perfidy

In a comment to my economics post below, GeekLethal coins the term "onanomics" to describe that branch of economics that manages, through narrowly modeled, tightly construed conditions, to describe absolutely nothing of use. Good coinage.

This weekend, I was watching the Sunday news cycles when I saw footage of Laura Bush speaking at the yearly dinner they throw to persuade the White House Press Corps that they are something better than slime you scrape off a shoe. The networks all replayed that sorta-funny but really upsetting set of jokes where W is so dumb he once tried to milk a male horse, so easygoing he is in bed by 9, and so unsubtle that he likes to fix every problem on his ranch no matter how big or small with a chainsaw... which is why he gets along so well with Cheney and Rumsfeld. What? Did Laura Bush just call her husband cack-handed and dim, with a penchant for unintrospective bumbling and jerking off horses, and then play that for laughs?

Almost as good as last year when they did that whole "nope... no WMDs under here montage" with George looking under couches and in closets. Laff freakin riot.

Anyway, the word that popped into my head to describe Laura Bush's performance at the Press Corps dinner was "macrotesticularity." As in, "my, that was awfully macrotesticular of her to play our nightmares for laughs like that."

Bet you didn't know that a post about neologisms was going to degenerate into a takedown of the President's speechwriters, foreign policy, and taste for chainsaws, didja?

[wik] I should probably be clear here. I don't think the President is stupid. To begin with, that would mean that his opponents are even stupider than he is, and although there is ample evidence to support that thesis, all that can be proven is that his opponents are less smart, not that the President is stupid. Moreover, stupid men don't make President. Period. Now, that does not mean that George W. Bush is far to incurious and prone to what I would call lack of insight, but that's a matter of taste. Au chaque ses propres, you know?

But to make a funny out of the President's supposed lack of intelligence is neither funny, reassuring, or particularly worthwhile for anybody. If he's that stupid that he jacks off horses and can't be bothered to figure out why, say, Turkmenistan's Islamic crisis is different from Sudan's, that's horrible. If he's not that stupid than joking about how he is is just sort of tasteless.

[alsø wik] I should also be clear on another point. I thought Laura Bush was pretty funny; they were funny lines. Or as it occurred to me later, they would be funny lines in another context. Unlike certain moral majoritarians, I have no problem with the First Lady making horsejacking jokes, and unlike some uptight liberals, I think it's funny to laugh at the President while retaining some respect for the office. But my mind's subprocesses have been working it over the last couple of days, and at some point I began to realize that jokes about the President's smarts are weak, tired and lame. Where's Bruce Vilanch when you need him?

[alsø alsø wik] I should also also be clear that I really haven't spent very much time thinking about this. Reading this post over, I come off pretty uptight. In reality, I'm not all that bothered by any of this and in fact have spent far more time writing about it than I have fretting about it. So I'm going to move on now, and post something about robots or music or boobies, or robots with musical boobies.

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] Ohhh, but this is too good to pass up! Big Time Patriot of blogcritics recommends that we test the mettle of the FCC and lodge formal complaints about the hot man-on-beast penile manipulation talk aired on CSPAN. If a blurry accidental nipple is worth half a mil, what's the going fine for horse dong?