House of Eratosthenes

Via New York Daily News, via Trying To Grok, via Wizbang, via Rick, we learn of a truthy article about Barack Obama — or more precisely, about his campaign. It’s fascinating because it mentions what everybody knows, and nobody else says out loud. And in case you missed it, spells it out for you in the parting shot at the end.

Singles will check out eligible candidates at Obama rally
By Jo Piazza
Thursday, September 27th 2007, 3:18 PM

Looking for a date for Friday night? Want someone to read thepoliticker.com with and talk to about Eliot Spitzer’s fiscal policy late into the night?

Like-minded city singles are looking to tonight’s Barack Obama rally as more than just a politically charged soiree: It’ll be a raging pickup scene.
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Even the invite for the event reads like a singles bash:

“Hope hits the Big Apple! Join us at Jay-Z’s 4-0/40 Club on Thursday as we ride the winds of change from the hottest rally in New York. Move to the music, socialize with friends, and let your voice be heard as we celebrate with audacity.”
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One ardent Obama supporter (who declined to give his name because he works in politics) says he’ll attend both the rally and the after-party, and he doesn’t expect to be going home alone.

He’s confident for a reason.

“Let’s face it: Leftie girls are easy,” he says.

Ah…now, let’s be fair. It’s not so much about the donk girls being easy — although, it would be dishonest or foolish to dismiss that supposition out-of-hand. But as any experienced straight fella knows, and you don’t repeat this often in a co-ed environment: Methods work. Females of all political persuasions hate this, but truth doesn’t often deplore what the ladies deplore, much as they’d like it to. Methods work, guys who use methods are far “luckier” than guys who do not, and that nonsense about “eyes met from across the room, and we just clicked in a magic moment,” etc., has just about as much basis in reality as your average unicorn. When a lady says this, what she’s saying is that her paramour managed to think circles around her, to “fool” her if you will. Usually, with little or no actual deceipt, since when it works that well it means the damsel gave her tacit endorsement.

Simply put, the single fella has to have an angle.

Angles are arranged into families, just as species are arranged into phyla.

And the upshot is — this has been true since ancient times — there is no aphrodesiac more powerful than the “you and me against the world” thing. It ties in with just about everything on a maiden’s mind when she’s looking for a suitor. She’s programmed by the forces of evolution, or by God, or both, to make the world work the way she wants to work, through her uterus. She gets a vote, just one vote, on how the next generation is to molded and shaped, based on how she will splice her genes.

And so the appeal of a prospective suitor is equivalent to the appeal of the opportunity he brings. No opportunity is more appealing than the fleeting one, so the message is simple: We belong together, because you and I “get” a simple concept the rest of the world is too stupid to figure out. I’m the Adam to your Eve.

What is particularly embarrassing about this particular snippet to Obama The Walks-On-Water candidate, is that this superficial, utterly non-politics-related forum is going to work better with his events than with those aligned with any other candidate. Personally, I’ve done exactly this with the political movements on the other side of the aisle, many times. With mixed success.

It’s a little more complicated with rallies and candidates on the “right” side. The reasons why, are things I don’t wish to inspect closely here; they should be self-evident. If you don’t really care about re-shaping the world as much as you pretend to, and you just want something easy, the left side is the path of least resistance.

Don't Forget to Pre-Soak, Honey And you’re certainly not going to head down to a Hillary rally. I mean who knows, things might actually work out over a long term. What guy wants to spend half a century washing dishes by hand? Edwards is out, too. He’s a rich tort lawyer who has produced nothing, pretending to do battle on behalf of hard-working poor people, against rich people just like him. You have to be pretty stupid to fall for something like that, and when a woman is that stupid, she gets boring pretty quick. Hillary out, Edwards out. That leaves Obama.

As an added bonus, I would have to imagine the ladies there have been pre-selected for you. “You and I get it, nobody else does, let’s start changing what we both want changed without discussing what we’re going to change it to” — that’s Obama’s campaign theme right there. Anybody smart enough to see that one coming, isn’t going to be at an Obama bash.

It would have to be like some magical fishing trip, in which the fish jump into your boat. And somehow gut and clean themselves.

But if we can take a moment to inspect Obama’s political prospects and veer away from the dating scene for just a few paragraphs: This is why a lot of people don’t take him seriously. America, as a country, has a rich history and there is a core theme running throughout that history. In our culture, we do things the easy way for as long as we can…until it can be ascertained the easy way is going to be less rewarding than the hard way. And then, to our credit, we do things the hard way.

It is the shining jewel to the American crown. It is our schtick, you might say. We love our Starbuck’s foo-foo drinks and our big comfy air-conditioned cars and our water and dry-cleaning delivery services — but when you can get something over the long term by doing something tough, that you can’t get by doing it easy, we’re the first to see it and we are the most consistent in acting on it.

The countries all over the rest of the world cluck their tongues and call us stupid and talk about how much they resent us, and we just keep plugging away. What they don’t understand about us, after all, they’re never going to learn.

These single fellas showing up at the Obama rallies who just want to get their wickers wet, it seems to me, are emblematic of the Obama campaign as a whole. They want to do things the easy way, and are therefore “ardent supporters” of a campaign that is all about doing things the easy way. Ooh, we got a candidate who is the “real deal” and is articulate and well-spoken. Let’s get him elected and then figure out what he’s actually going to do.

So Obama, as a political phenomenon as well as a social one — means this: The destination is arbitrary, the ease of the journey is what truly matters.

This is as un-American as un-American can possibly be. It is antithetical to everything in our legacy that is significant and good. But I don’t say that to pass judgment on it, I’m just pointing out something about the very nature of the Obama campaign that dooms it’s chances and limits it’s life-expectancy. The plant is seriously mismatched from the surrounding soil. Obama has a commanding presence and can deliver empty platitudes just as well as anybody else, and is running for exactly the right office — in the wrong country. He’s a short-circuit, a traversing of the path-of-least-resistance, campaigning within a society that isn’t terribly wild about such things.

To recap: Yeah, we do like “easy,” as much as, maybe even more than, any other country on the globe. But we like to get things even more — be they easy or hard. We want to be assured we’re going to get everything the easy way, that we’d get if we did things the hard way. All Americans insist on this. Even our liberals insist on it. They just can’t see as far down the road as normal people can. The moment will come when Obama has to make those assurances, and that’s when his candidacy will end.

But in the meantime, I hope those horny guys get lucky. That’s about all they’re getting.

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On Women Writing About Men
Saturday, September 29th, 2007

Buck didn’t like this bank ad, which personally I found to be about as amusing as it was supposed to have been. Better than most TV commercials, not as good as a Super Bowl ad, but okay all around. Something about it really rubbed him the wrong way though…something to do with naked women. Well, I’m not going to pretend I can’t see his point, since I can. Get into the frontward-located gray matter of a guy’s brain, and you’re going to find…a doppleganger of himself watching TV just for the sake of watching TV? Really?

Looks like a specimen of the fairer sex was retained for writing ad copy on a topic completely outside her expertise.

Speaking of which, Buck went on to find a Snopes article, and dealt the famous urban-legend web site some overdue criticism. The same sin committed all over again, really…the subject is how often guys think about sex, and to figure out what makes us tick, the famous urban legend debunkers entrusted the question to Barbara. I have to take Buck’s side again on this one. David Mikkelson is right-freakin’-there. David…Barbara. Husband…wife. Boy…girl. The subject is how the gentlemen think, and what bubbles to the front lobes of their melons, and how often. Barbara gets to write this one up? Why? What happened, was David in a horrible accident or something? If so, couldn’t you just bring in a temp?

On Snopes being overdue for some kind of a smackdown, my comments on Buck’s blog, stand. I don’t think they’re due for a big one…their reputation for diligence and accuracy is well-earned, overall. Sometimes, I just get the impression they don’t know their limits. Putting the lady in charge of writing about how men think, well, that’s just one more example.

She Who Does Her Laundry With Me, and I, were watching some over-sickly-sweet glurgy movie in which Katie Holmes goes out on a date with some studly dude…and I was given cause to think about this when the studly dude started telling Katie about the first time he rode his bike without training wheels. I checked the credits — under writing, you have girl-boy. Jessica and Jerry. You know, I’m inclined to think Jessica was responsible for that line. Us dudes, we do not talk about the first time we went riding without training wheels, when we’re out with our dates. Not on the first date, anyway. We don’t talk about how scared we were to go to kindergarten, or how we cried when we watched Ol’ Yeller, or Mom kissing the first boo-boos we got on our knees. We do not go there. Not gonna happen.

Of course, such movie credits would have me to believe Michael Crichton wrote this movie, with the help of some dude named Paul Attanasio and…yeah, sorry. Not buying it. You may recall there is this scene in which Demi Moore gives a hummer to Michael Douglas, and he’s like desperately fighting her off, to no avail, because she forces herself on him, and she finishes up while he yells no, no, no, no, no…

Nope. A man didn’t write that. I’ll bet my bottom dollar.

