"Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand."

[kentuck]

A good quote from a letter in today's NY Times...
==============================================================================================
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/17/opinion/l17cheney.html

To the Editor:

Alessandra Stanley writes that Dick Cheney "is accustomed to being feared and despised by his enemies and rivals; he is less used to being laughed at" (The TV Watch, Feb. 16).

Perhaps the vice president ought to bear in mind Mark Twain's dictum: "Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand."

Nardi Reeder Campion
Lebanon, N.H., Feb. 16, 2006

[Skidmore]

1. Now that would be a much better protest than shunning or mooning

these guys. Just point your fingers and laugh in derision.

[RaleighNCDUer]

6. I do that whenever I see a Hummer on the street.

One of these days a Schwarzennegar wannabe is going to jump out, pull me off my bicycle and beat me senseless.

But for now, I enjoy it.

[Occulus]

2. I think we need to start a laughter movement.

Everywhere they go, wherever they appear... no signs, no chanting, no arrests.... just LAUGH at them. Ceaselessly.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

4. That's a great idea!

Can you imagine cops around a group of people laughing as Bush drove by? I can't believe they'd arrest people for laughing-but they might join in the laughter.

[tanyev]

3. That's why I come to DU!

Addicted to the snark.

[rucky]

5. This is how we should handle all the clowns in Washington

and on the TeeVee.

Humiliate them with ridicule and kill their credibility with laughter.

Imagine Ann Coulter speaking in your town, and having her provocations be met with uproarous laughter. She wouldn't know how to handle it.

[C_U_L8R]

7. The Veep is an f'n JOKE

and so his his pet chimpanzee

[tularetom]

8. That's what they don't want

This incident has turned dick from Darth Vader to Elmer Fudd, from someone to be feared to an object of ridicule. From now on every time someone looks at him they'll see a fat soft old man who couldn't even habdle a kid's shotguin properly. The macho hunter facade is all gone now and can't be restored.

[kenny blankenship]

9. Fascism is impervious to laughter and ridicule

I learned that lesson in 2004. Ridicule relies on a social context and conventions of behavior that Fascism overturns and uproots. Remember how, four and half years ago, the first victim they announced would be stood up against a wall and shot was irony?

For ridicule to work as a regulator, the social rules must be supreme. Not the written social rules, the kind found in books on etiquette, but the unwritten rules: thou shalt not be an conniving greedy bastard; thou shalt not take thyself too seriously --and so forth. Sociality is the arbiter of values and behaviors and even the powerful can be made to crawl before it when they've acted stupidly, self-importantly, or greedily. Under Fascism, however, the floating, consensual, gradually evolving rules of the social world are abruptly smashed by the top down hierarchical imperatives of a militarized society. Shared commandments are replaced by personal orders. Shared commandments can be appealed to, personal orders are orders and cannot. The Lord Protector or Dictator, armed with his Noble Purpose, flicks away shafts of ridicule, which might have brought down a powerful person under normal circumstances. You cannot question his behavior or that of his associates and henchmen and try them by the measurements of the old unwritten code of social behavior. In the first place the Dictator is shielded by his Noble Purpose, and its concomitant need for total secrecy, from having to answer any of your questions. In the second place, the simple attempt to question the Lord Protector while he is about the busy work of Guarding Our Nation or Chastising the Enemy, will be spun around in your face as proof that you do not share his--and the nation's-- Noble Purpose, that you work deliberately to subvert the Noble Purpose, and that you are at least a superfluous sniping cynic, and maybe even a traitor.

It's just lucky for Twain and his various dicta that he lived before Hitler.

[chaplainM]

10. Peter Cook would've agreed

In 1961 he decribed his London nightclub, The Establishment, as a "satirical venue" after the fashion of "those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the Second World War".

[SoCalDem]

11. Laughing at Cheney is fun.. UKers have had a field day....enjoy

Click the picture for the rest (about 7 of them )

[janx]

12. He'll never shed this one.

History books will all make note of it.