Let Them Eat Pussy: The Moveable Feast of Rob Ford

I feel conflicted about Rob Ford. On the one hand, it's impossible not to feel a wrench of pity and also a sense of self-loathing creepiness at bearing witness to someone's total self-destruction. On the other hand, Jacobin neatly outlines all the ways in which Ford is a civically and socially destructive asshole of the first order. If he's going to do his damnedest to blow everything else up, the motherfucker might as well take himself with it.

Then we also have to admit that everything about Rob Ford is strangely awesome. Not in the approving, "Rad, dude!" sense of the word, but in the original sense of inspiring a kind of bewildered awe. Beyond any sense of body-shaming, Ford is awfulness writ large. He has the decency to do gross things grossly, where there's no chance of anyone arguing inference and insinuation on the part of critics. You couldn't find a lustier representation of the I-enjoy-now, you-pay-later schtick of modern conservatism. Someone gave Falstaff a city, and all he had to give up in exchange was his brain. It's fun.

Maybe this is just me. I remember basically enjoying everything about Marion Barry. He was with a prostitute; who cares? She got paid, and she was an adult. He was doing drugs; big deal, everyone I knew admitted to having done drugs. I enjoyed the fact that he was pissing off a bunch of Reagan Democrats who spent the sixties smoking grass and the seventies taking Seconal. Meanwhile they were threatening to sue teachers who used harsh language at Caitlin or Brantley, while sporting huge hard-ons for high school principal Joe Clark because he was threatening black "thug" kids with a baseball bat. Not that this was about race.

Geraldo Rivera's Greatest Hits

by FUQUAMANUEL

As far as Fox News "personalities" go, Geraldo Rivera has always been the most palatable to me. Sean Hannity exudes a smugness unbefitting his accomplishments and intellectual abilities and bleats about "liberal double standards" and "media bias." When he furrows his brow just so and flashes that little smirk, it provokes a Pavlovian fist-through-TV response. Meanwhile, Bill O'Reilly is a bully, constitutionally incapable of recognizing the existence of arguments and perspectives that have not emerged from within his own prodigious skull.

Geraldo, on the other hand, possesses an earnestness and childlike exuberance which at least doesn't make him instantly repulsive. Of course, in his case the line between "earnestness and childlike exuberance" and "buffoonery" is rather blurry, but he seems like the FOX News personality I'd be least likely to get into a bar fight with if we were to one day sit down for drinks.

This is not to say that Geraldo's politics aren't repulsive, nor is it to excuse his desperate attempt to use the Trayvon Martin tragedy to catapult himself back to relevance when he blamed the young man's murder on something other than his murderer. "I think the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman was," he said on Fox and Friends last Friday. He continued:

GAWKER: Michigan, Home of Nothing

The predictive ability of presidential campaigns has been thrown out of kilter by a front-runner who can't win two contests in a row and challengers who can't win more than one on a weekly basis. Michigan didn't clarify anything. Reading meaning from Michigan is like trying to divine a source from the dust storm ejected by a Shop-Vac while politely pretending that nobody brought a device that farts anything.

Click on the Mitt & Rick cuddlebears to be taken to the Gawker article.


Thanks again to Jim Cooke for the excellent image you can see in whole by clicking the above.

Jeff Passan Cares About Judgment and Caring

Josh Hamilton is a very good baseball player, and he is very good at drinking and taking drugs. Drafted first overall by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, he proceeded to flush himself almost entirely out of baseball on waves of booze and coke. After being chastised by family and realizing how far he'd fallen, he straightened out his life and became the amazing player everyone expected him to be. Still, as is the case with many addicts, he's had relapses. He had one again Monday.

As of now, no one is sure what really happened. That didn't hinder Yahoo Sports' Jeff Passan (who readers last met being defended by Bill Plaschke) from telling you what it meant. He said so in plain terms: "The particulars... don't matter as much as the act."

