Phil RIP Rick James. We went to see Rick James and Teena Marie at Constitution Hall a couple of months ago. His on stage charisma was pretty amazing. They did a 15 minute + version of Fire and Desire may have been my favorite live song. He had become a cult figure lately because of the Chappelle Show, and he deserves more then becoming a catch phrase for loudmouth white dorks. Don't watch your TiVo'ed Chapelle Show, go listen to Give it To Me Baby.
- posted by Phil @ 6:05 PM

 
Kate Your observation about the North Carolina primaries alone, Phil, has made you more relevant than 90% of what's out there.

The convention has highlighted a dangerous political force - a pundit with a deadline and nothing to say. This, of course, has probably been made worse by blogs, 24-hour news channels, and the Fox News pundit-o-rama. But some of the attacks I've seen in the last week have been truly shameful.

Take, for example, Robert Novak reporting on Crossfire that Teresa Heinz Kerry's pumpkin spice cookie recipe "wasn't as good as Laura Bush's oatmeal chocolate chunk cookie recipe" and that Ms. Kerry, "when confronted with this assessment, blamed the failure on her staffer." Perhaps Mr. Novak's administration sources are drying up since they got in all that trouble for outing a CIA operative.  Mickey Kaus from Slate was close behind in his breathless revelation that Mr. Kerry had named Eddie Yost as his favorite Red Sock, when it turns out Eddie Yost had never played for the Red Sox at all. Actually, Mr. Kaus, Yost was a coach. Don't you feel silly now?

No, he doesn't feel silly; he got three blog paragraphs out of the perceived misstatement. As Elaine from Seinfeld once said, just when I thought we couldn't get any shallower we manage to drain a little more out of the pool. In fact, nothing seems too trivial to mention. Call it the Maureen Dowd school of punditry - when you don't have anything valuable to say, repeat the useless observation that Gore doesn't seem like an alpha male. Oh, and did you get the meme that he's been told to wear earth tones?

All these absurd factoids - supposedly in an effort to reveal something deeply meaningful about the candidate - have the vague feel of Republican talking points, despite the fact that some liberal pundits have repeated them. But unlike some wacky conspiracy theorists who posit that an entity as massive and amorphous as "the media" has some sort of specific, concerted political agenda, I don't think that's what's happening here.

These factoids sound like Republican talking points simply because Republicans are much better than Democrats at focusing their opposition messaging on matters that seem, well, kind of trivial. They learned during the Clinton years that tarring a candidate as a "tax-and-spend-liberal" is far less effective than tarring him as a phony or a liar. (Why so effective? Because these are things you can't disprove. If you're accused of being a tax-and-spend liberal, just push harder for welfare reform - but there's no way to convince someone you're not a serial exaggerator.) And it's easier to tar someone with those labels by emphasizing highly memorable, seemingly inconsequential, non-political examples. And if you repeat it often enough, eventually the mainstream media and even some of your liberal counterparts will be so effectively taken in by the newfound conventional wisdom, and so desperate for something to say, they'll do their work for you.

I feel I'm entitled to take the high road on the issue of triviality. I mean, have you read the House of Love? No, really read it? 100% weighty issue gold, 100% not at all desperate for something to say. Don't let anyone tell you that blogging isn't way easier than it looks.

- posted by Kate @ 5:41 PM

 
Phil Congressional primaries have been happening recently, and I ran across this tidbit from the Wall Street Journal

"Up in North Carolina, a black Republican placed first in a GOP Congressional primary for a vacant U.S. House seat. Vernon Robinson, a city councilman in Winston-Salem, ran an unapologetically conservative campaign using the slogan: "Jesse Helms is back! And this time he's black." "

Man that is bizzaro and great in so many ways. I certainly don't think it is strange for African Americans to be conservative, but you have to be pretty nuts to be a black guy embracing Jesse Helms as your political role model. Plus can you imagine how crazy this must drive Jesse? He is in his 90's and has to be half senile at this point, there is probably little left up there but the racism. I bet he is just spouting off with all the old-school 1930's racial slurs. "That pickaninny is saying what?" "What did that jigaboo call himself."
- posted by Phil @ 2:22 AM

 
Kate Phil, all your extended Hitchens quote proves is that back in the day Reagan was in office he was a leftist, and that he has a long, grudge-filled memory. These things we already know. You go on to say that just because he's "for the war in Iraq" today doesn't mean he's not on the left anymore. I would agree with you, of course, if he ever wrote about anything other than the war in Iraq. I haven't seen an article from him that wasn't war-related or the desecration of a recently-deceased public figure in at least a year, and likely more.

