Pop singers rarely show up on my radar. I’m more of a classic rock guy. My occasionaly interest in celebrity news tends more toward starlet meltdowns, and other such “Hollywood Babylon” stuff. So I’m grateful to feminist Naomi Wolf for denouncing Katy Perry’s music video:
Have you all seen the Katy Perry Marines video? It is a total piece of propaganda for the Marines…I really want to find out if she was paid by them for making it…it is truly shameful. I would suggest a boycott of this singer whom I really liked — if you are as offended at this glorification of violence as I am.
Here’s a great essay by Victor Davis Hanson on the racial divide, epitomized by the Trayvon Martin tragedy.
And yet. . .I just don’t think the great scholar gets it, or, at least, seemed to pull his punches:
Why?
I could go on and on, but one gets the message. So why the anger at this point and not, say, in 2007, when the evil Bush was president and Obama was but a weak senator and a dubious presidential candidate? For eight years there were African-American secretaries of state. Bush, through his African AIDS initiatives, saved millions of blacks who had no access to medicine. Minorities were visible in his cabinet. No one objected to the fact that Obama garnered 96% of the black vote, or thought much about it when, in the bitter Democratic primaries, the Clintons alleged that race was used to whip up support against them. So why, then, the anger now, when things should have improved even more?
I’ll tell you why, sir: power. 2008’s Racial Healer is 2012’s Master Baiter not because he cares fig #1 about the state of racial discourse in the United States. Rather, he maximizes power on both ends. 2008 was the year when harmony was a hot stock; this year, #OccupyResoluteDesk is shorting it like Carbonite.
Here’s a principle to keep in mind: assume anyone on the Left is arguing disingenuously until proven otherwise. Sometimes they are full of crap due to simple ignorance. But that seems increasingly less likely with each crappy gambit this year (Fluke, race, Rosen).
Power is the only unifying motive at work across these disparate threads.
Our nation’s first president, who led the 13 colonies in the Revolution against England’s tyrannical rule, was picked by a wide margin in a National Army Museum in London poll as the greatest foe ever faced by Britain.
Washington delivered one of “the most jarring defeat(s)” ever inflicted upon the British Empire at the time, said author and historian Stephen Brumwell, according to London’s Telegraph. “He was a worthy opponent,” he said. Washington was selected among five other finalists, who were picked during an online poll that received at least 8,000 votes. The four other potential British foils were Ireland’s Michael Collins, France’s Napoleon Bonaparte, Germany’s Erwin Rommel, and Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.
Each commander had to actually lead an army in the field of battle against British troops — excluding political enemies such as Adolf Hitler — and had to have faced England during the 17th century or later, according to the National Army Museum.
So that leaves out William the Conqueror and William Wallace, as well as Aulus Plautius, Vespasian, Suetonius, Tacitus, and other Romans.
Twitchy was so gracious as to pick up a few dozen great riffs, including some of my snarky-snark.
As you might expect, it puts the ‘B’ in brutal. The Left has completely abandoned trying to get a word in edgewise. Mostly because they have precious little to say. Can Twitter help restore serious government to the United States? If these riff-fests have any impact, the answer may be yes.
Bloggers young and old must envy such precocious success. How many college students — Gabby is a senior at UC-San Diego — have ever gotten that kind of traffic? Some bloggers may say to themselves, “Well, of course — she’s a blonde. Everybody knows blondes get more traffic. Just look at Ann Althouse, for crying out loud.”
A Scarborough native whose column about the welfare abuses she says she witnessed as a cashier at Walmart said she’s received five marriage proposals since the piece went viral online. And she has a follow-up column in the works to respond to those who didn’t like her original post.
Christine Rousselle, a 2009 Scarborough High School graduate and a current junior at Providence College in Rhode Island, wrote about her experiences working as a teenager at the Scarborough Walmart in a column that was published Tuesday on the website The College Conservative.
She wrote about customers at the store using government subsidies to buy toys, candy and jewelry, as well as a hot dog stand operator who she says supplied his business using food stamps. The column has skyrocketed past 400,000 views since it was posted early Tuesday morning and began to get passed around by readers using social networking websites.
Rousselle told the Bangor Daily News Thursday afternoon most of the response has been positive. “I’ve actually gotten five marriage proposals from this,” Rousselle, 20, said. “Or at least five. I haven’t checked the comments yet today. I’m floored by all of this.”
Some guys try to do that wimpy passive-aggressive thing, trying to conceal the seriousness of their interest by pretending they aren’t really filled with overwhelming desire for the woman of their dreams. This never works. Chicks spot that kind of phony “kinda maybe interested” game for what it is: Cowardice, concealing a fear of rejection.
If you’re going to make a move, make it, and don’t try to hide your interest. If she turns you down, so what? There are three billion women on this planet, and if this particular chick doesn’t appreciate your superior qualities, that leaves 2,999,999,999 other possibilites.
No need to play silly games like a schoolboy. Be up-front about it, and have the confidence to display a sense of humor about the ultimate absurdity of our civilized mating rituals. If it were up to your inner savage, the transaction would be simple: “Me, Tarzan. You, Jane.” Society might require you to be less direct about your purposes, but if a chick really digs you, there’s no need to waste much time finding out for sure.
You can ask Mrs. Other McCain about this: I was no rookie rider in the Rodeo of Love, and as soon as I laid eyes on her, my intentions were obvious. I was Pepe Le Pew and she was that pretty black cat with the white stripe accidentally painted on her back.
Twenty-four years and six children later . . .
Honesty is the best policy, and it’s also a great time-saver. If you’re instantly smitten with a girl — if you’ve got that feeling she might just be The One — there’s no point wasting time with a bunch of rigamarole: Make your move, and if she shoots you down, move on. No hard feelings on your part. You’ve got two tickets to Paradise, and if she doesn’t want to take the ride, some other girl is going to get lucky.
Smart girls dig manly men, and vice-versa.
Blonde, brunette or redhead? A matter of taste. But manly men are not afraid to admit it: We dig a chick with a big brain.
UPDATE: Nothing is more predictable: Gabby thought the photo originally posted — the one I took at CPAC — was not entirely flattering, so she asked me to substitute a photo (taken by John Hawkins) she liked better. In all my years of taking photos, I’ve never had a guy say to me, “Oh, don’t post that one — I look hideous!”
Law is based upon reason, and a reasonable person sees through the farce at work, as the truly sad death of a little boy is molded, claylike, into something completely different. The judge is going to apply reason, and reject this, and the Left is going to cry foul. And there will be an appeal. And it will fail upward, rolling up to the SCOTUS, if possible.
Referring to a teenager as a ‘little boy’ is a bit off, I admit. A bit more editing would have substituted ‘young man’. But the point here is that there are two threads afoot:
the sad demise of Trayvon Martin, whom George Martin killed, and
the disgusting, propaganda-driven spectacle to which I was reacting in the post.
Zimmerman isn’t charged with “raaaaacism” and he isn’t charged with Crimes Against Obama. He’s charged with second degree murder because he shot and killed somebody. As it turns out, Bill Ayers isn’t the governor of Florida and Saul Alinsky isn’t the prosecutor—Florida’s Republican Governor, Rick Scott appointed Angela Corey to investigate the case.
From the available evidence, the conservative movement these days is little more than a tribe and the important issue in any public dispute is who is Us and who is Them. Smitty and his fellow rightwingers seem to have decided that George Zimmerman is one of Us.
The question thus moves to whether Clark Stooksbury is oblivious to the Orwellian assault on Western Civilization being undertaken by the Progressives. Or maybe the President’s personal involvement, “If I’d had a son. . .”, and the presence of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, to the detriment of justice for the case, is just beanbag. Also, I have yet to hear anybody attempt to claim that GZ is one of ‘us’. Though perhaps a trip through the belly of the Progressive Cthulhu will help clarify matters.
Thanks, Clark, for the prompt to clarify a post which, admittedly, could have been stronger the first go-round.
NBC Meet the Press: Timothy Geithner; Rep. Michele Bachmann, R-Minn.; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.
CBS Face the Nation: Timothy Geithner; Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
CNN State of the Union: Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Committee; Reps. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash.
Fox News Sunday: Ed Gillespie, adviser to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney; David Axelrod, adviser to President Obama’s re-election campaign.
President Obama’s economic policies “were incredibly effective,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Sunday, crediting the president with having prevented a depression.
While admitting it is “still a very tough economy out there,” Geithner said the administration is “making a lot of progress” and said “the broad indicators are pretty encouraging.”
Interviewed on ABC’s This Week, Geithner was asked by host George Stephanopoulos about the gloomy forecasts from economists such as New York University professor Nouriel Roubini, who called the current recovery “anemic, subpar, below trend, below potential.”
Geithner suggested Obama could not be blamed for that, saying “if he’d had more support from his opponents in Congress, then we could have got more things passed that would have put more people back to work more quickly.” . . .
Read the whole thing at The American Spectator, which I hope citizen-journalists will study as a lesson in Neutral Objective Journalism. One of the basic jobs of a D.C. political reporter is the Sunday show round-up: What did the “newsmakers” (government officials, party leaders, candidates, etc.) say on the Sunday shows?
If you can do nothing else from the comfort of home, you can always report What People Say on TV. The key to doing that effectively, however, is to write it as straight news: “Joe Friday, Just-the-Facts-Ma’am” is a style that anyone can learn by study and practice. Repress your bloggerly temptation to snark it up, resist any urge you might have toward sensationalism, and just tell it straight. Identify the key quotes and facts and assemble them into the kind of basic reporting that wire services do.
When doing a Sunday show roundup, you generally want to work pretty quick: If your version isn’t online by noon or 1 p.m. Eastern, you might as well not bother. But on other occasions and with other kinds of What People Say on TV stories, you may have time — if you think nobody else saw the significance of the interview, news story or C-SPAN segment you saw — to fill in the background from other sources.
Some may ask, “Where’s the value-added? Anybody can see what people say on TV. Why should I do my own version of the story? Why not just link the Associated Press or Politico story and add my own caustic ideological sarcasm?” I reply that the way other sources assemble the quotes and facts — the way they do Neutral Objective Journalism — inevitably introduces a certain angle or bias to the story.
You will discover, if you try your hand at writing the What People Say on TV story, that there is no such thing as neutrality, no matter how straightforward and factual your account may be. Other than transcripts, every news story on a subject of political controversy (and what Tim Geithner said Sunday was obviously such a case) includes elements of selection and emphasis that amount to a slant. Continue reading Turbo-Tax Tim Does 3 Sunday Shows UPDATE: Geithner Praises Obama’s ‘Incredibly Effective’ Economic Policies →
