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RachelWatch: Rachel Confronts the Demon Sheep

Today: Political ads do not get much worse. And Rachel has news that she’s reading in verse.

Omentum

Rachel started us off with a second look at last night’s “Omentum” segment title. Turns out that an omentum is a real thing: It’s a flap of tissue that, in Rachel’s words, “holds in your guts”. Which is a pretty good description of what President Obama is trying to do for Senate Democrats.

Obama, still on a question-and-answer roll, had a question-and-answer session with Senate Democrats Wednesday. Today he is scheduled to join the two Senate Independents for a question-and-answer session, and then on Friday Obama will appear on Jeopardy!, where he’ll be answering with a question.

The President is trying to get his fellow Democrats to push forward and make health care reform happen instead of succumbing to the paralyzing fear that actually doing something might hurt their chances of re-election.

Really, frightened Democrats: If you’re worried about going out, why not go out swinging and speechifying? You’ll have a much better chance of getting on the teevee later.

The excellent Senator Sherrod Brown (D — Ohio) chatted with Rachel about his frustrations over the ridiculous need for a supermajority to get anything done in the Senate and how much he hates the Supreme Court’s landmark “Buy a Buncha Votes” decision.

Pants on Fire

Here’s a puzzler: What do you do when you have a genuine terrorist that you can use to score some Righteous Patriotic Outrage points, but the facts of the case and the law of the land aren’t backing you up?

Look no further than your treasured Constitution! Specifically, your First Amendment right to blather outright falsehoods at any camera in range for as long as you want.

Rachel looked at the unbelievably wrong wrongness of Senators Mitch McConnell (R) and Lindsey Graham (R) who, since we’re just spouting wrongness today, represent Sweden and France. Also they would like nothing better than for you to make a healthy donation to your local autonomous soy-growing collective.

Rachel also ran a delightful clip of Andrea Mitchell fact-blasting the even more wrong Senator Susan Collins (R — Cloudcuckooland) shortly before Collins grounded Natalie, Blair, Jo, and Tootie for making a mess of the kitchen during another wacky caper.

Fight To Serve

Blustering politicians who claim to be in favor of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell not because they’re prejudiced — perish the thought! — but merely because they are trying to support the military are finding themselves with less and less ground to stand on.

Case in point, Colin Powell, a military guy politicians like to agree with who now favors the DADT repeal. Oh, dear. Between him and Admiral Mullen, hard-right bigots are starting to have a severe crisis of we-stand-with-our-military posturing.

Speaking of sensible guys with military experience, Iraq veteran Congressman Patrick Murphy (D — PA) has been doing an amazing job of fighting for the DADT repeal. He and Rachel discussed the silly year-plus timeline for “integrating” LGBT troops who are already there and noted that the pro-DADT folks are just starting to sound bizarre. It’s like they’re advocating religious snake-handling in the military. How does anyone think they have real-world justification any more?

Ms. Information

For a long time, the United States has been maintaining that we are not at war in Pakistan because we’ve only been sending over killer robots so it totally doesn’t count. You’ll often see a family Pakistanis give a cheery wave and call “No problem!” to the fast-departing drone that has just destroyed their home.

Only it turns out that we do have troops over there after all, and some of them have just been killed in the not-a-war.

In fact, we seem to be doing everything like a war except calling it one.

At this point, we entered what Rachel called “the critter part” of The Rachel Maddow Show. Great flapping parrots, was it wonderful.

Rachel eased us into the magic with a story on Iran’s leap into the space race. The Iranians sent up a rocket with rat, two turtles, and some worms.

Well, actually what they had to do was first send up a rocket with the worms and leave them in space, then send the turtles up but bring the worms back to Earth. Next they sent the rat up and left it with the turtles and finally went back and brought up the worms.

Flacked by a Rare Parrot

You may remember Rachel’s Moment of Geek on the best moment in the history of birdwatching, the clip of the randy kakapo.

You’ll be thrilled to know that Sirocco the kakapo has put his telegenic charm to good use. He’s now the official spokesbird for New Zealand conservation and, of course, he is tweeting.

Horton Hears a Lawsuit!

Remember that weird sound you heard a little while ago that you couldn’t seem to place? It was a piece of your childhood shattering.

A coal company with some serious gall resources took the name “LoraxAg” so that everyone would know how environmentally friendly — not to mention brightly colored — its coal is.

Now get a drink of water and tuck yourself in. Rachel is going to read you a story.

Lamb-basted

Carly Fiorina is a Republican Senate candidate in California, and she has set a new, incredible standard for political ads. You need to see this.

Like all great art, the Firoina commercial only gets better with repeat viewings and raises more questions than it answers:

Who decided to spring for stock footage, animation, and multiple camera setups but figured it was fine to just use a sheepskin rug instead of a full sheep costume?

Why did they need a shot of the Demon Sheep pretending to eat?

Does someone in the Fiorina campaign think that “put your sheep on a pedestal” is a common phrase?

While we’re on the topic of sheep metaphors, is this commercial pro-sheep or anti-sheep? Several mocking sheep shots juxtaposed with the target of the ad suggest that being a sheep is a bad thing. But then the impostor Demon Sheep is clearly meant to be an evil presence that is pretending to be a good member of the flock, which suggests that the flock must be good.

Ms. Fiorina, when you are ready for an ovine symbolism consultant who knows what she’s doing, I’m here.

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