In other words, when the only thesis you ever forward is how right the neo-conservatives are on the only subject you ever write about, what do I care if you think school vouchers have distracted from more important discussions on education reform? Frankly, right now Hitch could believe that we should colonize the moon and set up a Soviet academic labor camp there for all I know. He certainly never talks about it.

I know it's rhetorically important for both conservatives and Hitchens himself to pretend he's still on the left. But the subjects he chooses to about write suggest otherwise.

And lay off my people, would you? Just because we hate people who've immigrated more recently than we have and like us some hair product doesn't mean our heart's not in the right place.



- posted by Kate @ 3:09 PM

 
Phil So I went down to Atlantic City to watch some boxing this weekend. This was my first experience with big time prize fighting and I enjoyed it a lot. However next time I go to a fight I am going to make sure it is two black guys fighting, or two Mexicans, or a Mexican and Black Guy, or a Puerto Rican v. a Thai. No more Gotti fights though.

The discos of Jersey were empty last night as every scumbag Jersey guido dirtbag was in Boardwalk Hall. The air was  saturated with the smell of gel. They announced the celebrities at ringside and the guy who plays Paulie Walnuts on the Sopranos got a bigger ovation then Willie Mays. Dorin is Romainian and we had a small but vocal group of Romanian fans cheering and waving flags. This was met with guys standing up and yelling "sit down you fucking faggots", "fuck you, you fucking fags" or "Fuck you, sit down, faggots." The epithets were telling if you consider the fact that your average Gotti fan is dressed exactly like your average visitor to Chaos the disco at the corner of my street. 


- posted by Phil @ 6:45 PM

 
Phil This is Hitchens on Ronald Reagan days after his death

"There was more to Ronald Reagan than that. Reagan announced that apartheid South Africa had "stood beside us in every war we've ever fought," when the South African leadership had been on the other side in the most recent world war. Reagan allowed Alexander Haig to greenlight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, fired him when that went too far and led to mayhem in Beirut, then ran away from Lebanon altogether when the Marine barracks were bombed, and then unbelievably accused Tip O'Neill and the Democrats of "scuttling." Reagan sold heavy weapons to the Iranian mullahs and lied about it, saying that all the weapons he hadn't sold them (and hadn't traded for hostages in any case) would, all the same, have fit on a small truck. Reagan then diverted the profits of this criminal trade to an illegal war in Nicaragua and lied unceasingly about that, too. Reagan then modestly let his underlings maintain that he was too dense to understand the connection between the two impeachable crimes. He then switched without any apparent strain to a policy of backing Saddam Hussein against Iran. (If Margaret Thatcher's intelligence services had not bugged Oliver North in London and become infuriated because all European nations were boycotting Iran at Reagan's request, we might still not know about this.)"

"One could go on. I only saw him once up close, which happened to be when he got a question he didn't like. Was it true that his staff in the 1980 debates had stolen President Carter's briefing book? (They had.) The famously genial grin turned into a rictus of senile fury: I was looking at a cruel and stupid lizard. His reply was that maybe his staff had, and maybe they hadn't, but what about the leak of the Pentagon Papers? Thus, a secret theft of presidential documents was equated with the public disclosure of needful information. This was a man never short of a cheap jibe or the sort of falsehood that would, however laughable, buy him some time. "

Those aren't the words of a right winger. His Clinton book was a critique of Clinton's presidency from the left not the right. Just because he is for the war in Iraq doesn't mean he has changed his philosophy.


- posted by Phil @ 2:23 AM

 
Kate While it's true that white people are as fickle as Britney Spears before her morning cigarette, I wouldn't call Linda Ronstadt washed up just yet.  Who could forget her duet with one of the Nevilles? Didn't she sing that song for that cartoon mouse? The less popular cartoon mouse? It may have been 15 years ago now but to me it's still like yesterday.

As for Hitch, yeah, he's on the "far left" the way David Horowitz is, the way David Brock still goes to CPAC conventions. At this point his leftist credentials are nothing more to him than a rhetorical device. I prefer my faux-leftist positioning from Democratic candidates or their speechwriters, thanks very much.

- posted by Kate @ 4:39 PM