I have been seeing that the writers for The National Review have been, relatively respectfully really, claiming Barack Obama as someone who is “not pulling a Sister Souljah” — the focal point being his reluctance to cut ties with Jeremiah Wright, which was to suggest that Obama is, fretfully for them, an actual straight-ahead Liberal poised to win the White House.

Actually he’s a man who has surrounded himself with a number of corporate hacks, plucking up an economic advisor who loves Wal-Mart here and on from there.  But leaving that aside, the Liberals are now fretting over some political manueverings.  The most “Sister Souljah”est moment in terms of actual parallel with racial politics actually came with Obama speaking about the problems of delinquet black fathers spending all their time playing Play-Station, comments which I close my eye and imagine various white suburban exiles wanting to walk up to Obama and deliver a “Terrorist Fist Bump” for letting them maintain their stereotypes.  His announcements over two of the Supreme Court decisions don’t much bother me, basically because I politically find them tenuable and agreeable.  His weasle with FISA just depresses me.

But we now also see the odd spectacle of Obama coming out in favor of expanding Bush’s “Faith Based Initiative”s, a small program under Clinton, a large program of electioneering with political patronage under Bush.  There are a few ways of looking at this — in this nation you have to burnish your Christian credentials and there’s a segment of the population that thinks Obama is Muslim.  And I suppose it dovetails with Obama’s “Community Organizing” past and thus his vision of America.  Heck — if he doesn’t simply use it as Bush has and just wield it as a Holy Tammany Hall unit, it may have its virtues.  But it also strikes me that you can look at this with polls that show that Obama is poised to win 30 to 40 percent of the Evangelical vote, and news of his electioneering around Christian Rock Concerts.  It is a poll number that makes one fretful, even if it is good news that the Evangelical Youth are looking beyond matters of the Gays and the Abortions to a larager scope, because it leads to a whole new group to pander to.  (Kind of how I was weary when I saw that Obama was close in Indiana — increases the possibilities that Obama would tap Evan Bayh as his vice president, and we don’t want that.)

Yeah!  Bob Kelleher Better Speak!  Damned right!  Brushing aside one of your own like that.

We’ll get right on sending over that $100 for those insightful answer to the request to show what harm gay marriage brings.  I’m sure he’ll agree and get right on that… right?

Damned ye, Robert Richter!  I was plotting to take your gun away, but now I’ll have to take it FROM YOUR COLD DEAD HANDS!  The problem being… you’ll have a gun — probably two or three in each hand– and I won’t.  It’s all so confusing.

Memes I am sick of:

#1: “If Gore had won his home state of Tennesee, Florida would not have mattered.”

Um… So?  I don’t get it.  Why would he need to win Tennesee when he could win Florida?  Let’s say you gave Gore a free thousand votes he could distribute them to any state in the nation.  I guarantee he would throw them to Florida and not to Tennessee.

#2: “If Gore had just won the previously Democratic seat of West Virginia, Florida would not have mattered.”

See #1.  And also see the changing nature of the map.

#3: “Joseph Lieberman was a horrible pick for vice president.”

I don’t like Joseph Lieberman, but electorally he picked up a whole slew of votes in Florida.  Far from being one of the worst vice presidential picks, he was maybe the best pick of any Democratic nominee in winning votes since either Gore or Johnson.  Edwards, meanwhile, proved to be either a nonfactor or a slight drag on the ticket — for whatever reason.

One of the disappointments of the 2004 Kerry loss was that if he had won, he would have done so without a single southern state voting for him — which would have done a number for that Carter — Clinton (and actually all the way back to when Roosevelt picked Truman for his running mate) which was proven useless when Edwards failed to pick up a single southern state.  Mind you, it’d turn out to be a frighteningly tight base with which to govern for re-election – likely dooming Kerry to one term-hood (might have been valuable in the Supreme Court picture), but no tighter than Bush’s victory — likely dooming a Democratic president.

“Grit” is the new “Gravitas”.  It is a word being bandied about by politicos and pundits all at once that was not particularly used before.  I remember in 2000 when everyone started using the word “gravitas” — a description of what George W Bush needed in a vice presidency and then a description of Dick Cheney.  Where did that word come from?  Was it in deep storage until it was plucked out and thrown into our word usage?

Yesterday Hillary Clinton, in that fabled “Unity, New Hampshire” where the two candidates received an equal contrived number of votes, praised Barack Obama for his grit.  This was after Barack Obama, weeks ago, praised Hillary Clinton for her Grit.  As the primary campaign hurdled on and Hillary Clinton won a bunch of late states to “keep her in the race”, pundits made comments about her new-found grit.  It will be interesting to see in November if the winning presidential candidate praises the losing presidential candidate for his grit, and then in January to see if the magnanimous new president in his first presidential speech praises George W Bush for his grit, and also if Bush comments on the new president’s Grit.

