I loved the Berenstain bears when I was kid, and I was sad to see that the creator of the series died recently. Apparently, Charles Krauthammer didn’t like the Berenstain bears so much (note: he wrote this a while ago, not right after the creator of the series died):
It is not just the smugness and complacency of the stories that is so irritating. That is a common affliction of children’s literature. The raging offense of the Berenstains is the post-feminist Papa Bear, the Alan Alda of grizzlies, a wimp so passive and fumbling he makes Dagwood Bumstead look like Batman.
[….]Mother Bear, too, is a creation. Every adult will recognize her as the final flowering of the grade-school prissy, the one with perfect posture and impeccable handwriting. The one the teachers loved. The one who disdained your baloney sandwich and pulled from salad out of her lunch box, minding her cholesterol in 1958. The one you always dreamt of drowning.
This is why I think conservatism is doomed. They can’t even watch a fucking cartoon without overlaying it with some crazy aggrieved male mythology. I don’t think most people have the time or energy for this kind of exegesis. Maybe I’m wrong.
The Dangerman
Berenstein bears are cool, but fuck that purple dinosaur.
Suffern ACE
Man, Calliou must make him pee his pants.
kdaug
You don’t say.
Seonachan
Weird – I’d never heard of the Berenstein bears until this year when my daughter started bringing the books home from the library.
And my (mild) reaction was that it’s too stuck in old fashioned gender roles, especially the mom. But that was under the assumption that it’s a fairly recent creation.
freelancer
Note to Chuckie CabbageMallet: Tracy Flick, there, that character model that you’re pushing on a children’s author’s creation? Not a Lefty! The call is coming from inside the house!
Walker
That is a seriously disturbed rant.
Suffern ACE
Maybe the Father Bear should kill a camper and feed him to the cubs, just so we know he has fulfilled the proper role as breadwinner. Or behave more like a real bear and kill any cubs he finds so he can mate with the mother. Mamma Bernstein, perpetually trying to raise the cubs while single would be an interesting twist as well.
Arrik
The modern right is filled with Zhdanovist culture warriors who literally cannot look at any piece of art, no matter how trivial and inoffensive, without judging it for adherence to their dogma. I can’t wait until the Lorax comes out. Yes, it’s going to be a crap movie that is utterly unfaithful to the book, but if it stirs the chit and causes a few more winger tantrums, I’m all for it. Every time they do this, they drive away a few more swing voters.
Arrik
The modern right is filled with Zhdanovist culture warriors who literally cannot look at any piece of art, no matter how trivial and inoffensive, without judging it for adherence to their dogma. I can’t wait until the Lorax comes out. Yes, it’s going to be a crap movie that is utterly unfaithful to the book, but if it stirs the chit and causes a few more winger tantrums, I’m all for it. Every time they do this, they drive away a few more swing voters.
Lit3Bolt
Does Krauthammer sob daily that men have been robbed of the ability to rape and repress women at will?
Jewish Steel
Berenstein? I dunno. Sounds a little jewy. Can we anglicize it a little? Bearstone maybe? I’m just spitballing here.
Judas Escargot, Your Postmodern Neighbor
Next week: Krauthammer explains to us how Muppet Babies is just as bad as the Holocaust.
kdaug
@The Dangerman:
Don’t even get me started.
No, I don’t love you. You may love me, but I really wish you’d shut up about it.
Really.
Love ain’t always reciprocal.
Stupid goddamned dinosaur.
pragmatism
@freelancer: Tracy Flick would have a thermomix for flawless bechamels.
Amir Khalid
Look, Charles Krauthammer is nuts. We all know it. There was this one time, The Daily Kos summarized one of his columns is four words: “Froth. Bark. Dribble. Howl.” I remember thinking, everything he writes is like that.
gnomedad
There are still some corners of the culture that the wingers have not yet noticed are conspiring against them. These must be exposed.
Abstruse
You know, that stupid chick we ALL dreamt of drowning.
Rawk Chawk
Don’t know what’s more revealing/disturbing; that you actually liked the fucking vacuous Berenstein Bears cartoons, which all three of my kids had the good taste to avoid as youngsters, or that you would think this a subject worth posting about.
DougJ continues to steer BJ round and round and down the toilet….
Martin
The story I remember best is when Papa Bear shut down the treehouse after he was forced to exit from the back of a plane, and Mama bear refused to have the kids do their chores and instead took away their dinner because she wasn’t invited to a neighbors cocktail party.
Fucking püssies!
amk
all this angst over cartoons? jeebus, what a fucked-up, shriveled soul.
Martin
@kdaug:
We got our TiVo when the kids were little. We deliberately told it to record a show on a different network in the time slot as Barney so we’d never have to come downstairs and suffer one of the kids watching it. They never once saw the show.
Chris
The hallmark of totalitarian ideologies is the politicization of everything. Movement conservatism’s been there for ages. This is just a slightly-more-ridiculous-than-usual example.
nwerner
It’s Berenstain Bears, not Berenstein.
nitpicker
@Abstruse: Right? Who among us didn’t dream of murdering a classmate?
David Koch
Well, at least he only attacked yiddish bears, and not Murphy Brown.
kdaug
@Martin:
Neither have I.
I don’t even have kids.
But somewhere along that fucking song seeped in.
If I ever spot a purple dinosaur I’m sending ordinance downrange.
Paul W.
Exactly, I just don’t get where this bottomless well of outrage comes from…
And really?!? Who the fuck cares if the dad is “sissified” or whatever the fuck he is is saying… Is he being a good father? Does it make you more of a man if you hit things all the time, like your wife and kids? Idiot.
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
grade school prissy, the final flowering.
some of this shit sounds like the worst sort of action movie/soft core you could possibly imagine.
Xjmueller
It appears that the hammer of the krauts has mommy issues. The prissy girl is just a projection. Mother K probably was domineering. It fits with his other issues, so I’m running with it.
amk
btw, nader endorsed the other old kook, rupaul.
birds of feather and all that.
Spaghetti Lee
It is not just the smugness and complacency of the stories that is so irritating. That is a common affliction of children’s literature.
Yeah, there oughta be more kids’ books about bombing Muslims to death! That would liven things up!
Christ, what is with this guy? How has he not choked to death on his own stomach acid yet?
Chris
@Paul W.:
This.
I mean, I know it’s there, I know it informs a hell of a lot of their actions, I just have no idea where it comes from. I can’t fathom how people with that much privilege can develop such a tremendous victimhood complex. Obviously they do, but damned if I know how.
MikeJ
You can also find many instances of wingers complaining that kids lit doesn’t teach good manners, and always show the adults as stupid and evil.
There is literally nothing you can write that they won’t find a way to turn into persecution.
middlewest
This isn’t the first, nor will it be the last woman that Charles Krauthammer dreams of murdering violently.
Rock
Is it just me, or did he really write that he wanted to drown Mama Bear? That shit is way more disturbing than anything I encountered in the Berenstein oevre.
If we want to be all analytical about stuff, I have to say that the dream of transgressive violence CK expresses seems typical of post-fin de siecle conservative rhetoric. Someone with a background in psychology should look into that….
Mike in NC
Every Krauthammer article boils down to a noun, a verb, and “Israel”.
kdaug
@Chris:
With Charles Krauthammer, it likely arises from the accident that left him paralyzed.
Being in a wheelchair can sour your mood.
dead existentialist
Heh. You know who else we all wish would’ve drowned rather than spew bile from his wheelchair? Why couldn’t that limp-dick piece of shit jumped off at, say, Acapulco?
cthulhu
Did such a person even exist? I thought the 50’s were the time we want to go back to?
WyldPirate
Speaking of wankerific sexual repression and crazy aggrieved male mythology Tom Tomorrow gives us Sex Talk with Rick Santorum.
Chris
@kdaug:
Well, now I know that… but nah. It explains him, it doesn’t explain the thousands of people exactly like him who haven’t had that kind of thing happen to them.
Violet
Krauthammer makes me nervous. He always looks like he’s got a very dark side and knows plenty of scary secrets.
Roger Moore
@Amir Khalid:
Not “Nitwit! Blubber! Oddment! Tweak!”? Or is that too classy for him?
