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WHAT I FOUND WHEN GOOGLED"OBAMA+U.S.+REPUTATION"You're gonna love this:I Googled and got an Inauguration Day post that recounts a December 2008 interview with Worst President Ever Jimmy Carter. Money quote:...not too long ago somebody asked me if the new President could change the reputation of our country in the first hundred days he was in the office and I said he could change the reputation of our country in the first ten minutes...
How's that reputation enhancement working out for you so far, America?Well, according to our former friends and allies, the citizens of Poland, it's working out like this:
Translated in English, that would be:TREASON![from their website.:]
[hat-tip: the increasingly essential, Acorn-busting Gateway Pundit]
Hugh Hewitt makes a neat point:"The kid's not ready." That's what a friend's father has been saying about Obama since the day he was elected. If Matt Latimer's tacky-by-definition tell-all book is to be believed, it's something Bush said as well. "Not Ready To Lead" is sounding more true all the time ("Always Ready To Campaign" could work nicely, though). As so often with President Obama, we are left to believe that he is either 1) haplessly naive, 2) brilliant beyond measure and playing a game of long ball none of us can comprehend, or 3) not interested in what have traditionally been American interests.
Or he's a triple-threat player.Hewitt links to this gem at the Corner:Birds gotta fly, fish gotta swim, ACORN's gotta engage in fraud, and Obama's gotta talk. It's really that simple; and it is amazing, given how little this guy actually knows about economics, about foreign affairs, about, well, just about anything...
Obama was reported, after the speech [at the 2004 Democratic Convention] and the thunderous reception that it received, to have said to someone, "You know, I can play in this league."
And so there we have it: Obama really believes at his core that empty rhetoric is the same as substance and judgement.
Read it all.
That curious quotation -- "I can play in this league" -- conjures up a later, similar little squeak of hubris, uttered to Harry Reid: "I have a gift" -- reflected on by Daniel Henninger, with considerable prescience, last April. By September, the increasing consensus is that "the gift has stopped giving, because people have started listening."And just in case anyone wanted to know precisely when it all started to go horribly, horribly wrong for Mr. Obama, that December interview might provide a clue:Kira: With the new president elect Barack Obama, what do you think about him being the new president elect and do you have any advice for him?
Jimmy Carter: Well, I have already talked to his major appointments - I have talked to the next Secretary of State and the next Security Advisor who will be in the White House with him and I have also yesterday talked with the person who is going to represent him and United States at the United Nations. So, I have already prepared him for some of the things that the Carter Center is doing that he might find helpful.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.On a final note, during a conversation with popculture rabbi, Michael Medved, something happened to insure that "John McCain's approval rating among conservatives just skyrocketed." [hat-tip/ Gateway Pundit]
McCain broke down and admitted that "President Carter has earned his place as, if not the worst president in history, then certainly the worst in the 20th century."SAY WHAT? WHERE WAS THIS STRAIGHT-TALKIN' SENATOR MCCAIN IN 2008?
DOOBIES FOR ME, BUT NOT FOR THEEFormerly sane pioneer blogger Andrew Sullivan came to the U.S. from Britain but shows that he doesn't really get why we are no longer a colony. Ya, see, Sully, it was all abo
ut dissolving the cast-iron divisions between classes, or perhaps going back to medieval times, between the "Estates". Sully has no use for the First Estate, the governing element of The Church. But apparently he is all in favour of retaining the barrier between the Second and Third Estates: The Nobility and The Peasants.It all unfolded when Sully got caught sucking on his weed-stash by some of the local constabulary, while at Cape Cod National Seashore, a Massachusetts park.
Now, the good folks of the bean-state have reduced penalties for possession to the misdemeanor category, for which reason they are less hesitant to prosecute than if it were a more serious crime. Most ordinary people caught in Sully's circumstances could expect to get convicted and punished, but the U.S. Attorney in question politely declined to prosecute because a criminal conviction might prove an obstacle to poor old Andrew in his quest for "a certain immigration status" (?) in the United States.Beg pardon? Well, I await correction, but I'm guessin' that this "certain status" is "spousal", applying to Andrew Sullivan because he married his male partner when Massachusetts legalized such arrangements. If that's the case, I can't imagine why it has to be cloaked in mystery. There's no mystery about Andrew. Maybe the "certain status" has nothing to do with his "marriage" -- in which case it's even more puzzling that the relevant documents hesitate to give this immigration status a name.
