Toward the end of a 10-minute standup routine at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in downtown Chicago, the 50-year-old star of “The Bernie Mac Show” joked about menopause, sexual infidelity and promiscuity, and used occasional crude language....
He promised to help Obama and ended his irreverent riff with a joke involving the women in the families and living with two “hoes.”
He swings his wings and slaps his back with a thwap once, then twice, then part-way around a final time. It is not, he says, a ploy to intimidate. It is rote, not even an afterthought, because it involves no thought.
Our family has been through a lot. Some caused by nature, some caused by human weakness, and some – most recently – caused by the desire for sensationalism and profit without any regard for the human consequences. None of these has been easy. But we have stood with one another through them all. Although John believes he should stand alone and take the consequences of his action now, when the door closes behind him, he has his family waiting for him.So he wasn't at the hotel with the child? Or he was there with the child that he didn't father? Blah. Did you watch him on "Nightline." I didn't. I never watch "Nightline."
John made a terrible mistake in 2006. The fact that it is a mistake that many others have made before him did not make it any easier for me to hear when he told me what he had done. But he did tell me. And we began a long and painful process in 2006, a process oddly made somewhat easier with my diagnosis in March of 2007. This was our private matter, and I frankly wanted it to be private because as painful as it was I did not want to have to play it out on a public stage as well. Because of a recent string of hurtful and absurd lies in a tabloid publication, because of a picture falsely suggesting that John was spending time with a child it wrongly alleged he had fathered outside our marriage, our private matter could no longer be wholly private.
[BOB] WOODRUFF:& How long did it last and when exactly did it end?Probably the most admired and beloved person in this country.... Where did that come from? Woodruff is a ninny. "How could you have done this?" is a pretty silly question anyway. Why doesn't he just slap Edwards in the face and shout "you beast!"? Edwards gives a long answer that boils down to the fact that he was selfish and egomaniacal — and running for VP can do that to a man.
JOHN EDWARDS: [refuses to answer.]...
WOODRUFF: I know this is a very difficult question, but were you in love with [Rielle Hunter]?
EDWARDS: [Answers in the present tense that he is "in love with one woman," his wife Elizabeth. Woodruff doesn't figure out that he should insist on an answer to the question that was asked in the past tense.]
WOODRUFF: Your wife, Elizabeth, is probably the most admired and beloved person in this country, she's had enormous sympathy because she's also gone through cancer, how could you have done this?
EDWARDS: I'm saying you asked me about this photograph, I don't know anything about that photograph, I don't know who that baby is. I don't know if the picture has been altered, manufactured, if it's a picture of me taken some other time, holding another baby -- I have no idea. I was not at this meeting holding a child for my photograph to be taken I can tell you that.Pay attention here. He does not say he didn't hold the child. He only says he didn't pose for a photograph and is refusing to authenticate the photograph. This has a real smokescreen feeling to it that to me this suggests that he did hold the baby.
WOODRUFF: You did say you did meet her at a hotel in California.Finally, cornered, he says "no." A lie?
EDWARDS: She was there, Mr. McGovern was present, and that's where the meeting took place.
WOODRUFF: But you don't remember a baby being there?
EDWARDS: No.
Elizabeth Edwards was diagnosed with incurable cancer in late March of 2007. Rielle Hunter's baby was born in late February of 2008. That means that if Edwards is the father, he was definitely still carrying on the affair with Hunter after he knew his wife's cancer was back.Yeah, but why come clean and still be dirty? Doesn't that just make you more of a sleazeball? Or is the idea that we're all supposed to understand that Elizabeth must be allowed some peace and shut up about the baby? I get it, but go away.
When a supermarket tabloid told a version of the story, I used the fact that the story contained many falsities to deny it. But being 99% honest is no longer enough.
Created by iPhone developer Armin Heinrich, the original blurb for the... download read: "The red icon on your iPhone or iPod Touch always reminds you (and others when you show it to them) that you were able to afford this… It’s a work of art with no hidden function at all."It's perfect conceptual art, now, isn't it?
It's the universal sign for the onion ring.That's a reference to my old onion rings post — more here — where I said "the 'O' of an onion ring is a vagina symbol." Which is why I'm saying now that the salute looks like it means "fuck me." It's a way to say "here's my vagina," just like the upraised middle finger means "here's my penis."