I have to say, Gordon Smith — a Republican politician I’ve found not terribly annoying even if his actions show he is clearly a politician– is really starting to annoy me.  The backstory is simply that his re-election campaign has rolled from “These two state Democrats support me… to (noted by the national media)… Barack Obama once said something nice about me… to… I support my Democratic Senate colleague (Ron Wyden)’s Health Care Plan”.  But I guess he’s annoying everyone these days.  So there.

It is interesting to see how a candidate in Gordon Smith’s position handles these matters, where the state’s political climate has simply moved past you.  It is a situation that requires a light touch.  Smith is just too ham-handed, I am afraid.

I find the wikipedia article on the term “Nixonian” very weird.  It has a strong Conservative Republican slant in its focus, stating that the term is primarily used in the way Conservative Republican use it — “akin to Rockefellar Republican, but more of a perjorative” — in advancing bigger regulation and the gummint and the like.  But line up 100 people on the street, making sure the street you are standing at is not across from a Convention Center where a CPAC Conference is occuring — and ask for a definition of “Nixonian” and I am pretty sure the definition will slide into the supposed “Democratic Party used” one of Corruption (not necessarily “Republican Corruption”) and the tangled issues with dirty electioneering.  Looking at the discussion page, the bias appears to be simply a product of having been written by… a Conservative Republican who uses it in that manner.  Mind you, his is a valid definition, but its placement shows that his vision is askew.

Curious to see if “Consevapedia” had anything on the phrase, I see that they don’t.  The most popular pages at Conservapedia, the wiki set up to combat the mighty Liberal biases of Wikipedia, focus on the rightness of Creationism and the theoretical problems of Evolution (note that this is the Daily Featured Article) and the Evils of Homosexual.  The “Atheism” page is entertaining in its list of explanations of why people become such things.  Also of some perplexity is the back and forth on what appears to be a “Silly Season” discussion where Conservapedia users bat around the question: Are Cats Just Useless Dogs?, which elicits the question “Where did that question come from?”

I remember disgracing ourselves somehow or other at a Catholic Church “Confirmation” Retreat.  I mean, as a group — not individually and surely I was not party to it in any significant way.  I don’t remember how, though.  It was such that my assholian History teacher mocked it the following Monday.

What I remember with more clarity was that four of us — whatshisname and “That Guy” and “That Guy”‘s girlfriend and I — walking off in and in some rooms we weren’t particularly supposed to, and Whatshisname and I having to gingerly back away when the other two started making out.  Nothing too notable about it, I suppose, except to suggest that this the Moment of Conception did not happen thereabouts, as she gave birth … 18 months later?  (A long term relationship in teenage terms, I suppose.)

The uproar over the “Pregnancy Pact” in that small Massachusetts village serves as a harbinger of a Moral Panic, and the line we get rippling out of it skews toward “we’re making it too easy for teenage moms” (the Daycare center attached to the school), “Hollywood is glamorizing teenage pregnancy” (Does Juno really do that?), we’ve let the stigma of teenage pregnancy lapse (Bring back good old fashioned shame).  It’s been some years since the rate of teenage rate had been going down, and now the added elements to the equation: Sham of Sex Education and decaying Economic situation.

Whatever the hand-wringing, when it happens you are sort of forced with the physical reality of a teenage mom, somewhere around there a teenage dad (you would hope), and a baby– all of which society is best served navigating to a productive place.  The contradiction hit me while sitting in my Journalism class and listening to my brash fellow student opin on the matter of teenage pregnancy and social mores and the annoyance of the contradiction where a girl gets a “bad reputation” then gets pregnant and everyone coos at the product of that “bad reputation” — a Whiplash, perhaps, a snap readjustment.  So I watched the teacher nod in agreement with these sentiments.  And then, a few days later, I watched this dynamic play out where that recently birthed teenage girl was roaming the halls of school, I suppose a home-coming of sorts, recently born baby in tow.  And she walked in and the teacehr’s reaction was the pleasant “see the baby” you would expect.  I thought this was an interesting experiment, which was to watch the “Brash Opinionated Student”‘s expression.  Stiff upper lip, not terribly veiled contempt, terse greeting, awkward fidgeting until not so much she left but until her Moral Position of not coddling the teen mom from the part of the teacher would end.  I almost wanted to ask to hold the baby, just to make her ever more uncomfortable — but like most things I let that lie.  (Incidentally, why would she have a “bad reputation” — she, and he from what I can tell, were monogamous, right?)

The father was a curious test case, and I suppose one can say at least he’s around.  First there was the odd spectacle of a sort of bonding connection being made between him and a teacher over child rearing.  I learned there that you should not try to calm your crying baby down to sleep by simply driving around as serves as a crux you will have to break eventually as your child becomes addicted to those particular rhythms.  Everything I know about that foreign sphere of Child Rearing I learned by listening to those conversations.