As of now, no one can be sure of the particulars of Jeff Passan's column. After printing it, he was immediately engaged, criticized or taken to task by baseball writers and personalities Kevin Goldstein, Old Hoss Radbourn and Jay Jaffe. He then announced that he was "updating column to suss [sic] out the point." (I'm sure Passan didn't intend to use "suss" correctly — as in "to figure out" — although God knows that he might as well have, if his aim was to contrive an opinion different from the one he'd plainly voiced.) He added that he "[wanted] to make sure for the majority of those who read in the morning, my feelings on the subject are clearer. Do not want greater point lost."

Here's the problem: the greater point wasn't lost. The greater point begins his column:

World War Newt

Years ago Newt Gingrich stumbled on a pretty good idea: garnish any policy proposal with multiple historical analogies or references to significant events and hope that one resonates with the audience.

History moves us; it bestows on us the sense that the mundane moments we endure are part of an as-yet unperceived grand narrative. Newt's schtick is that he alone perceives this narrative, and it works for two reasons.

One, as I said in a piece at Vice:

We Americans don't read as much as we ought, and our self-consciousness about this tends to make us reflexively credit anyone who claims he does. Gingrich tendentiously delivers policy banalities while citing books he's read or written, and it's easy to think, "Ah, a learned observation." It's the political equivalent of going to someone's house, seeing his 2,000-book library, and feeling uncomfortable about correcting him, even if everything he says makes him sound like Cliff Clavin.

Two, critics and historians are busy people. They don't have time to correct Gingrich on every point, because corrections require examining his statement, then having to explain where he and history parted ways.

Gingrich himself games this process by invoking history constantly, as if in a kind of endless filibuster against an authentic record of America that he dearly hopes to eliminate through repetition. Not only does he throw facts at the American people to see which ones stick, he also throws so many at intellectuals that eventually their exhaustion, disgust or crowded schedules will permit him to get away with one. He did this again last night, at CNN's South Carolina Republican Debate.

Shantytown on the Fourth Estate

I think we were very deferential because in the East Room press conference it's live. It's very intense. It's frightening to stand up there. Think about it. You're standing up on prime-time live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country's about to go to war. There was a very serious, somber tone that evening, and no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time.
— Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times writer, March 20, 2003

Yesterday, New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane solicited reader input with an opening sentence so viscerally and efficiently dumb that it's almost sublime: "I'm looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news reporters should challenge 'facts' that are asserted by newsmakers they write about." Essentially, the ombudsman of the most important newspaper in America crowdsourced the idea that reporters might do their jobs.

The response was electric, and a majority of it featured the word "stupid," all of it deserving. Brisbane managed to pull off a stupid trifecta even before moving on from the lede:

1. He asked a question whose reply — YES — was almost guaranteed, making the asking a waste of everyone's time.
2. He asked a question whose obvious reply the Times might not embrace, trolling its readership with the illusion of valuing its voice in the discourse.
3. He showed the world that he was a person who had thoughts this simple and that the New York Times is willing to pay a person like this to head up its public accountability department.

Then, after provoking a giant readership on a topic this compelling and distressing, either Brisbane or someone else closed the comments section on his piece. Instantly, it evinced to critics that reader input — which was almost uniformly critical — would not be needed if it continued to fall on the undesirable side of the issue.

Still, as easy as it is to dismiss this as the unsupervised elementary thought experiment of a hack shunted to the reader complaint bureau, it's hard to shake the notion that the experiment was cannily structured. It's worth taking a look at how much work all its stupidity manages to accomplish in its favor.

VICE: Ron Paul, Part III: The Enpaulening

Today, on Vice, we have to deal with Ron Paul, Part III: The Enpaulening. There was the first version, and it was ugly and real, not like what we expected. It was like First Blood.

Then the replies made it all a vengeful, direct attack on something that was right. Like Rambo: First Blood Part II. We had to kill — even the made-up crap. We had to look the bad thing in the eye and say, "Aaauughhh!!!" Now, the third part, like Rambo III, it's about Afghanistan. We need to get the bad guys out. We need to fight them. Only the bad guys are us and Ron Paul is... right?