When rotated 90 degrees forward and oscillated, The Big Jerk Off.Paging Chip Ahoy. Remember when he did that thing to my vortex on Melrose?
Folks, I think there's some of that going on in the Democrat Party now, that they have nominated the wrong person. This guy should be up by 10 to 15 points; the Drive-Bys writing stories about why isn't that happening. Now Mrs. Clinton saying, we gotta get... her name in nomination -- so that people don't walk away unhappy, "dissatisfied"?... You know that old Bill is out there working the phones. "I warned you people. I warned you. I tried to tell you, but he threw the race card out on me and distracted everybody, and I had to run around and defend myself on race. I'm the first black president of this country, and I had to run around and tell everybody, 'I'm not a racist.' I warned you. I said, 'This is not gonna work. This guy can't win. He can't get enough votes, get enough support, and he's got no experience at all.'Rush is at his best — and he knows it — when he's telling us in blunt terms what various Democrats must be thinking.
"Look, he had all that media coverage over there when he went over, that 'summer intern tour,' as Limbaugh calls it. He's exactly right about that, and what happened? His numbers fell, and keep falling. I tried to warn you."
"It was a sorry or sad thing to see innocent people killed... I personally present my apologies to them if anything what I did have caused them pain."
He told the military panel deciding his sentence that he had continued working for Mr. bin Laden after a terror attack in 2000 only because he felt he had no options....
It seems to me a legitimate and not too rude a subject to bring up in the campaign.S here's an opening challege: craft an ad that legitimately and fairly raises the issue of whether he is too old to lead; and one less high-minded one that strings clips of gaffes, stumbles, mental blocks in public, and mistakes to make the guy seem like Abraham Simpson on a bad day. put "YouTube ad contest" in the contents line.Hey, is it legitimate and fair to point to the typos as evidence of Sullivan's competence?
Ann, I'd think that you of all people would include an option "I haven't decided" in such a poll!
"I think I may have teared up at the end..."...And how about favorite TV shows? Isn't it obvious which one is Obama and which one is McCain?
"Oh, yeah, I cried.''
"I think M*A*S*H was probably my favorite. [My wife's] favorite is The Dick Van Dyke Show, which she sometimes now watches [in reruns]. I have to say The Dick Van Dyke Show ranks right up there.''...
'There are shows [my wife and I] agree on. We like the reruns of Seinfeld. I really like Curb Your Enthusiasm. I kind of like Dexter, too, although it certainly has a macabre side to it. I'll tell you that [my wife] likes Big Love — I haven't watched it much, but she enjoys that. And I like The Wire a lot, too. That's a great show.''
[Marco] Folicaldi believes in using “too much” garlic, and he’s not shy about large quantities of olive oil or cheese either, so the food is consistently strong-flavored and rich.Vegetarianism is no more a weight-loss strategy than meat-eating.
Atta - Islamist extremist member of a death cult dedicated to the murder of as many people who disagree with their religious views as possible. Ringleader of plot to fly loaded airliners into the twin towers, White House and the Capitol building. Succeeded in killing almost 3,000 people.The idea is that they are completely different. I agree that they are different, but I wanted to move you to examine yourself. Many of us look at that picture of Mohammad Atta and think we can see evil. That is one of the most loathsome photographs in history. And then there's Ivins, smiling, nerdy, twinkly... we'd never pick out that face as a terrorist. We need to become skeptical of our own ability to see evil in a photograph.
Motivation - A far too common interpretation of Islam and a desire to put the entire world under the totalitarian, iron sandal of Sharia law.
Ivins - A pitiful nerd scientist obsessed with a sorority whose member had (quite obviously correctly) spurned his advances. Mentally unstable, increasingly more deranged, begins mailing packages and letters under assumed names. Eventually goes all the way around the bend and sends anthrax to a number of places killing five.
Motivation - He's a freakin' nuttah, who eventually snapped and indulged his mania and his need for employment by creating a domestic terror incident.
