Archive for February, 2010

Sarah Palin’s biggest complaint/defense of her past performance is that the “liberal” or, my favorite, “lamestream media” is picking on small details. That they are somehow holding her up to a standard that is higher than most. And her followers eat this shit up. How dare the media ask questions, demand substance and look for depth?

If you’re one of these people, then perhaps you shouldn’t watch this video. It kinda encapsulates the double-standard that Palin, herself, wants to live by. You see she’s the first person to complain that Obama uses the teleprompter too much…

…well at least he hasn’t resorted to the “I’m going to cheat on my exam” method of crib notes during his Q&A. He just leveled the entire House Republican Caucus at their retreat on national television. (For those of you who watch Fox, they cut away during the parts where he completely destroyed their talking points but you can catch the entire thing on the White House site. Send complaints to Roger Ailes c/o Fox News.) And he did that without having answers hand-fed to him by scribbled notes on the palm of his hand.

I guess tickets to this Tea Party event were upwards of a few hundred dollars each. And I would gladly pay that amount to see Sarah Palin stand in front of the House Democratic Caucus because I guarantee you it would be a totally different outcome. And I don’t even like them all that much.

But I think the kicker of this is what she did scrawl on her palm.

“Energy”
“Budget Cuts”
“Tax”
“Lift American Spirits”

She needed fucking crib notes for this? What a totally empty vessel.

Any guy from my generation liked the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Anyone who tells you they didn’t is lying or dead inside or quite possibly both. There was a simplicity and an honesty to the comic that rings through today with just as much relevance as it did when it was first published. And through it all, Bill Watterson, the author, seemed to have a message but he always left it up to the reader.

When he stopped writing the comic, many fans (myself included) were hurt. It was as though a piece of us was being taken forcibly away. What compounded the matter was that Watterson went into seclusion, refusing interviews for the past 15 years, which pretty much left us all feeling like the dumpee who wondered what we did.

Well that all changed when the Cleveland Plain Dealer scored an interview with the man himself. And some of his answers are just as poetic as his comic strips. A few of the better quotes:

What are your thoughts about the legacy of your strip?

Well, it’s not a subject that keeps me up at night. Readers will always decide if the work is meaningful and relevant to them, and I can live with whatever conclusion they come to. Again, my part in all this largely ended as the ink dried.

Readers became friends with your characters, so understandably, they grieved — and are still grieving — when the strip ended. What would you like to tell them?

This isn’t as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of 10 years, I’d said pretty much everything I had come there to say.

It’s always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip’s popularity and repeated myself for another five, 10 or 20 years, the people now “grieving” for “Calvin and Hobbes” would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I’d be agreeing with them.