The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Obscure Musical Allusion Blog Post Title Sweepstakes: Joy Division, for the Win!

Posted on | February 15, 2012 | 30 Comments

“It’s like being assigned to cover a psychotic breakdown, so that the challenge as a journalist is to report accurately all the paranoid gibberish, the bizarre hallucinations and delusions of grandeur.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Jan. 11, 2012

“But there is no point in haggling any longer with this. The time has come to get full bore into heavy Gonzo Journalism, and this time we have no choice but to push it all the way out to the limit. The phone is ringing again and I can hear Crouse downstairs trying to put them off. . . .
“Only a lunatic would do this kind of work . . . Where is the meaning? That light at the end of the tunnel?
“Crouse is yelling again. They want more copy. . . . Those halfwit sons of bitches should subscribe to a wire service . . . a whole grab-bag of weird news; just rip it off the top and print whatever comes up. Just the other day the AP wire had a story about a man from Arkansas who entered some kind of contest and won a two-week vacation — all expenses paid — wherever he wanted to go. Anyplace in the world: Mongolia, Easter Island, the Turkish Riviera . . . but his choice was Salt Lake City, and that’s where he went.
“Is this man a registered voter? Has he come to grips with the issues? Has he bathed in the blood of the lamb?”
— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72

Allusion is one of those literary devices with which I have a love-hate relationship: I love to employ allusions, but recognize that such references may be wasted in our subliterate postmodern culture, and I’m occasionally annoyed when some hipster smartass drops an allusion to something sufficiently obscure that I have to look it up.

We’ll get to Bob Belvedere in a minute, but first let me explain that sometimes allusions can serve the useful purpose of reminding us of our ignorance. Stupidity is incurable, but ignorance can be remediated, and an intelligent person should have enough pride to feel the sting when confronted with evidence of his ignorance.

Having partied my way through college, I emerged with an eclectic hodgepodge of an education, full of gaps representing classes I’d skipped or where I’d done only enough work to slide by with a C. And so, in my early to mid-20s, I began to recognize the vast depth and breadth of my own ignorance. One of the clues to this problem was when I’d pick up a magazine like The New Republic or Vanity Fair and, in the middle of an article, see a word like “Burkean” or “Tocquevillean.”

Now, I had enough of an education to know that there were such persons as Edmund Burke and Alexis de Tocqueville, and that these were important authors of influential works. And I was certainly fluent enough as a reader to deduce from contextual clues what the writers meant by phrases like “Burkean critique” or “Tocquevillean self-governance.” But I’d never actually read Reflections on the Revolution in France or Democracy in America, so that these allusions in magazine articles were picking at the scabs, as it were, of my wounded intellectual pride.

Eventually, I was prodded into pursuing a course of intense auto-didacticism, remediating my ignorance to such a degree that some friends have praised my “encyclopedic” knowledge of such things — praise that perhaps goes too far, but certainly reflects how hard I’ve worked over the years to fill in the gaps of my education. (Indeed, I’ve even been called a “Hayekian intellectual”!)

One of my most unusual encounters with such an allusion was the Police song, “Don’t Stand So Close to Me”:

It’s no use. He sees her.
He starts to shake and cough.
Just like the old man in
That book by Nabokov.

Again, I was sufficiently educated to have some sense of who Vladimir Nabokov was and, given the obvious contextual clues, understood that this was a reference to Lolita.

However, I’d never actually read the book, and this smartass allusion — damned British New Wave punks! — was enough to make me go out and buy the book, just so I could say I’d read it.

Well, surprise, surprise! Nabokov’s most famous (perhaps infamous) novel is a quite challenging piece of work, embedded with all manner of allusions and symbols that I frankly didn’t understand. The key clue of Lolita‘s inverted murder mystery — “Waterproof!” — completely eluded my recognition, and I failed even to comprehend how the novel functions as a sort of devious satire.

This made me feel stupid. And I don’t like feeling stupid.

