"The left wanted to make comedy illegal.... like, you can't make fun of anything.... Legalize comedy!"

Legalize comedy
pic.twitter.com/uKr6fiRI3K

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 20, 2025

And then, do you think this is funny, wielding a chainsaw? I mean, he's cutting thousands of jobs. Those are real people.

 

Must Watch Video: Elon Musk Has Been Knighted At CPAC After Receiving The Chainsaw For Bureaucracy

» WATCH/SHARE THE LIVE X STREAM HERE:https://t.co/7NYWKPuERO pic.twitter.com/mFe0unDA7u

— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) February 20, 2025

That's Argentina's President Javier Milei, handing Musk the chainsaw, so I went to Milei's feed to try to get the video to embed from Milei's feed, where I got a bit distracted. For example, he reposted this:

 

On this day, February 21 1964, the Rolling Stones released the single Not Fade Away in the UK. Originally a Buddy Holly track, the Stones recorded their version at London’s Olympic Studios and it became the band’s first Top 10 hit in the United Kingdom! 🇬🇧 pic.twitter.com/kkM69cBxUz

— The Rolling Stones (@RollingStones) February 21, 2025

So much masculinity: 1. Comedy, 2. Power tools, 3. The Stones.

ADDED: What is the evidence that Javier Milei loves The Rolling Stones?

"Whereas politics attend to concrete social matters, every great work of art is itself the manifest solution to a totally invented problem."

"Only in the artist’s psyche was the problem ever real. No artwork ever had to exist, nor be made to exist as it was.... [T]he arts suffer because they have been overtaken by a perversion of the democratic spirit. Political art has been prominent; derivative, pedantic, unambitious, historically ignorant, shallow, designed-by-committee art has been more prominent still. Great artworks may or may not be difficult but are always ruthlessly singular expressions, their nature aristocratic. A culture valuing inclusion above all else will never know its masterpieces."

Writes Alice Gribbin, in "Why Good Politics Makes for Bad Art/Affirmation is available everywhere. Why ruin aesthetics?" (Tablet).

Gribbin discusses the platitude "All art is political." In that context, she quotes Toni Morrison:

McAuliffe accuses Youngkin of racist dog whistling.

 Transcript. Excerpt:

TERRY McAULIFFE: [P]eople were very happy that I vetoed the bill that literally parents could take books out of the curriculum. You know, I love Millie and Jack McAuliffe, my parents, but they should not have been picking my math or science book. We have experts who actually do that. And look what happened. [Glenn Youngkin] is closing his campaign on banning books. It's created a controversy all over the country. He wants to ban Toni Morrison's book Beloved. So he's going after one of the most preeminent African American female writers in American history, won the Nobel Prize, has a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and he wants her books banned. Now, of all the hundreds of books you could look at, why did you pick the one Black female author? Why did you do it? He's ending his campaign on a racist dog whistle...

 It's racializing to call it a racializing, of course.

... just like he started the campaign when he talks about election integrity. But Chuck, we have a great school system in Virginia. Dorothy and I have raised our five children.

But McAuliffe sent 4 of those 5 children to private school (Catholic school). 

"Youngkin’s new ad features the heart-wrenching story of Laura Murphy, a mother who tried to shield her son from having to read Beloved, by Toni Morrison."

"The ad does not identify the book, nor does it mention that Murphy is a Republican activist. But the story was covered by the media at the time, back in 2013. Murphy’s son told the Washington Post that the book, assigned for his Advanced Placement English course, 'was disgusting and gross. It was hard for me to handle. I gave up on it.' He also complained that he suffered 'night terrors' as a result of reading it. Murphy sought to have Beloved banned until 'new policies are adopted for books assigned for class that might have objectionable material,' said the Post. One irony here is that Republicans are rallying around a privileged snowflake who claims a book millions of children have read caused unbearable trauma. If their principle is that parents should be able to prevent schools from assigning texts that upset their kids, what are they going to say when progressives start demanding the school excise texts by Mark Twain, Richard Wright, and other authors who have run afoul of the left for depicting racist dialogue?"

