When the President decried and bemoaned "The Soft American."

"Throughout our history we have been challenged to armed conflict by nations which sought to destroy our independence or threatened our freedom."

The young men of America have risen to those occasions, giving themselves freely to the rigors and hardships of warfare. But the stamina and strength which the defense of liberty requires are not the product of a few weeks' basic training or a month's conditioning. These only come from bodies which have been conditioned by a lifetime of participation in sports and interest in physical activity. Our struggles against aggressors throughout our history have been won on the playgrounds and corner lots and fields of America.

Thus, in a very real and immediate sense, our growing softness, our increasing lack of physical fitness, is a menace to our security.

That was 1960. I don't think JFK wrote his own material, but I note his/"his" absurd dependence on pairing one word with another that means almost the same thing:  rigors and hardship...  stamina and strength... real and immediate. Many, many more in the full article: vigor and determination...  effort and determination... vigor and muscle tone... soft and inactive... physical development and prowess... health and vigor... vigor and vitality...

I didn't listen to the DeSantis event on Twitter. I tried, but didn't keep trying, and what little I heard — that flat voice — convinced me...

 ... I'd rather wait and get the transcript. And here it is: The Transcript.

This is my effort to cherry-pick some substance (and style):

Well, I am running for President of the United States to lead our great American comeback....

It's like "make America great again," but with different words. I don't like weakening it by beginning with "Well," but it was a Reagan trademark. You have to do it... well. Can't know from the transcript.

And our president, well, he lacks vigor, flounders in the face of our nation’s challenges, and he takes his cues from the woke mob....

He said "well" again, and "vigor" is a JFK word. "Flounders in the face" has me looking up the old Monty Python fish-slapping dance. But he got his own trademark across: "the woke mob."

American decline is not inevitable, it is a choice. And we should choose a new direction, a path that will lead to American revitalization.... This... means replacing the woke mind virus with reality, facts and, enduring principles. Merit must trump identity politics.

He said "trump"! Maybe he'll say it a lot in an effort to lower-case the ultra-famous name. "Merit must trump identity politics" sounds like a slogan. He's continuing to talk about fighting wokeness. He's said "woke mob," and here is "woke mind virus." We need to re-infect the national mind with something better: "reality, facts and, enduring principles." 

(more later)

DeSantis uses Warren G. Harding's word, "normalcy": "We must return normalcy to our communities."

A couple hours ago, I put up a post that began to go through the transcript of yesterday's DeSantis event. I casually noted 2 things that called to mind former Presidents: 1. The Reaganesque "well," and 2. JFK's favorite word "vigor."

Getting back to the transcript just now, the next sentence I read is "We must return normalcy to our communities."

Normalcy! I can see wanting to resonate with Reagan and JFK — so presidential! — but Warren G. Harding? Here you have one of the famously bad Presidents, and the word is absolutely associated with Harding.

Harding said: "America's present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration."

From the "Back to Normalcy" chapter of the 1931 classic "Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s":

[Harding's] liabilities were not at first so apparent, yet they were disastrously real. Beyond the limited scope of his political experience he was “almost unbelievably ill-informed,” as William Allen White put it. His mind was vague and fuzzy. Its quality was revealed in the clogged style of his public addresses, in his choice of turgid and maladroit language (“non-involvement” in European affairs, “adhesion” to a treaty), and in his frequent attacks of suffix trouble (“normalcy” for normality, “betrothment” for betrothal). It was revealed even more clearly in his helplessness when confronted by questions of policy to which mere good nature could not find the answer. White tells of Harding’s coming into the office of one of his secretaries after a day of listening to his advisers wrangling over a tax problem, and crying out: “John, I can’t make a damn thing out of this tax problem. I listen to one side and they seem right, and then—God!—I talk to the other side and they seem just as right, and here I am where I started. I know somewhere there is a book that will give me the truth, but, hell, I couldn’t read the book. I know somewhere there is an economist who knows the truth, but I don’t know where to find him and haven’t the sense to know him and trust him when I find him. God! what a job!” His inability to discover for himself the essential facts of a problem and to think it through made him utterly dependent upon subordinates and friends whose mental processes were sharper than his own.

In the transcript, DeSantis only said "normalcy" once — and never "normality." He also said "normal" twice: 

If there’s no accountability over any individual or entity of course they’re going to behave differently than if you have normal accountability....

My grandfather worked in the steel mill in western Pennsylvania. I just know instinctively what normal people think about all this stuff. I have a good sense of when the legacy media and the left are outside of where the average American is....

I myself am hungry for normality, but I don't trust people who keep saying "normal." I always think of Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty in "Lolita" — "It's great to see a normal face, 'cause I'm a normal guy. Be great for two normal guys to get together and talk about world events, in a normal way...."

For a longer version of that quote, read my post from June 2010, "Barack spent so much time by himself that it was like he was raised by wolves." The post title is a quote from Michelle Obama. There was also this quote from Maureen Dowd: 

Of the many exciting things about Barack Obama’s election, one was the anticipation of a bracing dose of normality in the White House.

That was back when the abnormality was George W. Bush. The idea of a President as weird as Donald Trump was nowhere in sight. It's hard even to remember what was supposedly so un-normal about Bush. Remember when his brother Jeb stood on the debate stage next to Trump and pathetically relied on the assumption that we'd have to pick him over that unacceptably weird guy Trump? It didn't work, though it worked when Joe Biden stood on the debate stage next to Trump and argued, essentially, you'll have to take me over Trump because I'm the only thing here that approaches normality? That did work though.

