According to Klein, the reason Americans don’t appreciate the wonders of the stimulus is that they’re a nation of ill-informed dodoheads, especially those who listen to Fox News. The remedy he proposes, in true wordsmith fashion, is for President/Teacher Obama to explain things to us better.
[NOTE: Take a look here if you want to see how very very smart Klein is.
As for the stimulus itself, here’s something for Klein to chew on.]
From another admiring spambot, this one named “Democrats Suck,” of all things:
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…there was no way comedians could make fun of Obama?
Well, I think we can safely say that’s been remedied:
[Hat tip: American Digest: “Has this just been the bestest week in ever or what?”]
It has not escaped my attention that Scott Brown is a very good-looking man.
Now, I know that’s not the only reason, or even the primary reason, that people voted for him. He has other tremendous assets that are far more important. He projects a strong sense of reliability, honesty, intelligence, fairness, and common sense, along with fiscal restraint and an assertive attitude towards terrorism.
But even the gals on “The View” couldn’t help but drool over Scott:
As Whoopi said, “Ding dong!”
Scott Brown is not just good-looking; he may just be the best-looking male politician ever to come down the pike on the national level. I would say the same for Sarah Palin on the distaff side.
In Palin’s case, I believe her beauty both helped and hurt her, since it attracted some but gave special ammunition to those inclined to call her a bimbo. As for Scott Brown, although a few on the left tried to use the fact that he had once posed revealingly (although not nude, as some tried to say) for Cosmo against him, that charge gained no traction. On the whole, I think Brown’s looks were a tremendous asset, if only to get people’s attention long enough for them to listen to him speak and display his other stellar attributes.
It’s interesting that in the last two years we’ve seen two of the most physically attractive people ever to come onto the political scene on the national level, and that both are straight-shooting Republicans of a populist nature. Before that, Romney was considered handsome, but too perfect and almost Ken-doll-like. As Joy Behar notes in the above video, John Edwards (who never rang my chimes) was considered too pretty-boy, a category into which Dan Quayle also fell so long ago, a fact that caused people to treat him as much dumber than he was.
When I think back on the presidents in my lifetime, it strikes me that a great many of them were relatively good-looking. JFK certainly was, although he was hardly in the Scott Brown class in that respect (but then, who is? Brown is one of those people for whom Hollywood would be challenged to find an actor handsome enough to play him in the biopic). LBJ, who followed JFK, was a strange hybrid, because people considered him an impressively good-looking man in person but he came across as a big-eared bumpkin on TV.
Although not ugly, Nixon was not a physically attractive man, nor did he seem comfortable in his own skin. Ford and Carter were both meh.
And then we come to Reagan. Because Reagan was elderly when elected, his looks were more avuncular than hot. But after all, the guy had been a real movie star, and rugged good looks of the very mature variety were part of his appeal—to those inclined to like him anyway. To those who were not, his handsomeness was just another thing to mock.
Say what you will about Reagan’s successor George Bush senior, but come to think of it (and I never really did think about it at the time), he was a good-looking man too, in a patrician grandfatherly way. And then when Bill Clinton came to town, I remember hearing that hordes of liberal women were reporting having erotic dreams about him. I seem to recall that, a few years later, one very young woman had those dreams come true.
Successor George Bush junior was an odd case. Not a bad-looking man, to his enemies he seemed ugly and ape-like, probably not only because they hated him, but because his close-set eyes did give him an unfortunately shifty look. And we all know that many consider his successor Barack Obama to be both a handsome guy and a sex symbol. There’s little doubt that, as with Brown and Palin and Reagan, that was at least part of his appeal, especially initially.
It’s hard to escape the idea that the days when someone who looked like Abraham Lincoln could get elected are over. Television was a factor in their demise. But I think attractiveness was always a plus in politics—consider FDR, for example. It’s just that it’s become more important over time, and unattractiveness more difficult to transcend.
But I wonder if those who voted for Obama and have become disillusioned with him still find him as physically attractive as before. After all, handsome is as handsome does.
In this Slate article by Christopher Beam, written during the Brown/Coakley campaign, I took note of the following sentence [emphasis mine]:
Whatever the accuracy of Brown’s self-portrait””his mother was once on welfare, yet he owns five properties””Democrats are late in countering it.
In this phrase, Beam probably didn’t think he was revealing anything all that important about the liberal/left way of thinking. But I think he was, and it may go something like this: the expectation is that people on welfare are supposed to stay there (and their children and their children’s children), as permanent recipients of the state’s largesse. When they do so, it usually has the beneficial side effect of their continuing to vote to keep their friends the Democrats in power and handing out the goods.
Beam hasn’t quite figured out that Brown is a fifty-year-old man who has been on his own quite some time, plenty long enough to have acquired a law degree, a bit of money, and a few properties along with that truck. These two things—having a mother who was on welfare for a while, and becoming a success later in life—are not mutually exclusive, and so there’s no inherent contradiction there for Democrats to “counter.”
Just ask Barack Obama about the food stamps his mother received when he was a boy. I hear he did pretty well for himself afterward.
