Office Space Anticipated the Aforementioned Obama Poster

Is there any issue. Any issue at all that Office Space did not tackle?




Heh.

Why Some People Like Ron Paul, Part IV

Lo, it has been a while since Harrogate rendered an installment of his award-garnering series, Why Some People Like Ron Paul. This has been for several reasons. Some say an uncouth band of Paulites actually kidnapped Harrogate there for a while, and held him hostage on Pete's Couch, where in between tokes they force-fed him issues of The Federalist Papers.

Others, more cynically minded, asserted it was because Harrogate followed Media Hero Frank Luntz's lead, and just stopped caring about The Paul.

Finally, there have been rumors circulating that the real reason Harrogate stopped writing about The Paul is that he discovered a secret message in the movie Office Space, wherein it was pointed out that Libertarianism is the last, last, last thing that needs any extra discourse, in this gilded age of cubicles, outsourcing, mercenary contractors, cuts in education, and the like.


But whatever the reason, Readers, Harrogate now triumphantly returns to the topic. Yes, he boisterously links to one of the last great bastions of Independent Thought in the Media, that Lion known as the Washington Times. Courtesy the equally trustworthy AP, the Times reported yesterday that:

Supporters of maverick Rep. Ron Paul who are organizing a rally as an alternative to the Republican National Convention are moving their crosstown event to a larger venue.

The Rally for the Republic featuring Paul _ the Texas conservative failed in his bid to win the GOP nomination for president _ is scheduled for Minneapolis' Target Center, home of basketball's Minnesota Timberwolves.

"Bah humbug!" quoth Minnehaha Republican Honcho Ron Carey. Or, to quote him directly:

The real action is going to be at the Xcel Center where one of the people who does have a chance to be president is going to be speaking and rallying the troops. When people come to St. Paul in September, they're not going to be focused on Ron Paul.

Vanity Fair's Response to the New Yorker; Or, Something To Do In Between Softball Games

This is Vanity Fair's current "cover", an overt parody of the now ubiquitously discussed New Yorker cartoon.

The editors write:

We here at Vanity Fair maintain a kind of affectionate rivalry with our downstairs neighbors at The New Yorker. We play softball every year, compete for some of the same stories, and share an elevator bank. (You can tell the ones who are headed to the 20th floor by their Brooklyn pallor and dog-eared paperbacks.)

And heaven knows we’ve published our share of scandalous images, on the cover and otherwise. So we’ve been watching the kerfuffle over last week’s New Yorker cover with a mixture of empathy and better-you-than-us relief.

One thing that's interesting about this, although nobody with any stroke at all outside of Ralph Nader would ever mention such a thing, is the idea of collusion between media outlets. Nay, did Harrogate say collusion? Better to say, when a small handful owns the whole shabang, you're gonna get the same tripe rolled out in slightly different packaging. When was the last time we were able to say the major television and print media did a legitimate service for the nation?

But those days are over. Once they got rid of who was by far the most liberal President in the post WWII Era, Richard Nixon (that's right, Tricky Dick), for being more overt about his criminality than other Presidents, that was pretty much it. From there on out it's been water-carrier city. Hello ditto-heads, and a carnivalesque homage about what a great servant ye were, when ye die. Etc.

But stay! lo and forsooth, enough of such things that Readers don't care about, and to the Cover itself.

Jeralyn at TalkLeft writes of the cover:

I think the VF cartoon is much gentler and less offensive than the New Yorker cartoon.

Also, the McCain cartoon has more truths: John McCain is old, Cindy McCain did have a love affair with pills (even though in the cartoon the pills she is holding are for her husband) and McCain does admire George Bush.

What would you have added to the McCain cartoon to clearly represent the "politics of fear"?

Well. Harrogate is going to, as someone said in Office Space, "GO AHEAD and disagree" with her premise. After all, there really isn't that much you can make up about McCain that is harsher than the truth of what he represents.

But soft! What's that? Jeralyn's deeper premise is right, though? Does Vanity Fair really have the gall to treat the burning Constitution as a caricature, after all we've already seen?

Okay, to Jeralyn's last question, Harrogate will answer. In truth they should have depicted, on a War Room type screen, an image of a huge crowd about to be landed upon by a nuclear warhead. Or, to make the same point, simply a picture next to the one of Bush, except this one depicting McCain having lunch and laughing it up with William Kristol.

But then, how far off would those images have really been?