Whatever kind of status it may be, the more important thing is that the U.S. Attorney showed blatant favouritism in his treatment of the Sullivan case, and Judge Robert Collings, who heard it, while finding it outside his role to demand otherwise, made a clear finding that Sullivan asked for, and was granted, unequal treatment before the law.Powerline lays out the case. [hat-tip: Hugh Hewitt]
SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 + 8Once again Project 2996 honors the victims of the September 11 terrorist attack on America.
Project 2996 was conceived by Dale Challener Roe, who has tried to repeat the tribute annually over the years. I haven't been part of it since 2006, but I decided to play my part again this year, by repeating my tribute to Jack Aron, and taking on couple of others. The Project assigned me another WTC victim, John Thomas McErlean, and I requested the opportunity to pay tribute to Rick Rescorla.
In 2006 I volunteered to write a tribute to one victim, and was privileged to be introduced to Jack Charles Aron, who died in the offices of Marsh & McLennan
in Tower 1 of the World Trade Center. A man I had never met or even heard of before was brought to fleeting life again through the words of his friends, colleagues, and family -- my contribution was to collect and sift through them to bring his portrait into focus. He left behind him a wife, Evelyn, a son Timmy, who is now a young man of 19, and a host of heartbroken friends and relatives. He was one of 295 employees of Marsh & McLennan whose lives were taken that day.Beth McErlean was looking forward to celebrating her 14th anniversary on September 12th. In 1987 she had married John Thomas McErlean, a high-school sweetheart, now father of her four children and a vice-president and partner at the brokerage firm Cantor Fitzgerald. But when her anniversary day dawned, her husband was missing and presumed dead, his office having fallen from its lofty perch on the top floors of World Trade Center 1 into a disintegrated chaos of twisted metal, ash, and fire.John McErlean had survived the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. On that day he had carried a woman down 80 flights of stairs. No one knows what he was doing when he met his end in 2001, but his brother Tom figures he was probably engaged in the same sort of service to others.John Tho
mas McErlean Jr., a handsome, dark-haired and square-jawed Irishman, grew up in Larchmount, New York. He formed an attachment to that community which drew him there to bring up his own family. He attended Iona, the Catholic boys prep school run by the Irish Christian Brothers in New Rochelle, and then St. Michael's College in Vermont, where he earned his business degree.In the turbulent years since 9-11, the public has been forced to endure the foul spewings of wretches who need not be named, to the effect that those who died in the towers were symbols rather than human beings, that they represented all the grotesquerie and rapaciousness of American society, even to the extent that they were "little Eichmanns".Imagine how such a slander would sit upon the relatives of a John McErlean, whose life outside of Manhattan's financial centre made room for being an athlete, a sailor, a coach of children's sports teams, and active member of St. Augustine's Parish. He spent his last summer vacation on Nantucket, flying kites, riding bikes, and building beachside bonfires. John bought a t-shirt that was corny, but whose motto spoke what was for him a profound truth: "Life is Good". "It seems so simple," he said, "but it's true. I've been blessed with a wonderful family and everything I wanted from life." He was 39 years old.John's son Ryan is now 19, son Timothy 17, daughters Mary and Allie 16 and 12. In their sorrow they have known the generosity of the Larchmont/Mamaroneck Friends in Need organization, which has supported them and, in their mother's words, helped to "remind us all that there is much more good in our world than evil."Of the nearly 3,000 people who were murdered on September 11 in all three locations, 658 of them were employees of Cantor Fitzgerald -- every single employee who happened to be at his or her desk that morning; the handful who were late, or on vacation, or going about their business out of the office that morning were the only ones left from the entire New York head office. It has been a long road back.Nearly 3,000 people died on September 11. If not for the heroism of one man, that figure might well have been DOUBLED.
I refer, of course, to the indispensable Rick Rescorla, British/American soldier, hero of Ia Drang at Landing Zone X-Ray in Vietnam, and roly-poly oracle managing security for Dean Witter/Morgan Stanley, who had predicted BOTH World Trade Center bombings (predictions to the Port Authority obviously falling on deaf ears).You've seen his pic
ture --the iconic pose [taken by the once-reputable and Pulitzered CNN veteran Peter Arnett] on the cover of the best-selling military history,
We Were Soldiers Once...and Young, by General Hal Moore, (made into a thrilling film starring Mel Gibson as Moore -- Rescorla is not mentioned in the film despite his key role in the book -- not quite enough room for two heroes!) The book gives an account of a pivotal battle in 1965, which marked the escalation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam to real all-out war.It is almost pointless to try and memorialize Rick Rescorla, to pile word upon word after all the words which have been written, by people far closer to Rescorla's reality than myself. I've learned most of what I know about him from military blogs like Mudville Gazette [excellent video there] and Blackfive. There are numerous websites devoted to him and his story -- his many stories, since the several phases of his career are each worth their own book. The skeleton of the history goes thus:Born: 1939 Hayle, Cornwall, the old Celtic kingdom at the far southwest reach of England.British Service: 1956-1963 Paratrooper, Cyprus and Northern RhodesiaAmerican Service: 1963-1990 Colonel, U.S. Army, 1st Cavalry DivisionI saw Rick Rescorla come swaggering into our lines with a smile on his face . . . saying, ‘Good, good, good. I hope they hit us with everything they’ve got tonight. We’ll wipe them up,’ " recalled Lt. Larry Gwinn in the 1993 book, We Were Soldiers Once . . . and Young. Rick took a bullet in the arm and fought for six hours before the battle he called "a long, bloody traffic accident in the jungle" ended.
More than 300 men died at Ia Drang. Rick earned a Silver Star, a Purple Heart and Bronze Stars for Valor and Meritorious Service..."We were flown away," Rick said to the authors [of We Were Soldiers] "but the stench of the dead would stay with me for years after the battle." [more here]
Security work:1985 -- joined Morgan Stanley to manage and advise on corporate security1990 -- concluded from a security review of the WTC that it was vulnerable to terrorist attack, most likely a truck bomb in its underground parking garage1993 --predictions fulfilled -- Rescorla "jumped on a desk in the middle of the firm and threatened to drop his pants if his people didn't chill out and listen. In the stunned silence that followed, he launched an orderly evacuation, refusing to leave until the entire tower was empty." Following this attack he became convinced that there would be another, more deadly, probably involving airplanes. He advised his employers to move their offices to New Jersey, but they were not persuaded.September 11, 2001 -- After the north WTC tower was hit by an airplane, Rick Rescorla initiated a timely evacuation (punctuated by his bouts of folksongs and patriotic anthems through a bullhorn) of thousands of Morgan Stanley employees from the south WTC tower, ignoring assurances from the Port Authority that his people were safe and need not move. He went back and back again, to clear as much of the building as he could, for long enough that there are at least a dozen stories of "sightings" and phone calls made while he did his duty protecting his charges. In the end he went in for a last round-up, and was not seen again.Rick Rescorla was one of only SIX Morgan Stanley employees who did not survive on 9/11. He saved the lives of nearly 2,700 people in the south tower. [Another 1,000 from Building 5 also evacuated safely at his order.]Rick Rescorla gave his life doing what he had always done, with the dedication and skill he had acquired during his military career. Many of his fellow soldiers have signed on to the effort to award him the Congressional Medal of Honor, for which he is technically ineligible because he had retired from the reserves and did not die in military service.
Surely he is a proper candidate for America's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In any case, the living recipients of the Congressional Medal awarded him their own honor, the Above And Beyond Citizen's Medal, in March of 2009.
Other military personnel have honoured Rescorla in their own way. FOB Rescorla (forward operating base) was established near Farah, Afghanistan. Blending the sublime and the ridiculous, in a way that the honoree would no doubt appreciate, a fitting mural decorates one of the FOB latrines.Likewise, a beautiful bronze statue, based on Arnett's photograph, has been unveiled at the National Infantry Museum at Ft. Benning Georgia.Heroes come in all shapes and sizes and vocations. The heroism of a man like Rick Rescorla deserves monuments and wide public recognition. But every good father is a hero to his children, and does heroic service to society by being just that. We throw that word "hero" around a little promiscuously, even as applied to the victims of 9/11. I count myself lucky to be given the opportunity to salute and remember on this day three men who seem to me to deserve that title, for services large and small.
Jack, John, Rick -- in your name, and for all the othersThey shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning
We will remember them.
[For the Fallen, Laurence Binyon, September 1914]
SCOLD-IN-CHIEF GRABS THE AIRWAYS
FOR SPEECH # 18,642
ABOUT HEALTH-CARE-INSURANCE-REFORM-
EVERYBODY'S-A-LIAR-BUT-MEGateway Pundit covers the "liar" charge aimed directly (minus only her name) at Sarah Palin.Never mind that the speech itself piled falsehood upon falsehood, contradicting not only what common sense tells us about the legislation on the table, but also what candidate, and then President, Obama has said in one speech or interview after another.And someone yelled, "You lie!"
