Shit. For Clinton it was “dodged the draft”. For Kerry it was “speaks French”. For Obama it was “went to a scary church”. The GOP has gone and combined all three of those in one candidate.

Did the Tboggs spend their New Years watching that crazy motorcycle and snowmobile jump in San Diego that I just watched on ESPN? I haven’t watched anything like that since I was a kid watching Evel Knievel trying to jump the Snake River Canyon back in 1974, but I found myself strangely drawn to it.

Happy New Year, everybody.

Good point. You see how easy it is to get caught up in a narrative? I was actually giving him more credit than he deserved.

Sheesh. The guy’s a mediocre QB who got on a lucky streak. Lucky streak over. Time for him to buy a car dealership and get on with his true career.

This won’t stop the fluffing. Phil Simms is on CBS right now blathering about how “Tebow showed me a lot today”. Showed you what, exactly? That he can run? We already knew that. Earlier, Simms commented on a typically off-target Tebow pass with the words “That’s Tebow doing a good job avoiding the interception”.

This was a fairly typical Tebow performance, with the important difference that it was against a good team.

The reason Tebow’s being fellated by the press and (some) fans is pretty simple: nobody can believe he’s winning. In a way, it really is a miracle, because as many here have already pointed out, he doesn’t have NFL talent.

Even if there were no religious angle, people would still be creaming over him, because he’s white and talentless, and in American sports that means everybody has to root for him.

Shorter Palin: I’ll totally go vigilante on his ass, after proper due process has been followed, of course.

On a sidenote: the poor dear is entering minute 16. It’s astonishing how fast it happens, ain’t it Sarah?

What? One tedious 300-plus string of comments wasn’t enough?

Please note that “300-plus string of comments” and “tedious” are completely redundant. There are few verities in this life, but any collection of several hundred comments on the internet is guaranteed to be a nexus of dullness and stupidity. I don’t care if every comment is written by Nobel Laureates, it will gradually degenerate into something less than useless.

All this fuss over a guy who has been about as consequential in presidential elections as Pat Paulsen.

The most sensible response from Palin would be something like “We were both young and single, what’s the big deal?”. If that happened, I might have to develop some respect for her, which would be painful, but it would be more than offset by the intense pain it would cause her fans.

Travy, you’re still not getting it. You’re making the same mistake that NFL teams persist in making about Heisman-winning QB’s, namely that college achievements have anything at all to do with the pro level. I watched Ryan Leaf play in college, and I swore he was going to be an NFL Hall-of-Famer. I learned my lesson, and haven’t made the same mistake since.

When it comes to the draft, NFL teams can be as cowardly as politicians. If there’s a Heisman-winner on the board, it doesn’t matter if he’s even a good fit for their team, they feel they have to at least consider him, because, my gosh, what will the fans and the press say if they pass up a Heisman winner?

Sad sack mumbling colostomy bag Joe Lieberman

Thank you for this. I’ve always preferred “less than useless” as a prefix, but this will do nicely.

I’m not sure why NFL teams keep repeating the same mistake over and over again. Heisman-winning quarterbacks in general have had a very poor track record in the NFL, and those that hail from one of the big three Florida schools in particular are worst of all. In fact, this trend is so strong that it actually falls outside of statistical margin of error. The same pattern does not apply to other positions that win the award.

If I were in charge of a draft, I would immediately exclude Heisman-winning quarterbacks from consideration.

unless one gets points at FDL for putting down the religious

Oh, shut your fucking gob, you whiny little superstitious twat.

Hey, I just earned 50 Putting Down the Religious Reward Points! Thanks!

On a comparative number of screens (less than 10), “The Undefeated” enjoyed the fifth highest-grossing debut in the history of political documentaries.

I believe this is what is known in fallacy circles as “special pleading”.

the spiritual issues he’s grappled with throughout his life

Wow, Stapp is really “grappling” like a motherfucker, isn’t he? He’s just tortured by the possibility that his freaky Pentecostal parents were only 99% right instead of 100% right. The existential dilemmas this creates for him must be nigh intolerable.

As much as I disagree with Miller and West on principle, they aren’t completely wrong.

Sure. And if, back in 1945, 5 minutes after the announcement of VE Day someone had piped up and said, “This doesn’t mean fascism is dead. Wake up, Mr. Roosevelt”, they’d have been a fucking asshole with lousy timing.

The best part is actually: “The challenge is in finding a way to overcome the critics”

And the funniest part of that? Hollywood manages to accomplish this quite regularly. A quick glance at Rotten Tomatoes confirms that four out of the top five grossers right now are a “splat” on the tomatometer. People are flocking to movies that the critics hate, because those movies, mediocre as they may be, are presumably giving audiences something they want to see.

The butler answers it

Ooh, how vulgar. Nobody above a footman should ever touch one of those ghastly things.

Shorter TBogg: “I am on a drug. It’s called TBogg. It’s not available. If you try it once, you will die. Your face will melt off and your children will weep over your exploded body.”

Aside from everything else she gets spectacularly wrong (like droning on for several paragraphs about how the “shoot Obama” quote never happened), she somehow manages to cram this in as well:

the leftosphere where no one seems to mind all the violent and over-the-top language and imagery at the week-long Wisconsin protests

I’m sure examples of the above will be rapidly forthcoming, because it would be shoddy to assert something without evidence.