THE EISENHOWER MEMORIAL PROPOSAL:

IT'S SO CRAPPY ITS CRAPPINESS HAS ITS OWN WEBSITE


Version 1: All Pompeii ruins à la mall parking lot, with Stonehenge center


Frank Gehry, one of the two 'hottest' modern architects in the modern world (along with that cheery old soul, Daniel Libeskind, who contributed a pointy tumor to Toronto's Royal Ontario Museum), has put on his tin-foil hat and come up with a design that resembles nothing so much as the underpinnings of an unfinished overpass.

It is (a) ugly, (b) meaningless, (c) appears to be constructed out of the same kind of cheesy materials that go into too many apartment blocks, only to rust out and look like they're crumbling within a decade, and (d) unrelated in any obvious way to its subject or the period of history that he shaped.

The remaining Eisenhower family hates it.

Join them! The website tells you what you can do about it.

Here's some more trash talk on this trashy 'Deconstructivist' design.

[hat-tip Daily Caller]


Version 2: Fewer purposeless columns, more 'minimum security prison exercise yard' appeal, Stonehenge knocked over


[tip of the beret to Arch Daily 'the world's most visited architecture website', where the first three comments on the article read:

-- Zzz

-- building a memorial for one person is so 19th century. get over it...

-- wait, there's going to be an eisenhower memorial? what in heaven's name FOR?


But, you know, artists are so much more sensitive than the rest of us. What's one charging horde of Nazis more or less, huh?

REJECTING THE KEYSTONE PIPELINE
IS AN ACT OF NATIONAL INSANITY




I didn't say it. This guy did.

But on behalf of both nations, I agree.

THE COPY OF NEWSWEEK YOU MIGHT CONSIDER BUYING

Over at RedState they're soliciting photo-shopped parodies of the infamous current issue of Newsweek magazine. Check them out. These are my personal favourites:

SPIRIT OF AMERICA

Self-explanatory.



President Bush gave recognition to Spirit of America and its founder Jim Hake, but never spoke out publicly about what he knew of their work. HUGE MISTAKE. Back then, all Americans wanted to know what they could do to help the war effort, and Mr. Bush said almost nothing.

President Obama shows no evidence of even knowing about Spirit of America, or any of the other civilian programs to give aid to people living under Islamist tyranny -- and if he did know, drawing attention to their work would not fit his strategy of retreat and kow-tow. Now Americans are depressed about foreign entanglements, forgetful of the threats against their well-being, and fearful for their own economic futures.

We'll survive all that (I hope), and there will be plenty of room for the absolutely amazing work of Spirit of America or Operation International Children and others. So dig in, cough up, hand over, speak out, and change the world one little warm kid at a time.

WHO'S THE BANE NOW?

This is just too funny: Newt is telling his PAC to fix or withdraw their film on the evils of Bain Capital under Mitt Romney's tenure, because it contains some, er, lies. But who is the real villain?

Who really turfed people out of jobs in Marianna, FL, AFTER Bain sold the successfully re-structured company? Who bought Unimac from Bain, shut the whole operation down and moved to Wisconsin?


Why, it was that most notoriously cut-throat of venture capital operations, 'Teachers Private Capital, the private-equity arm of the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan', says the Wall Street Journal. That's right folks! The Ontario [that's CANADA] public school teachers' union -- those dog-eat-dog capitalists who own pieces of international airports around the the world, and who just sold their majority share in the Toronto Maple Leafs, because they do NOT like LOSERS.

So Bain helped the workers recover, get raises and promotions, and have a better life. Then Ontario Teachers (because it's all for the children, right?) laid them all off and took their jobs to another state.

[hat-tip to the Wall Street Journal -- subscriber only online, but trust me, I read it in the dead tree, and it's all there]

The NewtPAC's anti-Bain film trailer is here. It's short, but there are enough clichés to satisfy anyone's appetite for cheesy self-parody worthy of Saturday Night Live. I kept waiting for that nasty banker Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life to pop up, pulling George Bailey's money out of his newspaper.

Who is the 'bane' indeed?

OK AMERICA --

PLAYTIME'S OVER

Mitt takes the New Hampshire primary with gobs of votes. Now can we please move on to a state where the grown-ups are allowed to vote without proof of mental instability? -- voters who might have a glimmer of an idea that Ron Paul is totally batsh#t crazy, and John Huntsman is themost sanctimonious bore since Al Gore? Huh?

Unbelievable. And I predict, it ain't gonna hold. If it does, I'm moving to Canada.

Oh wait.... I already......y'know.


ARE YOU FREAKIN' KIDDING ME, NEW HAMPSHIRE?

WHEN WORDS FAIL....

RAMIREZ ROCKS IT

Michael Ramirez has to be one of the finest satirical artists in the history of satirical art, and I'm talking all the way back to its 18th-century invention by such folks as Ghezzi, Hogarth, Rowlandson, and company.

