OKAY, that headline won out over "Karen Hughes, 2001-Spring 2002, 2005-2007: An Appreciation", and "Karen Hughes: My Work Here Is Finished", on the grounds that the more I thought about it the more I figured that her first resignation was the only thing Karen Hughes ever said or did that had a fair chance of being remembered. This is the principle difference between Karen Hughes and a stick of gum: the stick of gum actually delivers some flavor for a couple of minutes.
This is the woman the Cato Institute's David Boaz, in what can only be assumed was a desperate cry for help, once described as "[possibly] the most powerful woman in the history of American politics". This came in the opening paragraphs of an April 30, 2002 "think piece" in the New York Post "newspaper" in which he insisted that Hughes really was leaving to spend more time with her family, and he said this as a means of promoting his idea that women (God love 'em) are just too estrogen-laden to run anything more complex than a nursery. (The Institute has graciously reprinted it here, just in case any outsiders were contemplating taking libertoonianism seriously, even for a moment.)
I have to admit I find the lure of Bush administration nostalgia almost irresistible, now that the man himself is reduced to playing a community theatre Miss Havisham and the only thing left of his gang is Condi Rice and a mountain of criminal prosecutions. Oh, bright cherry blossoms of 2001! Hughes was the most powerful woman ever to set foot in the West Wing. Rice and Colin Powell were the twin avatars of The Mostest Color-blind Administration, Like, Ever. Winking, smirking, and used-car-dealer bonhomie were the softening artillery barrage of a Charm Offensive set to conquer the land with Conservative Compassion. And Dick Cheney was the selfless éminence grise with one ambition-less hand discretely on the rudder as the Boy King learned the read the winds.
We say again: it is impossible to believe that anyone who accepted this crap could have survived the required navigation of any of a multitude of modern-day commonplaces: lighting a pilot light, refueling a vehicle, crossing a street, operating a zipper. And yet, there you have it, a kitschy, sentimental small-town parade where all the floats are constructed of horseshit, with a couple of local disc jockeys babbling on the PA about how fresh the air seemed that morning.
And sorry to destroy the reverie, but this wasn't the hopeful beginning of some potential New Camelot, it was the coronation of the man who had lost the fucking election. And it was not some wispy and wistful naivete; it coincided with the ugly and transparent Hey Look Over There attacks on the outgoing President, spearheaded by libels from the new Press Secretary and gleefully transmitted by the White House Press Corps and the other seekers of truth who had, to the best of their ability, ignored Iran-Contra and the Great S&L Swindle but revived the dead-issue of Whitewater for an eight-year run. It's difficult not to focus on the colossal blunders of the administration, and the unblinking bloodlust of the public in the wake of 9/11, but the departure of Karen Hughes, former Most Powerful Woman in the Solar System For Several Weeks, former WHIG, former Dallas teleprompter reader, should remind us that nothing about this operation ever passed the smell test, and it survived as long as it did because of a complete lack of public scrutiny which stinks just as bad. I hate to go all misty-eyed on ya, but to me the enduring image of the Bush administration comes from shortly before there was such a thing: his limo stopped for several minutes in the coronation parade, while the teevee commentators said nothing.
Thursday, November 1
Wednesday, October 31
Tuesday, October 30
Many Are Babbling, But Few Are Brooks.
THE last thing I remember is reading David Brooks' Friday column about outsourcing cortical function to our modern digital inconveniences--GPS, iPod, internets--which read like zombie Erma Bombeck without the humor. I know I read it, because I found four paragraphs about it on my desktop this morning, even if three of them tried to explain how James Lileks is the comic-book action hero Brooks would invent as an alter-ego, boldly going into Target an' Red Lobster an' stuff, instead of just imagining the horrors and the prices within. At first I thought--you can appreciate why--that this was where Friday's second "vitamin" had kicked in, even though I woke up not in my office but face-down in the upstairs bathtub--despite my long history of such things this was a first, and, if I may say so, a particularly disconcerting combination of color, texture, and temperature, like waking up with your face pressed against a dead Osmond--and, as I figured out after a few unsuccessful minutes of trying to get my legs to move, wearing those Andy Griffith motorcycle boots my wife likes so much.
So the Lileks thing turned out to be more-or-less rational thought, and the more I thought about it the better I liked it: Lileks has Target, Brooks has sociological faux-profundities built of chain-restaurant menus; Lileks has the Clorox Battery-Powered Rotating Toilet Brush, Brooks has the Chicago School of Economics, and each waves it around like a trophy of mighty battle; Lileks may, or may not, have left the Grange Hall of his ancestors for the post-9/11 bomb shelter, just as Brooks may or may not have abandoned Jewish liberalism for the charisma of Milton Friedman. I'm pretty sure comics are the correct medium for Brooks' work, and I think it's the world's loss that he spent all those hours alone in his room imagining that he was Crofts and his imaginary playmate Seals, instead of working with art materials.
After the universe had righted itself, at least visually, I tried checking the news, which I figured couldn't have gotten much worse in the last 72 hours, and saw there was a new Brooks column. "Hair of the dog," I chuckled to myself as I opened it, only to reveal David Brooks doing a David Brooks impression. You would be correct in assuming this had a startling effect on my re-integration efforts:
Although "nothing," I think it's only fair to point out, would vastly outpoll "Taking unfathomable amounts of treasure, thousands of young lives, the foundation of our personal liberties dating to the Magna Carta, and the most basic sort of respect for the very notion of truth and shoveling them into a bottomless pit at the service of your dimwitted alcoholic uncle and his animal-torturing, sex pervert partner," excepting Pew didn't ask the question.
