Should I be More Worried?

Hee, those of you who know me are, right now, screaming, “Please sweet Jesus how could you worry MORE?” But I meant specifically in the context of the election. Last night, as expected, Hils won South Dakota, Obama won Montana, and Obama got the few remaining delegates he needed to clinch the party nomination.

Time out to note that I am just drinking my coffee, so this is not going to be some great masterpiece of political discourse here. Or even a coherent essay. Just words.

Ok, so I have a lot of thoughts. The funniest thing that happened last night was that on CNN, tiny, tiny Larry King was talking to various heads about Clinton and her not-concession speech (she’s sleeping on it? I guess?) and Lanny Davis (he of the petition to make Obama pick Clinton for VP) was talking about how Clinton is just the bestest that ever was and her speech was awesome and she’ll totally concede when Obama has the nomination, etc.  All the while behind him, teamsters were loudly and casually breaking down the stage and chairs and whatnot.  Mmmm, obvious symbolism.

As for the whole VP think, I do not want Clinton as VP.  She and Obama differ too greatly on how to effect change.  People decided (not by a lot, granted) that they want to see what this new guy can do, and bringing Clinton doesn’t really work with that.  Also, she is pretty mad, you know?  I’d be concerned that she would still try to have her way and be the boss.  Arianna Huffington got all fired up at one point, pointing out that if you bring Hillary Clinton on, you of course also get Bill, and now you have to deal with them both.  And, let’s face it, Bill has been kind of a baby.

But people seem to want me to think that the party is badly divided, and that we need Clinton to be VP to bring it together.  Feh.  I just don’t feel that it is that badly broken up right now, but maybe that’s just where I live and who I know.  Certainly, Barack isn’t going to hold a grudge and be mad that he only secured the nomination by a few delegates.  I do think that we need Clinton to basically tell her people: “Ok, I lost, now you have to get behind this guy, ok? It’s really important.”  And I do worry that she will be petty and not do that without the VP nod.  But only for a bit; I have to believe that in the end she knows it is more important that Obama beat McCain than it is that she pout about not being on the ticket.  Still, the longer she refuses to bring her people over because she is hoping for a consolation prize, the more intractable some of those Clinton supporters will become.

I just find it difficult to believe that there are Clinton backers SO PUT OUT by her loss that come fall, they will not vote or they will vote for McCain.  Really?  I mean, I guess that dude in West Virginia who thought Barack was a Muslim and Michelle was an atheist (which does not compute) and if elected, Obama would put too many “coloreds” in White House jobs…yeah.  So that guy is probably out.  But things just don’t feel all that fractured to me, maybe because Obama seems so likable, I can’t imagine people not getting behind him.

Apparently, though, I am supposed to be worried about the party.  But I’m not.  So.

Who’s the biggest tool?

Hello! Yes, I have been remiss in posting. But I also have been in 3 states other than my own in the last week, so, you know, get off my back, etc.  I too am mostly only capable of miscellany, but miscellany with a theme! I would like to second Ro’s words about Friday Night Lights. It’s really good. It makes me cry every time; I guess maybe that’s not a selling point for everyone.

I was on the west coast last week on election day (don’t worry – in Cambridge, the Election Commission stays open all weekend before the big day). As a result of my location, I got to stay up until the Democrats were a mere two states away from awesome victory, so that was nice. And imagine how pleased I was when CNN took the time to send an email alert to my boss’s blackberry about Britney dumping K-Fed, so that she could be the one to announce that fine news to me. Side note: I love a good pun, and I love the nickname "FedEx." Heh. Ro was kind enough to send me a list of all the awesome things that happened while I was gone, which included the above, along with news of Rumsfeld’s departure. Woo!

While I am pleased that what went around came back around to the two aforementioned gentlemen,
what’s up with O.J.? Dude. Not cool. I mean, not only is he publishing this book in which he basically says, "Yeah, not only did I kill my wife, let me tell you exactly how," CNN.com tells me this:

"Simpson has failed to pay the $33.5 million judgment against him in the
civil suit. His NFL pension and his Florida home cannot legally be
seized. He and the families of the victims have wrangled over the money
in court for years."

Charming.

So who IS the biggest tool: FedEx, Rumsfeld, or O.J.?

I’m going to rule out FedEx. It is definitely not cool to spend like $50 million of your wife’s money, especially since it was presumably on forties, pot, trucker hats, and manpris (tm Go Fug Yourself). And while in some ways it is awesome, it also is quite appalling that he seems to be totally unfazed by the way that people aren’t even coming to his free concerts. Only a special kind of tool can continue to think he is a ladies’ man and cool dude in the face of such public mockery. BUT. Britney did marry him and let him get away with that crap for a long time, so.

