Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I thought we were promised Infrastructure Week

Technically true, but collectively nonsense.

How has Obama failed you today?

An army of rabid, anonymous commenters

Dinky Hocker Shoots Smack!

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

The revolution will be supervised.

Women: They Get Shit Done

Screw the Judean People’s Front. Splitters.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Militantly superior in their own minds…

We can agree to disagree, but I’m right.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Too inconsequential to be sued

Peak wingnut was a lie.

I can see Russia from this blog!

Saul Alinsky is my co-pilot

We have all the best words.

Mission Accomplished!

Wetsuit optional.

Word salad with all caps

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

No one could have predicted…

You are here: Home / Civil Rights / Racial Justice / Post-racial America / Let’s Play Mad Libs

Reader Interactions

84Comments

  1. 1.

    Downpuppy

    Are you certain? I can see a member of the WSJ editorial board spending time here as an alternative to destroying their liver.

  3. 3.

    Patricia Kayden

    What prejudice? She made one gaffe about Israel and has moved on. They’re simply targeting her because she’s an outspoken woman of color who also happens to be a member of an unpopular religious minority. They have no problem with Trump’s bigotry.

  5. 5.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Steve “David duke without the baggage” scalise

    I’ve never heard that rather odd self-description explained

  7. 7.

    Kraux Pas

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Hes racist as all hell and in a leadership position. But he doesnt have that KKK association (as far as we know) hampering his ability to approprately play the plausible deniability angle the Rs have mastered to disguise their racism.

  10. 10.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: It’s a bit inside baseball, but David Duke owns and is inordinately proud of a full set of vintage Mark Cross luggage (including the increasingly rare steamer trunk). Scalise has some cheap bags he picked up at Sam’s Club. It all makes sense now, don’t it?

  11. 11.

    mrmoshpotato

    Can the Republican party stop being a god-damned pile of shit that hasn’t cared about the majority of this country since before I was born?

    Am I playing correctly?

  12. 12.

    schrodingers_cat

    May Allah have mercy on their souls. My outrage meter is broken and sufi/bhakti music is like a balm for my soul.
    Allah Hi Reham, Schlemazel used to love this number from My Name is Khan, sung by Ustad Rashid Khan, perhaps the best living practitioner of Hindustani classical music
    * Allah is Mercy
    Ustad== Honorific which means maestro, expert

  13. 13.

    Desargues

    Can J-Kush overcome his Chernobyl-level lack of wit?

    Can repubicans overcome their longing for dem thick-azz caudillos?

  15. 15.

    plato

    The thug’s prejudice led to diplomatic vandalism.

    Donald Trump abandoned the Iran nuclear deal to spite Barack Obama, according to a leaked memo written by the UK’s former ambassador to the US.

    Sir Kim Darroch described the move as an act of “diplomatic vandalism”, according to the Mail on Sunday.

    It says the memo was written after the then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson appealed to the US in 2018 to stick with the nuclear deal.

    Donald Trump abandoned the Iran nuclear deal to spite Barack Obama, according to a leaked memo written by the UK’s former ambassador to the US.

    Sir Kim Darroch described the move as an act of “diplomatic vandalism”, according to the Mail on Sunday.

    It says the memo was written after the then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson appealed to the US in 2018 to stick with the nuclear deal.

    The British ambassador is said to have highlighted splits amongst US presidential advisors and that the White House did not have a “day-to-day” strategy of what to do following withdrawal from the deal.

    The paper reports that Sir Kim wrote a memo to Mr Johnson, saying: “The outcome illustrated the paradox of this White House: you got exceptional access, seeing everyone short of the president; but on the substance, the administration is set upon an act of diplomatic vandalism, seemingly for ideological and personality reasons – it was Obama’s deal.

  16. 16.

    jl

    I think Ilhan Omar is a Real American, dammitall. And if I ever run into her in an airport or something, or next time I’m a tourist in the Capitol building, I’ll tell her, probably with tears in my eyes. Even though I have some big problems with how she’s expressed some things.

    Not sure if that is completing whatever, but those thoughts have been running through my mind when I see her viciously and unfairly attacked in the wingjutosphere.

    Edit: I should write her office a note of support.

  18. 18.

    Aleta

    A bit weird that today’s NYC blackout is on the anniversary of 1977 July 13-14. I briefly saw today’s attributed to fire in a manhole.

  19. 19.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @mrmoshpotato:

    Can the Republican party stop being a god-damned pile of shit that hasn’t cared about the majority of this country since before I was born?

    No. Next question?

  21. 21.

    Steeplejack

    They were just doing NPR Mad Libs on Twitter today:

    NPR STORY MADLIBS: "That voice you hear? That's [man's name]. He's been [verb]ing this [noun] for over [number] years. And he says all this talk about [noun]? It's just that. Talk."

    — DC Pierson (@DCpierson) July 12, 2019

  22. 22.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Aleta:

    A bit weird that today’s NYC blackout is on the anniversary of 1977 July 13-14. I briefly saw today’s attributed to fire in a manhole.

