Smart Alec

Alec Baldwin is an egocentric, arm-candy-collecting metrosexual. A smarmy, bubble-headed, Bush-bashing poltroon. A corsetted, sycophantic, smirking, B-movie thespian. And now a short-tempered, blowhard father. His voice-mail rant against his daughter, Ireland, when she turned off her cell phone rather than take his scheduled call may be a career-ending faux paux. Clearly I don’t respect this fellow, but there is one person I esteem even less – his ex-wife, Kim Basinger. She, the scorned woman, has apparently helped create this spoiled brat of a daughter and, by releasing this tape to the hyena-press, done her best to publicly humiliate the father of their child. She has consequently driven a wedge between these two that may never allow them to have a meaningful relationship. And this will certainly further wound this child. To me, it’s as though she said to King Solomon, “Go ahead, cut the baby in two.” Shame on her! Shame on her! Shame on both of them … but somehow spare their daughter her prancing parents.

Global Warming Warning

The global warming nuts are now predicting drought and flooding will be the result of global warming. Now, when we get droughts or floods (as we have since the beginning of time), it will prove that (man-made) global warming is real. Pleeease! Larry David's wife is now flying around the country in a private jet preaching how we need to stop using fossil fuels. Other nabobs (John Edwards, the Governator, John Kerry, etc.) buy "carbon offsets" (planting trees, etc.) to justify their own profligate cee oh two production. While "The Economist" now opines that new computer modeling says that trees contribute to global warming and we should cut them all down. Will such naive mass hysteria never stop?

Signed,
Euell Gibbons

Clive James

I was just watching the famous critic, Clive James, on Book TV (CSPAN2). He said two things that I would like to share. He first related that when he was once lecturing he noted that while two negatives make a positive, two positives never make a negative. With that, someone in the audience cynically barked, “Yeah, Yeah.” He later said that he never found John Coltrane worth listening to. He followed that Coltrane was “the sonic equivalent of a toothache”. (In the sixties I went with a buddy, Jay Goshen, to listen to John Coltrane at the Five Spot in New York City. Coltrane was so spaced out on drugs that there was absolutely no continuity or art in his performance. While the rest of the audience sat in reverent silence, I turned to Jay and said “The emperor has no clothes.” He nodded and so we got up and walked out.)

IMUS IRONIES

Don Imus, who has been booted by both MSNBC TV and CBS radio for his comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team, calling them “nappy-headed hos”. This story is full of sweet, sweet ironies … some of which I am now compelled to relate:

1) Imus, who has feathered his New Mexico nest by extorting money and payments in kind (“donations”) from his sponsors and other US corporations, has been taken down by two far greater extortion artists, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. (This is a “borrowed” idea from my son.) Imus went on Sharpton’s New York radio program, I suppose, expecting Sharpton to recognize him for his over-the-years pandering to black rappers (who NEVER use such derogatory remarks). Instead, Sharpton kicked him to the curb. And, I got to believe that most of the sponsors that dropped Imus like a hot potato had gotten a call from Jesse James … er … Jackson.

2) Al Sharpton, who cut his teeth defending Towanda Brawley, and Jesse Jackson, who recently viciously attacked the three Duke Lacrosse players for “raping” that Durham stripper, have both had to back peddle from these outrageous and likely libelous charges. The true irony here is that both these Sharpton-and-Jackson-defended women surely were NHHs.

3) Hillary Clinton benefits enormously from Imus’s demise. Generally once a day Imus would refer to Hillary on his show as “Satan.” This drip, drip, drip of derogatory remarks (I can’t now say dissing) for the next year could not have been good for Hillary’s try at the Presidency. But now, this chronic negative goes away. I am enough of a conspiracy theorist to believe that anything good that happens to Hillary is not accidental.

4) Many of those liberal guests who have appeared on the Imus in the Morning have dropped him like he was radioactive (stolen term). These include David Gregory, Barak Obama, Harold Ford Jr., and James Carville. He has so far been defended only by Paul Bagala, Mike Barnacle and Bo Deitel. Over the next few days many more former “names” and politician guests (who used Imus much as he used them) will go on extended vacations to avoid having to comment on-air and be proven the hypocrites that all are. I’m particularly curious to see on what side Tim Russert will land.

5) Chris Carlin, Imus’s punching-bag sports commentator, also does play-by-play for what football team? You guessed it … Rutgers. This poor schmoo, who daily suffered taunts of vicious and diabolical proportions, is now out of a job thanks to the sadist he sucked up to.

6) In the end I really don’t think that this kerfuffel (another stolen term) had anything to do with the Rutgers women’s basketball team. It just has been a massive settling of scores … kinda like what is going on in Iraq these days, but a tad less bloody.

40 Degree Easter

Would someone please call Al Gore and ask him to turn up the heat?