I thought that I’d never been asked to join JournoList because, unlike some people around here, I am not a member of the elite liberal-media vanguard. As it turns out, though, I was not asked to join because, truth be told, I am quite a handsome man. I take no pride in this fact, believe me, but was reminded of it when Twitter threw up this piece of genius, which argues that the liberal JouroListers were all pig-ugly losers who had been on “the business end of a fugly stick beat-down”. It brought a tear to my eye, reminiscent as it was of the good old days of blogging, when such arguments were very much to the fore. The real reason I bring this up, though, was to show you a screenshot of the piece:
Who among us has not marveled at DaVinci’s David while strolling through the streets of Venice? It’s one of the many gifts of Western Civilization that a solid conservative education teaches us about.
{ 44 comments }
Don Gomez 07.29.10 at 7:43 pm
That punchline should be better… otherwise that post seems quite pedantic.
Jacob T. Levy 07.29.10 at 7:46 pm
No, sometimes pedantry is just what’s called for. This is one of those times.
rea 07.29.10 at 7:56 pm
liberal JouroListers were all pig-ugly losers who had been on “the business end of a fugly stick beat-downâ€.
With all due respect, no one who has ever seen Ezra Klein would believe that . . .
:P
John Protevi 07.29.10 at 8:01 pm
@ Don Gomez: You think mocking someone who thinks Da Vinci did a David, or for that matter that a David was attacked, or that the attack happened “a few years ago” is pedantry? Talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations!
rosmar 07.29.10 at 8:08 pm
Someone who thinks Andrew Sullivan is fugly must be gorgeous.
politicalfootball 07.29.10 at 8:14 pm
I need some help remembering – Ezra Klein was involved in a dustup a few years ago about his alleged homeliness. I remember that person mocking him was a liberal woman – was it Naomi Klein? – but I can’t remember the context. And like rea, I also think it’s peculiar that a good-looking young man like Ezra is the target for this sort of thing.
rea 07.29.10 at 8:16 pm
“for that matter that a David was attacked”
Maybe I’m misunderstanding you, but the David was attacked back in ’91 (broken toe), although the damage was not as serious as the more famous attaack on the Pieta back in the ’70’s.
Walt 07.29.10 at 8:19 pm
Da Vinci’s David is in Paris, dumb-ass.
Hidari 07.29.10 at 8:20 pm
I take it Why I want to fuck Ronald Reagan by J.G. Ballard would be the sort of thing that Mr Judge would approve of? I mean, if that is not a paen of praise to the pulchritude of the pro-capitalist president, I don’t know what is.
CRD 07.29.10 at 8:27 pm
The more precise analogy would be the hammer attack on Duchamp’s fountain: http://boingboing.net/2006/01/06/duchamps-fountain-at.html
P O'Neill 07.29.10 at 8:34 pm
If ever there was a time to remember October 2008 …
Projecting through the Screen [Rich Lowry] A very wise TV executive once told me that the key to TV is projecting through the screen. It’s one of the keys to the success of, say, a Bill O’Reilly, who comes through the screen and grabs you by the throat. Palin too projects through the screen like crazy. I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me.” And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can’t be learned; it’s either something you have or you don’t, and man, she’s got it.
Anderson 07.29.10 at 8:36 pm
The really sad thing is that, by GOP standards, Palin and Coulter are “hot.”
What impoverished fantasy lives.
John Protevi 07.29.10 at 8:45 pm
@ rea, thanks! Google informs me of the David attack in 91. I was thinking only of the Pieta attack in 1972.
Delicious Pundit 07.29.10 at 8:49 pm
“Sculpting” is a weird verb choice, too. It’s like saying, “I often enjoy Mozart’s composing of The Magic Flute. ” Although, to get the full flavor of the sentence, substitute “Smokey Robinson” for “Mozart”.
Conservatives learned from Burke to abase themselves before the good-looking (“It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision.”)
Irrelephant 07.29.10 at 9:04 pm
Not Venice. DaVinci’s David is In Vegas now, and lit up in neon real nice. I heard Sarah talk about it. You bitchcha!
ben 07.29.10 at 10:06 pm
His “sculpting” of David?
John Quiggin 07.29.10 at 10:15 pm
The Pieta attack: Australian art criticism exemplified!
nick s 07.29.10 at 10:25 pm
His “sculpting†of David?
There’s got to be an infomercial selling a Renaissance Man Sculptercizer.
