• Okay, so I'm as glad as anyone that we've thwarted al-Qaeda's big Tenth Anniversary Plans, since that run of successful 9/11 anniversary surprise attacks was getting monotonous.
But "attacking America's commuter rail system?" Ten years, all that nefarious plotting, sleeper cells, and they still confuse us with Europe.
• As expected, Mike "Choirboy" Pence is running for Governor of Indiana, completing the Republican snail trail begun when he collected a dozen church-basement Presidential straw poll votes in Oiowa or Idahoma or someplace, and became the leading Republican Wholly Divorced From Reality candidate overnight. Those of us old enough to remember when that was merely a faction were caught off-balance when Team Daniels reacted swiftly and decisively by kicking Lt. Governor Becky "Night School" Skillman to the curb so Pence wouldn't have to soil his Sunday shoes.
Seems like a good time for a recap: well-heeled Candidate Daniels tapped the obscure (to say the least) Skillman as his running mate in 2004. The City of Lawrence, one of the towns outside Indianapolis, but inside Marion county, which Dick Lugar allowed to keep their identities while helping to vote white people into the Mayor's office for another generation, and which is probably the craziest burg in American not actively being invaded by bats, bees, or raw sewage, thereby lost the best damn Assistant Comptroller it ever had, but Daniels gained a diversity talking point.
This really just seemed like a standard, ham-fisted political maneuver, but then, at the time, those of us who hadn't lost our Water Company pensions to Mitch Daniels didn't really know the man. At the time the real chuckle was how the search for a woman candidate took the Indiana Republican party down to the end of the bench, back out the tunnel, up the stairs, into the stands, all the way up to the tuba section, where the fourth chair had invited his girlfriend.
In the intervening seven years Skillman has spoken three times, and was chair of the Remember That Time President Reagan Changed Planes In Indianapolis? Centennial Commission. The last of those times was when she announced that Pence's strong showing in Wyomaha had reminded her she was overdue for her annual check-up, which, sadly, had discovered a chronic disease which would rob her of the strength required to conduct a campaign, though she promised to soldier on through 2012 cutting ribbons Mitch Daniels was too busy to fuck with any more. If any.
As for Pence, of course, his histrionic departure from his House leadership position signaled that his bugsplatter craziness runs deeper than just Jebus, and his quick fold from the Presidential race where he, right now, would be an answer to the complaints of the Republican faithful, even if that answer was more actuarial than actual, shows that he really does understand the value of a dollar, particularly when there's several million of 'em and Mitch Daniels has the key. And his willingness to return to Indiana to finish Daniels' crash landing shows, I think, a remarkable flexibility for one so religiously assured, and a heretofore unsuspected inability to think ahead in the slightest.
• David Brooks' chunk of prime New York real estate today features his meditation on how this is a republic, not a democracy. Really.
• Donald "The Donald" Trump has withdrawn as celebridriver of the pace car for the 95th running, and the Centennial year, of the Indianapolis 500, citing time constraints.
IMS, by the way, reportedly got suckered into using this sucker because NBC, the corporate giant that sees fit to foist Trump on a deserving public, is about to buy Versus, the cable bump that runs the Indy Car series.
In some wiser, but unspeakably sadder, future, Digging Up The Corpse of Ayn Rand And Desecrating It In Some Novel Fashion Day will be a legal, and much-anticipated, holiday.
• Cheer up, we're all gonna die: Riley Waggaman, "What is America, Anyway? Too bad Leni Riefenstahl wasn't there with her Flip Cam!
2 comments:
Wow, Davey's piece was even lazier than usual, but also funnier. I liked to imagine what he cut out to make word count.
"This was not simply elitism, a matter of some rich men distrusting the masses. This was a belief that ran through society and derived from an understanding of history" ...of elite rich men distrusting the masses.
"it meant 'curbing one’s passions and moderating one’s opinions in order to achieve a large consensus that will ensure domestic tranquility.' Instead of self-expression, it meant self-restraint. It was best exemplified in the person of George Washington" ...'s escaped indentured servant Tom Jomphries, who had his jaw broken during capture, and Washington's slave, Patsy, who obediently donated his teeth for his master's (who was totally not an elite rich man) orthodontia.
Jeebus Krist; give me a locker and Brooksie and just look away for 10 minutes.
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