A Twitter-riffic Beclowning: #Trudeaueulogies

First came the silly utterance. Then comes the Twitter mockery.  There's nothing quite as entertaining as watching an overhyped public figure shoot himself in the foot.

Quote of the Day: Hey, Limited Government is Hot Again!

Via Samizdata comes this thought:

"It has been delightful to wallow in the grief of triggered leftists. Yes, their candidate lost. And no, they have neither self-awareness nor irony and that is bloody hilarious. But for classical liberals/libertarians or even smaller state Conservatives, the man who won is by no means our guy.

... I am far from depressed by Trump’s victory, though I agree with him in so few respects. Not least because our statist foes are about to relearn a proper fear of excessive state power and in particular of such undemocratic and unconstitutional devices as presidential executive orders."

Quote of the Day: Dan Drezner on FIFA

FIFA, that hive of scum and villainy (remember this?), deserves everything that it's getting and probably more.  All my soccer fan friends and I are watching with unadulterated, Schadenfreudelicious glee.  Here's a hilarious comment from foreign policy prof Dan Drezner:

We live in an age when foreign affairs pundits like to bemoan the crumbling of existing order and ponder whether the United States’ best days are in the past, when rising powers seem more comfortable throwing their weight around than the U.S. government. These are days when American scandals and dysfunction and economic stagnation seem to wrongfoot U.S. foreign policy aspirations at every opportunity. 

But then there are days when the United States is the greatest country in the world, because it makes stuff like this happen ...

Supermoon, Solar Eclipse, Vernal Equinox, March Madness, Starbucks Race Hustling, and Netanyahu Derangement Syndrome All In One Day!

Well, I guess the only thing I can do as commentary is post this Onion story. 

It's been a lunatic day, in which learning that Starbucks is actually encouraging its baristas to engage customers in discussions about race relations wasn't even the craziest thing that happened.  The inevitable backlash has, admittedly, provided its own form of Schadenfreudelicious entertainment. (Of course the incomparable Iowahawk has a quip.)

Elsewhere, my head is spinning from all the post-Israeli election howling from various people and quarters and media outlets.  I really can't take any more of it, because all the yelling and yammering has coalesced into one wordless collective shriek.  Maybe later I'll try to consider the fallout and talk about foreign policy again, but for now let's just call the furious reactions together "Netanyahu Derangement Syndrome" and let it go at that, mmmkay?

Finally, let me add: THANK GOD March Madness has finally started.  It's the only madness right now that makes any damn sense at all.  

(PS: Go, Anybody-But-Duke!)

March Madness: Duke's Out In the First Round

I didn't even have time to blink, much less get my Duke hate on, before the Blue Devils got eliminated from the Big Dance this afternoon.  And just who beat the #3 seed and basketball powerhouse?  Mercer. WHO?  Yeah.  Mercer, the 14th-seeded school that I had never even heard of.

You know, gigantic upsets like this are what make March Madness so great!  

By the way, that howling you hear is the sound of millions of college hoops fans lamenting their now-ruined brackets.

As for Duke ... BYE BYE BYE!

UPDATE: Need a tutorial in dancing the Nae Nae on the grave of Duke's tournament dreams?  We aim to please here at MM Blog!

The Fall of Piers Morgan

You can read the entire analysis, or you can cut to the chase: "To put it more succinctly, Piers Morgan is a supercilious tosser."  (The inimitable Jeremy Clarkson would agree, I think.)

Not With A Bang But A Whimper ... and a Tweet

Occupy Wall Street's final implosion amid rival factions and bitter infighting.  That's terrib-- BWAHAHA!

Schadenfreudelicious: A Taste Of Your Own Medicine

*Snort*  (thanks to the incomparably engaging Iowahawk on Twitter)

Schadenfreudelicious: Hollywood Braces For Obamacare

*Snortgiggle*

Life Imitates Conan

Nope, not Conan O'Brien the comedian.  Conan the Barbarian.

Or, to quote Glee's Sue Sylvester, "Your resentment is delicious."  Perhaps this should be on our lunch menu.

Friday Fun: Turnabout Is Fair Play In Snowball Fights

Yes, it is!

Schadenfreude, Straight Up

Yes indeedy.  Kudos to Ben Shapiro.  Piers Morgan and his ilk get the "dirtbag du jour" tag.  I make it a matter of standard practice not to give Morgan and his bullying, intellectually dishonest, attention-whoring, gutter-media kind any time on my blog, but Shapiro's performance is too gorgeous to let pass in silence.  

LOL: Schadenfreude!

Oh, it's been a tough day.  I needed the laugh.