And that goes for this movie, while we’re talking about penises. Four writers. Four masculine names. These four studs put together a story, a movie is built around it, and in that movie a guy goes into an airport lavatory and starts talking audibly to his wang when he is by himself. Oh, I do believe there are a lot of chicks out there who would like to think we do this. It simply isn’t the case. Now, if the credits say four guys wrote this thing, well maybe there’s a grain of truth to it. But there had to be some help from somewhere. This project went co-ed, be it credited that way, or not. Otherwise, there’s just no way you’re going to have a guy standing around in solitude, getting ready to pee, talking out loud to his dick. I repeat: We don’t do this. We just don’t.

Next up, we have this fine thriller written by a couple of guys. It’s probably good enough to own, and maybe I should, I just never got around to buying it. One problem: The guy makes up with his girlfriend after promising never, ever, ever, ever, EVER to cheat on her, AGAIN. And then the psychotic chick dresses herself up as the girlfriend, sneaks into the guy’s hotel room and starts going down on him. He’s aaaaaaalmost there, and she reveals her true identity to him. He’s horrified, of course. Horrified! But just then, he finishes.

Um…you know, having not been in that particular situation, I’m not sure whether I can state definitively what a guy would or wouldn’t do. But it doesn’t seem credible, and it is highly doubtful the scene would play out the way it was shown on film. Could it really have been written by a couple of guys, directed by yet another guy, and assembled into the product that was delivered? Maybe. Perhaps. But obviously, the product was intended to appeal to women, and it’s probably fair to say it held more allegiance to female whim than to reality. To the feminine mindset, maybe this seems realistic, but to us dudes there is an abundance of suspension-of-disbelief taking place here to keep the story moving forward. Just can’t see it. The psycho-bitch could have finished the job and then let the guy know what was up. It would have worked just as well.

I could probably add a few more items to this list if I really worked on it. It seems, though, that just about everything, writing-wise, is credited to the guys, leaving a lot of questions unanswered. I suspect shenanigans are going on here, for reasons that may be now be evident. There’s something peculiar going on when women start writing about how men behave when women are not around; a lot of them seem to lack the ability to say, even to themselves, “this is just my opinion, but…” They know what they know, and they aren’t the least bit concerned about being wrong. They see us doing stuff, they describe what they see, and even if it’s a work of fiction it’s played out in front of a real man and we say — the who the what now? Nuh-huh, not me, not any guy I know.

Nevertheless, I’m willing to seriously entertain the possibility that guys really wrote all this nonsense. To entertain the remote possibility, I should say. With all those examples…except the one about Demi. Not buying that. Who thought it was a good idea to leave that the way it was, anyway?

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Phony Soldiers
Saturday, September 29th, 2007

Well well well. The donks are trying to make some hay out of Rush Limbaugh’s Phony Soldiers remark. There’s an effort in the House of Representatives to get a resolution going condemning him for his remarks.

Obviously, this is all about equal-time, what with that stupid General Betray Us ad backfiring so impressively. You dare to make “Move On From Some Selected Things And Not Other Things Dot Org” regretful or embarrassed about their ad…which seemed like such a great idea to them at the time…why, they’ve got to be able to do the same thing to Limbaugh, right? They’re entitled to a “freebie,” right?

All in the name of equal time?

Well…let’s take a look at this. Rush Limbaugh is failing to appreciate the service of all the soldiers, is that it? The soldiers he calls “phony soldiers,” are soldiers who disagree with his personal opinions.

I guess the closest parallel I can find to this, is the liberal donk who claims to “support the troops but not their mission.” I specifically brought this issue up with one of them one time. He was trying to start a dialog…snicker…yeah, in that way donks start dialogs. You know. To finish them. He wanted to start a dialog on whether it was possible to support the troops while opposing the mission upon which those troops were sent. Obviously, to bully and intimidate and cudgel anyone within earshot toward believing in the affirmative.

Along came the sound bite — I support the troops, I just oppose what they’ve been sent to do.

I thought it appropriate to pose a simple inquiry. I really wanted to know. Do you support all of the troops? And he was like…well, what do you mean by that? I said, I mean, even the troops who don’t agree with you about the mission. Some of these troops about which I keep hearing — the ones who “re-up” when they don’t have to. The ones who believe so strongly in what they’re doing, that they volunteer. Maybe…the ones who voted for President Bush twice. Do you support those troops? Or when you say “the troops,” do you mean only the ones you happen to like?

He changed the subject.

A year later, here we are…being instructed to hold Rush Limbaugh in some kind of contempt for failing to support all the troops, even the ones who disagree with him.

Rush has often been heard to say he doesn’t need equal time, he is equal time. If that’s true anywhere, seems to me it’s especially true here. From what I’ve been able to figure out, our liberal donks have been selectively picking and choosing which troops to support, since the very first one among them stepped forward and said “I support the troops.”