This one fooled me, if only for a second. When I read the first few words, I thought it had my number:
I thought this was going to be another long boring blog post, but I was pleasantly suprised. I will be posting a backlink on my blog, as I am quite sure my readers will find this more than interesting.
But alas, only the usual fawning spambot. The goal is to seem more like a real live person, just as in Philip K. Dick stories where robots grow more and more like humans, to the point where the two become virtually indistinguishable. They haven’t reached that goal yet, but they’re trying, they’re trying.
Technology marches on, and teenagers are in the vanguard.
With the ubiquity of cell phones that take pictures that can almost instantaneously be sent to friends, coupled with the driving force of sex in newly-pubescent bodies, we have a recipe for the disaster that can result from the practice known as “sexting.”
I may be behind the times, not having a teenager myself at this point, and having raised mine in the dinosaur days before people commonly had cell phones. But this news story alerted me to the fact that it’s not at all unusual for teenage girls to send nude or seminude photos to teenage boys in a sort of advertisement of their wares. Sometimes these pictures are then freely passed around by the proud recipients for all and sundry to ogle. In the case described in the article, the teenage girls were actually charged with child pornography for sending their own photos to three boys, who were also charged.
This seems far too Draconian, but it’s an understandable effort to stop the practice. Good luck, I say; I don’t think it will work. The temptation is too great, and the tools too readily available.
In my day—oh, do I sound old and quaint when I say that!—in my day we had neither the technology that would allow such a thing, nor the relaxation of social mores that once held it in check. The biology may have been the same, but the attitudes were not.
Yes, of course, there was a lot of fooling around even back then. But although the guys would have probably loved it if sexting had been available, the girls had not yet been taught to flaunt themselves so tartily to win attention and affection.
Make no mistake about it, either. Although young women are sexually driven in the physical sense, much more of the motivation for this sort of bold behavior comes from the need to be popular, have a boyfriend, and to ultimately be loved. Unlike what prevailed in earlier times, it is now a common perception that the way to achieve these things is to seem bold, edgy, and assertively provocative.
In the end, naive girls can get deeply hurt when they realize that boyfriends or acquaintances they trust have passed their nude photos around to share with many others, and that the girls have absolutely no control over how those photos are ultimately used.
At some unknown moment last night my sitemeter recorded that the number of visitors to this blog had passed the three million mark. So I want to celebrate, and I ask you to join me.
I would be lying if I said I didn’t love having readers; what’s a writer without them? I’m especially grateful for the lively comments section here. That was one of the goals I had when I began writing this blog, without knowing if I’d have any comments at all except the random spambot.
But be you commenters, regular readers, lurkers, or sometime guests, I thank you all.
This WSJ piece by Daniel Henninger describes an important and little-discussed turning point in American politics:
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy planted the seeds that grew the modern Democratic Party. That year, JFK signed executive order 10988 allowing the unionization of the federal work force. This changed everything in the American political system. Kennedy’s order swung open the door for the inexorable rise of a unionized public work force in many states and cities.
Read the whole thing.
Another factor is disillusionment with his successor. Some of us, of course, were never illusioned in the first place.
I’ve been saving that title for quite some time. And now there it is, big as life—because Scott Brown, the Republican Senator-elect from Massachusetts, has gone to Washington today.
As John McCain said, “Sen. Brown represents the dreams and hopes and frustrations Americans feel today.” And for once, that’s not hyperbole. It’s simple truth. We’ll see how he lives up to that promise; it won’t be easy.
Brown’s election was singular and extraordinary. I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve seen quite a bit.
How often has there been a US Senate election that has mattered so much? In an off year? An upset in a state where elections are usually foregone conclusions, and have been for decades? At a time when the whole country is hanging on the results, and participating as best they can, as well? In which the entire enterprise is vital to all because it is an attempt to derail an express train in Washington whereby a single party is trying to defy the will of the American people? And where the winner is such a charismatic and seemingly honest and sincere politician who came from nowhere? And in which the whole thing turned around dramatically in only a couple of weeks?
All you American history experts can let me know if I’m wrong. But I believe it’s the most singular election in US Senate history.
[NOTE: For those of you who didn’t get the reference in the title of this post, or for whom it was obscure, I was referring to Frank Capra’s 1939 classic film “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” a movie in which a regular guy gets an unexpected chance to go to DC as a senator, and ends up fighting corruption in that august body.
Read the synopsis of the plot here. The film features a recently deceased US Senator, with Smith (James Stewart) appointed his successor. Corrupt politicians try to frame him and drive him out of his job when he threatens their special interests, and when Smith stages a filibuster to try to stop them, they instruct the press at home to hush up the truth, and also manage to come up with huge bins of fake letters from constituents asking him to resign.
It all ends happily. Naturally! The film is pretty corny in parts, as might be expected. The corruption in the Senate of the film is the kind of petty graft that politics is famous for. What we face today, however, is of much greater import, and affects us all in far more profound ways. The economy, health care, our relationships with enemies such as Iran, the fight against Islamicist terrorists, and our very liberty are at stake.
That’s an awful lot of things resting on the shoulders of one man; and of course, they don’t, not really. But one man can make a difference nevertheless, and Brown is positioned to do just that.