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There’s been a lot of fail going around. It’s cool to be fail. Or at least funny. There’s whole blogs on being fail.
Fail can be a verb, to fail, or a noun. He is fail. Fail can also be a proper noun in certain extreme circumstances: “Hey, Fail! You’re looking pretty fail today.” (Notice its adjective status in the latter sentence.)
Gamers and comment trolls of all sorts have also begun doing spelling variations on the word, including: faille, fale and faill. Perhaps the last was a typo.
Let’s look at the word “fail” in relation to the current President, as begun by Rush Limbaugh.
The first definition of “fail” as a verb on www.dictionary.com, is the following:
1. to fall short of success or achievement in something expected, attempted, desired, or approved. Here, for Rush to say, “I hope Obama fails,” would imply that he (Limbaugh) had originally wanted him to succeed. We can’t say this is a realistic assumption.
2. to receive less than the passing grade or mark in an examination, class, or course of study. In terms of passing grades, President Obama can’t do much worse than the previous incumbent, who left with a 33% approval rating. Obama was not a scholastic failure but were he to be unsure, he has certainly reintroduced academia into the White House.
3. to be or become deficient or lacking; be insufficient or absent; fall short: Our supplies failed. President Bush spent an average of every third day going to, or already on, vacation. It has recently been brought up that Obama has requested a long weekend retreat, but as averages hold, he’s been more success than fail in this department.
4. to dwindle, pass, or die away. If we were to substitute these synonyms for Limbaugh’s outburst, it might read, “I hope Obama dies.” In this case, perhaps he should be behind bars?
5. to lose strength or vigor; become weak. Obama is young and surrounded by multi-partisan advisers. He’s an avid basketball player, so the Commander-in-Chief is himself healthy and fit.
6. to become unable to meet or pay debts or business obligations; become insolvent or bankrupt. “I hope Obama ‘becomes bankrupt’”. Just silly, especially considering the current financial crisis.
7. to break, bend, crush, or be otherwise destroyed or made useless because of an excessive load. Ew.
8. to stop functioning or operating. The most likely so far of the definitions. “I hope Obama stops functioning,” however would not solve what seems to be Limbaugh’s problem, which is the politics. If Obama were to turn into some kind of Marxist cyborg, everything is still technically in place for his policies to go through at least for the time being.
Limbaugh is so fail!
He’s got a big microphone, and a crazy strong following.
Bush permeated like a bad fart. He left a legacy, but not a positive one: he’s like Reagan, on steroids, with big guns.
I’ve got to believe that he tried to do what HE THOUGHT was right. He’s a misguided guy, and seriously should have been impeached. He and his actions were not fit for the presidency.
While it will be near impossible to undo the damage he’s done to the environment, and families will never see the casualties from the Iraq war again, bad farts go away.
Limbaugh, on the other hand, is like mold in your walls.
He’s been around for…how long? Too long, regardless. He’s got a following that supports his homophobic, racist, misogynistic, classist views. And while Bush had to give up his podium, Limbaugh is still in business.
I urge any reader to check out this article on Limbaugh’s response to making it easier for the media to access executive documents from the Bush era.
As well as this article, which shows Limbaugh making his usual anti-queer, anti-raced, anti-female slander. This is in relation to Democrats and Sarah Palin. While he stated that he doesn’t care about Obama’s skin color and that he sees him rather as a person, he later said,
LIMBAUGH: We are being told that we have to hope he succeeds, that we have to bend over, grab the ankles, bend over forward, backward, whichever, because his father was black, because this is the first black president.
I’m not calling to censor him, I’m calling for rationality on his part. His facts tend to be shaky, and his logic is too-frequently absent from the table.
So while Bush had a 8 year-long stinkfest, to put it as mildly as possible (in the vein of this running analogy), Limbaugh’s got no limit.
Someone hand me some PureGreen ASAP!
**Thanks to Think Progress for their awesome work.
