Monroe Anderson

In Search of Intelligence in the Multiverse--Not on Hardball with right-wing talk show host Kevin James

   

    I have a friend who is white, very rich and obscenely conservative. Once or twice a year we meet for a holiday dinner at his sister’s house where he and I are an appreciable portion of the entertainment when our political debate inevitably kicks off.                 Although most of the dinner guests are liberal, in his mind, he almost always wins because his approach is to shout—fast and furious--right-wing platitudes.
    My friend is not uninformed, just doctrinaire. But his approach to discussing all things political are straight from the right's play book: Logic or real facts be damned. I say real facts because this generation’s crop of conservatives navigates within an arena of gerrymandered facts that they spit out mindlessly.
    One of the gears in the right-wing echo machine is “experts” that research, not to discover truth, but to find facts that support a predictably backwards world view.  One of those conservative experts, Kevin James, was exposed for the ignoramus he actually is by Chris Matthews on Hardball.  James is a talk show host on KRLA-AM, “Intelligent, Conservative Talk Radio.”  If James is representative of his Los Angeles station's stable of gab jocks, then KRLA's talk is about as intelligent as Fox Cable’s news is “fair and balanced.”
    James was screaming on Hardball in support of President Bush’s disingenuous, poorly disguised political charge that Barack Obama is an appeaser for the “evil-doers.” Attempting to elevate the debate above typical conservative code-wording and name-calling, Matthews asked James what did Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of Britain in the 1930s do. “It’s appeasement,” James said, parroting Bush’s words.
    Matthews repeatedly tries to get the blow hard James to provide some historical facts behind his right-wing jingoism. The radio talk show host couldn’t do it. As it turns out, James had no clue that Chamberlain had signed the Munich Agreement, conceding a portion of Czechoslovakia to Adolph Hitler and his Nazi regime. He had no clue as to what appeasement meant in the historical context President Bush was misusing it in. Matthews had to turn to Mark Green of Air America for some historical perspective.
    And to think James gets paid to pollute the airways with his ignorance.
    Here’s the Hardball exchange. You’ll find it amusing if you’re progressive, depressing if you’re not.

In Search of Intelligence in the Multiverse--Not DMX in the DMZ

   
 

   

    In an interview with XXL magazine, DMX succeeded in lowering the bar when it comes to expecting a certain circle of rappers to not be too ignorant. It’s one thing to proudly and loudly denigrate your  people as niggers--ahhhh, sorry, niggaz--and your women as bitches. WTF, one is supposed to be an expression of endearment and the other is apparently a shout out because you’re their baby daddy.
    But it’s something else not to know what time it is, whose time it is or that it’s about time. Apparently, the 37-year-old Earl Simmons, aka DMX, the sixth highest-selling rapper of all time, star of the easily forgettable movie, Never Die Alone, is out of this world.
    That’s the only explanation for his can’t-be-real knowledge on this year’s presidential race which has been talked about in cyberspace, in foreign countries, in the mainstream media, in the barber and beauty shops, in whore houses and in prisons.
    This is how XXL reported a portion of its interview with the rapper.

Are you following the presidential race?
Not at all.

You’re not? You know there’s a Black guy running, Barack Obama and then there’s Hillary Clinton.
His name is Barack?!

Barack Obama, yeah.
Barack?!

Barack.
What the fuck is a Barack?! Barack Obama. Where he from, Africa?

Yeah, his dad is from Kenya.
Barack Obama?

Yeah.
What the fuck?! That ain’t no fuckin’ name, yo. That ain’t that nigga’s name. You can’t be serious. Barack Obama. Get the fuck outta here.

You’re telling me you haven’t heard about him before.
I ain’t really paying much attention.

I mean, it’s pretty big if a Black…
Wow, Barack! The nigga’s name is Barack. Barack? Nigga named Barack Obama. What the fuck, man?! Is he serious? That ain’t his fuckin’ name. Ima tell this nigga when I see him, “Stop that bullshit. Stop that bullshit” [laughs] “That ain’t your fuckin’ name.” Your momma ain’t name you no damn Barack.

