 | ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
| ||||||
Crybaby Roundup
It’s recently occurred to me that I’ve been giving one of my columns, Waambulance Ride, short shrift since its inception this past winter. This hasn’t been so much from a lack of material sources – i.e., public figures as crybabies – so much as a glut of them. There are simply too fucking many candyasses in public life, pussyaching about how very threatened, misunderstood, unhappy and put-upon they are. I’ve had a difficult time over the last six months finding one crybaby alone to focus on and devote a column to. Given how pleased I was with the way my last “a la carte” articles have been received, I have simply decided to dazzle my readership – both of them – with a colorful array of prominent figures, both from the political and entertainment fields, who’ve been dripping their big fat periods all over the media-addicted public lately.
I’ll start with the obvious – Israel.
All you Israel-boosters, flex your fingers in anticipation of firing me off some hate missives, because right now I hold them on par with Hezbollah themselves in the tangled clusterfuck they’ve unleashed on Lebanon this summer. Now, of all the parties involved in this tedious, back-and-forth waltz of dumbcuntery, you’d think the ones crying the loudest would be Lebanon. After all, they lost a popular and effective prime minister to an assassin, and their already rubbleized country is sustaining most of the “collateral damage” as the terrorist group embedded within their borders and their obnoxious next-door-neighbor nation duke it out in THEIR living room. But no, you really don’t hear much from the Lebanese on all this, leading me to suspect they might in fact all be dead already. What you DO hear is Israel doing what they do best; crying victim as they respond to terror tactics with bigger-budget terror tactics, ripping the heads off of Lebanese children, much like the pop-tabs off of beer cans, as they lob “surgical strikes” against such hotbeds of terrorism as schools and fallout shelters. We’ve all heard the old cliché about the definition of insanity – except, apparently, for Israel and the US government. They seem to think that fighting terror with terror will accomplish their ostensible goal of “peace” (read: hegemony) in the region, even though sixty years’ worth of this tactic would seem to suggest otherwise.
Meanwhile, the ineffectuality of the UN provides a steady contrast for these antics, insuring that generations to come will be able to fully enjoy watching blood pouring onto the sand, out of freshly beheaded babies, as much as we have. For this will never end if all parties involved continue to follow the course they’ve set. Israel’s “innocent victim only defending itself” act has worn paper-thin; this has been going on for so long that it really is a chicken vs. egg debate as to where this all started - one that I really don’t want to be bothered with. But, I’m the political writer around here, and it wouldn’t have been right if I hadn’t weighed in on this whole thing at all.
Now that I’ve alienated most of our American readers, I’ll commit the clumsiest segue ever put on e-paper here at DRS and move onto something a little lighter… and by “lighter” I mean “even more tedious, but in a less world-threatening way”.
The only bloody conflict that’s gotten more ink in the American press than the one in the Middle East, after all, has been The Angelina Jolie/Brad Pitt/Jennifer Aniston love triangle.
By now it’s pretty old news, given that Aniston has found a fleshy walker in the overgrown Vince Vaughn, and now that the Jolie/Pitt baby, Shiloh the Wonderdog Nuvo Wavo Farfington Jolie-Pitt, has sprung from Jolie’s overexposed loins. But it’s never too late to acknowledge a truly sterling moment in crybabydom, and one of these occurred the minute Aniston’s PR machine roared to life, in the wake of her husband’s hasty abandonment.
Yes, Jennifer Aniston has definitely bested all other celebrity contenders in the crybaby sweepstakes, merely by employing the old gambit of reverse psychology. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” she insisted in the umpteen-bazillion interviews she did to announce that she didn’t want to talk about the whole sordid mess. Immediately, legions of fat housewives teared up and tremulously declared her a “class act” by being “above it all”. The tabloids ate it up too, saving the scorned woman valuable time for more treacle interviews by doing the dirty work of trashing the other woman in their pages; printing the snarkiest headlines, the most innuendo-ridden catchphrases, and the nastiest-looking photos of Jolie to provide some quality skank ballast to Aniston’s dishwater-dull girl-next-dooritude. The whole thing – the muted crying, the pleas for privacy, the third-party discrediting of Jolie – worked like a charm. Maybe not everybody loves Aniston, but a lot of people are truly starting to hate Angelina Jolie. This sentiment gallops along a path I proudly blazed long before the whole love triangle thing happened - way back when the silly top-heavy bitch chewed the fuck out of all the scenery on the “Girl Interrupted” set with her big-ass beaver teeth.