Imagine.Joe Wilson -- no, not that Joe Wilson, but a Republican Congressman from South Carolina -- exploded at just one in a series of mendacities flowing from the slick lips of El Bambo. He did use the word "lie", which would have gotten him banished from the British Parliament -- but then again, if the American congress allowed for any of the free-wheeling back-and-forth, not to mention the chief executive facing the assembly during a Question Period, maybe the poor congressman wouldn't have lost control of his tongue -- a simple "shame, shame" or "balderdash" would have sufficed.Instapundit covers the whole question from a variety of sources, including reader James Somers, who opined that:...it might also be noted that a lot of Democrats and MSM journalists (same thing, I know) who suddenly have the vapors over Joe Wilson’s breach of decorum thought it was just dandy when an Iraqi journalist threw shoes at President Bush...The point is that lefties loved Sticking It To The Man when Chimpy McHitler was president, but now they’re prissily toting around copies of Robert’s Rules of Order.
Velvet-tongued Veep Joe Biden deplored this outburst, as did asp-tongued California flake, Rep. Maxine Waters. And then, of course, the ever-accomodating Senator John McCain urged an immediate apology from Wilson (which did occur) -- forcing us to wonder whether he ever did the same when President Bush was hooted and booed at during an address in the same august assembly.
John Hinderaker at PowerLine [hat-tip: Instapundit] does a thorough analysis of the speech, which he read rather than watched. He guesses that the delivery was Obama standard: "smooth, generally flat, occasionally a bit whiny." Having watched only a few excerpts during the Fox de-briefing, I would say that Hinderaker missed those other qualities that often creep into the Obama delivery, that is, the snippy, scolding sense of irritation that his critics won't roll over and button up in the face of his fundamental superiority. Still, Hinderaker catches that element in the tone of the words, and nails this phenomenon straight-on:I'm not sure whether Obama and his handlers understand how this sort of talk grates on those of us who are not liberal Democrats (a large majority of the country). Debating public policy issues is not "bickering." Disagreeing with a proposal to radically change one of the largest sectors of our economy is not a "game." This kind of gratuitous insult--something we never heard from President Bush, for example--is one of the reasons why many consider Obama to be mean-spirited.
Hinderaker closes his piece with the ultimate "bottom line": This was not, to put it kindly, a speech that was directed at thinking people.
Nor, as the writer points out, did it seem to be directed at a people who have ever heard of YouTube, where there is evidence aplenty that Mr. Obama will take any position, at any given moment, if it suits that moment, regardless of how diametrically opposed it is to the position he took the moment before.Over at American Thinker, Geoffrey Hunt predicts for Obama a "spectacularly failed presidency." A whole bunch of things are going wrong, but Hunt hits on the one that is becoming increasingly obvious:Obama doesn't have a narrative. No, not a narrative about himself. He has a self-narrative, much of it fabricated, cleverly disguised or written by someone else. But this self-narrative is isolated and doesn't connect with us. He doesn't have an American narrative that draws upon the rest of us...
It's not so much that he's a phony, knows nothing about economics, is historically illiterate, and woefully small minded for the size of the task-- all contributory of course. It's that he's not one of us. And whatever he is, his profile is fuzzy and devoid of content, like a cardboard cutout made from delaminated corrugated paper. Moreover, he doesn't command our respect and is unable to appeal to our own common sense. His notions of right and wrong are repugnant and how things work just don't add up. They are not existential. His descriptions of the world we live in don't make sense and don't correspond with our experience...
In the meantime, while we've been struggling to take a measurement of this man, he's dissed just about every one of us--financiers, energy producers, banks, insurance executives, police officers, doctors, nurses, hospital administrators, post office workers, and anybody else who has a non-green job.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, P.J. O'Rourke was talking "failed presidency" last November.Today's comic relief:
The president is the descendant of slave-owners. [It must be true -- I read it in the New York Times.] Can we expect him to fork over some reparation bucks any time soon? Boy, it makes me glad my ancestors came over in steerage from Ireland in the 1840's, Germany in the 1880's, and Greece in 1905 -- it means I never benefited from slavery no-now, and don't owe nobody nuttin'.
Apparently Obama's also related to Confederate President Jefferson Davis -- Adams, Harrison, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Gore, Bush, Dodd, Chafee....dynasties anyone?
Comic relief, part deux:
Buffalo's WBEN local talk guy, Sandy Beach, just opened his show with the suggestion that the next time President O'Whopper gives a speech, he should just arrange to have it in a church so the kneelers will be in place.