So you’re not following the race. You can’t vote right?
Nope.

Is that why you’re not following it?
No, because it’s just—it doesn’t matter. They’re gonna do what they’re gonna do. It doesn’t really make a difference. These are the last years.

But it would be pretty big if we had a first Black president. That would be huge.
I mean, I guess…. What, they gon’ give a dog a bone? There you go. Ooh, we have a Black president now. They should’ve done that shit a long time ago, we wouldn’t be in the fuckin’ position we in now. With world war coming up right now. They done fucked this shit up then give it to the Black people, “Here you take it. Take my mess.”

Right, exactly.
It’s all a fuckin’ setup. It’s all a setup. All fuckin’ bullshit. All bullshit. I don’t give a fuck about none of that.

We could have a female president also, Hillary Clinton.
I mean, either way it doesn’t matter. I don’t care. No one person is directly affected by which president, you know, so what does it matter.

Yeah, but the country is.
I guess. The president is a puppet anyway. The president don’t make no damn decisions.

The president…they don’t have that much authority basically?
Nah, never.

But Bush pretty much…
You think Bush is making fuckin’ decisions?

He did, yeah, he fucked up the country.
He act like he making decisions. He could barely speak! He could barely fuckin’ speak!
Can’t be serious. He ain’t making no damn decisions.

Well Barack has a good chance of winning so that might be something.
Good for him, good for him.

In Search of Intelligence in the Multiverse--not on Forbes on Fox, not in Forbes in print

    Fox Cable is better entertainment than the cartoon shows on Saturday mornings.
    So on almost any given Saturday you can catch me in front of my flat screen chuckling as I watch the business bloc on the fair-and-balanced news channel. I just sit back with my morning coffee in hand and laptop within reach and enjoy a steady stream of right-wing platitudes and pseudo-business banter masquerading as thoughtful analysis.
    It’s hard to really say which of the four business shows I find funniest but if I had to choose, it’d probably be Forbes on Fox. Steve Forbes is a self-appointed regular panelist on the show.
    Yes, Steve Forbes, the goofy-looking guy with the oddball flat tax platform, who got roundly rejected by GOP voters in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination in 1996 and 2000. He’s the guy who was smart enough and industrious enough to pick billionaire Malcolm Forbes for his father, therefore assuring that he’d be super-rich for life.
    The show also features other Forbes Magazine editors, each one expressing cutting-edge political thought and business analysis straight out of  the mid-20th Century.
    So when I read that Forbes Magazine had published a pointless list of America’s Most Miserable Cities, I was not surprised to find Chicago, New York and Los Angeles in the top 10.
    Forbes is funny that way.
    If the 15 million people living in those three cities were half as smart as the Forbes editors and had any idea how miserable they were, why they’d move to somewhere like Darien, Connecticut or Pierce City, Missouri.
    Since I live in Chicago, between snickers, I gave the Forbes list a little thought. The first thing I noticed was that nine out of the 10 most miserable cities just happen to be in blue states.
Before the second thought occurred to me, I ran across Sheeple Herder’s Weblog which lists the top 10 cities on the Forbes Most Miserable Cities list while providing some U.S. Census Bureau racial statistics along with them. Here’s the rundown:

Detroit, MI = 89% Non-White: Black 83%, Hispanic 6%
Stockton, CA = 48% Non-White: Black 11%, Hispanic 37%
Flint, MI = 59% Non-White: Black, 56% Hispanic 3%
New York, NY = 53% Non-White: Black 25%, Hispanic 28%
Philadelphia, PA = 55% Non-White: Black 44%, Hispanic 11%
Chicago, Il = 63% Non-White:Black 35%, Hispanic 28%
Los Angeles, CA = 59% Non-White: Black 10%, Hispanic 49%
Modesto, CA = 36% Non-White: Black 4%, Hispanic 32%
Charlotte, NC = 45% Non-White: Black 34%, Hispanic 11%
Providence, RI = 52% Non-White: Black 16%, Hispanic 36%

