A billion years ago, when I was a poor student, this kind of behavior was reserved for the student section at Tiger football games. No, really. When I was a freshman in '79, a fight broke out and someone went flying past my head. Down the steps.
Airborne.
I blame the spread of this kind of bad behavior to campus dining facilities -- and note that the video contains many F-bombs . . . screamed, no less -- on Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and his budgetary broadax.
Y'all watch this video, then all y'all tell me whether the amalgamated foofarah below accurately represents what happened at LSU's weekly football presser with Coach Les Miles.
Here's the incompetent reportage -- Aw, hell, I was supposed to let you make up your own mind . . . you go ahead, ignore my editorializing -- from the hometown rag, The Advocate, as it throws an 86-year-old alumnus under the team bus:
An offbeat exchange between LSU football coach Les Miles and a retired Advocate reporter led to some awkward moments Monday at Miles’ weekly news conference.
Near the end of Miles’ question and answer session, former Advocate sportswriter Ted Castillo asked Miles about being interviewed by ESPN sideline reporter Erin Andrews.
“What is it like to be, and you can take the Fifth (Amendment) on this, but what is it like to be interviewed by a sweet, young thing like Erin Andrews?” Castillo asked.
Miles responded by saying: “If they had given that job to some old, big, ugly man, it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun. But what a joy it is to represent LSU in the postgame with victory and to celebrate victory in a postgame interview with a very talented, very attractive woman.”
Andrews was the subject of a celebrated invasion of privacy incident in 2009 when she was secretly videotaped in the nude through peepholes in her hotel room. Michael David Barrett pled guilty to interstate stalking and admitted he shot videos of Andrews on at least two occasions.
Barrett was sentenced in March to 27 months in prison.
The case became the subject of a follow-up statement by Castillo.
“You know they nabbed the guy who was filming her through the keyhole,” Castillo said to Miles.
“I’m not going to go there, Ted,” Miles replied.
“What I’d like to know is how that guy pulled that off,” Castillo continued, “because I’ve been peeping through keyholes for years and I’ve yet to see anything but a blank wall.”
Miles responded: “Ted, damn if I’m not impressed with your candor. I’m with ya,” before moving on to a question on a football-related topic by WBRZ sports director Michael Cauble.
Castillo, 86, worked for The Advocate from 1948-91 and for several years after that wrote stories for the newspaper as a freelance writer.
(snip)
ESPN’s Josh Krulewitz, vice president of public relations for college and news, did contact The Advocate and LSU seeking to learn more about what was said.
Contacted on Monday night, Krulewitz said: “We’re not going to dignify those offensive questions with a response.”
Miles called Andrews after the incident became public to offer his support and encouragement, according to Bonnette. Bonnette said Miles was sensitive to and supportive of Andrews’ situation.
Since his retirement, Castillo has frequently attended LSU sporting events and news conferences and often asks questions and offers his view on topics at Miles’ weekly media gathering.
“I consider Ted a longtime fixture in the media in Baton Rouge, and I have never considered it my position to block his participation in our news conferences,” Bonnette said. “In the past he has generally asked good questions. Coach Miles has enjoyed his relationship with Ted. He only sees him about 12 times a year, and he respects Ted and understands that he’s been around a long time and has a history about LSU to share.
“But that being said, what happened (Monday) was unfortunate and something that we don’t condone.”
NOW WE move from the newspaper realm to that of the Internet's East Coast snark patrol, where liberal hipsters all congregate to gratuitously make fun of people not like them.
There, something like the humanity of an old man is unimportant. Gotcha -- and only gotcha -- is all that need govern the actions of media professionals here.
What do you know? Noo Yawk hipsters and The Advocate's Baton Rouge Bubbas actually have something in common.
(Dammit, there I go again. Strike that. Again, you go on and make up your own mind here.)
This is how we want to spend our (imaginary) retirement: asking LSU's football coach insane questions about Erin Andrews at the post-game press conference.
Andrews, a "very attractive" journalist for ESPN, interviewed LSU Coach Les Miles, prompting 86-year-old retired sportswriter Ted Castillo to ask, "What is it like to be -- and you can take the Fifth -- interviewed by a sweet, young thing like Erin Andrews?"
