Dear Mr. Nugent:
Please come back to Michigan and help clean up the mess you are partially responsible for making.
Then go home to Texas.
Thanks.
N.
Keep back 500 feet — we’re watching the parade.
I’ve been reading about Mrs. Palin. My head didn’t explode until I read this:
She’s a hit [Mona Charen]
I’m getting tons of mail like this:Sarah is real!!! What a fabulous contrast with Obama, who is not real. Sarah is from America. Obama is not.
If it was meant to bait me, well nom nom nom, I am eating the bait. I now officially hate these weasel fucks. And that’s saying something.
For 20 years, I lived in Indiana, where you can’t make a Dan Quayle joke in mixed company, where our right-wing editorial page regularly got complaints that it wasn’t conservative enough, where the same thing was said about Rush Limbaugh, blah blah blah. I developed a mantra, which I’ve discussed here before, but indulge me. I’d say: I have arrived at this point in time on my own path, and so has this person before me. We have reached different conclusions along the way. Ommmm. This kept me from going insane and perhaps even made me a better person. I should have said it out loud more often. Hell, I should have screamed it in a few people’s faces. I certainly feel like doing so now.
That smelly little excrescence above, that’s it in a nutshell. These are the people I want gone. Not just out of the White House, off the national stage. I want them out of the country, put on boats and sent to the southern ocean to circle the pole until they break up in the ice and drown. Mona Charen, daughter of privilege, who went from Livingston, N.J. to Barnard to the White House to the Capital Gang to the Corner, approvingly quoting an anonymous turd-juggler calling Sarah Palin “from America” and Barack Obama not from America. [Enter: Ghost of Ashley Morris] Fuck you, you fucking fucks. [Exit: Ghost] You are un-American. You don’t deserve to live in this country. You are simply too much, dare I say, of an elitist.
Since the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan, these people have been the self-appointed arbiters of Who Gets to be American. For nearly 30 years, they’ve sat in their well-paid jobs typing with their soft little hands, making the world safe for themselves. They are liars and hypocrites of the worst sort: Divorce is OK for Peggy Noonan, bad for you. Working mothers named Phyllis Schlafly or Mary Matalin or Mona Charen are good, but your job takes you away from your precious children just so you can be fulfilled, you selfish bitch. Homosexuals who want to live together under a legal contract will destroy marriage, but homosexuals married to opposite-sex partners (Hi, Mrs. Craig!) won’t. Bill “Double-down” Bennett repackages Aesop’s fables as “The Book of Virtues” and gambles his royalty checks in casino VIP rooms, but that’s OK.
I could go on.
Of course it would be Mona Charen who would do this for me. Our paper used to run her column, and I’d read it every so often. Her big issues were communism and culture, and like most columnists, filed dispatches from the home front once in a while. She nearly dislocated her shoulder patting herself on the back for staying home with her children — she’d blushingly describe her child-care arrangements while she penned her deathless prose as “having help” — and occasionally would express her simmering resentment that she’d given up her career (writing speeches for Nancy Reagan: Wikipedia) and its financial rewards for her kids, while others hadn’t. One day she wrote that a family with a $200,000 annual income could hardly be considered affluent. In her, ahem, elite circles, this is certainly true. And yet she claims to be in touch with the “real” America, while everyone with a D after their name isn’t. You couldn’t make this shit up on a head of windowpane, folks. You really couldn’t.
And who wouldn’t be a little resentful? She went to Barnard and George Washington University Law School! All that to write twice a week for Creators Syndicate and be part of the Corner? That’s a waste of a good education. (I keep wondering how long it’ll be before these folks come out against educating girls at all, if they’re just going to stay home with their kids anyway. In this arena, the FLDS folks are bleeding-edgers.)
You know why “the base” loves Palin? It comes up time and again, as it’s about the only really notable thing about her: She had her last baby, even though she knew ahead of time it had Down Syndrome. This is a noble act, to be sure, but I don’t see how it qualifies one for high office. And so much for women being judged as anything other than a collection of female body parts. (The fringiest part of the fringe will wonder, if she’s so pure ‘n’ all, why she even had the test in the first place, opposition to all prenatal testing being a big signifier for these folks.)
But back to the culture warriors. They’ll snicker behind their hands at the funny names black people give their kids but think Track and Trig and Willow are fine names for, er, white children. Palin, from the 49th state, is “from America,” and Obama, from the 50th, isn’t. Palin hunts and fishes in exurban Anchorage — good. Obama works in inner-city Chicago — bad. They’re too self-deluded to see the truth before their eyes, that they’re both “America,” an America that can support and elevate people from such divergent backgrounds, who make such different choices. But they can’t see that, because only people who make choices they approve of get to be Americans.
You might say they don’t matter, these little foot soldiers. Yes, they do. They matter now more than ever, because they’re the amplifiers. They’re the bloggers and other chatterers who pick up the talking points and talk them to death.
Later in the day at the Corner:
Not from America [Mona Charen]
Did not mean to endorse what one letter writer said about Obama not being from America. He obviously is — from the furthest left part. I just loved the guy’s phrase “more precious than pearls is a woman who likes to fish and hunt.” FWIW, I do neither.
Really, Mona? Could’ve fooled me.
By the way, I fish and have no particular problem with hunting, although I’ve never done it. And I’m voting for Obama.
Cobbler on Saturday, or as I like to call it, “Peach Dessert II: The Impeachening.”
The emotion that most binds us, one to the other, is empathy. I’m never more empathetic than when buying school supplies and recalling the mix of excitement and dread that accompanies every new school year. I remember my own little flip-outs in particular, how the supply sheet would say “scissors” and I would insist on new scissors.
“Last year’s scissors are fine,” my dad would say.
“No they’re not! The new scissors are supposed to have a sharp point, and those are rounded! Ahhhh!”
My dad wasn’t the empathetic sort and insisted on the old scissors, and he was right, no one cared. The progression from round- to sharp-pointed scissors seemed like a huge step to me; I still remember when we gave up wide-ruled notebook paper for the narrow variety — fourth grade — and when fat pencils were exchanged for standard ones. Wouldn’t you flip out if your dad was trying to make you carry last year’s scissors to school?
Middle school is, um, in the middle, and so are the school supplies — the fancy calculator and the colored markers. Kate’s nervous and so are her non-lying friends. I told her that if anyone hip-checks her into a locker she has my permission to hip-check back, but I’m told the school keeps sixth-graders more or less segregated from the rest of the student body, which combined with the so-called freshman academy movement, sort of raises the question: Why have these arbitrary divisions in the first place? Let’s go back to the parochial model — K-8, 9-12. And uniforms!
Anyway, school supplies. Three-ring binders, highlighters, marking pens, notebooks. Plus a new backpack with pink hearts and skulls-and-crossbones. ‘Cause that’s how my little girl rolls. My mom used to get excited in hardware stores, but for me, it’s Staples. Every ream of paper is an unwritten book.
Quick bloggage today, because apparently I have to spend the rest of the weekend shopping, too:
In the local papers, the story of what happens when prosecutors run amok. A supremely odd-looking former kindergarten teacher is finally free of charges he sexually assaulted two children at the school where he worked. The case stunk from the start, beginning with the alleged facts — that this teacher dragged two boys, ages 4 and 5, from a supervised lunch line at the school and into a classroom, where he forced them to perform oral sex, one after another, before returning them to the lunchroom.
Never mind that a newspaper’s investigation showed the classroom where all this supposedly happened was occupied at the time, and that this was something the official investigation somehow overlooked. Never mind that a doctor found no signs of abuse on either boy. Never mind that the prosecutor, a showboater of the first order, was giving interviews calling the teacher “a freak” and “a pedophile,” and revealing such details as this: That certain materials gathered at the teacher’s house, including the Harry Potter books and a video of “The Lion King,” constituted “non-erotic pornography,” and should be admitted as evidence of his guilt. (I don’t know what non-erotic pornography is, but I suspect it’s sort of like that non-wet water you can buy now.)
The tables are turned now: The prosecutor is up on ethics charges and the teacher is free, although at least one of the supposed victims’ mothers is hanging tough. You have to wonder what sort of prize she is, too.
I’ve known a few sexual-abuse victims in my life. They tell a variety of stories with common elements, mostly alcohol or drugs but always this: Someone they know. A parent or step-parent or mom’s boyfriend or Dad’s army buddy who’s sleeping on the couch for a few weeks until he gets his life back together. That’s not to say the smash-and-grab pedophile doesn’t exist; of course they do. But not many do it in their own workplace, in front of witnesses, two kids at a time and then go on about their business as if nothing ever happened. Just sayin’.
From the DetNews, a fire story with one of the best pieces of fire art, evahr:
Halp halp I iz being taken hoztej. And mah hare is a mesz.
Peach. (Homer Simpson drool goes here.)
Checking the signal on Lake St. Clair.
Smooth sailing.
I braved:
The Gemini.
Iron Dragon.
Couple others.
What I think about on them (an incomplete list):
Metal fatigue;
Rust;
Hidden corrosion;
The possibility of al-Qaeda penetrating the workers’ ranks, most of whom are from overseas.
On wooden coasters:
Termites;
Carpenter ants;
Pencilpost beetles;
Dry rot.
Among other things.
I think I’ve been a journalist too long.
We had a nice time, despite my overactive imagination. Heading home soon.