Category Archives: sarcasm

The Life of Celia

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(With apologies to the Obama perpetual re-election campaign. Other people have had a go at this concept – I think The Life of Brian is one of the funniest, but I wanted to have a go at this myself. )

3 Years Old – Under President Eisenhower, Celia stays home with her younger brother, as her full-time work-at-home Mom helps her get ready for school by reading aloud to her, supervising her playtime and providing a secure home environment. She will join thousands of students across the country who will start kindergarten ready to learn and succeed.

17 Years Old – Under President Nixon, Celia takes the SAT and is on track to begin applying for college … which college program includes two years at a local junior college capped by two years at a state university – a public university system that the taxes paid by Celia’s parents over the years have subsidized. The public high school which Celia attends is in a working-class suburb, but offers academically enriched courses for those students who qualify for them.
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May Miscellany

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Holy krep, is it May already? Guess it must be – time flies when you are having fun. My excuse is that I actually took a whole Sunday off; Blondie and I went up to the World Famous Buda Texas Wienerdog Races on Sunday, and I have been working alternately on two paid projects all this week to catch up. So – barely able to keep up with the news, such as it is, between all this and noodling around in the kitchen making another wheel of Leicester cheese and starting two crocks of home-made sauerkraut. All this German stuff is starting to catch up to me, I swear.

Sauerkraut, red potatoes and nice little sausages from the best meat market in New Braunfels, all cooked up in the same pan, make a darned tasty meal. (The recipe is on my book blog, under “The Splendid Table” page. No, seriously – good eats. I’ve begun to wonder, tasting the glories of home-made cheese, how good are the pickles that we have canned, and the sauerkraut which will eventually emerge from the canning kettle.)
Anyway – the news is it’s usual bounty of the richly comic:

Like Professor Elizabeth Warren, who looks like an older version of a Bund Deutcher Madel recruiting poster (League of German Maidens, the female version of the Hitler Youth) claiming to be 1/32 Cherokee Indian … ok, then. Now and again, I met people who told me they were part whatever American Indian. A fair number of them were blue-eyed blonds, which led me to assume that … certain physical traits must have been pretty darned recessive. Even if my friend Esther T. who was one-eighth Shoshone did look like Geronimo got up in drag as a Wagnerian soprano. So who’s really a minority, when you look at first glance like a member of the majority class? Oh, and I won’t even get into how the head of the NAACP, Benjamin Jealous is almost a dead-spit look-alike to my brother J.P. – who in spite of having dark hair and brown eyes and used to tan very easily … is a person of unmixed pallor, Anglo-Saxon and protestant descent for as far back as family records go. Seriously. But honestly, how seriously can you take this s**t these days?

I see where some Occupy Whatever doofuses had a plot to blow up a bridge. But they didn’t have the wit to see that all their needs for explosives were being met by surprisingly helpful FBI informants. I am being reminded of those dear sweet days in the late 60s and early 70s, when law enforcement alphabet agencies made up a substantial portion of the membership of so many of these fringe little groups with violent inclinations. Apparently, they were the only ones willing to come to tedious meetings and reliably pay their dues. I kid, I kid.

And now that all the jollies have been wrung out of President Obama’s boyhood proclivities for chowing down on chow (and hound, and peke and collie), I guess now it’s time to make fun of his composite girlfriends. Seriously, he had girlfriends, composite or individual? My impression was that he was too much in love with himself to get involved with an outsider, but OK … You know, after a certain point, when enough stuff has been composited, created, massaged and shaped, you may as well call it fiction, not a memoir.
And that’s my week. Working up a piece to accompany the administrations latest bit of work “The Life of Julia” will call for a separate entry of it’s own.

(links below – somehow the posting of embedded links on this blog is frelled beyond redemption.)

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/edit/a.3037076371979.2121366.1415091659/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/League_of_German_Girls

http://celiahayes.wordpress.com/2012/04/09/one-pan-wurst-supper/

WTF?

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That’s the feeling, really – as Blondie and I walk the dogs of a morning, and discuss such weighty matters as who remembered to bring sufficient poopy bags, if it is safe enough to let the Weevil off leash long enough to have a brisk run up and down the long fence behind which lives another Boxer mix who carries on a sort of fence to fence tag run, how many tomatoes we are likely to get from our current planting of garden bounty, if there will be enough cucumbers to make a decent batch of pickle spears soon, what to have for dinner that evening … and the morning gleanings of various internet news sites that we favor, upon rising from our slumbers first thing of a morning.