I guess Rumsfeld v. O.J. isn’t really a tough call either. O.J. is definitely a world-class tool, and I am sure I don’t need to enumerate the reasons. But Rumsfeld. Oh, Rummy. The hubris! Engaging in a course of action leading to the deaths of thousands of American troops and tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and the refusal, right up to the day of his "resignation," to admit that he made mistakes. Just because an apology can’t fix the mistakes made in Iraq, just because it can’t bring those people back to life, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be made.

Only one of these people actually makes me want to vomit, and thus, Rumsfeld is the biggest tool. Props these folks for suing his ass.

Endless Love

Sometimes, when I think about the eight years Bill Clinton was president, I get so sad. He wasn’t perfect, but a quick rundown and compare of "Major Problems Caused or Faced While President" between Bill and our current "leader" really gets me in the gut.

Last week, Mr. Clinton was on the Daily Show. I didn’t get to watch it until this weekend, when I was cleaning out the old TiVo (much more fun than, say, cleaning out the fridge). It was as excellent as every episode of the Daily Show always is.  But the real fun was yet to come, when Bill appeared on FOX News in an interview with Chris Wallace.

FOX News gives me hives, so I didn’t watch it live, but of course it’s been all over the news. Chris Wallace is now saying, asshat that he is, is acting all confused as to why Bill got so riled up in his answer, claiming, "All I did was ask him whether he felt he did enough to connect the dots and go after Al Qaeda."

Actually, CHRIS, I am looking at the transcript right now. What you actually did was ask the world’s longest question. You started by saying this was a question that many viewers e-mailed into you: "Why didn’t you do more to put Bin Laden and al Qaeda out of business when you were President?" Then you highlight claims made in the book The Looming Tower, which says that Bin Laden was talking shit about the U.S. back in 1993, and you wondered why, after the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, we didn’t strike back. You end with: "[B]ut the question is why didn’t you do more, connect the dots and put them out of business?" That seems to me like a pretty confrontational way to ask that question, Judgy McBlamey.

Clinton goes right after him, though, bless his heart. He points out that while he will answer all of the questions that Wallace smashed in there, he wants to note that he is being asked this on FOX news.  He goes on to acknowledge that he tried and failed to get Bin Laden, and calls Wallace out for doing "FOX’s bidding" and doing "a nice little conservative hit job on" him. Wallace tried to make out like Clinton is not answering his questions. This brings us to my favorite part of the interview, which I will quote in full, because it’s awesomeness cannot be contained by summary. My comments are in brackets.

Clinton: It was a perfectly legitimate question but I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked this question of. I want to know how many people in the Bush administration you asked: ‘Why didn’t you do anything about the Cole? I want to know how many you asked: Why did you fire Dick Clarke?’  I want to know . . . [Bring it, sir!]

Wallace: We asked . . .

Clinton: . . .

Wallace: Do you ever watch Fox News Sunday sir?

Clinton: I don’t believe you ask them that. [Ohhhh, SNAP!]

Wallace: We ask plenty of questions of . . .

Clinton: You didn’t ask that did you? Tell the truth.

Wallace: About the USS Cole?

Clinton: Tell the truth. [Do it.]

Wallace: I . . . with Iraq and Afghanistan there’s plenty of stuff to ask.

Clinton: Did you ever ask that? You set this meeting up because you were going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers because Rupert Murdoch is going to get a lot of criticism from your viewers for supporting my work on climate change. And you came here under false pretenses and said that you’d spend half the time talking about . . .

Wallace: <laughs> [Yeah, laugh it up, jackass.]

Clinton: You said you’d spend half the time talking about what we did out there to raise $7 billion dollars plus over three days from 215 different commitments. And you don’t care.

No, they DON’T CARE. I love you. There’s enough fodder here for a series of posts – not just the rest of the interview, which continues to be super, but also the reporting on said interview in the conservative press, which is infuriating, or the things he says in the interview about the administration’s lack of focus on Afghanistan, or on Bill’s Global Initiative, which has potential.

I think the thing I like best about this, besides the calling out of FOX, is that Bill admits he failed. I’ll grant you that the consequences to him for admitting this failure are not as great as they would be for, say, a current President. But still, he admits that he tried and failed. SOMEONE could learn a lesson from that, surely.

The Atlantic

Page 27 – Bearing in mind I know little about politics and less about the economy, I thought this article about tax cuts was fascinating. Apparently one of the backbones of the GOP is/was the idea that if we cut taxes, government shrinks (since there is less money for those supposedly bloated government programs to spend). But! William Niskanen, a nonpartisan economist, did a little study and found that tax cuts cause government spending to go up. Uh oh! For example, after Bush’s crazy rich-person-loving tax cuts a few years ago spending increased, and the same thing happened to Reagan in the 80s. As in all things macro-economic, I bet there is an equally well-considered opposite position I could be quickly convinced of. But this is so IRONIC! And a total catch-22 for Republicans. Therefore I believe it wholeheartedly.

