Very Tough Guy Lawrence O'Donnell, Who Became A Hardass Fighting Through Vietnam... Imagery on TV, Challenges Son of Presidential Candidate to a Fight on National TV

Video below. Watch it, if you haven't seen this national embarrassment yet.

Remember, he's part of the NBC News division. But he's indulging in Jerry Springer/Morton Downey Jr./Geraldo Rivera talk-show antics. Those guys used to get into brawls, or trash talk like they wanted to brawl, a lot.

NBC News. Now doing this kind of low-rent syndicated talk show crap. NBC News.

Now, about Lawrence O'Donnell. I goofed on this sad old clown last night, noting his completely fake "Tough Boston Kid" accent, which sounded like he got it from a Broadway musical. (And, on that front, the Broadway musical "Miss Saigon" is where all of his Vietnam-era battle experience comes from. The song before the second-act intermission is seared into his memory.)

Lawrence O'Donnell announced that while Tagg Romney might be a privileged child of the suburbs, a talk of fisticuffs never would have been permitted in the "paht of Bahston" he grew up in.

Suggesting he was a real scrapper from Southie.

In fact, per Wikipedia, he was the son of a lawyer. He attended what appears to be a very tony Catholic all-boys school. St. Sebastian's is a Hobbesian pit where young boys quickly learn that they must either fight or die:

The School features a rigorous academic program focusing on the liberal arts and offers Spanish and Classics courses. Writing is emphasized with numerous courses in the English curriculum, with Freshmen (9th grade) students taking a special class to hone their skills. Public speaking is also emphasized, with each student required to deliver an annual speech during his class's weekly chapel meetings.

The student:teacher ratio at St. Sebastian's is 7:1, and 60% of the faculty hold graduate degrees. The average class size is 11. The school offers 20 classes at the Advanced Placement level. Students are all assigned a faculty advisor and at the end of every academic quarter, awards for honors students are presented before the school community.

Classics? That means Lawrence O'Donnell's youth was eked on thin gruel of Latin conjugations.

And... the average class size is 11? That's not a class, that's an arena football squad. Including the punter/kicker.

Charles Dickens just emailed me to say, "Oliver Twist had it easy."

Which paht of Bahston is St. Sebastian's in? It's in Needham, Massachusetts., which is another way of saying it's not a paht of Boston at all. What it is is a tony, tree-filled suburb of Boston. Sort of a distant suburb, actually. The kind of hellhole where some of the cars are three or more years old, and where you find shady businesses with sketchy names like "The Olive Garden, "Dress Barn," and "Anthropology."

It's such a tough place that people sometimes call it "The Brookline of the Outer Bedroom Communities."

The sort of place where a kid growing up only has two options-- Harvard, or a lesser New England private college. Fortunately, Lawrence O'Donnell avoided the hell of a lesser New England private college and got into Harvard. (In an age where it wasn't actually as difficult to get into as it is today, mind you.)

So, that's the "paht of Boston" where Lawrence O'Donnell learned how to scrap. And also, he learned from watching Robert Conrad on TV.

And this sad, aging poltroon is on NBC News challenging people to fights. Well, not people. He's challenging Camera A to a fight, actually. Camera A weighs in at 450 pounds, but then, Lawrence has the better footwork and reach. Since it's just a camera and therefore inanimate.

Lawrence, it's hard to feel physically threatened by a 61 year old wearing make-up and Spanx.

posted by Ace at 12:28 PM

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