I did slowly come to realize that this was in fact David Brooks, 10/30/07, reinventing himself with a remarkably old-style conservative frugality, out of whatever leftover junk has survived his last four years of championing the disastrous Bush administration, then pretending it didn't exist. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you...retro-fear mongering! Yes, you loved it in the early Oughts. Now relive the magic on today's high-tech HD DVD or Blu-ray, without all the worrysome decision-making! Your moral confusion and self-centered disengagement never seemed so clear! And if you act now, we'll throw in the revolutionary Gilt-E-Racer™, a $1.2 trillion value! Yes, you'll once again be proud to announce your personal Lifestyle Niche selection to the world through lawn care practices! Pretend you always cared about Global Warming, and supported Universal Heath Care! Convince yourself you knew the difference between Sunni and Shi'a in 2002, and, furthermore, you cared! Amaze 20% of your friends as you convince them that Congress ought to do more about the war you're ambivalent about! Hurry! Quantities are imaginary!
UPDATE: contractually forced on Friday's News Hour to discuss actual events in the actual decade he finds himself in, Brooks coughed up, "I just wish [the Democrats] had an Iran policy and not a[n anti-] Bush policy." As a dedicated gardener, I have to wish him luck getting six-year-old seed to germinate. But as a proud practitioner of sullen, post-punk, anti-Big Business leftist lawn care I have to remind him that he and his party are suffering from a high-speed collision with reality, not a shortage of trite slogans, and that while dummy threats and phony histories have been winning elections in this country for decades, they have yet to un-lose a war.
So the Lileks thing turned out to be more-or-less rational thought, and the more I thought about it the better I liked it: Lileks has Target, Brooks has sociological faux-profundities built of chain-restaurant menus; Lileks has the Clorox Battery-Powered Rotating Toilet Brush, Brooks has the Chicago School of Economics, and each waves it around like a trophy of mighty battle; Lileks may, or may not, have left the Grange Hall of his ancestors for the post-9/11 bomb shelter, just as Brooks may or may not have abandoned Jewish liberalism for the charisma of Milton Friedman. I'm pretty sure comics are the correct medium for Brooks' work, and I think it's the world's loss that he spent all those hours alone in his room imagining that he was Crofts and his imaginary playmate Seals, instead of working with art materials.
After the universe had righted itself, at least visually, I tried checking the news, which I figured couldn't have gotten much worse in the last 72 hours, and saw there was a new Brooks column. "Hair of the dog," I chuckled to myself as I opened it, only to reveal David Brooks doing a David Brooks impression. You would be correct in assuming this had a startling effect on my re-integration efforts:
Researchers from Pew found that 65 percent of Americans are satisfied over all with their own lives — one of the highest rates of personal satisfaction in the world today.
On the other hand, Americans are overwhelmingly pessimistic about their public institutions. That same Pew survey found that only 25 percent of Americans are satisfied with the state of their nation. That 40-point gap between private and public happiness is the fourth-largest gap in the world — behind only Israel, Mexico and Brazil.
Americans are disillusioned with the president and Congress. Eighty percent of Americans think this Congress has accomplished nothing.
Although "nothing," I think it's only fair to point out, would vastly outpoll "Taking unfathomable amounts of treasure, thousands of young lives, the foundation of our personal liberties dating to the Magna Carta, and the most basic sort of respect for the very notion of truth and shoveling them into a bottomless pit at the service of your dimwitted alcoholic uncle and his animal-torturing, sex pervert partner," excepting Pew didn't ask the question.
I did slowly come to realize that this was in fact David Brooks, 10/30/07, reinventing himself with a remarkably old-style conservative frugality, out of whatever leftover junk has survived his last four years of championing the disastrous Bush administration, then pretending it didn't exist. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you...retro-fear mongering! Yes, you loved it in the early Oughts. Now relive the magic on today's high-tech HD DVD or Blu-ray, without all the worrysome decision-making! Your moral confusion and self-centered disengagement never seemed so clear! And if you act now, we'll throw in the revolutionary Gilt-E-Racer™, a $1.2 trillion value! Yes, you'll once again be proud to announce your personal Lifestyle Niche selection to the world through lawn care practices! Pretend you always cared about Global Warming, and supported Universal Heath Care! Convince yourself you knew the difference between Sunni and Shi'a in 2002, and, furthermore, you cared! Amaze 20% of your friends as you convince them that Congress ought to do more about the war you're ambivalent about! Hurry! Quantities are imaginary!
UPDATE: contractually forced on Friday's News Hour to discuss actual events in the actual decade he finds himself in, Brooks coughed up, "I just wish [the Democrats] had an Iran policy and not a[n anti-] Bush policy." As a dedicated gardener, I have to wish him luck getting six-year-old seed to germinate. But as a proud practitioner of sullen, post-punk, anti-Big Business leftist lawn care I have to remind him that he and his party are suffering from a high-speed collision with reality, not a shortage of trite slogans, and that while dummy threats and phony histories have been winning elections in this country for decades, they have yet to un-lose a war.
