What the fuck is wrong with the
Wall Street Journal? Maybe it's not news, but today as I was doing something completely unrelated I happened on a post that really gobsmacked me. I'll get to that in a second, but also today is
this stupid article which helps to explain why
WSJ and one-trick ponies of its ilk shouldn't do stories that only tangentially deal with their field of expertise. (Which reminds me of a Heartwarming Family Anecdote. My brother, who is a gifted professor of economics in the macro-DC area, once argued with me several years ago that the
Journal was the "perfect paper," since it was his opinion that they did the best financial reporting [I'll cop to that, esp since I know dickfist about finance] as well as reported on everything else on a par with everyone else. "It's the perfect paper," he said many years ago. "Really? Look at the fucking op-ed page sometime," I cheerfully respond in the present day. Ah, family.)
And now here's this stupid article, which I call a blinky, which is what happens when one-trick ponies like the Journal blink and look around outside their previously-mentioned fields of expertise and realize that OMG, stuff happens inthe world! College football is all-of-a-sudden popular and ascendant and dominant in the South! Ahem, fellas. College football has always been all of those things. It's no tnews that the state of Florida is where the speed is or tht they've been taking Northern kids out of the Ohio State/Michigan/Penn State/Big Ten pipeline.
Sports Illustrated, a sports magazine that publishes articles written about sports, and only occasionally ties them in with stories about the money floating around in sports, did this story in their annual College Football Preview issue the year I got out of college. I remember that because I read it on my first day on the job at my first real-world job. OUT OF COLLEGE. In 1988. So, not news,
Wall Street God-damned Journal. At all.
No, this article is clearly another tired-ass sop to red-state, deep-South, center-to-hard-right America and its presence as the only remaining fortress for old-school Republican and conservative values. Tying the traditions of SEC football and the Big Big Money to be gleaned from same is
WSJ's way of saying the South will rise again, which, whatever. Like Army and Notre Dame have no tradition. (They don't have any talent now, either, but that's not what this article is trying to say.) And of course, as good as Florida, bama, LSU and Florida State have been in recent years, there also exists in the South an Ole Miss, a Mississippi State, a Baylor, and many other teams that do, in fact, suck. Like everywhere. So other than the fact that the SEC is pretty good, and the fact that the WSJ desperately needs the right wing to feel good about itself, this story shouldn't exist.
Ah, but that's just the icing. The cake (or perhaps I should say "shit-pie") is
this steaming load from the always-load-bearing Peggy Noonan. God damn it. She so fucking sucks. It's her usual bullshit bit of moseying around rich white naeighborhoods doing rich white things with rich white people, which culminates in her "throwing down" to Barack Obama (Oh
snap, Irish Lady!), challenging him to do better than Bush on Homelamd Security, because, after all,
At Least Bush Kept Us Safe.
No. No he did not. You stupid idiot of stupidity. Shut up, sit down, shut up, and listen. Bush got us killed. Bush had the opportunity to keep us safe and ignored it, then lied us into a war that has beget another war based on that botched opportunity. Remember? Yellow gingham on the bed,
yellowcake lies in the SOTU, remember, darling? We were safe for a good long while until Ol' Cowboy Chucklefuck got into office and made us all look like boorish assholes. Noonan seems to forget, or maybe it's because she really is stupid, that 9/11 happened on Preznit Fuckhead's watch. (Hers, too, so
she hasn't kept us safe either.) And just offhand, to be a mean Republican cunt about things, her "observation" that dirty furriners the globe 'round are reacting less to Obama's victory and more to McCain's concession speech? Just another example that history is constantly being rewritten by the losers. The rich, white losers.