    SOME of us (hint, hint, *ME*) remember the ORIGINAL AND BEST NYC blackout on November 9, 1965. I’ve told my story here, previously.

  25. 25.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Can the reactionary scum of the Wall Street Journal editorial board overcome their racism, sexism, religious bigotry and unapologetic worship of Mannon?

    I don’t think so.

    Wipe them out. All of them.

  28. 28.

    chris

    @SiubhanDuinne: That was the whole Eastern Seaboard, no? It included Toronto. As the eldest, I had just turned eleven, I was sent out to the car to turn the key(!) and get the latest report. I don’t recall much except that I felt so grown up for being included in the adult disaster management.

  33. 33.

    MisterForkbeard

    Yes. Of all the blatantly racist (republican) congressmen, let’s choose a Democratic black Muslim woman who just has issues with Israel’s policies. This is all very cool. >_<

  34. 34.

    Jay

    Can WSJ wipple stop being Becky’s?

    Be the change that you want to see in the World.

    Optimus Prime.

  35. 35.

    Jay

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    The blackout’s primary cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, an Akron, Ohio–based company, which rendered operators unaware of the need to redistribute load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage. What should have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into collapse of the entire Northeast region.

    Theory #2 is that NYC was way past due paying the Quebec Hydro bill.

  37. 37.

    Martin

    Can the NFL Overcome Their Prejudice?

    Reminder that Colin Kaepernick couldn’t get a contract, but Richie Incognito barged into a funeral home and demanded access to his dads body so he could cut off his head. When they refused he threatened to shoot the place up, and of course police found guns in his truck.

    2 game suspension.

  38. 38.

    Steeplejack

    @Aleta:

    “Fire in a manhole.” I was in the car when I heard that, and for some reason I immediately flashed back to the old Marvel comics of my childhood, when the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and various supervillains tore up shit brawling all over Manhattan.

  39. 39.

    piratedan

    since we’re talking about the WSJ…. I would say ….

    No, the end is nigh, she is as relentless as the night. You might as well divest yourselves of all hope and all property and move to Fiji because for you, America is lost and you are denying the inevitable.

    Then if nothing else, we’d be rid of these asshats….

  41. 41.

    Martin

    The 77 blackout was wild – I was 9. We had just moved back to NY. 6 months later we had a brutal ice storm. In between we had Star Wars and I got an Atari for Christmas.

    I don’t think anything else happened that year – just those 4 things.

  49. 49.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @NotMax:

    We had to stumble about in the dark – uphill both ways!

    That’s terrible, but were you on the 40th floor of the Union Carbide Building when the blackout hit?

    Did you have to walk down 40 flights of stairs, in high heels?

    Did you have to hitchhike a ride from midtown Manhattan to Flushing, Queens?

    Did you then have to climb fourteen flights of stairs to your apartment, in the dark, wearing high heels, at midnight or thereabouts?

  50. 50.

    Dan B

    @SiubhanDuinne: Hey! I was born in “Dakron”!! When will you get over your prejudice about Akron – (former) Rubber Capital of the World!!!

    I left in 69 and only went back three times to visit my parents. One visit the airline crew stated they had spent a year, one night, in Canton / Akron. Some years later I got an announcement for the highschool reunion with the rejoinder to attend because “remember what happened in ’87!” I had no idea what happened in 87 but somebody probably ate the rental fee at the Turkeyfoot Lake Recreation Center. (Don’t laugh. It’s rude.)

  51. 51.

    NotMax

    @SiubhanDuinne

    Hints from Heloise: Shoes are removable.

    :)

    Back in the day I was trying without success to find and buy a replacement B battery for an old tabletop radio (used 1 B and 3 D batteries). No luck anywhere. Eventually wrote a letter to Union Carbide asking where in the area to buy one.

    A week later a package showed up containing three of them. For free.

  56. 56.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    Scott Lincicome @ scottlincicome
    Seriously, bravo to the script-writers for putting Mayor Bill in Iowa preaching the Green New Deal hours before there’s a massive blackout in Manhattan. It’s almost too good.

  58. 58.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Aleta:

    Long story short: My husband and I had moved from Atlanta to NYC (Flushing, Qns) in late October 1965. I had a job at Union Carbide, he worked for an IBM subsidiary. Both offices were in midtown Manhattan, maybe 10-12 blocks from each other.

    When the blackout hit, shortly after 5:00 p.m., I actually could see out the window of my 40th-floor office in the Union Carbide building the lights going off all over southern Manhattan, before the outage hit my building a minute or two later.

    UC had some kind of backup generator that provided light on the emergency stair exit — of course, the elevators didn’t operate — so I walked down the 40 flights. I had signed up a few days earlier to be part of a corporate musical theatre group, and we were actually scheduled to rehearse that night, so I eventually made my way to the meeting/rehearsal room. One of the group’s officials invited me and a few others to her apartment, which was in walking distance, so we all went there for several hours and tried to make phone calls by candlelight.