In 1990, as his fellow students rallied to protest the dearth of black professors at Harvard Law School, Barack Obama wrote a vigorous defense of affirmative action. The campus was in an uproar over questions of race, and Mr. Obama, then the first black president of The Harvard Law Review, decided to take a stand.I read about this far the other day. My impression was that Obama, like most students of that era, supported affirmative action — it's what all the good people do — and knew he'd benefited from it. And now, he's refurbishing his position to serve his political ends. The article goes on to talk about his well-known concessions about how perhaps affluent black kids like his own should not get in on the affirmative action. Yawn. [CORRECTED to read "should not get in on..." A typo.]
Mr. Obama said he had “undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action” in his own academic career, and he praised the intellectual heft and wide-ranging views of his diverse staff.
“The success of the program speaks for itself,” he said of the law review’s affirmative action policy in a letter published in the school’s student newspaper.
Mr. Obama, a Democrat, has continued to support race-based affirmative action, calling it “absolutely necessary” when he was a state senator in Illinois and criticizing the Supreme Court for curtailing it in his time in the United States Senate. But in his presidential campaign, he has unsettled some black supporters by focusing increasingly on class and suggesting that poor whites should at times be given preference over more privileged blacks.
Former classmates say Mr. Obama chose not to mention his race in his application to Harvard Law School to avoid benefiting from affirmative action, an assertion that his campaign declined to confirm or deny.I don't remember reading that before. This is important. How would former classmates know this? He would have to have talked about it. They may be misrembering or misreporting what they heard from him (or heard second-hand), but if not, we know 2 things: 1. He declined to show his race on his application, and 2. He chose to talk about that with other students.
“His work was with those who didn’t have much, and they were black, Hispanic and white,” said Gerald Kellman, who hired Mr. Obama to help organize poor families in Chicago. “He never had much inclination to use affirmative action as a tool then. He wanted to level the playing field by providing early childhood education programs, access to good schools.”There's some resonance with what Clarence Thomas has said:
Even as Mr. Obama embraced more traditional liberal views of affirmative action, he was rarely doctrinaire. As a student, Mr. Obama sometimes engaged in and sometimes avoided the bitter racial debates on campus.
As an undergraduate at Occidental College, for instance, he declined to get involved in student efforts to push for affirmative action and minority hiring. At Harvard, he spoke at a rally in support of students who condemned the school administration for failing to offer tenure to any of its professors who were black women.
But he and other editors at the law review were ambivalent when some students argued that women should benefit from the review’s affirmative action policy....
“He was clearly unambiguously in favor of affirmative action as a policy matter, but he recognized some of the ambiguities and the nuances in the argument that the most passionate affirmative action supporters often did not,” said Bradford A. Berenson, who served as associate White House counsel under President Bush and worked on the law review with Mr. Obama.
Mr. Obama was sympathetic to minority students who argued that affirmative action undermined them in the eyes of their white colleagues. But he said he never felt that way at Harvard.
“I have not personally felt stigmatized,” Mr. Obama wrote in his letter to the editor in 1990.
That changed after law school.
A federal judge once asked a friend of Mr. Obama’s whether he had been “elected on the merits” as law review president, Mr. Obama told The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education in 2001. He said the question came up again when he applied for a job as a professor at the University of Chicago Law School.
Mr. Obama has not described how he felt then. But as a state senator, he spoke with empathy about accomplished minority students at elite universities who sometimes lived “under a cloud they could not erase.”
But at Yale, Thomas sensed he was being treated differently by teachers and fellow students. The law school had a program that set aside a certain number of slots for minority students.Of course, as a Democratic politician, Barack Obama would never state his doubts about affirmative action in such a vividly harsh way — even if he thought exactly the same thing.
"I honestly, honestly believed that Yale thought that having a kid who came from working people in the South, who had grown up through segregation, that this kid who had prospered, who had done well every single place he'd ever been, whether an all-white school, all-black school, he's always done well. He will do well here. And it will benefit both him and Yale," Thomas says. "That's what I thought. Well, that isn't what it was converted to."
"It was converted to, 'Well, you're here because you're black,'" Thomas explains.
Thomas did well at Yale, graduating somewhere in the middle of his class, but he says it was the first time anybody had tried to put him in a box because of his race, and whatever benefits he accrued from being there were tarnished when it came time to graduate.
"You know, I was in debt. I needed a job. And I couldn’t get a job," Thomas says.
"Not even with a Yale law degree?" [Steve] Kroft asks.
"I couldn’t get a job. And I just saw the discounting of my degree happen before my eyes," Thomas says.
Asked why he thinks that is, Thomas says, "That degree meant one thing for whites and another thing for blacks…it was discounted."
"You write in the book that your Yale degree was worth 15 cents," Kroft remarks.
"Well, you know Steve, I have still a 15 cents sticker on the frame that my law degree is in," Thomas says. "It's tainted. So I just leave it in the basement."
How is it pro-McCain?Beldar said:
1. Well... there's no hint of pulling back from her lifestyle. Looking to where she can fly next is not unlike McCain's call for the sound of fifty thousand Harleys.
2. Her position is very much like McCain's -- drill, but not everywhere. (I'd prefer more drilling.)
3. If she really wanted to skewer McCain, she'd do more than make fun of his age in a way that he did himself on SNL.
4. Obama not seriously engaged.
5. Again, she's not backing down from the American life of excess. There will be no scolding of people's life choices. That doesn't fit with the environmentalist movement.
6. She left the door totally open for the McCain riposte -- "Paris Hilton supports drilling! Paris Hilton has a better energy policy than Barack Obama!"
***
So the ad's objectively pro-McCain.
Was it intentionally pro-McCain?
I suspect so -- I don't think she's dumb.
But then, I'm prejudiced -- I'm a McCain fan.
I don't think the ad's intentions, other than furthering the popularity ambitions of Ms. Hilton, are at all clear.Ben (The Tiger) responds:
Because I already had a view of Obama as (mostly) humorless and of McCain as being willing to poke fun at himself ("older than dirt"), I was inclined to take her comments about the "really old guy" as fond teasing. But honestly, that's me projecting sly wit onto Ms. Hilton that I'm not at all sure she intended.
The ad does McCain palpable damage by its strong suggestion that he opposes conservation. He doesn't. As others have pointed out, what she describes as the "Paris Hilton position" is in fact essentially the McCain position (a combination of prudent development and conservation). In fairness, the McCain campaign itself has muddied these waters by choosing to lampoon Obama for suggesting that people check their tire pressure, which in fact is a perfectly good conservation suggestion, albeit wholly inadequate by itself.
I'm not at all sure why, Prof. A, you think this video cuts so unequivocally in McCain's favor. I think you may be crediting the "average" viewer, or at least large numbers of viewers, with more subtlety and discrimination than they in fact possess, but I eagerly await your promised explanation.
I want to see Althouse's explanation, but I think it's telling that almost all the right-wingers whose reactions I've read think that the spot was charming, whatever else they've thought about Paris Hilton in the past. (And I do, too.)Yeah, and Beldar, the unclarity of Hilton's position is what makes it effective. An openly pro-McCain ad would not be effective. Her above-party-politics pose is .... hot.
The ad is 90% about McCain (when it's not about Paris) and 10% the 'other guy'/Barack.J Lee said:
Specific McMentions:
1) He's the oldest celebrity in the world
2) like super old
3) dancing a sin & beer in a bucket examples
4) is McCain ready to lead
5) wrinkly, white-haired guy
6) thanks, white-haired dude
7) Paris' energy plan endorses McCain's drilling plus his $300 million battery prize
8) three McCain pictures - none of Barack
It's all about McCain.
When it's not about Paris.
What makes the ad pro-McCain in large part isn't just what it says, but the McCain camp's reaction to the ad.
Watching how the morning network news shows tried to play it today, the spin was "Paris Hilton strikes back at McCain ad", which is where it would have stayed if they had their way. Unfortunately, they were forced to also cover the McCain camp's reply that credited Ms. Hilton with having a better energy policy than Barack Obama. Had the McCain camp responded with the same sort of humorless "whatever" remark the Obama people did, it would have freed up the big media folks to paint this exclusively as a slap-down of Maverick and his original ad.
Has anyone else picked up on the subliminal racism of the "best tan" comment? I mean, Obama is seriously tanned and he's from Hawaii. It's code, I tell you, code!Interesting, but is that pro- or anti-Obama point?
NYT columnist Bob Herbert gets embarrassingly mixed up about the image of the Victory Column in Obama's "biggest celebrity" commercial.
