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Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Finally, a mushy liberal has the balls to speak the truth
Posted by Jill | 5:58 AM
Joan Walsh, who isn't exactly known for being a firebrand, puts the Wanda Sykes/Rush Limbaugh flap in its proper context (emphasis mine):
Sure it was off-color and, um, slightly out there – but that’s the point. Or it used to be. Even if I didn’t already love Sykes, my point of view would be: Once a barely elected president who started a devastating war on false pretenses can joke about those pretenses at that same dinner (Remember Bush looking behind sofas for WMDs? ) it’s hard to ever be offensive again.

There are other wince-worthy examples we never hear about: At the 1970 Gridiron dinner, according to "Nixon's Piano," by Kenneth O'Reilly, the not yet disgraced GOP president Richard Nixon and his scandal-dogged VP Spiro Agnew did a classy racist interpretive piece. "What about this 'southern strategy' we hear so often?" Nixon asked Agnew. "Yes suh, Mr. President," Agnew replied in what was known as “dialect,” adding "Ah agree with you completely on yoah southern strategy." While Nixon played a variety of songs on piano, Agnew drowned him out with his renditions of “Dixie.”

Also in that Gridiron program, a newspaper reporter sang a rendition of “Dixie Melody” with these words: “Rock-a-bye the voters with a southern strategy; Don't you fuss; we won't bus children in ol' Dixie! We'll put George Wallace in decline Below the Mason-Dixon line. We'll help save the nation From things like civil rights and inte-gra-tion! Weep no more, John Stennis! We'll pack the court for sure. We will fight for voting rights - To keep them white and pure! A zillion Southern votes we will deliver; Move Washington down on the Swanee River! Rock-a-bye with Ol' Massa Nixon and his Dixie strategy!” Hilarious, right? Move over, Wanda Sykes! Let's make room for that kind of comedy!

Does anyone honestly believe that were (God forbid) Rush Limbaugh to be the featured entertainer at the White House Correspondents Dinner, that he would tone it down? Hardly. And anyone who's ever seen Wanda Sykes knows that what she served up Saturday night was pretty weak Wanda Soup. I would question wishing kidney failure on someone solely under the category of its potential to deliver Bad Karma to oneself, but my main gripe about that line was that it just wasn't funny. Sykes made a valid point about how wishing failure on a president faced with a crisis IS wishing failure on America, and that wanting America to fail really IS something that Limbaugh and Osama Bin Laden have in common, and for the same reason: the amassing of power unto themselves.

It's really a shame that she had to throw that in there, not because it was insulting, but becuase it was a convenient hook on which too many people, (and even Keith Olbermann succumbed), could hang their Outrage Overcoats, while ignoring the sad truth she spoke just seconds earlier.

As always, Jon Stewart nails it:


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