If you could bring back any television series for one more season, which would you choose?
(And the cry arose from hill and plain: Firefly, they cried. Firefly...)
I'm tempted to say Twin Peaks, which I loved only slightly less than I love Lost, but instead I'm going to say Freaks and Geeks, the truncated greatness of which haunts me yet.
[Part Fourteen in an Ongoing Series. Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen.]
Haven't done one of these in awhile—not that there hasn't been ample opportunity provided at every newsstand in America. Anyway, here's the always-stunning, talented, and witty 45-year-old Vanessa Williams on the cover of May's Ebony, with approximately 15 years, every ounce of character, and most of her humanity airbrushed out of her face.
Feminism is an integral part of progressivism.
If you're not a feminist, you're not a progressive.
No matter how much you hate Bush.
No matter how much you hate the Iraq war.
No matter how much you hate our current torture policy.
No matter how much you want to restore habeas corpus.
No matter how much you're totally going to vote for the Democrat in November.
If you're not a feminist, you're not a progressive.
You're a fauxgressive.
End of story.
by Ginmar—liberal pinko commie hippie feminist female combat veteran who loves zombies and werewolves and hates trolls, twits, and MRAs.
John McCain's getting a free ride in the press because of his status as a war hero, despite numerous examples of the way he's not lived up to the standards he so heroically met as a POW. He's called his own wife a trollop and a cunt—in front of people; referred to Asian people as gooks; and has serious ethical violations, such as his involvement with the Keating Savings and Loan. He was tortured himself yet believes that torture is okay for some people.
He has not lived up to the standards which he upheld as a POW.
Show me a veteran who has behaved honorably both during and after their service, and I will respect them. That is the because the standards of the military—not the Xtianist-infiltrated organization that some fundies are trying to make it into—honor responsibility, leadership, and sacrifice. I've seen commanders get down and get their hands dirty to demonstrate to their troops that they won't be asked to do anytihng the CO won't do, and I've seen a general or two standing aside at the chow hall so the troops eat first. This means the good food might very well be gone by the time they get to eat.
(I don't consider PTSD in this assessment, because it's something any soldier can suffer and struggle against. However, that changes when a soldier pleads PTSD made him commit rape or deserve a lower sentence for the crime. As far as I'm concerned that rape negates his service, much like John Stebbins' rape of his own daughter erases his valiant actions in the Battle of Mogadishu.)
Of course, conservatives will whine that that means they get to bash liberal soldiers if they make mistakes—if, that is, the conservatives don't make things up out of whole cloth, as they did with John Kerry—but in fact it's the conservatives who are the primary offenders when it comes to both not respecting soldiers and in not living up to the standards set by the military. Conservatives have repeatedly repudiated liberal soldiers, all the while claiming to be 'fair and impartial', defending their friends rather than principles, and attacking people on the basis of their politics rather than their ethics, behavior, and intention. As some types of conservatism are dishonorable by definition—the Nixonian ethos of slander springs to mind—one often finds one's self confronted by people who scream lies, refuse to dialogue, repeat lies ad nauseum, and denigrate other's service entirely coincidentally only when the subject is liberal. We're seeing now a conservative press fawn over McCain not because of all the years he's lived as a civilian, but because of five years of behavior that a cold look a his life reveals to be atypical.
McCain was the son and grandson of Admirals, but he did not inherit their capacity for hard work. He graduated near the bottom of his class, was referred to as McNasty, and was not well-regarded before he was taken captive after being shot down in 1967. Despite being seriously wounded—he had several broken bones which were not treated—he refused an early release because other soldiers had been in captivity longer than he had, and also he did not want to be regarded as using his father and grandfather's status for his own gain. Upon release, he cheated on his wife who had been disfigured and gained weight as the result of a car accident, and married his current wife six weeks after his divorce was final. He left the military in 1981, and while he was supposedly a maverick, he was soon embroiled in the Savings and Loan scandal, where he was accused of using his influence on behalf of Charles Keating in return for campaign contributions.
In 2000, McCain came up against Karl Rove, the former Nixon protege, who waged a stealth campaign against him that included all the tricks that conservatives had learned under Nixon. People received phone calls asking about McCain's 'black' child, and McCain was the subject of whisper campaigns started by Rove. McCain did not win the nomination and he emerged from the debacle—during which he does not appear to have stood up for his daughter and attacked those who attacked her—determined to do whatever it took to become President. That included sucking up to the very people who had used his young daughter in a racist fashion to sway voters. Rather than fight such disgusting tactics, McCain embraced those who used them. McCain has not, apparently, learned the lessons of war at all. He has joked about bombing Iran, has stated that if it takes a hundred years we will stay in Iraq, and he has voted in favor of waterboarding. To top it off, in 2007, McCain, wearing a bullet-proof vest and accompanied by 100 soldiers, three Blackhawk helicopters, and two Apache gunships, strolled through a Baghdad market that had been cut off from civilian foot traffic for the duration of his visit. He claimed the heavily-armed walk through showed that the American public was not getting the true picture of what was really going on in Iraq. It was the final hurrah for any claim of independence on McCain's part. As a third-generation military member, he knew the significance of those numbers, that flak vest, those gunships. He knew. He knew, and he lied blatantly to the Ameican public nevertheless. The prize for him was the support of the Bush administration and their assistance in gaining the presidency that will shut the door on his messy, complicated past.
While McCain is constantly referred to as a war hero, people like Hugh Thompson—who upheld the highest and most honorable standards of the military—are relegated to footnotes in the history books as we worship people like McCain, a one-time victim who has become a bully himself. Hugh Thompson rescued civilians against the opposition of his fellow soldiers, and did not weigh pros or cons or future career choices while doing so. While John McCain has gone on record as calling VietNamese people 'gooks'—"I hate gooks. I always will."—Hugh Thompson visited Viet Nam several times, as have other soldiers. It seems that honorable behavior often does not involve bluster and grandstanding, but quiet and private acts and working individual by individual. Many World War II veterans from America, for example, met their former opponents years later and were astonished to find out how ordinary they were—and how easy it was to be friendly and forgiving.
A hero is not just someone who resists torture. They must resist the idea that the way to survive abuse is to become an abuser themselves, that the way to be a hero is to kill many people. Hugh Thompson saved peoples' lives. Joe Darby blew the whistle on Abu Ghraib and was run out of town on a rail. Nevertheless, he did it. "I've always had a moral sense of right and wrong. And I knew that you know, friends or not, it had to stop," Darby says. People in his hometown sided with the bullies. Bully or be bullied, and then call it honor, say the conservatives. Defend, protect, trust, hope, and resign one's self to being slandered say the liberals, who have dealt with Nixon's children for forty years. A whole community turned against Darby because they just didn't want to know about torture, and didn't care once it became apparent it was just brown people.
People often ask how a liberal can be a soldier, with the possibility of killing always there. The answer is simple: the military will take a good person and make him or her better. It will give you strength, and courage and discipline. What it will not do is offer you a lot of opportunities to kill. Many soldiers, even in this time of war, fire weapons only on the firing range, and that's after a tour in Iraq.
To be fair, as I mentioned above, there are different kinds of conservative, and many of them differ in credo from liberals only in how they believe money should be budgeted. Unfortunately, the military appears to be in a state of flux, with Xtianists prostletyzing at the academies, with women still ignored as anything but sexual assault victims whose 'negligence' causes their own rapes (because all men are rapists and all women should be wary), and with injured soldiers being neglected because the powers that be in Washington can't be bothered to care for used-up people. Conservative pundits talk about supporting the troops, but liberal ones aren't 'real' soldiers—they're 'pustules' or whatever else conservatives can dream up. To conservatives, a liberal soldier is by definition a bad soldier, and even worse, to some of those, a female soldier is a contradiction in terms.
These are the forces that McCain has aligned himself with and has for most of his life. Seen in its entirety, his life offers only one or two honorable moments, and long stretches of questionable service. The military made of him what could be made, and then he turned his back on it when he couldn't attain the same power his father and grandfather had. (He was turned down for promotion twice.) His most recent honorable act, a singular event, came when he defended fellow veteran John Kerry against the attacks of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a Republican group funded by arch conservatives and designed to spread lies about Kerry. It was a glimpse of what McCain could have been, a welcome and poignant vision of one veteran standing up for another, no matter what their politics.
The military is supposed to be apolitical, but in this, the conservatives have consistantly fired the first shots, attacking liberals and their service records and seeking nothing less than to erase them from sight by calling them liars or not soldiers by definition. This is similar to the way women are called liars and the other by men, and it speaks to an extremely simplistic world view—man/woman, white/gook, strong/weak, bully/ bullied, victimizer/victim. In fact, to have the military we need, we need a spectrum of all sorts that teaches soldiers to get along, first, with countrymen of their own who are different from themselves, and then to expand that lesson to citizens of other countries. By clinging to his hatred, McCain has repudiated everything he could have been and could have done.
We must not follow his example. We must demand more. We must supply more to our soldiers. To have such a military, we must have a citizenry that rejects cheap shots and either/or dichotomies, who have some measure of the honor they demand of their soldiers—and it is our right to demand this. For our soldiers, it is an honor to be so highly regarded and trusted. But above all else, we must broaden our definition of heroism so that we can judge it accurately, reward it accordingly, and encourage it not just in soldiers, but in civilians as well.
(Crossposted.)
One morning over three years ago, my wife M took notice of a little black cat in our back yard. M being who she is, she went outside to get a better look at him. The cat greeted her with a plaintive cry - miaooww - followed immediately by a warning - hisssss - and crouched under our decrepit patio furniture, staring balefully. Inside the house, our four kitties - Venice, Baxter, Scooter and Roxy - scowled with disapproval at the interloper.
We called him Jack because he had one eye - or one good eye, at any rate. His right eye was not missing but was disturbingly recessed as though it had been cruelly shoved in. Most days the recess glowed red; sometimes it wept a sickly greenish gunk, a sure sign of infection. Jack had two large patches on the back of his head where his black fur had been torn away, leaving mottled gray skin. It was easy to imagine all these injuries having been caused by the jaws of some ferocious dog. He was a scrawny little guy with gray hairs scattered here and there among the back. It was impossible to guess his age. He had a patch of white on his chest. Between that coloration, the eerie eye, and the scolding voice, he put you very much in mind of Poe’s titular feline.
Jack took to showing up in the mornings before we left for work, and in the evenings after we had returned home. His appearances were sporadic enough that we might go for days without catching a glimpse of him, then suddenly there he would be, crying for attention, hissing at any approach. We took to feeding him; it seemed cruel not to. We would fill a bowl with dry kibbles, set it in the middle of the patio, then re-enter the house. Only once we were inside would Jack approach the bowl. He ate with gusto, ever pausing at some sound or other; when he was done, he was done, trotting quickly along the flagstone path to the back of the yard, slipping through the corner where two fences did not quite meet, disappearing.
And then one day, with winter coming on, he stopped coming. By then, we had decided that he likely made some kind of home at a local lumber yard where a number of feral cats hung out. We pitied Jack that year in the same general way we pitied any animal who had no business living out of doors, but felt that we already had a full house with the four rescue kitties in the household.
Spring came, and Jack made a reappearance. We were delighted to see him again, but concerned over his appearance. His bad eye looked awful, and he seemed to have lost weight, if that was possible. We took to feeding him wet canned stuff, as M was concerned that he wasn’t getting enough liquid (he always disdained the water dish we set out). By now, Jack had become relaxed enough to eat while we we sat outside - though a respectful distance away on the back steps. He still hissed in warning, but maybe not as long or often. He was a sloppy eater; often, when he glanced up, he’d be wearing food on his chin.
We felt closer to Jack by then, and talked about taking him in. Jack was still far too untrusting for that, however. One day such thoughts became academic: he failed to appear, and that absence stretched into weeks, then months. A year went by, and we were forced to conclude that he had met his end.
Late last fall, M ventured out to California to visit one of her sisters, leaving me and the kitties to run the ranch without her. On a cold Saturday morning of that week, I paused by a kitchen window, then stared. Jack was sitting on our patio table, waiting rather expectantly. When I tapped on the window, he looked at me and meowed. My second move was to prepare a bowl of food for him. My first move was to grab my cell phone and take a quick picture. When I took the food out to Jack, he actually came to me. He meowed again. He didn’t hiss. He ate, sloppily.
After he had finished his meal and done his usual business in our garden, I fired off the pic to M’s cell phone in California. She called back in moments.
“Sweetie,” she said, “is that an old picture?”
“Five minutes old,” I replied.
Jack was back, and minus the hiss. In the coming days, he allowed M to approach him, even to pet him. Eventually, things progressed to where he would climb in her lap and purr. Not every day was like that, though; he remained fitfully skittish and one expected move by either of us would cause him to bolt. Winter came, with ice and snow and grave worries on our part. One day following a substantial snowfall, I cleared the front walks, the driveway, and an extensive series of paths from the patio to the back corner of the back yard, all with Jack in mind. M thought it was a sweet gesture. So did Jack, apparently; the next morning saw him moving briskly along the cleared path, heading for his breakfast appointment.
Weeks passed without much change in Jack’s willingness to acquiesce to a cat-napping, however. One attempt to bring him inside ended in failure and a rather mistrustful cat. We didn’t see him for a couple of days, and when he did appear, it was clear that he’d gotten the worst of it in a fight. That was a bad day.
We laid plans to adapt the house for a fifth cat. We alerted our vet, who instructed us to bring him in regardless of appointments as soon as we had him. We decided to lodge him in the basement, but the walls there needed scraping and re-painting; that project obviously had to be completed in advance of snatching Jack. We browsed the web and found a fancy extendable gate purported to defeat any cat trying to get under or over it. We installed the gate near the top of the basement stairs, providing a sense of security that lasted less than a day: Baxter, smartest cat in the world, quickly made a mockery of the gate. So too, later, did Scooter. Off to the ReStore at Habitat for Humanity, where we bought a real door for use in conjunction with the gate, making for a double-entry arrangement that we now call “the airlock.”
And then, this past weekend, we grabbed Jack. We set out our largest pet carrier and placed a bowl of food inside. Jack nosed inside - betrayed, as Bugs Bunny would say, by his baser reflexes. M locked him in, and took him to the vet. Jack got the complete workup - urinalysis, bloodwork, neutering, microchipping, five hundred dollars worth of care. We knew the concerns about feral cats and particular illnesses, and had been lucky in the past with former strays Venice, Scooter and Roxy. Jack was not so lucky: he indeed tested positive for the feline immunodeficiency virus, or FIV.
The disposition of Jack was never really in question. Out in the wild, he would remain a threat to spread the virus to other cats. Euthanizing him could be argued to be a humane choice, but we rejected that option out of hand. So long as we had the means to keep Jack comfortable yet separated from the other cats in the household, there was only one real choice for us.
So now we have a cat in the basement. He so far disdains the comfortable beds we have provided and sleeps instead on the pipes up near the rafters - in the same fashion, we imagine, that he once slept high up on stacks of planks at the lumber yard. He took quickly to the litter box - though he has marked a couple of corners as he was taught in the old country. He curls on M’s lap, fawning appealingly, and even allows me to pet him…sometimes. (M is definitely the favored custodian). It seems pretty clear to us that he was, at some point in his life, somebody’s cat.
And while it’s impossible to know the circumstances that brought Jack to a homeless state, I find myself these days paraphrasing Baudelaire (as relayed by Lovecraft, at least): people allow cats to wander outside and unsupervised with an audacity that would be incomprehensible if we did not know that it is the result of ignorance of the danger.
Either that, or they really, really hate their own cats.
We hope to create a better long-term situation for Jack - if not with us, then with someone who can offer him more than a gray basement, someone willing to provide for a special needs animal. But in the meantime, Jack is warm, dry, fed, and safe - things he could hardly count on before.
Good boy.
(Cross-posted.)
Eric Alterman writes in The Nation that the right wing has made a lot of noise -- and money -- by labeling liberals as "elitists" without bothering to notice that when it comes to being elitists, the Republicans have no peer.In observing the members of the conservative elite denouncing "elitists," it can be difficult to tell your players without the proverbial scorecard. For instance, radio talk-show host and former conservative cable host Laura Ingraham has written an entire book about the dangers posed by liberal elites, Shut Up and Sing: How Elites From Hollywood, Politics, and the Media Are Subverting America. In it, this daughter of a Connecticut lawyer, a graduate of Dartmouth and the University of Virginia Law School who now lives in an expensive home in Washington, DC, distinguishes between liberal elitists and those she terms "true Americans." She begins her treatise by explaining who these "elite Americans" are and what they think: "They think we're stupid. They think our patriotism is stupid. They think our churchgoing is stupid. They think our flag-flying is stupid. They think having big families is stupid. They think where we live--anywhere but near or in a few major cities--is stupid. They think our SUVs are stupid. They think owning a gun is stupid. They think our abiding belief in the goodness of America and its founding principles is stupid."
Of course, this glaring hypocrisy never got in the way of exploiting the red-staters for their votes, their money, or their sons and daughters in the military.
[...]
In red-state America, explains the slumming blue stater David Brooks, "the self is small"; whereas in blue-state America, "the self is more commonly large." Unlike the citizens of the states that voted for Al Gore, according to Andrew Sullivan, they can even be trusted not to betray their country on behalf of Islamic terrorists. Yet while unelite America is wonderful in every way, it's just not a place where Laura Ingraham or Rush Limbaugh or Bernard Goldberg or Ann Coulter or John Podhoretz or Newt Gingrich or Peggy Noonan or Andrew Sullivan or David Brooks would ever choose to live.
Read the whole thing; there's a lot more, including an excellent analysis about the way the Republicans have managed to make the word "elite" mean whatever they want, even if it makes no sense whatsoever. What Mr. Alterman makes clear is that so far the Democrats have failed miserably at calling out the GOP on this blatant charade, letting them get away with it at every turn. Perhaps it's because it seemed so preposterous that anyone could take them seriously, that the sham would be so glaringly obvious that even P.T. Barnum wouldn't try it. But then, we're talking about an electorate that bought the idea that an Andover-Yale-Harvard educated scion of a patrician Connecticut family was the anti-elitist.
(Cross-posted.)
Senator Straight Talk Won't Go on the Record with Project Vote Smart:
For an advocate of straight talk and government transparency, John McCain has been less than clear with a voter-education nonprofit, on whose board he serves, about why he hasn't responded to its survey of issue positions. Now, after nine months, 17 phone calls, and 8 emails asking McCain to state exactly where he stands on key issues, Montana-based Project Vote Smart is poised to kick McCain off its board later this week.Clinton and Obama haven't responded, either, as part of a general declining trend in politicians participating—which might be a commentary on the candidates or might be a commentary on the survey; perhaps a little of both. But what I don't understand is why McCain, if he has good reason to not want to participate, hasn't quit the board instead of waiting to be kicked off. Daft.
There's a big discussion going on over at Feministing about the "King Takes Queen" image at left being used to advertise Showtime's series The Tudors. Vanessa described the image as suggestive of spousal strangulation and also posited it was possibly meant as "a precursor to Anne Boleyn's beheading."
Now, I don't watch The Tudors, so I had no clue that the people pictured were supposed to be King Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. (Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry VIII? Seriously? Especially during his marriage to Boleyn, at which time Henry was in his 40s? Oy.) So my immediate reaction was free of the context of the show or the history associated with the people portrayed—which is perhaps why I was (to try to break down an instinctive response into its infinitesimally quick parts) drawn primarily to the spilling red wine she is holding right in front of her crotch, and secondarily to the violence implied by his expression and by his hands at her throat and sliding down her abdomen, and translated the image as quite strongly suggestive of rape.
What I find amazing is that none of the nearly hundred commenters at Feministing appear to have come to the same conclusion, despite the placement of the goblet and the spilling wine alluding so clearly to vaginal bleeding, not a slit throat. Merely moving the placement of the goblet not only illustrates quite clearly how a beheading might better (ahem) have been suggested, but also makes plain what really is being suggested in the original:
Were there no suggestion of violence, one could charitably interpret the goblet and wine in the original image as a reference to losing one's (female) virginity, but this image is hardly that innocent.
As ever, there underlies the image the idea that rape is both: A) a compliment; and B) the inevitable result of men's unfettered lust. He just can't help himself; she should be flattered that her bewitching beauty compels him to grab her throat and force himself upon her. And, naturally, no thinly veiled rape imagery used to promote a TV show or film would be complete if it didn't also portray the symbolic rape as totally hot.
That many women and men will look at that image and think it's sexy, without ever considering the disturbing implications of that tipped goblet and spilling wine, no less his hands ominously poised to choke her and force apart her legs, exposes the profundity of the rape culture more certainly and shockingly than anything I write about the image ever could.
Melissa and I were just marvelling over the fact that we haven't done this one yet. (At least, we don't remember doing it.)
Do you collect anything?
Recently we had some guests in Spudville; I was rather chuffed because someone noticed my Dr. Zoidberg action figure on display, which then allowed me to show off my pride & joy, my tiki mug collection (cunningly displayed next to Dr. Zoidberg; he's so good at attracting attention).
Check it out:
(It behooves me to warn any delicate young ladies that may be reading this visual-teletype newsie that coarse words are contained herein. You may wish to peruse the latest sewing samples and leave this nasty business alone altogether. Gentle-men, if your wives are headstrong or happen to read this while you are earning your wage, I suggest you prepare yourself to care for them once they swoon with a case of the vapors.)