And I’ve noticed this is true across the board. Anytime a donk says “I support free health care…affordable college tuition…a transparent government…clean air and water…for all” you get back such an interesting deer-in-headlights look when you pose the simple follow-up: “Even folks who vote Republican?”

It brings a smile to my face watching them scramble. But kind of a sad one. With liberals, everything depends on definitions. Even miniscule tidbits with supposedly ironclad non-negotiable meanings…like “all” and “everybody.” And “is.”

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Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XI
Saturday, September 29th, 2007

…but this LiveJournal user stumbled across our list of Things We Know, and made a comment that we’re “worth a look.” Or that the list is, anyway. He liked TIKs #37, #65 and #78.

It would seem from the resulting traffic blip that a few peers agreed with him.

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A Quiet Triumph May Be Brewing
Saturday, September 29th, 2007

And now for something completely different: Reasonable opinions about the War on Terror, based on concretely established and objectively evaluated fact.

At this point, can you handle it?

You may remember a couple of months ago a report that al Qaeda and its’ affiliates had abandoned their training camps in Pakistan along the Afghan border. The initial report caused quite a blog storm but soon the mystery was forgotten. According to AI [Internet Anthropologist], which links to references for all of this, the US got fed up with not being able to reach al Qaeda inside Pakistan. Then a few months back the US government told the Pakistani government that we had the coordinates for twenty-nine terror training bases and in a week we will be destroying them (perhaps on Cheney’s visit this summer). The intent was to drive the terrorists from those camps so we could get to them.

It worked. That’s why those camps emptied out.

So the US left the terrorists an escape route into Tora Bora. Once they had detected a large group of al Qaeda at the fortress and the likelihood of High Value Targets as determined by large scale security detachments, the US dropped the curtain on the escape routes back into Pakistan. We have been pounding the hell out of them for weeks in near complete secrecy.

None of this is proof, but it’s worth watching, and certainly a lot more informative than talking points from Wolf Blitzer. Or John Stewart, of the White House press corps, or a bunch of phony forged papers from Dan-o.

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A Paragraph
Friday, September 28th, 2007

The date of publication of Atlas Shrugged is the twelfth of October. October 12, 1957…fifty years ago. Here’s where I found out about that…

Even though many reviewers weren’t impressed with “Atlas Shrugged,” it still left a major mark. Ayn Rand inspired many, many people; most of them highschool or college students when they first read it. Although it’s not a literary masterwork, it still sells some 150,000 copies each year. People’s lives continue to be changed by it. And for that, Rand should be respected.

Damn straight. And it’s a sad, tragic thing that it is become more and more relevant to our lives with every passing day.

You know about the world of Atlas Shrugged? It takes place in a dystopian future in an unspecified year, in a sort of alternate universe wherein the world is caught up in an industrial revolution, but one in which air freight was never possible and never implemented. In this world, the entire world has gone drunk on socialism, and America remains the sole hold-out…descending threateningly into the molten scrap heap that has already engulfed all the other countries.

I’ll quote one paragraph. Just one. If this doesn’t raise some eerie similarities with the reality plane you get to hear about each evening when you click on the news, each morning when you read the paper…well, you should probably move on to the next subject. But give it a read first:

We’re all one big family, they told us, we’re all in this together. But you don’t all stand working an acetylene torch ten hours a day - together, and you don’t all get a bellyache - together. What’s whose ability and which of whose needs come first? When it’s all in one pot, you can’t let any man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim that he needs a yacht - and if his feelings is all you have to go by, he might prove it, too. Why not? If it’s not right for me to own a car until I’ve worked myself into a hospital ward, earning a car for every loafer and every naked savage on earth - why can’t he demand a yacht from me, too, if I still have the ability and have not collapsed? No? He can’t? Then why can he demand that I go without cream for my coffee until he’s replastered his living room?…Oh well…Well, anyway, it was decided that nobody had the right to judge his own need or ability. We *voted* on it. Yes ma’am, we voted on it in a public meeting twice a year. How else could it be done? Do you care to think what would happen at such a meeting? It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars - rotten, whining, sniveling beggars, all of us, because no man could claim his pay as his rightful earning, he had no rights and no earnings, his work didn’t belong to him, it belonged to ‘the family,’ and they owed him nothing in return, and the only claim he had on them was his ‘need’ - so he had to beg in public for relief from his needs, like any lousy moocher, listing all his troubles and miseries, down to his patched drawers and his wife’s head colds, hoping that ‘the family’ would throw him the alms. He had to claim miseries, because its miseries, not work, that had become the coin of the realm - so it turned into a contest among six thousand panhandlers, each claiming that *his* need was worse than his brother’s. How else could it be done? Do you care to guess what happened, what sort of men kept quiet, feeling shame, and what sort got away with the jackpot?