Hey, what about the use of Britney Spears in that ad? Spears!! Get it? Everyone knows spears are a phallic symbols!
Racist too, I might add.
Come on, Bob. Don't give up just because you got the monuments wrong. It's still a phallic symbol, and that ad is full of symbols that just won't quit.
Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.
Brit + Paris = Europe!
-ney + Hilton = knee + hotel = blatant sexual imagery.
Senator Obama is headed for Elkhart, Indiana, tomorrow, where he is scheduled to campaign with Senator Bayh, who is being described in some quarters as the "safe" choice for Mr. Obama as a running mate. As a former chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, Mr. Bayh might be seen as a centrist who can help make good on Mr. Obama's talk of working to bridge party differences and unite America.But the NY Sun says Bayh "has lurched to the left in an effort to make himself palatable to the party's base of hard-left activists and special interest groups":
He voted against the confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts....Hmmm. I realize I have no opinion on Evan Bayh. I can't even picture him. I've never progressed beyond the stage of making an effort not to call him Birch Bayh. Okay, I just looked at a picture of him. I still can't picture him.
Mr. Bayh has also lost his bearings in pursued of the left wing of organized labor...
He has pandered on the Constitution, as one of just 14 Democrats in 2006 who backed an amendment giving Congress the power to ban flag-burning. On January 22, 2004, he voted against school vouchers in Washington, D.C., a bill that more reasonable Democrats such as Senators Feinstein and Schumer supported. He filibustered to block a vote on confirming John Bolton as the Bush administration's ambassador at the United Nations....
I kind of like the sound of "Obama/Bayh" ... though I can't help turning it into the Hindi "Obama Bhai," which means "Obama [my] brother." Then again, there's "Obama Bai," for the "kthxsbai" LOL-cat crowd. And I suppose McCain can make hay with "Obama bye." Or the capitalists: "Obama buy."kthxsbai.
In the autumn of 1961, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a 43-year-old high school teacher of physics and astronomy in Ryazan, a city some 70 miles south of Moscow. He had been there since 1956, when his sentence of perpetual exile in a dusty region of Kazakhstan was suspended. Aside from his teaching duties, he was writing and rewriting stories he had conceived while confined in prisons and labor camps since 1944.Much, much more at the link, but let me add this:
One story, a short novel, was “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” an account of a single day in an icy prison camp written in the voice of an inmate named Ivan Denisovich Shukov, a bricklayer. With little sentimentality, he recounts the trials and sufferings of “zeks,” as the prisoners were known, peasants who were willing to risk punishment and pain as they seek seemingly small advantages like a few more minutes before a fire. He also reveals their survival skills, their loyalty to their work brigade and their pride.
The day ends with the prisoner in his bunk. “Shukov felt pleased with his life as he went to sleep,” Mr. Solzhenitsyn wrote. Shukov was pleased because, among other things, he had not been put in an isolation cell, and his brigade had avoided a work assignment in a place unprotected from the bitter wind, and he had swiped some extra gruel, and had been able to buy a bit of tobacco from another prisoner.
“The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one,” Mr. Solzhenitsyn wrote, adding: “Just one of the 3,653 days of his sentence, from bell to bell. The extra three days were for leap years.”
Mr. Solzhenitsyn typed the story single spaced, using both sides to save paper.
His rare public appearances could turn into hectoring jeremiads. Delivering the commencement address at Harvard in 1978, he called the country of his sanctuary spiritually weak and mired in vulgar materialism. Americans, he said, speaking in Russian through a translator, were cowardly. Few were willing to die for their ideals, he said. He condemned both the United States government and American society for its “hasty” capitulation in Vietnam. And he criticized the country’s music as intolerable and attacked its unfettered press, accusing it of violations of privacy.Here's that Harvard speech. Read it. I'll just excerpt at part about our legal system:
Many in the West did not know what to make of the man. He was perceived as a great writer and hero who had defied the Russian authorities. Yet he seemed willing to lash out at everyone else as well — democrats, secularists, capitalists, liberals and consumers.