I favor Instapundit myself – out of long habit, even if he did drop this site from his blogroll a couple of years ago, but my daughter favors a combination of TMZ and the Daily Mail website, which (oddly enough) often puts up items of American news days before it appears in our own very dear mainstream media organs. Nope, tis true, tis true: sensationalist, twee, celebrity-addled, frequently misspelled/ungrammatical/confusing/sentimental-enough-to-trigger-a-diabetic-reaction, the DM still unashamedly and without much bias that I can detect covers the news. What a concept, hey? (Leaving aside the DM’s editorial bias, whatever it might be. When it comes to Brit newspapers, I used to favor the London Times and the Spectator myself, until they put everything interesting behind a paywall, then the Telegraph, and even the Guardian – until … well, that last just went beyond the pale for me. The lefty establishment bias just got to hard to take. God knows what the Grauniad thinks of the Tea Party; I don’t have a stomach strong enough to check.)

Anyway – to see ourselves as the DM sees us. My daughter notes the increasing numbers of American commenters, who ask why they hell do they have to go to a British newspaper site to see relatively unbiased American news. I’d guess it’s probably because the DM doesn’t seem to actually have a rep in among the White House Press Whores, or among the local establishment in whatever city the interesting story of the moment comes from. So, they can tell the story and access-to-the-elite-establishment be damned. Kind of refreshing, actually: what was the old press motto? To comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable – damned if it doesn’t seem that principle has been reversed, in these degraded modern days.

Anyway – we were talking about a wide-ranging number of topics, but actually, they weren’t all that wide-ranging. Mostly it was the various aspects of the Federal Gummint’s heavy and strangling hand descending on a variety of concerns and businesses: the EPA going after coal-burning power plants (what – do they want rolling blackouts?), the Department of Labor going all ‘it’s for the chiiiiiiiildren!’ in forbidding children, tweens and teens from working certain essential jobs on family farms, hammering the Catholic church for not handing out free birth control like it was Skittles, the EPA going after rabbit breeders, the Justice Department casually allowing weapons to walk from border states into Mexico, prosecuting Gibson guitar manufacturing enterprise for using certain kinds of imported wood, the TSA (who easily could be the most despised organization in the US today but for all the competition from the EPA) feeling up four-year old girls and ripping off wheelchair bound veterans, the NOAA enthusiastically ruining the livelihoods of New England independent fishermen … and the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman imbroglio, with respect to flash-mob violence and the disinclination of our own very dear Department of Justice to become involved in prosecuting those who incite racial violence. Long list it was, too. So, I don’t think I want to get fitted for a tinfoil hat just yet … but WTF do these various numbskulls think they are doing? Exactly how far do they think people can be pushed before an individual or a community entirely looses patience? I mean – do they want large numbers of Americans to openly defy the Feds, nonviolently or otherwise? Is this deliberate incitement or just dumbassery on an epic scale?

I know, cheerful thinking for a morning walk. I think I’ll go fire up the canning kettle, and put aside another dozen jars of home made pickles, relishes and sauerkraut. To the best of my knowledge, the EPA or the DOJ hasn’t come out regulating against that … yet.
(Links here. Impossible to embed links any more…

https://truthfarmer.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/rabbit-raid-redux-six-bells-farm-update/

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903895904576542942027859286.html

http://pjmedia.com/blog/new-regulations-crush-new-england-fisheries/

About Darned Time

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As I wrote – gosh, how many years ago in the Brief – about wishing that Hollywood could find it in their heart and wallets to make movies that didn’t kick military members and veterans in the teeth; now they finally come up with one: Act of Valor, after lo, these many years. It looks as if looks as if the regular movie-going public likes Act of Valor as much as the movie critic establishment seems to despise it. Or so I can see from the Rotten Tomato ratings. But hey – opening weekend box office figures tell something. And if it cleans up on subsequent weekends, maybe, just maybe I might have hope that the usual Hollywood ‘tards can connect the dots.

And about time, too. But I still think the ‘Obama gets Osama’ drama is going to fall flat, unless the current administration works with their folks to drag us to see it by the bus-load.

