In Obama’s America
Shorter literal William Kristol:
When The Decline and Fall of the American Republic is written centuries hence, the date October 17, 2012, will occupy a prominent place in the narrative. On this day, a playoff game between the Yankees and the Tigers in Detroit was called not because of rain, but because of … the threat of rain. Just as today’s “liberalism has become hardly more than a trembling in the presence of illiberalism,” so, in Obama’s America, Major League Baseball cancels games not because of rain but because of trembling in the presence of the threat of rain.
OK he’s kidding.
Right?
The only good William Kristol is a William Kristol who’s been strapped to the top of a light post during a baseball game that’s been cancelled because of the threat of rain.
Ever since President Obama nationalized major league baseball….
You have to cut Kristol some slack, though – he likes his presidents to be Republican and incompetent, and that’s a hard case to make with facts and logic.
Another thing you have to do is admit that if Herr Kristol were a comedian, that would be a damn funny essay. I mean, show it to someone who doesn’t know him and ask.
Ironia est deperditum.
K-R-I… wait, I think you misspelled “The Onion.”
Does this mean that the American Republic will never fall?
Not necessarily. William Kristol Is Never Right is an axiom of the universe, but there are many ways this particular snippet quoted here could end up wrong:
* The American Republic never falls
* The American Republic falls, but no one writes about it
* The American Republic falls, and is written about, but the date October 17, 2012 has no prominent place in the story
* The American Republic falls, and is written about, and the date October 17, 2012 has a prominent place in the story, but it isn’t because of the Tigers/Yankees game.
So the universe has a lot of wiggle room here for Kristol to be wrong.
These are the good end up…obviously wrong… :)
Leadership Coach
It’s all part of the pussification of America, like that dinging noise your car makes if you open your door with the keys still in the ignition. Is that what government should be wasting MY money on? Be a man, Barack Obama! REMEMBER YOUR OWN DAMN KEYS .
Yeah, its a common RWing snark. According to the Right, the Left used the phrase “in Bush’s America” whenever something terrible happened in America.
I have no idea if the Right is right, but I understand that they see it as payback.
Right. Because it’s not like, before Bush II, anybody on the right blamed something like, oh I don’t know, a woman drowning her children in a car, on Bill Clinton.
Once again, alarmingly stupid commentary on the part of right wingers must be snark, rather than the alarmingly stupidity it patently is.
I don’t know about you, but I’m blaming Grover Cleveland for this. I’ll have Erik on my side, at least.
Just out of curiosity, I checked Google results for “Bush’s America” versus “Obama’s America”. Even after filtering out “movie” and “D’souza”, the numbers are roughly 90k Bush references and over 3M mentions of Obama.
Providing reasons for the difference is left as an exercise for the reader.
From one of the men who didn’t want the Iraq War cancelled no matter what, this make perfect sense – the very threat of anything means you go, Go, GO!, despite what the experts are telling you – nuclear, chemical, biological, or meteorological!
Hey, the threat of WMD’s didn’t stop Bush and the Neocons from playing their little games!!!
And after those threats proved to be nothing, they lost the game anyway.
But, who cares?
All that’s important is that they played it anyway!
After all, you can’t win it, unless you’re in it!!!
Yeah. This is particularly rich coming from a man who apparently never sees a “threat” that isn’t worth exploiting for political purpose, and/or spending a whole lot of American blood and treasure preemptively. Um, do the words “mushroom cloud” ring any bells, Billy?
Kristol is, of course, too young to remember the 2011 playoffs, where the Yankees and Tigers started Game 1 under similar circumstances, only to have the rest of the game postponed to the following day due to rain in the 2nd inning. The result was to waste starts by Verlander and Sabathia (and Verlander was less than his usual self trying to come back and pitch in Game 3)
I might add, that this type of mistake is part of a pattern with Kristol. For example, he want to fight iran, but that’s only because he’s too young to remember what happened when we fought Iraq.
In that sense, he’s probably too young to remember what he had for breakfast today.
true that. the romans called off a grand ol’ lion feeding frenzy war on xmas at the coliseum due to some sort of weather event … no roman holiday, no rome … i believe it was biggus dickus (diccus?) who made that fated call
billyK considers breathing a force majeure event, thereby releasing him from any obligation to anything resembling sanity …
My jaw has dropped. That’s some pretty purple prose for such a minor thing, at least in the annals of history.
Try George Will sometime on the same subject.
I actually thought that was George F. Will at first, until I realized that it was lacking a plethora of ponderous and pretentious polysyllabilicity.
Let me try to clarify:
For Kristol, professional baseball is a metaphor for what’s gone wrong in America. Except for the top 1% of players getting paid really high wages, the owners doing even better courtesy of taxpayer-funded stadiums, and everything else that’s good about capitalism.
For Will, professional baseball is great! It’s college football that is the metaphor for our nation’s crumbling virtues.
Those damn union layabout baseball players.
THIS, THIS IS OBUMMERS AMERICA!
Union NFL refs, union basketball players, union hockey players. See, this is what happens when Obama’s bashing of the job creators riles up all that class warfare
Billy is just fighting for the middle class people! These poor baseball players, what have we done to them!? If Billy’s agenda gets passed, he will help these middle class people.
Shee-it. The Brits call off a day’s play during test matches when the light changes.
But it’s cricket. It’s supposed to take forever.
or something to do between the various tea serving times.
A brit once explained to me that cricket is just an excuse to drink gin and tonic, so that’s why the rules don’t really matter.
I thought it was more “the Yankees fans are such whiny asses that we’d better play it safe & move the game so we don’t have to listen to how they were ROBBED.”
It actually totally screws the Yankees- should their hitting prayers to Joe-Boo be answered and they somehow make it to a game 7, they’ll have to go to their 5th starter (#4 got injured, 1-2-3 are the next 3 days.) The postponed game ensures that their #1 starter will only pitch once in a 7 game series, practically unheard-of.
Well, he would obviously start this hypothetical game 7 on 3 days rest, but anyhooo…
I think the Yankees would be OK with me starting if they were guaranteed a 7th game.
THE YANKEES WERE ROBBED BY THEM CANCELLING THE GAME NOW SABATHIA CAN’T START GAME 7 THAT’LL NEVER HAPPEN
I think only a cowardly liberal could fail to see that “rain” is an anagram of “Iran”. What will the Ayatollahs think of us if we quake at a mere anagram of their islamoterror?
Code: BROKEN.
That’s some dog whistle.
Anagrams are easier to detect at higher frequencies.
The apology tour strikes again!
Ok, I’ll do the shorter:
Radar, how the fuck does it work?
The facts once again have a liberal bias!
+1
Oh, yeah? Well, back before the greatest generation went off to whip Hitler, nobody mentioned radar during weather reports. Yet today, when we lack the will to eradicate Islamism before it eradicates us, we hear about radar all the time. Coincidence? I think not.
liberalism has become hardly more than a trembling in the presence of illiberalism
Ironically, I agree quite a bit with this statement. It seems that Kristol’s preference is that we should therefore embrace illiberalism. Accordingly, it is Romney and Ryan’s solemn mission to persuade the public to do so. I’m not kidding.
That’s an interesting point of view. I think you can argue that the modern “conservative” movement is more anti-liberal than conservative. While the bigwigs might be more interested in preservation of the existing power structure, the sound and fury is all about what they hate. They hate all aspects of liberalism even where liberalism doesn’t conflict with conservatism.
They hate women and minorities now more than they want to exploit them. They hate science too much to pursue profitable long-term energy policies.
It’s been coming for a while but 2010 seems to have been the year that the reactionaries became more anti-liberal than conservative.
You left out the biggest conundrum of all. What if Bill Kristol and Dick Morris predict opposite things. We all scoffed at the Mayan prophecy, and yet here we are with potential cataclysm staring us in the face…
That will cause a rift in space time. Tax cuts would raise revenue, presidents would become wimps and tyrants, facism would become communism, dumbfuck teabaggers would become constitutional experts. This can never happen.
The only thing worse would be if one of them predicted that nothing could be divided by zero.
Goodbye, sweet universe.
If Dick Morris and Bill Kristol were in direct opposition, I would assume that Morris was inadvertently adopting an accurate stance for purely political reasons.
Charles Krauthammer is the tie-breaker.
BilK has his own distinguished career as a professional athlete to compare to this situation.
in Obama’s America hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
that design might cover their face,
in Obama’s America
hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall
harpes et luz
or where virgin receiveth message
and halo projects from incision,
in Obama’s America
seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but it is made to sell and sell quickly
in Obama’s America, sin against nature,
is thy bread ever more of stale rags
is thy bread dry as paper,
with no mountain wheat, no strong flour
in Obama’s America the line grows thick
in Obama’s America is no clear demarcation
and no man can find site for his dwelling.
Stonecutter is kept from his tone
weaver is kept from his loom
IN OBAMA’S AMERICA
. . . . . . .
. . . and so on.
CONTRA NATURAM, BITCHEZ
+N, for all positive values of N.
Nothing like a career desk jobber to sneer at guys who won’t risk electrocution for a game.
So Bill Kristol’s reduced himself to biting Dennis Prager’s schtick. A few years ago Prager when nuclear when the mayor of Philadelphia begged the NFL to cancel an Eagles game because of snow, which of course in Dennis’ mind was The Beginning of The Fall of The Republic.
biting Dennis Prager’s schtick
Typo or pun? In either case, ouch, and ewww.
This is why Kristol is an intellectual giant among wingnuts: he actually picked a date when Obama was President, rather than something that happened, say, in 2005.