Well, That Was Easy

Jake Tapper, "Obama Camp Hammer New 'Ironic' New Yorker Cover Depicting Conspiracists' Nightmare of Real Obamas", July 13

OKAY, I realize you're not killing trees with it, but who wrote the headline? The "New" New Yorker cover? The one that's " 'Ironic' ", not "Ironic", or just Ironic? The one that depicts conspiracists' (wouldn't "Conspir-racists" be better?) nightmare of the real Obamas? Shouldn't it be "Nightmare Vision", or is there a fourteen-word limit?  I really wish you'd'a worked the Volume and Number in there, so I could be absolutely certain we're talking about the same thing. Y'know, before I even begin reading the piece, I mean.

It's the New Yorker written by "sophisticates", Tapper would like you to know. And he wants you to know it by word 2, not counting the headline, in which case it's word 247. Just in case, say, you've never heard of the New Yorker. He means it as an insult, though he's sophisticated enough not to put it in scare quotes.

Sophisticates--I think this could have been better explained--are people who will laugh at anything. Such as Patriotism. Or True Love. Or Jake Tapper's preferred presidential candidate.

Knowing the liberal politics of the magazine, I believe the magazine's staff when they say the illustration is meant ironically, as a parody of the caricature some conservatives (and some supporters of Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.)...

Oh, that Hillary Clinton.  Wait, you couldn't figure that out for yourself?

are painting of the Obamas.


But it's still fairly incendiary, at least as these things go. I wonder what the reaction would be were it the Weekly Standard or the National Review putting such an illustration on their covers.

Different.

You're welcome.

I really thought that was all I had to say about the matter--hence the title, which may have held out the false hope of a rare and welcome short post, sorry. But by the time I'd actually typed out my Fair Use segment there--ABC has no Print button and thwarts cutting-and-pasting, at least for the idiot blogger who still doesn't know what the right mouse button is for--my head had begun to swim. And in a different way from last night.

ITEM: What th' hell are we to do with Jake Tapper? I remember him as semi-decent at Salon, not that I'm a regular or anything; not in Conaison or Greenwald's league, but who is? and veering towards Saletan or Kaplan territory on occasion, maybe, but who doesn't? (please; tell me), though not enough so that I wasn't surprised when I first found him on ABC and sounding like Jeff Greenfield's Eve Harrington. Except Greenfield was at least interesting for the first six months he was on teevee. Tapper sounded like he'd been doing Ted Koppel impressions in front of his bedroom mirror since junior high.

Now he's outraged by the Conspir-racists' (I like it; sue me) getting skewered on a New Yorker cover--a magazine which, by the way, I personally have always viewed as too sophisticated to be Liberal, and I mean that without irony, 'irony', or "irony"--when his own job is to re-gargle Charlie Gibson's mouthwash for him.  And write sentences like "But it's still fairly incendiary as these things go."  Your medium, Jake, bears the primary responsibility for the state of affairs that cover pillories.

Not to mention that "Dear me, if the Republicans tried anything like this the reaction would be overwhelming!" schtick, when we all know that your network wouldn't even cover it, except, perhaps, safely buried in some "public affairs" wallow. And even then it wouldn't be overwhelmingly criticized; it'd be treated as political commentary, the way this should be by anyone with a high school education worthy of the honor.

ITEM: This prompts me to consider what we might call the Chevy Chase Effect in American culture, by which I do not mean "How does someone with some degree of youthful/early career promise turn into a complete dork the minute real money starts getting waved around?" No, I mean "How to we begin to address the debilitating effect this has on our news coverage when two-thirds of our fellow citizens are Peter Principle chair-moisteners willing not just to shovel, but wallow in, any sort of shit, in exchange for the privilege of not being required to do anything really useful?" And who flock to anything that stars Will Ferrell, for that matter.

ITEM: I have no idea whether Obama is actually Tapper's preferred candidate or not; I'm sure at this minute there's two hundred bloggers typing out some latest variation of "The media is in the bag for Saint Honest John Maverick McCain", with ample scare quotes (See Bob Somerby from last Friday; scroll down to "Calumny Watch". And why isn't Somerby on teevee? Not enough political blatherfests to squeeze him in?  Why does our public discourse sound as though no one has ever heard of its most devastating critic, or his criticisms?  Hmmmm?) But his forced humorlessness and easy offense--this is someone who's covered American politics for ten years--is suggestive of the Fellow Traveller, at least. My god. It may be defensible to confront every last slight your man suffers, but going to the trouble to imagine them first is a sign you need some fresh air. Reading some blogs these days is like a student-film version of Groundhog Day, except it's just one hour, and you are an NBC switchboard operator in the first minute after Sinead O'Connor tore up the Pope's headshot.

ITEM: I may have said this before, but who th' fuck is running the Obama campaign? Their Quick Response Team shit manages to wrong-foot the candidate twice in one weekend, and on issues (Access Hollywood, a satirical magazine cover) that ought to be so far beneath them it took two staffers just to locate 'em.  You're running a candidate for Most Powerful Man In The World. Try doing so, instead of acting like he should have been swept into office in January, by acclamation.  You think things are going to go smoothly once if he's elected?

Maureen Dowd Versus The Mass Disappearance of Amphibians: Which Is The More Frightening Bellwether of Human Stupidity Run Amok?

HOW long, O Times, how long?

The girls were impossibly cute and charming and a tribute to the Obamas’ parenting. When Malia said she enjoyed decorating and was most excited about a possible move to the White House because she’d have a new bedroom to dress up, it made me want to see the Obama girls in the White House no matter who wins.

The same piece [Warning: Don't go there] quotes a Margaret Carlson bon mot. From Hardball. And the Times actually scruples to print comics.

That's Mildly Amusing! ™

Steve Ballard, reporting in today's Indianapolis Racist Star:

Negative reaction to a report that BAM Racing was close to a deal with presidential candidate Barack Obama to sponsor its car in the Aug. 3 race at Pocono (Pa.) Raceway has prompted team owner Beth Ann Morgenthau to end the negotiations.

"BAM Racing has decided to heed the advice of the overwhelming response by fans to keep politics out of racing," she said in a news release Saturday.

This Is The Last Time I Follow A Norbizness Caption Contest Link

AP: Actor Ed Begley Jr. shows the sprinkler control system that electronically checks the forecast and automatically shuts down if it's supposed to rain, at his home in the Studio City district of Los Angeles Thursday, May 15, 2008. Begley and his neighbor Bill Nye, the host of the educational series 'Bill Nye, The Science Guy,' who moved in two doors away two years ago, are locked in a friendly but serious eco-battle of keeping up with each other. The two moderately famous and occasionally geeky environmentalists vie to see who can leave the smaller carbon footprint. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon)

Y'KNOW, I'm just spit-ballin' here, Ed, but maybe if you weren't trying to raise a large grass crop in the fucking desert you could avoid pouring water onto the ground altogether, forecast be damned. 

 

You, Madame, Are No Rothschild.

OKAY, so, first, nice catch, Rumproast. But after I'd seen it bruited about for the better part of a day I began to realize that the left, and not The Left, had absolutely no idea how to handle this. I've scribbled a few notes.  I'd be happy to share them.

First, the joke is this: On CNN yesterday, Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild said she didn't like Barack Obama. "He's an elitist," she explained.

Now, by "this is the joke" I am not trying to explain what started the general merriment. I'm telling you that's the joke. Once you begin tacking on personal details about Lady Lynn, her dwellings, her jet-set chums, and her social import on both sides of the Pond you are doing what I believe comedy professionals describe as explaining the joke.  Which, and again this is my understanding of expert opinion, is generally held to reduce the humor quotient considerably. Ditto linking to every article you can find which describes her rugs or notes she has servants. Believe it or no, most people actually get it that someone called Lady Lynn Forester de Rothschild likely belongs to The Snooty Set, eats off real plates, and doesn't worry much about her bank balance. And in fact the audience is rather more likely to experience some sort of general bonhomie and fellow-feeling towards Lady de Rothschild upon gaining details of her opulent surroundings, since we--and I include most members of the one-time labor party of the U.S.--have turned out to be a nation of natural-born hat-tippers. So long as we're whittlin' on the Bill of Rights, we might cast a glance at modernizing the Seven Deadly Sins. Americans do not like envy. Americans feel much warmer towards covetousness.

No, assuming Lady de Rothschild does not spend her time bathing in the blood of Christian virgins, her bio is not much likely to outrage.  But this is mere Brooksian whimsy (although, look, really, you ruined the joke). Hypocrisy is not a sin in modern-day America. It's expected, in the same fashion that another culture might expect hospitality or careful social stratification. And elitism surely has had nothing whatever to do with the Latin eligere, elect, since sometime in the Nixon administration; thinking about it now I suspect that elite maintained its use as a measure of typewriter key size longer than the notion of  The Quality survived political expedience. "Elitist" now means "smart", with a hint of "-ass". You'd imagine that liberals, who've been the main target of its use as a slur for so many decades, would understand this by now.

In fact, this dovetails with the earlier point: the reason being noted as a "Lady" is sufficient to get the humor across is that all such titles imply to Americans that the holder knows the difference between a soup spoon and a desert fork, the sort of thing which is considered a risible example of overeducation, unless one actually operates a chain of discount flatwear dealerships across the Southwest. It is certainly not the case that the modern American finds anything in common with his sacred forebears, who threw these scoundrels out two-and-a-quarter centuries ago. The modern American stands in line for two hours to view that Spencer dame's shoe collection at a traveling exhibit.

So it is perhaps understandable that the real blow to the solar plexus was not delivered, despite its ready availability. It simply wasn't recognized. Lady Forester de Rothschild is not an elitist.

She's an arriviste.

She's no Rothschild. Rothschilds are smart, and possessed of wit. Rothschilds do not tout their political opinions in public (on FOX!) like a greengrocer displays his kohlrabi. If there's been another "Rothschild" from either side of the sheets who refers to the sainted Lafite as "the family wine"--to a reporter!--I'll use that bottle of '90 I have in the basement to make chili.

Real Rothschilds had style, not just $100 M fortunes from telecom holding companies:

• Nathan Meyer Rothschild, the First Baron Rothschild (he didn't use the title) departed a hansom cab one London evening. The driver eyed his tip distainfully. "Your Lordship's son always gives me a good deal more money," he said.

"I daresay he does," the Baron replied. "But, you see, he has a wealthy father. I haven't."

• The Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith once spent the weekend at Alfred Rothschild's estate. The butler approached him at tea.

"Tea, coffee, or a peach from off the wall, sir?" he asked.

"Tea."

"China, India, or Ceylon, sir?"

"China."

"Lemon, milk, or cream, sir?"

"Milk."

"Jersey, Hereford, or Shorthorn, sir?"

• In the 1980s Baron Philippe de Rothschild, Grand-Prix driver (under an assumed name), poet, and probably the single most important figure in the history of wine, was interviewed at a tasting of every vintage of Mouton-Rothschild back to 1924, the year he invented estate bottling. "Which was your favorite vintage?" he was asked.

He paused to consider. "The '59, I think," he said, then added, "If you like young wine."

Your Presidential Candidate Gets His Point Across In Just One Mess O' Pottage. My Senator Has To Eat Four Bowls.

MUCH appreciated, Glen Greenwald:

Dodd-Feingold-Leahy amendment
Every Republican (and Lieberman) voted against removing immunity (including Arlen Specter, who spent all day arguing against immunity). Democrats voting against removing immunity: Bayh - Carper - Conrad - Feinstein - Innouye - Johnson - Kohl - Landrieu - Lincoln - McCaskill - Mikulski - Nelson (FL) - Nelson (Neb.) - Pryor - Rockefeller - Salazar - Webb.

Specter amendment
All Republicans (and Lieberman) voted against, and these were the Democrats voting against: Bayh - Carper - Johnson - Landrieu - Lincoln - Mikulski - Nelson (FL) - Nelson (Neb.) - Pryor - Rockefeller - Salazar.

Bingaman amendment
The Democrats voting against: Bayh - Landrieu - Nelson (Neb.) - Pryor - Rockefeller.

Democrats voting in favor of final passage of the FISA bill: Bayh - Carper - Casey - Conrad - Feinstein - Innuoye - Kohl - Landrieu - Lincoln - McCaskill - Mukulski - Nelson (Neb.) - Nelson (Fla.) - Obama - Pryor - Rockefeller - Salazar - Webb - Whitehouse.

Thanks, Evan, and good luck with that Vice Presidential thing. Oh, and say hello to your Dad, the last Democrat elected in the state of Indiana.

Thanks, But You've Done Enough Already.

Report Urges Overhaul of the War Powers Law

By JOHN M. BRODER

WASHINGTON — Two former secretaries of state, concluding that a 1973 measure limiting the president’s ability to wage war unilaterally had never worked as intended, proposed on Tuesday a new system of closer consultation between the White House and Congress before American forces go into battle.

Their proposal would require the president to consult senior lawmakers before initiating combat expected to last longer than a week, except for covert operations or rare circumstances requiring emergency action, in which case consultation would have to be undertaken within three days.

Congress, for its part, would have 30 days to approve the military action or, if it declined to do so, could then order it ended by disapproving it.

YEAH, thanks, but 1) we already have an absolutely Constitutional system governing this, called, well, the Constitution; the fact that we don't use it has spent almost a century lying on the doorstep of that same legislative body we now propose to let solve the problem. Again. 2) We've now spent almost five-and-a-half years--well over six if you'd like to begin admitting to yourselves that he fucked up Afghanistan, too--getting the most direct object lesson possible, short of the actual rape and pillage of our own shores, about the President as Commander-in-Chief. And we've spent almost two years with a Congress which was elected, about as specifically as one could be, to fucking do something about it. And again, as luck would have it--Reality sure has a way of smacking everything touched by James Addison Baker III and/or Warren Minor Christopher smack dab in the kisser, don't it?--that same body just yesterday, with great, trans-partisan care of the sort we're promised a whole new era's worth of just ahead, slammed the fucking door on punishing, investigating, or even bothering to glance at, a Presidential crime wave so plain. so invidious, and so thorough that I've spent the past few waking hours asking myself just what the fuck Bill Clinton could have done with Monica Lewinsky that would have begun to approach a single twenty-four hour period with this crew. So far I've come up with "Given her to Prime Minister Hashimoto with a note apologizing for WWII", but I'm not sure even that qualifies.