Consider the Michelles of the Field

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…they toil not, nor do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Enough of that simile, since it’s pretty obvious that Solomon in all his glory was not spread all over just about every fashion and women’s mag for the last couple of years, accompanied by cutlines, stories and editorials, all drooling over how chic, fashionable and oh-so-modern and otherwise laudable the spouse of the current occupant of the White House was.

Yep, upon the apotheosis of the Empty Suit known as Barack Obama, to the highest office in the land, I could hardly pass the supermarket checkout stand, without being assured that his Significant Other was the best thing since Jackie Kennedy or sliced bread… so lovely, so tasteful, so chic, the very model of an ultra-modern First Lady. Frankly, the sycophantic chorus got to the point where I began muttering to myself something along the lines of, ‘Sister, I remember Jackie Kennedy – and you, darlin’ – aren’t no Jackie Kennedy. If Jackie Kennedy had ever dressed for a public event by raiding her daughter’s closet and the nearest Goodwill outlet, she would have at least made it look good!’ Frankly, if I never see another picture of Michelle in a boob-belt and too-small cotton cardy, or one of Laura Ashley’s more unfortunate evening dress designs, it will all be too soon. And I speak as one who does raid her daughter’s closet, the local Goodwill store and loved Laura Ashley, but then I do not see any fashion mags out there breathlessly lauding Sgt. Mom’s inimitable sense of style.

About the only mystery left unexamined regarding Michelle Obama’s dress sense is how on earth one can spend a bomb of money and still finish up wearing such desperately unflattering clothes, or clothes grotesquely unsuited for the occasion – or both.

So, you will have gathered that Michelle Obama annoys me. I would have been content to dismiss her as I did, yea these many months ago as “a seething pit of resentment in spite of two high-end degrees, a large income and a mansion; a BAP with a limitless sense of entitlement.” I might have been able, eventually, to blow off the fashion and women’s magazine going all full Pravda on us … but for the vacations.

The incessant expensive vacations to lavish resort locations annoy me. I don’t grudge rich people their amusements, knowing that they mostly pay for such excursions themselves, and that spending on them will trickle down to make a good living for the people who own, run, and work at such places – heck, I live in a destination city, although I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not a tropical paradise like Hawaii, or an enclave of the uber-rich like Martha’s Vinyard. I certainly didn’t grudge President Reagan, or either of the Presidents Bush from taking vacations at property they owned and improved, and even hosted VIPs at. (I did derive amusement out of the White House Press corps being dragged to Crawford, Texas, in August, though. Awwww, poor cosmopolitan urbanites, being dragged to the ass-end of nowhere in the most miserable part of a Texas summer!)

But at a time when ordinary working people are cutting back to a week or so, taking a frugal holiday here and there, or even not taking a vacation at all – Michelle Obama taking a lavish holiday every two months or so, looks very, very bad to the general public. And the White House must know that it’s going over about as well as a case of the chicken pox at a kid’s birthday party. That someone whose job it is to consider damage control can’t or won’t talk her into slumming it at Camp David instead is not a good thing.

Weekly Miscellany

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It’s been another one of those weeks, sportsfans; all kinds of odd things going on, some of them personal and some of them in the larger world. Kind of hard to see which of them are more important in the big scheme o’ things, and not many of them worth a full blog-post.

1. So King Barry I did his state of the union address this week. Meh … I didn’t watch, although we did catch a few seconds of it while channel-surfing. Just enough time to wonder why on earth he appeared to be such a garish orange color … seriously, he looked like a giant Cheeto with ears. I gather the speech was the same paint by the numbers blah-blah-blah. It must not have gone over all that well with the partisans, because I distinctly heard an announcer or a guest on a certain classical music program make a crack about it; something about a certain classical music performer getting more applause than the state of the union address.

2. Gingrich or Romney, Romney or Gingrich. I am underwhelmed. The sniping between the partisans is unseemly. My one wistful desire is that it were possible to take elements of all the candidates and mold them into one single candidate: Gingrich’s fire and take-no-prisoners attitude, Romney’s skill at organization, Santorum’s constancy to principle, Perry’s experience as a governor … but it isn’t, so I’ll just have to deal with the easy decision of who to vote for in November. Anybody but King Barry, of course, but I might give the Dread Cthulhu a look-in.