    This belongs in the "liars can figures, figures can lie"  or "garbage-in, garbage out" column. You can get the results you want by creating a cock-eyed criteria. In Forbes' case, it came to its figures by employing the late economist Arthur Okun's "discomfort index"--which is the sum of unemployment and inflation--and adding weather, crime and toxic waste for good measure.
   By throwing in weather, for example, the publication gets to be super subjective, boiling it all down to rather you prefer extreme heat or extreme cold, hurricanes or firestorms. Using Okun's misery index alone and applying it to nations, the U.S. is a more miserable country than Japan, Canada, Germany and Italy.
   Apparently the Forbes concoction prefers not to measure in shades of gray. The magazine's bottom line seems to be simply this: If a city is too black and brown, it’s got to be a miserable place to live.

In Search of Intelligence in the Multiverse. Not this dubious dozen, not this year

 

                    2007 Keystone Props

George W. Bush–For seven long years of being stuck on stupid. When the worst president in our nation’s history isn’t incompetent, he’s dishonest or foolhardy.

Dick Cheney–For not being a straight shooter in any right, at any time.

 

Ann Coulter–For her statement on Donny Deutsch’s CNBC show The Big Idea which says it all: "That is what Christians consider themselves: perfected Jews."

Leona Helmsley–For taking her “Queen of Mean” moniker to her grave by leaving a $12 million inheritance to her pet dog.

Alberto Gonzales–For instituting cockeyed hiring and firing practices in the U.S. Department of Justice and not having a clue what “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth” means.

O.J. Simpson–For not being content to have gotten away with murder, insisting on retrying his luck over some of his tacky sports memorabilia.

Katt Williams–For wearing a noose around his neck as a fashion accessory with his shiny pink suit and at the BET Hip-Hop Awards while introducing two of the Jena 6, Bryant Purvis and Carwin Jones.

 

Andy Young–For mouthing his squirrelly theory that screwing a lot of black woman makes Bill Clinton more black than Barack Obama.

Roy Pearson–For flaunting his foolish judgment by attempting to take a small Korean cleaners to the cleaners in insisting on a $57 million lawsuit over a pair of his pants.

Bill O’Reilly–For decrying “the anti-Christmas jihad,” for exclaiming that surprisingly black people at Sylvia’s in Harlem are no different from other people and for blow-harding other disingenuous neo-con banalities on his nightly Fox Cable ego show.

Rush Limbaugh–For the mouthpiece of the right-wing's ever-predictable hypocrisy and his racist buffoonery, most notably his airing of the dumb ditty, Barack the Magic Negro.

Erik Rush–For taking his screwball right-wing Christian blog from dumb to dumber while lusting for his 15 minutes of fame by comparing Chicago’s Trinity United Christian Church, where Barack Obama and thousands of other middle-class African Americans from the Windy City worship, to the Branch Davidians because of its pro-black mission.

In search of intelligence in the multiverse. Not from this view

Sherri Shepherd, the newbie host on The View, the quasi-funny comedian and the true True Believer, once again proved herself a disgrace to the race. Today on the nationally-syndicated TV show, Ms. Shepherd said that "I don’t think anything pre-dated Christians," in a discussion on whether any religions existed before Christianity. In mid-September, Ms. Shepherd put her ignorance on national display by admitting she didn’t believe in Evolution and didn’t know if the world is flat. If I didn’t know better, I’d think The View has her on the show in a global, evil conspiracy to demonstrate that, unlike co-host Whoppi Goldberg, black women are naturally stupid. (Memo to Ms. Shepherd: The Bible really is a good book but here are three others you should tackle before going on to many more. They are: How to Read a Book, The Origin of the Species and A History of Civilization. Oh, one more must-read for you, Paula J. Giddings' When and Where I Enter.)