Castillo's voice is something akin to what you hear in your mind when you read phrases like "You boys ain't from around here, are ya?" Miles could only respond with: "What a joy it is to represent LSU in the postgame with victory and to celebrate victory in a postgame interview with a very talented, very attractive woman."
We have video of the bizarre line of questioning Les Miles dealt with during his "Lunch With Les" press conference this morning. Furthermore, we've ascertained the identity of the mysterious "Ted" who is so curious about Ms. Andrews.
The "Ted" in question is Ted Castillo formerly of the (Baton Rouge) Advocate. He has a reputation for asking off-the-wall questions, and judging by Miles's reaction, as well as the rest of the room's reaction, we don't doubt that for a second.
A retired sportswriter for The Baton Rouge Advocate has stirred up a controversy by asking Les Miles what it’s like “to be interviewed by a sweet, young think like Erin Andrews.”
In case you haven’t seen, the exchange has already made national news on sites like Deadspin.com.
Here’s a little background: Ted Castillo is an 86-year-old man. LSU allows him to still take part in media events. According to Deadspin, “He has a reputation for asking off-the-wall questions.”
Miles took the “sweet, young thing” question and responded as follows: “If they had given that job to some old, big, ugly man, it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun. But what a joy it is to represent LSU in the postgame with victory and to celebrate victory in a postgame interview with a very talented, very attractive woman.”
Better answer? “Come on, Ted. I’m not going there. Andrews does a very good job.”
I THINK we are agreed that Ted Castillo committed a serious breach of political correctness, forgetting this isn't 1967 and that humor is no laughing matter, Mister.
All right, I get it now. I have been enlightened.
The old codger committed the sin of letting time pass him by. Frankly, he should have known it's inappropriate to objectify beautiful young women . . . and especially to joke about their good looks.
He forgot (if he ever knew) that it's what's inside a woman that's important. He was oblivious to Andrews' reportorial skill, which is the only thing one needs to know -- or notice -- about her. Frankly, in this enlightened age, we rightly realize how terribly wrong it is to objectify any professional woman.
It is the content of her mind and her heart that matters . . . not the content of her double-D cups.
Pity Ted Castillo, who must make sick, sick comments at football press conferences, humiliating a proud educational institution and offending the dignity of Erin Andrews and a serious journalistic institution like ESPN. It is not unreasonable to demand an answer from the octogenarian as to why he must speak inappropriately in public instead of privately downloading Internet pornography like everyone else.
THIS SAD -- and, frankly, deeply troubling -- incident has at least served to highlight the plight of young professional women and the daily struggle they face in a society still ravaged by sexism . . . and randy old farts. This, one hopes, is a wake-up call for America.
It is time we take Erin Andrews seriously, and it's time we take sex completely out of any discussion of this talented sports-journalism professional.
IT IS TRULY . . . a . . . despicable thing . . . that . . . Ted . . . Castillo has . . . done. It is . . . high . . . time -- Holy mud-wrestling mother of God! -- that . . . the LSU athletic . . . department stands up for . . . the dignity of -- Ow! Mamacita! -- women and . . . takes Ted Castillo -- Hubba! Hubbahubbahubba! -- out of . . . its . . . pressers and . . . puts him -- pant pant pant -- out . . . to pasture.
When a high-profile consultant in your own party starts recycling jokes he told at your expense during the 2008 campaign -- when working for your archrival -- you may be in some political peril, Barack Obama.
Especially when it's a really, really funny joke.
And even more so when it kinda, sorta has the ring of truth about it.
Then, when the White House gets all pissy and thin-skinned about a joke -- especially a good one that people think is kind of close to reality -- the butt of the joke just starts to look like a butt, period.
Democratic strategist James Carville compared President Barack Obama to his democratic primary rival and current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Thursday, implying Obama needs to toughen-up.
"If Hillary gave up one of her balls and gave it to Obama, he'd have two," Carville said at a "Christian Science Monitor" breakfast discussion. His comment was a response to whether Obama is taking strong enough stands on taxes and repealing the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" military policy.
Carville made a similar comment to "Newsweek" during the 2008 campaign season when he compared Clinton and Obama's toughness.
"If she gave him one of her cojones, they'd both have two," he said.