Heh.
Newsflash!
THOUSANDS MOURN FALLEN HERO
AT FUNERAL MASS
...times two...
...in BUFFALOTWO FIREFIGHTERS WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES
LAID TO RESTRequiescant in pace.[uh, ...newsflash, take 2: ...and... roll it!]A KENNEDY PASSES
HEROIC FIGHTER FOR THOSE MARGINALIZEDBY DISABILITIESDEDICATED TO FAITH & FAMILYLIFELONG PUBLIC SERVANT
... uh, that would be....EUNICE KENNEDY SHRIVER, 1921-2009Requiescat in Pace
[damn! I'll get it this time....
Here we go: Newsflash!...]
ADDENDUM: ANOTHER KENNEDY PASSES
AT LASTEdward M. Kennedy, the senior senator from Massachusetts, can stop swimming now -- stop treading water and paddling furiously to escape that riptide moment which consummated a lifetime pattern of trampling over rules, feelings, persons, and boundaries of decency to preserve and prosper himself: from cheating on exams, to cheating on his wife, to trying to cheat the American system by getting the State of Massachusetts to do a legal flip-flop [or insert a Joe-Kennedy-hand-pick] every time he wanted keep up the Democrat vote-count in the Senate when a vacancy occurred.Actually it's not accurate to refer to a "riptide moment", because the Chappaquiddick incident [good analysis here] unrolled with chilling calculation over a period of hours; and while he may have been swept into the moral whirlpool by an instinctive and natural panic, it is plain for all to see that he very quickly made the conscious choice to go with that flow.
[That is assuming, via the benefit of the doubt, that he did not in fact drive off that bridge deliberately -- and why would he do that? Well, it could have made a speedy end to any nasty fallout from accusations of rape or impregnation. The burial, literally, of any autopsy findings on Mary Jo Kopechne leave these speculations both legitimate and eternally hanging.]
It is my sincere belief that the life of any person cannot be summed up in their one worst act. Ted Kennedy could long ago have been completely forgiven for his role in Mary Jo's death, were he sincerely repentant, and (as a putative Catholic) had he availed himself of the Sacrament. But, let's face it, his life was not otherwise sterling, both personally and politically.
He left a sha
ttered wife after 20 years of marriage, for a dissolute life of booze and broads [brought to a close only by his marriage to a fellow-divorcé barely older than his children, which he has insisted now has the Catholic Church's blessing, though God alone knows how].
And he has championed [with at least a coherent consistency not found in many politicians] every cause on the left-wing political menu, often with requisite passion, but just as often with characteristic excess in spleen and calumny against his foes. Reliable and respectable Mona Charen sums this up perfectly today. What time we invest in wondering whether Mr. Kennedy has had the grace to repent his horrific wrong toward Mary Jo Kopechne [feel free to doubt that -- apparently it was one of his favourite topics for a good joke] could just as well be spent on the subject of his unquestionably deliberate character assassinations of Supreme Court nominee Judge Robert Bork, President George Bush, and the American military in Iraq.
Odd, that -- a man whose family was sliced apart by physical assassination found the public slaughter of personal reputation out of one side of his mouth irresistible, while out the other side he was an impassioned advocate of "hate-crime" legislation, and insidious and repugnant vehicle for gagging free speech, which is always selectively enforced (Christians are never considered victims) and inevitably morphs into the creation of "thought crime." (Welcome to Canada)
But then, why should this man blanch at character assassination when he has been able to make himself comfortable with the bodily death of one (Mary Jo) or of millions (the killing fields),
or of millions upon millions (the pre-born) where it suited his larger agenda. [Kennedy was against abortion when he began his political career, but, as Germaine Greer so deftly said it, "I never knew a philanderer who wasn't pro-choice."]
The one tim
e he did hold his tongue while the rest of the Democrats were flapping theirs was during the confirmation hearings for successful Supreme Court nominee, Clarence Thomas -- Kennedy's own well-earned reputation as "an aging Irish boyo clutching a bottle and diddling a blonde" and "Palm Beach boozer, lout and tabloid grotesque" and "the living symbol of the family flaws" [from GQ, Time, and Newsweek, respectively -- long before there was ever a Fox News!] made it impossible for him to meddle in the lurid sex-swamp that the Democrats were juicing up for Judge Thomas. Far from being understanding, the Dems were livid with avuncular ol' Ted for not firing off a shot at that OK Corral.I'm glad there is a God who is in the forgiving business, since such vast swaths of his creation [i.e., me] are not. The Anchoress, as usual, inspires with her charity and largeness of spirit at these moments. I make my less generous comment part-way down her page.