He is. Click the man who has delivered over 4,000 babies to be delivered to the Vice article that reconsiders Ron Paul:


One thing that couldn't be addressed in the Vice piece, for space constraints, is that Paul is the only major politician on the radar of the 24-hour news who rejects any premise for invading or interfering with Iran, which pairs the most sensible attitude on the matter with the most easily maligned candidate. The United States either has troops, drones or sympathetic regimes surrounding Iran, and American foreign policy wonks daily advocate either an invasion or terroristic strikes on sites within its borders.

Increasingly, our justification for striking at Iran is its angry opposition to the fact that we surround Iran, threaten to bomb it and may already be doing so via clandestine strikes and assassinations. We practice a bullying foreign policy, and then we act surprised when that policy backfires. Our only solution is to double down on that bellicosity and violently eradicate the same antipathy that we've directly engendered.

Lastly, while you're there, feel free to keep clicking the MORE button and dig on those comments. There's probably a 5-1 ratio of negative to positive responses, which is sort of entertaining when it's not a stone bummer.

Penn State: 'Did They Do Enough?'

Note: unlike many guest pieces on Et tu, Mr. Destructo? today's article comes from a real, live person: the mysterious Mr. Awesome, an underemployed law school graduate. He wants a job, very badly. He will also do part-time writing or editing work. He would like to be paid money. He would also enjoy health insurance, but nothing fancy. He fears nothing and has great credentials.


Pretend Moral Quandaries for People Who Don't Know Anything
by MR. AWESOME

From the outset, news coverage of the Penn State scandal has baffled me. Like all good law students, I sat through Legal Ethics 101. The practices and procedures of internal reporting requirements are burned into my brain. I saw correspondents and talking heads going on about whether Joe Paterno, Mike McQueary, et al "did enough" by internally reporting these allegations in and through the Penn State bureaucracy.

I thought to myself, "Self, this is a corporate lawyer question. Why are these journalists asking corporate lawyer questions?" This news coverage confused me, gave me distorted, sideways flashbacks to the legal ethics course, only with everything just slightly off — like talking to an old friend in a dream, and he was an accomplice to decades of rape.

VICE: 'Really? Newt Gingrich?'

Bad historian, worse novelist, wife-and-idea recycler and generally insufferable fatlord Newt Gingrich took the lead in the race for the Republican presidential nominee this weekend. Finding Newt in the lead in this horrific contest despite all the pragmatic assumptions about his chances and his sincerity is like overhearing someone start to tell a mortifyingly inappropriate joke at a cocktail party and then realizing that there is no punchline — someone actually means this.

Of course, Gingrich's surge comes on the same weekend that Mitt Romney was supposed to hit people with a gangbusters announcement that would reward them for spending 48 hours walking around with iPhones in front of their faces and frantically hitting REFRESH on social media. Naturally there was no announcement. At all. What can it possibly mean?

For more, click on the smilin' Newt and the Manson-eyed mantis below to be taken to Vice:

Attaboy, Bloomberg!

Apparently between appointments to explain to people that minorities and poor would-be homeowners tanked the American economy with billions of dollars of debt brought on by 40-1 leveraging, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg decided to wipe the hippie smears off one of his parks. So long, for now, Occupy Wall Street.

I'm sure Bloomberg thinks he has a plan, and I'm sure he's wrong.

Bloomberg's office claimed that Zucotti Park had to be scoured of people and, with them, unsanitary elements that created a public health and fire hazard. Of course, all this potential epidemic and death lurked in the park before nightfall, before the eleven o'clock news, before people were at home asleep. They would also lurk tomorrow, in daylight, when people watch television or are on their way to work.

Given the sophistication of the economic cleansing — subway lines and the Brooklyn Bridge shut down, a mobile infantry division of police and vans, helicopter support and airspace denied to news helicopters, press stripped of credentials and removed from the park — it's difficult to view it as anything other than suppression, both of coverage and of the Occupy Wall Street movement itself.

VICE: 'Herman Cain—One of the Good Ones!'

If Herman Cain knew his greatest value to the GOP was providing distracting cover for "reliable" candidates, he definitely overdid it. Too hardworking and Republican. If only he'd been a "liberal black" about it—lolling his stupefied, unemployed head in squalor and super-fertility, in between compulsively voting for Clintons—he might still have only one sexual harassment allegation and a weird campaign ad starring Joe Camel's sickly cousin, Joe Weasel.