Friday, October 26
Looking For History With Both Hands
Jonah Goldberg, " Ted Kennedy’s America: The Borking of American politics". October 26
LET"S start at the bottom. Why the hell not?
Correction: The original text referred to Warren Burger as a "liberal" this was an unintentional error. It has been corrected in the text above.
[Note: Mr. Goldberg's unintentional errors should in no way detract from the veracity of his intentional errors.]
Ignoring for a moment the question of whether the grammar itself proves the NatRev lets Goldberg write his own corrections, let's focus on the evidence of that "unintentional error". Here's the full paragraph:
Kennedy’s assault rallied left-wing interest groups to the anti-Bork banner for an unprecedented assault on a man the late Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Berger dubbed the most qualified nominee he’d seen in his professional lifetime. As Gary McDowell noted recently in the Wall Street Journal , that time span included the careers of Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo Black, and Felix Frankfurter.[The "Berger" is his mistake, by the way, not McDowell's; cutting and pasting eludes our nation's premier conservative pundit, although he's pretty good at mudpies.]
Now, far be it from us to question Mr. Goldberg's commitment to honesty, but we do have to look at that and notice a practical reason for intentionally describing (or wishin' and hopin') the late conservative Republican functionary and future footnote in Court history as a practicing Liberal at the time of the utterance, instead of the more likely "man who had recently taken a bad fall down some stairs". It is, of course, one thing for that sort of nonsense to turn up in the Journal as part of their anniversary celebration of the modern Right's sorry equivalent of the Edmund Pettis bridge; it's quite another that Goldberg could read it and swallow it whole. Burger was obviously making a political statement. We'd be more than a bit surprised to learn he'd parlayed it and a Tigers-Expos series for five large.
The only other explanation that springs to mind is that the error was "unintentional" in the sense that Goldberg confused the Good "Warren Burger" with the Evil "Earl Warren" from the days of his after-school drilling with those Bircher for Kids brand flashcards. At any rate we note that, just as Roy is constantly pointing out that Goldberg has penned the stupidest thing ever written until he writes again, we note that without fail anytime he speaks of history aside from the history of sci-fi blockbusters he finds ways to get it wrong.
Okay, I suppose we're obligated to glance at the actual piece. If we can understand how Burger, a high-class courtesan who had no reputation to lose save that of always pleasing the client, could utter such a jaw-dropping piece of stupidity, we're yet left to wonder why it is that Goldberg, fast approaching forty, fer chrissakes, can't manage the noble indifference of the junkie streetwalker. He can't write a column without pretending consideration of "both" sides, generally his own and the one he's assigned The Left, yet he's never written a column whose point of view couldn't be guessed ahead of time. There's nothing in this column McDowell didn't say three days earlier, or more sensibly, for that matter. But where McDowell focused (if that's not too misleading a term) on the supposed debate over Constitutional interpretation, Jonah goes right for the sandbox Stratego™ culture war he's most comfortable with:
If you think American politics have gotten nastier, crueler, and more symbolic over the last 20 years, blame Ted Kennedy.
Ah, yes. How well I remember, the day after Kennedy's "tirade", when Robert Novak wrote, "Okay, enough politesse. Let's talk about Chappaquiddick."
What I do remember about the Bork hearings, since I was an adult at the time and not a doughy adolescent dreaming of icing those cinnamon buns on either side of Princess Leia's head, is that Bork was forced under oath to allow for "organic development" of that Constitutional text he insisted was inviolate, thereby giving up the game, something the last twenty years of utter failure to redefine the concept into something workable has double underlined. If 1987 represents anything in the history of partisan politics it's the sunset of the Reagan myth with Iran-Contra and the stock market crash, not that we expect either of those anniversaries to trigger a Goldberg reverie.
Thursday, October 25
World Series Note
Dear City of Boston:
If possible, could you please settle on six different official cap designs and your seven favorite color combinations for them, and stick to those?
Thanking you in advance,
James B.S. Riley ("Doghouse")
If possible, could you please settle on six different official cap designs and your seven favorite color combinations for them, and stick to those?
Thanking you in advance,
James B.S. Riley ("Doghouse")
I'm Sorry, I Didn't Quite Catch That. Would You Mind Regurgitating It, Eating It, And Regurgitating It Again Several More Times?
Jason Szep, "Are Democrats too confident in 2008 election race?" Reuters, October 24
SPOILER ALERT: You will scour this tree-killer in vain for any discussion of the confidence level, if any, of the Democratic party, its officials, members, affiliates, or well-wishers, or any single person living or dead, now, or previously, identified, self-identified, demographically disposed, or unfoundedly-rumored to be a Democrat or Democrat-friendly or who might have met any one who is.
POSSIBLE HEADLINE ASSUMING TRUTH-IN-ADVERTISING REGULATIONS COULD BE EXTENDED TO HEADLINE WRITING: Niki Tsongas Wins Special Congressional Election By Smaller Than Expected Margin; Someone From A Family Of Democrats May Have Voted Against Her
WHY THIS SORT OF THING IS AN IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTION TO AN INFORMED ELECTORATE: It ain't.