3. Working all week on an editing job; a novelette supposed to be a horror story, but in actuality it was what I call secondary guy-porn. Primary guy porn is what you think it is, secondary guy porn has lots of loving detail about weapons and vehicles in it. Secondary fem-porn has lots of loving detail about clothes and accessories. Hey, it’s a living. And it’s not the worst project I’ve ever edited.

4. The second edition of the separate books of the Adelsverein Trilogy has been uploaded to Lightning Source, the proofs are approved, and it should be listed on Amazon and the usual suspects by the end of the week – and at a price of a couple of bucks cheaper than the first edition. I’d always winced, looking at the retail price, and winced again, whenever I had to purchase a bulk quantity at my author discount from Booklocker. Here’s hoping that the Trilogy chugs along just as steadily as Truckee does – both e-book and print versions … and the German translation sells like hot-cakes.

5. Sigh. We found another lost dog. And no, we’re not keeping this one, as we did with Connor. German shepherdish, youngish, fairly clean and well-mannered, unneutered male, bouncing around in the empty field back of St. Helena’s. He followed along with us, all the way home; did not take well to having a leash put on him, so we deduce that he was never taken for walkies. Of course no tags. He’s already listed on fido-finder, and tomorrow we’ll go through the usual rounds. The other two dogs are freaked out by this. The Weevil has taken over Connor’s bed, wedged underneath my desk, and Conner has had to take the Weevil’s bed, which I moved over next to my chair.

And that’s been my week – yours?

With a Crowbar

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That is the sarcastic answer to an ancient question lately revised in the matter of the Penn State University athletic department having enabled a coach to serially molest young boys for decades – the question being, ‘How you separate the men from the boys at ____?’ Understandably, a large portion of the public is upset to furious about this, and those who are Penn grads and/or college football fans, and/or Joe Paterno fans are particularly distressed and/or seriously disillusioned.

The very saddest result from this appalling state of matters is something that I had meditated upon five years ago, when it was the matter of the Capitol Hill pages and a one Representative Mark Foley, who was forced to resign once his apparent inability to keep his hands, metaphorically speaking, off the junior staff became public knowledge outside Washington. I noted that the long-term and most damaging after-effect was how this kind of predation – after the immediate damage is done – screws up any chance of a teenager having a good mentorly relationship with an older person not their parental unit. Any cross-generational friendship will be looked at with grave suspicion – and that is so not a good thing.

We came to the point several years ago – after the various scandals in the Catholic Church – of having to consider an apparently friendly overture from an older man to a teenage boy or child as potentially the first move of a chicken-hawk. This just has to poison the pool just that much more, adding one more smidgeon of crappiness to a teenager’s lot in life, or to that of a child from a dysfunctional home. Being a teenager is an awkward age, for a variety of reasons; being physically nearly an adult but emotionally nearer to being a child, craving respect and responsibility, but really getting much of a chance for earning either, the utter pointlessness of much that is taught in a public school setting . . . and then add to the fact that the average tweener or teen is stuck with their peers, by custom and institutional practice for much of each day.

Picture it, if your own memory of middle or high school is not painfully vivid in your memory: stuck with inane conversations, pointless rivalries, even more pointless academic curricula, bitter feuds, bullying and mind-games. Feeling ill and over-grown, flushed with too many hormones, and no outlet – and even if you are one of the lucky ones who do get along with your parents – they are, after all, your parents.

For a lot of teenagers, a friendship with an adult not their parent is a lifeline, and an anchor to sanity, a connection to a real world outside the confines of high school and their peer-group, a reassurance that they can connect with the real world. I have always had a conviction that teenagers – in order to get through the worst of it – need more than anything else, the companionship and example of adult friends who have common interests and enthusiasms. It tends to take the younger generation out of an insular round of strictly teen-approved interests, encourages them to connect and to get away from that sour view expressed in my own youth of “not trusting anyone over thirty.”

One of our joint enthusiasms, when my daughter was in middle school and we lived then in Ogden, Utah, was a regular meeting of the Salt Lake City Chapter of the Dr. Who Fan Club. Thirty or forty Whovians met socially once a month at a certain member’s house to watch an episode of Dr. Who on video and chat about their mutual liking for the series. (I rather liked the Whovians by the way; they were much more cerebral and grounded than the Trekfans. One felt that they had fairly successful and interesting lives, and their appreciation for The Doctor was merely an amiable eccentricity, not an overwhelming obsession.) Anyway, it gratified me as a parent to notice my daughter’s social assurance, and that of some of the other younger Whovians. At fourteen, she was much the youngest; I think the next youngest was sixteen, and the ages of the other members ranged well up into the seventies. But everyone always had a wonderful time at meetings, interacting as equals and friends, and I thought it was marvelous for the youngest fans, in that they were tacitly reassured that there was an escape over the walls of the teenage ghetto, and an wide world full of interesting friends on the other side. And at the very least, I am sure they came away from the meetings of the Whovians with the assurance that they would not be trapped in the teenage wasteland forever.