See anything familiar?

If you think you do, or if you think you might…it’s six bucks.

Timeless. I wish it were not.

Update: Here, the date of publication is listed as October 10.

Should try to pin this down. Whatever the exact date is, over the next two weeks there will likely be a mild uptick in the hubbub among the group-minded about what a dreadfully tedious book it is, and everyone should be advised to pronounce it juvenile and boring without actually reading much of it, or any at all.

With it’s tangled hodgepodge of interrelated sociopolitical themes, this “magnum opus” is actually pretty simple. It’s a manifesto that says some people are horrified at the idea of accomplishing something useful, or allowing anyone else to do so. And that in any organization or society in a decline, those people end up running things. Excellence and mediocrity switch places. This makes the decline more certain and inescapable.

I’m repeatedly instructed to believe, especially after having read the book, that I should find it to be a silly, meandering and pointless treatise, invariably by people who have not read it. Basically…that I should dismiss it. What keeps getting in my way, is that the core theme dovetails so nicely with what I’ve observed about people myself: When they do little to distinguish themselves, they get peevish and cranky about the very idea of someone else doing it.

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Unhappy Marriage
Friday, September 28th, 2007

David Limbaugh makes a lot of good points.

The [crazy leftist donk] base, typified by groups like MoveOn.org, has no choice but to accept the Democratic Party as its vehicle to promote the liberal policy agenda. There is no other viable alternative. In turn, party leaders must cater to the far left because of its indispensable funding and grassroots contributions.

While there are many blind followers in the base, there are also plenty of savvy operators who are fully aware of the massive deception Democratic leaders have perpetrated on the American people concerning Iraq.

They’re too shrewd not to understand that John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, to name a prominent few, have been lying through their teeth in saying they were duped into supporting the Iraq war resolution.

Other than their delusions about Bush having stolen the 2000 election, nothing motivates the base more than the carefully crafted fable that Bush “lied” us into war. You cannot be worthy of the left’s consideration unless you fully embrace this propaganda.

My take on it? He’s being unfair in singling out the donks, since unhappy marriages is what successful politics are all about. Like millions of others, I’m in a pretty “unhealthy marriage” with the Bush administration right now, and I’m sure your average rabid leftist donk is going to lose no time in pointing that out should Limbaugh’s article find it’s way under that donk’s nose.

And the wombat-rabies-bollywonkers crazy donk would be quite correct.

But in his typical lawyerly fashion, and in this context I mean that as a compliment, he dissects the unholy alliance with an admirable diligence and the slicing-and-dicing job ends up neat, thorough, and educational.

The only problem that remains is how to warn the mainstream halfwits that this is what they’re ready to elect next year. A bunch of freakin’ raving loons who show NO signs of executing an actual plan, any better than they did following the 2006 elections. Yes, politics is filled with unhappy marriages. But fer cryin’ out loud, there’s Romeo-and-Juliet unhappy marriages, and then there’s Claus and Sonny von Bulow unhappy marriages.

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Adorable, Until…
Thursday, September 27th, 2007

Thanks to blogger friend Phil for sending me this in an off line e-mail.

Hillary Clinton ‘could cost Democrats dear’
By Toby Harnden in Washington
Last Updated: 2:29am BST 27/09/2007

A leaked Democratic poll has suggested that Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner in the race for the party’s presidential nomination, could lose the 2008 election because of her “very polarised image”.

The survey by the Democratic pollsters Lake Research indicated that both Mrs Clinton and Barack Obama, second in the Democratic race, trailed Rudy Giuliani, the Republican front runner, in 31 swing congressional districts.

The private memo, leaked to The Washington Post, painted what researchers described as a “sobering picture” for Democrats who believe that President George W Bush’s disastrous favourability numbers almost guarantee they will capture the White House next year.

All party preference polls show that Democrats are much more popular than Republicans. But when the names of individual candidates are used, the gap narrows considerably.

“The images of the two early [Democratic] favourites are part of the problem,” the memo said.
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The poll found that Mrs Clinton, in particular, could damage the chances of congressional Democratic candidates on the ballot. The sensitivity of the issue was underlined by the reluctance of Democrats to discuss the survey.

“We’re not commenting on this poll,” said Daniel Gotoff, co-author of the memo accompanying the Lake Research poll. “It was leaked and obviously not by us.”

It really got me to thinking. If I was a donk party chieftain way high up, responsible for writing party platforms and doing the cool “kingmaker” stuff, figuring out who was going to get nominated…how would I handle this, exactly?