HOW MANY MORE SUCH STORIES WE CAN LOOK FORWARD TO READING IN THE NEXT TWELVE MONTHS: Umpteen.
HOW MANY MORE SUCH STORIES WE CAN LOOK FORWARD TO READING IN THE NEXT TWELVE MONTHS IF HILLARY CLINTON IS THE NOMINEE: Umpteen google.
BROWN (or GREEN or SMITH) IS THE NEW CABBIE: Mary Burns, disgruntled Democrat, is never actually identified as a Democrat; She reports having "a lot of Democratic friends who voted for him because he understood their concerns."
KEEP MASSACHUSETTS FOR THE MASSACHUSETS: Ogonowski issued fliers that overlapped images of Tsongas and Bush with the words "Niki Tsongas/George Bush Immigration Plan: Amnesty to 12 million illegal immigrants."
WHY THIS SORT OF THING BODES ILL FOR DEMOCRATIC PROSPECTS NEXT FALL: Because the party is so obviously in the pocket of Big Alien.
WHERE THIS SORT OF THING CAN LEAD: Straight to a Dana Milbank appearance on Olbermann, where the ultra-liberal journalist from the ultra-liberal Washington Post was so in thrall of this shocking new development he worked the following into a discussion of Republican Gaffes and Bleepers: "[Howard] Dean had a nervous breakdown in Iowa," and "the campaign against Hillary is she's a flip-flopper--they want to do a replay of the whole windsurfing thing." Except this time, when she reaches shore she finds it's been declared part of Mexico.
SPOILER ALERT: You will scour this tree-killer in vain for any discussion of the confidence level, if any, of the Democratic party, its officials, members, affiliates, or well-wishers, or any single person living or dead, now, or previously, identified, self-identified, demographically disposed, or unfoundedly-rumored to be a Democrat or Democrat-friendly or who might have met any one who is.
POSSIBLE HEADLINE ASSUMING TRUTH-IN-ADVERTISING REGULATIONS COULD BE EXTENDED TO HEADLINE WRITING: Niki Tsongas Wins Special Congressional Election By Smaller Than Expected Margin; Someone From A Family Of Democrats May Have Voted Against Her
WHY THIS SORT OF THING IS AN IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTION TO AN INFORMED ELECTORATE: It ain't.
HOW MANY MORE SUCH STORIES WE CAN LOOK FORWARD TO READING IN THE NEXT TWELVE MONTHS: Umpteen.
HOW MANY MORE SUCH STORIES WE CAN LOOK FORWARD TO READING IN THE NEXT TWELVE MONTHS IF HILLARY CLINTON IS THE NOMINEE: Umpteen google.
BROWN (or GREEN or SMITH) IS THE NEW CABBIE: Mary Burns, disgruntled Democrat, is never actually identified as a Democrat; She reports having "a lot of Democratic friends who voted for him because he understood their concerns."
KEEP MASSACHUSETTS FOR THE MASSACHUSETS: Ogonowski issued fliers that overlapped images of Tsongas and Bush with the words "Niki Tsongas/George Bush Immigration Plan: Amnesty to 12 million illegal immigrants."
WHY THIS SORT OF THING BODES ILL FOR DEMOCRATIC PROSPECTS NEXT FALL: Because the party is so obviously in the pocket of Big Alien.
WHERE THIS SORT OF THING CAN LEAD: Straight to a Dana Milbank appearance on Olbermann, where the ultra-liberal journalist from the ultra-liberal Washington Post was so in thrall of this shocking new development he worked the following into a discussion of Republican Gaffes and Bleepers: "[Howard] Dean had a nervous breakdown in Iowa," and "the campaign against Hillary is she's a flip-flopper--they want to do a replay of the whole windsurfing thing." Except this time, when she reaches shore she finds it's been declared part of Mexico.
Wednesday, October 24
Olio
• Trouble in Pakistan and on the Turkish border? That's un-possible!
If Nancy Pelosi is finished (for the moment) apologizing because a Democrat said something mean, maybe we could get around to investigating how we came to this point before this point is so far in the future we're rewriting it as a victory. We ignored the sort of international diplomacy even the most gun-totin' previous administration had heeded (to some extent, at least) in order to make in into Iraq by the timetable Bush's puppetmasters had set in 1999. By contrast we made a deal with Musharraf, a tin-horn dictator with a known conflict of interest (to put it nicely) and a track record of passing out nuclear weapons technology like trick-or-treat candy, despite the fact that a) we didn't need to, and b) we knew it wouldn't do us any good unless we got bin-Laden in the first place. Lord knows, the neos were (and still are) capable of imagining anything, and Lord knows they've got a soft spot for a man in uniform, but still.... And I don't care how blind you are, the refusal to take the time to get Turkey on board the Coalition Choo-Choo was a blunder obvious at the time, and not just because we had to reroute troop carriers and reformulate our well-vetted war plans. I mean, shit, this administration didn't know where the oil is? The Kurds seem to be the one cultural or religious sub-group we can be sure the President did know about before the invasion. We went to war for purely partisan political reasons, and on a timetime designed for maximum electoral effect, Madam Speaker. The real outrage is that hearing he enjoys it is the worst thing that'll happen to George W. Bush.