Phil 07.29.10 at 10:27 pm
Difendete la libertà ovunque!
Maurice Meilleur 07.29.10 at 10:54 pm
Hey, now. Once liberal scorn bankrupted the painter of light and drove him to drink, the loss threw conservatives’ art history compass into a collective out-of-control spin. A little sympathy and patience, if you please. Who will paint snow-covered Victorian houses full of candlelight and good Christians now?
Salient 07.29.10 at 11:10 pm
As it turns out, though, I was not asked to join because, truth be told, I am quite a handsome man.
Kieran Healy is possessed of matinee-idol good looks
And is a ditch-hurler of the first order
I am missing the point, reinforcing it, or both.
roy belmont 07.29.10 at 11:11 pm
Anderson @11:
I confess, while not being a conservative myself, to a shared predilection with Bill the Cat.
Salient 07.29.10 at 11:24 pm
KIERAN: PLEASE WARN US WHEN YOU LINK TO AN ARTICLE WHICH VEERS INTO FULL-ON SCHOOLGIRL FANTASY IN THE SECOND PAGE.
There’s usually one hot female jock like Palin in every school. It’s a girl who is so stunning that even teachers find themselves staring, yet she is too modest to acknowledge her beauty.
BLECH.
KTHXBAI.
rea 07.29.10 at 11:27 pm
I need some help remembering – Ezra Klein was involved in a dustup a few years ago about his alleged homeliness.
As Yglesias has now pointed out, Ezra was once named the 5th most sexy man in the world:
http://jezebel.com/5093450/the-10-sexiest-everyday-men-of-2008
bbp 07.30.10 at 12:45 am
The idea that Palin is some kind of successful athlete is my favorite part of her bizarre reality-bending mythos. She was a scrub cross country runner and an OK basketball player. Can anyone really be crazy enough to think that large numbers of liberals are intimidated by this?
John Quiggin 07.30.10 at 1:45 am
#25 I assumed the “jock” part referred to her “Grizzly Mama” persona. I’d forgotten that she played sport in high school (or was it college).
Maurice Meilleur 07.30.10 at 2:16 am
High school. She was never in any particular college long enough to make any sort of team, if memory serves.
bad Jim 07.30.10 at 3:57 am
Plus she was so aggressive and unscrupulous that she earned the sobriquet “Barracuda”. So much for being nice.
The left hates good-looking Republicans and jocks, so combining the two is like an exorcist hitting a demon with not only prayers, but water blessed by the Pope.
Does that even work? Has anyone done an experiment?
M. Bouffant 07.30.10 at 4:04 am
Another reactionary gets his facts straight (It’s been up since 1022 ET) :
Speaking of lox, John Podhoretz, the editor of Mother Jones magazine, has written to Goldblog to point out, acerbically, that Eric Alterman is drafting Zabar’s into a culture war that cares not at all about Zabar’s and what it ostensibly represents. He writes, “This is the first time I have ever heard anyone say Zabar’s requires or deserves an ideological defense.”
Salient 07.30.10 at 6:38 am
Does that even work? Has anyone done an experiment?
If a fly ball hits the foul pole, home run!
deliasmith 07.30.10 at 11:40 am
@20: Excellent summing up of the Kincaidophile worldview in the comments section of the LA Times piece:
“if he were a murderer, illegal alien, Atheist, Homesexual Artist painting crap, a no talent Hollywood Celebrity, he would be strongly defended, admired and placed on a pedestal” – sounds like a strong pitch for a piece of living art, perhaps for the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square.
And, @24, on reading the piece on Ezra Klein – Americans are funny – has no-one in New York heard of Glenda Slagg?
mds 07.30.10 at 12:41 pm
It helps if you remember that Tucker Carlson is basically a poorly-raised twelve-year-old. I mean, once you’ve already done “Fine! I didn’t want to be in your stupid club anyway,” having your lickspittle minions run with “U-G-L-Y. You ain’t got no alibi” is pretty much par for the course.
Who needs the Internet Archive when Salient is Crooked Timber’s own theater of memory?
Don’t get too smug about this inverted accolade, though, Professor Healy. Sure, you’re sane and rational, fearless and intrepid, witty and forceful, and, above all, devilishly handsome. But you’re still no Mark Chaves.
norbizness 07.30.10 at 1:59 pm
I, the actual The Left, have met Ezra Klein (no, really), and can attest that one is struck mute by his grandeur for an average of six minutes.
