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About the whole Larry King weirdness: I don’t believe she just decided to take off her microphone and sit there by herself and thus I don’t think it even makes sense to call this a “meltdown”. A meltdown would be if she cracked under pressure or freaked out and couldnt take it anymore. Instead what happened was that Larry King was asked not to raise certain questions or even go near certain topics, which is why you GO on Larry King – he’s the show that does that. There aren’t a few shows left on cable news where you can just tell your side of the story without being challenged, probed or fact checked by the host and King is one of the last, if not THE last who will accept “no no areas” of questioning from his guests. There was a miscommunication somewhere and King went into that area. big deal. After that happens, Larry goes to the phones which evidently was the other thing that was agreed beforehand to not happen and Carrie appears to be told by, probably her handler/legal council, to take off her microphone. she does. It’s awkward cuz she doesn’t walk off the set, but rather waits for CNN to get their shit together and realize they made a mistake in breaking the terms and cut to commercial or something so they can hash it out and return for a normal ending. CNN didnt do that and ya, it looks weird, but what else was Carrie supposed to do, really?

SECOND: Here’s the deal on the “sex tape” that isnt a sex tape (you can’t make a solo sex tape. by definition, sex involves another person): if they were all for one guy, then it no diff than there only being one. if they were for more than one guy – even if its 2 and not 7 separate dudes – then its all out the window.

The best interview comes on Fox News’ RedEye, where host Greg Gutfeld jokingly, but not jokingly at all, lectures Carrie about sex tapes right off the bat.

Men and Women alike often have a hard time understanding that females are not visually stimulated, sexually. I blame this mostly on the brainwash of college and culture that lies to kids and tells them there are no differences between the sexes and teaches them a black-and-white idiotic philosophy against generalizations (things that are generally true).

The David Letterman “I know you had sex with employee’s” blackmail attempt illustrates this as one of the girls, a former intern named
Holly Hester comes forward about her affair with the Late Nite host.

“I was madly in love with him at the time,” said Hester. “I would have married him. He was hilarious.” It all started in 1990 when Letterman asked her out on a date to see a movie and the secret romance (/affair? he’s been with the mother of his child since 1989. no word on if they had gone on a “break” the year of 1990), until the funnyman called it off because of their age difference (chicks half your age are only good for one thing, and that thing isn’t “long term relationship that ends in marriage”).

So she was “madly in love” with him… because “he was hilarious”… Can you imagine for a second a man saying that about a woman? of course not, Captain Rhetorical. Not in a comparable circumstance (obviously). If the woman is Sarah Silverman, then that’s not quite the same as a 62 year old David Letterman, now is it.

It’s annoying when news outlets and opinion commentators falsely ascribe seriousness or comedy to something to fit their bias. If someone they like says something outrageous, then it was just a silly joke, not meant to be taken seriously and thus can’t be offensive – but if someone they don’t like makes a joke that could be taken as mean spirited, the reverse logic is applied in the reporting of the comment. The Daily Show fits this balance perfectly in that supporters who think Jon Stewart may have made a particularly devastating point are able to tout the show as truth speaking journalism, however if a detractor tries to criticize a point made on the show, its supports and in fact Stewart himself, dismiss it because after all its a “fake news” comedy show. duh.

Here are 2 examples I recently noticed involving James O’Keefe, a 25 year old activist who specializes in illustrating absurdity by being absurd, such as holding an “Affirmative Action Bake Sale” in college (an event popular among Campus Republicans nation-wide where the racial discrimination of affirmative action, which lowers standards for racial minorities, is illustrated in a bake sale by charging whites more for a cookie than a minority). His latest work released a series of 5 hidden camera videos showing corrupt employees of community activist group ACORN, a Democrat front-line group closely associated with Barack Obama, helping him cheat the tax system, hide and operate a whore house, traffic illegal aliens, and use 13 year old El Salvadorian girls as sex slaves. In fact these revelations recently led congress to cut funding to ACORN.

Right wing media has been calling O’Keefes expose a “sting” and “journalism the mainstream media used to do” while left wing media has dismissed it as “Borat style gotcha-videos”.

Steve Krakauer, a writer for Mediate.com, is clearly not a fan of O’Keefe as displayed in a recent piece investigating and mocking O’Keefe. The title, Right Wing Darling James O’Keefe: The Man Who Exposed ACORN and Lucky Charms, gives the tone of the article away, but the snarkiness is also misleading. Krakauer reports about O’Keefe on the Lucky Charms thing:

He waged a campaign against dining halls serving Lucky Charms. You see, besides being magically delicious, O’Keefe thought the cereal was offensive to Irish Americans.

That sounds… odd. And it should. because it isnt true. The Mediate columnist failed to mention that O’Keefe didn’t find the cereal offensive, but rather was satirizing the idea that anyone would find it offensive. I was fooled by Mediaites mis-reporting on this myself until I read the real background from the New York times:

In 2004, at a buddy’s suggestion, he and a few fellow Rutgers students set out to satirize what they saw as a pious sensitivity to ethnicity on campus. The result is still there to see on YouTube: Mr. O’Keefe protesting to a slightly befuddled university dining official that the leprechaun on the cereal box “appears to be an Irish-American.”

“As you can see, we’re not short and green — we have our differences of height — and we think this is stereotypical of all Irish-Americans,” Mr. O’Keefe deadpans, as the official earnestly scribbles notes.

I appreciated the Times clearing that up for me as a reader, however in that very same column the author Scott Shane says this of O’Keefe’s previous under cover endeavors:

He has lampooned liberals by inviting them to become pen pals of imprisoned terrorists, and, more darkly, recorded Planned Parenthood staff members agreeing that he can designate his donation exclusively to the abortion of black babies.

eh.. “Lampooned”?… Really? I thought “lampoon” meant comedic satire, ie: the National Lampoon Chevy Chase movies were humorous satirizations of American life, aka: actors acting out a comedy.

Before I embarrass myself by having to make a correction, I went and looked it up and “lampoon” in fact means “a harsh satire”. So… what exactly is the satire taking place here? How are you “lampooning” anything when you ask an abortion advocacy group if you can donate money to kill black babies and they say yes, or ask a government aided organization if you can get help trafficking 12-15 year old south and central american girls to be used as sex slave prostitutes and getting help?

Satire should be reported as satire. Jokes as jokes. Serious acts as serious acts.

First tell the truth. then give your opinion.

I wrote a post last night about Ted Kennedy before anyone knew he had died, saying that he seems nice enough and everything but he’s a useless hack of a politician who should have resigned awhile ago. Now, while I have the deepest sympathy for his family and am not glad he’s dead or anything – I can’t help but not be indifferent towards his passing on account of his prementioned uselessness to the public he was supposedly serving and that other thing. The “other thing” being how he killed a girl and got away with it.

Since the news media has been respectful of the murder and not dwelled on it since it happened or since news of Kennedys death was released this morning, people have been taking to teh Googlez to find out more and indeed the second and 4th most searched term on the search engine is the Chappaquiddick “incident” and the 5th highest is the girl who died there.

At first I was going to just show the top 5, but then I saw 2 more in the 26-33 column to the right, so I included that also just for context.

It was a long time ago… though there isn’t really a statute of limitations on murder (or to be fair: “involuntary endangerment of life that only turned into manslaughter when the suspect leaves the victim to die a horrible death and doesn’t tell the police until the next day”).

In 1969, on the little island of Chappaquiddick on Martha’s Vineyard, Ted Kennedy was leaving a party, driving drunk with a 28-year-old girl he was banging and probably impregnated (oops) named Mary Jo Kopechn. He drove right off a frigging bridge and into the water but was able to escape the overturned vehicle and swim to safety… and then said oh well and went home probably to do a line of coke and masturbate. Wait, what happened to Mary Jo? Ya, she friggin drowned in the car and Kennedy not only left the scene of the accident, but didn’t say nuthin to nobody until Kopechne’s body was discovered the following day. Fortunately, there’s a happy ending for everyone who didn’t die that night: Kennedy apologized and denied being drunk or banging Mary Jo, was never indicted, and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court accepted the request by Kennedys lawyers for the inquest on the matter to be conducted in secret.

Even though they found that a lot of Kennedys claims were not true and that he was at fault, nothing happened and Kennedy easily sailed to re-election as senator the following year, and every year since then.

Radio host Mark Levin told the story last month:

In 2004, I posted this video from the short lived Spike TV cartoon This Just In that references the crash at the end:

Don’t drive with Ted Kennedy!!!!

UPDATE: Former editor of Newsweek and New York Times Magazine, one of Kennedy’s close friends, Ed Klein, tells something called the Diane Rehm Show that Chappaquiddick jokes were high up on the list. full audio of the show here. The line comes at 30:10, or you can just listen to this little wow-moment isolated in the clip below:

I don’t know if you know this or not, but one of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself. And he would ask people, “have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?” That is just the most amazing thing. It’s not that he didn’t feel remorse about the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, but that he still always saw the other side of everything and the ridiculous side of things, too.

Vanity Fair released this behind the scenes’ featurette of the shoot:

Then the real unedited version of it:

BONUS slideshow:

and PS if you have no idea wtf these videos are about, here’s the Today Show on it: