Is there a greater insult to our intelligence than political “talking points” - those utterances of utter banality uttered endlessly through the udders of utterly uxorious campaign surrogates. [Oh, stop. -ed. Okay.]
Well, they were out in force last night before and after the Hillary Clinton speech - first telling us what she should say and then what she did (or didn’t.).
Who cares? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist, political genius or even Stanislavsky himself to understand the “subtext” of Hillary’s speech last night. She hates Obama’s guts - and undoubtedly his wife even more. Barack stole from Hillary what she thought was rightfully hers. Fortunately for her, he may well go down in flames himself, leaving her an opening in 2012. Everything she said was predicated on that - just enough to stay friends with the Democratic Party but not so much as to help get Obama elected (assuming she could). She did a fine job of that.
Now everybody knows that - though almost nobody came out and said it. American politics is all about all pomp, circumstance and “talking points.” Nevertheless, it is endlessly fascinating as pure spectacle. I got an email from Dutch novelist Leon de Winter, visiting California for a year, who said he was transfixed by the convention as “anthropology.” Veyr Euro of him, but I see his point.
As for me, it put me in mind of that other great piece of American Tradition - the musical comedy - specifically Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse and its great “Oh, Diogenes”. Sing along… “Oh, Diogenes/Find a man who’s honest/Oh, Diogenes/ Warm him up for me….” And so it goes. [I thought you weren’t doing any more John Edwards posts.-ed. ]
Otherwise how to explain her prancing around to the brain dead “Bush is Hitler” meme, but this time with McCain as bloodthirsty dictator. It plays right into the “Obama is a witless celebrity” theme the McCain campaign has been employing so successfully. More likely Madonna doesn’t know or care… But what if she was a secret pro-McCain person? Unlikely, of course. But scuttlebutt in Hollywood… and this time it’s pretty reliable… is that Angelina Jolie and Robert Downey Jr. are. Not that it matters. I think the public is so bored with the political opinions of entertainment personalities, their eyes are rolling back in their heads.
UPDATE: If I were in the Obama camp, this would make me nervous.
I must confess I had never heard of Deborah Wasserman-Schultz - Democratic Congresswoman from Florida’s 2oth - but it’s a long way from LA to Broward County. In any case she seems like a nice enough woman. She’s responsible for safety-oriented swimming pool legislation in Florida.
But she sure seemed like a deer caught in the proverbial headlights on Fox News today when asked to justify Biden’s views on Iran. (He was one of four senators to vote against declaring the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. There’s a lot more, some of which we will be revealed on Pajamas Media in days to come.) Wasserman mouthed platitudes about the Jewish vote and how it was outrageous for anyone to doubt Biden on Iran and his loyalty to Israel, etc., etc. I wonder how much Wasserman knows about Iran and about the Pasdaran and its Quds force. Not a great deal, I would hope. Otherwise she would not be so sanguine about Biden’s vote. Any normal Jewish person would cringe.
Note to Wasserman: Stop being a party hack. This isn’t about Republicans or Democrats. This is about forces far more important than mere domestic politics. Study harder. Don’t let yourself be used.
I was very tired last night when I switched on the USA-Spain gold medal basketball game ten minutes late to find Kobe and Lebron already on the bench in foul trouble. Somehow I had sensed it. This wasn’t going to be easy. Spain was filled with good players playing loosey-goosey out of their minds. They had nothing to lose, after all. And the USA was weak in the paint - no real enforcers to stop the Spanish guards. (Andrew Bynum next time?) Pau Gasol was doing much better against the USA bigs than he ever did against the Celts… dammit. Sure enough, fourth quarter Los Espanoles were within four and I was wide-awake.
But then it was just like a Laker game. Forget Lebron. Forget Jason Kidd and his years of experience. Bring on the Mamba - the best crunch player since Jordan. Pretty soon things were in hand. It was like being at Staples against the Spurs.
More here, including Kidd calling Kobe “best on the planet.”
BARACK , just back from a speech, is undressing. He is about to toss his socks on the floor when he notices MICHELLE, already in bed, raising her eyebrows. He stops, carefully puts his socks in the hamper.
MICHELLE
(leafing through Vogue, very annoyed)
I told them to shoot me on my left side.
BARACK
(getting into bed)
Let’s try to forget it, honey. We’re under a
lot of stress.
He puts his arm around her but she’s in a bad mood and unresponsive.
MICHELLE
Did you see the Gallup tracking?
BARACK
(nuzzling up)
An aberration.
MICHELLE
(pushing him away, one track mind)
It’s been the same for two weeks. You’ve got to do something!
Democrats are supposed to be up by twenty in summer.
Barack sits up, obviously disturbed. She’s right.
BARACK
( looking tentatively at Michelle)
Well… what about…?
MICHELLE
(alarmed)
No, not The Witch! I told you a thousand times. I can’t live
with her or that horn dog in Blair House!
BARACK
Okay, okay…
He shakes his head, flummoxed.
MICHELLE
(gets an idea)
Biden!
BARACK
(frowns)
But he said all those horrible things about me. And you always hated
the hair plugs.
MICHELLE
(gestures to magazine)
He’s not running for the cover of Vogue.
BARACK
And he’s been around for centuries. What about “hope” and “change”?
I’m opposed to guilt-by-association. I’d better be, considering at various times in my life I hung out with the California Communist League, the Black Panthers including Eldridge Cleaver and their Minister of Information Elaine Brown, Abbie Hoffman while he was a fugitive on the top ten wanted list, Bill and Emily Harris of the SLA, Timothy Leary and Chairman Deng Xiaoping of the People’s Republic of China. I was also recruited by the KGB. (Don’t worry. I turned them down.)
I’m not going into the details here. [Blatant self-promotion alert] You can read all about them in my memoir BLACKLISTING MYSELF to be published by Encounter Books in January 2009. Suffice it to say if there were guilt-by-association, I’d be in deep trouble.
But….
1. I am not running for President.
2. I am not trying to hide my past associations. [You’re trying to sell books off them.-ed. Indeed I am.]
I’ve been thinking about the latter point reading the various reports of Barack Obama’s relationship with former Weatherman Bill Ayers. No, I didn’t know Ayers. So I have no personal knowledge of this. But I am troubled by the “cone of silence” around the details of their association, including the “cones” erected by the University of Illinois and the Daley machine that has, despite moments of reform, made the city of Chicago synonymous with corruption in many people’s eyes.
Still, I have nothing to add to that story, which may reveal itself, as the saying goes, in the fullness of time. But I do have some feelings about past associations and what they mean from personal experience. Like it or not, to one degree or another, they are part of our fabric, though not in a simple-minded sense. Knowing communists in the past obviously does not make you one now, or then, for that matter. Nevertheless, the 1972 Roger Simon who gave money to the Black Panthers is a building block of the 2008 Roger Simon who now despises identity politics and thinks it a reactionary betrayal of black people. That past is part of my emotional and intellectual DNA. If I hid that from you, you would not understand my present, where it comes from and what it means. You would be missing important context with which to analyze my current views.
The same goes for Obama, only his past is being shrouded by the institutions and cronies above. No matter what the truth is, this obfuscation makes it worse. Indeed, the obfuscation is the problem, in itself probably worse than almost any possible fact being hidden. (Obama is far too young to have been a Weatherman himself anyway—and, I suspect, far too great a careerist.) As usual, the cover-up is apparently more serious than the crime.
And yet, what if… arguendo… there is something significant buried in those unreleased Chicago documents that is finally revealed after Obama is elected President? The fallout could be highly destructive to our country. (And people thought John Edwards running while having an affair was problematic…) In an era that is at once domestically polarized and internationally dangerous, those Chi-town institutions owe it to us to be as transparent as possible. If past history is an indication, they won’t.
I have little to add to Ann Althouse’s raised eyebrows over Andrew Sullivan’s latest obsession (with John McCain’s cross reference - no pun intended).
Except to observe the obvious: Sullivan’s general response to Obama/McCain - though, to be kind, eccentric in details and choices - is paradigmatic of mainstream media. And I regard Sullivan as entirely MSM because his writing almost always looks outward toward them for approval, rarely any longer toward the blogosphere, which he has virtually abandoned except in instances when it seems useful to him (turning, of all places, to the over-heated Kos).
Sullivan and the MSM are in the midst of buyer’s remorse regarding the shallow Obama and desperate to find a way out or some justification. Via Glenn, I have discovered even the most soddenly conventional of all MSM purveyors of conventional wisdom - David Gergen - is sounding alarms. And now Zogby is reporting a five-point McCain lead in the summer (when the Dems have almost always been way ahead… hello, Hillary?) Sullivan - the conformist masking as a rebel - rushes to the fore like a refugee from a Vampire movie with his cross silliness. Opera bouffe, I suppose.
But there is a bright side for Sully. If McCain wins, it’s good for his blog. He can start taking potshots at the new President from day one and build traffic. [Isn’t that what he was already doing with this cross nonsense?-ed. Yeah, you’re right… worked though.]
Forget the Redeem Team. Forget the nine-year old Chinese gymnasts. When you look at the medal count on a per capita basis, that Australians are the best athletes at the Olympics by far. The population of their country is only twenty million and they have, as of now, thirty-three medals, almost half of China’s total with their population of 1.3 billion.
Maybe I was watching through biased glasses (we all do) but I couldn’t agree more with John Podhoretz when he wrote of the Rick Warren/Saddleback event last night: “If John McCain can perform during the three debates the way he is performing tonight with Rick Warren, he will win this election.”
No kidding.
And it wasn’t just because McCain was good and Barack Obama was ineffectual and ill-informed. (Others have said Barack is infected by reactionary post-modernism. I’m not so sure I would give him that much intellectual credit. It might simply be expedient political vacillation.)
No, it was something more extreme and I think more important: John McCain is the single most prepared person to be President in my lifetime - and I ain’t young. [Didn’t you vote for JFK?-ed. I’m not that old. But you did go to college when he was in office. Okay, okay. Don’t rub it in.] Last night McCain exhibited a grasp of the issues and an ability to communicate them extempore in a concise manner that were exceptional. Unlike the frequently bumbling Bush and the evasive Obama, he knew precisely what to say on the big issues - Georgia, radical Islam, energy. He puts to mind the legendary Presidents of a more distant past - Teddy Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower - and carries with him a pride to be American that surpasses even Reagan for me, because it is fraught with that personal history we all know.
And, of course, if you care about the ability to cross party lines or about the courage to stick with your opinions when they are unpopular, McCain has demonstrated that more than any politician of recent memory. It was ironic that the only example Obama could cite of when he had done such a thing was when he had worked with John McCain on ethics reform (in an instance when Obama apparently crumped out).
But this is not about Obama. What happened last night is this: An election that the pundits had told us was about whether the public was ready for Barack Obama suddenly became about acknowledging John McCain.
A new Rasmussen Poll quoted on Drudge shows 47% favor government mandated political balance on radio and television (a lower number favors these mandates for the Internet). Of course the mandated “balance” they are talking about is between those hoary concepts “liberal” and “conservative”. Meanwhile, considerable polling data from other sources (including Pajamas Media) indicates the majority of Americans do not identify with either of these ideologies. In other words, more people in reality are political hybrids, American pragmatists, if you will. What about equal time for them? Not likely. Too hard to quantify.
What the absurdly named Fairness Doctrine holds for us then is one long perpetual Hannity & Colmes Show, a tedious debate for the lowest common denominator between two increasingly stultified and stultifying ideas that we have been debating from time immemorial to less and less effect. Genuinely original thoughts under this peculiar doctrine would have little chance because they didn’t fit the tired mold. No fairness. No equal time. Socrates, you’re out. Galileo, sayonara. Al Franken and Ann Coulter, you’re in.