Now Warren, Jim, I understand you feel seriously about this issue, or you'd have never bothered to hog valuable camera time in a country that can't possibly still realize, let alone care, that you're still drawing oxygen. And you know me; I'm all about the solutions. So I scribbled down a, well, modest proposal here. Go ahead and use it without attribution, if you like:

The James B. S. Riley Simplified War Powers And World Peace Initiative Act

The duties of the Commander-in-Chief shall be construed as requiring that he or she, or, in the future, he/she, physically lead the troops of the United States into any military action, foreign or domestic, he, she, or he/she orders under Article II of the Constitution of the United States, while riding a big white steed. And carrying a big motherfucking flag. Amen.

This should have the attendant benefit of reducing our military budgets rather drastically.

Now, you two get out of the sandbox and let the younger cats shit all over it for a change.

Well, That's Certainly A Grilled Rib-Eye With Porcini Mushrooms, Spinach Salad With Chick Peas And Feta, And A Dove Dark Chocolate Piece For Thought.

Reuters: "Study Shows Value of Food Diary in Losing Weight".

THIS shows you precisely why a little education is a dangerous thing: elitist that I am, I've been keeping a food roman à clef, where everything I ate appears slightly disguised, but not enough that insiders wouldn't recognize them. Plus I had a really good twist ending planned. I think Viacom may be interested.

Fortunately, Roy reprised this two-year-old NRO wonder from wingnut back-bencher Melinda Ledden Sidak--who, assuming her most-Googled work isn't just a pure timecard job, spends most of her days baking cookies, mixing cocktails, and hoovering the collection of exotic-animal-skin rugs before hubby gets home--which reminded me, at the edge of despair, that whatever hardships the possessor of A Little Learning faces, it still beats hell out of 21st century galloping Tory megalomania.

I have a confession to make. It’s about an embarrassing habit that has earned me the sneers and pitying glances of sommeliers and right-thinking people from Europe to the Caribbean. You see, I love to drink Big California chardonnays. Big, fruity, buttery, oaky, in-your-face, so-over, 90s-style chardonnay.



And I refuse to apologize for it.


Let's begin by asking ourselves why this is important. The answer may surprise you: it isn't.

But it is personal, for a number of reasons. One, I've been educating myself about wine for thirty years, since the day I was handed a wine list and asked to make the selection for a big-shot dinner, and I had absolutely no idea what I was looking at. Second, I've been a curmudgeon even longer than that, and while the easy faux-curmudgeonliness of the wingnut right generally rolls off my back, it, like anti-evolutionism, anti-intellectualism, and Driving With Your Goddam Cell Phone Plastered To Your Ear should, on general principles, be publicly denounced and humiliated from time to time, even though the intended target is sure to miss the point. Three: if I've learned anything at all in that time about wine it's that the perennial question about crappy, barely-merchantable products--namely, is the greedy producer or the idiot public most to blame?--is fairly easy to answer where wine is concerned: it's the idiots, and especially American idiots.

We're going to try to get through this with little or no Wine Talk, especially coming from someone who makes no claim of real connoisseurship. So let's begin by saying that, in general, this sort of "I'm an aggressive dumbass, and you can't stop me!" approach has its place, and that place is in the infield watching a NASCAR race. Reverse snobbery is an exponentially-worse intellectual transgression than regular snobbery, because the real snob is required to learn something first.

Then there is the business of believing, or appearing to believe, that the History of the World began when your mother's contractions started coming a minute apart. Being that these days when the temperature tops 70º, but fails to break 88.5º, I am subjected, whatever my preference, to the company of a five-year-old male and, frequently, his seven-year-old brother, and their long-winded expositions on what they find "hilarious", I have come to suspect the education system is to blame for this. Specifically, the pre-analytical child is barraged with facts, which he is taught to regurgitate as readily as he does red-dyed bars of pure sugar flavored with some chem-lab substitute for cinnamon. The thing he does not learn, from what I can see, is that those facts came from someone else, who, at least at this point, knows more about the subject than he does.

And so to Ms (pardon; the offense was fully intentional) Ledden Sidak, whose age we are unable to determine by indifferent internet search, but who lends us a clue right off the bat by presuming an ubiquitous, wildly popular, and much-maligned style of California Chardonnay which gained prominence in the 1980s belongs rather to the following decade, when, one must assume, she is most likely to have first come into contact with it. This is compounded by egregiously suggesting (facile curmudgeonliness, again) that all disputatiousness was a simple matter of a shift in elitist fashion, as though the world's premier white wine grape were a boy band, or a pair of leg warmers.

Now, a brief word about wine talk: it's ludicrous, sometimes embarrassing, and it's been pwned since Thurber (there is, somewhere in my collection, a vintage [sorry] cartoon rendering of two spike-haired, safety-pin-bedecked Punks seated at a Bistro table as one says to the other, "It's a naive domestic glue, but I think you'll be amused by its pretensions."). But there's no other way to talk about physical taste. Try to describe a steak. It's jargon. It's poetic. It also can carry very specific meaning. It takes a lot of experience to use well. Ms Ledden Sidak does not. Big, fruity, buttery, and oaky might all apply to California chardonnay of the particularly blowsy sort she prefers (though I'd use a lot of care with "fruity") but all have become trite through over-application by the ill-informed, something which is not much improved by that "in-your-face".