Senator Edward Moore Kennedy:Knight Errant of England
-- not everyone thrilled with taking Camelot this far!
Recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom
-- not everyone thrilled at this shallow substitute for a Gold in the 100-metre breast-stroke!Lion of the Senate-- would you want to be one of these?:
"Once established with a pride, males are usually able to scrounge food from the females, but they also have pride duties: males have to patrol and mark their territory by spraying urine, rubbing secretions of glands on objects, and roaring."
[I think they called it a "waitress sandwich" -- Chris Dodd would know...]And in answer to the musical question: why am I dissing the guy, now he's dead and can't do any more damage? That's an easy one. It's the rank dishonesty of it all -- the papering over, the re-writing, the distortion not just of the sordid realities of his repugnant personal life, but of the true picture of his performance as the total political partisan, right to the last week of his life where he tried to game the system to overturn his own previous gaming of the system to preserve the filibuster-proof majority in the senate. The longer his "leonine" career went on the more it became self-parody, as he barked and bloviated his way through the process while his underlings tried to prop up his superficial involvement -- best exemplified by his laughable performance at the Roberts and Alito hearings, as he took the field against two men each with more intellectual heft in their left eyebrow than Kennedy has every displayed at any juncture in his academic or political life.
Had the commentators of the past few days simply had the good taste to keep their assessments out of the stratosphere of hagiographical exaggeration, distortion, or just plain lies (Kennedy was a fighter, but it was never personal????) people like me might have just laid off and let it go. But I have heard enough (and I haven't listened that much) to find myself so sickened by the disingenuousness that I had no choice but to vent a little reality into the cloud. So here it was.
What is it with these professional stenographers? It's like calling Michael Jackson "the greatest entertainer who ever was" just because he died. Greater than Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr.?
NO.
NOT.
Not even greater than the ensemble cast of the Carol Burnett Show, for cripes sake. Give me a break.
What children these newsmongers are -- once it was their sin to try and rewrite history by knowingly spreading falsehoods (Cronkite on Vietnam) -- now I think they rewrite it because they are too emotionally self-indulgent and memory-challenged to keep their grip on reality on these momentous occasions.
Fortunately, when the flower-shrines have wilted and the kleenexes have been hauled away, most regular folks get on with their lives, and come to the sad conclusion that the world is full of the over-praised, and that these displays of emotional extremism change nothing. How much better to acknowledge a sane assessment of a person's true worth, and feel happy for the good they actually did, than to canonize them without warrant. So it is even with Princess Diana, whose departure still holds all the records for excess. She loved her sons. As memories go, that should be enough.
For the Tedster: Requiescat in pace is enough too.
EVEN A BROKEN CLOCK IS RIGHT TWICE A DAYEVEN A HOPELESS CHAUVINIST CAN GET IT RIGHTON OCCASION
In My Fair Lady, Professor Henry Higgins lets loose with a famous tirade against all womanhood which contains these memorable lines:Women are irrational, that's all there is to that!
Their heads are full of cotton, hay, and rags.
They're nothing but exasperating, irritating, vacillating,
calculating, agitating, maddening and infuriating hags!
Higgins is, of course, being vastly unfair with this mean-spirited sweeping condemnation based on tired old chauvinist stereotypes. Such generalizations about all women should not be tolerated!...even if, in selected instances, he totally NAILS it:JANEANE GAROFALO + SPLEEN + VENT = COMEDY?
In an appearance at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C. on Aug. 21, [the increasingly tatted and decreasingly funny Janeane] Garofalo ripped into tea party protesters, or what some of the wizards of smart on the left have deemed “tea baggers”…“Do you remember tea baggers?” Garofalo said. “It was just so much easier when we could just call them racists. I just don’t know why we can’t call them racists, or functionally retarded adults…
“The functionally retarded adults, the racists – with their cries of, ‘I want my country back,’” she said. “You know what they’re really saying is, ‘I want my white guy back.’ They apparently had no problem at all for the last eight years of habeas corpus being suspended, the Constitution being sh*t on, illegal surveillance, lied to on a war or two, two stolen elections – yes, the John Kerry one was stolen too. That’s not tin-foil hat time...
