Archive for January 6th, 2008
January 6th, 2008
In response to your many prayers, here’s a blog where dirty, commie, hippie, liberal scum and knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, neo-Nazi right-wingers alike can come for a fresh fix of political adrenaline.
Our focus here is on national politics, a subject of greater public interest in this presidential year than in any time in my memory — and I’m pretty old.
Your comments are cordially invited, but I ask that you refrain from using any language you wouldn’t use in front of your mother. Wait. You better make that langugage I wouldn’t use in front of my mother; for all I know, your mom might be a bit inelegant.
If you find this site provocative or entertaining, pass the word along to your friends. For each pair of eyes you send my way, I’ll give you a free ticket to Ron Paul’s Inaugural Ball next January — providing, of course, that he wins the presidency (which only the terminally naive think is even remotely possible).
January 6th, 2008
People who don’t much care for bare-knuckle politics are fond of remembering the days of yore when the rhetoric was more restrained and politicians didn’t say bad things about one another.
Yeah, those were the days. Why, I can almost see and hear John F. Kennedy making nothing but dignified references to his arch-rival Richard Nixon:
January 6th, 2008
Mitt Romney says it was “great…terrific” to get pummeled from all sides in the latest debate among Republican presidential hopefuls:
January 6th, 2008
As they run around the country seeking to curry the favor of voters, our Democratic and Republican presidential candidates almost never fail to express their admiration for the “values” of the people to whom they’re speaking.
I’m always a little suspicious of such talk. I mean, if one of these pols actually knew anything about my so-called values, he or she probably would want me kept in isolation from polite society.
I’m even more suspicious when the political rhetoric includes references to “Midwestern values.” What values, exactly, are those? Illinois and Iowa are both Midwestern states. Do their respective populations represent the same values? Not entirely, methinks. Illinois, for example, is a more Democratic state than Iowa. It’s also more urban and demographically diverse.
If I catch one of these White House hopefuls telling me about the wonderful values of us Illinoisans, I’m going to reply: “You told the Iowans they have the best values, but those folks generally are different from us. Make a choice, pal. Their values or ours? Which is it going to be?”
Another annoying bit of political bunkum is “heartland values,” which is frequently employed no matter the locale, Midwestern or not. President Bush has been known to extol “heartland values” in speeches far from the nation’s actual heartland, especially in the South.
A few years ago, the editorial board of the Sacramento (Calif.) Bee took umbrage at Bush’s frequent references to “heartland values.”
“Where exactly is this heartland so chock full of values?” the paper asked. “Is it just those red states, the ones Bush carried on the map of last year’s presidential election?…
“Homicide rates are higher in places like Texas and the South than in ‘sinful’ places such as California and New York, and three times higher than in New England. Teenage binge drinking is most common in the upper Midwest states such as the Dakotas. The list of states with the highest rates of dependence on alcohol and illicit drugs includes Iowa and Wyoming. Gonorrhea rates are about twice as high in Kansas as here, and Indianapolis leads the country in syphilis.”
The paper could also have mentioned the problem of meth abuse, among other pathologies, in the rural Midwest.
Of course, all this blather about “values” is a not-so-subtle effort to divide Americans into camps of “us” and “them.”
This effort often is meant to convey the message that people who are different from you have no values at all. Witness the “Values Voters Summit” held in Washington this past fall under the sponsorship of the Family Research Council and attended by theocrats from across the fruited plain.
These are the values people? What about the rest of us?
Well, this is America. You don’t have to be religious or conservative or from the heartland to have values. Everybody has values of some kind or another, worthy or otherwise.
January 6th, 2008
Poor Hillary Clinton. I’m no great fan of hers, but I can see that she’s getting pretty shabby treatment from some pundits simply because of her gender.
Witness the situation with Saturday night’s Democratic presidential debate in New Hampshire. At one point in the proceedings, Clinton got a little stern with her opponents. It was no big deal, really, but it prompted some critics to imply that perhaps Hillary should be heavily sedated and committed to a rest home.
ABC’s Jake Tapper was SHOCKED, SHOCKED by Clinton’s great “anger.” And more than a few other observers — THIS GUY , for example — argued that the episode was nothing less than a humiliating ”meltdown.”
If a man had said what Hillary said in the way she said it, he’d be praised as one who isn’t going to take unfair criticism without fighting back. Ah, but a woman isn’t supposed to act that way.
As I saw it, Clinton wasn’t especially angry and certainly didn’t suffer a meltdown.
Check it out:
January 6th, 2008
I’ve had a strange sense for several days now that something in the presidential race suddenly has vanished. It finally dawned on me Sunday afternoon that Alan Keyes seems to have disappeared.
Upon investigation, I find that Keyes is still a presidential candidate and still has a WEB SITE. He was in one of the debates a few weeks ago, and he got some votes in last week’s Iowa caucuses (but the Iowa Republican Party apparently REFUSES to say how many).
But his lack of money and the media’s understandable reluctance to pay him much mind has reduced him to a political nonentity, at least with respect to the presidential race.
Some of us here in Illinois have a weird fondness for Keyes stemming from his quixotic (to put it politely) race against Democrat Barack Obama for a U.S. Senate seat back in 2004.
Keyes, who had gained some national notice when he ran for president in 1996 and 2000, was recruited for the Illinois contest by Rockford State Sen. Dave Syverson, among others, when the winner of the GOP primary had to drop out in a sex scandal.
Keyes didn’t even live in Illinois, but the Republican poohbahs seemed to figure that their own articulate black guy could fare well against Obama, so they got him to move here from Maryland.
The result was a disaster. Keyes pompously declared that his candidacy was “God’s will,” and opined that Jesus Christ wouldn’t vote for Obama. He referred to Vice President Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter as “a selfish hedonist” and denounced all homosexuals, including his own daughter.
Keyes quickly became a statewide joke and ended up with only 27 percent of the vote.
When he slinked away from that humiliation, I figured we’d seen the last of him. But, without anybody noticing, he announced his candidacy for president just this past September. Then, suddenly, there he was on the stage at a GOP debate in Des Moines last month. His presence, not surprisingly, prompted disdain among conservative pundits who once regarded him with more respect.
Roy Edroso at Alicublog has more on Keyes HERE.
