December 8, 2005

WRTA

Brown Shoes Diary

Dumbest Comments of the Year

I heard Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, state on C-SPAN last week that, "History is difficult to predict."  Really?  Since history is a record of that which has already occurred I would think that it should be pretty easy to predict.  For example, I'm willing to predict a homerun when Bill Mazeroski comes to bat in the ninth inning of the seventh game of the 1960 World Series.  Call it intuition.

"History is difficult to predict" struck me as one of the dumbest things I've heard lately.  But that list is not a short one. What follows are a few examples of the dumbest comments I've heard in the past year.

In a radio interview discussing the alliterative names of sports teams (for example, Pittsburgh Pirates), Tony Kornheiser used the Anaheim Angels as an example.  When an emailer to the show corrected him by saying his example was assonance, not alliteration, and that an English major graduate ought to know better, Kornheiser responded defiantly by yelling, "I was a literature major, not a grammar major."  Hey, Tony, alliteration and assonance are literary terms not terms of grammar.  Is it any wonder Kornheiser's opinions are as loopy as they are?  And shouldn't his Alma Mater ask him to return the undeserved diploma?

In another example of dumb comments from sports (obviously a source of abundance for stupidity), a TNT reporter was interviewing former presidents Bush and Clinton before the President's Cup golf tournament.  This is a competition that pits America's best golfers versus golfers from the rest of the world (excluding Europe).  The interviewer asked the former presidents, in all sincerity, "So which team are you rooting for?"  Hmm.  If you're a former president of the United States of America, how do you answer such an idiotic question?  Well, Clinton and Bush answered directly that their allegiance was with America.  Glad we cleared that up!

Speaking of former President Clinton and dumb comments, I heard him give a speech in which he claimed that F.D.R.'s broken promise of balancing the budget helped bring about the economic recovery in the U.S. in the 1930s.  That would sure surprise my mother who claims that unemployment reached 25% under Comrade Roosevelt.  Others will say that World War II got us out of Roosevelt's Great Depression, but that's equally dumb.  Before WW II there were few goods and services, but a lot of leisure; during WW II there were few goods and services, no leisure, and lots of death and destruction.  That's an economic recovery?

During the space shuttle mission this year I heard a Foxnews radio reporter say that the space walk to repair heat tiles would be unknown territory for NASA and "NASA doesn't like unknown territory."  Isn't unknown territory the whole point of NASA?

The award for most misused word this year goes to Rush Limbaugh who thinks "literally" means its opposite, figuratively.  At least I hope he's just ignorant, because I heard him say his head was "literally spinning" after listening to Harry Reid.  That's some trick and if literally true, then maybe an exorcism is required.  Rush also said that Democrats "literally throw mud at the wall" to see what sticks whenever the President nominates someone for office.  I wish he were right because it strikes me that the Democrats spend their time literally slandering and libeling Bush's nominees.  It would be so much nicer if they were only throwing mud against a wall.

Rush isn't the only one misusing "literally."  The sports world is replete with people who don't know the meaning of the word.  I heard of a tennis match where Jennifer Capriati was "literally hammered."  A match on network television no less.  And a quarterback of an NFL team "literally put his whole team on his shoulders" to take them to the playoffs.  That's some player, those are some shoulders!

No list of dumb comments would be complete without a lawyer weighing in.  At the University of Pennsylvania recently a couple of students were engaging in sex in front of a window visible to the public on a daily basis.  As will happen in such situations, passersby gathered to view the activity and some viewers took pictures and put them on the web. (I wonder why nobody went to livecam?) Speaking on behalf of the female exhibitionist, a lawyer claimed, "There has been a public invasion into her personal life."

What about the dumbest comment uttered by a politician?  Although Barry Wright is making every effort to win the award, I think the comment "we need a tax increase" is the dumbest.  The list of politicians who mouthed those words is long and shameful.

So what was the dumbest thing said on WRTA's talk block this past year?  I'm not sure, but I think it's better than even money it was uttered by a co-host between 11:00 and 11:45 on a Tuesday.  Just a hunch.