Tuesday Nonsense

Apparently, there's some sort of fued 'tween comedians David Cross and Dan Whitney (aka Larry the Cable Guy). It started back in April, when Rolling Stone ran a piece on Whitney that included this quote from Cross:

"He's good at what he does," concedes fellow comedian David Cross. "It's a lot of anti- gay, racist humor -- which people like in America -- all couched in 'I'm telling it like it is.' He's in the right place at the right time for that gee-shucks, proud-to-be-a-redneck, I'm-just-a -straight-shooter-multimillionaire-in-cutoff-flannel-selling-ring -tones act. That's where we are as a nation now. We're in a stage of vague American values and anti-intellectual pride."

Then, there was Whitney's response:

"The only people who are uptight at my shows are politically correct white people," he insists. "They have to take in the social implication of the joke before they can laugh. Just lighten up!" Larry does have his own set of taboos, and they're very red-state-centric: "I don't say the f word, and I don't take the Lord's name in vain."

End of story? Of course not; David Cross blasted him in a letter that was cross-posted on the Bob and David website. An excerpt:

But you also specifically dumb down your speech while making hundreds of purposefully grammatical errors. How do I know this? It's on page 17 of your book wherein you describe how you would "Larry" up your commentaries for radio. What does it mean to "Larry" something up? Take a wild guess. The reason you feel the need to "Larry" something up? Because you are not that dumb. I mean you, Dan Whitney, the guy who's name the bank account is under.

You were born and raised in Nebraska (hardly The South), went to private school and moved to Florida when you were 16. This is when you developed your accent?! Not exactly the developmental years are they? At age 16 that's the kind of thing you have to make a concerted effort to adopt. Did you hire a voice coach? Or were you like one of those people who go to England for a week and come back sounding like an extra from "Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels"?

The letter really needs to be read in its entirety to fully appreciate the genius that is David Cross. In other news, Sam Seder of the Majority Report debated Bob Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute on CNN last night. The subject? The War on Christmas that FOX News created in order to boost sales of John Gibson's book on the fake crisis.

SEDER: Listen, as far as the war on Christmas goes, I feel like we should be waging a war on Christmas. I mean, I believe that Christmas, it's almost proven that Christmas has nuclear weapons, can be an imminent threat to this country, that they have operative ties with terrorists and I believe that we should sacrifice thousands of American lives in pursuit of this war on Christmas. And hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money. PHILLIPS: Is it a war on Christmas, a war Christians, a war on over-political correctness or just a lot of people with way too much time on their hands? SEDER: I would say probably, if I was to be serious about it, too much time on their hands, but I'd like to get back to the operational ties between Santa Claus and al Qaeda. PHILLIPS: I don't think that exists. Bob? Help me out here. SEDER: We have intelligence, we have intelligence. PHILLIPS: You have intel. Where exactly does your intel come from? SEDER: Well, we have tortured an elf and it's actually how we got the same information from Al Libbi. It's exactly the same way the Bush administration got this info about the operational ties between al Qaeda and Saddam.

Full transcript on Eschaton.