To what extent does Trump's new official portrait look like his mugshot?

 Surely, the resemblance is intentional... but so are the differences:

The similarities include the framing of the picture. Notice how the side of the collar and lapel line up under the ear (the famous ear!) and how much of the top of the head is showing, with the chin down. There's a lack of symmetry in the eyes, and a distinctive arced wrinkle over his left eye.

But the mugshot face has garish color and harsh light and shade and a deep frown line on the left side of the mouth. The official portrait lighting puts the shadow where it is flattering and where it reveals the individuality and humanity of the face. By comparison, mugshot Trump seems cartoonish. It's almost as if the light were adjusted to create the look of a Hitler mustache. 

In both pictures Trump's right eye seems more active. It's more narrowly pinched than his left eye. It's the eye that's looking right into you. The portrait eye is gentler, wiser, and it influences my interpretation of the mugshot eye. Mugshot Trump is angry. And, oh!, those mugshot eyebrows. They overhang the eyes ominously. He's saying he will fight, fight, fight. Portrait Trump is more complex.

What do you see in him? Whatever it is, it includes his intent to make you think about the mugshot and all that it represents. His adversaries threw everything they could at him, and he fought back and triumphed. But he's not smiling. He's not the Trump in the 2017 portrait:

But who is he? Who is he, now that he's Trump 47?

Today is my 73rd birthday, but, more importantly, 2 days from now is the 20th anniversary of the beginning of this blog.

That's a huge milestone! Is there anything I can do to mark the occasion? There are more than 71 thousand posts on this blog, quite evenly spread out over the years and days. It's not as though I can make a top 20 best posts list. 

Do I even have a favorite post from all these years? I used to say my favorite post — the post that exemplifies what I most hope will happen when I set out on a new post — was "Tattoos remind you of death." But that's from back in 2005. Surely, something in the succeeding years topped that.

I was just talking to my son John, and he urged me to include the post about "the Washington Post guy with the mustache." My post, from 2006, is here: "Of oversized things, MSM, and the internet."

John — wishing me a happy 10th bloggiversary (in 2014) — declared that it represented the "essence" of this blog.

So that gave me the idea to ask you, my dear readers, if you have some post — in there among the 71,000+ posts — that represents what you think is the best (or the essence) of this blog? I would like to learn something about what you think is the reason for doing this.

You don't have to like what you imagine is what I most want to do. Maybe you groan when I veer into tattoos-remind-you-of-death territory and wish I could give more clear answers about who should win the next election and how the Supreme Court should decide this or that case. That's okay. I'm just soliciting material for a blog post I feel I ought to write when we get to that milestone.

"Semicolons are ugly, pretentious and unnecessary; they immaturely try to have it both ways."

"There are so many things to fear in life, but punctuation is not one of them. That semicolons, unlike most other punctuation marks, are fully optional and relatively unusual lends them power; when you use one, you are doing something purposefully, by choice, at a time when motivations are vague and intentions often denied.... Are they ugly? That’s an opinion. Theodor Adorno said they looked like 'a drooping mustache,' but in his view, that’s good — all punctuation marks, and the downtrodden semicolon especially, are 'friendly spirits whose bodiless presence nourishes the body of language'; they ought to be defended. What’s more: Why does your text message, email, tweet, article or book need to be pretty? Is that not also a little pretentious? According to Kurt Vonnegut’s often-taught (and, if you read the full quote, both a little ironic and offensive) advice, 'all they do is show you’ve been to college,' but these days anyone can look up how to use a semicolon.... That semicolons aren’t popular on social media — where oversimplification and directness reign and the presence of too much grammatical flair is likely to limit 'engagement' — is perhaps the only argument some readers will need to be convinced of their value."

From "The Case for Semicolons/There are very few opportunities in life to have it both ways; semicolons are the rare instance in which you can; there is absolutely no downside" by Lauren Oyler (NYT).

"Did he have a sense of humor about himself? Kind of. But you couldn’t quite tell..."

"... because he would start saying things like, 'I am the most beautiful. I am the king,' all that kind of stuff. It’s like [Flamboyant 1940s and Fifties wrestler] Gorgeous George. A lot of boxers and wrestlers do that. Trump does that [laughs]. But that was like stuff he said on stage. Maybe he got confused, as many of us do, about whether you’re on the stage or in real life.... When he was the biggest singer in the country and his songs were huge hits, people didn’t talk about him being gay or anything. I don’t know if he was beyond that because he was so scary. They didn’t even know what he was. He was a Martian more than being gay. It was like he was from another planet.... [H]e died completely homophobic and saying horrible things about gay people and transgender people. I would always say in my [spoken word] show that we should kidnap him and deprogram him, like what that guy Ted Patrick used to do with Moonies. Remember when parents would hire him to get their kids, and he would take you to a hotel room for a week and get you unprogrammed?...  I guess he flipped over to radical Christianity. He could have been a Christian and not a hate-Christian. He could have just quietly gone to church. A lot of people do, but they don’t say terrible things about gay people. Especially when you look like that [laughs]. Especially when you were Princess Lavonne in the carnival; he was a drag queen in the carnival and wrote about it in his book."

From an interview in Rolling Stone with the film director John Waters. Waters interviewed Little Richard for Playboy in 1987, and Little Richard tried to take the interview back after he'd given it.

Waters has long worn a mustache that he says was modeled on Little Richard:



And Waters used Little Richard's song "The Girl Can't Help It" in his movie "Pink Flamingos":



That's a parody of this sequence in the 1956 movie "The Girl Can't Help It":

"I have no patience for contemporary handlebar mustaches. They anger me. They look indulgent and ridiculous."

"If you have a handlebar mustache, that is pretty much all you are. You are a delivery system for a handlebar mustache. I saw a guy in Brooklyn once with a handlebar mustache, pierced ears, a fedora hat and jodhpurs. He was a collage of sartorial attempts at evading himself. It looked as if he were interrupted during a shave in the mid-1850s and had to grab some clothes and dress quickly while being chased through a time tunnel."

From "My Desperate, Stupid, Emotional Hunt for the Perfect Pants" by Marc Maron (NYT, 2013).

#powerofthestash.

#powerofthestash pic.twitter.com/RjsB5h2a5C

— Green Bay Packers (@packers) February 24, 2018

"His moustache is still intact, [like clock hands at] 10 past 10, just as he liked it. It’s a miracle."

"His face was covered with a silk handkerchief – a magnificent handkerchief. When it was removed, I was delighted to see his moustache was intact … I was quite moved. You could also see his hair."

The exhumation of Salvador Dalí — already discussed in an earlier post today, here — does not respect the dead artist's privacy. Instead, an embalmer named Narcís Bardalet — who also handled the body at the time of the entombment in 1989 — gives the press his eyewitness account. He also said that the body "was like wood," and an electric saw had to be used to desecrate the body (that is, to collect the court-ordered bone samples).

These quotes appear in The Guardian, where there is a photograph of the woman who brought the lawsuit. She does look very much like Dali. Under Spanish law, she would be entitled to a quarter of the estate (though Dali willed everything to the Spanish state). The woman, Maria Pilar Abel, did not learn who her father was from her mother, but from her mother's husband's mother, who told her: "I know you aren’t my son’s daughter and that you are the daughter of a great painter, but I love you all the same."

Via Metafilter, where they are making jokes: "I will now enjoy imagining Dalí's mustache surviving the destruction of the earth, the guttering out of the sun, and even the heat death of the universe. In the end, there will only be the mustache, floating serenely in the void. An unguessable number of eons later, CREATION!"... "His moustache was in excellent shape, but his pocket watch apparently had melted."...

Speaking of Salvador Dali's mustache, here he is on "What's My Line?" in 1959, puzzling the blindfolded panel and cracking up the audience. It's a question about the mustache that identifies him:

"I'm a heading out Wisconsin ways/2000 miles to go/Madison, Milwaukee, sets my heart aglow."

"I'm a coming to that dairy state/My heart's a beating fast/I'll pick my banjo gently there/And twiddle my mustache...."

He never performed it and we don't seem to have the music for it, but Bob Dylan wrote 3 verses of lyrics for a song about Wisconsin. The handwritten lyric sheet — which you can see here — is being offered for sale.

I like that he mentions Madison — along with Milwaukee — and also says his home's in "Wow Wow Toaster" — presumably Wauwatosa (the home of Governor Scott Walker).

Also at the link is a facsimile of a Wisconsin State Journal article about a concert Dylan played in Madison when he was 23:

With a vocal style resembling an 80-year-old man with a nasal condition, Dylan still does the near-impossible when he belts out his self-written tirades again the ills of the world....

In no song, however, does he present a solution.

In other Dylan news:

The Bob Dylan archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma is now open to select groups and individuals with qualified research projects. Those hoping to view and use the archive at the Helmerich Center for American Research at the Gilcrease Museum will have to submit a Research Associate Application to the librarian and a list of relevant items from the archive's online finding aid.

"Jolen cream bleach turns the mustache on your upper lip to the exact color of Richard Gephardt's hair, which is better than its looking like Frida Kahlo's mustache, but it's still slightly hairier than you mean it to be."

Wrote Nora Ephron, a while back.

I'm finding that this morning, because Dick Gephardt is in the news today, blogged here, where William asked "How did Gephardt spend so many years in public life without being relentlessly mocked for his orange hair. I guess back then people were more tolerant of orange hair...."

Also, Bob Shrum, in "No Excuses: Concessions of a Serial Campaigner," describes a Dukakis ad (in 1988) that mocked Gephardt by showing a "gymnast with comically dyed orange hair dressed in a suit... trampolining and tumbling forward and back and forward and back again" with the voice-over describing Gephardt's various flip-flops.

So orange hair got mocked, even in the old days. It's not just something invented recently to attack Trump. I certainly remember Reagan's hair getting mocked, especially since he denied dyeing it. The much-repeated joke attributed to Gerald Ford was: "Ronald Reagan doesn't dye his hair, he's just prematurely orange."

"What does this headline mean?"

What does this headline mean? pic.twitter.com/AvMw9zXCm6

— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) February 26, 2016

Without reading the article, I'm going to assume it means conservative women are not really women. They should be counted as men.

Okay, here's the article. Let's see. The author, Julie Baird, is an Australian journalist who worked at Newsweek during the 2008 presidential campaign. At one point they were doing a cover, using a photo of Sarah Palin and the close-up crop revealed "some untended lip and eyebrow hair." They ran it because they don't do retouching, and because they'd certainly show a male candidate's closeup facial flaws. Newsweek was accused of bias. It was “mortifying,” “a clear slap in the face.”

The NYT doesn't show the cover, annoyingly enough. Here it is:


 

I don't think Newsweek covers normally crop in that close, but Baird insists: "The truth was, we’d portrayed Ms. Palin just the way we did male candidates." But aside from the cropping, the lighting was harsh, and that was precisely because the photoshoot was set up by technicians who did not know who McCain's running mate was going to be, so they had "man lighting," which is harsher than the "female lighting" they would have used if they'd known they'd be photographing a woman. And we're told that the close-up crop is something that's normally done to men and not women:

“Close-up photos of men are used all the time without being touched up — men, particularly our political leaders, are expected to have lines and wrinkles. In fact, the cragginess of a man’s face is thought to express character.”

Baird prods us to like comparable photographs of women: "Why are male blemishes signs of authority while women’s are signs of shame?" And, beyond that, why do we even regard female facial hair as a bad thing? Baird presents three examples, all from Victorian literature, portraying a women's mustache in a not completely negative light, e.g.:

In Victoria Cross’s 1903 novel “Six Chapters of a Man’s Life,” the heroine has a mustache “so perceptible that you can see it all across the room.” The male narrator is charmed: “It would spoil most women I know, but it doesn’t seem to spoil her.”

Baird asks:

Why do we consider a mere hint of the hirsute such a disgrace for women when men can mooch about our cities with goatees, mutton-chop whiskers, navel-skimming beards and even “man buns” with little comment? We think of ourselves as liberated, yet it is still considered embarrassing and shameful for a woman’s upper lip to be imperfectly depilated.

So my guess was wrong. Baird didn't say conservative women aren't real women. She said liberate yourself, ladies. Be out and proud with that hair.

"The Old Scott Walker Ad Where He Played An Alter Ego With A Fake Mustache And Glasses."

"The ad, which plays on the famous 'I’m a Mac, I’m a PC' commercial, was run during Walker’s 2008 race for Milwaukee county executive...."

"Be careful, 'I'm ready to love Obama' sounds a lot like the last line of a novel, a certain novel. JK/LOL."

Says tim in vermont, in the comments thread of the first post today where I quoted Meade (without context) saying "I'm ready to love Obama."

Meade intended the allusion to "1984," which ends:

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

If the allusion was intended, it should make sense. Surely, Meade didn't mean that he's finally beaten down to the point were he submits to Obama-as-Big-Brother. And it's Obama that just got beaten down. The idea, it turns out, is that Obama has loomed over us for years as a kind of Big Brother figure, but now he's cut down to human size. He's not so big anymore. He's a real person who needs love and who becomes lovable, at long last, to those who have resisted the cult of personality.

Stray thought that came to me reading that last paragraph of "1984": Obama should grow a mustache!

Finland issues stamps honoring an artist whose "sleek sado-masochistic drawings with abundant amounts of beefy male nudity" portrayed "a sensual life force and being proud of oneself."

The first quote in this post title is the way the NYT described the work of Touko Laaksonen, AKA Tom of Finland, and the second quote is from someone in Finland who chose the particular images for the stamps, who added: "There is never too much [sensual life force and being proud of oneself] in this northern country."

I'm showing more of the stamps than the NYT saw fit to print in its pages, though it did link here, where I got this:



The NYT just had a cropped image of the man on the left, in the center. The cropped image includes the emphatically glistening nipple. As for the image on the right, the NYT says it "depicts a mustachioed man staring out from below a pair of muscled naked buttocks." 

Staring out from below, indeed. "Why is that mustachioed man staring at us from behind a naked ass, Mommy?," I imagine a child asking, as she picks up the mail somewhere in Finland. Mommy says: "Why, darling, it's because we're living in a northern country, and our government cares very much about our life force and our pride in ourselves. Doesn't this make you feel alive and proud, sweetheart, in spite of having to live in Finland?"

I'm sorry. That's a very unrealistic scenario. No child would use the NYT-y phrase "mustachioed man staring out from below a pair of muscled naked buttocks." 1. "Mustachioed" is a silly word, particularly silly when — from what I've seen so far — every man Tom of Finland depicted has a mustache. 2. Are those buttocks particularly "muscled," or is the NYT just mindlessly crediting Tom with making his men even more attractive than he was obviously straining to make them? 3. The bodiless head isn't really in a "staring out from behind" relationship with the headless body. It's more of a surreal image in which the head takes the place of what would be a very large scrotum.

Those are my insights from the northern country of Wisconsin, where blogging random items early in the morning is enough to stir my sensual life force and make me proud of myself.

"Even in an age when a child’s every irregularity is attributed to a syndrome, the idea of a 'normal weird kid' seems reasonable enough..."

From a long New Yorker "Annals of Psychiatry" piece about Adam Lanza, based on an interview with his father Peter, who said that his son was "Always thinking differently... Just a normal little weird kid."

A supposedly extreme thing about Adam Lanza that doesn't sound at all extreme to me: "He showed such hypersensitivity to physical touch that tags had to be removed from his clothing."

And what if your child showed talent for writing in a manner that seems like those popular slasher films and Stephen King bestsellers?

[In 5th grade], Adam and another boy wrote a story called “The Big Book of Granny,” in which an old woman with a gun in her cane kills wantonly. In the third chapter, Granny and her son want to taxidermy a boy for their mantelpiece. In another chapter, a character called Dora the Berserker says, “I like hurting people. . . . Especially children.” Adam tried to sell copies of the book at school and got in trouble. A couple of years later, according to the state’s attorney’s report, a teacher noted “disturbing” violence in his writing and described him as “intelligent but not normal, with anti-social issues.”

And what if your child really loved the pop culture things from your youth that you showed to him?

When Peter took him to see Bill Cosby live, Adam laughed for an hour straight. He loved reruns of “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Get Smart,” which he would watch with his dad. One Christmas, Adam told his parents that he wanted to use his savings to buy toys for needy children, and Peter took him shopping for them.

Wouldn't you think your child was rather brilliant if you asked what he would do if he had 3 wishes and he said he'd wish "that whatever was granting the wishes would not exist"?

The parents took Adam to a psychiatrist, and the diagnosis was Asperger's Syndrome, which seemed helpful and specific, something they could work with. It made sense to Peter. But:

“Adam was not open to therapy,” Peter told me. “He did not want to talk about problems and didn’t even admit he had Asperger’s.” Peter and Nancy were confident enough in the Asperger’s diagnosis that they didn’t look for other explanations for Adam’s behavior. In that sense, Asperger’s may have distracted them from whatever else was amiss. “If he had been a totally normal adolescent and he was well adjusted and then all of a sudden went into isolation, alarms would go off,” Peter told me. “But let’s keep in mind that you expect Adam to be weird.”

AND:

When he was sixteen, [Adam] found a picture of Karl Marx (huge beard), Lenin (small beard), Stalin (mustache), and Mao (clean-shaven), and sent it around with a caption, “Comrades, we must rectify the faltering facial hair standards.” 

ADDED: It's obvious in retrospect that Adam Lanza needed to be institutionalized. Why didn't his parents do that?! It seems like a cartoon — a horror cartoon — of what happens when a child doesn't have a mother and a father together in his home. The mother seems to have appeased and comforted him constantly. And the fatherly judgment and discipline is exiled. But how much rationality is contained within Peter Lanza? He is responsible for the distance he took from what was a dangerous, hopeless relationship between mother and son. In this New Yorker piece, we get to read the story he's assembled for his semi-peace of mind, after the fact.

Peter was frustrated but felt that he couldn’t show up at the house in Newtown to force an encounter. “It would have been a fight, the last thing I’d want to be doing. Jesus. . . . If I had gone there unannounced and just, ‘I want to see Adam.’ ‘Why are you doing this?’ Adam would be all bent about me.” Later, Peter remarked, “If I said I’m coming, she’d say, ‘No, there’s no reason for that.’ I mean, she controlled the situation.”

The Wall Street Journal worries that Congress is not making enough laws...

... and that it's getting "rusty" because it's "not getting much practice" at the "art of lawmaking."

As if making a lot of laws ever was a way to get good at it.

Moreover, we're about to lose some of our greatest law-artists:

The retirements of Reps. John Dingell (D., Mich.), Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) and George Miller (D., Calif.) at the end of this year represent a huge drain of legislative skill in an institution where such experience is in short supply. Taken together, those three men alone – authors of major health, education and environmental laws of the last quarter century – will leave Capitol Hill with 139 years of experience behind them.

Man, it's like the late 80s when we lost Andy Warhol and Salvador Dali! It's so tough to lose one of the greats....



Art! It's dying!

Israel prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu shadow-paints a Hitler mustache on German chancellor Angela Merkel.

An astounding photograph.

Your reaction.
	Hilarious, great photo. Kudos to the photographer!
	Hitler was evil, so this chance image should have been trashed, not put up for our amusement.
	Inconsequential nonsense. Typical of the nothingness that distracts us these days.
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"Is there anything more American than America?"

I laughed at what I considered a really dumb first line, even as Meade, seeing the opening back-of-the-head shot, identified Bob Dylan. Here's the ad, to analyze in the cold light of day:



On review, I understand the sense of the line that caught my ear as dumb. It's that all the foreign carmakers are only imitating what is essentially American, the car. Detroit carmakers were the "inspiration" for "the rest of the world," says the great genius songwriter who took his inspiration from plenty of others who came before him.

At 0:49, Dylan lumbers forward saying, "Yeah, Detroit made cars. And cars made America." His upper lip looks strangely fake. There's no mustache. Did he shave off his mustache or is it plastered down with some sort of flesh-toned makeup paste that's impairing the mobility of his mouth? He wants his mustache, I think. He's had it a long time. But Chrysler doesn't want a mustache image.

Near the end, Bob says, "So let Germany brew your beer..." and I take a little offense, because beer is a big part of the manufacturing segment of the Wisconsin economy. But Bob's a Minnesotan, and there's some interstate rivalry, even as he's talking up Michigan. It's the state that shares your state's border that you tend to disrespect. Once there's another state buffering the proximity, you can get a little fuzzy and romantic.

Meade says, as I'm playing this: "The background tune is 'Things Have Changed.'" He recites a line of that song — which is playing only instrumentally — "I used to care but things have changed." The vocal track enters at the very end, with only the line "things have changed" — not "I used to care." You're supposed to care — a lot — about America. At least when you're buying a car. There are no cars in that song. There's some waiting for a train and walking on a bad road, and...

Feel like falling in love with the first woman I meet
Putting her in a wheelbarrow and wheeling her down the street

That would be a change, but what you need, in this unchanged America, is a car, and Bob recommends a Chrysler.

Top 10 Spanish mustaches.

Beginning with Salvador Dali ("who described his pointy facial hair as 'antennae with which to trap art,' used date sugar to sharpen the ends and also attract 'clean flies'").

"Movember as microaggression... characterized by too many moustaches, overarching shows of masculinity, and a general overload of testosterone."

"The pure and charitable sentiment is there – raising money for prostate and testicular cancer research, and fighting mental health problems among men – but what once started out as a harmless campaign has become sexist, racist, transphobic, and misinformed."

The idea of suggesting that men show solidarity with each other by growing moustaches is completely absurd....

[Blogger Jem] Bloomfield... remarks that, “This campaign, intended as a project by men for men, has immediately been turned into a pretext for demanding that women submit themselves and their bodies to male approval.... I don’t want to be told that a moustache makes me a man, or that my identity depends upon shaming women into being presentable to the male gaze.”

"Completely absurd" is a great phrase here. Who knew mustaches were such a problem beyond the mere aesthetics of a given man's face?

"I don’t think we should talk about Lincoln’s underwear..."

"It’s not appropriate for someone so iconic. Even in the bedroom, Lincoln is never shown in his pajamas. He’s in his shirt and pants."

Joanna Johnston, movie costume designer.

***

"But even the President of the United States/Sometimes must have to stand naked."

Bob Dylan.

***

"How many Bob Dylan songs have the word 'naked' and how many of them can you name?" I challenge Meade with a Bob Dylan test, as I tend to do when I've done a search at bobdylan.com (as I did for the "It's Alright Ma" quote, above).

Meade immediately says "even the President of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked," then none of the others — not even "You see somebody naked and you say who is that man?" — and makes 2 wrong guesses:

MEADE: "'Mr. Tambourine Man'... just to dance beneath the naked sky..."

ME: "That's 'diamond sky.'"

MEADE: "The one where the farmer is chasing him out of his house."

ME: "'Motorpsycho Nightmare?' No."

In "Motorpsycho Nightmare," Bob Dylan is just trying to get some sleep — no sign that he's sleeping naked — when Rita — "Lookin’ just like Tony Perkins" (i.e., the murderer in "Psycho") importunes him to take a shower. He's freaked out: "Oh, no! no! I’ve been through this [movie] before." Afraid of getting knifed to death, but unwilling to run off unless her father (the farmer) throws him out (because he promised the farmer he'd milk the cows in the morning), his sees his only option as saying "something to strike him very weird." What he says is: "I like Fidel Castro and his beard."



Beards. Fidel Castro made a beard as off limits to an American president — in spite of Lincoln — as Hitler made the mustache. And here I want to go back to that "Becoming Adolf" article by Rich Cohen that were were talking about a couple days ago:

[Y]ou could not wear any kind of mustache after [WWII], because, running from Hitler, you might run into Stalin. Hitler plus Stalin ended the career of the mustache in Western political life. Before the war, all kinds of American presidents wore a mustache and/or beard. You had John Quincy Adams, with his muttonchops...



You had Abe Lincoln, whose facial hair...



... like his politics, was the opposite of Hitler's: beard full, lip bare. You had James Garfield, who had the sort of vast rabbinical beard into which whole pages of legislation could vanish.



You had Rutherford B. Hayes...



Grover Cleveland...



... and Teddy Roosevelt, whose asthma and elephant gun were just a frame for his mustache.



You had William Howard Taft — the man wore a Walrus!



After the war, the few American politicians who still wore a mustache were those who had made their name before Hitler and so had been grandfathered in. Like Thomas Dewey.



Dewey was Eliot Spitzer. He was a prosecutor in New York in the 1930s (and later governor), the only guy with the guts to take on the Mob. For Dewey, the rise of Hitler was a fashion disaster. Because Dewey wore a neat little mustache. Dewey ran for president twice — losing to F.D.R., losing to Truman. In my opinion, without the mustache, the headline in the Chicago Daily Tribune (Dewey Defeats Truman) turns true. One of the few prominent American politicians to wear facial hair in recent memory is Al Gore, who grew a Grizzly Adams beard after he lost to George Bush, in 2000. The appearance of this beard was taken to mean either (1) Gore would never again run for office, or (2) Gore had gone completely mental.



The decision to grow a mustache or a beard is all by itself reason to keep a man away from the nuclear trigger.

Are we going to decide who deserves out trust based on they look? Come on, Abe. Lose the beard. Okay.

Pick one: