Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy for My Shirt” is to the 1990s what Kelis’s “My Milkshake Brings All The Boys to the Yard” is to the “Oughts”.  Every decade brings itself this basic trope in pop culture.  I am not sure what the equivalent song is for the 1980s — maybe Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax”, but that song is a bit too more overt in its suggestions.

And so with that I exhaust my thoughts on the previous decade’s popular culture debris.

It is interesting to note a contradictory polling result.  Americans believe that this next year will be be better than the last, and they also believe the nation is heading in the wrong direction.  It’s a symptom of rather loosely defined framing, I suppose.

Strikingly, people who otherwise don’t fall for the decade-trope are giddily accepting it, thinking they can mentally cut off “The Decade from Hell”.  It’s a curious enough contruct.  Woe to the Sports Franchise who wins a bunch of Championships, but wins them straddling the end of one decade and the beginning of the next — for the “Team of the Decade” moniker will go to that team that wins multiple championships in the proper ten year span.  The Los Angeles Lakers are the Team of teh Oughts, for they won four champions to the Spurs’ three champions in the years 2000-2009.  But, the Spurs won 4 against the Lakers’ 3 in the years between 1999 and 2008.  Dagnabit, the Spurs suck.

The idiocy of the definitions toward “Centrism”.

Moderates don’t tend to win presidential nominations — see Joe Lieberman or Rudy Giuliani — and, given that Bayh has been seriously considered as a running mateand then passed over twice in the past eight years, it’s hard to see the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee putting him on his or her shortlist.

We have been saved the Evan Bayh Presidency, which seems to be a good thing.  But… what the heck is this “moderates don’t tend to win presidential nominations” business?  Arguably John McCain once staked his reputation as something (medialy, at least).  Then we have George Herbert Walker Bush who won one in 1988, Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, Jimmy Carter in 1976, Richard Nixon in 1960 and 1968, and…

Evan Bayh and Joseph Lieberman just kind of stink.
Then there’s the problem that “Centrism” has no meaning that I’ve been able to decipher.

minus Garfield, William Henry Harrison, and the current occupant of the White House.

Tier 1 — The quote-in-quote “Greats”

1.  George Washington
2.  Thomas Jefferson
3.  John Quincy Adams
4.  Abraham Lincoln
5.  Chester Arthur
6.  Woodrow Wilson
7.  Franklin Roosevelt
8.  Harry Truman
9.  John Kennedy
10. Gerald Ford

Tier 2.  “Good”.

1.  James Monroe
2.  Andrew Jackson
3.  John Tyler
4.  James Polk
5.  Zachary Taylor
6.  Grover Cleveland
7.  Theodore Roosevelt
8.  William Howard Taft
9.  Dwight Eisenhower
10. Bill Clinton

Tier 3.  The “Middlers”

1.  John Adams
2.  James Madison
3.  Martin Van Buren
4.  Ulysses Grant
5.  William McKinley
6.  Warren Harding
7.  Herbert Hoover
8.  Lyndon Johnson
9.  Ronald Reagan
10. George Bush

Tier 4.  The Bad

1.  Millard Fillmore
2.  Franklin Pierce
3.  James Buchanan
4.  Andrew Johnson
5.  Rutherford Hayes
6.  Benjamin Harrison
7.  Calvin Coolidge
8.  Richard Nixon
9.  Jimmy Carter
10. George W Bush

Maybe you’ve seen this Urban Legend in your email box, carrot-packed and with a cc list heavy on right wing list serves.  Or maybe you saw it on a message board.  Oliver North lays out a scary super villian he encountered in his extra-constitutional globe trotting adventures.  An Incredulous Democratic Senator guffows.  And then North gives the name.  “Osamba Bin Laden”.

The first time I saw this was 2004, or maybe 2003.  John Kerry’s name was inserted into the narrative, as per the Presidential contest.  Last week I encountered it again, this time with the name “Al Gore”.  Arguably Kerry at least was on the right Investigative Committee, and for the life of me I can’t countenance why we settled back to Gore  (I suppose it might’ve been a reversion to 2002, Gore still probing a presidential run, and a means to suggest “We got the Right President in!”).  The thing is a dud, comforting the biases of a slice of the electorate who man the keyboards against incoming Democratic Administrations.

The propagators of that urban legend probably are hanging onto the “We did it” proclamation of “al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” — not to be confused with the other al Qaeda franchises such as al Qaeda in Iraq, and the famous al Qaeda in Walla Walla.  The keyboard warriors have rededicated their mission in the wake of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed airplane attack.  I don’t quite know what to make of them — are we supposed to find out what country he comes from, and then bomb Yemen back to the Stone Age?  At any rate, the attack was foiled by the second to last line of defense.  The final line of defense would be the possibility that the chemical reactions concocted would have been a dud — a pointer that everything in the plans has to work to get this to succeed.  But we don’t really want to get that far in the problem.  This next last line of defense is somewhat better, and while still we don’t want to get this far in the screening process — it is here that Janet Napolitano horribly tripped up, there is something there to point to the folly the Islamic Terrorists face.  The success of 9/11 is no longer operable — the plane is not going to be hi-jacked ever again, that tactical plan has been spent away.  So a terrorist receds to the next line of attack — which has for them the unfortunate side effect of being likely snuffed out by half-way observant by standers due to the conspicuous nature of how the plan is implemented.  Understand, the mode of operation for the terrorist right now has them pulling stuff out of their anus and out of their shoes — this cannot help but lead to suspicious behavior, and in this case the by-stander quickly assimilated the oddity of aguy behind a blanket with smoke starting to roil out.

