Well, after the night we had last night with the dogs waking us up at irregular intervals, it's only fitting that the news awaiting us this morning provided more grist for my mill. Where to begin, where to begin? I think alphabetically is the best choice.
Leading off, Alec Baldwin gave another long-winded exculpation of his behavior to a reporter for New York Magazine which is no mea culpa, believe you me. The rambing history of all things Baldwin explains chapter and verse of how wronged he's been by the media, how the public misunderstands him and how he just wants to blend into the crowd in New York but can't, thanks to an invasive media. This from someone who shows up on Saturday Night Live when he's not the host, has Capital One commercials running twenty-four hours a day, had a talk show on MSNBC and constantly gets in conflicts with the media. Methinks the man dost protest too much...but that's the point, isn't it? This is Mr. Baldwin's world and we should all just be thankful he allows us to live in it. Try to have an educated discussion with the man and he browbeats and shouts over the top. But he's never, ever wrong -- and my, isn't he talented? I wonder if he has a publicist because if he does, he's wasting money. He does a much better job getting publicity for himself, he probably doesn't listen to their counsel and who wants that headache anyway? How he's managed to get two beautiful women to marry him is beyond me; fifteen minutes alone with the man probably suffices to know that one would be nothing more than a consort and a baby vessel for the man. I'm sure he has some redeeming qualities, but I'll be darned if I can find any.
Next up we have the irrepressible Minister Louis Farrakhan. He's now come out and told the world that, contrary to the dictates of the Civil Rights Act, Brown v. Board of Education and even Dr. Martin Luther King, blacks need their own court system because they can't get any justice in white courts. Apparently, Mr. Farrakhan longs for the days of Plessy v. Ferguson and its support for the notion of separate but equal. Well, if Mr. Farrakhan wants to play the racial card, perhaps we should respond by allocating to his separate court system a proportionate share of the revenues based on population size. The most recent statistics I could find show that blacks constitute 13.1% of the American population. Therefore, they should get only 13.1% of the revenues allocated to the judiciary. That would also apply to the penal system, as well as everything else. This latest attempt to race-bait is ludicrous. Although there are clearly abuses in the system, blacks alone are not the only parties that suffer from them. Mr. Farrakhan needs to shut up and sit down with Mr. Baldwin to figure out a better course of action...for both of them. That Mr. Farrakhan made this speech in Detroit, where for the last couple of weeks there has been a spate of black homeowners shooting black intruders and were encouraged to do so by the black chief of police only makes the story that much more poignant.
Hitting clean-up is the one and only Piers Morgan. Mr. Morgan comes to us from the enlightened shores of the United Kingdom, where divide-and-conquer is a political technique perfected over centuries of tyranny. Mr. Morgan gained notoriety in this country with one of those insufferably rote talent shows wherein he played the role of the wizened and tough judge who knew better than anyone else. This got him cast on Donald Trump's Celebrity Apprentice (where has that show gone...?) which, in turn, garnered him his own talk show on the Clinton News Network. Mr. Morgan, whose background consists of fluff work reporting on celebrities and hacking their cellphones, fancied himself an expert on America. His scandal-ridden career reads almost as long as Mr. Baldwin's dirge in the New York Magazine. But based on his veddy British accent and his well-honed liberal Darth Vader routine, the Clinton News Network thought it had found the unimpeachable host for a show giving liberals a platform to attack conservatives in this country. Only thing was, there was a slight little problem: For all that British breeding and obnoxious accent, Mr. Morgan rubbed people the wrong way by trying to inject British perspectives into American political thought. The best example of this was when he debated the Second Amendment's application to the ownership of semi-automatic rifles and challenged an opponent to show where in the Amendment it referenced semi-automatics, clearly being based on muskets when enacted. The reply was classic: It refers to semi-automatics right next to where it mentions muskets. Argument over, winner declared, thanks for coming.
Mr. Morgan was haughty enough to declare that he would bury Fox News when it debuted The Kelly Files. Megyn Kelly is not only easy on the eyes she's educated -- not at the toniest schools, but in law school -- so any debate on politics and law would favor Ms. Kelly. Within a little over four months, The Kelly Files crushed Mr. Morgan's show. Mr. Morgan's take on the demise of his centerpiece CNN show is whimsical: Look, I am a British guy debating American cultural issues, including guns, which has been very polarizing, and there is no doubt that there are many in the audience who are tired of me banging on about it. That's putting it mildly: There's nothing an American likes less than a Brit lecturing us about our Constitution that was put in place after we ousted the tyrannical Brits. To call them cultural issues shows just how misguided misguided Mr. Morgan is; they're political issues, they're constitutional issues. To say that they're cultural issues is to say that giving the Republic of Ireland back the Six Counties Britain withheld at Partition is a cultural issue. To speak euphemistically about such an inherent right is to talk down to an American, and Mr. Morgan shows he simply doesn't get it.
So for unintentional hilarity, we should thank Mssrs. Baldwin, Farrakhan and Morgan for giving us plenty about which we can guffaw today. From the narcissistic Baldwin and Morgan to the woefully out-of-touch Farrakhan, each has delivered more cud than a herd of cows could chew on in a year. Each of them, in his mind, is unfairly picked upon by American society, albeit for different reasons -- Mr. Baldwin is misunderstood, Mr. Farrakhan is a minority and Mr. Morgan is a Brit -- but when each episode is distilled to its finest particle, they share one incontrovertible trait: They're woefully out of touch with reality and living in their own utopia which they want to foist on the rest of us.
There's a term for this.
It's called demagoguery.
(c) 2014 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
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