Nice line by Sarah Palin

This from her speech to some of our troops in Kosovo, in response to a rather lame attempt at a joke by John Kerry (or is that redundant?):

Senator John Kerry makes this joke, I don’t know if you saw this, but he makes this joke saying, “Well, shoot, of all the governors in the nation to disappear, too bad it couldn’t have been that Governor from Alaska.”

Well, when he said it, you know, he looked quite frustrated, and he looked so sad, and I just wanted to reach out to the TV and say, “John Kerry, why the long face?”

(laughter, applause)

Now Gov. Palin is on to Germany to visit the wounded in our military hospitals there; in her time in Kosovo, she gave the troops at Camp Bondsteel a real morale boost, and also met with the Lithuanian Minister of Defense, Rasa Jukneviciene.

There are days . . .

This is right up there with wanting the James Bond car so that one could drop oil slicks or caltrops for tailgaters.  Excessive, yes, but on our worse days, the thoughtlessness of others can drive us to wishing, just a little, that we could actually do something like this.  At least, for some of us, it can . . .  Check the mouseover on this one.

Joe Biden, Comedian-in-Chief

For all the flap about President Obama stiffing the Gridiron Club and sending Vice President Biden in his stead, I have to think that from an entertainment perspective, Joe Biden was a better choice; it certainly sounds like he put on a good show.  Here’s a partial transcript of his remarks, courtesy of the “Playbook” at Politico:

Axelrod really wanted me to do this on teleprompter—but I told him I’m much better when I wing it. . . . I know these evenings run long, so I’m going to be brief. Talk about the audacity of hope. . . . President Obama does send his greetings, though. He can’t be here tonight—because he’s busy getting ready for Easter. [Whisper] He thinks it’s about him. . . .I know that no president has missed his first Gridiron since Grover Cleveland. Of course, President Cleveland really did have better things to do on a Saturday night. When he was in the White House—he was married to a 21 year old woman. . . . I understand these are dark days for the newspaper business, but I hate it when people say that newspapers are obsolete. That’s totally untrue. I know from firsthand experience. I recently got a puppy, and you can’t housebreak a puppy on the Internet.Now let’s see: we have a Republican speaker who was born in Austria, and tonight’s Democratic speaker was born in Canada. Folks, this is Lou Dobbs’ worst nightmare. . . We are now two months into the Obama-Biden administration and the President and I have become extremely close. To give you an idea of how close we are, he told me that next year—maybe, just maybe—he’s going to give me his Blackberry e-mail address. . . . But the Obama Administration really is a good team. I am the experienced veteran. Rahm can be an enforcer. And Tim Geithner is always there when you need to borrow money, no questions asked.You know, I never realized just how much power Dick Cheney had until my first day on the job. I walked into my office, and you know how the outgoing president always leaves the incoming president a note in his desk? I opened my drawer and Dick Cheney had left me Barack Obama’s birth certificate. . . . I now realize that we have to be extra careful when we annunciate new policy ideas to make sure they don’t look like they’re personally motivated. For example, the other day there were a whole bunch of stories about the President’s hair going gray; the next day there’s a story about a Vice President who’s trying to grow new hair, and then the day after that, the two of us come out in favor of stem cell research. That looked bad.I’d like to address some of the things I said: Like when I said that “JOBS” is a three-letter word. I did say that. But I didn’t mean it literally. It’s like how, right now, most people think AIG is a four-letter word. . . . Or when I announced our stimulus package website, I was asked how you get to it: All I said was I didn’t know the website number. What I really meant to say was, “Ted Stevens didn’t tell me what tube the website is in.”

Are you pondering what I’m pondering?

For other Animaniacs fans out there, and particularly for fans of Pinky and the Brain, here’s an almost-complete list of one of my favorite of the show’s running gags:  “Pinky, are you pondering what I’m pondering?”A few of my favorite responses:

  • “I think so, Brain, but burlap chafes me so.”
  • “I think so, Brain, but me and Pippi Longstocking—I mean, what would the children look like? . . . Well, no matter what they looked like, they’d be loved.”
  • “Well, I think so, Brain, but I can’t memorize a whole opera in Yiddish.”
  • “I think so, Brain, but if you replace the ‘P’ with an ‘O,’ my name would be Oinky, wouldn’t it?”

Laughing at Uncle Joe; or, is Joe Biden the new Dan Quayle?

I like what Ed Walsh has to say about this:

In an earlier post, I mentioned the trouble comedians were having coming up with a funny trope to use to poke fun at President Obama. The experts’ conclusion seems to be that Vice President Biden is the fattest target for humor in the Administration.Now we see the story developing further. It’s not just Biden, see, but Obama’s reaction to Biden that is becoming a reliable comic routine. In this scenario, Barack Obama is Joe Biden’s straight man.It’s promising. As this Politico clip of segments from “The Daily Show” and “The Tonight Show” makes clear, watching the habitually on-message president react to Biden’s howitzer-in-a-hurricane rhetorical style is pretty funny. And it offers the hint of a crack in Obama’s cool public face.