PTirebiter
@Rock:
Dreams of Drowning My Father?
Anne Laurie
I remember reading that the very first children’s book (a primer) published in America started with the couplet:
We sinned all
And Ye Menne of Traditionale Values(tm) complain it’s been downhill to perdition ever since!
freelancer
@kdaug:
Or not. An asshole in a wheelchair is still an asshole.
Roger Moore
@kdaug:
Then avoid Coors Field. Of course that’s a purple ceratopsian rather than a purple carnasaur, so you’re unlikely to get them confused.
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
@cthulhu:
that would make her a hipster grade school prissy, see the slippery slope does exist.
kdaug
@Chris: Damaged people.
However it happened.
Ed Drone
Somehow, I don’t recall the B’s Bears being all that wishy-washy. Most of the stories are for the acculturation of wild children, with lessons on sharing, or bullies, or cleaning your damned room. Momma bear usually provided the maxims, and Poppa was there to take some of the psychic load (empathy was his shtick). Poppa was no wimp, nor a Robert Young; he wasn’t even a Ricky Ricardo.
And Momma wasn’t a prissy school marm / librarian, either. Then again, my son tended toward the #@!% dinosaur, anyway. By the way, there was something about the Purple One that mirrored an earlier TV performer, namely Buffalo Bob. Bob provided the voice for Howdy Doody, so the kids in the peanut gallery could see him doing both parts (he was no ventriloquist). A friend of mine was at a Barney appearance, and there was a guy who followed the star, and provided his lines via a microphone right out in the open.
And the kids in each case didn’t seem to mind. Talk about “suspension of disbelief.”
Ed
Satanicpanic
Oh shit, I thought the Berenstein Bears were preachy and annoying when I was a kid, does that make me Charles Krauthammer? Richard Scarry too and fucking busytown, except I liked looking for goldbug. If it weren’t for Shel Silverstein I think I would have grown up hating reading.
Edit to add:
BTW, Barney the Dinosaur is nowhere near as annoying as those child actors that populate those shows.
Linnaeus
Would it be excessive of me to say that Krauthammer is a blight on our national political discourse?
Villago Delenda Est
@Chris:
This.
It’s no coincidence that the Neoconservative movement has its roots in apostate Trotskyites. The same everything is political mindset permeates it. They tossed out all the good things about Marx and embraced, fully, the dumbshit stuff.
Linnaeus
@Satanicpanic:
Saying “I found the Berenstein Bears annoying” isn’t quite the same as saying, “Yeah, the mother reminds me of that girl in school that I wanted to kill.”
kdaug
@freelancer: Agreed. Should have bolded the “can”.
TBogg
I remember Goldameirlocks & The 3 Berenstain Bears:
Papa Bear: Oy. My soup is so hot…and such small portions.
Mark S.
(deleted scene from Team America)
Gary Johnston: I’m leaving. I’m out.
Spottswoode: No, Gary! You can’t leave! We need you now, more than ever!
Gary Johnston: Don’t you see what’s going on out there? Everyone hates us!
Spottswoode: Hey, now, everyone hated Winnie the Pooh, too.
Gary Johnston: No, they didn’t!
Spottswoode: Well, I did. That cocksucking bear killed Jack Kennedy!
kdaug
@kdaug:
ETA: I’m blaming Barney.
Satanicpanic
@Linnaeus: I also don’t want to bomb millions of brown people back to the stone age. Maybe there’s a correlation there.
butler
Its been at 20+ years since I read a BB book, but if I recall Papa Bear was some a lumberjack or had some job related to construction or something? Never seemed that effeminate to me, but then again I was 6 and probably wouldn’t have realized it if he was.
Vixen Strangely
“So Charles, how long have you been wanting to drown cartoon bears?
(Whipping out pad of paper)
“Is it significant that she is a Mother Bear? Is she….overbearing? How does that make you feel?
“And where is the father bear in all of this? Distant? Ineffective? Feminized!”
(Writes insight on pad.) “How do you feel this is impacting the baby bears?”
