"They really shouldn't be that outraged about the shape of that 'W.' Seriously."

Oh, but we are! The shape of the W is extremely valuable to us!

Untitled.

Talk about what you will.

The one thing that is most likely to turn the American voter against a candidate.

The answer is clear.

"Most people are not worried about Hillary’s ability to be strong."

"Anyone who can cast herself as a feminist icon while leading the attack on her husband’s mistresses, anyone who thinks eight years of presidential pillow talk qualifies her for the presidential pillow, is plenty tough enough to smack around dictators, and other Democrats."

Writes Maureen Dowd. (TimesSelect link.)

Gore's graphic depiction of sexual intercourse.

From Kristin Gore's novel:

He quickly matched my urgency in the clothes-removal efforts and we were naked and happy in no time. And then we were naked and extremely happy a half hour later.

Oh! Ick! I hate writing!

ADDED: It's so easy to see how Gore could have believed this was terribly clever. So why is it so bad? One thing is the complete lack of edge. If it had ended sarcastically, this passage might have been good. But, no, sex just made them "extremely happy." It doesn't make us happy. The only detail we get is that they took off their clothes -- a mundane point that we are told three times.

And then there's all this talk about time: "quickly," "urgency," "in no time," and then -- as if she realized that superfast sex is actually not generally considered good -- "a half hour later." Then there is what I think the author imagined as feminist fulfillment: The man synchronized himself to her.

Could something please go wrong?

How to photograph a grand achievement...

... to show contempt.

AND: Looking at this photograph, I'm thinking it may be impossible to photograph this thing without seeming to show contempt.

"Giuliani and Race."

The NYT provides access to its archive of articles on Giuliani and race, beginning with Todd S. Purdum's "Giuliani Has Taunt for Dinkins: He's a 'Jesse Jackson Democrat'" (from September 26, 1989, when Giuliani first ran for mayor of NYC).

Responding to his opponent's repeated taunt that he is a ''Ronald Reagan Republican,'' Rudolph W. Giuliani said after an appearance at an Orthodox Jewish private school yesterday that he could just as easily call David N. Dinkins a ''Jesse Jackson Democrat.''

So Dinkins tried to portray Giuliani as too conservative for NYC and Giuliani shot back with a parallel epithet.

Purdum again in 1993: "Rudolph Giuliani and the Color of Politics in New York":

But is Giuliani the right man to save [the city]? Can a hopscotch candidate, a purebred product of the tidy world of St. Joseph's, win and govern a hip-hop city?

Though he is just 49 years old, Giuliani often seems a striking throwback in New York City's anything-goes atmosphere. It's as if his cultural and psychic sensibilites froze about 1961, the year he left the tutelage of the Christian Brothers at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Brooklyn. This is a man so square that he started an opera club in high school and still refers to his old high-school classmates as "other youngsters"; so corny that he proposed to his current wife at Disney World; so accepting of authority that he says the nuns and brothers who taught him were right to smack him around, because he often deserved it. He says that he simply "missed" the convulsions of the 60's, that the dilemmas of long hair or inhaling "never came up." Pictures of Abraham Lincoln and Babe Ruth hang on his office wall; David Dinkins displays photographs of Nelson Mandela and Jennifer Capriati.

Giuliani can be so awkward in public -- with hunched shoulders and a tremulous voice -- that his best friends fret constantly that New Yorkers will never know Rudy like they know Rudy. That Giuliani is the warm father who can't imagine spanking his 7-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter, the man who lives in the same Upper East Side building as his elderly mother and who on New Year's Eve dances alone with his wife to Frank Sinatra records in their apartment.

Giuliani's Wonder Bread image carries risks in a polyglot city where no single racial or ethnic group predominates, and no topic will be trickier for him than race.

In sum, he was the squarest guy in the world back then, and that was connected to race.

THE TWIST IN GIULIANI'S nostalgic pitch is that he is making it just as New York stands poised for a new political order, made inevitable by demographic shifts in a city where non-Hispanic whites are no longer a majority. In a profound sense, this son of the 50's is running against history. Even if he wins, he may be the last white man for years to lead his city.

"I've got to get this city to stop thinking in categories, to stop thinking in terms of black and white and Hispanic, and gay and heterosexual, and get us to start thinking about people," Giuliani told a group of working-class Hispanic parents in Sunset Park this spring, in an almost plaintive declaration he makes often. "I've got to get New York to stop thinking about all this symbolism."

While that may sound disingenuous to some, Giuliani is undoubtedly sincere. Far more than Dinkins, he needs to keep overt references to race out of the campaign. Dinkins's race, which helped elect him in the first place as a nonthreatening healer, remains one of his greatest assets. What Giuliani really means is that he must be free to talk about race and ethnicity on his terms, and to attack the Mayor's record, without being seen as racist.

We see that 15 years ago, the NYT portrayed him as a throwback, but the old article shows its age with the assumption that only the old fashioned think about transcending racial divisions. (Or else Barack Obama is a throwback.)

Here's today's front page article on Giuliani and race, "In a Volatile City, a Stern Line on Race and Politics," by Michael Powers:

Mr. Giuliani, aides say, found a city in the early 1990s where most of the departments affecting the lives of black New Yorkers from schools to welfare to public safety were dysfunctional. Too many citizens expected government to coddle them, and too many black leaders, said Peter Powers, one of Mr. Giuliani’s oldest friends and his first deputy mayor, were afraid to work publicly with a white Republican mayor.

Much more in the article, which details a particular time and place -- NYC in the 1990s.

How do the volatile racial politics of that time relate to the current presidential campaign?

Save for immigration, Mr. Giuliani rarely fields questions about race on the campaign trail. Republican voters, who are overwhelmingly white, have clamored to hear about 9/11 and terror....

Well, it seems that the NYT is keen on bringing race forward in the discussion of the 2008 campaign. I doubt if it helps Giuliani to sort through the painful incidents of the 1990s, though it can't hurt to repeat the amazing statistic that he reduced crime by 60 percent.

The Church of Dog.

Doesn't this violate the constitutional requirement for the separation of kennel and state?



This is only part 3 of a bizarre sermon in praise of Dog. For parts 1 & 2, plus commentary, go here.

For an previous discussion of Senator Byrd's devotion to Dog, go here.

Goodbye to Tammy Faye.

She said goodbye to us two days ago on Larry King. Speaking about Jesus and Heaven, she looked shockingly wasted, and her makeup -- long the subject of jokes -- ought to have seemed even more absurd on this near-corpse, but it wasn't like that. It felt like a brilliant expression of love for life and defiance of death (even as she accepted death).

Part 1 of the show:



Part 2. Part 3.

The NYT obit:

Tammy Faye Messner, who as Tammy Faye Bakker helped her husband, Jim, build a multimillion-dollar evangelism empire and then saw it collapse in disgrace, has died. She was 65....

In an interview with CNN's Larry King... an emaciated Messner -- still using her trademark makeup -- said, "I believe when I leave this earth, because I love the Lord, I'm going straight to heaven." Asked if she had any regrets, Messner said: "I don't think about it, Larry, because it's a waste of good brain space."

If you have a hard time seeing why you should love Tammy Faye, just watch this movie.

The Justice Department won't pursue contempt charges against the witnesses who invoked Executive Privilege.

Any alternative?

Congress has another route to enforce its will, an inherent power of contempt. But that has not been used since early in the 20th century. It has long been deemed unwieldy in the modern era as it entails Congress stopping all work to hold its own trial and imprisoning any offenders in the basement of the Capitol.

"Unwieldy," i.e., too bizarre to do.

"Can you name a major moral, political or intellectual issue on which you've ever changed your mind?"

After running profile after profile, Normblog finally -- for the 200th profile -- profiles Norm!

TPM thinks it's found a video of Giuliani "screaming" "bullsh*t!"

Here. I've watched it. He's not "screaming" "bullsh*t." Nor has he "come unhinged" (as TPM puts it.)

He's addressing what appears to be a police union rally and giving a rousing speech, which contains the shouted expletive "bullsh*t." Reminds me of one of my favorite TV shows.

Shouting is not "screaming."

Some people don't like the harsh word "bullsh*t" -- and I'm modifying it here with an asterisk out of my bullsh*t fear of filters -- but it's a normal and useful word. I'm sure cops appreciate it. Using it doesn't make you crazy, and I'm positive TPM doesn't think it does. TPM is simply trying to hurt Rudy's chances with conservatives so he won't get the nomination and get his chance to win over liberals. So acting like he's "unhinged" in that video is bullshit.

UPDATE: Here is some background on the context of that speech (from a NYT analysis of Giuliani and race):

... Mr. Giuliani took a fateful step that would for years prompt questions about his racial sensitivities. In September 1992, he spoke to a rally of police officers protesting Mr. Dinkins’s proposal for a civilian board to review police misconduct.

It was a rowdy, often threatening, crowd. Hundreds of white off-duty officers drank heavily, and a few waved signs like “Dump the Washroom Attendant,” a reference to Mr. Dinkins. A block away from City Hall, Mr. Giuliani gave a fiery address, twice calling Mr. Dinkins’s proposal “bullshit.” The crowd cheered. Mr. Giuliani was jubilant.

“If you’re acculturated to like cops, you don’t necessarily see 10,000 white guys who don’t vote in the city, don’t write political checks and love you for the wrong reason,” an aide said. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he is working with the Giuliani presidential campaign.

Mr. Dinkins has not forgotten that sea of angry cops. “Rudy was out there inciting white cops to riot,” Mr. Dinkins said in a recent interview.

Mr. Giuliani said he never saw racist signs. “One of the reasons those police officers might have lost control is that we have a mayor who invites riots,” he said at the time. The Giuliani campaign later conducted a “vulnerability study” to identify their candidate’s weaknesses in 1993. This study, obtained by Wayne Barrett, author of “Rudy!” — an investigative biography — offers an unsparing critique: “Giuliani’s shrieking performance at the cop rally may be his greatest political liability this year. Giuliani has yet to admonish those who attacked the mayor with racist code words on signs and banners. Why not?”

MORE: After TPM attacks me for this post, I respond here.

AND: I wrote more on the NYT coverage of Giuliani and race here.

If Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton had been bald, would we have elected them?

Look at pictures, and be honest. But isn't Fred Thompson different somehow? Isn't he "good bald"? Or is it just that I'm used to seeing him bald and shocked at the revelation of how Clinton and Reagan would look? Perhaps Thompson's face is so elaborately creased with character that the blank dome provides needed balance. Hair would seem fussy.

Yet maybe we're moving into a time when a shaved-down scalp will look best on a man and the politician's hair we've been seeing for the last quarter-century will look absurdly wig-like and repellent.

But to look good bald, you need a well-shaped head. One reason Reagan and Clinton look so stupid in the caricatures at the link is because the artist has given each of them a narrowing cranium, a pointy ridge of a head. Compare Thompson's head: high, big and rounded. It may be that Reagan and Clinton had similarly well-shaped heads.

Come to think of it, wouldn't you like to get a look at a man's head before electing him President?

This last question has me off and searching for a picture of Zippy the Pinhead. A cool thing about the Zippy website is this page with a clickable map of the United States, which lets you find old strips set in whatever state you want. Zippy, not being a presidential candidate, has not yet visited Iowa. But here's a strip from Wisconsin. Interestingly, the last panel may give a clue what it is we fear about the bald head.

"Whatever it is, I'm against it."

Ruth Anne found the YouTube clips for the 2 Marx Brothers scenes I mentioned in yesterday's vlog.

"How much sex education is age appropriate for a 5-year-old? In my mind, zero is the right number."

Says Mitt Romney, taking aim at Barack Obama:

"All I said was that I support the same laws that exist in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, in which local communities and parents can make decisions to provide children with the information they need to deal with sexual predators," Obama said in an AP Interview.

Romney on Wednesday targeted Obama for supporting a bill during his term in the Illinois state Senate that would have, among other things, provided age-appropriate sex education for all students....

Obama said Romney was wrong to take the shot and incorrect on its basis.

"We have to deal with a coarsening of the culture and the over-sexualization of our young people. Look, I've got two daughters, 9 and 6 years old," Obama told the AP. "Of course, part of the coarsening of that culture is when politicians try to demagogue issues to score cheap political points."

Well, I'm going to keep score. Obama gets one point and Romney loses one. Actually, I'm going to give Obama 3 points and subtract 2 for Romney. Here's my thinking:

+1 Obama: He's correct that young children need "age appropriate" sex education. For example, a 5-year-old should know enough to prevent abuse and can hear a simple explanation about where babies come from

-1 Romney: He's wrong to say that a 5-year-old should get absolutely no information about sex.

-1 Romney: Trying to gain ground by stirring people up about sex and children.

+1 Obama: Reacting quickly and competently when attacked. Those quotes, above, are pitch-perfect.

+1 Obama: Federalism! Let state and local government decide matters having to do with children, education, and morality.

A little Friday afternoon vlog.

Just answering your questions... from the previous post. Trying to do it without edits, but the phone rang....



ADDED: Here's the song I mention.

MORE: Ruth Anne found the Marx Brothers clips.