"Once European fashion houses stopped pretending that they were ignorant of Black culture, they began to openly feed on it."

"Sagging had made young Black men objects of scorn, particularly by the paternalists—Bill Cosby, the father; Barack Obama, the politician; and Eric Adams, the cop—who had each done their separate campaigns admonishing the brothers for not pulling up their pants. The derision was predicated on protection. Black man, make them respect you by your dress. Black man, hold yourself high. Legislation against sagging—modern morality ordinances, passed in municipalities in states such as New Jersey, Illinois, and Michigan, and across the South—became a possible pretense for arrests. In February, 2019, in Shreveport, Louisiana, Anthony Childs died while being chased by police, who pursued him for a 'saggy pants' violation. They engaged in gunfire, and although the coroner ruled Childs’s death the result of a self-inflicted wound, he was killed in a confrontation that never should have happened in the first place. Did Balenciaga care? The brand’s sweatpants, looked at through the prism of death and disrespect, were a real problem and a sort of social evil, conjuring bodies in effigy."

Writes Doreen St. Félix, in "Girl, What Waist? How the waist became the site of enduring race panic" (The New Yorker).

"NYT reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro sits in silence as JD Vance educates her on the labor force participation rate relating to illegal immigration."

"Garcia-Navarro tried arguing that illegal immigrants can't be deported because America needs them for jobs," writes Collin Rugg, with this clip:

NYT reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro sits in silence as JD Vance educates her on the labor force participation rate relating to illegal immigration.

Garcia-Navarro tried arguing that illegal immigrants can't be deported because America needs them for jobs.

She pointed to the… pic.twitter.com/SiNwyldSwR

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) October 12, 2024

ADDED: I don't agree that Garcia-Navarro is silenced by Vance. She lets him have his say, but she also breaks in. She's challenging him with a practical point that I don't think Harris supporters like to be explicit about. From the NYT transcript (with Garcia-Navarro in boldface, interrupting Vance 5 times):

The lack of enthusiasm for Kamala Harris "seems to be more pronounced with the brothers."

Said Barack Obama, quoted in "Obama admonishes Black men for hesitancy in supporting Harris/Former president suggests some in the Black community are uncomfortable voting for a woman and are coming up with excuses" (WaPo).

“And you’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses, I’ve got a problem with that,” he said. “Because part of it makes me think — and I’m speaking to men directly — part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.”...

The “women in our lives have been getting our backs this entire time,” Obama said. “When we get in trouble and the system isn’t working for us, they’re the ones out there marching and protesting. And now, you’re thinking about sitting out or supporting somebody who has a history of denigrating you, because you think that’s a sign of strength, because that’s what being a man is? Putting women down? That’s not acceptable.”

It looked like this:

Former President Barack Obama has a “tough talk” at the Black voters for Harris event in East Liberty. He addressed that Black men have not been as enthused about Harris as during his first run, and he sought to encourage them to join Harris’ movement pic.twitter.com/gDFZhsdLxC

— Ryan Deto (@RyanDeto) October 10, 2024

This gets my "Obama and manliness" tag.

And it made me think of the old "talking down to black people" controversy of 2008 when Jesse Jackson was caught on an open microphone expressing hostility toward Obama, because he had said, in a Father’s Day speech, addressing black men: "Any fool can have a child. That doesn’t make you a father."

But there, Obama was, I believe, attempting to appeal to white voters by displaying a bit of social conservatism. These new remarks of Obama's are, it seems, very directly aimed getting out the black male vote. It's very close to the election, and he's coming forward, at risk of overshadowing Harris, to deliver a strong push to the black men who might tip the balance in the 3 must-win states. Is his rhetoric effective? It's not for me to say. We'll find out.

ADDED: Harris is black because her father is black, but her non-black mother kept the father from participating in the upbringing of his daughters, and Harris continued the estrangement after her mother died and continues it to this day. We never get to hear from this man, Donald Harris, who is still alive. Do the black men who are hearing Obama's instruction to vote for Kamala Harris think about her relationship to her father? And does Obama think about his own father, who's gone now, but who barely took the trouble to know him?

"In July, Joe Biden released a seven-hundred-and-seventy-five-billion-dollar plan with the tongue-twisting title 'Mobilizing American Talent and Heart to Create a 21st Century Caregiving and Education Workforce.'"

