A perfect weapon. Because, after all, what’s in a name?
My thanks for this video, and for being the first person to encourage me to start a blog, goes to my friend and colleague Bao.
Tag Archives: GOP
Changing The Name Game
Filed under Campaigning, Climate Change, Conspicuous consumption, Elections, Humor, Hypocrisy, Law, Pets, Sandy, Stupidity
It’s A Cookbook!
You probably don’t know this, but at one time I was a terrific cook. And I have the books to prove it. I’ve bought cookbooks wherever I’ve gone — I have them from all over Europe, although following the recipes in another language and using a different measuring system can be a bit of a challenge.
I even have one with recipes from Bill and Hillary Clinton and other political notables. It’s called the Congressional Cookbook, and it came out in the late 1980s. It has recipes from governors, congressmen and senators and their wives. Hillary’s chicken, by the way, is awesome and easy. She is a damn smart lady.
A small sample
These days, I don’t cook as much as I used to. And so my cookbooks are mostly gathering dust instead of flour.
But today I learned that in spite of the fact that I don’t cook so much any more, there will soon be another book I’ll need to add to my collection.
You see, Ann Romney has penned a Cookbook called The Romney Family Table.
Yup, You just can’t get away from Ann. Cover photo courtesy of Politico.com
In it, I’m sure she’ll tell us all how “To Serve the 47 Percent – a la Twilight Zone.” Yum.
Because folks like Ann and Mitt wouldn’t want to eat with the 47 percent, now, would they?
{My thanks to The Last Of The Millenniums who first alerted me to this important news. Well, sort of. I think I’d sleep better not knowing about Ann’s plans for the future, but still.]
Filed under Campaigning, Elections, Family, Humor
Mary Grace
In the summer of 2011, my friend Carol, a nurse, joined a mercy mission to Haiti to treat people still suffering from the January 2010 earthquake. A last minute volunteer, she hadn’t had time to fundraise, but was expected to buy and bring all kinds of medical supplies – bandages, Tylenol, alcohol wipes, rubber gloves. Everything.
To help defray the cost, Carol sent emails to some friends, and we donated to help defray her costs.
A week after she got back, Carol invited me and three women I had never met over for a glass of wine to thank us, celebrate her return and hear about her trip.
One of the women, Mary Grace, rubbed me wrong immediately. The middle-aged bleached blond wore a tight sparkly dress that screamed “I’m still 20!” with gold glitter-encrusted flip flops.
Before we were even introduced, I heard her say,
“Now they’re going after Michelle Bachmann because she has migraines!” I had just the day before posted this blog piece about Michelle’s migraines. Mary Grace and I were clearly not destined to be BFFs.
(Newsweek cover photo)
A minute later, she continued her political commentary:
“I’d push Nancy Pelosi under a truck. I just wish I could keep her clothes …”
“Carol,” I said, looking at the enormous glass of Pinot Grigio she gave me and trying to lighten the mood Mary Grace had struck, “shouldn’t you just pass out the bottles and save hand-washing these glasses?”
Everybody chuckled and we made some small talk. Drinks became dinner; Carol told us all about her trip.
Everybody but me had a few large glasses of wine, I was driving.
“Even after all the attention following the earthquake,” explained Carol, over grilled shrimp salad, “not much has been rebuilt. People still live in tents, with cholera, typhoid, other nasty diseases that poverty and no clean water bring.”
Mary Grace didn’t seem to be at all interested; she kept trying to change the subject. I was getting irritated because we were there, after all, to hear Carol’s story. I certainly was.
Carol described the terrible plight of the Haitians, especially children, and how difficult it is for them. Then Carol said the thing that set Mary Grace — and at least three large glasses of wine — off.
“The most wonderful thing about my trip,” said Carol, “was Sean Penn. He’s my new hero.”
“Ugh!” said Mary Grace with disgust. “No!”
(Thanks, Google)
Carol continued. “Right after the earthquake, he raised millions of dollars to build a hospital. A few months later, though, his money was still in the US. They couldn’t get it to Haiti.”
“Didn’t he have some crap Hollywood movie to make?” slurred Mary Grace. The rest of us rolled our eyes.
“Well,” Carol continued. “Sean managed to get the money, architects and skilled workmen there – he brought them over. They designed a hospital, hired a whole lot of previously unskilled unemployed Haitians, and taught them the skills to build it. They did it! They built the hospital! It’s not done, but I treated patients there!”
Mary Grace rudely burst out “Sean Penn is scum,” she said. “What good’s he ever done? He just trades on his Hollywood connections. Hero, my ass.”
Now I am not a huge Sean Penn fan. But we weren’t talking about that; we were talking about Haiti. We were talking about someone who’d helped over there. We were talking about Carol and her incredible experience. And we were doing it in Carol’s house.
“He’s an alcoholic, drug abuser,” she said, holding up her enormous glass for a fourth refill.
“Drink up,” I said to her to stifled laughter from everybody else at the table.
I couldn’t believe her rudeness. Still, I was thinking I am a guest here, so I clenched my teeth, bit my tongue. But my heart raced and my blood pressure skyrocketed. I didn’t want to offend Carol, but I did want to throttle Mary Grace. Clearly, she didn’t care about offending Carol.
Kelly, one of the other women, said “Ooh, Carol, where did you get that sculpture?” in a transparent effort to change the subject.
But Mary Grace wouldn’t drop it.
“He just trades on his celebrity. Those liberals in Hollywood, they just trade on their names. What does he really do? People like Carol do the real work.”
“Carol did a great job. As a nurse, she has a skill that she can use to help people. It is great.” I said with more reserve than I felt. “But other people have different skills, abilities. If Sean Penn can manage to build a hospital, why are you putting him down? What’s wrong with using what you can to help people?”
“He does nothing good. Sean Penn hasn’t done anything good. Other people do good things.”
“Well,” I said, “you’re a person. What good things have you done lately?”
Without hesitation she told me:
She held up one finger. “I am a nice person. I don’t flip people off in traffic. I am always polite when I drive.”
She had me there. I have been known to raise a finger now and then.
Holding up her middle finger, she went on, “When somebody asks me how they look, I always tell them that they look nice. Even if they don’t.”
The rest of us sat in stunned silence, mouths gaping.
She held up a third finger: “And I was in Chipotle yesterday. Behind me in line were three soldiers. And I said to the cashier ‘their dinner is on me.‘”
For a minute, I expected her to continue. But she didn’t.
“Let me see,” I said, holding out my hands. I held up my right hand, palm up, weighing things: “On the right: Lunch at Chipotle.” I held up my left: “On the left: building a hospital for the poor people of Haiti. Yes, Mary Grace, you’re by far the better person.”
The table was silent. Everybody, including me, was watching Mary Grace to see what she would say.
She said nothing.
“Carol,” I said, rising from the table and fearing I’d just lost a friend, “I think it’s time for me to leave.” I grabbed my purse and headed for the door. Carol was mortified.
“I’m so sorry,” I told her as she walked me out to my car. “I tried to not be rude, but it was your trip and your hero!”
“You know,” Carol said in her lovely British accent, “Mary Grace wasn’t even invited tonight. She’s always crashing along with Kelly and Kate.” She grabbed my arm to make sure I heard the next part. “When I sent that email asking for donations? I got an email back from Mary Grace telling me ‘no’ and saying ‘Charity begins at home.’”
I was relieved that I wasn’t the only one to think Mary Grace a rude bore.
“Mary Grace has been rude to me every time I’ve seen her. She’s not my friend, yet she always just shows up.” she said, laughing. “But until tonight, nobody has ever managed to shut her up.”
Carol told me the next day that Mary Grace was insulting Bono along with Penn when she got back in.
“Apparently,” Mary Grace sneered as Carol sat back down, “your friend just couldn’t take it.”-.
Carol closed her eyes. “Mary Grace, please leave. You’re no longer welcome here.”
* * *
This piece is from my memoir class. I had to recount a memorable argument. I thought I’d post it tonight to celebrate two things:
- Michelle Bachmann’s Retirement!
- My 2nd Blogging Anniversary! Thanks, everybody. It’s been a blast!
This is long but it is taken from just about the view I have from my office!
Filed under Bloggin' Buddies, Humor, Hypocrisy, Stupidity
Now Why Didn’t I Think of That?
It’s kind of late in the game for me. My son is in college. He drives. He Facebooks.
He’s beyond my control.
So I am really upset that I didn’t get this vital piece of parenting advice from Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY-did-you-elect-me) years ago:
“There is no doubt that we need to do more to curb the senseless acts of violence that continue to occur in this country,” Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY), an opponent of the underlining gun bill, said. “One of the things we need are parents, parents to be more careful and more repetitive at telling their kids that it is not right to kill people. It’s not even right to bully them. And it’s definitely not right for them to kill themselves. Until we can get that message across to our kids, I hope that we don’t rely on a few votes by this body to make everybody feel comfortable that all the problem is taken care of.” (Clip courtesy of Daily Kos. They got it from Think Progress.)
Google Image
Now why didn’t I think of that?
Filed under Childhood Traumas, Criminal Activity, Elections, Gun control, Humor, Hypocrisy, Stupidity, Voting
Different Dominos
Last night, I was really tired and wanted to go to bed early. But then I heard the start of a story by Rachel Maddow on Nixon, treason, and five years of needless war. How the Vietnam war was on the verge of settlement at the end of October, 1968, and Richard Nixon scuttled those talks to get himself elected. How he committed treason. How he got away with it and set the precedent for Cheney and Bush to get away with lying about Iraq. How it set the precedence for so many terrible things that have faced our country since 1968.
I wish I was making this up. I wish Richard Nixon had stayed in California. Because the world would be a very different place if there had never been a President Nixon.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/26315908/#51234332
This is incredibly disturbing.
Here’s the transcript (Sorry, it’s rough.)
>> Thank you at home for joining us. we start with some jaw-dropping information about American politics that has been reported out by a British news source. it’s the BBC. they have just aired a new documentary based on oval office tapes, which proves something about the American presidency and modern history that even the most conspiratorial among us would not be able to believe. it’s about the 1968 election. the democratic electorate was split. they were not unified behind their candidate. on the right, southern white democrats who were against civil rights, they were being peeled off to vote for George Wallace, the symbol of proud segregation. also, different problem for the democrats. people hated the Vietnam war. and the president at the time was a democrat, Lyndon B. Johnson. so if you were against the war, as most Americans at that point were — this is the gallop polling on the war — the number of people who thought it was a mistake — if you were against the war as increasingly everybody was, you were so the psyched to vote for LBJ’s successor. so the democrats were losing their appeal in the south because of racism, and they were losing the anti-war vote. the republican candidate tried to take advantage of that split, and was this handsome devil. Nixon in 1968 was running against a democratic party that he knew was split. he was, in response, pledging to get rid of the draft. and he claimed to have a plan to end the war. he argued that if you wanted the war to end, you needed to elect him. you needed to vote the democrats out of office because clearly LBJ and his party, the democrats and the democratic party, Hubert Humphrey had no idea how to end the war. when you needed was total change at the white house. the democrats had to go to Nixon could come in and end Vietnam. but then less than a week before the election, it all went horribly wrong for Richard Nixon, because less than a week before election, on halloween night, 1968, the democratic president, LBJ, went on TV in a surprise nationally televised address. he made a surprise announcement that peace was at hand. the communist side, the Vietnamese side was going to be make concessions at peace talks. the south Vietnamese were going to agree to a deal. peace was at hand. the terms were all set. peace was at hand. in recognition of the fact that peace was about to be declared, the united states would step back right away and stop all military operations in vehement. LBJ said that on Thursday night. the election was going to be Tuesday. turns out the democrats know how to end this war. that was bad news for Richard Nixon, but good news for the country who wanted the war to be over. good news for the people fighting the war. this was good news, right? almost. Thursday night LBJ made that announcement, that peace was about to be agreed to, by all sides in Vietnam.
That was Thursday night. by Saturday morning, never mind, deal was off. peace was not at hand because the south Vietnamese side has decided actually it didn’t want the deal. in fact, they didn’t want to talk about it deal. they pulled out of the peace talks. and so the war was back on. what happened? what happened between Thursday and Saturday? now we know.
>> good morning. how are you, my friend?
>> fine.
>> I’ve got one that’s pretty rough for you. we have found that our friend, the republican nominee, our California friend, has been playing on the outskirts with our enemies and our friends both, he’s been doing it through rather subterranean sources here, and he has been saying to the allies that you’re going to get sold out. you better not give away your liberty just a few hours before i can preserve it for you. Mrs. Chennault is contacting their ambassador. this is not guess work. she’s young and attractive. she’s a pretty good-looking girl. she’s around town, and she is warning them to not get pulled in on this Johnson move.
>> president Lyndon Johnson, 1968, Saturday morning, November 1st, explaining to senator Richard Russell what had gone wrong with this peace deal that everybody thought was going to end the war. LBJ was so sure this was going to end the war that he went on TV Thursday night. the reason peace did not happen, what he was explaining on the phone, is that the republican nominee for president that year, Richard Nixon, had intervened in the peace talks to blow them up. he used an intermediary who was involved in the talks to approach the south Vietnamese Vietnamese side and told them don’t do it. these peace talks in Paris was not going to be a good deal for them. they should not participate. they should just wait until after the election when he, Richard Nixon, would be president and he’d give them a much better deal. Johnson was going to sell them out. he, Richard Nixon, of the one he should deal with. Nixon’s intermediary was caught on tape telling the ambassador, just hang on. we need the war to keep going through the election. it’s outrageous, right? the war could have ended. it was on the verge of ending, except a candidate for office in our country thought that the war ending would help his opponent in the election. he thought he’d have a better chance of getting elected if the war kept going. so instead of getting the war to end, he did what he did. it was astonishing. and president Johnson thought so too.
>> and they oughtn’t to be doing this. i think it would shock America if a principal candidate was playing with a source like this on a matter this important.
>> yeah.
>> president Lyndon Johnson there on the same day as that earlier tape remark be thatter as far as he could tell, this is treason. he says it repeatedly on the tapes. he thinks that is a hanging offense. he thinks that was treason. this was four days before the election that year. having thought that the war was going to be over, now the president finds out the peace deal fell through because a candidate who wanted there not to be peace before the election intervened to make one sidewalk away. now, why didn’t LBJ say anything publicly? this is right before the election. can you imagine how the country would have reacted to that? this is a war the whole country was against. it was going to be over except candidate Nixon intervened to undo the peace deal and keep the war going? can you imagine how angry the American public would have been. but LBJ did not say anything publicly at the time because he thought he couldn’t. the reason he thought he couldn’t is the way he found out what Nixon had done. the FBI illegally wire-tapped the phones of the south Vietnamese ambassador. we couldn’t let anybody know that we were illegally listening into the ambassador’s phone lines so they couldn’t let anybody know what they had heard. so Nixon got away with it. and the October surprise. the Halloween night surprise that the war was ending right before the election, that October surprises ended up getting undone. anybody who was anti-war in the country had no reason to vote for a democrat. the racist right wing voted peeled off the the vote on the other side. and yes, Nixon won. he got by barely. squeaked by on the basis that he was the guy who knew how to end the war, not those dumb democrats. and of course Nixon did not know how to end the war. he didn’t have a plan. and instead of the war ending on Halloween in 1968, the war went on five more years, in which time 15,000 Americans were killed as were untold numbers of Vietnamese. so that happened. that actually happened, and now in 2013, what are we supposed to do with that information? LBJ is dead, Nixon is dead, George Wallace is dead. 15,000 Americans are dead who otherwise would not have been. how does this get made right? it cannot get made right because the people of this decision cannot be brought back from the dead. you also can’t get revenge. you can’t indict Nixon’s ghost. but you can refuse to let him get away with it again. we can make sure it is a way we tell his history and the history of modern politics. you have to include it in the history, both so nobody gets away with it in the long run, but also so we don’t do it again. so we at least don’t dismiss this kind of possibility as some conspiracy theory of nonsense. so we know there is precedent for this particular kind of evil.
Filed under Campaigning, Criminal Activity, Elections, History, Hypocrisy, Law, Politics, Stupidity
FiftyFourandAHalf 