From "Glenn Youngkin’s Closing Message: Ban Toni Morrison From Schools/Virginia Republican wants the angriest parents to have a veto on school curriculum" (NY Magazine).

Here's the ad: 

What's it like to have Terry McAuliffe block you from having a say in your child's education?

This mom knows – she lived through it. Watch her powerful story. #VAgov pic.twitter.com/u8EjmMQX0n

— Glenn Youngkin (@GlennYoungkin) October 25, 2021

Why aren't people talking about the new Jordan Peterson book? It came out 4 days ago, and I'm only just noticing it now.

Here's the book: "Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life." 

I only noticed it just now because I was having an in-person conversation that caused me to need to check the exact reason why Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton "the first black President" and I landed on "It Was No Compliment to Call Bill Clinton 'The First Black President.'" 

That was in The Atlantic. I hadn't stopped by The Atlantic in a long time, but while I was there, I noticed "What Happened to Jordan Peterson?/Adored guru and reviled provocateur, he dropped out of sight. Now the irresistible ordeal of modern cultural celebrity has brought him back." 

Reading that, I was surprised to see that Peterson was "back" in the sense that he'd published a new book. The publication date was March 2d. You'd think I'd have tripped across that information by now. 

I've put the book in my Kindle, and I'll get back to you about it.

For now, let's read a little of this Atlantic piece, which is — you can't tell from the headline — a book review. It's by Helen Lewis:

After nearly 400 pages, we learn that married people should have sex at least once a week, that heat and pressure turn coal into diamonds, that having a social life is good for your mental health, and that, for a man in his 50s, Peterson knows a surprising amount about Quidditch....

Peterson writes an entire chapter against ideologies—feminism, anti-capitalism, environmentalism, basically anything ending in ism—declaring that life is too complex to be described by such intellectual frameworks. Funny story: There’s an academic movement devoted to skepticism of grand historical narratives. It’s called … postmodernism.

That chapter concludes by advising readers to put their own lives in order before trying to change the world. This is not only a rehash of one of the previous 12 rules—“Clean up your bedroom,” he writes, because fans love it when you play the hits—but also ferocious chutzpah coming from a man who was on a lecture tour well after he should have gone to rehab.

The Peterson of Beyond Order, that preacher of personal responsibility, dances around the question of whether his own behavior might have contributed to his breakdown. Was it really wise to agree to all those brutal interviews, drag himself to all those international speaking events, send all those tweets that set the internet on fire?

Like a rock star spiraling into burnout, he was consumed by the pyramid scheme of fame, parceling himself out, faster and faster, to everyone who wanted a piece. Perhaps he didn’t want to let people down, and he loved to feel needed. Perhaps he enjoyed having an online army glorying in his triumphs and pursuing his enemies.

In our frenzied media culture, can a hero ever return home victorious and resume his normal life, or does the lure of another adventure, another dragon to slay, another “lib” to “own” always call out to him? Either way, he gazed into the culture-war abyss, and the abyss stared right back at him. He is every one of us who couldn’t resist that pointless Facebook argument, who felt the sugar rush of the self-righteous Twitter dunk, who exulted in the defeat of an opposing political tribe, or even an adjacent portion of our own.... 

"I affirm whatever I think has the best chance of working, of being both inspirational and unsentimental, of reasoning across the categories of false division and beyond the decoy of race."

Said Stanley Crouch, quoted in "Stanley Crouch, Critic Who Saw American Democracy in Jazz, Dies at 74/A prolific author, essayist, columnist and social critic, he challenged conventional thinking on race and avant-garde music" (NYT).

Espousing that pragmatism, he found ready adversaries among fellow Black Americans, whom he criticized as defining themselves in racial terms and as reducing the broader Black experience to one of victimization. He vilified gangsta rap as “‘Birth of a Nation’ with a backbeat,” the Rev. Al Sharpton as a “buffoon,” the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as “insane,” the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison “as American as P.T. Barnum” and Alex Haley, the author of “Roots,” as “opportunistic.”

By contrast, he venerated his intellectual mentors James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, who, by his lights, saw beyond the conventions of race and ideology while viewing the contributions of Black people as integral to the American experience.

Are we taking a break from Trump-hating?

Here are the "Editor's Picks" on the front page of the NYT website this morning. Click to enlarge (not that you need to enlarge Pamela Anderson's breasts, but you can make the small print clearly readable by clicking):



1. "How the ‘Baywatch’ Swimsuit Became a Summer Classic/Athletic. Flattering. Red. Who needs a string bikini?" Yes, ladies, it is okay and maybe even cool to wear a one-piece bathing suit. But don't expect support from Pamela Anderson: "Ms. Anderson said modesty was not an issue for her but confirmed that the suits were pretty fitted. 'Some people bring me bathing suits to sign autographs on and they are these big bathing suits and I say, "Listen, my bathing suit was tiny. It just stretched and pulled onto your body,"' she said." If you want support, get a structured brassiere.

2. "They Met on the Court. They Both Won in Love. Eric Wankerl and Paige Marquardt first connected in 2013 during a Special Olympics event in Minnesota." This article could be #1 on the all-time list of feel-good stories in the New York Times. If you're hoarding your free reads for the NYT and you have any heart at all or you just want to try to have one, click through to this wedding story. Tears are running down my face as I give you this advice. Excerpt from the article: "We were told he’s never going to be the doctor or lawyer or engineer that you might have hoped for, so prepare yourself.... His dad and I had to go through counseling, this sort of grieving stuff where they tell you, 'This is the child you were given.'... I thought, the more people who are seeing him in town, the more people who are going to know him and look out for him. And that turned out to be true." Beautiful wedding photos.

3. "The Week in Books/Téa Obreht’s new novel, Barack Obama’s summer reading list and more." Oh, my lord! It's time for Barack Obama's summer reading list again! Topping the list is the collected works of Toni Morrison, so that's some serious homework for you. Or is that what he's reading? The book on the list I think he's most likely to actually be reading is the one that I've read, "Men Without Women" — the Haruki Murakami one. There's also an Ernest Hemingway collection with the same title, and that's actually the audiobook I've been walking to this week. Excellent performance by Stacy Keach. Recommended!

"Personal debasement is not easy for white people (especially for white men), but to retain the conviction of their superiority to others—especially to black people..."

"... they are willing to risk contempt, and to be reviled by the mature, the sophisticated, and the strong. If it weren’t so ignorant and pitiful, one could mourn this collapse of dignity in service to an evil cause. The comfort of being 'naturally better than,' of not having to struggle or demand civil treatment, is hard to give up. The confidence that you will not be watched in a department store, that you are the preferred customer in high-end restaurants—these social inflections, belonging to whiteness, are greedily relished. So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble."

Wrote Toni Morrison in "Making America White Again/The choices made by white men, who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status," originally published in the the November 21, 2016, issue if The New Yorker, in a collection of pieces titled "Aftermath: Sixteen Writers on Trump’s America" and featured today on the front page of the magazine's website. Morrison died on August 5th.

"This style—let’s call it 'Faulknerian,' after its other Nobel-winning master—is heady and clause-dense."

"Long associated with the South, Faulkner’s great theme, it eddies and circles, with an often maddening indirection. The Faulknerian style’s weakest imitators simply view it as a license to slather adjectives and metaphors all over the page. Morrison, who hated seeing her fiction described as 'lyrical' or 'poetic,' had a deeper understanding of Faulkner’s stratagems. In her Paris Review interview (a must for any appreciator of Morrison’s genius), she delivers a brilliant dissection of Absalom, Absalom, a novel that fascinated her: Faulkner, she says, 'spends the entire book tracing race and you can’t find it. No one can see it, even the character who is black can’t see it. … Do you know how hard it is to withhold that kind of information but hinting, pointing all of the time? … So the structure is the argument.' The elliptical nature of Faulkner’s style epitomizes the paralyzed condition of Southern culture: Everything in it gestures toward the one thing it can’t bring itself to talk about. This paradox gives Faulkner’s fiction its power, but for any writer seeking to follow in his footsteps, it leads to a dead end."

From an article at Slate by Laura Miller that I clicked on because of the teaser "How Toni Morrison’s Revolutionary Novels Broke Open American Literature." I wondered what this "breaking open" consisted of. For these words to make sense it would need to be that many other writers followed along. The headline at the article is more modest "Toni Morrison Reshaped the Landscape of Literature/Her novels made moves that no other novelist, black or white, attempted." There's no revolution, no breaking open, no implication that other writers followed on, only that she did something alone. She reshaped, she didn't break. And it's not a military metaphor — revolution. It's a landscape. From front page to inside page, it seems we moved from masculine to feminine. Is that analogous to the difference between Faulkner and Morrison?

Let me read the thing I would not have read without that overheated teaser. Okay. I read it. There's no mention of other writers! I see no argument that Morrison reshaped the literary landscape (or led a revolution). All I'm seeing here is that Morrison put some things on the surface that Faulker "pushed below the surface."

"Toni Morrison, Nobel laureate who transfigured American literature, dies at 88."

WaPo reports.

“The Bluest Eye” (1970), Ms. Morrison’s debut novel, was published as she approached her 40th birthday, and it became an enduring classic. It centered on Pecola Breedlove, a poor black girl of 11 who is disconsolate at what she perceives as her ugliness. Ms. Morrison said that she wrote the book because she had encountered no other one like it — a story that delved into the life of a child so infected by racism that she had come to loathe herself.

“She had seen this little girl all of her life,” reads a description of Pecola. “Hair uncombed, dresses falling apart, shoes untied and caked with dirt. They had stared at her with great uncomprehending eyes. Eyes that questioned nothing and asked everything. Unblinking and unabashed, they stared up at her. The end of the world lay in their eyes, and the beginning, and all the waste in between.”

Toni Morrison in The New Yorker: "Making America White Again/The choices made by white men, who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status."

Spoiler alert if you haven't read William Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom," but Morrison seems to think it's valuable in understanding what just happened in the election. Here's how her essay ends:

On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump....

William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer. In “Absalom, Absalom,” incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its “whiteness” (once again), the family chooses murder.

The editor fights — about punctuation... !

From a NYT article about the longtime Knopf editor Robert Gottlieb:

He and [Toni] Morrison often bicker about commas — he loves them, she uses them sparingly. “I am right and he is wrong,” she said in an email. “He uses commas grammatically. I deploy them musically.” He usually wins, she noted.

Mr. Gottlieb and Robert Caro, the author of “The Power Broker,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Robert Moses, and an ongoing, multivolume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, fight about semicolons, which Mr. Caro finds indispensable, and Mr. Gottlieb uses only as a last resort. Often, their shouting matches erupted into the hallways of Knopf’s offices, when one of them slammed the door and stormed out.

“He would always say, ‘Bob Caro has a terrible temper.’ The truth is, we both have a terrible temper,” said Mr. Caro.... “He’s willing to spend an entire morning fighting over whether something should be a period or a semicolon.”

Here's Gottlieb's memoir: "Avid Reader: A Life."

Cornel West attacks Ta-Nehisi Coates with a side swipe at Toni Morrison, and Michael Eric Dyson tells West to shut up.

West put this up at Facebook:

In Defense of James Baldwin – Why Toni Morrison (a literary genius) is Wrong about Ta-Nehisi Coates. [James] Baldwin was a great writer of profound courage who spoke truth to power. Coates is a clever wordsmith with journalistic talent who avoids any critique of the Black president in power. Baldwin’s painful self-examination led to collective action and a focus on social movements. He reveled in the examples of Medgar, Martin, Malcolm, Fannie Lou Hamer and Angela Davis. Coates’s fear-driven self-absorption leads to individual escape and flight to safety – he is cowardly silent on the marvelous new militancy in Ferguson, Baltimore, New York, Oakland, Cleveland and other places. Coates can grow and mature, but without an analysis of capitalist wealth inequality, gender domination, homophobic degradation, Imperial occupation (all concrete forms of plunder) and collective fightback (not just personal struggle) Coates will remain a mere darling of White and Black Neo-liberals, paralyzed by their Obama worship and hence a distraction from the necessary courage and vision we need in our catastrophic times....

In other words: Coates, like Obama, is only a liberal, not a hardcore lefty, as he should be.

I got there via the Observer, which tried but failed to get Coates to respond and proceeded to get a response from Michael Eric Dyson, "a professor of sociology at Georgetown University who wrote a withering takedown of Mr. West in the April issue of The New Republic."

He described Mr. West’s Facebook post as an “acrimonious dirge,” a “bitter, nasty, sorrowful blue note,” and “despotically and willfully intolerant of the gifts and talents of those who may potentially eclipse him. It shows the vast ineptitude of professor West’s scholarship,” Mr. Dyson told the Observer in a phone conversation. “The point I made in my piece is that he doesn’t keep up, he doesn’t read the freshest, newest, most insightful scholarship, nor does he write about it in any serious fashion or teach it in his curriculum, and it shows here.”...

Mr. Dyson suggested that Mr. West listen to “the great Ludwig Wittgenstein,” who said: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

In other words: Shut up.

Eye color implants.

"I looked in the mirror and I was, like, they’re amazing."

ADDED: "The Bluest Eye is a 1970 novel by American author Toni Morrison.... The title The Bluest Eye refers to Pecola's fervent wishes for beautiful blue eyes. She is rarely developed during the story, which is purposely done to underscore the actions of the other characters. Her insanity at the end of the novel is her only way to escape the world where she cannot be beautiful and to get the blue eyes she desires from the beginning of the novel."

"Amazon's Best-Selling Books of 2013, and What They Tell Us About America."

Interesting, but what it tells me is that it's time to make all those end-of-the-year lists, like Best Quote Quoted on This Blog for Each Month of the Year That's Now Ending, or whatever that annual nonsense I used to do was. I'm using the term "annual nonsense" because I have a tag for that.

When I click on that tag, I see that bellyaching about end-of-the-year fussing is an annual thing for me. Such as: "Blogging, paying attention to each day as it happens, makes it hard to assess a whole year." And: "Personally, I don't get too revved up about the shift from one year-number to the next one. I think we live in days, and when life is good, normal days are the best, and the truth is, we live in days."

Yeah, I love normal days. Nice to get past Christmas. I mean, nice to get past Christmas and not believe in Boxing Day.

Hey, actually those old quotes are quite fascinating to return to. From the second link, above, remember this oldie-but-goodie?

"In addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don't see in other candidates. That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom. It is too bad if we associate it only with gray hair and old age. Or if we call searing vision naivete. Or if we believe cunning is insight. Or if we settle for finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree in the forest while ignoring the poisonous landscape that feeds and surrounds it."

Oh, the shit that was shoveled in 2008!

As 2013 stumbles to a close, many of us wish the country had settled for finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree and not acquired the grandiose notion that the forest was a poisonous landscape. Some of us liked our tree and wanted to keep it. 

If your teenaged son had nightmares after reading "Beloved" in Advanced Placement English class...

... can you imagine responding by seeking to get the book removed from the classroom, engaging in public activism that included talking about the boy's dreams? Quite aside from the censorship angle, is this any way to treat your son?

IN THE COMMENTS: I said:

The book is a pain to read if you're not into [it]. I would never force anyone to read that book. The writing style is enough to give nightmares.

Robert Cook said:

Oh, rather like THE GREAT GATSBY, eh?

Let me answer that here on the front page, because this is important. Yes. It is like "The Great Gatsby." Neither book should be forced on anyone. It's destructive of the capacity to appreciate exactly what is most notable, the strange locutions. If you are not in the mood to get inside those sentences and luxuriate and ideate, it's a damned pain. If you've been assigned the book and so you feel like powering through it, everything that's good about it will feel like a speed bump. People hate speed bumps. These English teachers who imagine they are serving up delight are making it hateful.

I've said this already, but I don't keep repeating it as I've blogged about isolated sentences from "The Great Gatsby" in my "Gatsby" project. So let me point out one place where I made the point clearly:

My initial motivation was love. I thought of all the high school students — I remember being one — who were assigned this book and made to read the whole thing. That being the task, the really interesting sentences are speed bumps. They're completely annoying. You can't take the time to figure them out. What should be loved is hated. Later in life, I reread the book and enjoyed it, because of the worthiness of individual sentences.

The writing style of "Beloved" is, in my opinion, much, much worse than "The Great Gatsby." Chances are, a high school student will resist the project of reading this material, especially since the teacher might not emphasize the artistry of the style. It may be administered medicinally, by a teacher who wants her presumably bland and cosseted students to vicariously inhabit the condition of slavery. This is a terrible idea. Recommend "Beloved" for optional, outside reading and give the students the 19th century narratives written by Americans who were themselves enslaved. That's real and that's free of the pretensions of poetry.

"Barack Obama, the first female president."

A predictable headline — don't you feel you thought of it first? — after Newsweek's "The First Gay President," which played off Toni Morrison's famous declaration about Bill Clinton.

Do you regret referring to Bill Clinton as the first black President?...

People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race.

The "first female president" riff comes from WaPo's Dana Milbank. He doesn't mean it in the Toni Morrison way — that Obama's getting the kind of shabby/unfair treatment typically aimed at women — but in the way Morrison was misunderstood. Milbank's evidence for his proposition is that Obama has gone on “The View” 4 times and that he gave a commencement speech at Barnard. Obama is. speaking to women, boosting them, pleasing them, hoping to get something in return. Hello! He's not getting treated like a woman. He's not even acting like a woman. He's acting like a man, angling for the favor of women.

Milbank admits it:

His reelection campaign has been working for months to exploit the considerable gender gap, which puts him far ahead of likely GOP rival Mitt Romney among women. But Monday’s activities veered into pandering, as Obama brazenly flaunted his feminine mystique.

Pandering. Let's consult the OED:

1. trans. To act as a pander to; to minister to the gratification of (another's desire or lust)....

 2. intr. To act as a pander; to minister to the immoral urges or distasteful desires of another, or to gratify a person with such desires. Also in weakened use: to indulge the tastes, whims, or weaknesses of another. Now usu. with to.

Sorry. Pandering to women is not acting like a woman.  (Or being treated like a woman.)

And Milbank doesn't really know what "the feminine mystique" means. Betty Friedan defined her term clearly in her classic book, in the first paragraph of the first chapter, which was famously titled "The Problem With No Name":

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—“Is this all?”

The "mystique" — she says a few pages later — was the pervasive cultural belief in "feminine fulfillment" in the home...

... the American suburban housewife, kissing their husbands goodbye in front of the picture window, depositing their stationwagonsful of children at school, and smiling as they ran the new electric waxer over the spotless kitchen floor. They baked their own bread, sewed their own and their children’s clothes, kept their new washing machines and dryers running all day. They changed the sheets on the beds twice a week instead of once, took the rug-hooking class in adult education, and pitied their poor frustrated mothers, who had dreamed of having a career. Their only dream was to be perfect wives and mothers; their highest ambition to have five children and a beautiful house, their only fight to get and keep their husbands. They had no thought for the unfeminine problems of the world outside the home; they wanted the men to make the major decisions. They gloried in their role as women, and wrote proudly on the census blank: “Occupation: housewife.”

No way Obama was "flaunting" his feminine fulfillment in the house. Presumably, Dana Milbank (who is a man) thinks he can pontificate about female matters and use a feminist catchphrase and give it whatever meaning it seems to have to him. He's got a longstanding column in the Washington Post, so he feels he can do that. Ironically, that feeling is utterly the opposite of feminism. It's patriarchy. And this patriarch, Milbank, is himself pandering to women. It's funny that he's attempting to flatter and impress women by tagging alongside the man he thinks all the women love, Barack Obama.

Milbank tells us that Obama told the college women that "'Congress would get a lot more done' if more women were there." And Obama gave the women the supposedly good news that "more and more women are out-earning their husbands. You’re more than half of our college graduates and master’s graduates and PhDs." (Presumably, he didn't tell them they're going to have a hell of a time finding a mate on their level.) Milbank goes on:

And they can look good doing it! “You can be stylish and powerful, too,” he said. “That’s Michelle’s advice.” 

And this makes him "a woman"... how? Oh, what's the point of looking for reason in Milbank's lame obeisance to the alpha male?

There were some ironies in the appearance. When the White House asked Barnard for the commencement speaking role, the college dumped its original speaker, Jill Abramson. In addition to being an actual woman, Abramson is the first of her sex to become executive editor of the New York Times.

Obama made no mention of Abramson, but he did mention that he knows the past three Barnard commencement speakers, including Hillary Rodham Clinton, whose presidential aspirations Obama dashed.

Ha ha. Step aside, ladies. The patriarch is here.

What do Bob Dylan, Toni Morrison, John Glenn, and Madeleine Albright have in common?

Obama is giving them all a medal — the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Speaking for freedom, Bob's got an old song called "I Shall Be Free." It says:

Well, my telephone rang it would not stop
It’s President Kennedy callin’ me up
He said, “My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?”
I said, “My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot
Anita Ekberg
Sophia Loren”
(Put ’em all in the same room with Ernest Borgnine!)

It's not a slow jam, but like that Obama's slow jam the other day, it got that idea that sexual stimulation is what the country needs. (Speaking of old, there's that old Woody Allen joke: "I ... interestingly had, uh, dated ... a woman in the Eisenhower Administration ... briefly ... and, uh, it was ironic to me 'cause, uh . . . 'cause I was trying to, u-u-uh, do to her what Eisenhower has been doing to the country for the last eight years.)

Bob's most famous reference to the President is in "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)":

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked

Lest you think that was sexy-naked, the year was 1965, and the President was LBJ.

Romney having trouble raising money from Jewish donors who say they prefer "the Jewish candidate" — Michele Bachmann.

What's going on here? Republican fund raisers are exploiting Obama's weak support for Israel, but Mitt Romney is not doing so well with Jewish donors. If these donors aren't responding to Romney, and if they are indeed calling Bachmann "the Jewish candidate," are they really making a mistake, as the NY Post puts it, not realizing that she's Christian? I doubt it! Bachmann flaunts her Christianity, and her critics critique her for it. And a mere mistake could simply be corrected.

[S]ome in Romney's camp have been wondering whether Bachmann and her allies are pushing the "Jewish" rumor to help their own fund-raising, sources said.

Some! The dreaded some! Sources said. Maybe some in Romney's camp are pushing the Jewish rumor rumor to to help their own fund-raising!

The NY Post article goes on to say:

[Bachmann] has enjoyed strong popularity among Jewish voters and often talks about her stay on a kibbutz during the summer of 1974, when she was a teenager.

In a speech to the American Israel Political Action Committee last year, Bachmann recalled being guarded by soldiers while working on the kibbutz.

"While we were working, the soldiers were walking around looking for land mines," she said. "I really learned a lot in Israel."

She went on to say, "I am a Christian, but I consider my heritage Jewish, because it is the foundation, the roots of my faith as a Christian."

Bachmann also told an AIPAC gathering earlier this year that she and her family make sure each year to attend at least one Jewish-theme play or movie.

I think if any of these donors are calling Michele Bachmann "the Jewish candidate" they mean it in the figurative and satirical sense that Toni Morrison used when she called Bill Clinton the first black President.

People misunderstood that phrase. I was deploring the way in which President Clinton was being treated, vis-à-vis the sex scandal that was surrounding him. I said he was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp. I have no idea what his real instincts are, in terms of race.

There's a somewhat common phrase "honorary jew." It's noted in the Urban Dictionary. It turns up over 20,000 Google hits, and, on the first page, we see discussion of whether Sarah Palin and, elsewhere, Hillary Clinton should be counted as "honorary Jews." Here's a cute blog post about Sarah Palin, noting 10 reasons why Palin counts as a Jew. You get the idea. The big one is support for Israel.

What might have motivated the Romney people to get the idea out there that Michele Bachmann is really Jewish? It could be to generate unease among voters who have some anti-Semitism.Think of the rumor that Barack Obama is really Muslim. The Romney people should not want people to think they meant to ignite that kind of suspicion about Bachmann. Oddly, Romney himself has to deal with the antagonism toward his religion — the religion he actually follows. You'd think his campaign folk would be more sensitive. It's almost as if they're trying to generate a rumor that Bachmann's not Christian at all to deal with his problem with some people thinking Mormons aren't Christian enough (or at all).

But what was the point of saying that the prospective donors are mistaken about such a basic fact about Bachmann? If you're trying to warm people up to your candidate, you don't normally insult them!

UPDATE: I'm told this proves she's not Jewish:

Maureen Dowd says "Rush Limbaugh... mocks 'Imam Obama' as 'America’s first Muslim president'" but what did he actually say?

Here's Dowd's column. You can search the radio show's transcripts here. It was a joke:

"If it was laudatory to call Bill Clinton America's first black president, why can't we call Imam Obama America's first Muslim president?"

To be fair, Dowd's use of "mocks" could be said to acknowledge it as a joke. But come on. She says:

Many people still have a confused view of Muslims, and the president seems unable to help navigate the country through its Islamophobia. It is a prejudice stoked by Rush Limbaugh....

If you're going to worry that comments plant the wrong ideas in people's heads, you should be more careful about the ideas you plant. Dowd took a Limbaugh phrase out of context. (Hey! Remember last month, when we were hyper-sensitive about the problem of taking quotes out of context?) In context, it was, first, a question, and second, always only a comparison to the famous Toni Morrison characterization of Bill Clinton as the first black president:

Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.

 "Trope" — I love that. AKA stereotype.

And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President's body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and bodysearched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke?

 Ha. You know how I feel about "gainsay." It's the red flag of bullshit.

The message was clear "No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and--who knows?--maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us."

(Shouldn't that be "all your expletives are belong to us"?)

Now, we all know that Bill Clinton is not actually black, so to say Obama is the first Muslim president in the way that Bill Clinton is the first black president actually implies that Obama is not a Muslim. As in: Christian faith notwithstanding, this is our first Muslim President. More Muslim than any actual Muslim person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.

In context, please!

And answer the question: If it was laudatory to call Bill Clinton America's first black president, why doesn't the phrase "first Muslim president" work the same way?

There are some good answers to that question:

1. Back in 1998, when Morrison wrote her essay, Americans — or at least the Americans she was writing for — really did think it would be a fine thing to have a black president, but today, when Rush Limbaugh said that, Americans have a big problem with the idea of a Muslim president and Rush knows that.

2. Since we know Bill Clinton isn't black, calling him black creates no confusion. Calling Obama a Muslim, even as a trope, plays with — stokes — the doubts people have.

Bottom line: Am I criticizing Dowd? Only a little. She's stoking the misunderstandings of Rush Limbaugh that she knows NYT readers have. She doesn't care about giving him his due. But that's okay. He feeds on the things like this. I'm sure he'll have his fun on tomorrow's show. And it will give him license to spend a few more minutes massaging Obama-Muslim, Obama-Muslim, Obama-Muslim... into the listeners' confused mushy heads.