Western society has given itself the organization best suited to its purposes, based, I would say, on the letter of the law. The limits of human rights and righteousness are determined by a system of laws; such limits are very broad. People in the West have acquired considerable skill in using, interpreting and manipulating law, even though laws tend to be too complicated for an average person to understand without the help of an expert. Any conflict is solved according to the letter of the law and this is considered to be the supreme solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right, and urge self-restraint, a willingness to renounce such legal rights, sacrifice and selfless risk: it would sound simply absurd. One almost never sees voluntary self-restraint. Everybody operates at the extreme limit of those legal frames. An oil company is legally blameless when it purchases an invention of a new type of energy in order to prevent its use. A food product manufacturer is legally blameless when he poisons his produce to make it last longer: after all, people are free not to buy it.
I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either. A society which is based on the letter of the law and never reaches any higher is taking very scarce advantage of the high level of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relations, there is an atmosphere of moral mediocrity, paralyzing man's noblest impulses.
And it will be simply impossible to stand through the trials of this threatening century with only the support of a legalistic structure.
What I meant is simply that it's remarkable that a first-term senator's proposals on Iraq, having been decried as defeat and surrender by McCain and Bush, came to be endorsed by the Iraqi "government," and that McCain and Bush had to adjust their own views accordingly. It's rare that any American politician who is not president would bring hundreds of thousands of foreigners into the streets of Berlin. It's rare that a Democratic nominee would be endorsed by the most successful young right-of-center politician in Britain, and be hailed by the conservative president of France. It's rare that such a newbie could pull off a complicated and pitfall-laden foreign tour without any noticeable gaffes or blunders.Remarkable ≠ miraculous. And it would be a hell of a miracle to do all that and lose ground in the polls, which is what happened.
McCain is attacking Obama as a celebrity because Obama gave him no opening to attack him as an incompetent or unready on the world stage.But the celebrity ad is very much an attack on Obama as unready — as is the follow-on "miracle" ad embedded above. McCain turned Obama's European success against him — and closed up the gap in the polls. Why not call that "objectively miraculous"?
[T]he time between his first campaign for the Illinois State Senate in 1995 and his race for U.S. Senate in 2004-can fairly be called the "lost years," the period Obama seems least eager to talk about.But Obama wrote 40 columns for the Hyde Park Herald during those years, from which Kurtz extracts that Obama is "profoundly race-conscious" and "exceedingly liberal." I'm not so sure. Wasn't Obama saying what was politically advantageous for him to say at the time, in Chicago? And wasn't it good leverage for him to begin his climb to power in Chicago? I'm not convinced Obama is motivated by ideology.
Would it be safe to say that he either:I agree that if he's motivated by ideology, he's liberal, though maybe not all that extremely. I think it's more likely that he's a politician seeking prestige and power, and I agree that we need to analyze how he would interact with a liberal Congress. But I do not assume that he will go along with a runaway liberal agenda. In fact, I'm concerned that McCain may be more oriented toward getting along with the Democratic Congress. Obama, unlike McCain, will want to be reelected, so he will take account of what the people want and establish his independence from the deeply vested interests of the congressional Democrats. McCain has a lifetime of strong ties developed within Congress, and Obama has scarcely spent any time in the place. So I'm thinking Obama will be more finely attuned to what is good for the country and less beholden to Congress.
* Is motivated by ideology, which evidence suggests is extremely liberal,
or
* Is not motivated by ideology but rather political expediency, and would be working with a Congress that is likely to be very liberal, meaning he would have to take non-expeditious stands in order to go against them?
MR. BROKAW: Let's, let's talk about energy for a moment, if we can, because there have been several developments this past week that are important. A bipartisan coalition of 10 senators...What?!
SEN. KERRY: Yes.
MR. BROKAW: ...five Democrats, five Republicans--want to expand offshore drilling and they want to end a tax credit on oil companies. Senator Obama, in the past, has often said that he's opposed to offshore drilling.... Now, having said that, here's what Senator Obama had to say over the weekend: "My interest is in making sure that we've got the kind of comprehensive energy policy that can bring down gas prices. ... If, in order to get that passed, we have to compromise in terms of a careful, well thought-out drilling strategy that was carefully circumscribed to avoid significant environmental damage--I don't want to be so rigid that we can't get something done." I can already hear the bloggers saying, "Flip-flop." Here's a guy who just...
SEN. KERRY: Sure.