“Our media is quite happy to report on any stolen election around the world, any stolen election around the world except ours,” Garofalo said. “And it’s just unexamined narcissism. It’s just, if you were to say this to the average American, ‘You know they steal elections in Uganda.’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘You know they steal elections in America.’ ‘Why do you hate America?’ ‘Why didn’t you ask me why do you hate Uganda?
“This is not politics, this is neuroscience. It is purely limbic brain activity – this emotion over being angry that there’s a black guy in office, with the people showing up armed to the health care meetings – to whatever, the town halls… It makes me soul sick.”
Indeed.Some sort of sick, in any case.Somebody help this woman. Let's pass the hat.
A SHORT VACATION BUT A LONG, HOT SUMMER:
THE AMAZING WILTING PRESIDENT
Fouad Ajami at the Wall Street Journal lays out a withering assessment of the Great Obamatron Disenchantment now in progress, among the massed voting blocks slowly recovering from their temporary insanity of last fall. Money quotes:In one of the revealing moments of the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama rightly observed that the Reagan presidency was a transformational presidency in a way Clinton's wasn't…
The failure of the Carter years was, in Reagan's view, the failure of the man at the helm and the policies he had pursued at home and abroad. At no time had Ronald Reagan believed that the American covenant had failed, that should apologize for itself in the world beyond its shores. There was no narcissism in Reagan…
In contrast, there is joylessness in Mr. Obama. He is a scold, the "Yes we can!" mantra is shallow, and at any rate, it is about the coming to power of a man, and a political class, invested in its own sense of smarts and wisdom, and its right to alter the social contract of the land. In this view, the country had lost its way and the new leader and the political class arrayed around him will bring it back to the right path.
Thus the moment of crisis would become an opportunity to push through a political economy of redistribution and a foreign policy of American penance…
Sssss-s-s-s-s-s-s-s
IN A SIMILAR VAIN:
Chris Stirewalt at The Washington Examiner declares the bloom to be off the romance of the rose between the slobbering press and the insufferable vanitas of the Obama machine.
[hat-tips both: Instapundit]TREND-SPOTTING:THE RETURN OF 'HIPPIE SH*T'This is actually last winter's story, since I first noticed it when shopping in Houston over Christmas: the very, very depressing return of fashion merchandise based on what we blithely categorize as 'hippie sh*t'. What would be best consigned, unlamented and unremembered, to the dustbin, trash heap, rubbish tip, dumpster of history -- the love beads, the fringe vests, the embroidered jeans, the tie-dyed tees, the sprinkle of hot-pink daisies, the haze of doobie-smoke -- is once again fashionable, being marketed from Walmart to Filene's.At the time I credited this immediately to the coming of the Obamessiah -- and patted myself on the head for the prescience of my post of October '08, about the 'new' White House decor we could look forward to:
Now it's everywhere. So it was hardly surprising to learn [upon discovering that my Newfoundland rental car had Sirius satellite radio, including an all-Broadway network] that there had been a hugely successful 2009 revival of that profound study of late 20th-century social reality, HAIR -- the American tribal love-rock musical -- the navel-gazing, free-loving, peacenikety, draft-card-immolating blasphemenomenon of 1965.If, like me, your only exposure to the complete work in performance was the Milos Forman film of 1979, here are some scenes you missed, according to the Wikipedia synopsis of the original script:Berger gives a joint to Claude that is laced with a hallucinogen. Claude starts to trip as the tribe acts out his visions ("Walking in Space"). He hallucinates that he is skydiving from a plane into the jungles of Vietnam. Berger appears as General George Washington and is told to retreat because of an Indian attack. The Indians shoot all of Washington's men. General Ulysses S. Grant appears and begins a roll call: Abraham Lincoln (played by a black female tribe member), John Wilkes Booth, Calvin Coolidge, Clark Gable, Scarlett O'Hara, Aretha Franklin, George Custer.
Claude Bukowski is called in the roll call, but Clark Gable says "he couldn't make it". They all dance a minuet until three African witch doctors kill them – all except for Abraham Lincoln who says, "I'm one of you". Lincoln, after the three Africans sing his praises, recites an alternate version of the Gettysburg Address ("Abie Baby"). Booth shoots Lincoln, but says to him, "I ain't dying for no white man".
As the visions continue, four Buddhist monks enter. One monk pours a can of gasoline over another monk, who is set afire (reminiscent of the self-immolation of Tri Quang Duc) and runs off screaming. Three Catholic nuns strangle the three remaining Buddhist monks. Three astronauts shoot the nuns with ray guns. Three Chinese people stab the astronauts with knives. Three Native Americans kill the Chinese with bows and tomahawks. Three green berets kill the Native Americans with machine guns and then kill each other.
A Sergeant and two parents appear holding up a suit on a hanger. The parents talk to the suit as if it is their son and they are very proud of him. The bodies rise and play like children. The play escalates to violence until they are all dead again. They rise again ("Three Five Zero Zero") and, at the end of the trip sequence, two tribe members sing, over the dead bodies, a melody set to a lyric about the nobility of Man ("What A Piece of Work Is Man").
EX-SQUEEZE ME? Could anybody but a Bill Ayers type feel nostalgic about this twaddle?
["Gimme a head with hair/ Long beautiful hair/ Shinin', gleamin', streamin', flaxen, waxen"/ Put it on an empty head/ Hangin' in vacant eyes/ Here baby, there mama / no problem so big it can't be solved by explosives............]Ahem.Some comments about the "themes" in Hair, from the Wiki-tooters:Religion appears both overtly and symbolically throughout the piece, and it is often made the brunt of a joke. Berger sings of looking for "Donna", which takes on the double meaning of the woman he's searching for and the Madonna. During "Sodomy", a hymn-like paean to all that is "dirty" about sex, the cast strikes evocative religious positions: the Pietà and Christ on the cross. Before the song, Woof recites a modified rosary. In Act II, when Berger gives imaginary pills to various famous figures, he offers "a pill for the Pope"... Claude becomes a classic Christ figure at various points in the script. In Act I, Claude enters, saying, "I am the Son of God. I shall vanish and be forgotten," then gives benediction to the tribe and the audience. Claude suffers from indecision, and, in his Gethsemane at the end of Act I, he asks "Where Do I Go?". There are textual allusions to Claude being on a cross, and, in the end, he is chosen to give his life for the others. Berger can be seen as a John the Baptist figure, preparing the way for Claude.
More from the synopsis:After handing out imaginary pills to the tribe members, saying the pills are for high profile people such as Richard Nixon, the Pope, and "Alabama Wallace", Berger relates how he was expelled from high school ("Goin' Down")... Claude returns from his draft board physical, which he passed. He pretends to burn his Vietnam War draft card, which Berger reveals as a library card. [ring any bells?????!!!!!] Claude agonizes about what to do about being drafted.
I would add to this the observation of a high school friend of mine, a girl with a beautiful sweet soprano voice that could lovingly embrace three octaves in range. She saw a production of Hair in San Francisco, and was shocked to discover that a beautiful song she enjoyed singing -- How can people be so heartless? -- was occasioned by the world's lamest plot device: the dismissive treatment of a gift tee-shirt by an inconsiderate boyfriend. Having suffered this rank offense, the offended giver draped herself in white and blue veiling resembling the Virgin Mary as she stood in a top-lit spotlight bewailing her ill-use.My friend was so disgusted by the triviality of the back-story she said she could never sing that song again -- it was all just too creepy.Needless to say, such things were re-imagined when the story was puffed, fluffed and packaged to be palatable for the coming 1980's. Yes, I admit it -- I rather enjoyed Forman's film, and found the look of the characters familiar from the sights and sounds of my high school days. Apparently Rado and Ragni, godfathers of the original show, were less amused.Original writers James Rado and Gerome Ragni were unhappy with the film. In their view, Forman failed to capture the essence of Hair in that hippies were portrayed as "oddballs" and "some sort of aberration" without any connection to the peace movement. Both are quoted as saying: "Any resemblance between the 1979 film and the original Biltmore version, other than some of the songs, the names of the characters, and a common title, eludes us." In their view, the screen version of Hair has not yet been produced.
However, the film was generally well-reviewed. Writing in The New York Times Vincent Canby called it "a rollicking musical memoir.... [Michael] Weller's inventions make this Hair seem much funnier than I remember the show's having been. They also provide time and space for the development of characters who, on the stage, had to express themselves almost entirely in song.... The entire cast is superb.... Mostly... the film is a delight."
Ah, that's the problem right there. No wonder Rado/Ragni went wiggy about it. Oddballs? Aberrations? Perish the thought!Anyhoo, it's ba-a-a-ck -- and I suspect the current revival version has reprised all the original bite. Or maybe it just bites. Like the original. Whatever.When, oh when, will the Boomer bunkum DIE?????Die, hippies, die, DIE!! Or maybe just grow up? Step aside and let the next generation breathe.
Sign in my office:And don't let the door swat you on the rump on your way out.
Apparently some innocents are more equal than others.
Do not mess with these people.
