick assertion because he said "most authentic." Or is it that we Baby Boomers were raging phonies, and the biggest phony would thus be the most authentic. As for Taylor Swift, she seems like a nice person. Is she bland or am I jaded to find her too bland to care about? Is one more or less authentic when nice and bland?
So, my proposition is: Authenticity is bogus.
Back to Hinderaker:
* The three most desirable actresses in movie history are Paulette Goddard, Anna Karina and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
"Desirability" isn't a good abstraction. Hinderaker likes the brunette gamine.
* London is the world's greatest city, and Israel is the world's most exciting place.
I can live without that kind of excitement. Have you noticed Indiana?
* America's youth have never been the same since Saturday morning television went from real programming (Fury, Sky King, the Cisco Kid, etc.) to cartoons.
I can't even remember that those shows were on in the morning. When I think about "Sky King," I remember this from Bill Bryson's "Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid": "Even at six years old, and even in an age as intellectually undemanding as the 1950s, you didn't have to be hugely astute to see that a flying cowboy was a fairly flimsy premise for an action series. Sky could only capture villains who lingered at the edge of grassy landing strips and to whom it didn't occur to run for it until Sky had landed, taxied to a safe halt, climbed down from the cockpit, assumed an authoritative stance, and shouted 'Okay, boys, freeze!' — a process that took a minute or two, for Kirby Grant was not, it must be said, in the first flush of youth." Now, I have to admit, I didn't think about that at the time. What I thought about was how it seemed that there was a competition between "Sky King" and "Whirlybirds" and that everyone had an opinion about whether they preferred airplanes or helicopters. I was adamantly helicopterist.
So my controversial proposition will be: The best people prefer helicopters to airplanes.
* The only good lawyer show in the history of television was Perry Mason.
* The smartest person whom most Americans see on a regular basis is Simon Cowell.
Ha. Maybe. I'm going with a corollary: Americans are better able to enjoy displays of intelligence that come with a British accent. And: What seems especially smart about Cowell is that he's willing to come right out and say — quite directly — things that are true. He gets away with doing that on television because he's got a British accent. An American panelist with the same amount of time to express an opinion will need to blow at least half of it on blather intended to make us feel that he is a nice (and normal) person.
That's all I've got to say. Sorry I didn't take the bait on any of Hinderaker's historical propositions — the best and worst characters in history and so forth. Or, no, I can make one very grand assertion: The best and the worst human beings who ever lived were undoubtedly shunned by most people and forgotten soon after they died.
Reid is apologizing profusely, now that those quotes appear in a new book. How many other Democrats said more or less the same thing?
Biden famously said, "I mean, you got the first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," and he went on to become Obama's choice for VP.
Can we infer that they were pretty much all saying that?
ADDED: I'm very interested in this "unless he wanted to have one" idea. I'm picturing them trying to figure out whether it might be effective, at least some of the time, to dial up the dialect and just how far would be appropriate. I'm thinking maybe Hillary paid attention...
I've got to tell you, I laughed like mad at the trailer for the new Michael Moore movie "Capitalism: A Love Story":
I will definitely see this movie. Annoying as I've found Michael Moore at times in the past, I love the light but stinging touch. Quite charming, if the trailer is accurate.
Okay, see? Sometimes I throw out red meat for the liberals.
Now, here's red meat for you righties. In the trailer at 1:40, we hear and then see George W. Bush and — even though I was in a theater in the lefty hotbed of Madison, Wisconsin — I leaned over to my seatmate (the estimable Meade) and said (loud enough to be heard): "I miss that guy."
***
The movie we were seeing was — as the previous post hints — "Inglourious Basterds." In "Chapter 2" of that film, when Brad Pitt first appeared, Meade now says — if he hadn't needed to maintain Hoosierly etiquette — he wanted to lean over to me and whisper "George W."
And it's true. Brad Pitt is kind of doing a George Bush impersonation. (Meade points to 0:30 in this trailer, when the character says "killin' Nazis.") Now, it's an awful accent, really. And I don't think it's a Tennessee accent, which is what we're told it is. Oddly, later in the movie, there's a whole thing about speaking Italian with a bad accent, and Pitt's is the worst of the bad accents, so maybe there — and throughout the movie — Quentin Tarantino intended to treat us to layer upon layer of joking.