I have nothing against professions of love for the style, though they won't come from me, but, first, it would have been better to acknowledge that difference of opinion exists and is firmly grounded, by adding, well, "blowsy", or "boarderline psychotic", or something to suggest you appreciate that not all opinion in the world is to be judged by whether or not it's yours. Propounding a particular style of wine, particularly one from so noble a grape as Chardonnay--especially given that "nobility" in a grape denotes its ability to take many, sometimes subtly distinct, forms and remain successful--is a neophyte's foolishness. Simple discrimination and pep-rally enthusiasm are not accomplishments. They're not even the beginning of understanding. Listen, the true connoisseur doesn't care if you put ice in the damn stuff, and two olives, if that's how you like it. He'll probably bristle if you tell him you're right and he's the prisoner of the oenological PC police, though.

We can't go on without a word about "oaky".   Sorry.  I have a friend who worked for many years in the best wine store in town, and to this day one cannot say "oaky chardonnay" in his presence without first making sure he won't hit any furniture as he falls. If you break it to him gently and while seated, he may recount the time when, one busy and exasperating Saturday, the umpteenth customer asked him for a "really oaky chard", and he suggested buying the cheapest bottle in the house and putting a twig in it. Wine is not supposed to "taste" "like" oak. Or of oak, except in particular circumstances which would include the fact that one is tasting it too young, before the imparted oak has had a chance to harmonize with its surroundings. You're supposed to be tasting wine. This attitude is apparently a by-product of the American discovery of Food, circa 1975, after which a nation whose primary culinary influence is three island nations known almost exclusively for boiling everything until the flavor is safely removed, decided, by the Inverse Law of Idiocy, that everything on one's plate, or in one's glass, should have a flavor capable of stunning a mid-sized dog. Chipotle-Mango Mayonnaise this! motherfucker.

Chardonnay always has seemed to be a very loaded sort of wine compared with other varieties. People think they know something about you the instant they hear you order. The central stigma in the U.S. is its alleged association with affluent political liberals. The term “chardonnay-sipping,” usually is paired with other derogatory compound phrases such as “Volvo-driving,” “brie (or sushi)-eating” “running shoe wearing” and less colorful epithets like “snob” and “sissy.” In this formulation, by the way, chardonnay sippers always live in “leafy” neighborhoods.

Rule #2: just because other people are stupider than you, it doesn't make you smart. Especially when they're the people who share your political allegiances and sense of humorlessness.

Recently, I have tried to break out of my wine rut. My husband and I vacationed on the French island of St. Bartelemy, enjoying delectable food and warm sunshine. There was only one problem with our otherwise perfect holiday in paradise. There was not a single bottle of California-style chardonnay to be had at any price.


Sheesh, the ocean was nearby. Why didn't you walk into it?

Oh, we tried. The chardonnay grape is the basis for many famous French labels such as Chablis, Pouilly-Fuisse, and Montrachet. We tried many an expensive bottle to try to feed our nasty habit, to no avail. Each one of them to our palates seemed watery, or acidic, or too tart. One afternoon, we even set off on a desperate mission to a huge warehouse literally stacked floor to ceiling with wine. The nice French lady who helped me seemed dumbfounded when I asked if they had any California wine among the thousands of bottles surrounding us. “But….thees is a French island!” she asked, bewildered.

Okay, first, "thees is a French island!" is not a question, and, second, I'm guessing that when you replied, "But I vant zee American zhard-o-nay," it didn't help matters.

Lesson--where are we?--three. Zee fucking Mow-ra-chay, from a good vintage and producer, is the goddam epitome of the sort of wine you claim to like, but without the two kilograms/liter of oak chips. French wines are naturally more acidic than California wines (which have a severe problem with over-ripe, acid-shedding grapes).  Acidity provides the wine with a backbone (and, in the lack, is why California Chardonnays are so often flabby). It's a good thing. The wine may be "tart" to someone expecting, maybe, a Diet Pepsi, and its naturally lower alcohol may seem "watery" to someone expecting a Jack Daniel's, which, incidentally, is nearly as sweet as that Pepsi, suggesting that American palates, generally educated by the mass market, might benefit from a long-overdue weaning. Greater acidity and less "alcohol burn" make them much better accompaniments to food, which is where, generally, wine should be consumed, not as a cocktail with a faux-Continental flair which one then poor-mouths as not American enough.

Later, when I explained to the proprietor of one of the island’s finest restaurants about my inexplicable craving for California (or Australian—they do it well too) chardonnay, he offered his sincere condolences.

I'll bet.

We decided to stick to pina coladas and beer for the rest of the trip.

Why stop there?

