https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8YhED4IgQA

Kermit and Miss Piggy, in London to promote the UK premiere of their new movie, address the Fox-fueled Controversy! that said film is trying to “brainwash your kids” against capitalism. It’s not quite on par with Dan Quayle taking on Murphy Brown in the Picking Fights With Fictional Characters Sweepstakes, but only because Fox’s Eric Bolling is not a sitting Vice Preznident of These United States.

[via Media Matters]

Forgot to post this back in May … somewhat jarring:

[ThinkProgress]

Sarah Palin on Fox: “Vote for Newt. Annoy a liberal. Vote Newt. Keep this vetting process going, keep the debate going.” [NRO, via Political Wire]

So, what’s happening today at the Washington Post?

Obama: The most polarizing president. Ever.

Wow. Ever. Like. Wow.

Now, before you trot out your favorite Blazing Saddles references, let’s have a look at the rumors behind the news:

For 2011, Obama’s third year in office, an average of 80 percent of Democrats approved of the job he was doing in Gallup tracking polls, as compared to 12 percent of Republicans who felt the same way. That’s a 68-point partisan gap, the highest for any president’s third year in office — ever.

Well, you can’t dispute the numb—

Wait. The highest for any president’s third year in office. Or, if you’d like that in bold, “The highest for any president’s third year in office.”

Can we break that down? Has Obama also set the polarization record for any president’s 857th day in office? Ever? Because that would be, y’know, historic.

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Newt Gingrich: why do people take such an instant dislike to me?

Bob Dole: because it saves them time.

Andrew Sullivan labels this exchange “a quote too good to check.” Mark Shields refers to the exchange as “apocryphal.” I’d say, rather, that the short conversation excerpted above conveys a deeper truth that transcends such crude and unhelpful categories as “factuality” or “historicity.” Asking whether Bob Dole “really said that” is akin to putting a conch shell to a child’s ear and answering “no” when he asks you if that’s really the ocean he is hearing. Of course that’s the ocean the child hears, and of of course Bob Dole actually said that. How do I know? Because it couldn’t possibly have been otherwise.

Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich is on TV reminding us why it is we despise him so. Speaking to This Week host Jake Tapper on Sunday, the man who insisted that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae paid him 1.6 million dollars to act, not as a lobbyist for the mortgage giants, but as a historian, explained his poor debate performance on the most recent Florida GOP debate by noting:

“I don’t know how you can debate someone with civility if they’re prepared to say things that are factually false.”

There’s nothing so unseemely as a bully who’s finally been beaten up by a foe who chose to fight back, licking his wounds and complaining how unfair it was to be matched against an opponent who didn’t “fight fair.”

Being Our Age, one of the things we remember from Our Youth was the annual Bob Hope USO Show. Whatever you think of Bob Hope’s politics — we weren’t aware of them at the time — the USO Show was unabashedly a Good Thing, bringing entertainment to Our Beleaguered Boys in Vietnam, none of whom was Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney.

That war is long past, but the USO endures — not just with high-profile events like Stephen Colbert’s week in Baghdad, but visits to the troops from folks you’ve probably never of. Comedian Graham Elwood is one of those folks, and in a recent podcast chat with Chris Hardwick, Elwood describes the practicalities of doing stand-up in war zones. You don’t just work blue, for example — you go full on fucking indigo. But Elwood steers a wide berth from one subject:

“I’m fairly liberal in a lot my politics, but I was like, ‘They don’t need to hear this shit — they’re living it…’ They’re living the result of politics.”

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