Matt Philbin
Latest from Matt Philbin
Los Angeles has only one “LGBT-focused coffee shop.” This is surprising news to me, but then I believe pumpkin spiced latte is Big Coffee’s fiendish plot to turn America into a nation of jittery, fem Pajama Boys.
Remember when liberals in the media disdained everything about the Catholic Church? Simpler times. Then Pope Francis came along and muddied things. He talks about climate change, castigates capitalism and plays verbal footsie with lefty Catholic hobby-horse issues like divorce and gay acceptance. This Francis guy, they think, might be one of us.
It was supposed to be an inspirational advertising tagline, not a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything,” is the phrase Nike used to introduce unemployed QB Colin Kaepernick as the face of it’s 30th anniversary “Just Do It” campaign.
Sheila Jackson Lee was right! The astronauts must have planted an American flag on Mars because, according to Hollywood, they didn’t put one on the moon.
The new Neil Armstrong biopic First Man starring Ryan Gosling records the astronaut’s iconic small step, but ignores the other iconic moment from the 1969 moon landing: Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planting the American flag.
NBC Sports is about to become a lot more watchable. According to The Washington Post, the network is in talks to terminate Bob Costas’s contract: "Costas, 66, joined NBC Sports in 1979 and has long been a reassuring presence during the Olympics, Super Bowls, World Series and other national events. That role has changed in recent years with the arrival of Mike Tirico from ESPN, and with Costas’s increasing interest in providing context and opinion on matters of the moment, such as the NFL’s concussion problem and gun violence in America."
There really are second acts in American life. Just look at Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. One of the greatest college and NBA players of all time, he’s since reinvented himself as the unofficial apologist for dissident black athletes, a superstar joining the ranks of race pimps like Al Sharpton and Jemele Hill.
When the higher education bubble bursts (and won’t that be a mess -- Gender Studies PHDs and Postcolonial Queer Poetry majors splattered everywhere!), you can still point your offspring down a sound career path. Pull Junior aside, look him purposefully in the eye and say, “Two words: sexbot repair.”
“When I managed to finish my first pussy hat, though, I was overjoyed.” That’s an actual line from an actual article in Slate about politicized knitting. It seems that’s a thing, with a “community,” and you can buy Donald Trump pincushions on Etsy
Reporters are really good at worrying about the standards of other people’s professions. Their own? Maybe not so much. Take Washington Post reporter Joel Achenbach, who tells readers “Researchers are supposed to have what is known as ‘equipoise’ going into a trial.” Equipoise is a completely neutral attitude toward what a scientific trial may prove or disprove.
It’s a pressing question: Why are three out of four American vegans women? Well, women are more verbal than men, and vegans won’t shut up about being vegan … or is it just that men really are smarter?
Turns out the Washington Post is good for something besides being a puppy wee-wee pad or making spitballs to shoot at the interns while straws are still legal. Specifically, if not the Post and its flaky feminist subsidiary The Lily, I wouldn’t know that Zoe Hollomon, “a 39-year-old black queer activist in Minneapolis, represents synchronized swimming — and its future.”
Well, she doesn’t have much else to do these days. CBS has announced that Hillary “What Happened” Clinton will be playing herself on Madam Secretary, the show she inspired. Madam Secretary stars Téa Leoni as a woman Secretary of State. She’s super-smart, competent, empathetic and oozing with girl power.
To suffer through Roy Scranton’s New York Times oped, “Raising My Child in a Doomed World,” is to come away wondering how a guy so hang-dog depressing and lacking in discernable masculine qualities managed to attract a woman -- sorry, a “partner” in Scranton-speak -- at all, let alone got her to procreate with him.
The “border crisis” -- is there anything it can’t do? Last year it highlighted the inhumanity of both our immigration and abortion laws when the government refused to help a 17-year-old illegal in its custody kill her unborn child. Then last month it had liberals holding forth on the sanctity and efficacy of the nuclear family. How’s that for versatility?
Fun fact: When he wasn’t bedding his slaves, “purchasing” Louisiana and warring against peaceful Muslim trading ships, Thomas Jefferson was a proto-environmentalist. So were the other Founding Male-Identifying Parents. Joe Romm, at ThinkProgress tells us so.
“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” True, but the PC Inquisition is getting mighty predictable. The fetish for diversity reached a whole new level of stupid recently as the BBC introduced its new direction. Programming would emphasize “stories that haven’t been told” and “the voices we haven’t yet heard,” according to U.K. newspaper The Independent.
Liberals are never comfortable with displays of American patriotism, so Independence Day is particularly awkward for them. Everybody likes cold beer, hot dogs and fireworks, but the militarism and U.S. imperialism and corporate greed and ... as Broadly assistant editor Leila Ettachfini declares, “America has always been bad, no matter who the president is or was.”
Don’t you hate it when we view the charming customs of indigenous peoples through our “Western colonial gaze.” Take for example the Aztec ritual of ripping out the still-beating hearts of thousands of victims before decapitating them and removing the flesh from their skulls. Then they’d hang the skulls on racks the way college kids stack empty beer cans. We may see it all as “weird and violent and gruesome,” but Lizzy Wade wants us to know that's not “the only way to see it, or the ‘right’ way to see it.”
Man, being “woke” is a full-time job. You’ve got to get a handle on the outrage du jour and how it intersects with all the other stuff you’re supposed to be outraged about -- the fight of Zoroastrian little people for the right to work in Tajikistan’s steel smelting industry is of a piece with the struggle of Portland’s gay Asian ice cream vendors for the right to scoop in leather Speedos. And then you’ve got to get ready for it to change.
[insert name of unfunny female comedian here] is bitter about politics and she doesn’t care who knows it. [Unfunny female comedian] just unleashed an obscenity-filled tirade against a member of Donald Trump’s family, calling her a “feckless [insert crude, profane insult].”