LOL: Facebook Snarkery At Its Finest

LOL: Excuses, Excuses, Excuses

I tried not to say anything about this, but a girl's only got so much self-control, especially if she's a teacher.  If you want a good laugh, do take a look at the desperate Democrats' loopy excuse-making as they try to explain away Obama's miserable performance during the first debate - a defeat so blatantly obvious that across the Pacific it turned into a Taiwanese satire and here at home the New Yorker has come up with a zinger of a cover (somewhere Clint Eastwood is smiling).  My personal favorite excuses are the utterly ludicrous accusations that Obama lost because he was suffering from altitude sickness in Denver or that he lost because Romney had a cheat sheet - which turned out to be just a hanky. (Oh, and there's now a crazy theory floating around that Obama meant to lose as part of some cunning strategy.  Seriously?  "I totally meant to do that!"  Yeah, right.)

Come on!  I teach a lot of students, and this entire scenario is all too familiar.

LOL: Fashion Faux Pas When Zooey Met Lucy

I didn't bother watching the Emmys because award shows are boooooooooooooring.  Still, the fashion statements on the red carpet are often diverting and sometimes laugh-out-loud hilarious.  Now I'd seen Zooey Deschanel's cutesypoo baby blue ballgown with all the tulle layers and Lucy Liu's insane sci-fi-ish dress with mega-sequins that looked like she was wearing a mirrorball, but I had seen the official photos.  I'm much more taken with this shot of what happened when Zooey's floaty netting met Lucy's metallic disks. Oh, and I apologize for the image of Ryan Seacrest, but it couldn't be helped!

British Humor 1, Apples Maps 0

Seen at a London train station.

(Source.)

The Oatmeal/Scumbag Lawyer Saga Reaches Glorious Apogee

The Oatmeal, after dealing with this entire mess, is even more hilarious in triumph. Kudos, sir, KUDOS.  He even leaves us with a moral of the story spelled out for your viewing pleasure: "Philanthropy > Douchebaggery."  Indeed.  Make that "Philanthropy with a Sense of Humor"!

Sympathy Violin: the Left's Campaign Donation Scrooges

Behold the return of the "sympathy violin" tag, which in this case is linked inextricably with the "Schadenfreude" tag as if they were BFFs.  As the Transterrestrial blog did say, "You’d have to have a heart of stone to read this story and not laugh out loud."

I laughed.  And laughed.  And laughed.  Awwwww.  Poor baby!  Boo freaking hoo!   Apparently the heady days of HopeyChangey 2008 are long gone and now replaced by the hand-wringing whinging and near-panic of 2012.

You really can't read the story and not connect it with another recent instance of fundraising in sheer laughable bad taste and unwittingly contemptible venality.  Oh, sure, some people are offended, but the rest of us are busy guffawing and tweeting our derision.  Come on, man.  The president of the United States of America is hankering for your birthday money and wedding gifts, citizens!  What, stooping to this?  Are you freaking kidding me?  Apparently it's so ridiculous an idea that people have gone to Snopes to see if it can be debunked ... but it can't, because it's actually true.  Here's the thing in all its garishly undignified and utterly blind stupidity, straight from the official Obama-Biden website.

Oh, FYI to my posse: If any of you tries to tell me that you didn't give me a birthday present in order to make a political donation instead, I will curl up my perfectly manicured fingers and proceed to punch you in the face, OK?  I'm glad we got that all straightened out.

You know, I've never donated a single red cent to any political campaign in my whole entire life.  I have to say, though, this one-two punch of fundraising bullcrappery from the Left makes me want to give my lunch money to that human Valium Mitt Romney - not so much as a donation for Romney as much as one against the clowns on the other side.  In fact, it's enough to make one wonder if there's some GOP operative buried deep undercover in the Obama campaign who suggested this entire "in lieu of gifts" idea in the first place.  Alas, I think in this case that simple overt foolishness is at play instead of glorious subversive cunning.

Estonia: The Mouse That Roared (on Twitter!)

This is even better than a huge pot of coffee on this morning: watch as the president of Estonia takes down the insufferable Paul Krugman.  (Also noted on Foreign Policy.)  It's absolutely a flame war to savor as a head of state mixes it up with an econ Nobel Prize winner.  I had honestly not paid much previous attention to President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, but I gotta say that as of right now, I love you, man.  You now get your own blog tag!  The "nerds behaving badly" tag goes to Krugman.

UPDATE: Ilves hits back twice as hard and reminds us of a recent news report on the Estonian economic success.  More on Ilves - a Columbia man (which explains his tweeted potshot at the Princeton background of Krugman, hahaha).  Note too this piece that Ilves wrote back in March.  Follow him on Twitter here.