Kiss It, He Said

I don't know, Bill, but what if I had your past—and of course, as a woman, I never could—I'd be thinking seriously on shutting up right about now.

Which, I understand, would be the exact point where you really get started, but my god, has your presidential aura ever worn thin. That statesman thing? So over.

Once there was good feeling; I remember '92. What people like you don't understand is, That is capital you done spent.

All by your little self. Pissed away our goodwill.

Hitched her wagon to a low-rent star, poor Hillary did. Became, over the years, as women will, too much like her husband.

You can't skip over great chunks of trauma in the national life, dude, like they never even happened. 

She worked so hard as a girl. Teaching, helping. Such a social conscience.

She's not going to make it, Bill, and in no small part, because of you.


footnote 

 You and Mark Penn. What are you, in cahoots?

And Then He Wishes, And Then He Waits

                               

For R.   (you dead yet, honey?)

Not This Girl

Women Settle for Mediocre Sex: "Not knowing why they feel so deflated after sex, women assume it's their fault or they just don't bring up the topic to their partner."

Yeah, right. Or how about the actual truth. How about some tips on telling your man he can't fuck worth shit. Tactfully. No such thing. Easier to suck it up the way women do with whatever's wrong, and no idea the price they're going to pay later on. Lies take it out of your hide. Lying out of fear, out of misguided compassion, or that terrible admixture of both.

How about let's back up a step. 1, How many men do you know (this one's for the gals out there) with a clue. Who like women's real bodies. To whom sex is one big juicy mutual act. To wit, if he won't go down, honey, he's curb material, and you're a fool if you don't start kickin.'

2? Don't think so. Not today. Don't want to start missing the man who did adore me—not the one I'd married. (Give me credit, the ex already languished curbside.)

Some other time. You learn, over the years, Truth, she is a sad but beautiful creature.

Dear Mr. Fantasy

Dear TMN,

When we got the results of the Iowa caucus, I felt the things I was supposed to feel: excitement, vindication, enthusiasm, and fear. Fear of Mike Huckabee, primarily, but also fear that if the campaign a year ahead of us was to be between a black man from Chicago with a foreign name and a Baptist preacher from Arkansas, we may not have seen the end of the culture wars that have spoiled my young adulthood.

But there was another emotion present, more interesting than any of those: tremendous anxiety for myself. It was so disturbing that I didn’t tell my wife about it for several days. An unfamiliar anxiety, but not entirely remote. It was that night-before-the-S.A.T. anxiety. It was applying-to-college anxiety. It was first-real-job anxiety. Maybe even will-she-marry-me anxiety. In other words, it was stepping-off-into-maturity anxiety.

Barack Obama is one year younger than me. We are both almost baby boomers, but not. This isn’t the first time that someone our age has done something world-changing, but it’s the first time someone our age has done this.

You know what that test-taking anxiety really is, don’t you? I wasn’t afraid of a poor performance. I was terrified, in fact, that I would do well on the test.

I became an adult when I figured this out.

This is what an adult knows that a child doesn’t: A good performance on a test only assures the imminent arrival of other, much more difficult tests. I was scared of the S.A.T. because it promised college. I was anxious about college because it opened the possibility of a demanding career. I was terrified of a career because it meant that one day … I might have to decide the fate of my country.

You think I’m kidding? Maybe what I admire most about Barack Obama is his willingness to tell the truth. About himself, primarily, but also about us all. He uses words like “we,” he talks about “this moment in history,” not because those phrases make us comfortable, but because they are the truth.

I’ve got to decide if I’m ready for what I’m now certain is coming: the candidacy of Barack Obama. But don’t think such a wonderful event will solve anything or complete anything or even make the world a better place. We can talk about what it will mean to have the son of a Kenyan in the White House (and I will). We can talk about what it will mean that an interracial face will lead the world (and I will). But those aren’t the real issues, which is why Sen. Obama doesn’t speak about them so much himself.

The real issue is whether we’re all ready to grow up.

Growing up is not about power—it’s about sacrifice. It’s not about perfect faith—it’s about stumbling, incomplete faith. It’s really not about proceeding in airtight confidence of perfect righteousness—it’s about the completely absurd instinct that compromise and love of our fellows will somehow get us through.

I have spent a long time waiting for power and certainty to be conferred on me so that I might meet the challenges of my life. The news from that precinct has not been good. While I was busy wondering how to avoid being a citizen of this beautiful but terrified nation, we lashed out at the rest of the world, betraying everywhere our most sacred principles.

The news from other precincts, however, has been very good. Out of the crucible of this awful decade, a leader has emerged. Maybe Barack Obama is inexperienced and charismatic and full of the naive and unsupportable belief that America is still a great country and capable of great things, but I think I’m just inexperienced and charismatic and naive enough myself to support him with all my heart and soul.

And I will never call his vision of America—a nation innovative and undivided, a nation whose huge power can be wielded for the good of all nations—a fantasy. It is not a fantasy: It is what I pray for when I’m holding my wife and son. It is the true flag that I pledge allegiance to. And, from now on, it is how I will vote.

Sincerely,
Dan Barden

(Thank you for this, Dan Barden, whoever you are. Deeply: thank you.)

20 Minutes to Blow Your Mind

                           

Got twenty minutes? This ain't no ordinary tech talk. Empty yourself of all expectations, sit back and ... go.

Doing The Limbo Rock

Out Of Iran Bloggers: Ben Carter, a former Halliburton-KBR water purification specialist, discusses discovering Halliburton was providing dangerously contaminated water to troops.

Video here. If you can bear it. Are made of sterner stuff than I—and believe me, at this point you are.

The bottom of the barrel? Oh it's way down there.

Et Tu, Geraldine?

If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept ...

No I don't know where I got that, it's all over everywhere and you don't need the goddamn link anyway. I am so pissed.

You told me a few decades ago these women would turn out to be more than a disappointment, I would have jumped down your little sexist throat.

Course, the fact that Geraldine Ferraro happened to be very lucky to have been in her position—one that thrilled the bejesus out of us, I do recall that. You cannot imagine, if you are a man—or if you're one of the pups that do seem to becloud this Interwebs thing—what it was like. Sea after sea of male faces ... and for the first time, my god, there was a woman up there on the platform, running, as it were, for Vice President!

I think that was the moment that unlocked it, for America. The avalanche of feminine faces where the world had only seen men. Oh yes. The first female news anchors were an amazing sight. And we all gained authority. Why, it made me how I am today! (No remarks please.)

Sometimes this blog seems like nothing but questions. Why do people ... I'm sure there's a name for this, um, conversion reaction. (I didn't quite become a therapist. Is it obvious?) Where people cannot wait to accuse someone else of what they benefited from. Another goddamn sentence ending in a preposition. The world is going to hell, I tell you.

The good news: Intrade has Obama taking Hil and poor John McCain. Like I always say, Follow the money. This time, though, seems it just might have a happy ending.

Simply Irresistible

Reuters: “Campaigning on Saturday, in Mississippi, the former president was quoted as saying his wife and Obama would be a dynamic duo, 'an almost unstoppable force.'”

Hm, yes. Especially since they will be running against a man in a (well-deserved) coma. (Has anyone the sense that John McCain wants to be President? Lusts after four years of epic work and nothing but hassle? I see the word Retirement writ large on his face.)

The question for today is, How screwed up are Hill and Billary—I mean, Bill and Hillary—really.

We're looking for signs of grace, folks. Humility. What have you done with that grotesque ambition of yours, and can a beast like that ever be whapped down to size. Does it happen.

Can Bill and Hil even conceive of themselves as vice-president of anything.

It's clear he was a spoiled-rotten kid, the kind who deploy their considerable charm and charisma in the interest of just plain survival. Has Bill gotten a grip on himself—or is he still in addiction's grip.

A glib little sentence, but no small question. For make no mistake, Monica-gate was total addict behavior. Something Bill Clinton absorbed at his mama's knee. The belief that people are objects, to be arranged at will. A deeply mechanistic view that cannot, by definition, ever approach the Moral, which is so Golden Rule: treat others as you would be treated. Far too fluid—and rather rules out that primary drive, to get.

My guess is that their lives, that family, are shot through with ordinary lies ... that they are nice folks, but are textbook Dysfunctional  I mean, Where the fork are her tax returns? Things like that.

It's a Shakespearean drama, unfolding on the national stage. What does the woman do when the Unstoppable is not her queenly, entitled self, but this Dark Prince out of nowhere, with all this Honesty crap, and you really cannot grasp the attraction. And people are watching.

Hillary genuinely strikes me as a born Vice-President. Just saying.

Cry If I Want To

“I certainly hope not, and if that is the dreary case, how the hell does she think she's going to keep Bill Clinton from horning in on everything (NPI.) Honestly, has the nation gone to sleep on ... oops, not my blog? 'KTHXBYE!”

... I was busily ranting away at Frank's place when I realized, tis only right, mete and just to confine one's rant to one's own blog. Especially when you exceed the comment box.

Based on the results of yesterday’s primaries we may yet see a former President as First Gentleman in the White House ...

Frank had writ (done wrote?) (writed?) and suddenly I was overcome, as if by fumes. So infuriating was the realization—and don't tell me America hasn't thought of this, although it is perfectly obvious it has not—Bill Clinton will no more stay out of the Oval Office than he successfully kept his pants zipped. (That sentence would be better in present tense, but it seemed crude; one does not really know. One did know, however—and however unwillingly—more about presidential ejaculatory matter and other grossities than we, as a nation, ever wanted.) (It stains.)

Did this not carve a deep enough rut in the national neocortex? Are not all, to a man and woman, sick to death of Bill Clinton and his close relations? (Oops, bad choice of words.) If the name Clinton be not anathema enough, take a gander, I dare you, at the worst, most devotedly unhip, glaringly 1995, clunky, unreadable excuse of a website ...

Do you know what youth for Hillary is called? (Hold your barf, please. We have bags.) 

“Hillblazers.” That's right, and anyone under the age of twenty found clicking that link will be promptly sent into treatment. I have monitors.

When the great culture war of the Sixties was over ... oh, sigh. Same old rift, nay, same old ne'er-to-be-bridged chasm. Between, you got it, the normal and Teh Square. 

Which is how she won Ohio.

(I wonder how the vote came down in Winesburg.)

Next up: Watch Barack Obama busta move.