It’s a little awkward for them. See they’ve got this name for themselves…they don’t call themselves “donks,” they call themselves something that has to do with the ancient Greek word demos, for “The People.” And if you call them that but leave the “ic” off the end, they get really cranky — right before insisting you call the Boy Scouts a “hate group.” But for the donks to get out of this malaise they’re in, it seems there’s no avenue available to them except to go by that ancient Greek name, and start living up to it.

But see, they can’t do that. The People want a bunch of things the donks aren’t going to tolerate, let alone promote. Let us have guns. Stop reverse-discrimination on the basis of skin color. Build a border around the country that actually means something. Make public school students repeat grades until they pass the requirements academically…in English. Put the United Nations in the business of bringing food and medicine to those who need it — and nothing else — and put them in the position of supervised, not supervisor.

And, bring me the bodies of dead terrorists. The more the better. Preferably, a little singed around the edges with horrified expressions etched onto their dirty dead faces. But quantity over quality; the bigger the carcass pile, the better.

Take your glowbubble wormening and shove it. Drill in the Arctic. Lower my taxes. Get people off welfare. Let me listen to whatever radio station I think deserves my attention, and let those radio stations broadcast what they think will attract and hold my interest. Treat businesses more like they’re real people…which is what they are…and treat unions as if they’re not, since they aren’t.

They can’t do any of this. And so they are left to make noise about scandals that involve Republicans, so that those scandals end up toppling careers, and direct us to “move on” from scandals that involve donks, so that those scandals don’t.

They do other things to make their image all friendly and happy — and, in a grievous assault upon that Greek name by which they would choose to go, everything they do seems to begin and end with a shady smoke-filled back room handshake with the right people. Union bosses endorse the donk candidate in an important election, and then in so doing insist on being called “the police” or “the firemen.” Our print media journalists, also in the right place at the right time during the back room handshake deal, obediently comply. That funny Greek name, come to think on it, makes perfect sense — as long as you don’t interpret “The People” to mean all of the people. What it means is, the “right” people. Union thugs, crooked politicians, heads of states that sponsor terrorism, or in some other way fail to have our interests at heart. People antagonistic, for whatever reason, to capitalism. Gun-grabbing Nazis. The important thing is, all the definitions are laid out with the captains of all those teams…behind closed doors. Those “people.”

The riffraff, the hoi polloi, they’re just kind of a hydraulic fluid agent through which it’s all supposed to be made to happen.

But the donks do have this going for them — they are popular. They are much more popular than Republicans. Until they select a candidate, and then the worm turns. Any candidate.

How can I not be amused by this? They’ve clearly got something going in their favor right now, even if that something is limited to them simply not being Republicans. The ideas they have, the “principles” under which they operate, if you want to call ‘em that…loser.

Their candidates…bigger losers. We don’t like them because after all the money’s been spent making them likable, the candidates remain anything but. The worst part of it is that just before the candidates stop being likable, what they do to end their likability, has something to do with explaining what they plan to do after they win.

It must be awfully frustrating. Especially when you have that razor-thin window of opportunity after you’ve sent all these faux-grassroots voices out there with their phony bumper-sticker slogans, about so-and-so being “the real deal,” before so-and-so opens his or her mouth and spoils everything. That must be more frustrating than if you didn’t have that narrow window of political victory at all.

Hillary has a good defense here. Nominate her, and she can win — with good timing. If ballots are punched while people are still thinking about poor, poor Hillary and her husband cheating on her, and by golly it’s high time we had a woman in the White House, and oh she is so strong-willed just like someone on a Lifetime television movie airing on a Sunday night…but before they think about issues, and lying, and “I don’t recall,” and Rose Law Firm, and subpoenaed billing records…as long as the election takes place within that narrow window of time, she can win.

If it happens anywhere outside that narrow window, she’s a dead duck.

But the same is true of anybody else who could be nominated. It all demands careful handling and public relations. Very, very careful, with surgical precision…just like any other bad idea.

The other thing that impresses me about this, is that in spite of Thing I Know #212…

Some of the words that end with “ist” seem to support weighy, urgent ideas, but enjoy very little by way of definition, especially the ones tossed around over the last thirty years. Chauvinist. Racist. Feminist. People who use these words the most often, seem to be frustrated by something. Maybe they’re frustrated because nobody has any way of knowing exactly what it is they’re trying to say.

…there is something decidedly sexist about Hillary’s star appeal, and the primary force behind it. I’m referring to husband Bill’s chronic infidelity. Were it not for that, I wouldn’t be talking about her, and neither would anybody else.

Now, what would we be saying about a male candidate whose wife was screwing every pair of trousers in town because she had all the scruples of an alley cat? It’s not difficult at all to speculate, with remarkable confidence. We’d probably be abuzz with something like…how, if he can’t preside properly over his own household, does he dare to offer himself in equivalent service to his country. How good can a leader of anything be in a leadership position, when his wife sleeps with other guys? Something questioning his manhood, and his lack of willingness to stand up for it.

