The Enlightened Despot

Words fail:

This has been a very video-heavy few days, but I can’t resist posting this. I promise there will be real posts with words in them again soon:

The North Korean nuclear test is something of a downer, so I’m lightening the mood here:

This video created a minor scandal when it first surfaced, but the scandal was merely that it surfaced - I have never heard anyone claim that this is particularly off-color for military humor:

From Robert Gibbs, via Ben Smith, on Wanda Sykes’ performance:

I think there are a lot of topics that are better left for serious reflection rather than comedy. I think there’s no doubt 9/11 is part of that.

Well, there should be doubt, because that’s completely wrong. Let comedy go where it will. What made Sykes’ comments ugly wasn’t the subject matter, but the fact that there wasn’t anything funny about them. The only reason to laugh at her hope that Rush Limbaugh die of kidney failure is that you hate Rush so much you are determined to laugh at anything nasty said about him. But anything can be a suitable subject matter for comedy. Here’s Ricky Gervais joking about something far more serious than 9/11:

As I said before, I will not defile this space with the attempted comedy of Wanda Sykes. So, instead, here’s (part 1 of) Steven Colbert filling the same role back in 2006:

Solid work:

I’ll dig around for some of the other speeches. According to Ben Smith, the biggest buzz generator will be Wanda Sykes, who said some edgy things about Rush Limbaugh, but I will not be posting that. The White House may not have any standards for quality in comedy, but the Despot does. However offensive she was, the real scandal is that someone in the administration thought: “You know would be a great speaker? Wanda Sykes!”

UPDATE:

Here’s part 2 of Obama’s speech:

Something has always bothered me about Tim Geithner, and I finally put my finger on it: he was bad guy Eric in Billy Madison!:

When they’re right, they’re right:

Mainstream Media At It Again, Bloggers Report

NEW YORK—The mainstream media—a loose consortium of corporate news outlets known for using professionally trained journalists who adhere to an editorial process—have once again completely missed the boat in their reporting of national events, outraged sources within the blogosphere said Monday. “When will the MSM dinosaurs realize that they’re TOTALLY irrelevant?” wrote 39-year-old part-time librarian James Last, commenting on coverage of Obama’s first 100 days in a scathing post that appeared on his blog, The LAST Word. “If the idiots at MSNBC, The New York Times, and WaPo could lift their heads from the money trough for a minute, maybe they’d write a story that’s not completely driven by the corporate agenda. I’m not holding my breath.” Right-wing bloggers were reportedly equally upset, with many singling out MSNBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post as “shills” for the liberal agenda. At press time, an estimated 8.4 million bloggers nationwide were watching CNN

On torture:

Incidentally, PHOKC is, in my seldom-humble opinion, the funniest internet meme to date.

I may have posted this before, but the funny thing about this song, written thirty years ago, is that it always feels timely:

Scare quotes are bad, and air quotes to indicate that you’d love to be using scare quotes if only you were writing instead of speaking are simply inexcusable. Nonetheless, this is pretty funny, in a dark, decline-of-our-nation’s-moral-standing kind of way:

Some out-of-character racial humor from Kevin Drum, mocking Taleb:

If an asset bubble followed by a banking crisis is a black swan, then black swans must be about as rare as black point guards.

Incidentally, I’m pretty sure Drum has Taleb’s views completely backwards.

This is almost entirely meaningless, but amusing nonetheless:

(h/t the YZA)

It’s old, I know, but 1,000 Fighting Styles of Rumsfled is still funny, and I don’t think we’ve ever linked to it before.