Presto Agitato: Are You Ready for Some Bullshit?

October 04, 2011

Are You Ready for Some Bullshit?

ESPN pulled Hank Williams Jr.'s classic intro song from its broadcast of Monday night's NFL game after the country singer famous for the line ‘Are you ready for some football?’ used an analogy to Adolf Hitler in discussing President Barack Obama.

In an interview Monday morning on Fox News' ‘Fox & Friends’, Williams, unprompted, said of Obama's outing on the links with House Speaker John Boehner: ‘It'd be like Hitler playing golf with (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin) Netanyahu.’…

‘While Hank Williams Jr. is not an ESPN employee, we recognize that he is closely linked to our company through the open to “Monday Night Football”’, the network said in a statement. ‘We are extremely disappointed with his comments, and as a result we have decided to pull the open from tonight's telecast.’

Do you suppose they would have pulled him if he'd said the same about George W. Bush? The question answers itself.

(But ‘disappointed’? ‘Extremely’, even? Try a mirror, jackasses, and do please stuff the PC bullshit.)

Update: The 2012 SuperBowl Half Time entertainment has used the Hitler analogy against GWB, but (unlike Hank Jr's comment) apparently seriously. (Well, she thought she was being serious.) No word of any demands for an apology….

Posted by Mike at 11:04 AM in Music, Politics & Courts | Permalink

Comments

Frankly, I was disappointed that he hauled out that over-used chestnut. Surely he could have come up with something both more creative AND more offensive?

Posted by: Omnibus Driver | October 05, 2011 at 07:32 AM

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

Posted by: |

This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.

Your comment could not be posted. Error type:

Your comment has been posted. Post another comment

The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again.

As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.

Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.

Post a comment

Your Information

(Name and email address are required. Email address will not be displayed with the comment.)

Name is required to post a comment

Please enter a valid email address

Invalid URL

Recent Reading

Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle: The Mote in God's Eye
(8/8/2021) (****)
Asimov, Isaac: The Gods Themselves
(8/2/2020) ‘Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.’ Awesome! (*****)
Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest
(7/11/2020) ‘A Trivial Comedy for Serious People.’ Well, that's about half right. It is trivial, but occasionally funny, especially toward the end. It's also frequently nihilist. (G.B. Shaw panned it as ‘heartless’, which is also true.) Serious people will spit. (***)
Kagan, Donald: The Peloponnesian War
(6/21/2020) (****)
Dan Barker: God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction
(1/12/2019) In the second chapter of his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins says that:

‘The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomanical, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. Those of us schooled from infancy in his ways can become desensitized to their horror.’

Barker provides hundreds of citations, using the best available biblical translation (NRSV). They are devastating to the case for a loving, moral God, but for some reason Barker sometimes (quite unnecessarily!) reads more into the text than is justified. Let the reader beware (Think for yourself!), but this is essential reading all the same.

And yes, the ‘offering’ of Isaac was understood to be burnt, English-language euphemism notwithstanding. Isaac wasn't the only Old Testament child ‘offered’ to God in this way, but he was was luckier than most. (****)
Daniel C. Dennett: Freedom Evolves
(11/5/2019) I didn't always follow his argument (maybe his fault, maybe mine), so I'll need to read this again. (****)
Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(09/25/2019) No, Amazon, this is not about multiple personality disorder or whatever you want to call it. (!) Maroons. (****)
Frederick Douglass: Life and Times of Frederick Douglass
(8/30/2019) (*****)
Alexandre Dumas: The Three Musketeers
(08/06/2019) (***)
Bernard Lewis: What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response
(07/13/2019) (****)
Larry Niven: Footfall
(06/22/2019) Lost it's chance at five stars due to an unreasonable implausibility at the end.

But Project Orion? Really? (****)
Barbara W. Tuchman: Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour
(06/13/2019) ‘As regards the fortunes of the Jews, and of Israel, I am not detached but emotionally involved. That may be permissible or unavoidable to a journalist who tends to become advocate or adversary on strongly-felt issues, but it invalidates the work of a historian. I found this out when at the request of the original publisher I tried indeed to carry the narrative through 1948. It turned into polemic. The British betrayal of their own impulse in establishing the national home; the White Paper policy; the collusion with the Arabs; the ramming of the Exodus and detention of Jewish refugees from Hitler in new concentration camps on Cyprus; and, finally, the encouragement of the Arab offensive on the heels of the Britain's departure was all impossible to relate without outrage. This is not a suitable condition for a historian. The pages I produced were out of keeping with the rest of the book and would have impaired its value. I tore them up and let the book terminate, as originally planned, in 1918.’ (****)
Manfred von Richthofen: The Red Fighter Pilot: The Autobiography of the Red Baron
(4/18/2019) (***)
Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls
(4/3/2019) (****)
Voltaire: Candide
(3/31/2019) Bwahahahaha! (****)
Daniel C. Dennett: Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking
(3/29/2019) (****)
H.G. Wells: The Time Machine
(3/21/2019) (****)
Justin Pollard and Howard Reid: The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern World
(3/18/2019) Very good, but it's very hard to keep track of all the Ptolemys! (****)
Robert A. Heinlein: The Puppet Masters
(3/12/2019) (****)
Ayn Rand: The Fountainhead
(3/11/2019) I've read this before, but missed a lot of the jokes. There's a lot going on here, you know? (*****)