He reacted to the comment on CNN's "John King, USA" Thursday.
"If I offended anybody, I am not sorry and I do not apologize," Carville told CNN's Chief National Correspondent John King.
THE WHITE HOUSE and senior Dems, according to King in the CNN video, "are outraged tonight (Thursday)." Well, that certainly violates a basic rule of politics, and life: "When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging."
President Obama can stop digging any time now.
The proper way to handle this would be 1) not to look like something traditionally paired with "balls," and 2) step out of character and summon your sense of humor. (Like, everybody's supposed to have one of those, right?)
An example: Pop in at the daily briefing and announce to the White House press corps -- in a basso profundo voice -- that you'd just had a productive meeting with the secretary of state. A good laugh defuses much.
Face it, when the most celebrated Democratic strategist's response to reports of your outrage over his political funny is "I am not sorry, and I do not apologize," you'd best start doing all the defusing you can regarding that H-bomb in the middle of your presidency.
P.S. TO CNN: If you're going to quote somebody -- especially somebody telling a a joke -- get the quote straight. All you had to do was . . . watch the videotape. Doesn't YouTube come through your Internets tubes in the CNN newsroom?
If you care to look at what kind of political climate we're facing these days, look no further than Rep. Steve King, western Iowa's crazy-uncle congressman.
In 2008, King -- a three-term representative for whom the description "incendiary" may well be an understatement -- won with 60 percent of the vote. Tuesday, he won with 68 percent.
In February, he was being glib about the guy who flew his plane into the IRS offices in Austin, Texas. Two years before, it was this:
King is a staunch conservative known for eyebrow-raising comments. He expects the GOP takeover of the House of Representatives to lead to his becoming chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law. He is the senior Republican on the subcommittee.
He said Tuesday he wants to introduce legislation reducing and eventually ending federal aid to so-called “sanctuary cities” if they did not change their policies.
“We have a number of cities in our country that, essentially, forbid their law enforcement officers from gathering information on illegals,” he said. “We need to put an end to it.”
Cities — including Seattle, Los Angeles, Houston and San Francisco — have adopted ordinances banning city employees and police from asking residents about their immigration status. King described Des Moines as a “de-facto” sanctuary city where the practice is in place without an ordinance.
He also called for ending automatic citizenship for what he called “anchor babies,” children born in the United States to illegal-immigrant parents. Doing that would likely require changing the U.S. Constitution.
WHAT DEMOCRATS have to deal with isn't that King is a nut and attracts like addle-minded zealots. What Democrats have to deal with is that lots of normal people in the country's breadbasket keep electing a bomb-thrower like the congressman from Iowa's 5th Congressional District.
That they regard him as "normal" enough to represent them, and see Democrats as unfit.
What Democrats have to ask themselves is why they are so alienated from normal Midwestern folk -- angry, fearful, marginally knee-jerk and increasingly deluded folk, to be sure, but not particularly lunatic ones. Dismissing folks like Steve King's Iowa voters, deriding them as bigots and nuts, may be satisfying for the Democratic base, but it still amounts to pissing in the wind.
The difficult question that some Democrats need to ask themselves, but won't, isn't "Why is everybody but us so crazy?" The pertinent question, instead, is "Why do people find us significantly more frightening than somebody like Steve King?"
"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars . . ." etc., and so on.
When I saw a link to an outraged post on one of Andrew Breitbart's "news" sites about what horrible things rat-bastard, "delusional" Krauts were saying about tea partiers in their rat-bastard, commie Kraut magazine, I jumped to an immediate conclusion.
I figure that whatever it was the Krauts said to so upset all the Right people, they must be on to something.
And sure enough, though the language was overbroad in parts of the Der Spiegel opinion piece, I thought this part of it could not have been more right.
If not Right.
But what is more appalling still, what is more shocking on so many levels, is the state of the nation -- the political stupidity of entire federal states and systems that seem hell-bent on self-destruction. Europe and the United States are much farther apart than many Europeans think. The US is different, completely and utterly different. Americans have a completely different understanding of social solidarity and the duties of the state. But there are also contradictions. Millions of Americans want to reduce the power of the government, because that's the way their countrymen have always thought. Yet these same Americans want their president to lead them out of crisis. They want railway stations, schools and clean energy, but they don't want to pay taxes. They are the descendants of immigrants, and proud of it, and they oppose immigration.