MR. BROKAW: ...a couple of months ago said, "No way we're going to do this," now he's opened the possibility of it again. Two weeks ago on this program Vice President Al Gore, who's the godfather in the Democratic Party of energy policies, said, "No way should we drill offshore."
SEN. KERRY: I agree with Al Gore, and I don't want to. But, but Barack Obama...
MR. BROKAW: You, you--so you don't agree with Senator Obama?
SEN. KERRY: Well, I don't agree--here's, here's what I think his position is demonstrating. He still believes we should not drill offshore.
MR. BROKAW: But he's prepared to do it if necessary.What?! So you're saying that Obama's newest statements on the subject are just some meaningless politicking that you won't even pretend to believe temporarily while he gets himself elected?
SEN. KERRY: He has not changed--what he's prepared to do, Tom, is break America's gridlock by honoring a bipartisan effort if that is the only way to move us towards alternative and renewable fuels and, and, and an energy policy that's comprehensive. I think what you see in the response on this drilling is really the difference in how they might govern. Barack Obama doesn't want to drill offshore, doesn't believe it's the thing to do.
There's a very--there's a four-state carefully circumscribed proposal in that, that, in that initiative that, that could conceivably allow some drilling.that, that... that, that...
He doesn't want to do that.He doesn't? So Obama muddied his position, opened himself up to the accusation that he's flip-flopped, and the take away point really is just that he doesn't want drilling? Thanks a lot, Kerry.
But if that's what gets us to the energy independence and to the other efforts, I think Joe Lieberman actually supports--now, he didn't support drilling. He's changed and moves in that direction."He" — who? I can't even tell if he's talking about Obama or Lieberman. So the point is, I think, that Obama wants to get some legislation through and he's willing to accept some provision that happens to be in it because it only opens a possibility of drilling, and he doesn't support drilling? I thought Obama wanted people to think he was open to offshore drilling, but Kerry is squelching that belief. How is Kerry trying to help Obama?
But here's the bottom line.Go to the transcript for the news that oil companies make too much money and need to be taxed more. Let's skip a step ahead, and pick up in the middle what Lieberman's saying when he gets the floor again:
... John McCain says we need to drill offshore. That's American oil, we need to bring it into the market to help lower gas prices and make us energy independent. Barack Obama says, this weekend, maybe, and, and, if, but. He did not endorse--he did not come out with a strong decision, Obama, and say, "I'm for offshore drilling." And I predict to you he'll find reasons not to be for it if this comes to a vote in the Senate.Oh, so Kerry was talking about Lieberman before. That's a distraction. We're talking about Obama and McCain, aren't we? Or is Kerry more concerned about the Senate-level debate about what legislation gets passed?
SEN. KERRY: Are you for it now? Have you changed?
SEN. LIEBERMAN: I am for it...
SEN. KERRY: You've changed.
SEN. LIEBERMAN: ...because of the crisis. That's...Is this helpful to Obama, who's been reframing his position?
SEN. KERRY: You're now for it.
SEN. LIEBERMAN: ...absolutely right, because of the facts.
I want to take a minute from a personal perspective...
MR. BROKAW: Are you--you're--and you're not for it, Senator Kerry, under any circumstances.
SEN. KERRY: It is an absolutely fraudulent offering to America.
SEN. LIEBERMAN: It, it is not.Yes, exactly! Kerry is being a Senator. Has he forgotten his role of helping Obama? But he wasn't invited onto "Meet the Press" to do his Senate work.
SEN. KERRY: Drilling--let me tell you why. We only...
SEN. LIEBERMAN: My buddy here is filibustering this morning.
SEN. KERRY: We only have, we only have 3 percent of the world's oil reserves. Sixty-five percent of the oil comes from the Mideast. The problem with global climate change is oil. The problem for our security is our dependency on oil.The same old Democratic talking points... I thought Obama trying to get away from that.
MR. BROKAW: So what you're saying...
SEN. KERRY: If we go out and drill more oil, even temporarily, when it doesn't come to the pump for about seven years, you're not dealing with the real crisis, which is moving America's innovation...
SEN. LIEBERMAN: Well...Yes, let's move on, now that Joe Lieberman has just done a triumphant 2-part dance on the supine carcass of John Kerry. And that's it for the discussion of oil drilling. Is Brokaw playing it straight, biased against Obama, or just painfully aware that John Kerry is pathetically incapable or perversely unwilling to help Barack Obama?