He had recently been especially eloquent on certain unspeakable developments from the within the turgid imperium of Demander-in-Chief Barack Obama, as follows:




And, lest we forget:



Revel in the further wealth of Ramirez, Pulitzer Prize winner and contributor to Investor's Business Daily, here.

Buy his book.

RICK ROCKS IT

Iowa caucuses still tighter than a tick, but get seriously goosed by the little whiney guy on the end in all the debates. Rick Santorum comes from the far rear position to probably win the night, intruding himself into the coronation process -- will he be the Not-Mitt we've been waiting for? Open your wallets and fund the contrary voice for as long as it can be heard above or among the fray -- the genuine so-con with impeccable pro-life creds, who, by the way, could be made even more good-looking by standing next to Marco Rubio.............................

P.S. Dear Rick: Lose the sweater. Totally nerd.

2012 [updated]


Back in the olden days I used to sit alone by the Christmas tree (the family having packed it in) as one year passed into the next, and write down my reflections, usually melancholy, about the onward march of time. Later this habit passed from ink and paper to electronic media, but the ritual remained the same.

This year I decided not to think. I cast about on the internet for various things, went to Facebook and enjoyed the 6.5 minutes of a fine Te Deum a friend had posted, and then turned on the TV to see if there was anything worth watching before calling it a day and a year.

As luck (or something else) would have it, one station was playing what is probably an appropriate choice of film as we face the challenges of 2012: The Two Towers, part deux of the Lord of the Rings trilogy -- the one where adventure turns to near despair. I was tired and wondered if I had it in me to commit to watching out the end of it, since it was just at the moment when the Orcs, riding their bat-&-boar-faced wolverine/hyena/dingo-like Wargs, attack the almost defenseless Rohirrim. But I was drawn into the action, having had in mind for much of the day the prospect of the Western World backed into a corner like the denizens of Helm's Deep.

This desperate confrontation is always chilling and draining to watch, more for the palpable despair among the bravest of warriors than for the violence of the battle itself. Pile up a few of the day's global headlines in recent months, and one feels a similar sense of "the end of all things" looming closely as the fatter and less industrious hobbits and trolls of Europe and North America scramble about and squabble over acorns.

What just months ago might have had the potential for being the bold stand of the Fellowship against the tide of chaos -- that is, if you'll bear with me, the field of Republican Presidential aspirants preparing to face off against Obama -- risks devolving into a nasty quarrel among trolls and garden gnomes, all too small to reach the stature of the contested office.

Surely none of them so small as the incumbent -- small in character and empathy and imagination, if not in power and raw ambition. Small and bloodless and ideologically calculating while politically obtuse. Where we needed an Aragorn, or at least of Faramir of some ilk, to stand against this chilly, feckless little golem, we may have to make do with some blustering troll or wannabe elf all wrapped up in a shiny foil wrapper, bruised and tatty from a primary smackdown. Yuck.

Leaving aside all these cutesie little metaphors and analogs, what the replay of Helm's Deep really brings most sharply to mind is the image of the seemingly endless waves of slathering, blood-starved, malconceived Orcs, descending upon the noble remnant with its back against the wall. It was an image branded upon the turn of the year 2005/6, and again 2008/9, and once again suggests itself now in precisely the same terms.

Once again, the ORC, in all its threatening savagery, does NOT stand for the Nazis or the Taliban or the Muslim brotherhood or the drug lords, the pirates, or even the Democrats -- it never did. As it ever was, the ORC is the embodiment of the LIE.

I mourned its total triumph in 2008, even though, in a sense, the lies of 2005 were more insidious. The lies of 2008 were gargantuan, bloated, and almost comical in their obviousness, but in the end they have done more damage -- and if they are not laid to rest within a year's time, their consequences may take generations to undo.

Yet here we are, poised for another round of assaults by the armies of the LIE, prepared to double down their efforts and dig their roots deeper into the public landscape, out of stubborn refusal to admit their own madness of four years ago. When I read back to my 2008 Orc-based post, it almost seems naive in its under-estimation of the potential for the official and auxiliary (press) Obama administrations to wreak havoc on the American nation through hapless and rigid adherence to perverse ideology, and through its ruthlessly thuggish application. It is hard to fathom how anyone so fundamentally vacant could turn out, in his own way, to be so effective.

And if we thought we saw the Year of the Lie in full flower in 2008, we ain't seen nothin' yet. The pundits always say it, but this year it is true that we are in the political fight of our lives, and the future of the American nation (and that of all its allies and dependents) hangs in the balance. The stakes have not been higher since the Cold War got hot. The hordes are poised to descend, having laid down covering fire from their bunkers for the past three years -- sample it here among the Top Ten 2011 examples of Media Malfeasance. It's only going to get uglier.

UPDATE:
Further on the Media Malfeasance theme: wise fellow Victor Davis Hanson reflects on some "No News" stories of the recent past.