So the mentoring aspect in society is critically important, for boys and girls alike: How the heck and from whom – are you going to work out what being an adult really is – if all you have is your teenaged idiot peers, and the crazy-house hall of mirrors that is the media? Who can you pattern yourself after? What if your parents are dysfunctional and you do not get along with them? I had friends in the military in that situation, who were able to find another mentor to pattern themselves upon, and thereby have a chance at becoming reasonably well-adjusted and functioning adults. I have mentored a friend of my daughter whose parents were perfect studies in rotten parenting skills, and any number of young female airmen along the way. Adult friends and mentors are the fallback position, the rescue, and second chance at becoming a well-adjusted and functioning adult. That sexual predators can inject themselves into this situation, can extend a pretend hand of friendship and respect, while all the while be looking for their own sexual interests – this is an obscenity. It casts a more-than-decade-long shadow of suspicion and distrust on those – mostly male –volunteers willing to involve themselves in youth betterment-programs as well as discouraging any well-inclined adult from opening themselves up to potential accusation.

So, thank you, Coach Sandusky, and by extension those personnel in the athletic department faculty at Penn State U – who covered for your insatiable need to get your rocks off by molesting children – just thanks. You’ve proved yourself to be a really putrid, manipulative and exploitative human being, if the published indictments are anything to go by. And everyone else in the chain of command that enabled this? Well, just thanks again. Hope you feel good about having kept your job secure by keeping silent. In addition to having facilitated the serial abuse of kids, you have also put another obstacle in the way of well-intentioned men and woman wanting to do their bit for the larger community in ministering to kids and teenagers with issues and problems. Again, just thanks.

(Cross-posted at Chicago Boyz)

Memo: You First, Maxine

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From: Sgt. Mom
To: The Hon. Maxine Waters,
Re: Telling the Tea Party to Go to Hell
1.Dear Maxine, when I call into memory the particulars regarding your district, I can only assume that you are already well acquainted with Hell, and the audience you were addressing with your recent inflammatory and insulting diatribe are a pretty fair assembly of your constituents. So nice to see that you are upholding the new civility in our political discourse.

2. Allow me to enlighten you – or bring it to your own awareness – that the so-called Tea Party are a leaderless and distributed insurgency of involved and patriotic citizens united by three basic concerns: fiscal responsibility, strict dedication to the precepts for self-government outlined in the Constitution, and an affection for free markets – which is not anything like crony capitalism, as is currently practiced among the current corruptocracy. A limited federal establishment, state and local control, a high degree of personal responsibility also come into it.

3. I can also see why this Tea Party political tendency would greatly concern a certain kind of long-established political parasite; that kind of machine-based, racial-grievance charlatan who battens onto the American body politic like a tick, exploiting the life-blood of the Republic no less than the woes and miseries of their constituencies for decades. A new political class imbued with devotion to Tea Party principles is very likely viewed by such a politician as akin to the approach of someone with a pair of tweezers and a hot match . . . I only draw the parallel. You may take that simile as far as you like.

4. Finally, I expect that within my lifetime, there will be another person of color – man or woman elected to the Presidency of this country. He – or she – will definitely not be a product of the corrupt special interest, racial-grievance chasing, big-city machine-oligarchy. They will most likely come out of the larger business world or the military . . . and very likely will be Tea Partiers. This will probably not please you, but life is just full of these little tragedies.

5. Bless your heart, Maxine – you have a nice day, you hear?

I remain, most sincerely,
Sgt Mom

(cross-posted at Chicago Boyz)

Reissue of Memo: John Wayne is Dead and Arnie Has a Day Job

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(In light of the current ruckus over President’s Obama’s very personal wet smooch from Hollywood regarding the proposed “get Osama” movie, I am reissuing my historic memo, from 2004 or so. Greyhawk at Mudville Gazette has the whole depressing, infuriating saga of the world’s longest proposed political advertisement, here.)
To: Providers of our Movie & TV Entertainment
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Lack of Spine and Relevant Movies

1. So here it has been nearly three years since 9/11, two years since the overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan, a year since the thunder run from the Kuwait border to Baghdad, and all we get from you is a TV movie, a couple of episodes from those few TV serials that do touch on matters military, and a two-hour partisan hack job creatively edited together from other people’s footage. Ummm … thanks, ever so much. Three years worth of drama, tragedy, duty, honor, sacrifice, courage and accomplishment, and all we get is our very own Lumpy Riefenstahl being drooled over by the French. Where is the Casablanca, So Proudly We Hail, Wake Island, They Were Expendable? My god, people, the dust had barely settled over the Bataan surrender, before the movie was in the theaters. You people live to tell stories— where are ours? What are we fighting for and why, who are our heroes and villains, our epics and victories?

2. And it’s not like other media people have been laying down on the job: writers, reporters, bloggers have been churning out stories by the cubic foot: the brave passengers taking back Flight 93, the stories of people who escaped the towers, and those who helped others escape, as well as those who ran in, the epic unbuilding of the Trade Center ruins. What about the exploits of the Special Forces in Afghanistan, on horseback in the mountains with a GPS, directing pinpoint raids on Taliban positions, the women who ran Afghanistans’ underground girls’ schools? What about Sgt Donald Walters, Lt. Brian Chontosh, the 3rd ID’s fight for the strong points at Larry, Curley and Moe and a dozen others. There’s enough materiel for the lighter side, too: Chief Wiggles, Major Pain’s pet turkey, the woman Marine who deployed pregnant and delivered her baby in a war zone, the various units who have managed to bring their adopted unit mascots back from the theater. (Do a google search, for heaven’s sake. If you can’t handle that, ask one of the interns to help.) The shelves at my local bookstore are pretty well stocked with current writings on the subject, memoirs, reports, thrillers and all. Some stories even have yet to be written; they are still ongoing, and even classified, but I note that did not stop the movie producers back then: they just consulted with experts and made something up, something inspiring and convincing.

3. Of course, actually dealing with a contemporary drama in the fight against Islamic fascism would mean you would have to actually come down out of Hollywood’s enchanted world, and actually, you know … speak to them. Ordinary people, ordinary, everyday people, who don’t have agents and personal trainers and nannies, and god help them, they don’t even vote for the right people, or take the correct political line. Some of them (gasp) are even military, and do for real what movies only pretend to do … and besides, they have hold to all these archaic ideals like honor, duty, and country. (Ohhh, cooties!)

4. And since even mentioning the Religion of Peace (TM) in connection with things like terrorism, mass-murder, and international plots for a new caliphate is a guarantee to bring CAIR and other fellow travelers seething and whining in your outer office … ohh, best not. Drag out those old villainous standby Nazis, or South American drug lords, even the odd far-right survivalist for your theatrical punch-up, secure in the knowledge that even if you piss off what few remains of them, at least they won’t be unleashing a fatwa on your lazy ass, or sending a suicide bomber into Mortens’. Just ignore the three large smoking holes in the ground; cover your eyes and pretend it away. Never happened, religion of peace, all about oil, la-la-lah, fingers in my ears, I can’t hear you.

5.To make movies about it all, is to have to come to grips with certain concepts; among them being the fact that we are all potential targets for the forces of aggressive Islamo-fascism, that it is not anything in particular which we have done to draw such animus, and that we are in this all together, and that we must win, for the consequences of not winning are not only unbearable for us all — but they would be very likely to adversely affect you, too. I would expect an industry dependent on the moods and fashions amongst the public at large to have a better feel for what would sell … but I guess denial is more comfortable, familiar space, Sept. 10th is what you know best.

6. Still, if you could pass a word to Lumpy Riefenstahl, about getting signed releases, for footage, interviews and newsprint. It would be the courteous gesture towards all the little people for whom he professes to care, and save a bit of trouble in the long run.

Thanks
Sgt Mom

Strong Tea

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Well, it looks like the accusations of Tea Partiers being terrorists may be falling a little flat, or maybe the usual media tools and pols have gotten some blow-back for jumping on that particular bandwagon. Me, I’m beyond outrage. Anyone mouthing that poisonous little meme –– is someone that I will cheerfully boycott, vote against, disregard and shun – and that even includes John McCain. I took his description of Tea Partiers as hobbits as meaning to be demeaning. Once, I had expected better of him. Now – just another bitter establishment RINO, one of a number of old-line Republicans, seeing the writing on the wall: Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin and not liking it a single bit. You have been tried and found wanting, and your kingdom will be divided between the strict constitutionalists and the fiscal conservatives. Rage, rage against the dying of the light of things in Washington as they have been for lo these many years.

Frankly, to me – for a professional politician of either party to have been happily ensconced within the Beltway for more than a term or two or three is now a positive dis-recommendation, and I shouldn’t be the least surprised to find out that my attitude is shared, and will be demonstrated in November, 2012. It is to laugh, though – to see the established political elite twist and squirm over the last two years since the first Tea Party rallies, and the conventional wisdom morph. Let’s see – first, just bitter clingers having a tantrum, and if there were more than a dozen or a couple of hundred, the protests would peter out for lack of continuing enthusiasm. I think this attitude among established pols and the mainstream media began to change after the humongously large gathering in Washington, late in 2009. I could almost hear the grinding of the gears inside the political and media Leviathans: Oh krep-we’d better start paying attention to those freaks with the Gadsden flags, there’s a whole lotta them out there! And then when Senator Bennett of Utah was given the bum’s rush by the Utah GOP caucus – packed full of Tea Partier sympathizers, who were only following up on the same earnest intention of the Tea Partiers I knew in Texas – to take over the local GOP caucus from the inside . . . well, it was to laugh.

Really, at first the local establishment Repubs were all enthusiastic about the Tea Party; some of them were naturally in sympathy anyway, but I am sure the higher-ups were seeing it as a new source of money, and volunteer enthusiasm, all ready to be bridled, saddled and ridden. It was sweet and kinda pathetic – they heard what they wanted to hear, and disregarded the rest. I distinctly remember a strategy meeting about this, sometime in the summer of ’09 or so; third party was out, no future in that. Taking over the Dems from inside – we did kick around the idea, but concluded that – given our various backgrounds and inclinations, probably the GOP was a better fit. And such was the genius of the self-organizing Tea Party, all of the leaders and local enthusiasts were talking to each other, emailing and sharing information on a grand scale; what one local party came up with swiftly spread by internet osmosis to others. It was a demonstration of the principle of the wisdom of crowds, or if you like – a number of minds tackling the same problem from many different angles and coming up spontaneously with pretty much the same answer.

And now the old-line, established Republican politicians and strategists – among others – are belatedly discovering that many of the Tea Party candidates meant exactly what they said, having said what they meant. Good luck with trying to marginalize them – that feline has already exited the fabric containment field.

2012 is shaping up to be a really fun election year, I must say. (Note to self – buy some more popcorn, before the price of it goes up. And note to everyone – last week was invited to be one of the contributors to the Chicago Boyz blog. I had been commenting there since forever, in blog-years time, and so Lex and Johnathan very kindly invited me. I’ll try and cross-post as much as possible.)

On the Internet No One Knows You Are a Dog

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Yes, it would appear that the lesbians are actually straight men, the women are women, and the tween-agers are FBI agents, and a certain NY congressman with a slightly risible last name and a penchant for tweeting suggestive pictures of his body or parts thereof – is a bit of a perv. Honestly, I thought everyone had gotten a piece of Wiener last week, and there were absolutely no further possible ways in which the gentleman in question could embarrass his party, his constituents and his spouse, after the pic of him in the gym dressing room, clutching his ding-a-ling through a towel, but my daughter alerted me to this gem, courtesy of the UK Daily Mail. Seriously, I am wondering what possibly could top that for humiliating revelations, although now that he has resigned, perhaps that will stop any more from appearing.

The Gay Girl in Damascus and the Paula Brooks thing – honestly, it seems like the plot for a movie – something titled The Gay Deceivers just suggests itself right off the bat. Seldom in real life do we have such a delicious confluence of pretense . . . what is real, what is the real identity behind those pixels on a screen, and how much of what you put out there is really, really, really real. And I speak as someone who has been blogging under a not-terribly opaque nom du-blog since 2002, mostly because I didn’t want to put my real name out there. My daughter was still on active duty, my parents and brothers are listed in the phone book, and I had enough of demented devotion from eccentric fans when I was on radio, here and there among military radio stations. Yes, you have a million fans, if you are in the public eye in some manner, and a half-dozen really sick f**ks as enemies, all of whom have never met you, don’t really know any more about you than what you put out about yourself . . . and I didn’t really want to deal with it, or have my family deal with it.