Instead, he apparently tried to grope everything female in the United States, up to and including those so designated only after gender reassignment surgery. So now he's only got one real use: race-based tokenism!

Click the Herm below to be taken to Vice:

Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo: Yer Fracking Dead

Note: every week, news aggregators address hundreds of worthwhile stories or opinions that never catch on, either because they lack an obvious follow-up or because sites that live off ad revenue would rather bang high-traffic drums over and over. Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo provides a summary of good stuff you might have missed. He has a Bachelor's degree in political science, the rank of Field Marshal and was the last ruler of a free Uganda. He has not eaten anyone since 1980.


Wake up to Five-Hour Energy from Glorious Leaders' Natural Gas Plan

of Explosive Prosperity
by IDI AMIN DADA

• Former Governor Tim Pawlenty (R-MN) desperately wants you to pay attention to him. Come on, he's doing all sorts of neat stuff! He's mangling history and likening the National Labor Relations Board to the Soviet Union. He's simultaneously calling Obama a "champion of class warfare" and advocating class warfare, by calling for the elimination of the capital gains tax, the estate tax, interest income taxes and dividend taxes.

That's not all. Pawlenty proposes a flat tax rate of 10% for everybody earning under $100,000 and 25% for everybody earning above that. He claims these tax cuts for the wealthy on an unprecedented scale would lead to 5% growth of the economy over ten years — despite the fact that 5% growth of the economy over ten years has never been done. Ever. Do you care about him yet? Really—no? You're still doing that thing where you stand alone in your driveway shooting free throws and saying to yourself, "If this goes in, it means that Melissa likes me"? Jeez—uh, okay, how about this: he casually mentions a "Google Test" that says if you can find a service being offered by the internet, it should be done by private industry and not government. Some astute people observe that this covers "everything ever."

That Pawlenty is thoroughly unexciting despite his best attempts has been satirized on The Daily Show and Colbert Report for the past few months. However, the media's portrait of him as a non-entity because of his boringness rather than as the sort of person who can destroy the social composition of America via his radical views allows the Republican narrative to slip even further to the right without consequence, so you probably should care about him.

Remembering Amy Winehouse

Note: The talented and troubled English soul singer Amy Winehouse died this weekend at the age of 27. To help us understand the cultural and personal impact of losing such a talented person so prematurely, we the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo? turn to noted family man, Christian and tireless workaholic Bil Keane, creator of the comic strip The Family Circus.


Who Thinks Dying Young Is a Neat

Thing to Do? Not Me.
by BILLY, AGE 7

One time I told my dad that heaven must be getting pretty crowded, because everyone who dies sure is special and got hugged by someone sometime, and my mom always said that getting a hug is like someone handing you a ticket to feeling happy.

Then again, now that I think about it, it must be getting crowded just getting to heaven! Climbing old Jacob's ladder with so many people has got to be pretty darn difficult with folks in front of you stoppin' halfway to look at how small everyone down here on earth is.

Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo

Note: every week, news aggregators address hundreds of worthwhile stories or opinions that never catch on, either because they lack an obvious follow-up or because sites that live off ad revenue would rather bang high-traffic drums over and over. Idi Amin's Briefs Rodeo provides a summary of good stuff you might have missed. He has a Bachelor's degree in political science, the rank of Field Marshal and was the last ruler of a free Uganda. He has not eaten anyone since 1980.


Cut-Pains Courageous; Rep. by Divine Right; and 'How, Redman — Put Down That Firewater'
by IDI AMIN DADA

• The Guardian wonders why the Republicans' budget, from gee-whiz kid Paul Ryan, which balances the budget over a very long period of time via radically slashing social services, is called "courageous" in the American media, while the Congressional Progressive Caucus's budget, which balances the budget much faster and in a fair manner, is all but ignored.