• With all due respect for people facing terrible hardships, I would rather hammer pencils up both auditory canals, pointy part first, than listen to any more wildfire coverage, which--in rather stark contrast to the equivalent period in Katrina coverage, which ran, as I recall it, "The Coloreds are stealin' TVs! The Coloreds are stealin' TVs!"--has amounted to a sort of enormous electronic group hug and complimentary unlimited salad bar. I actually heard someone last night saying that there hadn't been any looting (!), and I've heard at least a half-dozen times, without trying to, how quickly aid is arriving compared to Katrina, as though this proves American Has Learned Her Lesson. Bosh. It underlines the fact that the Katrina response lagged--as did any Press recognition of the human scale of the tragedy--because we weren't exactly 100% sure we cared. One of the wealthiest states in the Union is prepared for a seasonally-occurring natural disaster; the Gulf Coast--three of our six poorest states--wasn't prepared for one of the most devastating hurricanes ever to make landfall. And our news hairdos identify with people losing their homes, but wondered why New Orleans' flood victims didn't all jump in their swamp buggies and get the hell out. This is why I'm keeping all the pencils in the other room, and why I'm not visiting the Corner in the near future.
• I swear I ran into the article on my way to the Obituaries: Ellen DeGeneres, serial puppy abandoner. Who could have guessed?
And who could anticipate that the bandwagon of a celebrity in mid-public meltdown would prove to be missing a wheel?
If Nancy Pelosi is finished (for the moment) apologizing because a Democrat said something mean, maybe we could get around to investigating how we came to this point before this point is so far in the future we're rewriting it as a victory. We ignored the sort of international diplomacy even the most gun-totin' previous administration had heeded (to some extent, at least) in order to make in into Iraq by the timetable Bush's puppetmasters had set in 1999. By contrast we made a deal with Musharraf, a tin-horn dictator with a known conflict of interest (to put it nicely) and a track record of passing out nuclear weapons technology like trick-or-treat candy, despite the fact that a) we didn't need to, and b) we knew it wouldn't do us any good unless we got bin-Laden in the first place. Lord knows, the neos were (and still are) capable of imagining anything, and Lord knows they've got a soft spot for a man in uniform, but still.... And I don't care how blind you are, the refusal to take the time to get Turkey on board the Coalition Choo-Choo was a blunder obvious at the time, and not just because we had to reroute troop carriers and reformulate our well-vetted war plans. I mean, shit, this administration didn't know where the oil is? The Kurds seem to be the one cultural or religious sub-group we can be sure the President did know about before the invasion. We went to war for purely partisan political reasons, and on a timetime designed for maximum electoral effect, Madam Speaker. The real outrage is that hearing he enjoys it is the worst thing that'll happen to George W. Bush.
• With all due respect for people facing terrible hardships, I would rather hammer pencils up both auditory canals, pointy part first, than listen to any more wildfire coverage, which--in rather stark contrast to the equivalent period in Katrina coverage, which ran, as I recall it, "The Coloreds are stealin' TVs! The Coloreds are stealin' TVs!"--has amounted to a sort of enormous electronic group hug and complimentary unlimited salad bar. I actually heard someone last night saying that there hadn't been any looting (!), and I've heard at least a half-dozen times, without trying to, how quickly aid is arriving compared to Katrina, as though this proves American Has Learned Her Lesson. Bosh. It underlines the fact that the Katrina response lagged--as did any Press recognition of the human scale of the tragedy--because we weren't exactly 100% sure we cared. One of the wealthiest states in the Union is prepared for a seasonally-occurring natural disaster; the Gulf Coast--three of our six poorest states--wasn't prepared for one of the most devastating hurricanes ever to make landfall. And our news hairdos identify with people losing their homes, but wondered why New Orleans' flood victims didn't all jump in their swamp buggies and get the hell out. This is why I'm keeping all the pencils in the other room, and why I'm not visiting the Corner in the near future.
• I swear I ran into the article on my way to the Obituaries: Ellen DeGeneres, serial puppy abandoner. Who could have guessed?
And who could anticipate that the bandwagon of a celebrity in mid-public meltdown would prove to be missing a wheel?
Tuesday, October 23
Fred Takes The Gloves Off, Loses One; Wife Vows To Sew Them To His Snowsuit Before Next Debate
THE once-sputtering Fred Thompson (R-TV) Presidential campaign, buoyed by recent polls showing him pulling even nationally with Joe Biden, unveiled a new tactic in Sunday night's debate (co-sponsored by long-time business associates FOX News and the State of Florida): emphasizing Thompson's superior ability to remain out of touch with the vast majority of Americans.
On a night that saw open sniping break out among all the "leading" Republican candidates, Thompson fired first. “Mayor Giuliani believes in federal funding for abortion,” he said. “He believes in sanctuary cities. He’s for gun control. He supported Mario Cuomo, a liberal Democrat, against a Republican who was running for governor, then opposed the governor’s tax cuts when he was there.”
After pausing in vain for the applause to die down, Thompson continued. "And, sure, most Americans support those things, and they're looking for someone who can rise above the stultifyingly stupid partisan politics of the sort which insists I'm a viable candidate. But those are not the values of the people who conduct elections in Florida. They aren't the values of the sort of people your great state permits to vote. And they aren't the values of the dozens of decent, hard-working Americans who think Chris Wallace is a newsman. And I have to ask those people: 'Which of us do you imagine is better able to sleep through all of that for four years, waking only long enough to veto any legislation you tell me to?' "
Asked for a response, Giuliani fired back. “You know, Fred has his problems, too,” he said, going on to criticize Mr. Thompson, a lawyer, as “the single biggest obstacle to tort reform in the United States Senate,” suggesting that Giuliani mistakenly believes that Senators must be physically lifted out of their chairs in order to end a filibuster, a practice which was actually discarded in 1892 when it appeared WIlliam Howard Taft might mount a Senatorial campaign.
Duncan Hunter, the California assemblyman whose 52nd District is becoming more secure daily as all the America haters have their houses burned down, took the high road by sniping at former Democrat John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was President of the United States in a previous century, for not getting rid of Fidel Castro. "If I'd have been President, he'd have been out of there," Hunter declared. "I'd have contracted Mafia hitmen and sent him some poisoned cigars. I'm sure one of those would have worked." This momentarily shocked the rest of the candidates and the invitation-only crowd, all of whom thought Hunter dropped out five weeks ago.
The evening also included some actual criticism of actual contemporary Democrats as yet unkilled by right-wing death squads, as well as a touching standing ovation accorded to Senator John McCain for his admission that he'd missed Woodstock. This being the Republican party the reception was unsullied by any recognition of the irony of McCain being saluted for his patriotic service by a stateside audience which considers him a flaming liberal.
On a night that saw open sniping break out among all the "leading" Republican candidates, Thompson fired first. “Mayor Giuliani believes in federal funding for abortion,” he said. “He believes in sanctuary cities. He’s for gun control. He supported Mario Cuomo, a liberal Democrat, against a Republican who was running for governor, then opposed the governor’s tax cuts when he was there.”
After pausing in vain for the applause to die down, Thompson continued. "And, sure, most Americans support those things, and they're looking for someone who can rise above the stultifyingly stupid partisan politics of the sort which insists I'm a viable candidate. But those are not the values of the people who conduct elections in Florida. They aren't the values of the sort of people your great state permits to vote. And they aren't the values of the dozens of decent, hard-working Americans who think Chris Wallace is a newsman. And I have to ask those people: 'Which of us do you imagine is better able to sleep through all of that for four years, waking only long enough to veto any legislation you tell me to?' "
Asked for a response, Giuliani fired back. “You know, Fred has his problems, too,” he said, going on to criticize Mr. Thompson, a lawyer, as “the single biggest obstacle to tort reform in the United States Senate,” suggesting that Giuliani mistakenly believes that Senators must be physically lifted out of their chairs in order to end a filibuster, a practice which was actually discarded in 1892 when it appeared WIlliam Howard Taft might mount a Senatorial campaign.
Duncan Hunter, the California assemblyman whose 52nd District is becoming more secure daily as all the America haters have their houses burned down, took the high road by sniping at former Democrat John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was President of the United States in a previous century, for not getting rid of Fidel Castro. "If I'd have been President, he'd have been out of there," Hunter declared. "I'd have contracted Mafia hitmen and sent him some poisoned cigars. I'm sure one of those would have worked." This momentarily shocked the rest of the candidates and the invitation-only crowd, all of whom thought Hunter dropped out five weeks ago.
The evening also included some actual criticism of actual contemporary Democrats as yet unkilled by right-wing death squads, as well as a touching standing ovation accorded to Senator John McCain for his admission that he'd missed Woodstock. This being the Republican party the reception was unsullied by any recognition of the irony of McCain being saluted for his patriotic service by a stateside audience which considers him a flaming liberal.
Monday, October 22
A Dog And Pony Show, Minus The Pony
OKAY, so I'm a closet authoritarian. I was raised in a passive-aggressive church: theologically liberal, tolerant, forgiving, but also hair-splittingly doctrinaire, and guess which side got the most attention?
So that when something like the Ellen DeGeneres dog 'do worms its way into my consciousness my first impulse is to say, "Try obeying the fucking rules." And my second impulse is to consider that for a moment, then say, "Try obeying the fucking rules." And when Keith Olbermann, appearing in character as Mr. Exasperated Good Sense says, "Give the dog back to the little girl already!" my immediate thought is that it might be time you booked someone on your show to disagree with you once in a while, although my thinking that has not had any noticeable effect to this point.
Maybe it's not emotional; there are good solid reasons why "girl" "cute" and "puppy" should not, taken in any order, trump contract law. And while justice must be tempered with mercy, it shouldn't be tempered with Hallmark card sentimentality. It's beyond sloppy to ignore the reasons why a shelter operation requires a contract, and why that contract specifies the animal can't be transferred on a whim. BILL FUCKING FRIST, Mr. Olbermann? I have no knowledge of the particulars of this operation, but a logical assumption is that the welfare of the animal matters to some extent. When we adopted Larry I managed to get in line behind a woman who wanted to argue (for five minutes) that she needed to have the cat in question declawed (to save her furniture, she kept explaining), despite the fact that the prohibition was item #2 on the contract (which spelled out why), and despite the fact that she was in a pet store where, for about the same amount of money as she was paying in adoption fees she could have purchased a cat she could have declawed, defurred, and given breast implants with no impediment except her bank balance and tiny intellect. I don't know what comparable, lifelong, blindingly-painful indignities are visited upon canines, aside from matching sweater and hair ribbon sets, but it's obvious why a "no-transfer" clause is written into an adoption agreement, and maybe we could save a few tears for the sake of unwanted animals tortured in the pursuit of longer-lasting hair coloration.
I don't know the details, and I'm prevented from learning anything further by the fact that I fucking refuse to read--or care--about Ellen DeGeneres' personal problems, so whether the matter could have been settled to everyone's satisfaction, outside the glare of publicity, I do not know. I do know it couldn't be once DeGeneres used her popular syndicated talk show as a bully pulpit, a fact which seemed to escape Olbermann beyond the cheap laugh provided by the video of her clumsy execution. She wants to go all weepy over the plight of Palestinian refugees or Israeli settlers, fine. She can turn on the waterworks for Gitmo prisoners or against Islamofascism; that's up to her viewers to evaluate. Using her show to pressure a butcher for selling her fatty pork chops, or complain if someone hauls her into small-claims court is beyond the pale.
I was keeping all this to myself--okay, I may have vented a teensy bit to my Poor Wife when the major details were rehashed in a promo for one of those execrable "entertainment" shows--but this morning I was cleaning up the three or four dozen browser windows I'd left open over the weekend when I happened to refresh Dean Esmay's site rather than close it, and I wound up chasing his link to The Ballad of Amber Dauge, the latest in Right-wing educational outrage stories driven by mindless local reporting from an upper-middle-class perspective. Ms Dauge, a high-school freshman, ran afoul of the Goose Creek High zero-tolerance weapons policy when a hapless butter knife fell out of her locker. She was suspended and recommended for expulsion, thus becoming the latest folk hero in the Whatever Happened to Common Sense campaign which oddly focuses its energy on "cute" "girls" with "puppies".
I suppose we should be thankful she wasn't packing Christmas-themed cutlery or we'd never hear the end of it.
Now, first, if you bother the read the linked story you may notice that it's remarkably one-sided. The particulars come from Amber; her mother objects to the paperwork timeline; and her father pops up to opine about the limitations of Zero Tolerance as a concept. But there's not word one from the school, its administrators, or the district. Which is always the case, because they aren't permitted to comment as the innocent young student is locked inside an airless cattle car on the Uncaring School Board Bureaucratic Railroad.
But this is not the way it works, and we assume even a teevee news-gathering operation knows it. No public school district serving any area of the country that has electricity can be cavalier about expulsion. There's generally at least two levels of appeal before an expulsion takes place, and the possibility of legal challenge once that runs its course, during which time the student remains in class. (Such rigors are part of the reason Zero Tolerance is spelled out in the first place.) If that's not the case in Berkeley county someone needs to disabuse them of old notions. If it is, then, the story is sensationalized as well as slanted.
I'm married to a teacher, and I'm the last person who'll ever tell you that school administrations are unfailingly wise or even competent. But then I'm also from Indianapolis, and I've watched as the local media remained silent as de jure crypto-segregation robbed our poorest schools of funds, then hopped aboard the Our Schools Are Failing bandwagon with attendant Blackboard Jungle subtext (at one point in the 80s the fact that a white student was punched by a black one was an above the fold story that lasted a week or more; in my day, absent the race angle, we called that Another Day in Gym Class). This sort of coverage went on unimpeded for a decade, until shortly after changing housing patterns and statewide testing removed some of the suburbs' protective coloration. It is still the case that local education reporting focuses on county schools, test scores, and police runs while football Fridays feature sportscasters touring the mega-schools of the white-iced doughnut counties in a helicopter whose annual operating costs exceed the total IPS extra-curricular activities budget.
Zero-tolerance programs in schools are by and large the result of televised sensationalism and the increasing pressure on public schools to respond to it after the fashion of the modern public relations campaign. And there is "zero" tolerance, where there actually is, in part because that makes good PR copy (the new Dress Code for Indianapolis Public Schools--which essentially requires children to dress as if they were working at Best Buy--was universally applauded by local teleprompter readers thrilled that baggy-pantsed ghetto dwellers they occasionally glimpse through their SUV's windshields would be learning sartorial restraint, if not algebra), but mostly because it's the only way to fairly enforce the rules. Either a butter knife is a weapon, or it isn't. Either Amber Dauge, cute puppy-owner, is prohibited from carrying one or she's not, but if she isn't then no one is. There's no rational way to write a rule covering only those people the News4 Team finds acceptable targets.
So that when something like the Ellen DeGeneres dog 'do worms its way into my consciousness my first impulse is to say, "Try obeying the fucking rules." And my second impulse is to consider that for a moment, then say, "Try obeying the fucking rules." And when Keith Olbermann, appearing in character as Mr. Exasperated Good Sense says, "Give the dog back to the little girl already!" my immediate thought is that it might be time you booked someone on your show to disagree with you once in a while, although my thinking that has not had any noticeable effect to this point.