Are we just alternating between weird and normal — perceptions of weird and normal? If so, then 2024 is Trump's turn again.  

"Woo Hoo! Feingold at Walkerville tonight, maybe my other honey Jon Erpenbach will be there too!"

"I do love rubbing up against those two!"

In light of Weiner's Twitter troubles, it's fascinating to read a tweet like that.

ADDED: "A 5pm visit by former WI Sen/rockstar Russ Feingold will result in streets overflowing w/adulation."

So it's at 5. I'll try to get some pics of the idolators... and the rubbers-up-against.

IN THE COMMENTS: Shouting Thomas said:

Haven't read it, but this brings to mind the theme of Ann Coulter's new book, Demonic.

Having heard Coulter discuss this book on the radio the other day, I'd had the same thought as I was writing this post. So I bought the book — you can buy it here — to extract some relevant material.

Manifestly, liberals fanatically worship their leaders. FDR, JFK, Clinton, Obama, even Hillary, Liz Holtzman, and John Lindsay—they’re all “rock stars” to Democrats. They’re the Beatles, Elvis, or Jesus, depending on which cliché liberals are searching for. As Le Bon says, the “primitive” black-and-white emotions of a crowd slip easily into “infatuation for an individual.”

Le Bon is Gustave Le Bon, who wrote a book "The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind" (1895), which Coulter relies on heavily. Back to Coulter:

The most Reagan-besotted conservative would never seriously refer to his presidency with something as hokey as “Camelot.” But in the bizarro-world of the Democrats’ Camelot cult, all we ever hear about is the youth, the vigor, the glamour, the “Kennedy mystique,” and the rest of the cant.... Bill Clinton was called a rock star often, the expression “rock star” [is] the most irritating cliché of the century....

Eleanor Clift described the doughy Clinton-Gore team as “the all-beefcake ticket,” gasping that she was “struck by the expanse of their chests”... The Washington Post’s Sally Quinn said women identified with Clinton because of “the softness, the sensitivity, the vulnerability, that kind of thing.”... An infatuated Jonathan Alter babbled in Newsweek about the Clinton hug: “Bill Clinton hugs other men. It’s not a bear hug, usually—more like a Full Shoulder Squeeze. Women get it, too, but the gesture is more striking in its generational freshness when applied to the same sex....”

When Obama came along, guess who liberals started having sex dreams about?... The New York Times’s Judith Warner reported, “Many women—not too surprisingly—were dreaming about sex with the president.”... The Obamas, Warner wrote, were “a beacon of hope, inspiration and ‘demigodlikeness.’ ”...

NBC’s Matt Lauer noted that “people” have called Obama “ ‘The Savior,’ ‘The Messiah,’ ‘The Messenger of Change.’ ” Try to imagine conservatives coming up with such honorifics for Dwight Eisenhower. Being rational individuals, conservatives don’t turn their political leaders into religious icons. Liberals, by contrast, having all the primitive behaviors of a mob, idolize politicians. 

"And take careful note of the American man’s v-neck sweater. That’s the uniform of a man who is owned by a woman."

That's Scott Adams hating on the v-neck sweater in a blog post titled "The Humiliation of the American Male in 2016." He uses a Cascade TV ad to illustrate his point that "the humiliation of American men is now institutionalized in the media" — and he sees that as a big undercurrent in the rise of Donald Trump. I guess "Make America Great Again" translates, psychically, to Restore My Manhood and consequently — according to Adams — there's going to be a massive turnout of men sweeping thrusting Trump to victory.

But what's so awful about the v-neck sweater? I was struck by Adams's certitude about the unmanliness of the v-neck. How could the shape of the neck matter? Is he reading the letter "V" and thinking of the prominently feminine V words, vagina and vulva? But there are masculine V words: virility, valiant, vigor (JFK's word), vitality, victory.

You may remember that on Christmas eve in 2014, I was puzzled by something a saleslady in Austin, Texas said to me as I was looking for a sweater to give to one of my sons (both are men in their 30s).

She pulls one out that she thinks might be suitable, but then says in a somewhat apologetic tone: "It has a V-neck."

ME: Is there something wrong with V-neck sweaters? People have some kind of problem with V-necks? What's that about?

SHE: Well, my husband doesn't like them. But he's black.

ME (resisting the urge to say "Black people don't like V-neck sweaters?"): V-neck sweaters... are... square?

I blogged that really not knowing what the problem was with V-neck sweaters. Did the commenters help? Well, Jason said "Get back home, Loretta," refers to Loretta Martin, the character in the Beatles' "Get Back" who "thought she was a woman but she was another man." But it wasn't Loretta who was "wearing her high-heel shoes and her low-neck sweater," it was her mother, who was waiting for her back home where she once belonged.

And lemondog said "Uh... oh... V-neck," linking here:



Wow! He's got his hand in the position seen in picture of John Calvin I put up in yesterday's post about the Café Fellatio (where I was hoping you'd read that hand gesture in phallic terms?).



Anyway, I was very interested in getting a solution to this v-neck mystery from Scott Adams. The v-neck, in his view, is aggressively, horrifically emasculating:

How many of the married men reading this blog have received those same sweaters as “gifts” from women? Personally, I’ve received about 25 over the years. None from men. I received three of those sweaters so far this year. I throw them away. Nice try.

Ah! But wait! Wait, Scott Adams: You need to get your mind around this painting of Donald Trump that hangs in his Mar-a-Lago estate: