The Hollywood Idiocracy has let out a primal scream to protest Donald Trump, the people's president. Members of the collective convened to convulse like Linda Blair in "The Exorcist," to the sounds of Gloria Gaynor in "I Will Survive."
This particular protest was made up of mediocre females: Emma Stone, Natalie Portman, Amy Adams, Hailee Steinfeld, Chris Pine, Michael Shannon, Matthew McConaughey, Andrew Garfield, and Joel Edgerton (the last five are women with the Y chromosome).
Miss Blair, of course, was great in "The Exorcist." The same goes for the demon Pazuzu who possessed Blair's character (Regan MacNeil) in the film. At his gurgling snarling worst, Pazuzu was easier on the ear than the actors who primal-screamed their way through Gaynor’s fabulous, 1979 disco number.
How full of yourself must you be to sound and look as vapid as these celebrities did on the vid? A less self-aggrandizing group would have used the Auto-Tune technology, a must for the pop-pornographers who parade as artists these days! Or perhaps they did, and Team "I Will Survive" is even worse than it sounds.
Speaking of self-adoration, I've lost count of how many goodbyes Barack Hussein Obama has bid. The countdown to President-elect Trump's inauguration has morphed into a search-and-rescue for the Obama legacy, except that when something is dead; it becomes a recovery operation.
The other day, Obama "popped by" to say goodbye to Press Secretary Josh Earnest. I can't quite recall what 44 said, but the interlude was all about Obama.
Indeed, nothing Obama has ever said is memorable, or has intellectual acuity to it. This goes for his farewell address. President-elect Trump might be inarticulate and plain-spoken; but each of his words means something tangible and actionable. The incumbent's words, conversely, are like a Rorschach test: fuzzy, hazy verbal vapor, designed to absorb the listener’s projected emotions and reflect them back soothingly.
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The cliché is the operative word in an Obama sentence. Visit any random site or video clip featuring Obama excerpts and you’ll hear mind-numbing banalities. Here’s one at random (2009): “What brings us together is stronger than what pulls us apart.”
As measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability test, a “Smart Politics,” 2012 study concluded that “for the third straight Address, the President’s State of the Union message was written at an eighth-grade level.”
During his interminable farewell address, Obama appeared to imply that because some western immigrants were once disparaged and discriminated against in bad old America—it follows that all immigrants to his newly transformed America should never-ever be doubted or rejected. What did I tell you about eighth-grade reasoning?
For the farewell address, Obama had asked BJ the Chicago Kid—is he a Malia crush?—to ululate the National Anthem. "Take people's minds to another place" was the instruction BJ allegedly received. BJ's crushingly bad warbling took me back to 2009.
The scene was a "sedate" soiree at the White House—down to the disco ball and the half-nude, pelvis-grinding Beyoncé. The soiree was held by the first lady for Mexican President Felipe Calderon. Bibi Netanyahu, also visiting, was confined to the basement.
Good times.
Back to the farewell address. No sooner had I tweeted, "How long before our dreadful cur of a president mentions the ignominy of slavery and the glory of illegal immigrants"—than Obama went ahead and mentioned ... the ignominy of slavery and the glory of migrants and refugees.
"White Americans" were encouraged to keep "acknowledging ... the effects of slavery and Jim Crow," and be cool about allowing "minority groups" to "voice discontent," which is Obama's code for burning down neighborhoods.
"How long before the president belittles white yokels," I tweeted next. Not one to disappoint, Obama followed with a derogatory reference to "the middle-aged white guy." "From the outside," noodled Obama, "the middle-aged white guy may seem like he's got advantages, but he has seen his world upended by economic and cultural and technological change."
Yes, give him some change.
All in all, it was as though the guy failed to realize his vision had been rejected root-and-branch when Mr. Trump was elected. America's potential, intoned the POTUS, would only be realized if the American democracy works; if we have common purpose. Beware of a socialist preaching solidarity. What "our democracy" actually demands is that the POTUS know the US was born a republic, never an unbridled democracy. In this republic, self-government was to trump centrally imposed solidarity.
To follow was an Obama audacity we won't miss. He praised his spoilt daughters for graciously wearing "the burden of years" of life in the lap of luxury (courtesy of the taxpayer), a sentiment his wife, Michelle Antoinette Obama, voiced non-stop on the talk-show circuit.
As I write, 44 is making news with the Fake News establishment. Obama is giving a last, long press conference. The final love-in with an adoring press corps saw the president praise the sycophants in the room for keeping him honest. Obama's "skeptic" lapdogs obliged, as they'd done for eight years, with a drubbing. The phrase "(Laughter)" is the most challenging in the transcripts of this, Barack Obama's last news conference.
Deplorables can agree with one sentiment Obama expressed on the occasion: "I want to be silent for a while and not hear myself talk all the time." Hear, hear.
We serenade Barack Obama, who just can't exit center stage, with the chorus line from "I Will Survive":
Go on now, go, walk out the door
'Cause you're not welcome anymore ...
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