Upon our return, we could hardly wait to open a frosty (yes, we like our wine incorrectly and unfashionably cold, too) Rombauer Carneros chardonnay, which we buy by the case and often to the exclusion of everything else other than the occasional splurge on a Kistler or Newton. For those of you who share my leanings, you absolutely cannot do better than Rombauer. How fitting that such a sexy, muscular and swaggering chardonnay should have been created by a winery founded by a former fighter pilot. No watery French swill here.

By the Great Horned Satan and his leafy, tree-lined streets, lady, the reason you like it frosty (wow, I'm shocked) is that home cryogenics numbs the fucking excesses and hides the lack of acidity. Why don't you learn to take it like a man? Although I suppose Koerner Rombauer, stud fighter jock from the California National Guard might miss the fellatio.

The Finer Points

James B. S. Riley
Global Powders & Notions, LLC
General Delivery
Indianapolis, IN
July 8, 2008

M [redacted]
c/o The Anchor Desk
W [redacted] TV News
Indianapolis, IN


Dear [redacted]:

I trust I have waited a decent-enough interval before addressing this, assuming "decent" still carries the broad sweep of meaning it did before you, your profession, and the industry where you ply it helped coarsen American discourse, manners, and tastes in "entertainment" beyond what was previously considered theoretically attainable, and has not, instead, been relegated to cases of Janet Jackson's nipple jewelry turning up While Children Are Watching. In fact, considering the amount of air time regularly invested in telling me to dress in layers during the cold months, or maintain necessary hydration in warm, not to mention which of the latest scientific breakthroughs in cosmetic surgery is Right For Me this week, it would be nice if you could devote a little of the time remaining, after your in-depth consideration of Today's Issues, to keeping me abreast of what's left of etiquette, if anything, specifically, in this case, how long I should wait before urinating on Jesse Helm's grave. Am I still required to wait until the widow has gone home? So much seems up in the air anymore. Would consulting any of the hundred hours your network dedicates every week to filming drunken half-wits screaming at each other, or, worse, dancing, be of any help?

So, apologies for any unintended affront, but I wanted to express something of the absolute friggin' astonishment I felt this past Fourth of July when you, and your fellow newshounds at the other local stations, pulled yourself away from thinly-disguised exhortations to your fellow citizens to buy up the remaining stocks of brightly-hued 1/4-ton sticks of dynamite still available at any of the many fine retailers who fill your coffers each June thanks to the World's Third-Most Corrupt State Legislature, and keep shooting them off until their stocks were exhausted, long enough to do what felt like a ten-minute obit of former Senator Jesse Helms, despite the fact that his connection to Indiana might be subsumed under the heading "Snubbing Ryan White's Mother After His Death". Which, oddly enough, garnered no mention. I do suppose that he, like our local troglodytes, was consuming oxygen up to the last, but that's the next best connection I can come up with, and were I you I'd try for scientific confirmation before running with it. 

Now, I am aware that "Truth" and "panegyric" go together the same way "Church service" and "Igniting One's Flatulence" do, so I was not expecting much of the former (though I did expect the amount of time spent on Helms' "service to his country" be commensurate with some reasonably-objective definition of "service", or else its applicability to viewers in your Market, which, after all, produces very little tobacco and had integrated most of its public schools several weeks before Helms was first elected to the Senate). And, as usual, I got it, though I am grateful that you got around to mentioning his opposition to the Martin Luther King Birthday Holiday, which now serves as a sort of touchstone of how the outright race-baiting Republicans of an earlier, more backward, time could get a tad unreasonable on occasion, and Thank God those days are over.

No, the thing which most surprised me was that your own report referenced, quite early on--about fourteen and three-quarters minutes before the King Holiday came up, by the seat of my pants--"his battles with what he called 'liberal elitists' ". It's a fine little swerve there, and seeing as how the man was already a-moulderin' I suppose you needed to find the least offensive thing that ever came out of the old reprobate's ugly, twisted maw and treat it as though it might have had some tiny claim to veracity if you qualified the hell out of it. So I suppose you're to be complimented for it, but I've been too excited to sleep since that scumbucket hurtled screaming to Hell, not that I could have with all the fucking fireworks going off all weekend, thanks again, and I'm still a bit jumpy.

But what I would like to do is to inform you, in the spirit of the piece, that I have personally battled forty years with what I call the "infantile sexuality, seething racism, inborn crytpo-Nazism, and microcephalic intelligence of the American Right", and that, should you have reason to cover my own demise, I'd appreciate it if you saw fit to get the quote right.


Regards,


James B.S. Riley

Feel Free To Use "Thanks To The New York Times, I Got 35% More Lawn Care Done Sunday!" New York Times.

Zev Chafets, "Rush Limbaugh Is Just Getting Warmed Up."

Whatever Now Inhabits "Maureen Dowd," "An Ideal Husband."

[NOTE: I am about to type a simple declarative sentence, in English. It is fully formed in my head, but not actually laid out word-for-word, as a man my age, even the consummate thrill-seeker such as myself, cannot laugh in the face of The Risk of Debilitating Stroke. If you are reading this, and the first sentence of the next paragraph ends abruptly, or the rest of the page runs /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// all the way down, kindly dial 911. Okay:]

THERE is a column on the Op-Ed page of the Sunday Times which consists of Maureen Dowd dispensing the marriage advice of a Catholic Priest.

