Category Archives: Media Criticism
More On The Life Of Julia
Cholesterol
The junk science. This pseudoscientific nonsense has been killing millions of people for decades.
Composite Americans
Last week, in an election campaign ad, Barack revealed his latest composite girlfriend — “Julia.” She’s worse than the old New York girlfriend. She can’t even be herself. In fact, she can’t be anything without massive assistance from Barack every step of the way, from his “Head Start” program at the age of three through to his Social Security benefits at the age of 67. Everything good in her life she owes to him. When she writes her memoir, it will be thanks to a subvention from the Federal Publishing Assistance Program for Chronically Dependent Women but you’ll love it: Sweet Dreams from My Sugar Daddy. She’s what the lawyers would call “non composite mentis.” She’s not competent to do a single thing for herself — and, from Barack’s point of view, that’s exactly what he’s looking for in a woman, if only for a one-night stand on a Tuesday in early November.
There’s a lot more.
Striking A Nerve
Well, this certainly has gotten Think Progress’s panties in a twist. They’re squealing like a stuck pig. This, from the sort of folks who think that “deniers” should be executed or shipped off to reeducation camps. That said, I’m not sure how effective such a campaign will be.
[Afternoon update]
As I said, I’m not sure that that this is a useful tactic, regardless of how badly the Warm Mongers behave. But as a commenter notes, it is the hit dog that yelps. Phil Plait isn’t happy, either.
Here’s the thing, though. There really are a lot of people in the AGW movement who think exactly like Ted Kaczynski, even if they’re not quite as pro-active in acting on their beliefs, including a former vice president of the United States. It is one thing to be concerned about the apparent results of some doing research in climatology, and wanting to have a reasoned discussion about its potential implications for policy. It is another to seize on them as an excuse to impose a political agenda on people that you’ve been wanting to do anyway, out of the hatred of humanity (Bob Zubrin just came out with an excellent book
For instance, I’ll be curious to see what Judith Curry has to say about all this.
A Better Life For “Julia”
Over at the Heritage Foundation.
[Update a while later]
The men in Julia’s life.
[Update late morning]
Wow. Just how big is the #Julia fail? Even MSNBC thinks it sucks.
The Southern Poverty Law Center
…I couldn’t help feeling that there was a little bit of a syllogism going on; that being that “Left” equals “good,” and “Right” equals “bad,” and therefore anything “Left” couldn’t be “bad” unless it were infiltrated by the “Right.” In my time covering Occupy Wall Street I have seen anti-Semitism, black nationalism, class hatred, and threats of violence; there have been rapes, a few murders, and now some domestic terrorism. One would have thought that these things would be sufficient warrant for a group like the Southern Poverty Law Center to stand up and take serious note, but, as I learned yesterday, there’s one problem: They’re just “not set up to cover the extreme Left.”
But don’t call them ideological.
Of course, the last time I took the SPLC seriously was…never. It’s a shame that anyone does.
Elizabeth Warren
Some questions that the media should be asking Sacajawhiner (aka Spreading Bull), but won’t.
“Julia”
Of all the creepy things this administration has done, this may be the creepiest.
Here’s the Twitter commentary.
[Afternoon update]
The life of Julia, under Obama and Romney.
[Update a few minutes later]
More milestones from Julia’s “life”:
21 years: After barely completing her high-school degree in her god-awful school, Julia goes looking for a job. There aren’t many, especially for people without college degrees. Julia kicks around the food-service and hospitality industries for a while, and ends up getting a job as a bartender. Even at her relatively low level of income, she pays a host of direct and indirect taxes to help subsidize Obama donors and supporters at politically connected businesses. She can’t quite figure out why President Obama’s pet millionaires and billionaires need her money more than she does.
22 years: After working in the bar for a while, Julia decides she likes it and wants to open her own place. But she’ll need capital to get that done. Under Obama, there is little or no credit available to small entrepreneurs, because we never got around to fixing the problems in the banking system, instead choosing to futz around with things like the disclosures on credit-card offers and micromanaging swipe fees and grandstanding about bonuses. Julia does not open her new business, and she doesn’t hire any other Julias to build, decorate, supply, or staff it.
23 years: Being a bartender, Julia works late at night. Under Obama, the federal government supports laws that make it difficult or impossible for a private citizen to own a gun in many places. Leaving her bar one night, the defenseless Julia is killed in the street. Ironically, the gun used to kill her was sold to a Mexican drug cartel under a program run by President Obama’s Department of Justice.
And of course, President Obama is president for life.
What a huge juicy target for parody.
[Update a while later]
That only took a few hours: the inevitable I Am Julia parody Twitter account.
[Update a few minutes later]
More thoughts from Yuval Levin:
It’s not just that each of its elements can be easily parodied, it’s that every single one of them is a perfectly common feature of contemporary satire, and the whole thing — right down to the fact that it is a web slideshow that can be very easily aped by countless clever and tech-savvy smart-alecks sitting underemployed in front of computers right now — feels like a joke and yet isn’t.
It’s going to be very very difficult for the purveyors of knowing sarcasm in the hipster-industrial complex to resist this provocation, even though openly mocking Barack Obama will feel uneasy and unnatural at first. And that’s what could make this a genuine misstep for the Obama campaign: Obama’s 2008 campaign was very careful to keep itself on the side of the culture of cool, so that the agents of that culture would turn their guns against John McCain but mostly lay off Obama, even as he offered up embarrassingly vapid nonsense about turning back the oceans. If they begin to make the culture of cool uneasy about Obama, and increasingly comfortable treating him (as it is inclined to treat everyone) as a self-important windbag, they could do serious damage to his standing with precisely the intended audience of the Life of Julia: young liberals, who must turn out in uncharacteristically large numbers if Obama is to have a decent chance of re-election. If those young liberals come to see the president not as a cool modern idealist in on the joke but as a bloviating panderer who buys his own shtick, he’s in big trouble. If you puncture Obama’s balloon, there is not much left of him, and he seems to be running the risk of puncturing that balloon himself.
One can only hope.
[Update a few minutes later]
We learned from the dog dust up that no one in the campaign had actually read Obama’s book (I’m guessing the first time that Obama read it himself was when he did the audio version). Now you have to wonder if any of them read 1984? Or if they read at all?
The Occupy Movement
Why it’s a potential disaster for the Democrats.
I hope so. They deserve it.