(Exuent patient, pursued by a Grizzly Momma, raving about bombing something. Nothing is bombed.)
kdaug
@Linnaeus:
You’re not real familiar with conservatives, are you?
Mnemosyne
@Ed Drone:
You’d be surprised — we saw “Avenue Q” and damn if you didn’t forget all about the puppeteers and only watch the puppets after a few minutes. And “Avenue Q” is, um, not for children. At all.
dead existentialist
Shiny Beads
You’re not wrong.
Linnaeus
@Satanicpanic:
There just might be a correlation.
@kdaug:
Oh, I am. I really shouldn’t be surprised by Krauthammer’s murder fantasies at this point.
jheartney
When my kids were young at one point I actually was able to grok the Teletubbies. You see, it’s really a cousin to religious rituals like Catholic Mass. They do the same shit every time, with a tiny number of small variations kind of like Gospel readings. And the imagery is totally weird (that baby in the sun by rights ought to be nightmare fuel) but everybody acts like it’s normal, kind of like people acting like having a big graphic image of a guy being brutally tortured to death on a cross is normal.
The wingers completely miss all that while freaking out because they imagine one of these pseudo-infants is gay. I don’t understand how that kind of stupidity survives in a modern technical society.
kdaug
@jheartney:
I don’t remember now – which one was the gay one?
cthulhu
@Satanicpanic: There is a bit of a disconnect here in that originally the Berenstein Bears were a staple of the books available from Scholastic when I was learning to read. The regular animated series that Krauthammer is referencing didn’t premier until 20+ years later in the mid 80’s and onward. As my kids did watch the latter here and there (they were never huge fans), I did think that the animated characters seemed more “modern” and “PC” than I recalled from my youth, But they weren’t horribly so and the biggest criticism that my kids and I had of the show was that it was simply boring compared to the alternatives. That anyone would find this show, of all children’s shows, worthy of sociological commentary baffles me.
Suffern ACE
@kdaug: Tinky Winky (the purple one with the red magic bag).
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
@kdaug:
that was just gossip from the other teletubbies, jealousy that only one of them could afford cable.
jheartney
@kdaug: This one: Tinky Winky
Brandon
While I am sure he would argue otherwise, you just don’t write about the desire to drown young women or girls out the blue as the result of some creative license. It had to come from within his own mind, which his writing continues to reveal as truly sick and perverse. Not to mention the fact that from what I have seen and read of him, his public persona is an obviously angry, comtemptible and bitter man
What I find most detestable about Krauthammer is his past proclivity for abusing his professional training through projecting mental health diagnoses on his political enemies. So it would be wrong of me to repeat that mistake in regards to my criticisms of the published expressions of his psyche. However, I do know enough about his biography and freak spinal injury (I believe it happened diving when he was in medical school) to understand that could have had a formative role in shaping his politics, relationship with his religion, as well as his angry and bitter disposition.
But if that’s the case, not all people similarly afflicted by tragedy respond by making it their life’s mission to ensure the entire world becomes equally acquainted with miserable fortune. I just hope for his sake that the public persona is an invention, because it would be a terrible shame if he went through his day-to-day life carrying so much anger.
DaddyJ
Good Lord, the Berenstain Bears (the books at least) are all about home-spun family values: honesty, faith, pluck, picking your socks up off the floor, doing your gender-traditional chores. not cussin’. I bet when David Brooks dreams about the elites transmitting their shining values to the lower classes, mass readings of Berenstain Bears books are part of the curriculum.
For anthropomorphic morality tales give me the Frog and Toad stories or that clever little badger named Frances (by another author who recently passed away, Russell Hoban).
sfinny
Jeez, I would hate CK’s take on the Thundercats.
Redshift
@Suffern ACE: And the triangle on his head.
MikeJ
@DaddyJ:
Oh yeah! Frances had jam, if I recall correctly.
I don’t remember what I read when I was young, but I read Hojo the Laughing Dragon and the Wizard of Wallaby Wallow to my brother.
kdaug
@Suffern ACE:
Oh, God. Now I know why you’re Suffern’, ACE.
Here’s some brain-bleach. Play it loud for the little squirmy ones. (And, yes, I did have to post this.)
And something for the adults. Good show.
MikeJ
@MikeJ: Better source for laughing dragon info.
Steve Finlay
I also found the Berenstain bears irritating and preachy. But doesn’t Krauthammer outdo almost anyone else in that department? Maybe he doesn’t like competition.
But what I really didn’t like about the Berenstain bears (both as a kid and now) is the same thing I didn’t like about so many children’s books: Most of the authors write badly. Dr. Seuss made it look easy. The Berenstains prove that it is not.
Canuckistani Tom
@butler:
Carpenter/Furniture maker, I think (it’s been a couple of decades)
Gex
@Lit3Bolt: That’s Scott Adams’ schtick.
Martin
@Paul W.:
The evening discussion with the teenager was to address the question of “Why do these people dislike gays so much?” The ensuing conversation explored two conservative trends:
1) Fear of losing social and political power.
2) Casting blame on the powerless for the ills of the country and absolving those in power of responsibility for things that only they could possibly control.
Everything in conservatism boils down to one or both of those things. The bottomless well of outrage comes out of that fear of having to share power with the kinds of people glorified in these stories and movies.
DaddyJ
@MikeJ:
She did. She did indeed. (Sadly, the illustrations are deliberately bleached out.)
YellowJournalism
The Berenstain Bears were part of my introduction to reading. My mom read the three or four of them we had to us every night. Our favorite was The Messy Room, the one where Mama Bear loses it after having to clean her kids’ room and starts tossing their toys in the garbage. Mama Bear getting the short end of the stick and teaching everyone to help out is a common theme, so I guess that’s a little feminist, but it wasn’t like she was starting a Bear Country chapter of NOW or burning her bra on the steps of the Mayor’s office.
Even so, the stories are pretty conservative in terms of gender roles and messages about manners and health issues (seeing a dentist). I’m also pretty sure there’s an entire set of stories devoted to God and Christianity. (Not fun to read.)
But the cartoon does suck. It waters down the stories. And Papa comes off as Homer Simpson without the alcoholism and satirical storylines.
Martin
@Mnemosyne:
You don’t go to the right church. Wife’s church did quite a few Avenue Q pieces for one of their concerts – and for kids. Not that song, alas, but Everyones a Little Bit Racist and If You Were Gay.
YellowJournalism
Oh, I forgot! Mama Bear did start her own small business–a quilt shop. Fucking working mothers.
Martin
@YellowJournalism:
And when someone threatened to raise her top marginal rate, she decided to withhold her productivity rather than have it stolen by a looting usurper.
Bill
Krauthammer should have read The Bear: History of a Fallen King, by Michel Pastoureau. Then he would have known that the bear, once the king of beasts and worshipped by early European tribes was subject to an implacable war by the Catholic Church who sought to introduce the foreign lion as the new king and stamp out the bear cults. Already by the time of the Roman de Renart in the 12th century the bear is the subject of ridicule in literature.
Geoduck
Just to nitpick, Jan was the co-creator of the franchise, with her husband Stan. Also, it’s probably rare to come across a copy anymore, but I highly recommend their non-Bear book “Flipsville Squaresville” which is about teenager-parent relationships. Dated of course, but still genuinely hilarious in places.
kdaug
@Bill: Yup.
Was in a bar, somewhere in Colorado (Telluride, maybe?), where they had a stuffed, 13-foot grizzly.
Each claw was as big as my hand.
Did you know they can run faster than a horse?
Keep your sharks and meow-meow lions – bears would be the top of the food chain if we hadn’t figured out bows and spears.
Suffern ACE
@kdaug: Phooey. I take my a capella Canadian. Even if they might be prone to becoming Gingrich-curios.
Satanicpanic
@cthulhu: Ah, I only remember the books. I remember thinking “I know I should clean my room, I don’t need to read a book about it.” But that was the extent of it. I never would have guessed it would send an adult into a frothing rage. I would have been even more surprised that said adult had the title of “pundit” and would be widely looked upon (by other pundits) as some sort of wise old man. If I had known this I probably would have given up on society much earlier.
Chet
No shit, I can remember as a kid the pastor of our conservative Missouri Synod Lutheran church devoting an entire sermon one week to “The Get-Along Gang” and how it perfectly encapsulated the godless relativism of the age.
Suffern ACE
@Satanicpanic: Well perhaps if you did what you knew you had to do, you wouldn’t need a lecture on it in the form of a book and your mom would have bought you the one about their pleasant outing to the beach instead. (muttermutter. ingrate. muttermutter.)
Suffern ACE
@Chet: Well, to be fair, the basic theological and ethical stance of LCMS since Walther has been “No frickin way am I going to get along with y’all. Especially you heretics and by “heretics” I mean everyone.”
weasel
Isn’t there a bible verse at the beginning of these books? I remember them from my childhood without any affection or dislike, but was recently perusing one for my daughter and immediately rejected it when I opened the book and saw some chapter and verse.
kdaug
@Suffern ACE: Newt’s soundtrack.
Jager
@kdaug: On a climbing trip in the Bugaboos on our approach hike, we saw a grizzlie across a narrow valley from us hauling ass up a 90% slope. He was moving up through the rocks and brush like a train. Amazing to see.
Bill
@kdaug: Apparently in the Roman colosseum bears always won against lions, but Martial records an instance where a bear suffered ignominious defeat on the horn of a rhinoceros.
kimp
kdaug-
Win. The idea that we readers here even try to engage in a discussion this trivial and inane is beyond me. This ranks up with Teletubbies and Elmo. Next thing you know, they will be seeing images in toast.
Tehanu
@Chris:
It’s the fear of losing the privilege. They have no self-esteem, no faith in themselves, so they’re terrified; if they don’t have privilege to protect themselves, they have nothing.
Tehanu
@Roger Moore:
I thought it was “Millenium hand and shrimp! Bugrit!”
Ruckus
I got it figured out.
Conservatards have little tiny dicks and are trying to compensate. Conservatard wives didn’t sleep with the men with tiny dicks because, well, they are conservatards and now they are pissed off that they have to sleep with men with personality problems due to their tiny dicks. But of course they can’t do anything about this because then they would all have to admit conservatard men have small dicks. And their wives weren’t smart enough to find out. And religion is no help because they don’t discuss dick size anywhere in the instruction book nor tell them that the equipment they have is sub standard. In fact they are told they are OK and god made them in his image and it’s everyone unlike them that is inferior. And are they pissed off. And taking it out on us and everything else in the world.
Abby Spice
To be fair, my mother, who is a socialist feminist atheist pro-choice pro-gay hardcore lefty, hated the Berenstain Bears, though I imagine for different reasons.
I won’t tell her she agreed with C.Krau, I think. I value my life more than that.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
Well I thought the Berenstain Bears sucked, and not for any political reason, it just sucke.
Now if you want a great children’s book, buy The Day the Goose Got Loose from Amazon or B&N. It’s from around 1988. My oldest is 20 and the rhymes in that book are still going through my head.
BSoSR +3 god help me i have to get up for work in < 3 hours.
PurpleGirl
@kdaug: Also hearing that people think you look like a turtle. (But he does…)
Joey Maloney
@jheartney: Tinky Winky speaks out.
Linda
You seem surprised. I’m not. I know wingers that I love dearly who are just a bundle of repressed rage, who feel the universe has been screwing them all their lives, and they clasp conservativism to their breasts because it articulated their sense of persecution.
BryanS
If that bothers him, watching Dora the Explorer would blow his mind. There is a squirrel who won’t raise a drawbridge unless you shout “raise” in Spanish. Also the door to the library won’t let you in unless you say “open” in Spanish.
rea
These people think Sponge Bob and Patrick are sleeping together, too.
Donald G
@BryanS:
Is anyone old enough to remember when Sesame Street would have a Muppet segment, and then, several minutes later, perform the same Muppet segment in Spanish. I think that they pretty much dropped that by the late seventies.
Emma
@kdaug: You know, not to be insensitive to his physical problems, which I am sure are many and painful, but I share a bus ride most every morning with a guy in a wheelchair that still has to get up and go to work for a living, rather than sitting in a plush home and barking and frothing about everything under the sun, and I have never known hmi to be anything but polite and cheerful. I think he’s a vet, btw, and he got his new traveling chair in one of those wars Mr. K. is always cheerleading.
I think his physical problems are real, but his character… the less said the better.
jefft452
@butler: “Never seemed that effeminate to me, but then again I was 6 and probably wouldn’t have realized it if he was”
Yeah, but at 6 you’re far more emotionally mature then the average wingnut
Would he have seemed effeminate when you were 3?
redbeardjim
@Donald G: Sesame Street is the reason I know how to count to 20 in Spanish.
chopper
don’t get him started on pocoyo’s eurososhulist values system.
Svensker
@Satanicpanic:
My son loved the BBs and he especially wanted me to read him the stories mimicking the cartoon voices. I f*cking hated Papa Bear for being such an incompetent goof and Mama Bear for being right all the time and annoyingly smug. So, yeah, Krauthammer is right on this one. So shoot me.
Actually, I think Krauthammer is a very smart man, unlike most of the righties. He’s a f*cking warmonger and Evil Git, but he does have a brain.
Mjaum
One could assume that in general, conservative males were raised by their mothers, idolize their (seemingly) strong, distant fathers, and are very, very unhappy about not being able to live up to their own twisted image of what a “man” should be. And they blame everyone they perceive as having “held them back” from being “real men”. This includes the state, the culture, europeans, women, and most of the inhabitants of the planet. But not, somehow, themselves.
Would be funny, if they weren’t so bloody destructive…
(This idea probably belongs to someone, but I can’t remember who, so meh.)
ladies auxiliary fuckhead (a/k/a eemom)
Meh, let’s cut Krautie some slack. He does, as Svensker says, possess a brain, and he sees very clearly the big-ass writing on the wall that says YOU ARE SO FUCKED COME NOVEMBER. Thus, he is beside himself with evil grief.
As for the Berenstains, I was always kinda meh about them too. Except there was one book I liked, where the Papa Bear plans this rustic camping vacation and he’s all excited but of course it all goes horribly wrong — and yes, Mama steps in and saves the day. They all got a good laugh at the end though.
Nicole
I’d just lurv to hear his take on Yo Gabba Gabba. I think Super Action Robot Girl alone would make his head go kaboom.
Tom
I can see what he’s talking about… check out this left-wing extremist picture of the feminist ideal.
Cacti
Everything I’ve ever seen from Charles Krauthammer leaves me with the impression that he’s a deeply miserable human being.
flukebucket
@TBogg:
I don’t even know how to respond to something that hilarious. That kind of gold should not just be thrown out there free of charge. Casting your pearls before the swine you are. But I surely do appreciate it.
Marc
The one who wouldn’t date, or look at, Charles Krauthammer.
Also, too: maybe the police in Krauthammer’s home town should take a second look at any mysterious drownings?
Baron Jrod of Keeblershire
@Svensker: You only think Krauthammer is right if you think it’s normal to be driven to homicidal rage against someone you knew in elementary school because that stuck-up bitch had good posture and ate healthy lunches. If you just want to drown that lousy whore, then yes, you agree with Krauthammer.
I suspect you don’t really agree with him at all.
LAC
@ladies auxiliary fuckhead (a/k/a eemom):
Agreed! That is pretty much why Chuckles is spewing his bottomless bile on a fucking cartoon. A CARTOON!! BWHAHAHA!!!
Really? This who idiots on the right think is an intellectual?
chopper
@Baron Jrod of Keeblershire:
seriously, what kind of crazy old dude still carries a rage boner over some grade-school kid who didn’t want to eat garbage and stood up straight? oh noes, she had good handwriting too! if i had my druthers back then that whore bitch would have tasted the curb!
what the fuck is wrong with people?!
Tone In DC
@Ruckus:
LULz.
Tone In DC
I think if Chuck watched the early “Zoom” episodes from the 1970s, his head wouldn’t just explode, it’d be a mushroom cloud.