Eventually, however, I encountered The Annotated Lolita, with an introduction and extensive footnotes by Alfred Appel Jr, who had been one of Nabokov’s college students. Suddenly the meaning of all those obscure references was revealed, and I felt slightly smarter (and much less ignorant).

Longtime readers will have by now noticed my fondness for the works of Hunter S. Thompson, which is a double-edged sword. If you love the legendary Gonzo journalist and also like this blog, this is clearly a compliment to my work. But I realize that some may disdain me as offering a cheap imitation of Thompsonesque writing, and I also realize that there are some people who hate Thompson.

Pearls. Swine. Et cetera.

The fact that Thompson was himself attempting to emulate his own literary heroes — including Fitzgerald and Hemingway and, to a lesser degree, Norman Mailer — is generally overlooked. What was original in Thompson has to be understood in light of those influences, but I didn’t start this post with the idea of conducting a Gonzo Journalism Seminar and we’re already past the 700-word mark, so I’ll avoid that digression.

My point in bringing up Hunter S. Thompson was that there are a lot of people who “know” his work in the sense that I once “knew” Burke, Tocqueville and Nabokov: They are familiar with his name and know him by reputation, but have never taken the time to fully acquaint themselves with his work or really understand what he was all about.

It is my hope, of course, that my frequent references to Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 have caused a few of you actually to buy the book, because I insist that you can’t really understand what’s going on in this year’s Republican presidential primary campaign unless you go back and see what Thompson wrote about the 1972 Democratic campaign. Were I asked to teach a college course on political journalism, that book would certainly be on the syllabus, because what Thompson did was absolutely some of the most honest and insightful writing ever published about politics.

Also, it’s funny as hell. Read more

Category: Books, Camp of the Saints, Election 2012, Fear. Loathing., Music, Shoe Leather Fund, Vanuatu

Obama’s Contraceptive Disinformation

Posted on | February 15, 2012 | 37 Comments

Some readers may wonder why I haven’t published anything about the battle over mandatory contraceptive coverage under ObamaCare. Basically, it’s because every time I try to do it, I tend to write a couple of thousand words before discarding the draft.

However, yesterday I was CC’d on an e-mail that some crazy woman sent to multiple recipients at National Review. Given that I’ve never had anything to do with National Review, my inclusion on the CC list was somewhat mysterious, but the entirety of the crazy woman’s message was in the subject line:

Good to know that you agree that Muslim employers can impose Shari’a restrictions on their employees, dumbass

Crazy, right? No one who actually understands the issue would make such a comparison. This issue isn’t about employers imposing anything on anybody. It’s about whether the federal government can mandate certain types of insurance coverage for private employers, even to the point of requiring Catholic organizations to pay for insurance that includes full coverage — no deductible, no co-pay — for contraception, sterilization and abortifacient “morning after” drugs.

In this battle, the defense of Catholic organizations is actually a libertarian position, and the only people who could possibly take the side of the Obama administration are . . . well, crazy people, or perhaps well-meaning people who have been deliberately misinformed about the issue.

Believe it or not, a CBS News poll claims that 61 percent of self-described Catholics support the Obama administration, and that the crazy, ignorant and misinformed are an actual majority of Americans. A few headlines:

Reid to Allow Vote on Rescinding
Contraception Rule
— National Journal

Birth Control Amendment ‘Dangerous,’
Obama Spokesman Says
— Huffington Post

Palin on contraception flap:
“An un-American act”
— Real Clear Politics

Can we at least admit that there is an important difference between (a) not covering something on a health insurance policy, and (b) “denying” something or “imposing” something? And are people too stupid to understand that having government mandate certain types of coverage represents a gigantic intrusion into the insurance marketplace?

But if I let myself get worked up about this, I’ll spend a couple of hours on it and end up with another unpublished 2,000-word draft, so I’ll just quit now.

Category: Abortion, Barack Obama, Catholics, Contraceptive Culture

They Told Me If I Voted McCain That Clueless Gits Would Run Amok, And They Were Right!

