Everybody in the blogosphere is buzzing today about that mildly risque photo of President Bush trying to decide whether to accept Olympic volleyball player Misty May-Treanor’s invitation to smack her on the tushy for good luck, but personally I was far more amused by this pic:
You know, I think this is the first time I’ve ever felt any sense of empathy whatsoever for this man… yep, George, I know how it is. We’re both guys, after all…
So, did you hear McCain compared Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, apparently in an effort to paint him as a pretty but vacuous celebrity instead of a serious politician? Here’s Paris’ response:
(Go on, click it — you may be surprised. God knows I was…)
I don’t know about you, but that clip fills me with a killer case of cognitive dissonance. Who knew anything that sensible could ever come from her beglossed lips? I know, of course, that this material was surely written for her, but still… she actually sounds as if she knows what she’s talking about! If nothing else, she reads from the teleprompter better than McCain or our current Fearless Leader…
Here’s something I’ll bet most people — especially we younger folks who grew up hearing the term in question on a regular basis — have never considered:
WE hear constantly now about “our commander in chief.” The word has become a synonym for “president.” It is said that we “elect a commander in chief.” It is asked whether this or that candidate is “worthy to be our commander in chief.”
But the president is not our commander in chief. He certainly is not mine. I am not in the Army.
…
The president is not the commander in chief of civilians. He is not even commander in chief of National Guard troops unless and until they are federalized. The Constitution is clear on this: “The president shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States.”
When Abraham Lincoln took actions based on military considerations, he gave himself the proper title, “commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” That title is rarely — more like never — heard today. It is just “commander in chief,” or even “commander in chief of the United States.” This reflects the increasing militarization of our politics. The citizenry at large is now thought of as under military discipline. In wartime, it is true, people submit to the national leadership more than in peacetime. The executive branch takes actions in secret, unaccountable to the electorate, to hide its moves from the enemy and protect national secrets. Constitutional shortcuts are taken “for the duration.” But those impositions are removed when normal life returns.
But we have not seen normal life in 66 years. The wartime discipline imposed in 1941 has never been lifted, and “the duration” has become the norm. World War II melded into the cold war, with greater secrecy than ever — more classified information, tougher security clearances. And now the cold war has modulated into the war on terrorism.
Just a little food for thought as the echoes from the Fourth of July fireworks fade and the campaign rhetoric returns to full volume. Original source here, via.
So, the news this morning was the now-usual drumbeat of rising gas prices and calls to begin exploratory oil drilling in Alaska and protected coastal areas, and I was thinking of my dad’s irrational certainty that the high prices aren’t merely the result of supply and demand, that someone has just got to be behind the abrupt and seemingly unstoppable increases, and suddenly I had an epiphany. My idea was paranoid and sounded like a tinfoil-hat conspiracy theory cooked up by the lunatic fringe, but maybe, just maybe… well, consider this:
I learned long ago that, in politics, you don’t count your proverbial chickens until they hatch — which is my roundabout way of saying I’m not writing off Hillary Clinton until I hear from her own lips that she’s quitting — but after yesterday’s Democratic primary results in Indiana and North Carolina, the assumption across the blogosphere seems to be that her campaign is finished. On that note, Evanier makes a very interesting observation:
If all goes as expected, Barack Obama will accept the nomination of the Democratic party at their convention on August 28… 45 years to the day after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
How cool would that be? Historic and poignant… almost cinematic, in fact. I can already see the “dream fulfilled” graphics on the television news coverage…
SamuraiFrog poses a real head-scratcher:
Why is it that in a presidential race against a former First Lady and an admiral’s son who married into a beer fortune, it’s the black guy with almost no political presence who has to prove he’s not an elitist?
This started me thinking: What does “elite” really mean, anyway, and how does one become “elitist?” Is it a factor of education or wealth? If it’s a question of intelligence or accomplishment, what’s gone so wrong in our society that a term that once meant simply “the best” has acquired such a negative connotation? What’s wrong with being the best at whatever it is you do?
Why is it that our current president, a New England blue-blood by birth who only plays at being a working man on his ranch in Texas, is seen as a “good old boy” and therefore not elitist, but our previous president — who started life as poor Arkansas trailer trash — was often accused of elitism? Is it perhaps more a reflection of the person calling someone elitist than the person being accused of it? Bill Clinton has a tendency to come off as the smartest guy in the room — worse, as someone who knows he’s the smartest guy in the room — and perhaps he makes some people feel insecure because of that, or his detractors mistake his intellectual confidence for an air of superiority, so they call him an elitist. Here’s the funny thing: smart people don’t bother me, personally; the ones who I see as having an air of superiority are the wealthy, especially the children of the wealthy. For me, money and privilege are far greater indicators of “elitism” than brains. But that’s probably just my own personal insecurity and prejudice; other people’s issues may vary.