We certainly wouldn’t be cluck-clucking over how the poor dear fellow is so put-upon, and deserves to be President. I’m sure very few would be saying anything even remotely similar to that. Even fewer would admit to saying something like that.

People who like Hillary, are often heard to ask a question: “Is America ready for a woman to be President?” My counter-question is whether America is ready for a cuckold to be President…a male cuckold. And the fact is, the country is decidedly NOT. She won’t be. The cuckold’s other qualifications impeccable, unquestionable, polished to a mirror-finish, he wouldn’t last as long as a snowflake on a red hot stove.

But Hillary’s failure to keep her spouse happy — let’s face it, if she was a man, that’s exactly what we’d be calling it — isn’t just a stumbling block that has managed to stay out of her way. It helps her. It is a virtual qualification for the office she seeks.

Arguably, her only one.

Why it’s gotten Hillary this far, is something someone should be called-upon to explain. I’d love to hear the composition of it, although I imagine the substance of it wouldn’t hold much surprise. It says something about women, or more precisely, how they are perceived by those who hold themselves up as tireless champions fighting for the interests of women. And what it says, however it is phrased, can’t be good.

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Tough Guy
Thursday, September 27th, 2007

I don’t think they can come any tougher…unless maybe if you want to start talking abut that guy who hacked off his own arm when he got lost in the woods.

The “good” part is pretty much over by about 10 or 15 seconds into it, but it’s interesting watching this guy walk around when he shouldn’t be able to. Kind of looks like, while he was still airborne, the only thing going through his mind was “not again, this is seriously starting to piss me off.” If you freeze frame you’ll see he almost lands on his feet.

H/T to Miss Cellania. Incidentally, happy birthday to you.

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Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… X
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007

On Saturday morning, I had defined what I see are the two most important issues of next year’s elections, all-but-guaranteed to stay in those top two slots between now and then.

The single most important issue of the presidential elections next year: Who is going to bring me the the biggest pile of dead terrorist carcasses over the next four years?
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Coming in at a close second, and I do mean a close one, is a big package of interrelated sub-issues all knotted together. They have to do with the people who are actually proud to call themselves “liberals,” not in the classic sense, but in the post-modern sense…Are liberals crazy, or just stupid? Do we really have to let them vote even when they so obviously lack the level of maturity one would be expected to achieve by age eighteen?
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What exactly is this well-funded advocacy group that I continue to call “Move On From Some Things And Dwell Endlessly On Other Things Dot Org”? For whom do they speak? Now that we all understand they’re a bunch of all-but-certified nutcases, when they tell us their nutcase things are they speaking on behalf of Hillary? Obama? Edwards? Kerry? Kennedy? Anybody else who will be invested with the authority to decide important, life-altering things, should we opt to put the kiddies from the kiddie-table in charge again next year? What about Michael Moore, does he speak for anybody? How cozy is his relationship with the “Inmates Should Run The Asylum” party?

In posing this as an open question to be decided, I speak recklessly, since I speak for others. I gather many who feel the obligation of exercising their civic duties, are all-but-decided that the Republicans have been in charge long enough. But they aren’t getting a warm-fuzzy out of the prospect of putting the donks in the White House. They know there are consequences. They know, for four years at least, we’ll be buried in phony solutions to non-problems, sky-high inflation, race-baiting, feminist-weeping, tyrant-coddling.

For myself, it’s not an open question. It’s an item of concern.

And I’ll tell you what really concerns me about this, what really makes it almost as important — but not quite — as the “who’s gonna deliver the biggest number of dead-terrorist-bodies” issue. It’s the donks themselves. They aren’t ready to accuse me of sliming and slandering them; not some among them, anyway. These donks don’t disagree with me about what they are, or might be. To plagiarize Sally Field for just a second: They’re nuts. They’re really, really nuts.

My first reminder of this was not long at all in coming. Fellow Webloggin contributor Teri O’Brien managed to capture an item from the 9/11 anniversary that had smoothly flown in under my radar, which falls squarely into this second-most-important issue and in fact helps to highlight how important it really is. Veteran actor James Brolin, famous for a long and stellar movie career and for marrying whats-her-name, made just about as big an ass out of himself as could be managed under a tight schedule. Appearing on WPLR radio to promote his new film, The Hunting Party, he managed to get himself a little sidetracked. The film, you’ll notice, has something to do with the CIA not being able to find bad guys. Brolin, perhaps wishing for a peaceful domestic existence, or whatever, went out of his way to find some parallels in real-life — and the radio guys had to remind him what today’s date was.

