Via Alasdair Watson, we have this fine campaign video starring Mike “The Latest Crazy Old Guy To Be The Libertarian Party Candidate For President” Gravel. (I think it’s a rule that the Libertarian candidate has to be at least 65, white, and unreasonably privileged.) I know it’s a trial, but try to watch the whole thing. You will not in any way feel as if your time has been completely wasted, I promise! (For given value of “completely wasted,” of course.)

For a real treat, click to the Youtube site and read the comments, which like all libertarian gathering points are the usual clustering repetition of Ayn Rand and Ludwig von Mises quotes, none of which actually address the salient point that the video is fucking insane and presents no actual argument worth mentioning. (But of course, the wisdom of libertarianism is self-evident, you see.)

The Barack Obama race speech video on Youtube has over two million hits in less than two days. This, for a video that is, let us not forget, nearly forty minutes long.

By way of comparison, remember that “music video” thing? It got to a million hits in five days, and it’s about three minutes long.

EDIT TO ADD: I certainly didn’t expect to see comments like this from Mike Huckabee, who seems to be refusing to march in lockstep with the far-right outrage over the Obama speech:

And one other thing I think we’ve gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say “That’s a terrible statement!”…I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack — and I’m gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who’s gonna say something like this, but I’m just tellin’ you — we’ve gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told “you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on the bus…”

And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

Okay, now if it was me, and someone came to me and said “look, we need to have you make a commercial for our pasta sauce,” I would probably shoot a commercial that is at least slightly conceptually related to the pasta sauce in question. You know: the pasta sauce tastes good, the pasta sauce is just like Grandma used to make, the pasta sauce reminds you of better days, the pasta sauce is something which the whole family enjoys at dinnertime. The usual tropes.

This is why I could never get a job in marketing in Japan. (Well, quite beyond the fact that I don’t speak Japanese.) It would never occur to me to say “hey – let’s advertise your pasta sauce with a little white girl dressed up as a cheerleader, dancing around, with pompoms made out of hundreds of your vaguely dildo-shaped mascot.”

Well, not per se, anyhow.

Years later, it only really becomes apparent how much of a genius Jim Henson really was, and this from someone who considered him a genius when he was still alive.

I promise to try and cut down on the Youtube links for the next little while, because there’s been a lot of them lately. But this one was too good to pass up, considering I wrote it.

Lawyerbear created by Kevin Church and made available for use under a Creative Commons license.)

I would also note – for those concerned about me retconning Lawyerbear’s sexuality – that the tail end of the sketch (fade to black, “Next Week On Lawyerbear” and then him making out with the anti-bear lady) got cut off. So rest assured that in the sketch Lawyerbear is either lying or at least experimental.

(Via.)