Whooo-ooo! Damn! That is, like, the keyboard equivalent of summitting K2 by the Polish Line.

There is nothing left to be said, really, except that climbing down off Maureen Dowd must be at least as treacherous as climbing on, should not be attempted without a belay, and one has to ask what sort of desperate thrill junkie would attempt it twice.

Well, there's the quote of kindly, crinkly, creepily fixated Call No Man Father Connor, who advises the connubially-minded young woman to check her mate's friends, and this advice is channeled through Dowd, who, if she had any friends, would have been forcibly prevented from getting anywhere near a typewriter for at least the last decade. We are now so far beyond asking why the Times kills trees for this shit that every concept attached to the idea has become a meaningless sound, like when you were a kid and repeated "bubblegum bubblegum" over and over and over until the ground melted away beneath you.

And here's the thing: in many respects the Limbaugh piece is worse. I don't say this because I don't like the man politically; I am, truth to tell, almost completely indifferent to him. The rather flaccid Left Internet scandals he's engendered have been singularly uninteresting, despite the fact that, like all right-wing blowhards, he simply can't help showing himself as a hypocritical asshole with religio-Daddy issues, stunted sexuality, and a barely-disguisable contempt for a bumptious audience he imagines himself smarter than. The only time I ever gave Limbaugh more than a moment's thought was when they announced his ESPN gig, which, on the one hand, I found outrageous, but which, on the other, aroused a certain curiosity, just not enough to actually watch an NFL pregame show. First, I wondered if Limbaugh could possibly really know football, as the hype insisted--this was answered almost immediately, and in the negative. Second, I wondered what th' fuck the man was thinking? If he didn't really know his shit, did he think he was going to bluff the sports audience the way he bluffs the dentition- and genetically-challenged AM burpfest aficionado? He apparently imagined he could, and, further, that he had a sort of crossover career in his headlights, like he was Amy Grant with blubber, the way Coulter would also imagine she did about eighteen months later, circa the Time cover. It is, after all, the same group of sycophants telling these witlings they're funny.

Anyway, I think Limbaugh was disabused of that notion rather quickly, and I think his McNabb comments were calculated to get him off the air, quickly, and with some small measure of PC Police Brutality mixed in so he could return to his audience trailing Clouds of Glory. The casual football fan knew McNabb was playing hurt, and had been since the previous season, knew the notoriously fickle, make that evil Iggles fans had turned on him for failure to win A Ring, and knew that he was being reassessed by the sometimes brutal and frequently brutally short-sighted sports media. And Limbaugh  knew exactly what was going to happen when he played the But What I Said Wasn't Racist card, which is the oldest card in the "conservative" deck, or at least the most dogeared.  He waved goodbye to The Rush Limbaugh Variety Hour, New! This Fall on NBC, and went back to Jethroville, and, apparently, back to work on his advertisers with a blowtorch and a pair of pliers.

Besides, Al Franken had already dealt Limbaugh out of the game, hadn't he? Wasn't there a sense in which, after the Chickenhawk Brigade and the pilonidal cyst, that Limbaugh was as dead as Mission Accomplished? Sure, he's still got an audience. Hell, millions of Americans would vote to repeal the 22nd Amendment so they could vote for Commander Codpiece again. Does that make him Not A Ghost? And Franken did it before the oxycontin business, which, if I may say so in the guise of something of an expert, is one of the really Who Gives A Fuck Limbaugh stories. I mean, oxycontin? We have entered the Elvis It Was Prescribed Medication Zone, which, for the benefit of any amateurs out there, is Extraordinarily Lame. Cosmically lame. Claiming you were sleeping with a pre-op transexual because you're afraid to show your dick to a real woman lame. This is drug abuse for people who don't even know what drugs are. At least Elvis was taking real drugs, even if he was in denial.   I don't know anyone who'd take oxycontin for kicks without washing it down with a frozen margarita or three, which you'd never do with real painkillers unless you had a four-inch-impacted-bolus-in-the-large-intestine tolerance built up. Oxycontin is the fuckin' sissy bike of the broad American pharmaceutical highway, and, furthermore, no one obtains and continues to feed an addiction to Prescription Drugs in post-Reagan America without trying. I feel about Rush's drug problem what Marx thought of Engles' mistress: I don't care about the hypocrisy, it's that it's so fucking common. (Though, of course, it fits the man, and his Reaganism, just like discovering cigars after they'd become a temporary craze, then running around acting like you're leading a parade.)

