Confused Walnuts Starts 'Lord of the Rings' Debt Ceiling Fight Meme

Oh God, John McCain, he is getting more senile by the hour. Somebody handed Walnuts a copy of the Wall Street Journal , which, in the paper's effort to fill all of its blank pages with words about anything besides disgraced overlord owner Rupert Murdoch, said let's type words comparing Tea Party people to hobbits. Uh, sure! Hobbits are of course the most topical fantastical children's story character for a columnist to choose this summer, but old Walnuts thought this was hilarious and appropriate and so he marched onto the Senate floor with this editorial in hand and read it aloud, to make his point about everyone in the Tea Party being insane.  And now magically everyone is super upset including Sharron Angle (?) and Rand Paul and Discover magazine, who will naturally all respond with more "Lord of the Rings" references.

Here is the WSJ passage to blame in all of this:

But what none of these critics have is an alternative strategy for achieving anything nearly as fiscally or politically beneficial as Mr. Boehner’s plan. The idea seems to be that if the House GOP refuses to raise the debt ceiling, a default crisis or gradual government shutdown will ensue, and the public will turn en masse against . . . Barack Obama. The Republican House that failed to raise the debt ceiling would somehow escape all blame. Then Democrats would have no choice but to pass a balanced-budget amendment and reform entitlements, and the tea-party Hobbits could return to Middle Earth having defeated Mordor.

This is the kind of crack political thinking that turned Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell into GOP Senate nominees. The reality is that the debt limit will be raised one way or another, and the only issue now is with how much fiscal reform and what political fallout.

It is a mystery why Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell are involved in this, since they are mercifully not actual elected representatives and have less than nothing to do with the entire debt ceiling negotiation. Nonetheless, the victimized Angle shot off a flurry of angry statements and tweets calling John McCain "Lord of the TARP," which does not rhyme with anything nor make much sense so we give that a D- for creativity. She also points out that the hobbits are sort of the heroes of the books, which okay on that one, since the WSJ metaphor didn't entirely make sense to start.

Rand Paul somehow also got into this fray by pointlessly declaring he would rather be a hobbit than a troll. Uh, zing? Is he calling Walnuts a troll? Yes, apparently. Are there even trolls in the books? Tolkien was better at making up mythical creature names than just calling something old and confused a "troll," but Rand Paul is not, apparently. So he gets an F.

And of course, Discover magazine points out that Middle Earth is where Mordor is pretend located, hobbits live in the Shire, etc etc, which is the only truly salient point, since it suggests that the WSJ writer did not bother to read even the Wikipedia entry for the Lord of the Rings trilogy before writing the column and confusing poor old Walnuts. HUGEST F OF ALL. [ WSJ / Politico ]