Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Now ship them to the Hague

I may yet get cathartically verklempt later on, but this morning I didn't really hear the big cartoon sun singing Beatles songs as angels frolicked, though I would have liked to. (Did you?) Perhaps it's because I was multitasking and as usual it ended in a botch-up all round: ended up with an unwritten lecture, an ominously hockey-puck-like pie, and having missed all the fun bits of the inaugural ceremony, if indeed there were any. (I gather that at any rate Cheney's transformation into Dr. Strangelove is now complete; that there was a groovily weird benediction; and that Barry O's speech was basically depressing.) For whatever reason I'm more in a mood for retrospective bile today, and in that spirit will link to the most telling comment I've found on the interwebs today: a summary of the Bush years according to America's Finest News Source, at Making Light. Lest we forget, eh.

UPDATE: For anyone else still working the schadenfraude, nothing (as you might expect) can touch Wonkette and commentators on the Old Testament satisfactions of seeing Dick Cheney in a wheelchair. Setting aside the now-standard Dracula and Hannibal Lecter riffs, opinion is evidently divided on the important question of whether the right cultural touchstone is now (a) Mister Potter in It's a Wonderful Life; (b) Doctor Strangelove (seemed like the obvious call to me); (c) Burgess Meredith as a Batman villain (this I don't get); and (d) a Dalek in Doctor Who. But who or what is a Dalek, and just how sordidly evil is it?

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Well, there was the Chief Justice trying to do the oath from memory and flubbing it. I thought the theme, that it's time to cut out the nonsense and act constructively. was apt.

Dr. B. said...

If the Repubs manage to coopt all his rhetoric about growing up and being responsible and making sacrifices in order to cut Social Security and Medicaid and their usual pet stick-it-to-the-poor stuff, I think my head will explode. They are already starting to give it a try.

On a more trivial note, I'm now watching the Obamas watch a parade, and Michelle for once looks truly awful. She's done up in just the kind of thing Laura or Nancy would wear, an ensemble of yellow brocade slipcovers apparently. I hope this is not a portent.

Anonymous said...

The Threadkiller actually really liked the colour of Michelle Obama's dress (and the green gloves and shoes!) but did not care for the neckline, or the fact that it appeared to be made out of upholstery fabric. Or for the dress/coat combination, really. She's a fine-looking woman with a lean athletic build, and as the ballgown later showed us, her upper arms are nothing to be ashamed of, so why all this nonsense about cardigans and the like? The TK didn't get a really good look at the ballgown, but a blogger on an unrelated site described the sight as "a beautiful woman wearing a dress made out of a chenille bedspread".

The Threadkiller thinks the American people don't want their First Ladies to look simply too wonderful, anyway: they want them to look pretty and non-threatening, like Barbie (and not like that tart what married that French guy) - i.e. successful, as evinced by sparkly bits brought out for special occasions, but not truly chic.

Anonymous said...

And, in reference to Dr. B's question regarding daleks, the Threadkiller appends the following description of said creatures, made by Georgia Nicolson (heroine of And Then He Ate My Boy Entrancers and other excellent books by Louise Rennison):

In England we had this hilariously crap TV show called Dr. Who where this bloke in a scarf went time traveling. His archenemies were these senselessly violent creatures ... They were called daleks. They’re a form of robots. They had weird mechanical voices and a sort of gun sticking out of their head bits. They said “Exterminate, exterminate!” Well, I told you it was crap.

Dr. B. said...

Oh quite a good likeness to Cheney then.