Tag Archives: Bogeymen

Is Palin writing for SNL or vice versa? Who are this election’s screenwriters?

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Remember when Sarah Palin gave her infamous 2008 Katie Couric interview? Palin’s disordered responses were so Miss Teen Carolina that Saturday Night Live writers didn’t have to wring out a parody. Instead Tina Fey brought down the house by repeating Palin’s folksy schtick verbatim. Essentially SNL added a laugh track. Every week the entire country tuned in to SNL in anticipation of Fey’s mimicry act. Eight years later Palin has come out of the wood paneling to endorse fellow freak Donald Trump. Immediately everyone is salivating for the SNL instant replay. Hmm.

It seems Sarah Palin has reprised her role as fount of Ugly Americanisms and I have to wonder. Maybe SNL’s humorists hadn’t caught a break after all. Maybe they had been hard at work in preproduction. Working on Sarah Palin as season pilot. Gag writers didn’t have to write a Palin parody because they drafted the original jokes.

We like to think of our comedians as authors of their own brilliant wit, yet we know their TV talk shows employ gaggles of writers. It’s true from Comedy Central to the Tonight Show. Why do we give a village idiot like Sarah Palin credit for her seamlessly funny imbecility?

Or Donald Trump for that matter? Trump has yet to miss a single sour note or plumb an inoffensive punchline with his every gutterance.

If we recognize the American two party system and its lesser of bogeymen false choice as an unchanging melodrama, we must consider the show has its screenwriters. Palin and Trump and Hillary and Bernie are reciting lines already tested on focus groups, seasoned to our taste, to manufacture consent for political continuity.

And how about casting directors? Somebody is deciding who gets the screentime. Why is anyone asking Sarah Palin’s opinion about Trump or anything for that matter. What qualifies Palin to opine at all? She’s been neither public figure, candidate, governor, nor mayor of Alaska’s meth capitol, since she came and went two elections cycles ago.

Political kingmaking is frequently attenuated by media gatekeepers but clearly the casting decisions they make are based on viewership ratings.

If there’s a show with cast and crew, there’s a showrunner. Elsewhere in TV-land the spotlights is regularly turned on them. I’m not talking about campaign managers or party heads, they are the stage managers or Don Pardos at best. Showrunners are the real auteurs, if that word doesn’t lend excessive dignity to their oeuvre, which is crap.

Team Obama 2008 won advertizing’s most prestegious award for that brand’s successful campaign. The Cleo is an industry award, generally outside the public’s viewshed. Of course the awards should have been Emmys.

If you want to see the real wits behind the scenes, it’s time to unmask the twits. Exile them to Reality TV where they belong. Let us accept or reject the showrunners if you’re going to pretend this is a democracy.

Will the 99% Spring mean grassroots reinforcements for Occupy or MoveOn?

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I’m going to think that the more mobilization of the 99% the better, no matter if it’s, ding-dong MoveOn Calling. The vast 99 are wise to the corporations and the corporate media, I think they’ll recognize when corporate organizers try to co-opt their protest. It might be bad enough that MoveOn’s nationwide “Nonviolence Teach-in” wants to defang the popular uprising, they probably imagine the public’s anger can be refocused on the usual Republican bogeymen. What’s so nefarious about MoveOn? It backs President Obama. That means even though MoveOn wants to play megaphone for the 99% and its demands, it’s actually against all of them. MoveOn Obama is against Wall Street reform, against universal healthcare, against action on climate change, against fill-in-the-blank if the people are for it! MoveOn’s centralized DC HQ, effective but decidedly not-grassy, will probably be its undoing.

Fox News is the media’s Sarah Palin

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Do you wonder how it is Fox News can retain its broadcasting license? While traditional news outlets scrupulously uphold a pretense of objectivity, Fox spews forth with unapologetic propaganda, often easily debunked. You’d think our government could prosecute Fox for abuse of the public airwaves, for propagating untruths, even treason. Is it that regulators must not be seen to pick on conservative voices, or that this comically-rendered caricature of the Right is better than a real critic? They may be unfunny clowns, but they’re our clowns.

Fox as a distinct role within the corporate media. As Palin to Obama, or Mel Gibson to the Israeli Lobby, they’re bogeymen meant to frighten in a calculated way.

NY trial no threat for Guantanamo 5

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BUSH REGIME ENGINEERED 9-11Whatsa matter Mayor Giuliani? Are you afraid if the 9/11 suspects come to trial in NYC, that these 9/11 TRUTH fellows might turn up? It was your Ground Zero hero’s launchpad, this time it may be theirs.

You and the media paint the Guantanamo 5 as guilty, without a trial. Sarah Palin would like to see them executed before a trial, allegedly. We can grant her the benefit of the doubt to not have said something so callous, but there’s no charity left for ragheads. Maybe a drone outfit could target Guantanamo, and we’d be spared having to incarcerate its inmates elsewhere. The detainees have already served eight years of inhumane detention and torture. I’m very enthused to see them get a day in court. They’re what, innocent until proven guilty, so that makes them suspects, at best alleged terrorists. You call them terrorists, but at worst they are terror conspirators. Neither are, after all, the nineteen hijackers.

Speaking of which, if you could get your hands on the hijackers who were mistakenly identified to have been on the plane, who are taunting you from their homes in the Middle East, if you could extradite them, what charges would you bring? Conspiracy to impersonate phantom bogeymen?

Normally high profile defendants plead to be tried away from the population center of their victims. For NINE ELEVEN there may be a case to make either way. The “9/11 terrorists” may face a tough crowd sourced from NY’s bitterly racist civil servants. On the other hand, the aftermath of Ground Zero has ruined a whole lot more people than were killed in the twin towers and were bought off handsomely to ask no questions.

Speaking of the 9/11 victim families, when are we going to quit asking the families about this, that, and how to proceed in Afghanistan?! We’re ALL OF US VICTIMS OF 9/11 NOW! None more than the Iraqis and Afghans, and poor people everywhere the US is prosecuting its War On Terror. They’re offered a pittance for their loses, Americans are losing sons and daughters, husbands and wives, and sometimes the survivors get a favorable insurance payout, but the rest of us get zilch, that much credit, and a broken economy. The 9/11 family survivors were compensated for the lost expected income of their darling WTC financiers, plus a little extra to stay away from the 9/11 Widows, the true patriots. Of course the war industry and its corporate media look to the 9/11 families when the public needs a booster shot of embittered venom, but why are the rest of us not laughing in derision? Come on, you fathers and mothers of bitches. You took your silver, now beat it to Cancun. No more innocents need to die because you can’t come to terms with the fact that your Little Eichmanns got their due.

The GOP culpables are wondering aloud if NYC trials for the terror suspects would in reality put America on trial. You betcha!

Usually when the posses returns with the wanted men, the deputes have to protect them from the angry mob trying to break into the jail to have a lynching. Rudy Giuliani and his GOP can see the mob already converging for the trials, and they know it’s not the Guantanamo Five they’re after.