Ben 07.30.10 at 2:12 pm
Give the poor guy credit. He evidently knew that:
1) A famous statue called David existed
2) It was done by a famous Italian guy
3) It is in a city in northern Italy
4) It was once vandalized.
While I would have gotten 1-3, and known the artist and the city, I didn’t know 4.
Mucking up some trivia hardly attacks the main thesis, that beauty is often hated.
Now, whether Palin is at all “beautiful” is an entirely different issue, but it really has nothing to do with where David is.
Heck, many of the people who see the one on display in the plaza think they’ve seen the real one.
Ginger Yellow 07.30.10 at 2:15 pm
Once liberal scorn bankrupted the painter of light and drove him to drink, the loss threw conservatives’ art history compass into a collective out-of-control spin. A little sympathy and patience, if you please.
Don’t feel too bad. Kinkade is now in the Texas curriculum thanks to their nutbar State Board of Education.
Uncle Kvetch 07.30.10 at 2:55 pm
It helps if you remember that Tucker Carlson is basically a poorly-raised twelve-year-old. I mean, once you’ve already done “Fine! I didn’t want to be in your stupid club anyway,†having your lickspittle minions run with “U-G-L-Y. You ain’t got no alibi†is pretty much par for the course.
The real tragedy here is that, once he got a decent haircut and ditched the stupid-ass bowtie, Tucker Carlson revealed himself to be a pretty attractive dude, in a purely physical sense.
Which just makes the whole “sniveling, reactionary little piece of shit” thing that much more unfortunate.
Roger Ailes 07.30.10 at 3:45 pm
I can’t believe that the creator of Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill is such a clueless right-wing maroon.
Coughin' Ed 07.30.10 at 4:14 pm
Mike Judge is the creator of B&B and KotH, this peanut is Mark Judge
Coughin' Ed 07.30.10 at 4:16 pm
Mike Judge created B&B and KotH
chris 07.30.10 at 5:17 pm
@Coughin’ Ed: What, you expected factual accuracy from Roger Ailes?
Roger Ailes 07.30.10 at 9:56 pm
My comment was written in the DaVinci Code.
Get it?
Andrew 07.31.10 at 9:20 pm
The Resistible Rise Of Sarah Heath: A Play In One Act
Wasila High Guidance Counsellor: Sarah, it’s time to discuss your future.
Sarah Heath: Well, you know my dream for, like ever – I want to further my knowledge of the great religions of the world, and travel, discuss Islamic theology with the, um, Islamites – ‘cos you can’t do that here in America!
WHGC: Really? Have you considered a career in sports? I’m told you’re a heck of a basketball player – you must have lots of drive, to get that kind of nickname!
SH: No, really, Mrs Putterschmidt – people heard me listening to Heart, goofing off to that song. I think being tough and mean to people is really icky.
WGCH: Have you thought of sports journalism?
SH: Well, being a reporter is a fine calling. You have to be really careful, accurate, get your story straight, do all your research. I’m always striving for that there sort of attitude, but I don’t know that I could live up to it. Me, a member of the Mainstream Media! [Laughs softly]
WHGC: You should definitely consider it. Plus, and I don’t want this to go to your head – you really are a good looking young lady. Why, I’m sure you could go up on stage as Miss Wasila or better, especially with your flute playing and everything.
SH: Oh, no way, Miss P! Stand up in front of crowds of folks, who’d all be, like, judgin’ ya? Next you’ll be askin’ me to make speeches [Blushes furiously]
WHGC: Well that’s not a bad idea, either, Sarah. You could pretend you were speaking to a convention of folks, or describing all the stuff you read to some lady interviewing you. Just keep the natural way you see the good side in everyone, and you’ll have a real bright future. [The bell rings] OK, that’s all for now.
SH: Thanks, Miss P! You’ve given me a lot to think about! [Exits]
WHGC: [Sighs] Another student who didn’t hear a word I said. Nice girl, but none of them have any ambition or see a mile beyond the Valley. I wonder why I bother…
[Curtain]
doxastic 08.01.10 at 2:22 pm
Is it wrong that I find his conflation of resentment and ressentiment the most offensive part of the argument?
richard 08.02.10 at 7:42 pm
Ben @ 34: this is the best argument I’ve seen so far for the internet allegedly cheapening discourse. Why should we have high standards for writing online?
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