Donald Rumsfeld is the latest person edging away from criminal responsibility for the Iraq disaster but rather than shifting the blame to the rest of the Bush-Cheney regime for what was doomed from the start to be a quagmire, he, like other media commentators, is now trying to blame president Obama for the mess that he inherited and has led to the current state of affairs.
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This is what you get when Breaking Bad meets SpongeBob SquarePants.
Stephen Colbert has been out of the news while he plans his return to TV as the replacement for David Letterman on CBS’s The Late Show that begins on September 8. But he has been busy growing a beard and has put out a short video promotion for his show that suggests that even without the conservative mask he has been wearing for so long, he is still funny.
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And so we have senator Lindsey Graham, a man who is perpetually terrified that all of us are going to die from one catastrophe or another, announcing that he too is entering the race for the Republican nomination for president. This was undoubtedly good news for The Daily Show, to be exceeded in its comedic potential only by Donald Trump also joining the race.
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Jon Oliver of Last Week Tonight thinks that the arrests of top FIFA officials for widespread corruption does not go nearly far enough and has launched one of his campaigns, this time calling for the removal of its long time head Sepp Blatter, which he says could be facilitated by major sponsors withdrawing their support for FIFA.
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Jon Stewart brings us up to date on the latest entrants on the Republican side, from the crazy to the racist. It is quite incredible to me that people like Carly Fiorina and Lindsey Graham can be so casual about being condescending and bigoted towards entire nations of large populations.
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Whatever happens to the lead actresses in action films, whatever turmoil they go through, they somehow manage to emerge looking good. The secret about how they achieve that is now revealed by these outtakes from such films. It is because these films are written by men.
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I am way out of touch with popular culture and so I had never heard of John Legend before the Oscars this year when the news reported that he and Common (another performer whom I had never heard of until recently) had given a boffo live performance of the song Glory from the film Selma during the Academy Awards show, where it won an award and where the two gave great acceptance speeches.
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On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver exposes how the chicken industry is dominated by four major companies (Pilgrim’s, Tyson, Perdue, and Sanderson Farms) that use their monopoly power to create hellish conditions, not just for chickens of which we are all aware, but also for the chicken farmers who work for them on contracts that are incredibly exploitative. And Congress protects these abusive companies.
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Somehow I missed the sad news that British comedian John Fortune had died on December 31, 2013. Michael Coveney provides a retrospective of his life. I came across Fortune only about a decade or so ago, when the brilliant improvisational sketches that he did with John Bird appeared online. These took the form of an interview in which one of them would question the other on the issues of the day. I love this kind of deadpan comedy, where the conversation takes an absurd turn but the speakers discuss it quite seriously.
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