I think what’s really going on is that “elitist” has taken the place of many other words that political correctness and a societal trend to not want to debate race and class no longer allow us to say. Where once you could call someone a nasty name or, in the case of a woman or a black candidate who rub one’s prejudices the wrong way, uppity, our modern social mores now dictate you have to express yourself some other way than with the, ahem, traditional epithets. You have to call them something else, find a word that’s less loaded than the one you’d probably really like to use. At the core of it, you don’t like the thought of women or black people or smart people or rich people being superior to your own pathetic self (whatever your definition of superiority may be), so you call them “elitist.” Really, all the word means these days is “other.” By calling someone an elitist, you’re saying, “this person isn’t like me, he (or she) isn’t one of my kind, so therefore, I dislike this person.”
But that’s just my Saturday morning theory…
I’ve pretty much stopped paying attention to the seemingly endless back-and-forth between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama — at this point, I figure I’ve already decided who I prefer and I’ve frankly lost interest in following the campaign any further until a candidate is officially chosen at the Democratic National Convention in August — which means that I only learned of “Bittergate” this morning when I saw that the blogosphere had been chattering about it all weekend. Basically, I guess Obama made a remark about small-town folks relying on guns, God, and anti-immigrant feelings to deal with their frustrated ambitions, and Hillary and McCain are feigning offense on behalf of those people he was talking about, branding Obama an “elitist.” (In case you also missed this one, details are here.)
Now, I’ve read Obama’s remarks and I personally don’t think he said anything all that offensive (although I grant I may feel differently if I were one of those small-town people). While you never know what’s going to piss people off, this whole thing strikes me as a tempest in a teapot that’ll likely be forgotten by next week. However, the accusation of elitism has been reliably effective in bringing down politicians who display too much schooling in their speechifying, so, again, you never know what’ll happen here. It’s a phenomenon I’ve never fully understood, myself. I find our cultural distrust of intellect both mystifying and deplorable.
So does writer Peter David; he made some particularly cogent remarks on the subject today:
We have a situation wherein this country’s anti-intellectualism has become so pervasive, so suffocating, that we have multi-millionaire Ivy league graduates trying to pretend they’re just plain folks when clearly they’re not. And people know they’re not. This country was founded by men who knew they were the best and brightest, and the citizenry took pride and comfort in that. But television has put politicians into peoples’ homes, and now we just want someone we’re comfortable with. We don’t want men and women who come across like professors; we want the guy who sat in the back of the class and goofs off, as if life was a sitcom. To put it in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” terms, we should want to elect Mr. Hand; instead we opt for Jeff Spicoli.
Couldn’t have said it better myself…
Scalzi on the abysmal exchange rates of the moment:
…in the long run it would be nice to have my home currency seen as stable and having value. The cynical part of me wonders how much the global perception of the dollar will change simply by having a new occupant in the White House on January 20, 2009. I guess we’ll find out.
That’s an interesting question, isn’t it? I’ll admit that I know very little about economics or all the arcane factors that influence how well or poorly we’re doing as a country — I find even simple 401k investments utterly baffling and intimidating — so I have no opinion on this idea myself. But I do wonder just how much psychology and prestige plays into something like the value of a nation’s currency. Anyone have any thoughts?
I will say that, if there’s anything to this, a post-election rebound for the dollar would be excellent news for me, as The Girlfriend and I have been talking about finally taking that dream trip to Scotland next year…
Here’s an interesting bit of food for thought:
Suppose you had to choose between two Presidential candidates, one of whom had spent 20 years in Congress plus had considerable other relevant experience and the other of whom had about half a dozen years in the Illinois state legislature and 2 years in Congress. Which one do you think would make a better President? If you chose #1, congratulations, you picked James Buchanan over Abraham Lincoln.
So much for that campaign tactic…
The topic du jour this morning was, of course, the news that Fidel Castro is stepping down after decades of rule, followed by the White House’s affirmation that our country’s nearly half-century-old embargo against Cuba will not be relaxed anytime soon, regardless of which Castro is running the show over there.
So, here’s the thing I’ve been wondering all day: is there anyone out there in InternetLand who can explain to me why our country is so unrelenting on this damn-fool embargo? Anyone at all? Really, what purpose does it serve here in the year 2008? Maybe it made sense during JFK’s administration, when the Soviet Union was trying to use Cuba as a proxy against us, and everyone was terrified of communists infiltrating our borders from nearby nations. But the USSR is long gone, and our decades-long effort to keep the island nation isolated have utterly failed to effect any change within Cuba. The communists remain firmly in power and the Cuban people seem reasonably content with that state of affairs. So what’s the point of maintaining the embargo now?