SEN. KERRY: ...and creativity, the creation of new fuel.
SEN. LIEBERMAN: ...here, here's the difference. Here, here's the difference. Senator Obama, Senator Kerry say no to offshore drilling, no to nuclear power and...
SEN. KERRY: No, I don't say no to nuclear power.
SEN. LIEBERMAN: OK, hold on. Senator Obama certainly does. John McCain says we got to have all of the above. In the short term, we need to drill for American oil where we can find it and get it safely. That's offshore. Secondly, John McCain has presented--and we need nuclear power. Secondly, John McCain has presented the most bold alternative energy--wind, solar, electric car, hydrogen car--proposals that are around today.
I want to say just a word about the, the racial question here. And I, I speak personally. In the first place, the McCain campaign is, to use Barack Obama's words, raising the question is he a risky guy? But it has nothing to do with his name or his skin color. It has to do with his lack of experience and bad judgment, his unreadiness to be president. When you use the expressions that Senator Obama did three times this week, you're making a personal insult to John McCain.
I, I know John McCain. I've been with him for 20 years, private and public. This man does not have a bigoted bone in his body. His wife and he adopted a baby from Bangladesh, who, who they love. It's just wrong for Senator Obama to have done that. It was right for the campaign to call him on it. Let me just add a final word, Tom. In 2000, Al Gore gave me the extraordinary honor of being the first Jewish-American to run for national office, and Al Gore said he had confidence in the American people that they would judge me based on my record, not on my religion. And I urge Barack Obama to have the same faith in the American people that they will judge him on his record, or lack of record, certainly not on his name or his race.
MR. BROKAW: All right. We want to move on if we can.
If Obama is Mr. Darcy, with “his pride, his abominable pride,” then America is Elizabeth Bennet, spirited, playful, democratic, financially strained, and caught up in certain prejudices....If we're going to get all English proffy, heavy on the race-and-gender talk, shouldn't we critique Dowd for portraying the black man's pursuit of political office as a sexual exploit?
In this political version of “Pride and Prejudice,” the prejudice is racial...
So the novelistic tension of the 2008 race is this: Can Obama overcome his pride and Hyde Park hauteur and win America over?
Can America overcome its prejudice to elect the first black president? And can it move past its biases to figure out if Obama’s supposed conceit is really just the protective shield and defense mechanism of someone who grew up half white and half black, a perpetual outsider whose father deserted him and whose mother, while loving, sometimes did so as well?
Can Miss Bennet teach Mr. Darcy to let down his guard, be more sportive, and laugh at himself?
Frank Rich is off today.Isn't Frank Rich always off?
A quick look at the reality of an athlete’s life ought to settle the question.Absurd! Where is this picture of "the reality of an athlete's life" for us to take a "quick look" at? And even if there was such a picture and it could not be faked, what aspects of life are female and what are male? You can't answer the question without using sexist stereotypes that are not only offensive but have very little application to high-level athletes. Obsession with sports and competition is stereotypically male. If we took Boylan's laughable test seriously, there'd be no athlete left in the female category.
Maybe ... Olympic officials have to learn to live with ambiguity, and make peace with a world in which things are not always quantifiable and clear.It's fine to recommend that we appreciate ambiguity, but athletic contests need rules and those who enforce them have to make decisions. It's funny how Boylan wants us to believe in her "quick look" at lifestyle test but wants us to accept that biology is endlessly ambiguous.
That, if you ask me, would be a good thing, not just for Olympians, but for us all.
In this autobiography, she details her lifelong struggle with her burgeoning femaleness and the path she followed to become a female, both physically and mentally. For 40 years, the author lived as a man, seemingly happy and even marrying a woman and fathering two children. At a certain point, though, she realized that she couldn't suppress her desire to live as a female and so eventually went through all the steps to become female, including sexual reassignment surgery. There is something troubling about Boylan's lighthearted tone, and while she hints at it, there is no really clear depiction of the havoc this transition must have wreaked on her married life (Boylan's wife was clearly devastated) and on her children (who at times refer to her as boygirl or maddy).
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