Page 32 – Don’t worry, we’re not going to run out of oil. This remarkably short-sighted article seems unaware of the location of all the oil. I mean, the problem isn’t that one day we’ll use the last tank of gas and then no one can go anywhere or produce any goods. The problem today is that the scarcer the oil, the more power the people standing over the oil have.

Page 34 – America has permanent military bases in Iraq, obvious implications. This is not at all the point of the article, but the sentence, "Army engineers had to bring in 100,000 tons of gravel just to build the reinforced roads," BLEW MY MIND. There’s a person in the military who figured out how many roads, and how much gravel, and where to get it, and how, and how many trips, and how many people it would take. They probably had to figure out what vehicles would be on the roads, and how often, and how heavy. That’s hot.

Page 38 – Wal-Mart employs 1.7 million people, and provides health insurance for less than half of them. Wal-Mart Watch is a pretty new organization with an awesome strategy: force Wal-Mart to call for national health-care. That is so brilliant and clever and perfect.

Page 46 – The more daughters a senator has, the more likely he votes pro-choice. This makes me have all sorts of deep thoughts, but right this second I’m interested in the apparent corollary – sons don’t have the same effect. I suppose it’s natural, since the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy are more obvious for the daughter than the son, but someone’s still pregnant, if you see what I’m saying.

Page 80 – Management theory isn’t based on actual science. Doesn’t everyone already know that? I had no idea there had ever been any attempt to claim it was scientifically based. Weird.

Page 102 – Oh my God, Caitlin Flanagan, SHUT UP. Back again with another update on the problems of upper-middle class women, Flanagan finally addresses "How to Treat the Help." Thank God someone finally had the courage to tackle this vital issue. Also, Caitlin Flanagan, I hate you. Here are a few examples of why:

1. "At that time, I received a generous allowance from my parents, which arrived in my campus mailbox each month in the form of a check, cut and signed by their accountant." I obviously don’t have a problem with Flanagan’s parents supporting her, but I am completely confused about the inclusion of this fact in this article. She’s talking about how she took a baby-sitting job even though she didn’t need the money. I don’t need to know why, and in fact would have reached the correct conclusion without this little Flanagan tidbit. Why so specific? Why the detail about the accountant?
2. If you read between the lines, she implies that she was actually fired because she was young and attractive.
3. Every part of this: "[A deep South mentor lady] taught me how to treat the weekly cleaning person…I was always to pay her, even if I was out of town and didn’t need her services ("Just because you don’t need her doesn’t mean she doesn’t need her check"); … I was to understand that it was the way of domestic servants to fall short of money, and the obligation of householders to get them out of scrapes." I have no words. This was published in an actual magazine. On paper.

Page 110 – Awesomely Bitchy Review #1 – Alan Furst. The reviewer actually calls Furst’s work "bad writing." Awesome. Also, he quotes Furst’s novels to devastating effect. On Furst’s unearned reputation as a good writer of sex scenes,

"Maybe the name she told him was a lie and maybe he did the same thing, but three in the morning found them…hugging like long lost lovers, riding each other’s bottoms through the night."

Bottoms! On Furst’s punctuation,

"She was, she said, Levantine, of Greek origin, and, hair, eyes, and spirit, dark in every way…’I did have a few, suitors, for a time…’"

Ten commas! Twenty-six words! And those are Furst’s ellipses, too. And finally, on Furst’s general stupidity, a quote from the internal monologue of one of Furst’s protagonists, a graduate of "the most exclusive college in the Sorbonne… France’s Harvard, Yale and Princeton all rolled into one,"

"Albertine, tonight. His big, ugly treasure of a farm girl. Something good to eat. Vegetables, cow food – but garlic, salt, a drop of oil, and the cunning way she chopped it all up. Jesus! Was it possible that he’d reached that ghastly moment in life when the belly was more important than the prick? No! Never that! Why, he’d take that Albertine and spread her…"

If I had a nickel for every Harvard guy I heard say "cow food" and/or "spread her." Through and through, the best review I’ve ever read. I was giggling the whole time, because it’s nice for someone to just finally say, You know, that famous author is just really terrible, here, let me explain his terribleness in great detail.

Page 114 – Awesomely Bitchy Review #2 – John Updike. Too many burns to count. Just one:

"Updike has given us a black high-school teacher who, in the early years of this very century, thinks that J. Lo is a guy. And who is embarrassed to ask more about the subject. And who therefore raises his voice, at commencement, and seeks enlightenment from a sixty-three year old Jewish washout. Could anything be more hip and up-to-the-minute?"

BURN!

The Atlantic, I love you.