    Toward 11:00 p.m. or so, I decided to take my chances on the streets, as no subways operating. Ended up hitching a ride to Flushing. Stupid to take the chance — I was 23, and cute, and it was 1965 — but in the event there were no problems. I got to our apartment some time after midnight; I think Ken rolled in around 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. We had played Box and Cox for several hours, as it turned out, which is a whole nother story.

    The end.

  60. 60.

    HumboldtBlue

    @Martin:

    I was in Philly and I was 11 and I remember all of those things.

    Except it was my neighbor Avery who got Atari.

    I got mom’s hand-sewn festive Christmas vest. (may have gotten the Guns of Navarone set that year as well)

  61. 61.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @chris:

    There was an entire what we would now call a meme about “Where were you when the lights went out?”

    #WhereWereYouWhenTheLightsWentOut

  62. 62.

    TomatoQueen

    @SiubhanDuinne: That one was a classic, extending far and wide, clear to New Haven. I did my homework by the fire as we waited for my father to return from New York.

  64. 64.

    Jay

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    In the New Years Day storm, my fishing buddy and I “rescued” a young woman, inappropriately dressed, who had put her Dad’s Range Rover into a 4 foot snowbank.

    We are not all assholes, even though ancedotal evidence suggests otherwise.

  65. 65.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Jay:

    Never meant to suggest you are all assholes. In my experience, maybe 25-30% — okay, 27%, okay? — are assholes. Most of you are very decent, and some of you are extraordinarily wonderful. I prefer to hang with the extraordinarily wonderful.

  66. 66.

    Aleta

    @SiubhanDuinne: Thanks. The lights in windows going off in the building just before yours…that would be something to see. What did you do at Union Carbide?

  68. 68.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Aleta:

    I was a secretary in the Fibers & Fabrics Division. “It’s not fake anything. It’s real Dynel.” The advertising slogan for a huge ad campaign that ranged from faux fur coats to wigs and hair switches.

    One of the nice perks of the job was getting heavily discounted, or even free, clothes and wigs/wiglets. All we had to do was report to the advertising director — a formidable lady named Mary Lou Hannigan — and give her a quick thumbs up or down on how we liked a particular product.

    I furnished a great deal of my newlyweds’ apartment with laminated fabric I got for free. And I had an an amazing wardrobe, too.

  70. 70.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Martin: Daaaaamn, you got an Atari for Christmas 1977? That would have been the original Sunnyvale heavy-sixer model, a pricey beast. The game library wasn’t large yet, but it was so far ahead of anything else available at the time.

    I think we got ours for Christmas 1980, after Space Invaders came out.

  72. 72.

    Matt McIrvin

    @mrmoshpotato: Landing the Space Invaders license was the greatest thing that ever happened to Atari–it was a monster hit for Taito in the arcades, and meanwhile Atari’s console hadn’t been selling that well. Space Invaders moved millions of them.

    Getting it to work on the Atari involved stretching the thing’s capabilities far beyond anything it had actually been designed to do, though of course once programmers figured out a trick it would show up in lots of subsequent games, and they eventually got much more elaborate than that.

  74. 74.

    Matt McIrvin

    @mrmoshpotato: It’s amazing how primitive it really was. It had 128 bytes of RAM. Games like Video Olympics and Combat were what it was really designed to play: a couple of objects representing the players, maybe a ball or a little projectile or two, and a simple blocky playfield that was symmetrical. Anything beyond that involved the programmers pulling insane precisely-timed sleight-of-hand tricks to shuffle bits around while the electron beam was zipping across the TV screen, so that one object could become a whole army of space invaders or the playfield could change halfway across the screen.

  77. 77.

    Martin

    @Matt McIrvin:

    Daaaaamn, you got an Atari for Christmas 1977? That would have been the original Sunnyvale heavy-sixer model, a pricey beast. The game library wasn’t large yet, but it was so far ahead of anything else available at the time.

    Yeah, turns out my parents were about to divorce, so that was supposed to make me feel better.

    Beware of Parents bearing gifts.

  78. 78.

    Ruckus

    @Dan B:

    One visit the airline crew stated they had spent a year, one night, in Canton / Akron.

    Lived in the Columbus area for 11 yrs. I’ve heard that joke told about every city in OH. And by the way, it’s a true story.

  80. 80.

    Mike Toreno

    @Patricia Kayden: She didn’t make a gaffe about Israel. She made a non-centrist remark which sent the House leadership to the fainting couch. They tried to shut her up but we’re backed down by a groundswell from voters. The House leadership has not spent the time since then covering themselves in glory.

  82. 82.

    Hermann Fegelein

    Answering the WSJ question:

    No. Omar had to flee a homeland where people were dehumanized and had to live in a refugee camp. She will never overcome her prejudice against dehumanizing others, nor her prejudice in favor of people fleeing danger and oppression.

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