Thank you, Anthony Weiner

I’m embarrassed to admit I’ve been following all this Weiner stuff, where, unlike Strauss-Kahn or Arnold, there’s no meta story about pigs and power but only the inescapable conclusion that our news media function at the level of middle school boys – but at least it’s led me to do something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time: change my G-mail password.

Why? Well, it’s a circuitous route, getting from there to here, but here goes.

You’d think that Weiner would have just come out and said No, that’s not my surname down there, and those are not my underpants. But no: His Twitter account was hacked, he said, but that may or may not be me. So, given that he knows what his underpants and himself in them looks like, and since he seems so agonizingly honest about the whole thing, you have to figure that that someone really did hack in (and why does Andrew Breitbart always seem to be involved in these sordid stories?), found that photo somewhere, and sent it.

I have a Twitter account, but I only use it to follow my son and the weather and Jon Stewart. I never tweet anything, I have no idea how to twitpic, and my opinion of sexting makes me feel as old as I thought my mother was when she warned me about pedophiles on the Internet.

But I do have a G-mail account. I no longer pay attention to the ads and suggestions that appear next to my messages, though they are pretty freaky. Here, for example, is a recent message from a friend:

I’d love to write a real email but I don’t want to spend too much time on my neighbor’s computer seeing as he was working on his novel when I arrived today.

And here’s how helpful G-mail responds:

Ads

BlackBerry® Smartphones

Find More, Know More, Do More. BlackBerry Pulls It All Together.

BlackBerry.com

More about…

Neighbor Harrasing »

Cell Phone Reverse Phone »

Phone »

Computer »

[Please don't click on the links - you'll just encourage them!]

Yes, freaky.

Despite all this, I still think G-mail is cooler than other email addresses – it still has the cachet it had when my son, harbinger of all new media, invited me to join back in its beta days. However, even though I don’t have any sexy pictures to be embarrassed about attached to my emails, and I don’t work in the White House so I don’t think the Chinese would be interested in me, it just seems prudent to make it a little more difficult for someone to find out the details of my prosaic life.

And so, if you’re one of my G-mail friends freaking out while reading this (especially the one with the novelist neighbor), I, just like George W., am keeping you safe.

Never thought I’d miss him

But it’s hard, not having Bush to kick around anymore.

Beaten up in Egypt

Egypt has been hard on the pundits. It’s just hard to know what to make of  it, with  John McCain calling for Mubarak to resign and Glenn Beck screaming Mubarak has to stay (imagine the dilemma this puts Fox News in). And who gets the credit for this democratic uprising? Little W, for the Iraq domino effect (although those dominoes took an awful long time falling, and did so much damage as they fell)? Condi Rice, for her 2005 Cairo oratory, or Obama, for his in 2009?

And it was especially hard on Anderson Cooper:

This video was painful to watch. Gorgeous, rich Anderson Cooper, symbol of American exceptionalism, almost beaten up by Mubarak’s thugs.

Bush, Condi, Obama – the protests really had nothing to do with them; and America, despite over a billion in foreign aid to Egypt, has very little influence on the outcome.

I fear it’s not going to end well in Egypt.

How George W. Bush changed my life

I was never all that interested in politics until George W. Bush took eight years out of my life. I hated having to do Current Events reports in school, and I always skipped the political news section of Time. My theory was that it was all going to change anyway, so why try to figure out what was going on at any particular moment?

But then the election season of 2006 rolled around, and it seemed like the Democrats might have a chance at taking back Congress, even in our Republican-machine-run Pennsylvania district. I decided to volunteer for Joe Sestak’s campaign, and my political junkie career began.

No one had ever heard of him at first. “Joe who?” they’d say. But he was a former admiral, worked for Clinton, and was pretty smart. He also had an attractive wife and a kid who’d overcome brain cancer that he never stopped talking about, both of which helped.

He has a weird whispery Mr. Rogerish way of talking when he speaks in public, maybe put on to compensate for the “poor command climate” reputation that continues to haunt him, probably because it’s true. He’s very hard to work for, but he gets a lot done. He was a terrific first-term Congressman, voted the most productive by his freshman colleagues.

Early in his second term he decided to run for the Senate. I was dubious. Why would he want to leave Congress, where his workaholic nature is a perfect fit, for the very difficult climate of the Senate where relationships are all-important? Why was he abandoning our district, which may be leaning even more Republican now, after all our hard work campaigning? I decided not to work for him.

Then Specter switched parties, because Pennsylvania Republicans who tend to vote in primaries love nutcase Toomey, who believes in no taxes, no abortions, no gay marriages, and lots of guns. And Obama needed that 60th vote, and Joe Sestak was supposed to bow out.

Joe doesn’t bow easily. He’s still running, and may even win.

I’m still irritated at him because, even though I’m working for the Democrat who’s hoping to take his place in Congress, I believe the Republicans are going to take his seat back. But vote for Specter? No way. Here’s what he was doing during those long eight years of my apolitical life:

I’m a mindless tribalist, and I support Elena Kagan

Save me, please, from progressive Democrats. They’re using the same red herrings and specious arguments right-wingers use. Elena Kagan has no record like…oh, let’s just drag somebody with no record in here like Harriet Miers, and then we get to compare Obama’s thought process with Bush’s, and then we get to say Obama’s no better than Bush, and he’s trying to expand executive power just like Bush was, and because Kagan hasn’t said much about this she too believes in executive power, and therefore she’s definitely going to make the Supreme Court even more conservative than it already is.

And also, by the way, if you support Kagan because you elected Obama for his judgment, you’re no better than the slobbering idiots who believed in Bush.

I know it’s hard to believe intelligent people are actually arguing this way, but here’s just one example, by Glenn Greenwald in Slate:

If the choice is Kagan, you’ll have huge numbers of Democrats and progressives running around saying, in essence: “I have no idea what Kagan thinks or believes about virtually anything, and it’s quite possible she’ll move the Court to the Right, but I support her nomination and think Obama made a great choice.” In other words, according to Chemerinksy and Yglesias, progressives will view Obama’s choice as a good one by virtue of the fact that it’s Obama choice. Isn’t that a pure embodiment of mindless tribalism and authoritarianism? Democrats love to mock the Right for their propensity to engage in party-line, close-minded adherence to their Leaders, but compare what conservatives did with Bush’s selection of Harriet Miers to what progressives are almost certain to do with Obama’s selection of someone who is, at best, an absolute blank slate.

And one more carping comment: Glenn, those people who stick with their leaders are closed-minded, not close.

Reflections on George W. Bush, and some other hateful characters

When I was little one of my babysitters told me I shouldn’t use the word hate. “You don’t really hate that person,” she said.

This was pretty confusing, because although I was still trying to figure out what feelings were, it seemed to me that yes, I really did hate that person.

And they say you shouldn’t hate the person, just the actions of the person.

So I’ve been thinking lately about some people that I really do hate. I’ve never met them, of course, and if I did maybe I’d just hate their actions, not their persons, but tell me, babysitter: why shouldn’t I hate Karl Rove, or the Dick Cheney, or Sarah Palin, or George W. Bush?

The first two are very, very smart, and that’s a huge factor in the hate column. They are fully aware of how they manipulated, and continue to manipulate, all of us to serve their own power. If I met those two, I know for sure I’d hate them – inside and out.

Sarah Palin is clever, not smart. She’s clever enough to quit things while she’s still charming people and before she gets found out. She too manipulates people, but with her feminine wiles and folksy talk, not her intelligence. If I met her, she might charm me, but I’d be wary. She’s a mean girl, a bullying girl, but she might manage to suck me in. I hope I never meet her.

If you look at my little tag cloud over there on the right, you can see I’ve talked about George W. Bush a lot, nearly as often as Obama, which is kind of horrifying. He was my boogey man. I hated him fiercely when I started this blog, because we were still subjected to his incompetence.

But now I have a confession to make. If I met him, I feel quite sure I wouldn’t hate him. Yes, he left us with two wars and the biggest recession since the Depression and a screwed up financial system and unchecked global warming and Christian moles in most federal agencies (help, I’m talking myself back into hating him). But I believe he himself was manipulated, mostly by those two up there that I really hate. He’s a perfect example of the Peter Principle, but he’s not dumb, and I think he realizes this. Maybe this is why he’s been refreshingly quiet lately.

I hate his actions. If I met him, though, I’d have a beer with him.

W. is just like the germophobe at my gym

This is hilarious. You might think you can’t stand to see another second of him, but you just have to put up with his smirk for a second, and then you get to see him actually wipe his hand off on Bill Clinton’s shirt.

Where’s the flunky with the hand sanitizer when you need him?

And is Clinton so used to being petted that he doesn’t even notice?

Obama’s anger management class

I hardly ever feel angry, and mostly I think this is a good thing, even though a woman I once worked with told me it was a bad thing. She was a former psychotherapist, which indicates maybe she was right; except that she became a market researcher because she couldn’t make enough money being a psychotherapist, so maybe I shouldn’t still be mulling over her comment all these decades later.

And I wonder what they do in those anger management classes, besides getting people to hit their pillows. If Amy Bishop had ended up following the judge’s prescription after her IHOP incident, would her anger have been managed? I doubt it.

I’ve always felt that anger is a primitive emotion – it’s like the first thing that comes out, before you’ve had a chance to think about the other side. It’s like George W., not doing nuance.

Lack of emotional nuance is a good way to describe what conservative Republicans have been doing lately. Tim Pawlenty, telling people they need to smash up a few windows with golf clubs to get Washington’s attention; Scott Brown comparing his election to the angry suicidal pilot in Austin; even Romney, getting in the face of the rapper who wouldn’t adjust his airplane seat (I guess he did it because someone told him conservatives don’t like rappers, since Romney only pretends to be a conservative).

Not to mention Sarah Palin, who always finds a lot to get faux-angry about. That’s just retarded.

They say unexpressed anger turns into depression, which is probably a good characterization of Democrats these days, especially when they see all those angry Republicans unable to see, much less appreciate, Obama’s nuanced governing style.

Anger can be blinding; depression can be paralyzing. But I have a feeling no-drama Obama may have outfoxed them all, weaving his way past blind Republicans and paralyzed Democrats through the emotional thicket of healthcare reform. Stay tuned for his anger management class on Thursday.

A thumping, George Bush style

I went to camp in Massachusetts, and college in Massachusetts; I met my husband in Massachusetts and some of my best friends live in Massachusetts.

I also intend not to mention Massachusetts again in this blog. I am sick to death of Massachusetts.

Let’s just remember our friend George W. Bush. After suffering, as he described it, a “thumping” in the 2006 Congressional elections, he proceeded with dispatch to ignore the Iraq Study Group and the American public and send more troops to Iraq.

Not that I want Obama to resemble him in any way. Except by ramming healthcare through.

So that we can all have what that other state does.

The blame game

It’s pretty amazing that Rudy Giuliani, of all people, forgot about September 11. “We had no domestic attacks under Bush,” he said on Good Morning America. It’s horrifying that George Stephanopoulos, of all people, didn’t call him on it. He sets us straight in his blog, but why not during the interview, on camera, instead of going on to joke, in a chummy, good-old-boy way, about the snow in New York City?

We’ve been brainwashed. What about 9/11? Well, that was Clinton’s fault. What about the anthrax attacks? Some crazy scientist (even though they got the wrong scientist, it was still a scientist, not a terrorist). What about the shoe bomber? (If only we didn’t have to walk through airports in our socks, we might have forgotten about him too.) And why isn’t that situation exactly like the underpants bomber, except that Bush had seven years after the shoe bomber to protect us from underpants bombers?

I actually don’t think Stephanopoulos was brainwashed. After all, his blog was written barely two hours after the interview. I think he was covering himself, because, on camera, he chose the chummy, good-old-boy way.

But let’s think about what I myself am doing here. It’s what lies at the heart of our dysfunctional government: the blame game. Who did what, who is to blame for what: it’s our political discourse now, both on the right and on the left. It distracts us; it keeps us from having to do the hard stuff; it keeps us from even finding out what the hard stuff is.

The only ray of hope is that I think Obama knows this, and is trying very hard not to play.