Not that I don’t hate Aniston, too. I think they’re both a couple of silly twats, and it pisses me off that they’ve both gotten to kiss Clive Owen while his “people” won’t even let me send him an ear without crying to Interpol. These bitches don’t know how good they’ve got it, and they’re wrasslin’ like a couple of rabid bats over that vacant pretty boy, Shrinky Dink Pitt.
(That ear’s still on ice, Clive. Have your people call my people! I’m not mad at you, baby.)
Since descension into silliness is a sort of demi-theme to this article, you may now be left wondering who could possibly be a sillier more self-indulgent crybaby than Jennifer Aniston. If it doesn’t seem possible to you that such a creature could exist, you’re obviously not a regular viewer of “The O’Reilly Factor”.
Like Aniston, O’Reilly cloaks his boo-hooing in a hefty layer of subterfuge - only instead of faux-dignified media-whoring he goes for the more obvious tactic of wrapping his crying in flags. American flags. O’Reilly likes you to think that he’s a tough-talking, working-class Johnny Everyman trying to whip those gold-bricking pols into shape. But, no, dear reader - he’s really a world-class whiner. While he claims that his political affiliation is “independent”, he’s slavishly pro-status quo, taking the typical FOXNews stance of waxing adoration of the Bush administration like an ugly Stepford wife. Except when it comes to the Bush policy on immigration, of course, on which he gives the president a gentle, wrist-slapping chiding. Mention the scourge of the evil “activist” (read: liberal) Federal judges, or the “negative” (also liberal) media, though, and O’Reilly turns a mottled shade of purple and holds forth all sorts of evil-doing on the part of these twin blights on the “American” (Republican) way of life.
O’Reilly is a perennial favorite crybaby of mine. His blustering hysterics, over such unseen threats to freedom as The War on Christmas and The Silencing of the High School Commencement Jesus Speech, never fail to provide me with the same kind of affectionate chuckle I usually only reserve for my dog’s efforts to mate with my cats. Even better, lately he’s been on a roll. Here he is, outraged over Vermont’s “epidemic” of coddled child molesters in the courtroom, and there he is, shaking his head sadly over the news media’s continued insistence on hounding the Bush administration over outing CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity.
Now, you’re probably thinking to yourself that you could find that kind of carping ANYWHERE on FOXNews, so why single out O’Reilly? Delivery, my friends, it’s all in the delivery. The tougher O’Reilly is coming across, the more he’s actually just sitting there bawling. The more unctuous and condescending he acts, the madder he actually is that all of these poor foolish judges and reporters can’t just be like him, see the light and acknowledge that Republicans are always right and that we should just chuck democracy into the sea and rely on them to do all of our thinking for us.
My last group of crybabies is a little hard for me to come to grips with, since I’m in it myself: The Vitriol Suckers.
Yes, I admit it – I’m one of the people who leaked a big old heavy period over my little corner of the Internet when Ann Coulter’s last book came out. Loath as I was to pay any attention to this bullying, dried-up twat, I fell for the hype, like everyone else, and gave in to exactly the kind of name-calling and invectives that fuel her books in the first place. I actually have to give grudging credit where grudging credit is due – Coulter proves her point about her political opposition, time and time again, by setting them up with outrageous vitriol, settling back on her bony ass to watch them go ballistic and break out the exaggerations, and then filling another book up with venomous caricatures of them. She’s chugged her way onto the NYT bestseller list and into countless lucrative speaking engagements, and has made herself a staple on the talking-head circuit, by engaging us with this highly successful formula.
And we fall for it, every time... Of course, smearing 9-11 widows will be a tough act to follow with her next book. My money’s on a set piece on the Middle East that’ll focus on blaming those headless Lebanese babies for being headless due to their unquenchable thirst for media attention. Or something.
Dammit, it stings to get caught up in the crying game myself. No wonder Clive Owen won’t accept my ear. I’m a damned chump!
Oh well.
