Primary season in Alabama
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 14 years ago, in 2010, on the World Wide Web.
One reason to be glad for YouTube is that it gives me a chance to keep up with some of the things from back home that I’d miss out here in Vegas if it weren’t for the Internet. It’s summer in Alabama now, and it’s an even-numbered year. Which means it doesn’t matter if you get the local TV or not — no matter where you may be, thanks to YouTube it’s the season for Alabama state politics — the greatest show on earth.
Here’s Fob’s boy Tim, offering a soft-lit and touching tribute to monolingualism and belligerent ignorance:
Meanwhile, Dale By-God! Peterson is going to kick the ass of the Republican nomination for Alabama Commissioner of Agriculture and Industries.
It’s a dime a dozen for cowboy-themed campaign commercials in Alabama state politics. But this is something special. Listen up: the moment when Dale Peterson, having just finished off a completely out-of-right-field tirade about migrant workers somehow hurting farming in Alabama (?) and a paranoid rant about Facebook bragging and the minions of his political opponents stealing his yard signs in the dead of night, then goes on to shout We’re Republicans!
and hefts a rifle up over the fence — well, it may be one of the most wonderful unintentional Happenings that I have ever seen on television.
(Via Roderick Long and Tennyson McCalla)
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This is the first I’d ever heard of this Dale Peterson guy, and I subconsciously translated his “thugs & criminals” line to “nigras & spics” so quick I thought for a moment that’s what he’d actually said. Alabama is…interesting.
This anti-Bradley Byrne ad is also pretty awesome.
Just from curiosity, what would be a fitting campaign ad for a politician shouting “We’re Democrats!”?
Here’s a funny parody of Peterson.
I think the parody was less funny than the original ad. There’s no need to go out of your way to ridicule something that is already obviously ridiculous.
Here’s a good one on Tim James as well.
jrlcat,
Not bad for a liberal-baiting. The baffled astonishment about somebody believing that evolution is a nice touch. The only things lacking are the references to trial lawyers and sticking his photograph next to a photograph of Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, or Barack Obama. A defect which is apparently remedied in this ad.
For the genre, though, none of them can beat the liberal-baiter from the last Lt. Governor’s race baiting Lil’ Jim Folsom. I can’t seem to find a copy on YouTube, but if I recall correctly, it featured a dumpy actor playing Lil’ Jim who came on an empty screen and boogied down with a pair of sunglasses on while they threw up the all-caps “LIBERAL” sign, the “HERE IS A PHOTOGRAPH OF HIM NEXT TO A PHOTOGRAPH OF NANCY PELOSI” shot, and the “TOO LIBERAL FOR ALABAMA” closer, Damn I wish I could find some video of that one.
Gabriel,
Well, depends — Democratic Party politics in Alabama can get weird. (There is a big fracture line having to do with whether the candidate is white or black, and whether their intended audience is white or black. This is not a problem in Republican primaries because there are basically no black Republican primary voters in Alabama.) But if we limit it to the approach taken in the the TV ads that Democrats usually run on major-market TV stations, I guess the most appropriate thing would be one of those giant sweepstakes checks for like $250,000,000, made out to the CEO of Mercedes or Hyundai.
Howeever, the other thing to keep in mind is that white Democrats in Alabama also love to run ads about how they’ve got four times as many guns as their Republican opponent. See, for example, this garden of wonder and delight from Lil’ Jim’s campaign against Luther Strange.
His chief qualifications, by his own testimony, appear to be that he has helped to increase the human population and decrease the animal population.
Wow. We haven’t had anything like that in NW Arkansas since Dan Ivy disappeared. He tried to set himself up as a sort of Gerry Spence knockoff, with black suit and cowboy hat, and ran ads calling himself “Arkansas’ Rebel Attorney.” In ’96 he ran for Congress as an “Independent Rebel Republian”; during the debate with the conventional Republican and the Democrat, he waved a sheaf of papers around claiming to have absolute proof that the Arkansas GOP was involved with Clinton in the Mena drug-smuggling operation. Most of the time he was shaking and griping the podium like he was trying to keep himself from coming apart at the seams. Shortly after that, his political career imploded when he was charged with beating the crap out of his wife. I kind of wondered who’d actually hire him as a lawyer.
Glad I don’t get motion-sick; the camera work on the Peterson ad certainly tries its damnedest.
Listen up: Dale Peterson doesn’t give a rip about your weak liberal stomach. Dale Peterson is standing up to thugs and criminals. It takes surprise cuts to knock ’em off their guard.
In other news, I have decided that the only thing that could have made his ad more perfect is if Dale Peterson referred to himself in the third person. That is all.