Maybe it's not emotional; there are good solid reasons why "girl" "cute" and "puppy" should not, taken in any order, trump contract law. And while justice must be tempered with mercy, it shouldn't be tempered with Hallmark card sentimentality. It's beyond sloppy to ignore the reasons why a shelter operation requires a contract, and why that contract specifies the animal can't be transferred on a whim. BILL FUCKING FRIST, Mr. Olbermann? I have no knowledge of the particulars of this operation, but a logical assumption is that the welfare of the animal matters to some extent. When we adopted Larry I managed to get in line behind a woman who wanted to argue (for five minutes) that she needed to have the cat in question declawed (to save her furniture, she kept explaining), despite the fact that the prohibition was item #2 on the contract (which spelled out why), and despite the fact that she was in a pet store where, for about the same amount of money as she was paying in adoption fees she could have purchased a cat she could have declawed, defurred, and given breast implants with no impediment except her bank balance and tiny intellect. I don't know what comparable, lifelong, blindingly-painful indignities are visited upon canines, aside from matching sweater and hair ribbon sets, but it's obvious why a "no-transfer" clause is written into an adoption agreement, and maybe we could save a few tears for the sake of unwanted animals tortured in the pursuit of longer-lasting hair coloration.
I don't know the details, and I'm prevented from learning anything further by the fact that I fucking refuse to read--or care--about Ellen DeGeneres' personal problems, so whether the matter could have been settled to everyone's satisfaction, outside the glare of publicity, I do not know. I do know it couldn't be once DeGeneres used her popular syndicated talk show as a bully pulpit, a fact which seemed to escape Olbermann beyond the cheap laugh provided by the video of her clumsy execution. She wants to go all weepy over the plight of Palestinian refugees or Israeli settlers, fine. She can turn on the waterworks for Gitmo prisoners or against Islamofascism; that's up to her viewers to evaluate. Using her show to pressure a butcher for selling her fatty pork chops, or complain if someone hauls her into small-claims court is beyond the pale.
I was keeping all this to myself--okay, I may have vented a teensy bit to my Poor Wife when the major details were rehashed in a promo for one of those execrable "entertainment" shows--but this morning I was cleaning up the three or four dozen browser windows I'd left open over the weekend when I happened to refresh Dean Esmay's site rather than close it, and I wound up chasing his link to The Ballad of Amber Dauge, the latest in Right-wing educational outrage stories driven by mindless local reporting from an upper-middle-class perspective. Ms Dauge, a high-school freshman, ran afoul of the Goose Creek High zero-tolerance weapons policy when a hapless butter knife fell out of her locker. She was suspended and recommended for expulsion, thus becoming the latest folk hero in the Whatever Happened to Common Sense campaign which oddly focuses its energy on "cute" "girls" with "puppies".
I suppose we should be thankful she wasn't packing Christmas-themed cutlery or we'd never hear the end of it.
Now, first, if you bother the read the linked story you may notice that it's remarkably one-sided. The particulars come from Amber; her mother objects to the paperwork timeline; and her father pops up to opine about the limitations of Zero Tolerance as a concept. But there's not word one from the school, its administrators, or the district. Which is always the case, because they aren't permitted to comment as the innocent young student is locked inside an airless cattle car on the Uncaring School Board Bureaucratic Railroad.
But this is not the way it works, and we assume even a teevee news-gathering operation knows it. No public school district serving any area of the country that has electricity can be cavalier about expulsion. There's generally at least two levels of appeal before an expulsion takes place, and the possibility of legal challenge once that runs its course, during which time the student remains in class. (Such rigors are part of the reason Zero Tolerance is spelled out in the first place.) If that's not the case in Berkeley county someone needs to disabuse them of old notions. If it is, then, the story is sensationalized as well as slanted.
I'm married to a teacher, and I'm the last person who'll ever tell you that school administrations are unfailingly wise or even competent. But then I'm also from Indianapolis, and I've watched as the local media remained silent as de jure crypto-segregation robbed our poorest schools of funds, then hopped aboard the Our Schools Are Failing bandwagon with attendant Blackboard Jungle subtext (at one point in the 80s the fact that a white student was punched by a black one was an above the fold story that lasted a week or more; in my day, absent the race angle, we called that Another Day in Gym Class). This sort of coverage went on unimpeded for a decade, until shortly after changing housing patterns and statewide testing removed some of the suburbs' protective coloration. It is still the case that local education reporting focuses on county schools, test scores, and police runs while football Fridays feature sportscasters touring the mega-schools of the white-iced doughnut counties in a helicopter whose annual operating costs exceed the total IPS extra-curricular activities budget.
Zero-tolerance programs in schools are by and large the result of televised sensationalism and the increasing pressure on public schools to respond to it after the fashion of the modern public relations campaign. And there is "zero" tolerance, where there actually is, in part because that makes good PR copy (the new Dress Code for Indianapolis Public Schools--which essentially requires children to dress as if they were working at Best Buy--was universally applauded by local teleprompter readers thrilled that baggy-pantsed ghetto dwellers they occasionally glimpse through their SUV's windshields would be learning sartorial restraint, if not algebra), but mostly because it's the only way to fairly enforce the rules. Either a butter knife is a weapon, or it isn't. Either Amber Dauge, cute puppy-owner, is prohibited from carrying one or she's not, but if she isn't then no one is. There's no rational way to write a rule covering only those people the News4 Team finds acceptable targets.
Sunday, October 21
Friday, October 19
Professional Wordsmithing: A Guide To Being Teached By The Experts
It is true that 54% of the electorate is composed of women...
--Peggy Noonan
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