The Richard Jewell or Whatshisname Beemer in us has less personal danger and a larger vantage point to save the day.  I suppose we could name the new guy — but it seems he wants a pay in advance for his story, so he’ll just have to go unmentioned as I have no interest in paying him.

Meanwhile, 25 people were killed by a suicide bomber in Pakistan.  Obama made sure to mention throw in a rhetorical supprot for the Iranian protesters in his big speech (and I think he made sure to sidle past the Bush golfing gaffe).  All showing that, you know, the physical geographic spot of America remains on the periphery of the Islamists’ War.

Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues

In 2004, the magazine for the John Birch Society, The New American, published a review for the Michael Moore movie Fahrenheit 911.  It was positive, thumbs up.  It is interesting to note that the New American is indexed into google news (and not to be confused with a newspaper of the same name that publishes for recent immigrants — which seems an altogether different readership than the Birchers.)

The next time the Birchers pierced their way into enough public consciousness for me to notice, The Nation was pegging them as a source for the “Nafta Superhighway” structure — a highway being built that would take things from Mexico into Canada without stopping in the USA.  “NO!” yelled some usual suspects — by which I mean Alex Jones and the entire state of Oklahoma.

In the 2008 election, a photograph surfaced of Wasilla council woman Sarah Palin sitting at her desk, with a John Birch Society pamphlet.  It is interesting to note that various bloggers and news sources were tied up all over themselves picking the source of this publication, when really a simple call and check over to the John Birch Society would have solved the question of what she had on her desk.  Whatever the Birchers are, you’re not going to be catching cooties from them. All the stranger, as the Society had their heart in Ron Paul — who when asked brushed it off with roughly my “cooties” comment.

I don’t know what it means that CPAC is being sponsored by the John Birch Society.  I gather most people dropped the group from their conciousness round about when Barry Goldwater was being urged to disassociate them from them, before proudly standing foresquare behind Extremism.

But hey.  We were all a bit nuts back then, contemplating some matters.  Time change.

We are approaching some final bouts of the silly season before the Senate passes its … er… Insurance Industry Racket Protection Act…

… Okay, you know what?  I have a bit of a thought process on the acceptance / unacceptance level for that electorate segment that’s supposed to be aligned behind Obama, the Democrats, and this bill.  It goes back to a discussion I’ve seen splitting the difference in definitions of “LIberal” and “Progressive”.  I’ll have to… urm… blog on it.

But that’s beside the point here.  We have a few buffoons that need to be mentioned.  Michael Moore, for one.  Michael Moore “tweeted” out a call for a boycott of the state of Connecticut if the state doesn’t pull together a serious Recall effort for Joseph Lieberman.  I am not that much a fan of blind, undirected political rage.  There is no such thing as a Serious Senate Recall Effort — there are no legal provisions for such a thing.

Rolling into the Senate Filibuster Cloture vote, Tom Coburn — the Junior Insane Senator from Oklahoma (Inhofe is the Senior Insane Senator from Oklahoma) asked for prayers that a Senator might not make it to the vote for cloture.  Naturally, this was speculated not to be so much a general call, but a specific reference to the wheel chair bound 93 year old Senator Robert Byrd.  I am one that does not think Coburn necessarily had Senator Byrd in mind when making his statement.  While it just happens that Byrd is in position to fulfill Coburn’s scenario, I still think Coburn was being a general-directed ahole as opposed to a specific-directed ahole.  But just for the heck of it, I’ll pull all in to the speculation: maybe he was calling for a lone activist to push Senator Byrd’s wheel chair down an icy hill?  That’s the ticket!

Something worth noting, though: my inflamatory and mildly irresponsible speculation about references to lone nuts tossing down Byrd’s wheel-chair would be moot if not for a Republican Whip job that set three Republican Senators ready to stray over to the cloture vote.  I don’t know if these three were the “Moderate” Republicans — and, frankly, I don’t know who the third figure of such a triumvarite would be alongside the two Maine Senators — or if there’s this ideologically but not necessarily partisan conservative with his or her own rules of Senate Decorum.  Something pops up in my mind about this one, though.  If they had come to that spot earlier and more definitely, the ugly pork politics of the so called “Louisiana Purchase” and the “Cornhusker Kick-back” would not have fallen into this bill.  I think it is fair to blame these contortions of Health Care policy on the sheer force of the strategy that holds a firm 40 vote Filibuster block — ergo, a portion of the mildly exasperating items in this bill are the Republicans’ faults, notwithstanding the statement that “The Democrats own it!”

One last curious item, one final buffoon in addition to Michael Moore and Tom Coburn I need to mention.  Ralph Nader threw himself into a bid for relevance with his two cents, lining himslef up somewhat though in supercharged manner behind statements made by Howard Dean.  That’s alright, so far as it goes.  The more disturbing item from Ralph Nader, and it is not his first time in stating this, was making the racial reference to Barack Obama as an “Uncle Tom”.  This is sure to endear himself with someone or other, everyone and anyone — right?