Great Scott! I cannot believe my eyes, good people! Have we finally come to a point in time when lack of respect for the fair sex is as common as the latest penny-dreadful? 'Pon my mutton, I cannot begin to express my shock and dismay in learning that my former bosom chum, John S. McCain, has uttered one of the most foul words possible not only in front of, but in reference to his good lady wife. That a good, upstanding, full-trousered man such as McCain could possibly utter such filth in front of such a comely young lass makes my whiskers tremble! I do say, what kind of a world do we live in where men are using the word "trollop" in reference to the delicate maidens that launder their shirts?
I am flabbergasted that my bosom chum would dare voice such a disgusting word; the language of the shanty town! Why, it was McCain himself that set my mind upon the straight and narrow when it comes to the delicate ways of handling ladies, being that they are quick to succumb to hysteria. Back in the day, we had an investment together in the Nilsson Monowheel factory, and we would often lunch together on head cheese sandwiches and sassafrass. On one occasion, I had noted that I had recently purchased a spanking new Senniger wash-tub for my good lady wife on the anniversary of our nuptials.
"Benjamin, old sport... don't you realize you are blundering into a hornet's nest?" he said.
"Why, whatever do you mean, John Sidney, old top?" I responded. "This is a jim-dandy gift; one with which any petticoated petalcheek would be most pleased."
"Zounds, old bean!" he exclaimed, "Are you mad? You'll get her all bothered up with such a gift!"
I must admit that I was agape and aghast. Here I was, pleased as punch to be presenting my Mrs. Benjamin H. Grumbles with a sparkling new wash-tub (one I had spent many a jitney upon, I can tell you), and apparently it was leading towards a life of stink-eyes and cold dinners! "Now, draw your furrow straighter, John Sidney old man, and help me to avoid getting my wife's dander up," I exclaimed.
Yes, my friends, even I, Benjamin H. Grumbles can be quite the galoot. In my zeal to save a plug or two, I foolishly forgot the hand-cranked washing machine to pair with the wash-tub! By Jingo, I was hankering for hard knocks in the home! Why, I would never hear the end of it, at least until the dinner dishes had been cleared and the brandy had been served!
But I digress from the vapors-inducing lollypop-lashing at hand. That such a quick-witted comrade could sink to such depths makes my suspenders snap, good people. It wasn't as if his good lady wife was up the duff, or giving him the mitten, for heaven's sake! To lose one's temper over such a trivial thing as hair loss is the pinnacle of hoity-toity slobberchopsery.
Hear me now, McCain! I expect a swift and most public apology to your beauteous wife, post-haste! It's time you acknowledge the corn and let the world know what I already do, that you are a cad and a bounder of the highest order! I expect no less, or Benjamin H. Grumbles will be rolling up his shirt-sleeves to give you a sound thrashing, b'God!
(A most gentlemanly tip of my silken stovepipe to the shapely-ankled Kathy G.)
William Kristol once again dons his swami robes and reveals the future of the presidential race. He sees Hillary Clinton graciously conceding the primary race by mid-May and the Democrats all joining together for a love-in at the convention in Denver where "Kumbyah" will be sung by children's and gospel choirs and Barack Obama will be anointed as the Messiah, the True Leader who will vanquish the neocons and bring Peace, Love, and Harmony to our benighted nation. Meanwhile, John McCain will struggle to get fund-raising going and disconsolate Republicans will mope around their country clubs and NASCAR tracks, waiting for the November election the same way the foreclosed homeowner waits for the sheriff to come and evict them.
But wait...McCain’s comeback should begin just after Labor Day, on Sept. 4, with a strong acceptance speech at the Republican convention. The presidential debates will also provide an opportunity. Expectations for Obama will be too high, people will forget he isn’t as good a debater as he is a speaker — and McCain could well rise to the occasion.
In other words, the Republicans, who can't run on their record or rely on the sharp memory of their candidate (Shia? Sunni? Iran? Al-qaeda?) or his plans for revitalizing the economy (ready for more cake?), will do precisely what they're best at: attack their opponent and try to scare the crap out of the electorate without offering anything more than platitudes, nostrums, and the firm assertion that John McCain is most assuredly not George W. Bush; he just plans to do the exact same things he did but without the fake Texas drawl.
More fundamental will be the question of the discrepancy between the image of Obama the uniter and the reality of Obama the liberal. That hasn’t been much of a problem for Obama in the Democratic contest, since Clinton hasn’t attacked from the right or even the center.