"Biden’s plan aims to expand child care and services for the elderly and the disabled, and elevate the status and pay of caregivers as well. But those goals will remain aspirational without a Democratic majority in the Senate, which is why [Schanchline] Nanje and a dozen other Family Friendly Action canvassers have been knocking on a hundred doors a day in the suburbs north of Atlanta. Their work is financed by the Women Effect Action Fund, a group that promotes economic gender equality and women’s rights. Lisa Guide, the fund’s co-founder, told me that the organization was targeting the Georgia races to show both voters and elected officials the enormous impact that access to child care, as well as services for the elderly and disabled, have on women’s personal and professional lives. 'We’re in Georgia to make sure Georgia voters know which Senate candidates are going to help them through our national care crisis—and who aren’t,' Guide said. 'And we want elected officials and policymakers to understand that voters really care about these issues so they end up rising up the ladder for both Democrats and Republicans.'" 

From "Can Boosting Child and Elder Care Help Democrats Win Control of the Senate?" (The New Yorker).

That made me think about Obama's resistance to concentrating on healthcare jobs, which I blogged (in September 2011) under the heading "Obama's Infrastructure Stimulus — designed to build masculine pride": 

Here's a fascinating passage from Ron Suskind's new book "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President" (pp. 18-19)(boldface added). Obama and his advisers are plotting campaign strategy in August 2007 and the subject turned to the problem of jobs for 10 million low- to moderately skilled male workers. What "sunrise" could the government subsize and stimulate. The advisers hit on health care:

That was where the jobs would be: nurse’s aides, companions to infirm seniors, hospital orderlies. The group bandied about ideas for how to channel job-seeking men into this growth industry. A need in one area filling a need in another. Interlocking problems, interlocking solutions. The Holy Grail of systemic change.

But Obama shook his head.

“Look, these are guys,” he said. “A lot of them see health care, being nurse’s aides, as women’s work. They need to do something that fits with how they define themselves as men.” ...

Obama twirling and skittering in Lititz... Trump in Lititz...

On April 2, 2008, I blogged about Maureen Dowd's assertion that "Hillary has clearly raised Obama’s consciousness about the importance of courting the ladies." She fleshed out the theory like this: 

Touring a manufacturing plant in Allentown, Pa., Tuesday, he was flirtatious, winking and grinning at the women working there, calling one “Sweetie,” telling another she was “beautiful,” and imitating his daughters’ dance moves by twirling around 

Later, at a Scranton town hall, he went up to Denise Mercuri, a pharmacist from Dunmore wearing a Hillary button. “What do I need to do? Do you want me on my knees?” he charmed, before promising: “I’ll give you a kiss.”... 

At the Wilbur chocolate shop in Lititz Monday, he spent most of his time skittering away from chocolate goodies, as though he were a starlet obsessing on a svelte waistline. 

“Oh, now,” the woman managing the shop told him with a frown, “you don’t worry about calories in a chocolate factory.”

At the time, I said: "Wait, is [Hillary] toughening him up or feminizing him? And is the feminine stuff nauseatingly stereotyped?" Look at all the stereotypically feminine things pasted on Obama: He was "flirtatious." He was "twirling." His dance was an imitation of his daughters' dancing. He "charmed." He "skittered." He acted like " starlet obsessing on a svelte waistline." He was chided by another woman for worrying about calories. 

There's less shaming of Trump for seeming feminine, but it happens. He was mocked just 2 days ago for dancing like a woman.

But the reason I'm going back to that post is that it's about Lititz and Trump gave a rally in Lititz. My paternal grandparents are from Lititz. They are buried in the Lititz Moravian Cemetery. 

Lititz was founded by members of the Moravian Church in 1756 and was named after a castle in Bohemia near the village of Kunvald where the ancient Bohemian Brethren's Church had been founded in 1457.... For a century, only Moravians were permitted to live in Lititz....

Here's Trump in Lititz: 

I'm so pleased to see him in the home of my ancestors. From the transcript:

Who is Misty Obama?

I took that screen shot at Drudge just now.

I looked up the Wikipedia list of famous people named Misty. There were only 19 people on the list. Oddly enough, 3 of them were porn stars.

Did Drudge deliberately write a headline with a ridiculous double meaning?

No

Yes

 

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Obama "had thought about and considered gayness, but ultimately had decided that a same-sex relationship would be less challenging and demanding than developing one with the opposite sex."

That's a paraphrase of something Obama supposedly wrote — "somewhat elusively to his first intimate girlfriend" — that appears in a book by David J. Garrow that comes out next month "Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama." Garrow is, I think, a trustworthy writer. I know him mostly from "Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade," a book I read carefully when it came out and assigned in a seminar I taught on the right of privacy.

I'd like to see the text of the original letter, but just going on the paraphrase, it sounds humorous, especially if he used the word "gayness," but especially with this idea — expressed to his girlfriend — that he wanted to do the "challenging" thing and develop a relationship with a person of the opposite sex. Speaking of "challenging," he's presenting a challenging viewpoint to his girlfriend, stirring up conversation.

Is it, in fact, easier to be gay, because you only have to figure out how to get along with and be companionable to somebody who is like you or who, at least, you can have the illusion is pretty much like you? Certainly, the same-sex partner has a body like yours, and you might feel that you know your way around the territory and can predict how things will feel from the inside.

And then there's the question whether a person should want that kind of ease or whether it's better to take on the challenge of understanding the body and mind of a human creature who is so different from you. I'm just saying this is a good topic of conversation to bring up in a letter to your girlfriend. There's a lot that could be said here!

Now, of course, it's conventional to say that sexual orientation is not a choice, but:

1. These are still great conversation topics. You can easily make a hypothetical that excludes the problem that it's not a choice. Just say: Assume you had the choice, would it be better to be gay because it's easier (and is it easier?), or would it be better to be straight because it's more of a challenge (and is it more of a challenge)? (You can also tweak the hypothetical to remove complications about discrimination or other externally imposed difficulties to being gay.)

2. The not-a-choice orientation could be bisexual. If you are — not by choice — bisexual, you do have a choice whether to take an opposite sex or a same-sex partner.

3. A person with a homosexual orientation could choose to form a relationship with an opposite-sex partner for social and reproductive reasons and could take on the problem of lack of sexual interest in his partner. (I'm sure plenty of heterosexual individuals have opposite-sex marriage partners to whom they feel no sexual attraction.) Talk about challenges! That's a challenge. I'm seeing some commentators encountering Garrow's paraphrase as a contradiction to the proposition that homosexuality is a permanent and unchangeable characteristic. But I don't see a necessary contradiction.

"Why Don’t All Jobs Matter?"

Paul Krugman asks, musing on Trump's stress on bringing back coal mining and manufacturing jobs.

In an ever-changing economy, jobs are always being lost: 75,000 Americans are fired or laid off every working day. And sometimes whole sectors go away as tastes or technology change....

While we can’t stop job losses from happening, however, we can limit the human damage when they do happen. We can guarantee health care and adequate retirement income for all....

I don’t want to sound unsympathetic to miners and industrial workers. Yes, their jobs matter. But all jobs matter.

Is there something different about coal mining and manufacturing jobs? Is it just politically useful (because conservatives can blame liberals and foreigners for the job losses? because these are jobs for, mostly, white men?)?

I'm a little surprised to see Krugman adopting the rhetorical format so recently seen in the much criticized "all lives matter" response to "black lives matter." Trump is essentially saying "mining and manufacturing jobs matter," and Krugman is responding "all jobs matter." The first speaker says there's a special problem here, and the second speaker — with the "all Xs matter" response — cancels out all the work of the first speaker. I'm not saying the second speaker is always wrong, just that the "black lives matter"/"all lives matter" sequence is so freshly critiqued that I'd choose different words if I wanted to enlarge the frame around a problem that someone else has taken pains to identify and get other people to care about.

By the way, I remember when Obama wanted to pay special attention to jobs that "fit with how [men] define themselves as men."

[F]rom Ron Suskind's new book "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President" (pp. 18-19)(boldface added):

“Look, these are guys,” [Obama] said. “A lot of them see health care, being nurse’s aides, as women’s work. They need to do something that fits with how they define themselves as men.” ...

As the room chewed over the non-PC phrase “women’s work,” trying to square the senator’s point with their analytical models, [Alan] Krueger — who was chief economist at the Department of Labor in the mid-1990s at the tender age of thirty-four — sat there silently, thinking that in all his years of studying men and muscle, he had never used that term. But Obama was right. Krueger wondered how his latest research on happiness and well-being might take into account what Obama had put his finger on: that work is identity, that men like to build, to have something to show for their sweat and toil.

Obama tags on this blog that have collected a surprising number of posts.

You can see all my Obama tags below the fold. I'll just list some I particularly like for various reasons — odd specificity, surprising usefulness, whatever:

Obama the mood elevator (74)
Obama the boyfriend (58)
Obama and manliness (24)
Obama's psyche (68)
Obama is everywhere (15)
Obama and irony (14)
Obama and pop culture (87)
Obama the father (19)
Obama the teacher (28)
Obama and the fly (13) (Let's see Trump catch a fly with his bare hand.)
Obama eats dog (12)
Obama attacked from the left (11)
Obama gets mad (3)
Obama is bland ( 63)
Obama's tired (5)
Obama is like Bush (78)
Obama is like Carter (15)
Obama is like Nixon (35)
Obama is like Reagan (4)
Obama is like Sarah Palin (4)
Obama's umbrella (5)
Obama says something strange (1)

"Policy wonks like me have wondered why more lower-skilled men aren’t adapting" by taking up "girly jobs."

Writes Bloomberg View columnist Betsey Stevenson. (She's also a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan and has been on the Council of Economic Advisers and in the U.S. Department of Labor during the Obama administration.)

A wealthier, better-educated and older population has allowed professional and business services to flourish, and boosted demand for various kinds of care and help. Over the last 20 years, the education and health services sector have added 9 million jobs, while the manufacturing sector has shrunk by 5 million.... 

Lower-skilled men don’t seem to want service jobs. As the goods sector has declined, so has the labor-force participation of men without a college degree. Today only 83 percent of prime-age men with a high school degree or less are employed or actively seeking work. In 1964, 97 percent were.

Why don’t [lower-skilled men] take care of their children when they are out of work? Why don’t they take jobs as home health aides? Or sign up for degrees in nursing? One problem is that these occupations conflict with traditional notions of masculinity....

Stevenson thinks Trump got support from people attached to these traditional notions: "He won in part because he promised to return us to a time when men are strong and work in manly jobs." But since these jobs are not coming back — Stevenson assures us — Trump ought to help by "chang[ing] the culture" to "make girly jobs appeal to manly men."

The Bloomberg column is obviously not intended to be read by the poorly educated.



Those who will change the culture and affect those men's minds might be amused and enthused by phrases like "girly jobs" and "manly men," but you don't oust the traditional notions by using the words that heighten the desire to cling to the ideas they represent. You don't tell a man who likes his masculinity that he ought to do something "girly." Words like that only work behind the scenes, among the well-educated, talking about the poorly educated.

Interestingly enough, Barack Obama originally wanted to bring manly jobs to working class men. His economic advisers — perhaps including Stevenson — were telling him in 2007 that the new economy had health care jobs for lower-skilled male workers:

But Obama shook his head.

“Look, these are guys,” he said. “A lot of them see health care, being nurse’s aides, as women’s work. They need to do something that fits with how they define themselves as men.” ...

As the room chewed over the non-PC phrase “women’s work,” trying to square the senator’s point with their analytical models, [Alan] Krueger—who was chief economist at the Department of Labor in the mid-1990s at the tender age of thirty-four—sat there silently, thinking that in all his years of studying men and muscle, he had never used that term. But Obama was right. Krueger wondered how his latest research on happiness and well-being might take into account what Obama had put his finger on: that work is identity, that men like to build, to have something to show for their sweat and toil.

“Infrastructure,” he blurted out. “Rebuilding infrastructure.”

Obama nodded and smiled, seeing it instantly. “Now we’re talking. . . . Okay, let’s think about how that would work as a real centerpiece.... Don’t even get me started about potholed highways and collapsing bridges,” Obama said....

Somehow he got talked out of that, and now here's Betsey Stephenson trying to talk Trump out of it.

Why didn't the stock market crash when Trump won — like the experts said they would?

Ben Casselman looks into the wrong/bullshit prediction:

Investors didn’t necessarily want Trump to win...

You could stop right there. That's the answer. These people were lying to scare us out of voting for Trump.

... (although many probably liked some of his proposals, such as lower corporate taxes and reduced regulation), but even more than that they feared the chaos that could result from an uncertain or disputed outcome....

A few weeks back, I warned that it was risky — even irresponsible — to confidently predict how markets would react to a Trump victory. But it is just as unwise to read too much into one day of trading....

Even more uncertain is the effect that Trump’s victory will have on the economy as a whole.... But it’s too early to say how much of Trump’s agenda will be enacted.... Not all of Trump’s proposals would necessarily be bad for the economy. He wants to boost infrastructure spending, a position that’s broadly supported by economists (although Trump hasn’t given many details). He wants to implement a new tax deduction for child care expenses and expand the Earned Income Tax Credit. Some elements of his tax plan, such as eliminating the estate tax and lowering the corporate income tax rate, hew to standard conservative orthodoxy, although he departs from it in other ways.....

That reminds me. A day after hearing Trump's victory speech and thinking about what he would actually do in his endeavor to be a great President (which I believe he means to be), I thought of this paragraph:

We are going to fix our inner cities and rebuild our highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, schools, hospitals. We're going to rebuild our infrastructure, which will become, by the way, second to none. And we will put millions of our people to work as we rebuild it.

The man is a builder, and I think he can get these things built. Do that as your signature achievement, and we'll love it. Don't mess anything else up, and it will be enough.

ADDED: Don't forget: Obama wanted to build the infrastructure. He cared about putting people to work, and he got played out of it. In 2011, I wrote about how he got played. Read that and think about what a different political environment Obama had to operate within:

Rush Limbaugh calls my name... and calls out Obama for woman-kissing and other possible sexism.

Here's the transcript of a segment of today's show, where there was discussion of 2 related incidents: 1. The "don't touch my girlfriend" scene in Chicago where Obama, demonstrating how to vote, ordered a woman to kiss him, and 2. Obama's description of an ebola-related appearance at Emory University hospital: "I shook hands with, hugged, and kissed, not the doctors, but a couple of the nurses at Emory because of the valiant work that they did in treating one of the patients."

A woman had called in about that ebola incident, and — as Rush put it:

"[W]hat she thought was that since he made a big deal out of not kissing the doctors, that he wanted to make everybody aware that he wasn't gay. And her point was, what's wrong with being gay? 

My point would be that he used the stereotype that doctors are male and nurses are female. But, yeah, on top of that, what's wrong — within his world view — with men kissing men?

Well, he is married. If he was gay, that would be a problem....

Wait! If he's distinguishing kissing males and females, he's specifying that kissing is sexual, and kissing the women should be a problem for a man married to a woman. If it's not sexual, he should kiss both sexes indiscriminately (which would work to deny the sexuality of kissing unless he's bisexual).

... so he's going out of his way to say he's not gay. That's her interpretation. 

If that's correct, then Obama made a homophobia faux pas.  Rush connects that incident to the "don't touch my girlfriend" scene that I wrote about — here — yesterday. Rush describes what happened and says that some people think the scene was scripted. His theory — which is nothing like mine — is that it was supposed to make Obama seem attractive and supportive to women, to counteract Tina Brown's recent statement: "I don't think [Obama] makes [women] feel safe." Whether the Chicago incident was scripted or not, I didn't read it as a demonstration of making women feel safe. I thought it was an intrusion on the woman. But Rush proceeds to quote me:

Like Ann Althouse on her blog said, "Wait a second, I thought men weren't supposed to --" You know, you have to get consent to do this now on every college campus. You can't just kiss a woman without her permission, and you can't approach her and put your arm around without her permission, without her consent. Obama just forced his way on that woman. And she looked like she wanted it, by the way. She looked like she didn't mind, honored to be given a hug and a smooch by the president, cocksman A. 

In my book, it doesn't matter how she acted. He didn't know in advance how she would feel. Even if she loved it, he assumed he was welcome to impose on her body. And her reaction doesn't convince me that she loved it. She was on camera, overwhelmed by the most powerful man in the world, and forced to think quickly about what might be in her interest. How was rejecting him or acting offended even an option?

Rush continues:

So that happens, and everybody's laughing and Obama walks out around her and he's looking like he's pulled off some major score here. Talks about this guy, why would a brother want to embarrass me like this and so forth. So people are wondering if the whole thing was scripted since it followed, by one day, Tina Brown saying that Obama makes women feel unsafe.

Clearly this woman was not feeling unsafe. She's laughing. She's all excited. 

I don't think that's clear. She was put on the spot... by the President of the United States. She might be laughing out of sheer emotional overload, confusion, and the weirdness of it all. Are you allowed to fight off the advances of The Leader? Droit du seigneur?? Is there some core of personal autonomy and rectitude that I can voice right now? The safe bet is to let it all roll over you. Pretend you're into it. Safe bet. Women want to be safe. Tina says. Safety is one way to play the game of life. But the other players should not assume that your silence means consent. If they do, they don't really care about women. Yes mean yes. Silence does not mean yes. Silence may mean: I am subordinated.

Rush finishing the segment, trying — I think — to pick up on what I'd said:

But it's very clear that she did not sign a consent form before he embraced her. It wasn't an embrace. He put his arm around her shoulder. But there was no consent form. She didn't sign a consent form before he embraced her and kissed her. And that's illegal in many places in America now and on college campi. Just did it.

"Don't touch me"... "Don't touch my girlfriend."

Who says "Don't touch me"? Most famously: Jesus. He said it — "Noli me tangere" — to Mary Magdalene, in a scene depicted many times in art:



That had something to do with the fragility of the fleshly body in the immediate aftermath of resurrection. A very special case. In modern times, I think we tend to think of a woman saying "Don't touch me." But Howie Mandel wrote a book called "Don't Touch Me":



He was writing about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Maybe you remember pre-"2001" Keir Dullea as David in "David and Lisa" with his mentally disordered fear of touching:



"You touched me! You want to kill me! Touch can kill!... You coarse, clumsy, stupid FOOL!"

The truth is that we all have a right to sovereignty over our own bodies. It's not just something for women to demand from men. It's something we are all entitled to as human beings. We are now encountering the defense of female integrity embodied in the rather muddled campus policy known as "Yes means yes," but it applies to men too. Women care about our bodily integrity, but too many of us believe that our sexual favors are so universally desirable that a "yes" from a man can be presumed, that a woman can impose upon a man. But that's wrong.

And now, today, we see this story of the President of the United States, Barack Obama, making the kind of assumption that is more typical of the female — the assumption that the person he chooses to touch must necessarily want to be touched. Obama is caught in a relationship with a man who postures as the woman's boyfriend and says to the President: "Don't touch my girlfriend." The President proceeds to grasp at his own dignity by demonstrating to that man that he most certainly can touch that woman, but what of the woman, that woman possessed by two men? It was her choice whether to be touched by the President, and her choice whether to be owned by the man who said to the President "Don't touch my girlfriend," and yet both men assumed ownership over her autonomy — the boyfriend because he had a past with her and the President because, like too many woman, he thought of himself as so universally desirable that a "yes" from any woman can be presumed.

In the history of the world, has there ever been a woman as uniquely subordinated as Aia Cooper? My heart breaks to see how she saw her best hope in coming to the aid of both men, both men who, within seconds, claim sovereignty over the territory of her body. What history lies behind this instinct to protect these 2 men, these 2 exemplars of male power — the boyfriend and the President of the United States? Cooper didn't even want to stand next to the President: "I was like, 'do I have to stand there? I don't really want to stand there.'" And after the incident in which Cooper defended her boyfriend and acceded to the Commander-in-Chief's command "You're gonna kiss me," Ms. Cooper reached out to the President's wife:  "I wanna meet Michelle... Hopefully she doesn't think anything about me, but I really want to meet her."

"Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth," Jesus said.

I thought only "yes" means yes: Did Obama get true, verbalized consent from that woman before he kissed her?

No. He did not. People are focusing on Obama's interplay with a man who said "Don't touch my girlfriend" as Obama was voting in Chicago, demonstrating how to vote.

But let's talk about the woman. Obama orders her to kiss him: "You're gonna kiss me. Give him something to talk about. Now, he's really jealous." As you see in the video, he makes that declarative statement and immediately grabs her and kisses and hugs her.

Why is that acceptable? He's using her in an effort to regain dignity and to humiliate the man who humiliated him. It might all be dismissed as play humiliation and play counter-humiliation. But the woman's body was used as an object of that play, a means of communication between men.

"But on this issue of um uh Obama's man... man... manliness... or manhood... what's your... what's your take on this?"

This is a strangely evasive and inconclusive effort at approaching a subject!

What's going on here?!

Bob is anxious about this topic.

Althouse has a bullshit topic she can't advance.

Both of them are padding and stalling for time.

Neither of them wants to confront Obama's weakness.

 

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"Law professor Ann says Obama is acting like a law professor… Bob: Obama, like Bush, misunderstands terrorism…"

"Is Obama exaggerating the ISIS threat? If so, why?… The 'latte salute'; the military salute, and the Hitler salute… The real problem with Obama’s golf game… Is football getting a bad rap?…"

Manned and unmmanned, in a crouch and on a couch... and not on a couch.

Sometimes Maureen Dowd gets weirdly caught up inside her own lingual playfulness. Today's column mostly poops on George Bush's new art project — a book about his father — but let me highlight this:

Even though both Bushes protested that they didn’t want to be put on the couch, historians will spend the rest of history puzzling over the Oedipal push and pull that led America into disasters of such magnitude....

W.’s fear of being unmanned led to America actually being unmanned. We’re in a crouch now. His rebellion against and competition with Bush senior led directly to President Obama struggling at a news conference Friday on the subject of torture. After 9/11, Obama noted, people were afraid. “We tortured some folks,” he said. “We did some things that were contrary to our values.”...

The Bushes did not want to be put on the couch, but the thin-skinned Obama jumped on the couch at his news conference, defensively whining about Republicans, Putin, Israel and Hamas and explaining academically and anemically how he’s trying to do the right thing but it’s all beyond his control.

Remember when it was completely the norm for elite cogitators to do Freudian analysis?

But what I to know is why Dowd — having analyzed Bush's writing a book about his father — gets to the topic of Obama and never mentions that Obama wrote a book about his father... especially when she's imposing a Freud template. Freud wrote "The Interpretation of Dreams," and Obama wrote "Dreams From My Father."

Let's be old-timey elite cogitators and crouch psychiatrically by Dowd's couch. When something so obvious is not said, that's a very meaningful statement. Why are you repressing that?

And speaking of repression, Obama's writing a book about his father is a magnificent repression of the truth of the childhood he actually lived, with his mother, not his father. That's the Oedipal dream, to have the mother all to yourself. What was missed — says the old codger cogitator dredging up Freudianisms — was the opportunity to kill the father. The father was already gone. Bush Jr., as Dowd expounds, had to develop his psyche in the shadow of a toweringly great father. (I chose tower as my image intentionally.) If you're writing a column... and, of course, column ≈ tower ≈ phallus... if you're writing a column comparing Bush to Obama, we've got a lot to talk about here. What happened to Obama, a man who began with the Oedipal dream fulfilled? He had to create his dream-book to resurrect the dead father to make something out of the nonachievement of beginning with the full possession of the mother.

If we're going to go old-school and get Freudian, let's say all the unsaid things. If you don't want to, I'll talk about your problem with repression.

And Dowd is highly attuned to language play, but I think she would have edited out the word "crouch" if she'd noticed the resonance with "couch," a word she used 3 times and which formed the concrete image of psychiatry (her central theme). I think "crouch" was an expression that slipped out, that missed the usual filter and is therefore quite telling. She uses "crouch" to signify weakness, but crouching has a closer association with a strong animal lying in wait, ready to spring:

Can you hunt the prey for the lion,
Or satisfy the appetite of the young lions,
When they crouch in their dens,
Or lurk in their lairs to lie in wait?

That was God — did you recognize His voice? — talking to Job.

(Freudian side note: Joe Biden calls himself Joe — not Joseph — so that you will hear the name "Job" in the spoken "Joe Biden" — Job by den — Job, crouching by the den, lurking and lying in wait.)

And why did Dowd say "jump on the couch"? The thin-skinned Obama jumped on the couch... A psychiatric patient does not jump on the couch, even when he is enthusiastic about beginning the session. It's a dog that jumps on the couch. So it slips out again, the animal imagery. Crouching. Jumping.  Why liken Obama to a dog? Why liken Obama to a dog at the precise moment when you are referring to his skin?

Oh! This Freudianism is great fun. Thank you, Maureen Dowd, for inspiring me to display these insights of mine, such as this revelation of your racism.

And thanks be to God who has put wisdom in the mind and given understanding to the heart...

Who can number the clouds by wisdom?
Or who can pour out the bottles of heaven,
When the dust hardens in clumps,
And the clods cling together?

ADDED: "When the weather was good, my roommate and I might sit out on the fire escape to smoke cigarettes and study the dusk washing blue over the city, or watch white people from the better neighborhoods nearby walk their dogs down our block to let the animals shit on our curbs—'Scoop the poop, you bastards!' my roommate would shout with impressive rage, and we’d laugh at the faces of both master and beast, grim and unapologetic as they hunkered down to do the deed."

Do you recognize the voice? It's Barack Obama, in that book about his father.

AND: "Rising ground, and on it something like an open-air latrine; a very long bench, at the end of which is a wide aperture. The whole of the back edge is thickly covered with little heaps of excrement of all sizes and degrees of freshness. A thicket behind the bench. I urinate upon the bench; a long stream of urine rinses everything clean, the patches of excrement come off easily and fall into the opening. Nevertheless, it seems as though something remained at the end. Why did I experience no disgust in this dream? Because, as the analysis shows, the most pleasant and gratifying thoughts have cooperated in the formation of this dream...."

Do you recognize the voice? It's Sigmund Freud in his book about dreams, pouring out the bottles of heaven.

"I think the idea of the 'manly-man' appeals to the far right and not really to the rest of us."

"To me it's kind of a twisted concept of maleness. Not a protector or a dynamic kind of pizzaz but a bully. Putin is a good example of it. People's lives don't matter to him. Power matters to him. Who's the top dog? That's what I think machismo is all about. It's like Saddam Hussein. It's all about a pecking order and who is on top. Pretty boring really. Who has the biggest......weapon :-)"

Said Sunsong in the comments to last night's post linking to Adam Gopnik's New Yorker piece about overemphasis on manliness in a President. That comment made me think of this scene in Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator":



By the way, my father once opined that that was the greatest moment in all of movies. He wasn't a big moviegoer, though, so there were many scenes he missed, but he loved that one because it said the pithiest possible thing about politics, and it says it completely in the visuals, though it's not a silent film.

There is dialogue, but it's almost only background music for the ears — "a barber shop... that also has glass walls... oh, yes, with goldfish swimming inside... they're all dead, that's why I'm building a new barbershop...."

"Obama’s perceived flaws are the ancient effeminate ones, of the kind that a bigoted tradition ascribed to women..."

"... above all, the criticism reflects the President’s unapologetic distaste for violent confrontation and for making loud threats, no matter how empty those threats may obviously be."

Writes Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, responding to criticism of Obama for his supposed lack of manliness.

What pushed me over the line as I pondered whether to blog this was remembering that, of my huge number of tags about Obama, I have one for Obama and manliness.

Tom Brokaw, David Gregory, and Chris Matthews daintily allude to Obama's masculinity deficit.

On yesterday's "Meet the Press," Tom Brokaw said it was "just inexplicable" that the Obamacare website "suddenly landed the way that it did, in utter chaos." The President should have pressured "Kathy Sebelius and other people" about the "rollout" which was "going to be our big play for the second term."

"Big play" picks up on that football metaphor Obama used 4 times in his November 14th remarks. "We fumbled," he said, though in real football, it's an individual player who fumbles. But here was this "big play," and somebody fumbled. Was it "Kathy"?

The moderator David Gregory, immediately steps up to frame the next question in macho terms: "Who's got the muscle?" The manly (though 50-years-dead) JFK somehow shoulders his way into the conversation. Gregory turns to Chris Matthews and says:

You were making the point to me this week about, you know, where's his Bobby Kennedy? Who's got the muscle? When the president says, and he did say, "The user experience of this website is everything," who had the muscle in the White House to get it done and make sure the president gets what he wants?

Muscle, muscle, muscle. If a right-winger had phrased the question that way, somebody would call this misogyny. These 3 men — Brokaw, Gregory, and Matthews — are hankering for a muscular man who can nail the big play. He depended on a Kathy when he needed a Bobby. And here's what Chrissy Matthews said:

Everybody goes to their battle stations when there's chaos. 

I'll see you your football metaphor, and raise you a military metaphor.

You always go to where you've been arguing before. But I've always been arguing this president doesn't have a chain of command, a very clear line of authority and unique responsibility. I remember Sebelius, who I like of course, most people do like her, she's a public servant. 

She's liked. Kathy's likeable enough. She's a good servant.

But when she was asked, "Who's in charge?" in that committee, under oath, she started to talk about someone, the head of C.M.S., who handles Medicare and Medicaid. Among 30 or 40 other responsibilities, this person had the rollout responsibilities.

And was "this person" male or female? Female. Marilyn Tavenner. Can you say her name without vaulting back in time to your old macho icons Jack and Bobby? They knew what "responsibilities" to give their Marilyn.

Matthews reaches even further back, to an even manlier man:

Look at Japan, the occupation of Japan, it simple: Put one guy in charge, Doug MacArthur. 

Put one guy in charge. Doug. Call him Doug, not Douglas. Not — in the style of "Kathy" — Dougy. He's Doug. And there was a guy! Put one guy in charge.

You put somebody in charge and they're uniquely responsible for its success or failure. Obama doesn't do things that way. He's got floaters, like Valerie Jarett, floating around. 

Floaters. Like Valerie Jarrett. The disrespect! They can't even spell her name right in the transcript. Floaters, like Valerie Jarrett, floating around. Matthews being a good Democrat somehow feels secure that the double meaning of "floaters" won't bring on the accusations of racism that would surely have burst forth if a Republican had talked about Jarrett like that.

He doesn't want to have a real chief of staff, like a Jim Baker.

He's saying — it's hardly subtle — that Jarrett's not a real man. You need a man. A man like Bobby or Doug or Jim.

He doesn't want to give authority to people, and I think it's been a real problem.

So what does this say about Obama, not wanting to bring in real men, who take charge, who make the play, who exert authority? He's not man enough to work alongside real men? He needs to play with the ladies, ladies who don't know their place — who dither and float?