Mostly though the Father was aggrivating — easily sliding into one liners mocking his place as a teenage parent and not adequately ridding himself of his standard adolescent teenage impulsiveness.  He was inappropriately irreverant, going off on an ironic tangeant against “Kids having kids” to a substitute teacher who did not know he was a teenage father.  I suppose he had that luxury of remaining immature apart from his time with the baby, which the mother does not.  The group of teenage mothers in Massachusetts, I presume, now have a crash course on how idiotic and childish the thought of “Raising them together” looks.

Hm… Yes, that Rhode Island middle school — another news item source of Moral Panic — had the right idea in stocking themselves up full of condoms.  And telling everyone to keep their legs together, naturally, contradictory as those messages may be.

There’s an interesting effect where the conservative Republican magazine, National Review, and the liberal Democratic (it should be further to the left, but lately it’s been hewing toward the party) In These Times have covers which could be exchanged, with articles covering the same period of Obama’s career: Chicago “Community Activist” — the In These Times feature narrow cast to his “Get out the Vote” electoral strategies — which makes the National Review cover probably a more apt cover than the one In These Times uses as it shows Obama before his slogan for his registration drive, the National Review Article spanning the period and pooh-poohing the whole enterprise as exercises in liberal ineffectualism.

But reading through some articles in the National Review, I was struck by one sentiment.  A googles search shows it was not the first time expressed, as it was in March on the “Corner” here:

Remember when we were hearing about the need to purge Michael Moore and the MoveOn crowd from the Democratic Party?

I believe the more recent iteration has it in the not passive voice — putting the sentiment on parts of the Democratic party.  It is part of the narrative which shuffles the latest Democratic candidate as the most Liberal Ever, and post election the need to “move center-ward”.  But it is a narrative which, in the case history being woven by the National Review regarding the 2004 election, does not cite the only “Democrats” who came out and made the case.  Peter Beinart of the New Republic, and Al Frum of the Democratic Leadership Council, the first losing readership and the latter losing membership.  And Joseph Lieberman, when he was not trying to figure out how to win the Democratic Party nomination in 2006.  And that’s about it.

None of which is to say these battles wage — what rank and file Democrats will have to come to terms with is the increase in “Blue Dog”s which will greet any Democratic success down-ticket in 2008, some from Blue Dog districts and others unfortunately not (serves as an excuse to Pelosi and Hoyer for things like FISA) — but it is tiresome to see the one partisan side pick at these spots in declaring favorite and unfavorite members of the other partisan side.

Hey!  The man who played “Rufus” in the Bill and Ted movies is…

{tap tap tap}

Okay, you understand that if OJ Simpson were to die, I would chime in here with the “Star from the Naked Gun franchise”.

That being said, George Carlin, of Tommy the Tank Engine fame, has passed away.

Actually strike that.  Carlin did a bit on the “softening of language” and the preponderance of euphemisms, and euphemisms for euphemisms.  (Several, actually).  George Carlin did not pass away; George Carlin died.  And, devout Atheist that he is, that be it.  To honor Carlin, maybe dig up his predictions on what will greet the death of Bob Hope, and pause away gently.

I guess I have a mental list of notables to be bummed at when they die.  Carlin was on the list, and now I am bummed.  I don’t know who is on that list, really (Daniel Pinkwater, I guess), so maybe that list doesn’t exist.  There is also a competing list of notables who I shall  be dancing on the grave.  Fred Phelps, I am looking right at you.

The other list… figures of a “Meh” quality — Tim Russert, Johnny Carson.  I guess, by definition, not worth compiling.

Anyway, George Carlin.  George Carlin.  George Carlin.  I’m bummed to a degree I have not been since the passing away of Johnny Cash, if not even further in time to Richard Nixon.  (Wait…  Was I really depressed with Nixon?)

Regarding Oregon Senator Republican Gordon Smith and his “Democrats for Smith” advertisement touting that he was “one of the first to speak out against the Iraq War”.  I am not sure who would count as “first to speak out”, but I guess that group includes me.  (Shrug).  But maybe I don’t count, I’m not elected to anything and am unelectable besides.

More important for the somewhat soft back pedal to “one of the first Republicans”, and here I will go ahead and gauge Republican elected officials for that honor.  There were seven (give or take one, I think that’s the number and am working off memory) Republican House members who voted against the War Authorization, the biggest name amongst that group Ron Paul.  Now, that may be someone exceptional enough not to count.  Over in the Senate, the one Republican to vote against War Authorization was Lincoln Chafee.  Against, that may be exceptional enough not to count — he has since floated away from the party.  So who does that lead to as a mainline Republican, amongst voters for that authorization?  Chuck Hagel, for one.  Is he exceptional?  Perhaps… he’s a Republican who spoke out and criticized the Iraq War more plausibly before it became a seeming electoral necessity, which is the case with Gordon Smith who wants us to believe that he is… an exceptional Republican because… he made a speech and he’s been endorsed by those two state Democrats.