But Republicans will. Last week, over drinks, one Republican strategist not affiliated with the McCain campaign mused about how an independent advertising effort against Obama might work. “Barack Obama: He’s not who you think he is” would be the theme. The supporting evidence would come from his left-wing voting record in Illinois and Washington, spiced up with fun video clips of Reverend Wright.
There is no doubt whatsoever that the Republicans will do exactly what Mr. Kristol predicts; that's a given, since it's worked so well the last couple of times. But Mr. Kristol's record for predicting the future is also well-known. He's one of the bunch that said that we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq, that the war would last a couple of weeks or months, that it would pay for itself with the oil revenues that we'd get, and that our influence and model of democracy would turn Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia into the Iowas of the Middle East with freedom and McDonald's springing up on every street corner from Riyad to Damascus. With that kind of record, it really makes you wonder why anyone gives serious attention to anything he says other than to hold it up for mockery and derision.
In truth, there is another aspect to this kind of soothsaying, and that is the element of creating excitement for an event where the outcome runs the risk of being a study in foregone conclusions. There's a lot of pundit points to be scored by saying that the Democratic primary race could go all the way to the convention, and the inside baseball chatter about pledged delegates versus claimed delegates versus super delegates versus delegates who used Trident chews up a lot of air time on cable TV and lets the geeks with the charts and the chroma-key maps play with their toys.
Mr. Kristol, like all pundits, has to keep predicting that a blow-out will be a squeaker, much like the folks who still say that Mondale could really pull it out in 1984 and Barry Goldwater almost beat LBJ. It's his way of keeping some job security, and you can bet that he's already working on a column for post-election November that will excoriate the losers for not listening to him back in April when he told them how to win the race.
(Cross-posted.)
Amanda W dropped a link into the Monday Blogaround thread to a post of hers in which she notes:
I don't like it when people pick on Condoleezza Rice for her facial expressions. The fact that a woman's face at rest isn't pleasant and bright shouldn't be something to use against her. I don't get the sense that she's deliberately scowling; there's room for interpretation there, certainly, but I don't feel that she should have to walk about with a smile plastered on her face at all times to be acceptable to the public at large.Since that was directed at me, I want to just quickly respond to it:
I've watched this video twice now, hours apart, and it's made me cry both times. I am so fucking frustrated with this bullshit--and with how rarely it's called out by so-called progressives--I don't know what else to do anymore.
Anyone who believes the Democratic Party will magically unite as soon as mean old Clinton gets out of Obama's way not only needs to watch this video, they need to understand why it makes people like me--thinking, reasonable Democrats--cry.
And by "cry," I don't mean choke up while talking, I mean sob.
The party needs our votes in November. Figure it out.
Well, after apologizing last week for asking Tonight Show guest Ryan Phillippe to give the camera his "gayest look," Jay Leno spoke with KMXB radio in Las Vegas about the controversy on Friday and swiftly undermined any value his apology had with a series of pathetic excuses and justifications.
You know, it's really odd how on our show we have plenty of gay guests and plenty of gay guests who you know — 'how's your relationship going, how's your family going' — Melissa Etheridge, with everybody else. To me I never made fun of gay rights or even gay marriage. Do what you want to do. But to me — fashion, lifestyle, hair, you know that kind of stuff — you're a comic. That's what you do.Aside from undermining his own apology with the tired non-apology "if I offended anybody," he completely misses the overall point about how that kind of humor facilitates intolerance, offering "I never made fun of gay rights or even gay marriage," as if making fun of being gay isn't a bigger problem. See, if the premise weren't that merely being gay is somehow intrinsically funny, the joke would be "give me your best soap opera look," not "give me your gayest look," or even "gayest soap opera look" as Leno is now trying to reframe it. Who does he thinks laughs at a joke like that—people who aren't homophobic? Yeesh.
...I said 'ok, so you were a single good-looking guy on a soap opera' and I made the mistake, I guess, of saying alright, 'Give me your gayest look now. Give me that soap opera gayest look.'
Well, apparently 'gayest look' offended somebody and, you know. But what happens in these things is it then builds to — I would read the blog, 'I didn't see Jay Leno's anti-gay tirade but I heard he went on and on!' So it's one of these things where it just builds and builds and you go look, I'm a comic. If I offended anybody, I'm sorry, this is my job to make a laugh and we're a live show and maybe you say something that's inappropriate and I apologized, and it's as simple as that....(jokes) well I am in rehab now!"
