 |
| Image via TorWars. |
“Zach actually was pretty nervous,” Obama explained to Ryan Seacrest in a postmortem interview. “His whole character is to go after the guest, and I think he was looking around and seeing all these Secret Service guys with guns and thinking, I wonder what happens here if I cross the line? But we had a great time.”...
“Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words for you: ‘Predator drones.’ You will never see it coming.”....
The joke in each case is simple and similar: I’m more powerful than you, and, if I want to, I can kill you. Is it funny? Occasionally, if the atmosphere in the room is right and if one buys sufficiently into the conceit. Is it healthy that it’s funny? Not really, no.Apparently the joke is actually not that simple, but Cookie mistakes it for an entirely different kind—this kind:
Obama's jokes are exactly the opposite: about the power people imagine he has, and its comical contrast with his formal inability to do anything a dictator might wish to do. Naturally Cookie affects to believe that he can do whatever he wants:
The executive branch has reserved the right to murder literally anybody whom it regards as a threat anywhere in the world.But what Obama has actually done is an unprecedented attempt to prevent the armed services from killing anybody without his approval. At which he has obviously failed.
You can see the difference in that he obviously doesn't really wish to kill Mr. Galafianakis (with whom it is understood he is in broad political agreement) or the Jonas Brothers, whereas Reagan really did want to outlaw the Soviet Union and bomb it in five minutes; his joke was exactly what Cookie would be talking about, if he were in fact talking about anything.
The worst joke in political history was of course when George W. Bush thought it would be funny to do a thing where he acknowledged to the audience that the official casus belli for the bombing and destruction of Iraq and willed death of thousands of American soldiers and marines was a phony pretext on the dog-ate-my-homework level:
Cooke is increasingly in need of an editor who is not drunk:
At Arizona State University, the president lamented that the college had refused to award him an honorary degree. “I do think we all learned an important lesson,” Obama told the crowd. “I learned never again to pick another team over the Sun Devils in my NCAA brackets,” and “President Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS.” This ostensibly innocuous crack prompted Glenn Reynolds to risk the damning charge of humorlessness, a charge he delivered in the pages of the Wall Street Journal...The Instaperfessor risked the charge first and then delivered it? Or both, charged himself with humorlessness in WSJ? Damningly?
Five years into his tenure, Obama and his acolytes are still exhibiting a vexing cognitive dissonance and a crippling insecurity...
Only the most fevered and unhinged of Obama’s critics believe that he is likely to drone entertainers who irritate his family or that he will use his armed guards to silence the slings and arrows of America’s complaisant acting class...Exhibiting cognitive dissonance? (I don't think you know what that expression means...) Acting class?
Desperate for enrollees in the dying days of his signature law’s embarrassingly dramatic rollout...Dramatically embarrassing? Oh and by the way, maybe not so much...
 |
| Image via English Mafia Club. |
"Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I'm the only person standing between Richard Nixon and the White House." –President John KennedyHate to think what Cookie would say about that one.