Posted on | February 15, 2012 | 5 Comments

by Smitty

Via The Blaze, #OccupyResoluteDesk is all about the excuses:Via The Lonely Conservative, after three years of this goat rope, Obama’s losers still mis-underestimated the deficit by 4/5 of a trillion dollars.

Sure makes me glad that Barack successfully kept Sarah Palin away from levers of power.

Category: Barack Obama, The Lonely Conservative, Uncategorized

Cenk Uygur Is A Tool, And Andrew Breitbart Is A Hero

Posted on | February 15, 2012 | 15 Comments

by Smitty

I still haven’t worked with the video from CPAC of Breitbart and Citizens United, but that video promises to more or less explode. The feisty Breitbart works on Cenk here, who seems to throw out the famous ObamaCare spitting incident merely to poke Andrew. I couldn’t make it more that a third of the way through this; Uygur is too irritating:

Via Hot Air

Via Instapundit, Walter Russell Mead really misses the point:

That is how lame Occupy is. This so-called “movement” doesn’t even have the clout and enthusiasm to match one wing of the Tea Party—the weak wing.

The point isn’t to be a proper movement in the slightest. I’m still unsure about Ladd Ehlinger’s point that #Occupy is intended to tilt the election. My opinion is that the intent of #Occupy is to have a chilling effect on the Tea Parties; to get thugs in place with a threat of violence that will diminish the size and scope of pro-liberty demonstrations this year. To suck the oxygen out of public demonstrations entirely, as legitimate ones will hurt Obama’s popularity.

The Left can’t create anything, but it can destroy to control, as they are attempting to do with the right of assembly. Barack Obama, who is orchestrating the affair, (with sufficient layers of indirection to remain legitimate, of course) is failing utterly to uphold the Constitution here. This Administration, like Scottish cooking, seems built on a dare. The latter, culinary, the former, political.

Category: Andrew Breitbart

New Obama Administration Strategy: Make Stuff Up

Posted on | February 15, 2012 | 6 Comments

by Smitty

Via PJ Tatler:

On two different Sunday talking head shows, WH chief of Staff Jack Lew said that it takes 60 votes in the Senate to pass a budget.

Snipping out the quotations:

[Lew] said it twice on different national news shows, so it was no slip of the tongue. The Washington Post and National Review have characterized Lew’s statement as a “misleading” “stumble,” since it’s factually incorrect. Senate rules forbid filibustering a budget, so it only takes 51 votes to pass. Lew has served as the director of the Office of Management and Budget and is currently the chief of staff at the Obama White House. If ignorance is his best defense, it’s an exceedingly poor one. Vice President Biden and President Obama both served in the Senate, Biden for six terms, and Biden is currently the Senate’s president pro tem. He can case tie-breaking votes. But he shouldn’t need to; there are 53 Democrats in the Senate.

One really would like to fall short of the opinion that the Obama Administration really just doesn’t care at all, and they are just phoning it in until the election.

However, the sheer sloppiness on display here makes that increasingly hard to avoid. These clowns are paid from public funds; is it too much to ask that they demonstrate basic competence and integrity? Is it time for an intervention?

More news on the general debacle that is this budget from the Senate Republican Policy Committee, again via PJ Tatler. Just remember that taxes are fun, and this will all go swimmingly.

Category: Barack Obama

LIVE AT FIVESIX – 02.15.11

Posted on | February 15, 2012 | 4 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


TOP NEWS
Tentative Deal Reached On Payroll Tax Cut Extension

Speaker Boehner and other GOP conferees

Deal extends payroll tax cut, doc fix, unemployment through end of year

Michigan: Gettysburg For Romney And Santorum
Romney trying to deal with Santorum Surge

PRC Leader Remains Inscrutable
Xi Jinping’s visit boosts profile but offers little insight into the next leader of the Chicoms



POLITICS
Unsettled Texas Primary Might Slip Into May

Putting together the puzzle of Texas redistricting

Attorney general, minority groups can’t agree on how to divvy up four new Congressional seats

Geithner Says Administration Aims To Reduce Corporate Rates, Cut Specific Breaks


L.A. Mayor Villaraigrosa To Chair Democratic Convention

Virginia House Passes Personhood Act

U.S. Weighs Sharp Cuts To Nuclear Stockpile

Another Bungled Caucus In Maine?



THE ECONOMY, STUPID
U.S. Stocks Recover Most Losses On Greece, HP News
Britain Defends Its Austerity Measures
Berkshire Adds DirecTV, Liberty Media Stakes
Fed Clears Capital One Purchase Of ING Direct
Yahoo’s Talks To Sell Asian Assets Unravel
Gold Ends Lower, Posts Third Straight Session Loss
Paulson Calls For Hartford Split
Oil Prices Down Very Slightly As Investors Assess Greek Austerity Plan; Natural Gas Up 4%
Torn Between Two Motorola Droids
Lightsquared Faces U.S. Prohibition After Interference Report
Angry Birds Officially Take Wing On Facebook
AT&T Customers Surprised by “Unlimited” Data Speed Limits
New Service To Stream Local TV Stations In New York



SPORTS
LINSANITY! Knicks Win Sixth Game In A Row

Knicks guard Jeremy Lin celebrates after sinking game-winning three-pointer against Raptors last night

Knicks beat Toronto 90-87

Irsay Says It’s Peyton Manning’s Decision Whether To Stay With Colts

Rangers Blank Bruins, Continue To Pull Away From Eastern Conference




Lakers Overcome Kobe’s Poor Shooting, Beat Hawks 86-78

Kiprusoff Stops 41 Shots As Flames Rout Leafs 5-1

Spurs Clinch Win With Stretch Run Against Pistons, 99-95

Waltrip Gearing Up To Rewrite History

Nawroz Mangal: From Refugee To Role Model As Afghan Cricket Skipper

Gammons: MLB Wants Washington To Be Good



FAMOUS FOR BEING FAMOUS
Playmate Of The Year: This Is What Domestic Violence Looks Like

Claire Sinclair

Marston Hefner arrested, but Sinclair unwilling to press charges.

Nancy Grace Suggests Whitney Houston’s Death May Have Been Murder

Shakira Attacked By Sea Lion In South Africa



Whitney Houston’s Funeral Moved To Church At Family’s Request

Kate Winslet On Seeing Herself In 3-D “Titanic”: “Make It F***ing Stop!”

Lindsay: Did I Forget To Do My Taxes – Again?

Rumer Willis’ New Home Burglarized



FOREIGNERS
Explosion Damages Oil Pipeline In Homs
Arabs Open Way For Arming Syrian Resistance
Israeli Envoy Ties Thailand Bombs To India Attack
German Economic Boom Casts Shadow Over French Election
Indian Police Arrest Five In Bomb Attack
Tony Parsons: Don’t Try It On, Argentina
After Revolution In Egypt, Womens’ Taste Of Equality Fades
Soldiers Find, Detonate Car Bomb In Northern Nigeria
Athens Smolders After Anti-Austerity Riots



BLOGS & STUFF
Fausta’s Blog: Hezbollah In The Tri-Border And Tri-State Areas
Dana Loesch: Do Keith Olbermann And Markos Moulitsas Think Rape Doesn’t Matter?
K-Lo: Love Isn’t All McDreamy – Valentine’s Day, From The Hart
Megan McArdle: When STDs Are Untreatable
Newsbusters: Martin Bashir Compares Rick Santorum To Stalin
AmSpecBlog: Santorum, Social Conservatives, And Swing Voters
Don Surber: Poll – Catholics Abandon Obama
Jawa Report: We Don’t Have John McCain To Kick Around Any More
Big Journalusm: Left, Right Agree – Media Matters Is Toxic
Sister Toldjah: NC Nanny State Says Preschooler’s Lunch Not Nutritious Enough
Riehl World View: ma And Pa CPAC With Melissa And Erick
Babalu: Oliver Stone’s Own Islamic Spring
Ramesh Ponnuru: Our Religious-Freedom Baseline

Category: Live at Five

Cody’s Totally Excellent CPAC

Posted on | February 14, 2012 | 18 Comments

Cody with Daniel and John Santorum at CPAC, Feb. 10, 2012

His blog is called “Modicum of Insanity” (formerly “Letters From a Young American”) and he’s a student at Patrick Henry College. Two weeks ago, he sent me an e-mail to explain that he just got credentialed for CPAC — his first time at the conference — and to ask if I had any suggestions. Among the advice I gave him was this:

Sex at CPAC is strongly discouraged. Enjoy the conference, enjoy the parties, meet everybody you can meet, but don’t try to “score.” The resemblance to Mardi Gras or Spring Break is (mostly) superficial. “Networking within the movement” is not a synonym for “trying to get jiggy with that cute chick I met at the reception.”

And also this:

A cocktail party in D.C. is not like a kegger with your college buddies. Yes, people consume Adult Beverages at D.C. cocktail parties, but not in the collegiate spirit of, “Hey, dude, let’s get totally hammered.” . . . Getting drunk and obnoxious is frowned upon in D.C. if only because, hey, it’s politics and most of these a–holes are obnoxious enough when they’re sober.

My pre-CPAC advice to Cody is kind of interesting, in light of the post-CPAC commentaries offered today by Erick Erickson and Melissa Clouthier, both of whom express concern that too many young people at the conference were getting hammered and trying to get jiggy. This is actually something that has worried me at least since 2007, the year when an especially rowdy bash hosted by the Maine College Republicans got shut down.

Do we worry too much about these kids? I don’t know. While some of them were obviously enjoying the Adult Beverages with tremendous gusto, it is impossible to estimate how much “getting jiggy” was going on. Probably a lot less than us old folks might fear, given the 3-to-1 male-to-female ratio amongst the college-age contingent. And probably not enough to worry about an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea.

Unless you were paryting with the Maine CRs, in which case you might be in serious danger. Just sayin’ . . .

No one can responsibly disagree with Melissa’s argument against the super-short and super-tight party dresses which some Republican coeds seem to consider de rigeur for a night on the town. Also, the bare cleavage — c’mon, guys, testify for me here — makes it quite difficult to concentrate on anything else except the bare cleavage.

Nevertheless, while emphasizing my responsible agreement with Melissa’s argument, I also understand that not every girl who goes out clubbing in high heels and a skintight dress with a daring display of décolletage is a hussy, a floozy or a tramp. Or a Maine CR.

However unwise or indecorous it may be to follow the fashion trend toward bare-as-you-dare styles, in some sense it’s like makeup and jewelry: Items that were once frowned upon as whorish, tacky and/or ostentatious are now acceptably fashionable. (Am I the only one who remembers when hoop earrings were considered kinda racy?) Lamenting fashion trends is an enduring trend unto itself and — wow, I’m really giving away my Old Fogey status this time — I’m also old enough to remember when traditionalists frowned upon women wearing slacks or jeans. So I want to be responsible without being overly judgmental.

Dan Riehl’s eagerness to see CPAC hotties in tube tops? Irresponsible!

Anyway, my young friend Cody had a totally excellent CPAC, not least because I helped him get media access to a Rick Santorum meet-and-greet Friday. It was pretty simple, really: I arrived about five minutes before the event was supposed to begin, and found a huge crowd lined up to get in. Cody was in the huge crowd with some of his friends.

So I went around and found a side door that was unlocked, talked briefly to the Santorum campaign staff, then went back out into the crowd, grabbed Cody and said, “Come with me.” Bing, bang, boom — in like Flynn — and I introduced him to the campaign staff so that they knew he was OK. You can read his report at his blog.

Cody also has an item about the awesome Blog Bash at CPAC, in which he quotes an article at Yahoo News by my buddy Chris Moody. Cody probably doesn’t realize it, but when Moody was a young kid new to D.C., he had the good fortune to meet me at a happy hour party, which was the springboard to all his subsequent success.

OK, I admit, Moody’s awesome skilz might have been a minor factor in his subsequent success, but this kid Cody’s got some skilz, too. Check out his post about Sarah Palin at CPAC, wherein he shows that he’s already picked up the trick of getting a photo in a media scrum: Hold your camera up high and point down, then click, click, click — you may shoot a gazillion shots and only get two or three usable ones, but what the heck? Nobody but you ever sees the blurry discards.

Going through my own photos, I found exactly one shot of Cody, with Utah congressional candidate Mia Love:

For some strange reason, I never got a photo of Cody with his charming girlfriend, who has curly brown hair and beautiful eyes. She wasn’t wearing a tube top or stiletto heels, so I guess Melissa approves.

Also, Cody didn’t write about our awesome lunch with two of my American Spectator colleagues, including associate editor Jim Antle. Cody might fit in at the Spectator, although I worry that our esteemed Editor-in-Chief R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. is probably more in agreement with Dan Riehl on the issue of hotties in tube tops. NTTAWWT.

Category: CPAC

Rule 5 Tuesday

Posted on | February 14, 2012 | 7 Comments

— compiled by Wombat-socho


Ah, what a wretched week. The internets at home die the very morning of CPAC, Sunday gets eaten by a CPA exam review class, and preparing for this morning’s Business Law exam devoured Monday. Well, here we are, two days late and a C-note short…


Laughing Conservative leads off this week with Leryn Franco, while the Tiki Blog posts about guilt free sex. Randy’s Roundtable had a midweek twofer with Elle Liberachi and Cindy Taylor, while over at Reaganite Resistance there’s a Miss Sweden of the brunette persuasion. Eye of Polyphemus reveals why we tolerate Scarlett Johansson, and the JerseyNut comes up with some other reasons. Great minds and all that, eh? Jake Finnegan’s Burkalesque Babe last week was Adele.


El Opinador Compulsivo checks in with Uma Thurman, Sofia (SMOKING!) Vergara, a post on new trends in T-shirts, and Argentine homegirl Pamela David. Meanwhile, A View From The Beach went with Amanda Righetti, bikini ice fishing, cave girl DNA a la Frazetta, Mrs. Tom Brady, Ukrainian girls, and some Mongolian banjo for your edification. Related, because it’s Valentine’s Day, I present Mongolian throat-singing sensation Yat-Kha doing “Love Will Tear Us Apart”.


Soylent Green kicked off the week with some Monday Motivationer Mayhem, followed by Tuesday Titillation with Brigitta, a Back To The Classics Humpday Hawtness, a spot check, Extraterrestrial Visitors Day, Corsetation Confabulation Friday, and Happy Hour with Cali. Also, Saturday Night Snooch!


Proof Positive’s Friday Night Babe was Kylie Bisutti, while the Sex In Advertising feature has Legs Up To Here. Vintage babe was Merle Oberon, the wacky nekkid vegetarians are back, and not only is there a Maria Menounos bikini pic, there’s Elizabeth Emken Rule 5.
The Camp of the Saints chips in with Lucy Bayet, the Rule 5 News, and Evellyn Quagliato.


Dustbury had Sarah Michelle Gellar and Emma Watson last week, while Three Beers Later shook us all night long. Awwww yeah, AC/DC. 🙂
The POH Diaries took note of Kate Upton’a cover girl status,


Last but definitely not least, the DaleyGator’s DaleyBabes last week included Jules Asner, Jenn Sterger, Lela Rochon, Amber Lancaster, Elizabeth Banks, plus Asian Babe Wednesday; also also, Asian Babe Saturday!


Thanks to everyone for their linkagery and their patience! Deadline for next week’s Rule 5 Sunday is Saturday, February 18.

Category: Rule 5
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