Decades of prosperity have made the US a lethargic country. And in contrast to Europeans, whose lives and countries have been shaped by war, Americans are accustomed to feeling unique and invulnerable. They therefore react with near paranoia to a powerful China or a black president. Americans know they need change, yet they fear change. Such attitudes may be called schizophrenic. They're certainly a recipe for hysteria.
The older, conservative German demonstrators who have recently been taking to the streets to protest against the controversial "Stuttgart 21" railway station project are the product of demographic change and their own fears. But the German protesters look absolutely harmless compared to America's hate-mongers, gun freaks and Tea Party demagogues who first compare Obama to Hitler and then minutes later to Stalin. They are people so filled with vitriol they can no longer think straight -- people like television presenter Glenn Beck, who says that putting the common good first is "exactly the kind of talk that led to the death camps in Germany." Beck has millions of followers, and appears in public with former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin, the darling of the Tea Party movement, who gleefully pronounces Obama's middle name Hussein as if it were a naughty, menacing word. Just two years ago, such things would have been taboo, and considered below-the-belt by Republicans.
This is the new atmosphere in America, and it is reflected in the Senate and the House of Representatives, two self-confident bodies populated by two political parties that eagerly take turns holding the reins of power. They paralyze themselves with rules that demand unattainable majorities for everything that is important. And even the Constitution irrevocably decrees that a senator from sparsely-populated Alaska has the same rights as a senator from New York.
The German media alternate on a daily basis between talking about "Obama's victory" and calling him a "loser." But often neither view is accurate, because the president has little or no influence over much of what is done, or not done, in the US and its 50 federal states.
Of course the American media is largely responsible for the impression people get of President Obama as well as the state of the nation as a whole. Fox News, Rupert Murdoch's TV news channel, has come to specialize in partisan mudslinging. Four of the potential future Republican presidential candidates are on Fox's payroll. The liberal channels are only different -- they are no longer any better. CNN has atrophied into a soapbox for journalist presenters. There is no analysis anymore on American TV, and little news -- only polemical attacks and shouting delivered in 90-second chunks.
SOMETIMES, distance provides clarity. And always, not actually being in the middle of a nervous breakdown is the best perspective for determining that a nervous breakdown is what's ailing someone.
In this regard, Klaus Brinkbäumer has identified the problem perfectly. His German readers ought to be worried that, in this case, the emotionally unstable basket case controls a big chunk of the global economy . . . and, by the way, is armed to the teeth with thermonuclear weapons.
What we need is an Academy Award for Best Internet Mash-Up Video of Cartoon Clips Adapted to Make Fun of Talk-Show Goobers Who Really Have It Coming.
If we had such an Oscar -- and the sad fact that we don't is some sort of indictment on American society -- it would go to this one. "This one" is called Right Wing Radio Duck, and it hits Glenn Beck and the perpetually pissed peeps of the tea-party movement where they live.
Oh, and it's funny as hell, too.
Jonathan McIntosh, to be succinct, is a freakin' genius. Here's part of how he describes Right Wing Radio Duck's plot:
Donald’s life is turned upside-down by the current economic crisis and he finds himself unemployed and falling behind on his house payments. As his frustration turns into despair Donald discovers a seemingly sympathetic voice coming from his radio named Glenn Beck.
WATCH.Now.
The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is contained in the video's 7:46 of searing social criticism from Rebellious Pixels.
Has Glenn Beck attacked McIntosh as a "socialist" yet?
Now, when you see something on Facebook along the lines of "Sometimes your driving in traffic and you come across an American PATRIOT!" the word means something else entirely.
For one thing, it may mean that the person throwing around "patriot" has little command of English grammar. For another, in this context "patriot" now means "Angry half-wit who puts stupid and tasteless s*** on his pickup and wrecks a perfectly good paint job in the process."
It's just another small step in defining perfectly good English words and phrases down to something more idiotic than previously. For instance, "patriot" now is a euphemism for "crank," just as "make love" has become one for "rut."
Geez, about the only word that means what it always has is . . . yeah, that one.
