Sadly, No!

Above: taping of Fox News’s conservative comedy pilot

From Variety:

Satire hands a right
Fox, Surnow prep conservative skein
By MICHAEL LEARMONTH

Comedy Central has made a good living out of skewering the political right.

Now Fox News Channel, a primary source of material for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, is teaming with the exec producer of “24” to try its hand at a news satire show for conservatives to love.

Joel Surnow, co-creator of “24,” is shooting two half-hour pilots of a skein he described as “‘The Daily Show’ for conservatives,” due to air in primetime on Saturdays in January.

If successful, the show could take its place on the regular schedule, adding satire to FNC’s formula of news and opinion.

“The way I look at it, almost every comedy show or satire show I see uses the same talking points against George W. Bush and Dick Cheney,” Surnow said. “The other side hasn’t been skewered in a fair and balanced way.”

The working title of the show has been “This Just In,” but that will change because AOL just launched a broadband comedy channel by that name.

The pilot segs will be co-anchored by comedians Kurt Long and Susan Yeagley and feature a family of correspondents. “There will be some elements of ‘The Daily Show’ and some of ‘Weekend Update,’ ” Surnow said.

And as conservative humorists, they will of course be standing on the shoulders of giants.

Ladies and gentlemen, Republican funnyman Dennis Miller:

Ladies and gentlemen, Republican funnywoman Julia Gorin:

Ladies and germs, wingnut director David Zucker:

People, give it up for conservative comic Brad Stine:

Please, God, let this be the alleged screenplay that Jeff Goldstein is working on.

Bonus laffs: Here’s The Comic Battle for America, a BBC Radio segment on ‘the new phenomenon of right-wing humor in America.’

Anti-Syrian Lebanese Cabinent Minister Assassinated By Sniper-Shot
—Ace

No protests from the left, of course.

Posted by Ace at 03:02 PM

Uh, damn those snipering Muslims, for whom the left must so frequently apologize. I wave my shorts above my head in protest.

Above: It was looking a little barren on the right side of the banner

Update: Ace has redone the post with extra stupidberry frosting:

Seriously: I mentioned it as a throw-away put-down, but wouldn’t it be harder to question the left’s patriotism, and their motives, if they actually were equal-opportunity protesters of violence?

If this were the case, we might be able to view the left as truly “pro-peace.” Sure, they’d still be pricks when it came to America and Israel (and the one guy in Britain on our side, Tony Blair), but we would also be heartened by their condemnation of thuggish actions like this.

But.

They.

Never.

Do.

There is just nothing a non-American, non-Israeli actor can do that is out of bounds to them — or at least not out of bounds enough for them to break out the pot and papier mache puppetheads.

Above: Ace’s banner gets a votive image of the WTC — a symbol claimed to exclusion by wingtards who experienced 9/11 on comfy, distant couches with bowls of Cheez Doodles balanced on their laps, and with persistent, guilty erections.

Orgasms For Peace
-Ace

Ah, the left. So imaginative in their protests, which always seem to involve

1) Bad, distasteful nudity[*] of the sort of people who shouldn’t be permitted to be naked outside their own homes

2) Shocking (yawn) defiliation[**] of religious icons

3) Public sex[†] between people who shouldn’t be allowed to have sex even in their own homes

This episode of ‘Ah, the left’ earns Ace a C.C. DeVille Signature Edition Gibson Flying V. (Rock!)

Ace’s new logo: lookin’ sharp

* ?
** ??
† ??!?

Atrios asks

They Say Go

So why don’t we go?

More importantly, why the hell would we want to stay?

-Atrios 9:10 AM

Because it’s always been about the desire to control them. Which is sadly funny because of the paradox that occurs when there is a powerful popular front against such colonialism, as illustrated by this famous anti-imperialist dictum:

The more you tighten your grip, Governor Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

Which in turn is why so many wingnuts favor the Death Star solution against people who merely want soveriegnty over their own affairs.