And this is the thing about the Chafets piece. It gets around to The Oxy Problem precisely as deep into the piece as you'd expect, and then praises Limbaugh for not ducking it, as though he would ever have agreed to the piece without realizing it was coming. It studiously avoids calling him on any of his public inanities or factually-challenged loutisms, tours the 24,000 square-foot main house at his apparently largely self-designed Graceland-by-the-Sea in Palm Springs without sniggering, allows him to explain away his Little Versailles salon by saying he's no Francophobe (musta been some other hillbilly pillhead on AM radio goin' on about "Jean" Kerry in the last election), lets him tapdance around racist attacks on Barack Obama without calling him on any he's already made, let alone his track record. A small tin can gets tied, briefly, to the tail of Big Ego in the person Sean Hannity's superior Obama baiting. It is, in short, precisely what one could predict of a Times Sunday Magazine piece on the Free Willy of American poshlust politics: a "mold-breaking" faux-fair profile notable for its having removed its dentures before sitting down.

Tell me, when do they actually write the liberal hit-pieces they're so famous for?

Two other points. One: Limbaugh's just getting warmed up? It would be nice to hear what that entails, and what he plans to do once he's really going again. He's actually allowed to say that George W. Bush isn't a real "conservative", which really, really, underlines how good an idea it would be to at least get these things fact-checked by someone familiar with the internet. The Republican party is a shambles. Isn't the stinking corpse of Rush Limbaugh lying on top of the drain? Two: how many times do I have to hear how funny Limbaugh is before someone coughs up an example? It's apparently more than the six or so Chafets uncorks, since the best he can come up with is the official Limbaugh show Black Guy Who's Permitted To Criticize Obama (stop! I can't breathe!), and the "tongue-in-cheek grandiosity" of his calling his empire "Excellence in Broadcasting". Correct me if I wrong, but when supposed self-deprecation is wholly indistinguishable from self-aggrandizement, it can be a tad difficult to spot the humor, no?

AFTERTHOUGHT: The piece also notes his Buckley connection, and the fact that a lot of the "college-educated" types currently at NatRev secretly listened to Rush as teenagers. Which explains a lot. Everything, in fact, except whatever happened to the "college-educated" part.

Commercial Break

Sigh.

Everybody Comes To Matt's:

To make an analogy, anti-miscegenation laws were a horrible injustice but it wasn't "cowardice" of the politicians who favored civil rights to avoid running around the country losing elections left and right over the issue throughout the 1950s and 60s. You want to ask a politicians to take some risks on behalf of a controversial cause, but not so many risks that they lose. Backing the California referendum would have been pure cowardice -- surrendering any opportunity to advance the cause of gay equality in the name of political expedience. What Obama's doing is clever, hard-nosed practical politics.

OKAY, so I was educated in the last century, but back then they taught us that an analogy, while not actually requiring an analogue grounded in some sort of shared reality, was at least not weakened by the occurrence; in other words, we'd like to know what politician was running around the country winning elections by leaving miscegenation out of his call for civil rights. Or name us a white Southern politician who actually ran on the promotion of civil rights and/or an end to segregation, whatever the extent.  We'll spot you Richmond Flowers, if you'll agree to tell us what happened when Bear Bryant offered his son a football scholarship.

The fact is that no one had to mention miscegenation in connection with civil rights, and no one could avoid the issue just by not talking about it. "Civil rights" was just another name for miscegenation to large groups of voters.

And the other salient feature of the "debate" is that it was settled by the Court, and not by politicians.

To sum up: were people running around the country losing elections by crusading against anti-miscegenation laws? No. Is that because they felt "miscegenation" was a millstone around the neck of voting rights, employment opportunities, access to justice, and other, more "palatable" rights issues? Maybe some, but--as the commonly accepted wisdom runs these days, except when it chafes to admit it--"those people" didn't vote for you anyway. LBJ famously announced he'd signed over the South to the Republican party along with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Were there some civil rights "liberals" who nevertheless actually believed the right to marry the person of one's choosing was in fact something different from "civil rights"? Yes. Just as there are today.

So then, let's look the elephant in the eye before the room fills up with bullshit. Is there some figure we can point to, extend the thanks of a succeeding generation to, or put on a stamp, maybe, for his contribution to the advancement of civil rights by virtue of shutting up about interracial marriage? We'll take those crickets to be chirping "No".  The mere fact that someone can cough up "miscegenation laws" as an example of the accomplishments of the Civil Rights movement is a tribute to the people who rejected gradualism and legalistic hair-splitting.  Martin Luther King's birthday is observed as a national holiday. Roy Wilkins' is not.

Enshrining a distinction between "civil unions" and "marriage" is cowardice. It is pandering without a John. Whose vote does it change? It holds out the promise of mere fence straddling while permanently backhanding gays and lesbians as an expedience with no foundation, not to mention the fact that scant weeks ago Senator Obama was said to be sailing towards the Presidency on the pacific waters of New, Engaged Voters, not on his ability to submarine bigots with doubletalk. Say it again: it's bad enough that you're asked to justify this sort of thing over and over again: Iraq war budgets, FISA flip-flops, AIPAC reach arounds, and Stupid Lapel Pin Tricks. What's much worse is that you seem so eager to oblige.