Brolin thought this was worthy of a sarcastic, genuflecting comment: “Happy 9/11.” Too bad there wasn’t someone around to remind him he was really on the radio, and his words weren’t being confined to a cozy cloister of his crazy left-wing anti-war buddies, an audience to which I’m gathering he’s somewhat better accustomed. You decide:

Now, as I said, half-cocked brain-dead comments like this one, may or may not be representative of the donk party that wishes to be placed in charge of more things next year, and that, to me, is the open question on the second-most-important issue. What is a democrat? Is it someone who’s going to do what the electorate has in mind when it votes for democrats…just shave off the most prominent and offensive protrusions of the Republican platform, maybe save America from becoming a theocracy one more time? Rescue some little old ladies from having to choose between medicine and dog food?

I’m not asking about what registered democrat voters intend to have done when they are punching ballots. That and a buck-fifty will get you a coffee. I want to know what democrat leaders do when they are voted in. Are they all about repealing unwanted extremist conservative policies?

Or are they about a bunch of crazy crap. Like actor Brolin. Do they all live in their little tiny worlds, places where the worst attack ever launched against the United States since Pearl Harbor, and perhaps ever, is nothing more than inspiration for a sarcastic joke and a couple of yuks. In short, I’m wondering the same thing about Brolin that I wonder about Michael Moore. The donk activists, no doubt, will pour out of the woodwork with their “yes but” nonsense, e.g., “yes we all know that was offensive and absurd, but he makes some good points…”

Does Brolin represent the donk politicians who want to be put in charge of things next year?

Well in trying to answer that, I stumbled across this…

…and I would have to say, this is even more of a kick to the figurative solar plexus than the first item. He comes on The View, pretends to do a high-five with token Republican Hasselbeck, who dutifully falls for it…and then turns around and ingratiates himself with the “mainstream” with a not-so-humorous high-level anecdote about his background: All his relatives were Republicans, but he learned to think for himself.

Ouch! That’s gonna leave a mark!

And you don’t even have to ask for examples, either. The very next thing out of his mouth, is a plug for this website. This is what Brolin thinks about when he thinks for himself? Yes, it is…or that’s what Brolin wants me to think…assuming he’s ready and able to think through the messages he intends to convey, which is something I have to doubt for obvious reasons. But he seems pretty enthused about this goofy website. I didn’t see anything to the effect of a disclaimer, or limitation, or “just because I think you should hit that website doesn’t mean I agree with everything on it.” I saw nothing like that.

And the website is about all the usual bullshit. The towers were demolished from within, look at the puffs of smoke, inside job, thermite, pretext for war, blah blah blah.

So James Brolin, I must conclude, is enough of a crazy whackadoodle that he believes in the “Nine One One Was An Inside Job” line. He advertises it, in fact, to show how much he’s learned to think for himself since his grandmother tried to bully him into voting Republican. That’s some good independent thinking there, Jim.

And the donks who want to run for the White House…well, I still don’t know. This “inside job” stuff surfaces fairly often, and it’s comparatively rare that a donk candidate, for any office, will forcefully repudiate any of it. So is it an official — or all-but-official — platform of the donk party that there were no terrorists, and George W. Bush the big stupid idiot cowboy moron managed to wire the World Trade Center with blocks of C4 and then hide all the evidence?

This seems like a laughable supposition. But, again, the Ass Party doesn’t forcefully distance themselves from this, and their failure to distance is substantially just as good as endorsement. It’s the votes. They need them.

And this would have to mean the second most important issue, has a direct bearing on the first. You want to be President, Mr. or Ms. donk. To be President, you sell y

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EasySunday, September 30th, 2007

On Women Writing About MenSaturday, September 29th, 2007

Phony SoldiersSaturday, September 29th, 2007

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XISaturday, September 29th, 2007

A Quiet Triumph May Be BrewingSaturday, September 29th, 2007

A ParagraphFriday, September 28th, 2007

Unhappy MarriageFriday, September 28th, 2007

Adorable, Until…Thursday, September 27th, 2007

Tough GuyThursday, September 27th, 2007

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XTuesday, September 25th, 2007

Easy
Sunday, September 30th, 2007

On Women Writing About Men
Saturday, September 29th, 2007

Phony Soldiers
Saturday, September 29th, 2007

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… XI
Saturday, September 29th, 2007

A Quiet Triumph May Be Brewing
Saturday, September 29th, 2007

A Paragraph
Friday, September 28th, 2007

Unhappy Marriage
Friday, September 28th, 2007

Adorable, Until…
Thursday, September 27th, 2007

Tough Guy
Thursday, September 27th, 2007

Not In It For The Attention, Mind You… X
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007