***
Yeah, yeah more lefty/Chomkyite blathering from Retardo! He is not serious! So listen to Brzezinski, who is “serious”:

I mean, the fact of the matter is that, three years after the occupation of Baghdad, the authority we have installed is besieged and relatively helpless, and a civil war is beginning to mushroom, under the occupation, which is unable to crush the insurgency, because it is a foreign occupation.

And, last but not least, we have to get rid of the mindset, which is really by now totally ahistorical — we no longer live in the age of colonialism. We no longer have to assume “the white man’s burden” in order to civilize others, and I’m using these phrases in quotation marks.

The Iraqis are a historical people. They’re quite capable of handling things on their own, provided their leaders are real leaders of the country and not essentially proteges of an occupying power hiding in an American fortress.

[snip]

Now, Walter says, if I understood him correctly, that he’s willing to wait three more years to see if the present government leaves the Green Zone, the American fortress. Well, how many thousands of Iraqis will die in the meantime? How many hundreds, how many thousands of Americans will die in the meantime?

How much will our prestige internationally decline? How many billions of dollars will we spend on this?

You know, analogies are not always very helpful, but farfetched analogies are really misleading. I think the analogy to the American Civil War is really farfetched.

If you want some analogy, I would say a closer analogy is that of Algeria, in the waning days of the war that the Algerians were waging against the French. Until de Gaulle came to power, the government was getting all the time the same kind of advice we now are hearing about the situation in Iraq. It may get better. Yes, three years have been wasted, but maybe we can go on for another three years. And we’re going to do better; we’re going to control Algiers.

There’s a wonderful movie called “The Battle of Algiers,” which shows what happened when the effort was made finally just to control Algiers. I’m afraid the battle for Baghdad is, in many ways, reminiscent of the battle for Algiers.

And then a man came along, de Gaulle, who instead of listening to the same degree of timid consensus — “Gee, we are stuck, but we don’t know what to do, so let’s continue being stuck and maybe we’ll win” — he realized that this is a wrong war.

This is an unhistorical war. This is a war which France cannot win because the age has passed. And we have to realize that we cannot do now in Iraq what the British did in the 1920s. This is a new age and a colonial imperial war, in the name of tutelage, is just not going to prevail.

JIM LEHRER: So pull out, Dr. Brzezinski, now?

ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: Pull out in an intelligent fashion.

All the wingnuts can do — all they have ever done despite poll after poll like the one Yglesias cites — is insist, like Walter Russell Mead in the Zbig link, that those Iraqis who do not want us there are merely jihadists and terrorists, a minority faction. In point of fact, just as no American would tolerate an occupier here (‘benevolent’ or not), no ordinary Iraqi wants one there. Everyone wants to be sovereign. In short, wingnuts lie because they want to control other peoples and nations.

Col. Mathieu: “In practice, demonstrating a false humanitarianism
only leads to ridiculousness and impotence. I’m certain that all units
will understand and react accordingly.”

Why, and how, is Henry Kissinger still alive?

As for what he’s been up to:

Military victory is no longer possible in Iraq, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said in a television interview broadcast Sunday. […]

“A dramatic collapse of Iraq – whatever we think about how the situation was created – would have disastrous consequences for which we would pay for many years and which would bring us back, one way or another, into the region,” he said.

Kissinger, whose views have been sought by the Iraqi Study Group, led by former Secretary of State James Baker III, called for an international conference bringing together the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, Iraq’s neighbors – including Iran – and regional powers like India and Pakistan to work out a way forward for the region.

“I think we have to redefine the course, but I don’t think that the alternative is between military victory, as defined previously, or total withdrawal,” he said. [Emphasis added]

First the old “however that happened,” and now comes “the situation was created” — it’s like no one was actually actively going about creating it. Or advising those that did the creating. Well, at least all the problems in Iraq the region can be worked out by getting the permanent members of the Security Council and Iraq’s neighbors together. Why didn’t anyone think of that before?

Did anyone watch Jim Webb and Jon Tester on Meet the Press this morning? They sounded very, very good, especially on issues of economic fairness.

Dear Dems,

Your ethics reform package is a nice start, but it doesn’t go far enough. Check it:

Democratic leaders in the House and the Senate, mindful that voters in the midterm election cited corruption as a major concern, say they are moving quickly to finalize a package of changes for consideration as soon as the new Congress convenes in January.