Courageous is an old refrain, and it's the wrong one. Ryan's budget plan has been touted for over a year, with stuff like "analysis of it" only reluctantly dragged into mainstream discussion in the last month. The New Republic's Jonathan Chait even went so far as to bite his magazine's GOP overlords by noting that Ryan used to justify the exact same tax cuts to avoid a budget surplus. Regardless, there's nothing courageous about rephrasing Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign platform. Celebrating tax cuts in America is a gesture of the moral castrati. A really ballsy gesture involves vowing to keep one's promises even to American citizens who lack deep campaign paychecks and vowing to do so by putting the soft screws to someone in a bespoke suit and Sulka tie.

Meanwhile, the Congressional Black Caucus has released an almost completely ignored budget proposal that's so good you should fucking cry, because nothing close to it will ever be enacted. By the reasoning of Beltway "common sense," it's probably because black people are cowards.

Profiles in Florida: Unholy Unions

Democratic candidate for Florida governor Alex Sink recently caused a stir among Republicans and law-enforcement officials with a barrage of ads touting her endorsement by the Florida policeman's union. Though she received the endorsement months ago, the ads are the first time many are hearing it, which means that the rest of the state must now cope with a few people recognizing that the apocalypse is upon them. This is the first time in 20 years that a Democratic gubernatorial candidate has earned the nod.

The St. Petersburg Times has more:

Rick Cochran, vice president of Tampa's police union and a registered Republican, explains the union's reasoning:

The Florida Police Benevolent Association doesn't want Republican candidate Rick Scott to become governor because Scott supports pension reductions and the privatization of prisons.

That would cause prison guards to be laid off, and it would affect officers' pension plans, said Florida union deputy executive director Matt Puckett.

Cochran said that some local members have visited the union's office this week to ask why their group would endorse a Democrat. The party has generally carried the perception of being soft on crime.

"When we explain it, the majority get it," he said of the endorsement. "I've had a few people say that they're a Republican, and they just can't do it."

Frank Gaffney Returns on an Arabian Horse Made of Bullshit

Frank J. Gaffney, friend of the site and the president of the Center for Security Policy, is in the news again. You might remember his "center" as being the "Center of Abstracted Flaming" or the "Center for Torch-Bearing Yahoos." Frank Gaffney is ready to defend America from Islam with aggressive imagineering and bleak forebodings, like a fatal Disney ride set to a Peter Murphy record.

His credentials allowed him to testify in court that the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, Tennessee would represent a beachhead of Islamicism in the heartland of America, beating the drums of a tidal wave of Sharia against the cradle of our Christian hearths like a wolf in a velvet glove. Here's the fun stuff (emphasis mine):

Alvin Greene Behind the Scenes: or, 'How to Get the National Media to Hoax Itself Without Even Trying'

By now you might have read the true story of the Youtube video, "Alvin Greene Is on the Scene," a DIY campaign video promoted on Twitter by "Alvin Greene's" GreeneForSenate account. Earlier, I treated it 100% seriously, speculating about its origins. I did this despite knowing that it was not made by any member of the Greene campaign, but rather San Francisco MC Jay Friedman (aka "Satellite High") and freelance copywriter Justin Cass.

I had to bend over backwards to be able to take the video the slightest bit seriously. Neither man made any significant effort to disguise himself as Alvin Greene or campaign staff, and the contents of the video — song lyrics, music style and editing — made every attempt to seem as corny as possible. It was a hoax that worked without the requisite intent, a misdirection achieved by such an absence of effort at deceit that calling it half-assed overestimates the ass fraction by probably an ass factor of forty.

The un-assed deception did not stop the New York Times and half a dozen media outlets from reporting the video as authentic. They did this despite an absence of credible data linking the video to the campaign or any comment from the campaign itself. I made every effort to satirically bend the truth, while they reported for the record, and the result was an equal stamp of legitimacy for a campaign video that contains at least 45 seconds of LeBron James making killer jams.

The question is, "Why?"

Rage Against the Machine, Join It, Rage Harder, Look Stupid

Is there anything that Rage Against the Machine can't make breathtakingly banal just by being distantly related to it? All it took was a single album cover to somehow rob Thích Quảng Đức's self-immolation of its staggering power and turn it into a pop-cultural talisman borne by the sort of people who can't wait to annoy the shit out of you about the real reason you're never going to see a fusion-powered car even though they already have the technology.