Interrobang
I hated those books too. I thought they were preachy and Christian-y, and even by the age where I would have been reading them, I had pretty much decided that religion of all kinds sucked. I vastly preferred Eloise, Dr. Seuss, and the Star Trek of the month series.
different-church-lady
@Redshift: And he was pink! OK, purple… CLOSE ENOUGH!
Surly Duff
@Suffern ACE:
Actually, if he was a proper modern conservative of the Krauthammer mold, Father Bear would, after fabricating a nonsense story to create fear and incite action amongst the bear community, such as “the squirrels and rabbits in the field have grenade launchers and are coming for our honey”, recruit and engage younger, more idealistic bears to fight the enemy rabbits. These younger bears who would sacrifice themselves in this battle against the creatures in the field, and while Father Bear would become immeasurably rich on rabbit pelts and other spoils of war, the fighting bears would have to scrap for a single rabbit haunch amongst themselves.
That is how a True Manly Bear would act.
g
The Berenstain Bears first appeared in 1962, so I hardly think they were “post feminist”.
And yeah, I hated them, too, but the formula of bumbling dads and smug competent moms is as old as entertainment, and has nothing to do with American partisan politics.
Someguy
I hate to admit this publicly, but I’m sorta with Krauthammer here. My kid watched that show – a little – and quickly ditched it for ninja stuff. It was as preachy and sanctimonious as Jerry Falwell, but without the fiber.
Michael
I’m not exactly an expert on the Berenstain bears series, and maybe K-hammer is right that later books in the series featured a more Alan Alda-ish Papa Bear….but….I currently read one of the earlier books, The Bear Scouts, to my 5 yr old son, and from what I can tell, Papa Bear is the prototypical conservative male:
Chauvanistic arrogance? Check. Anti-intellectualism? Check. Massive FAIL that goes totally unacknowledged by the culprit? Check.
I really don’t know what Chuck is bitching about. If Papa Bear were any further to the right, he’d be outpolling Romney.
Lex
The Berenstain Bears went to hell when they stopped making the prose rhyme and (not coincidentally) stopped leavening the didacticism with humor. The later ones are so damn sincere they make me want to go hunt up 6-year-old me so we can puke together.
ThresherK
@cthulhu:
“minding her cholesterol in 1958”
Apparently Mother Bear was an NIH-level nutritional scientist.
Krackhammer also missed out on retconning us DFHs as having been pushing for arugula, mesclun and endive in 1950s Suburbia.
Someguy
@Lex:
I can’t think of a more unleavened, didactic way to put that. Nicely done.
different-church-lady
@Lex: This is the way of all children’s medai nowadays. You should check out how damn badly they ‘effed up Sesame Street sometime.
Mike
Conservatives are the old Soviets: Everything must conform to the Party Line. It was called Zhdanovism back then.
Michael57
@Svensker: Yeah, it’s true, or at least I agree–Krauthammer for once was absolutely right about something. I hated the bears. And don’t get me started about Thomas the Tank engine.
Delia
Krauthammer certainly knows about smugness, complacency, and prissiness. It oozes out of every sentence he writes.
As to the Berenstain Bears: They weren’t great children’s literature; more the sort of ‘problem’ story you resorted to when you had a situation coming up. Trip to the dentist? Starting school? Moving to a new neighborhood? There’s a Berenstain Bear book to discuss every problem.
iceskatingschnauzer
My daughter only had one BB book “The Spooky Old Tree” and we read it together every night. She didn’t turn out too badly – she received a dual degree in Aeronautical and Mechanical Engineering a full semester early and works as an engineer developing a new propulsion system for nuclear submarines. I think it was the slide that intrigued her the most…youtube.com/watch?v=bjFXf9iVvQw
jafd
@ThresherK: Actually, the relationship between cholesterol and heart disease was discovered a hundred years ago. Problem, though, was that the research was done at the Medical Institute of the Imperial Russian Navy, in St. Petersburg, and World War One started up before they could get it published.
David in NY
My rigid mathematical son loved them, but I hated them (as an adult). So I confess that, for the first time, I have been in agreement with Charles Krauthammer through about half a sentence: “smugness and complacency of the stories.” Yup, that’s it.