There were often discussions, early on – about blogging under a real name, or under a nom-du-blog; questions of credibility, of standing behind what you wrote. I took the line that yes, for piece of mind or actual physical safety, there were excellent reasons for someone to blog under another name. One could establish a reputation for verity, and honesty, no matter what name you called yourself. Over time, your on-line reputation could be as solid as it was in real-space, congruent with your real-life experience.

And there are bloggers who have been doing that – under cover or by their real names in various countries, and some of them in physical danger: Salam Pax is one that comes to mind at first, mostly because of the blogosphere controversy over whether he was a real and credible person, reporting from inside Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Hossein Derakhshan, the godfather of Iranian blogging may or may not still be imprisoned by the Iranian authorities. The Egyptian blogger who goes by the nom du blog Sandmonkey was briefly arrested in the recent past. They took – and still are taking risks by writing, and blogging. Creating a whole other persona and identity, at odds with real life, and claiming to bear first-hand witness in a blog to extraordinary current events, when you are actually hundreds or thousands of miles away?

When I do that, I call it a bit of historical fiction, and clearly label it such. Dunno why “Amina” and “Paula” didn’t think of doing it that way. Would have saved a bit of embarrassment, all the way around.

Shoot, Shove Overboard, and Shut Up

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Ya know, at least Obama actually did a very good speech, announcing that Osama Bin Laden had been taken down, and he did have the stones in the first place to step up to the plate and give the order for the SEALS to take out the trash. No shilly-shallying around and voting ‘present’ on that one, even if there are reports that he chewed over the decision for 16 hours. Well, it was momentous decision; a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize authorizing a targeted assassination, within the sovereign territory of a nation frequently described as being an ally. The irony abounds – one can only imagine the political and media response to GWB giving the go-ahead. So, our boy-king has the advantage of being one of those with a D after his name, which – when it comes to this sort of thing pretty much affords all-over protection against blowback.

So, approving noises all the way around, all the day long on Monday and into Tuesday this week: OBL sleeps wid da fishes, and the most sycophantic media tools are crowing that he will be a shoo-in for reelection in 2012 on that account . . . never mind that gas will probably close on $5.00 a gallon by mid-summer, and joblessness is endemic and the prices for basic groceries are sneaking up. And then . . .

And then . . . oh, oh. Different stories: firefight with the SEALS . . . or not. Use of a woman – perhaps wife, perhaps not – as a human shield. Plain old down and dirty execution, or did the plan call originally for everyone in the house in Abbottabad to be taken away for leisurely interrogation? Video or still documentation of the whole thing – as well as that rushed burial at sea, proving that OBL did indeed go over the side of the Carl Vinson? And now, not releasing any of the pictures of OBL, pining for the fijords because of inflaming the Muslim street, or something? People, get a grip – the Muslim street is always inflamed over something or other. Besides, they are always telling us that OBL was a bad Moslem, that he hijacked the Religion of Peace . . . so, wouldn’t they also want to see visual proof of his demise. There have been enough bloody pictures circulating in the last ten years, and anyone who has ever watched an episode of CSI has probably already seen many scenes at least as bloody and stomach-churning.

And no one at the higher levels of the administration had any idea as to how to deal with this, as an important news event and public affairs challenge – other than the boy-king making a speech. It was as if that was as far as they could see it going; the Administration appears to have felt no need to work out an in-depth response. Just take their word for it, no need to work out a coherent narrative, backed up by pictures, video, carefully shielded witness testimony, et cetera. Just shoot, shove overboard, and shut up.

Not gonna fly, in this wired world, not with so many people wanting to see just a little bit more, within the boundaries of operations security. I’d guess that the pictures and video outlining just a few more answers to questions will leak or be released within days. Just too many people, who are just too damn curious and haven’t had that curiosity satisfied in the least. I’m a long-retired military media professional – and I am offering this feedback gratis. The Administration better start working out a better response to this, and any future-type events.

Later: Froggy and Blackfive thinking along the same lines…