The latest bit of Rage news shows that even if the band drops off the map, somehow something brutally stupid about them will rise to the top:

It takes a lot to get Simon Cowell rattled, but rattled he appears to be. At a press conference today, Cowell acknowledged the Facebook campaign to get Rage Against the Machine's 1992 song, Killing in the Name, to Christmas No 1.... The campaign was started by Tracy and Jon Morter, who launched the Facebook group "Rage Against the Machine for Christmas No 1" earlier this month with the words: "Fed up of Simon Cowell's latest karaoke act being Christmas No 1? Me too ... So who's up for a mass-purchase of the track 'KILLING IN THE NAME' from December 13th (DON'T BUY IT YET!) as a protest to the X Factor monotony?"

Dan Brown Finds Dead Census Worker

Note: we, the good people of Et tu, Mr. Destructo?, don't just offer editorial pieces and book, television and movie reviews. On occasion, we take pleasure in dispatching one of our many guest reporters for in-depth coverage from the field. Today, for the latest on the census worker found dead in rural Kentucky with the word "Fed" scrawled on him, we turn to bestselling author Dan Brown, our stringer in Louisville.


This Could Be the First of a Wave of Crossword-Loving Boy Scouts
by DAN BROWN

Well-liked census taker Bill Sparkman staggered through the verdant greenery of Kentucky's outdoor wilderness. He, a substitute teacher and Boy Scout leader, lunged for the nearest tree he could see, a Green Ash Fraxinus pennsylvanica. Grabbing the barked trunk, the fifty-one-year-old man flung the Appalachian deciduous into his hands until bark tore from the tree and Sparkman collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canopy.

A voice spoke, chillingly close. Who is that voice? Sparkman wondered. From fifteen feet away, it said, "Do not move, Fed."

'No, I don’t want the retarded baby—I want the other one.'

Vanity Fair just published a mini-memoir from Sarah Palin's former son-in-law-to-be, Levi Johnston. It's cobbled together from interviews and written in a streamlined narrative style, obviously with help from Vanity Fair staffers ghosting paragraphs from a bunch of wandering recordings Levi made. Considering much of it is critical of Sarah Palin, the presentation might seem a little slickly unfair. But this was pretty much the case with her campaign speeches and is liable to be the case with her forthcoming autobiography, so it only seems just that what's good for the goose is also good for the gander.

The whole thing is brutally funny in that way things can be funny when they reveal pretty much what you imagined was true all along. For instance:

Coincidentally, there had been a big rumor going around Wasilla that Bristol was pregnant even before she actually was, and Sarah had recently denied it was true. When we told Sarah the news, the first thing that came out of her mouth was “I just told everyone on TV that you weren’t pregnant. So how are you pregnant now?”

You suspected it all along, but now you know: Sarah Palin does not understand how people get pregnant. Hell, you can string this theme through other parts of the interview: "She always wanted things and she wanted other people to get them for her. If she wanted a movie, Bristol and I would go to the video store; if she wanted food, we’d get her something to eat, like a Crunchwrap Supreme from Taco Bell." This could very well be what happens when an infertile mind is told to guard her over-fertile uterus by "wrapping that shit up."

It's only four pages, and they're all gold, even if some of them turn out to be untrue. Also, lest you think I'm being uncharitable to Ms. Palin with this, page four has this gem:

After Tripp was born, Sarah would pay more attention to our son than she would to her own baby, Trig. Sarah has a weird sense of humor. When she came home from work, Bristol and I would be holding Trig and Tripp. Sarah would call Trig—who was born with Down syndrome—“my little Down’s baby.” But I couldn’t believe it when she would come over to us and sometimes say, playing around, “No, I don’t want the retarded baby—I want the other one."

Edit: hat tip to friend and reader Devri for reminding me that Palin has previously had zero tolerance for jokes about special-needs children, such as President Obama's "special olympics" gaffe on The Tonight Show:

"I was shocked to learn of the comment made by President Obama about Special Olympics," Palin said in a statement. "This was a degrading remark about our world's most precious and unique people, coming from the most powerful position in the world."

I don't know; maybe these jokes become totally appropriate again once you quit your job.