Results tagged ‘ Newt Gingrich ’
The Filibuster
Two of your favorite guys have been in the news a lot lately. Glenn Beck
and Roger Clemens. If you had to be either one for a day who you would
you choose?
Greg
Livonia, MI
Wow. How do I even begin? I mean, both men are absolute paragons of masculinity. One man liked to stick needles in his butt on a regular basis and the other cries when he sees a bald eagle. But if I had to choose between the two and spending a day in their skin, I’d have to choose Clemens.
Here’s the problem. When you spend a day as someone, you have to be able to extricate yourself from that person in the end. Clemens doesn’t strike me as the type who has a whole lot going on upstairs. Being in his head is like walking down one long, empty corridor. There are doors here and there and maybe I’d get lucky enough to open the one where he throws the bat at Piazza and figure out what was really going on in that moment.
On the other hand you have Glenn Beck. Have you tried watching the guy’s show? He starts on one thought, flies off on some tangent, leaps off the tangent to attempt an allusion and winds up throwing logic aside for the beautiful simplicity of ad hominem attack. Why doesn’t he like Obama’s health care plan? Well, because the Nazis had a health care plan.
The twists and turns inside that mind are baffling from the outside and could only be more confusing when you’re right in the middle of it. If you go in there, your chances of making it out alive or at least sane are about as good as the odds that Newt Gingrich won’t cheat on this wife. Or that Bill Clinton has been faithful. Yeah, that bad.
So, give me Clemens. He may not be the nicest guy. He may not be the smartest guy. But at least I can kind of figure out what he’s thinking. There’s a simple beauty in that.
-A
A Magical Mystery Tour (Part I)
When I lie, people call me a liar. It’s part of this whole
thing I do called “living in the real world.” I’m not saying I lie
all that often but when I do, I expect to get called out on it. However, it
would be kind of nice, just for once, to live in another world. A world where
words don’t necessarily mean what the dictionary says they mean and where I can
spin the events and claim that the usual consequences don’t apply to me. You
too? You want to live in this world? Well, come with me as we tour of a few of
these magical lands.
PED-opolis:
“I thought they were vitamins.” “Really? It wasn’t just some
sort of magical cream/ointment?” “Sure, I’ve always taken estrogen
hormone therapy. Doesn’t everyone?”
And the list goes on.
Major League Baseball players have a somewhat impressive track record when it
comes to PED prevarications. And the longer this slow leak of names and
offenses takes, the more ridiculous the excuses will become.
However, that’s the beauty of living in a land like this. You never have to
face the truth. You know that MLB is going to slap you with a fine or a
suspension, you either pay it or serve it and then you’re back to doing what
you do best. No silly, not hitting home runs. Finding new ways to beat the
system by masking the drugs you’re taking.
Politicotopia:
Many, many people live in this fantasy land where nothing is ever quite what it
seems. However, one of the more recent newly minted citizens seems to be
carving out his own space and setting the foundations (or lack thereof) of an
enormous castle built almost entirely on sand.
Now, if you follow politics, you know that John Ensign used to be a
fire-breathing dragon of the Newt Gingrich led Republican Revolution. And he
was so personally affronted by Bill Clinton’s “low morals” in the
Monica Lewinsky affair that he helped push through the president’s impeachment
and urged him to resign since his actions meant he could no longer be an
effective leader.
However, it appears that screwing
the wife of one of your best friends and then having your family pay her hush
money so she won’t talk about it is somehow different. Yes, my friends,
only in this fantastical land can you justify adultery by claiming it’s not the
same thing because you “didn’t perjure yourself.” I wonder how that
excuse would fly for me?
_________________________________________________
Join me next week as we continue our tour with a couple fantastical lands that
could only spring from one delusional and mildly sociopathic man. That’s
right, next week we visit the mind of Jeffery Lung and I feel it’s only right
that I warn you in advance: It’s not a pretty thing. You might want to make
sure that any young children leave the room.
-A
A Little Creativity Please, Gentlemen
It’s amazing to me how creative people can be when trying to avoid admitting something embarrassing. Like Bill Clinton’s infamous definition of “is” or A-Rod’s original interview with Katie Couric, there are little embellishments, and large ones as well, that seem incredibly obvious in retrospect.
However, what I find even more telling is the response when they’re finally called out and forced to tell the truth. Maybe it’s a short statement issued over a weekend before disappearing for a week (or ten) like John Edwards. Or maybe it’s a couple lawyers finally letting slip that Sammy Sosa was juicing, something most of us had probably already figured out
But today brought around one of my favorites. The Republican paragon of virtue congressman admitting to an extra-marital affair. I mean, we expect this sort of thing from the Democrats. They are the party of Kennedy after all. But the Republicans? How sad is it when the titular head of the Democrats, Barack Obama, is a once married family man while the Republican leadership is full of guys like Newt Gingrich and John McCain who have multiple marriages under their belts, some of which came out of less than squeaky clean circumstances.
It is possible that there’s an upside to all this fudging and creativity, though. If we could just get our leaders to apply some of that creativity to the economy, maybe they could turn it around. What’s that you say? They already tried that and it didn’t work? Well, I guess we could just stuff our money in a mattress. That always seems to work.
-A
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