Their initial proposals, laid out earlier this year, would prohibit members from accepting meals, gifts or travel from lobbyists, require lobbyists to disclose all contacts with lawmakers and bar former lawmakers-turned-lobbyists from entering the floor of the chambers or Congressional gymnasiums.

None of the measures would overhaul campaign financing or create an independent ethics watchdog to enforce the rules. Nor would they significantly restrict earmarks, the pet projects lawmakers can anonymously insert into spending bills, which have figured in several recent corruption scandals and attracted criticism from members in both parties. The proposals would require disclosure of the sponsors of some earmarks, but not all.

Oh Jeebus.

Look, guys, the big problem with politicians accepting gifts from lobbyists is that they would inevitably result in more ridiculous earmarks. If you want to run a more honest Congress, instead of one that doles out cash to corporate interests, y’all have to get a handle on earmarks. That means the full disclosure of all earmarks put into a public database for the world to see. I understand we can’t get rid of earmarks completely, but if we could publicly shame some of these guys away from their “Bridge to Nowhere” projects, it’d make me awfully happy.

Read the rest of this entry »

After spending four years at a small liberal arts college in central Ohio, I grew to absolutely despise the goddamn Ohio State Buckeyes with every inch of my being. So let’s just say I’ll be rooting for Michigan big-time today. Rawk.

…though come to think of it, I hope this is a close game, ’cause I wanna see these two match up in the national championship game.

…oh, and I guess I’m sorta back now, though I still have a ton of work to do in the next couple of weeks.

Pot, meet kettle: Olbermann jokes about severing O’Reilly’s hamstring
By Michelle Malkin · November 17, 2006 01:03 PM

I should throw in another note here that Sadly, No!, as a European blog, ist on der Deutschestimezonetime, which often makes it look like we’re six hours behind things — when in fact we’re generally .05 miliseconds ahead of puny Earth time, except for me. This Malkin post just went up a little while ago.

Michelle, comme il faut, throws a Valley-girl tantrum, blaming Keith Olbermann for, you know, mentioning having been targeted by a lunatic terrorist who idolizes Michelle Malkin:

I don’t like to mud wrestle, but sometimes the slime-flingers need to be held accountable. All week, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann and his left-wing vassals have tried to blame female conservative commentators for one nutball’s fake anthrax letter attacks. Reportedly, the suspect was a Free Republic.com member whose pseudonymous profile noted that he “worshipped” Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, and me. Ergo, we’re to blame. Olbermann lies about my work and props up a clueless Radar Online stooge who accuses me of “introduc[ing a kind of thuggish, sort of intimidating tone into the political debate, this kind of, ‘Let’s not let them boss us around anymore.’ She’s got a very combative, kind of truculent rhetorical pose.”

Truculent. I like that.

It gets better from there.

Shorter Michelle Malkin:

“Keith Olbermann made a rude joke then apologized, therefore if some fan of mine wants to mail anthrax threats, it is no responsibility of mine.”

(Hat tip to Jesse “The Body” Malkin, for staying up late with Michelle, in wired-panic mode, to dig up some appropriately smeary out-of-context Olbermann quotes.)

First it was Ann Coulter, under investigation in Florida for ballot irregularities. Now Laura Ingraham is in some hot soup for her attempt to jam the Democrats’ voter assistance hotline during the election.

Ingraham’s performance was particularly Republican in that, once her flying radio monkeys had jammed the line, she went all cackly at the recorded ‘all operators are busy’ messages, claiming that the Democrats couldn’t even set up a hotline properly.

Here’s Senator Pat Leahy calling for a federal investigation of Ingraham’s phone-jamming stunt (audio clip).

Any comment from Malkin yet on that little serial terrorism thing?

Diebold Derangement Syndrome
By Michelle Malkin · November 17, 2006 10:36 AM
Oh, this is just side-splitting. The Daily Kos summons up the Black Box Brigades and launches a fund-raising drive to fight evil Diebold, which Kos thinks stole a congressional election from a Democrat in Florida’s 13th district.

Sadly, No!