The stage lights dim and an outside scene – a stone terrace, with an Iraqi city in the background – appears on a projection screen behind the stage. Barber stands chatting with the captain while the technicians scurry around making last-minute preparations. The dancers twist and kick.
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October 16, 2005
WB: A Chorus Line
Comments
Bringing out the Rockettes?
85-Year-Old Seattle Woman Recruited By Marines
Note:
During the halftime show of Super Bowl XXII in 1988, the Rockettes were seen by a television audience of 150 million viewers. President Bush’s 2001 Presidential Inauguration Ceremony featured the legged performers prancing down the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Oct 16 2005 7:21 utc | 1
The “Arizona Republic” is nearly as Republican as its title suggests, but their editorial cartoonist, Steve Benson, is right on the mark. Check out his take Benson Cartoon
Posted by: ralphieboy | Oct 16 2005 13:28 utc | 3
Sorry, no link, the cartoon is at
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/opinions/benson/articles/101505benson.html
Posted by: ralphieboy | Oct 16 2005 13:28 utc | 4
Hilarious as usual, Billmon.
I didn’t think that one could parody this Administration. It’s as if we are living in a Marx Brothers world except that none of the jokes are funny.
Posted by: nopping madbunny | Oct 16 2005 13:33 utc | 5
The usual high-grade satire from Billmon.
The show-biz theme puts me in mind to update the Cell-Block Tango:
He had it coming
He had it coming
He only had himself to blame
If you’d have been there
If you’d have seen it
[KARL]
I betcha you would have done the same!
[CONDI]
Tubes
[SCOOTER]
Roots
[JUDY]
Curveball
[DICK]
Squish
[HADLEY]
Yellowcake
[W]
Shit!
Posted by: 4-fingers | Oct 16 2005 13:45 utc | 6
Allison Barber, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense
…Ms. Barber holds a BS in Elementary Education from Tennessee Temple University…
Yes, she does.
Posted by: Anonymous | Oct 16 2005 14:40 utc | 7
I tracked the disappearance of political comedy during the Reagan administration. It just dried up. The last to go, was NBC Overnight with Linda Ellerbee and Bill Schecter (sp?). They were wickedly irreverent and had a cult following. They were not losing money for the network, and there was not a lot of competition for their time slot (2-5 AM). When that show was canceled in spite of the howls of protest from its audience, I took my TV to the dump.
Billmon’s Chorus Line demonstrates why humor must be carefully controlled. It is lethal force.
Posted by: eftsoons | Oct 16 2005 15:01 utc | 9
thanks for the comic relief billmon! once again i’m lol
Posted by: annie | Oct 16 2005 17:06 utc | 10
This production was so bad even the corporate media was forced to talk about it. But their take was to notice the obvious – that it was a staged event – and express a little displeasure. Well, duh. This administration has been doing these numbers since the beginning; but the choreography was smoother and the sets were more glamorous so the reviews were better. And the sheeple audience ate it up. The real story here is not that we got another staged event but that we got a really bad one. Even the faithful couldn’t bear to watch. Is their mojo gone? W had to stand there all by himself in a large room and feign the ability to interact naturally with actual people – and he fell on his face. The bit players recited their lines like 4th graders. And the exit scene, which they obviously had given no thought to, was a disaster with W dropping his earpiece on the floor, glancing down with a goofy “what now” look and then turning abruptly and marching of the set. Screenwriters use final scenes like this to make their characters look like fools. It worked; I burst out laughing in spite of my extreme disgust with the whole thing. They succeeded in satirizing themselves.
Unfortunately, this episode of Our President will disappear faster than a broadway musical about life in a hospice. It’s too close to the truth about this president.
Posted by: lonesomeG | Oct 16 2005 18:36 utc | 13
“The real story here is not that we got another staged event but that we got a really bad one.”
Yep the wheels are falling off bigtime. The flunkies, shills, and arselickers will be running around like chooks with their head cut off proposing ways to ‘fix’ this problem but in reality there is no fix.
Once the audience sees there’s something up the sleeve the game is over. Even if the magician found a real genie and started performing genuine magical acts, the audience would just spend more time trying to see where the wires, smoke and mirrors were. That means they won’t hear the message anyway, so the job is blown, the pooch screwed; and the only practical option is ‘exit stage left’.
“NEXT!”
Posted by: Debs is dead | Oct 16 2005 23:45 utc | 15
give them the hook!!
Partridge’s “Dictionary of Catch Phrases” has this entry:
: : ‘get the hook!’ This US c.p. derives ‘from the days, up to c. 1930, of amateur vaudeville contests; it was said that the managers kept a long hook in the wings to drag off incompetent but stubbornly persistent performers. Not, of course, a c.p. in those circumstances, but it is one when some guest is not succeeding in entertaining the company; sometimes extended to losing a job’ (Prof. John W. Clark, 1978).
: GIVE THE HOOK – “The ‘hook’ here is straight out of vaudeville. In grandfather’s time, a weekly event at the local vaudeville house was Amateur Night, when local talent competed for modest prizes and an opportunity to get a start in show business. Very bad acts were hooted vehemently and, when the boos reached a peak, the manager would reach out from the wings with a long pole bearing a hook at the end and unceremoniously jerk the ham out of the limelight. Nowadays anyone who gets or is given ‘the hook’ is a person discharged for incompetence.” From the “Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins” by William and Mary Morris (HarperCollins, New York, 1977, 1988).
I expect a more modern equivalent would be “being gonged”.
Posted by: eftsoons | Oct 17 2005 0:09 utc | 16
Love this.
I’ve dug further into the history of First Lieutenant Gregg Murphy of the 278th Regimental Combat Team and found that there’s more to Murphy than meets the lens. His pro-Bush rhetoric is sprinkled throughout the media in articles dating back to 2003.
This begs the question: how could one soldier get so much face time?
Posted by: beq | Oct 17 2005 19:39 utc | 17
“Paul Krugman meets Mel Brooks”. Shrill and hilarious at the same time.
Posted by: goodgerman | Oct 17 2005 19:52 utc | 18