Left Field Substitution

(The following is the top two paragraphs of a much longer rant lifted directly from Tim Kreider's The Pain, When Will It End?, of which I'm quite the fan. You can read the rest of this fine column here. =mike=)

Apparently Rush Limbaugh slew the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference with jokes I remember my father telling when I was a kid, except with himself inserted as the punchline (a joke, in this context, ostensibly self-deprecating but in fact self-adulatory), and one-liners (well, fumbling two and a half-liners) like "I don't know why people are afraid of liberals. People are always afraid of liberals... but why be afraid of the deranged?" Michael Steele later insulted Limbaugh by referring to him as an “entertainer,” but this is hardly fair; he’s not entertaining. This sort of thing doesn't really qualify as humor--it's just an allusion to a common set of assumptions (liberals are scary, liberals are crazy). You could substitute any other group-name and it would be funny to anyone who reviles that group—conservatives, the Quebecois, Presbyterians.

Offering himself up as an alternative visionary for the moribund party is Clinton-era villain Newt Gingrich, who was famous for re-introducing the concept of public orphanages and poorhouses back into the national discourse. Gingrich appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine two weekends ago, lit much like Baltar from the old Battlestar Galatica show, and when I was visiting my friends Jim and Sarah we had to turn the magazine face-down so it would not blight our Sunday morning brunch. Gingrich likes to think of himself as an intellectual, a thinker, conservatism's big idea man, although so far his main contributions to the ongoing discourse of Western civilization appear to be similar to those advocated on ballcaps sold in truck stops: "God, Guns & Guts Made America Great (Let's Keep All Three)".