Hello Crasstalk, I’m Mark Shields’ left jowl.
And I’m Mark Shields’ right jowl.
And this is World Roundup with Mark Shields’ Jowls.
As jowls go, we’ve seen a lot. We’ve been there and back again. We’ve forgotten more stories than most of today’s firm-cheeked young “journalists” have followed on Twitter. We’ve jowled with jowliest of the jowls from the limpest Liebermans to the meatiest McCains—we’ve literally gone jowl-to-jowl with every established, occasionally centrist, and often infuriatingly inconsistent politician in this town, and we know you and David Brooks wouldn’t have it any other way. With our bona fides established, Left Jowl begins our Roundup in North Africa.
Libya is more than a country in turmoil. Libya is also a great place for sensitive jowls to indulge in the flavors of asida, bazeen, and other jowl-friendly food shapes. There’s also a multinational intervention in a civil war that would have been a crushed uprising had it not been for the aforementioned multinational intervention, and it’s all very confusing right now. Mark’s secretary, Helen, she’s good with computers and she follows the news for him, and every time she brings him another one of her stenotype printouts, he shakes his head and Right Jowl and I swing violently about.
That’s right, Left Jowl. Libya’s more confused than Mark at a four-way stop in a neighborhood he hasn’t driven through recently. The Qaddafi regime is pursuing what Ollie North called the “Yeah, see what you can get away with” approach; it’s a three-pronged technique, with confidants traveling to London to negotiate with the coalition, the elite 32nd brigade mobilizing out of its barracks in Tripoli, and Qaddafi spokesman Mussa Ibrahim saying, “We could have any political system, any changes: constitution, election, anything.” Really, they’re just spitballing at this point, and who could blame them. In any case, London’s the place to be if you’re a Libyan right now, all the big names are going to be there, and if you get there, you just might get immunity from whatever the coalition’s going to do to you. Right Jowl?
Japan continues its slow slide into nuclear oblivion. Just completely and inevitably fucked. Mark doesn’t get to use the F, but it just kills him not to. Mark’s a foul-mouthed ex-Marine at heart, and every time David Brooks says something about how we’ve lost our national values and tilts his head just so, Mark just wants to rip the guy’s head off. Instead, he chomps on one of us good and hard and squints his eyes against the glare coming off Brooks’ bald spot. The lights in the NewsHour studio are, like, 40 watts, tops, but Brooks’ melon was studied by NASA for potential applications in the Keck Telescopes. It is not to be trifled with. Left Jowl?
Airplanes are just falling apart these days, just falling apart. It’s an aging fleet, and no one knows more about the ravages of time than your humble correspondents. Eric Holder has successfully claimed that Congress blocked the extradition of Khalid Sheik Mohammed while appearing to contradict his boss’s campaign promise. The Democratic base loses, but they really don’t even much care at this point; the Republican base wins, because they don’t care either but ha, eat shit, Obama; the Administration wins because they’re getting all their independent-courting ducks in a row for 2012; and Right Jowl and I lose because this has Mark frazzled, which means much consternation and shaking of the head. And it appears that the French may have stumbled ass-backwards into a military conflict they can win. Good for them, but seriously, these people in Côte d’Ivoire are using slingshots and sticks and whatever Cold War-era weapons they can find. You think I’m exaggerating, but most soldiers aren’t Rhodes Scholars, and even fewer illiterate orphans are Rhodes Scholars, and those are just some statistics I’m sharing with you. The only people who’ve displayed worse accuracy than the Côte d’Ivoire factions are the Butler Bulldogs in the final twenty minutes of last night’s game game. You can read more of Mark’s tangentially related thoughts on UConn athletics here. Right Jowl, bring us home.
Two companies you probably remember from high school math class have decided to merge, for some reason. Another firm tried to one-up Nick Denton. And TARP’s been paid back in full, with a tidy profit for the American taxpayer. Don’t question the math. Mark struggles with math.
