Correspondence: Things of beauty

Another of the 10+ best

By Moristotle

My personal favorite is the geese in the swamp: “10+ Of The Best Photos From 2017 National Geographic Traveler Contest’s Nature Category” [Giedrė, Bored Panda, no date]:

About those dead cats

It's cold and dreary in Mebane. There's even a possibility of snow (our always-reliable and hardly-ever-wrong weather forecasters tell us). What better sort of day for reading Gail Collins, who is even more reliable and right than our weather forecasters? I recommend her op-ed piece, "The Lost Weekend," in today's New York Times. Excerpts:

The Senate is going to be in session all weekend, debating the big health care bill and arguing about which direction the cost-curve is heading. This is a positive development on two counts. It keeps senators off the streets while providing much-needed employment in the chart-making sector of our economy.
    ...
    Is that perfectly clear? Good. Now we will return to our regularly scheduled conversation. Did you see that hot reality show “Hoarders” on A&E the other night? What about that lady who hoarded her dead cats? If “Hoarders” gets superpopular, do you think lots of people will start putting dead cats in their living room just so they can get on TV and be famous? Maybe somebody will try to bring dead cats to a state dinner at the White House! Does the Secret Service have a plan to avert this?
    Sorry. I’ll behave. Back to the health care bill.
    ...
    In fact, G.O.P. senators appear to have amendments aimed at wiping out virtually all the cost-cutting the Democrats have put in the bill, including productivity adjustments and incentives for innovation in health care delivery.
    If they can’t kill the bill completely, Republicans who are not from Maine seem intent on raising its price tag....
    There is no sane explanation for all this other than crass political calculation....
    Now, about those dead cats.

Enjoy today's weather.
    Or, as my friend Fred says:

McCain's not crazy. He's just performing stunts that he thinks will help him get re-elected. Unfortunately, there are no end of people (they're called politicians) who are quite willing to screw up the country as long as they can continue to enjoy the spotlight and perks of public office.

Robin Williams on American politics

If you have nine minutes...

http://politicalirony.com/2008/11/30/robin-williams-on-obamas-election/

The real Bill Ayers

In the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here’s why.

So begins William Ayers’s first public statement about John McCain's attempt to defeat Barack Obama by demonizing him by association with an "unrepentent domestic terrorist." I invite you to read Mr. Ayers’s complete statement, titled "The Real Bill Ayers" and published yesterday in The New York Times.

The comments on Mr. Ayers’s statement are also instructive. Times readers are well-educated, well-informed, and generally very thoughtful.

Fiery writing on the wall

On Thu, Oct 16, 2008 at 5:07 PM, my friend Edwin wrote me:

"Joe the Plumber" says he has no plumbing license.
    Does no one in the McCain camp have a computer? Has no one there ever heard of Google? This company that has two employees, the owner and himself, I doubt has ever made $250,000.
    As I watched the debate I thought of a college that was going broke and all the heads gathered around the table trying to come up with a plan that could save the day. The door opens and the coach runs in shouting about how fired up the team is and how he believes they could get a bowl bid. Two guys get up from the table and give him a high-five while the others look at them like they've lost their minds.
    I miss the 60's. It was more fun watching this stuff on drugs; now it makes me want to cry.
    I see the light at the end; let us hope it's not a train.

I share Edwin's sense of foreboding. Despite the high hilarity afforded us by the crumbling McCain and preposterous Palin (whose pronouncements can be distinguished from those of Tina Fey only because Fey refrains from becoming incendiary), I can't shake off a terrible sense of doom. That McCain could be proud (or claim to be proud) of the Americans who come to his and Palin's rallies and jeer at The Other (the questionably brown man with the suspect names) is not just desperate, it is ominous, like fiery writing on a wall. My local morning newspaper reports that those very people cheered maniacally yesterday afternoon at a Palin rally within fifty miles of where I sit to write this. Oh, America.

McCain's reward

McCain'll go back to the Senate beaten and bruised,
Defeated, derided, disgraced, and defused,
    No longer tall,
    Ignored by all
But Joe Lieberman—still piqued, heart-eating, confused.


_______________
Inspired by Comment #25 on today's article by Jim Rutenberg, "New McCain Ad Slams Obama on Ayers, Economy," in The Caucus, The New York Times Politics Blog. RMC's comment began:

...last memories of McCain will be a dirty, desperate, hate-filled campaign that couldn't argue the issues. What a pathetic way to send off one's legacy.

He will soon be back at the Senate, weakened and beaten and bruised [emphasis mine].

"weakened and beaten and bruised"

After the debate

Within an hour of last night's presidential debate, the following three comments (#8, #9 and #10) were posted on the editorial, "Politics of Attack," in The New York Times. They sort of say it all:

11:16 p.m. McCain visibly became more and more desperate this evening during the debate against a more articulate and poised Obama. McCain stuttered, breathed heavily, and repeated the same phrases over, and over, and over again. The last several weeks have clearly worn him down, and now he's making a last ditch effort. Mr. McCain, you're too old for this.
                    — Emily, Pennsylvania

11:21 p.m. The other night, an audience member shouted to McCain that Obama is a "terrorist." McCain smiled. Then, where Palin was speaking to a different audience, a member shouted "kill him"^* when she mentioned Obama—and she smiled. (MSN videos captured these incidents. [I could not verify this.])

What is going on here??? I am tempted to go get a bumper sticker made, "Restore Decency—Elect Obama."
                    — Darster, Birmingham

11:23 p.m. McCain looked old, stiff, and graceless in the debate. He was condescending, snide, and sarcastic. In contrast, Obama looked vital, strong, graceful and was very, very articulate and eloquent. He certainly went on the offensive but did it without coming across as disrespectful. He of course did not look or behave like the terrorist Palin/McCain have been trying to turn him into. He makes them look like mean-spirited fools with their pathetic character attacks.
                    — AJBF, New York City

_______________
* From the Times editorial:

Ms. Palin, in particular, revels in the attack. Her campaign rallies have become spectacles of anger and insult. "This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America," Ms. Palin has taken to saying.

That line follows passages in Ms. Palin's new stump speech in which she twists Mr. Obama's ill-advised but fleeting and long-past association with William Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground and confessed bomber. By the time she's done, she implies that Mr. Obama is right now a close friend of Mr. Ayers—and sympathetic to the violent overthrow of the government. The Democrat, she says, "sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."

Her demagoguery has elicited some frightening, intolerable responses. A recent Washington Post report [possibly "Unleashed, Palin Makes a Pit Bull Look Tame," by Dana Milbank] said at a rally in Florida this week a man yelled "kill him!" as Ms. Palin delivered that line and others shouted epithets at an African-American member of a TV crew.

Mr. McCain's aides haven't even tried to hide their cynical tactics, saying they were "going negative" in hopes of shifting attention away from the financial crisis—and by implication Mr. McCain's stumbling response.

We certainly expected better from Mr. McCain, who once showed withering contempt for win-at-any-cost politics. He was driven out of the 2000 Republican primaries by this sort of smear, orchestrated by some of the same people who are now running his campaign.

A reverse slam dump?

Last Tuesday, for the sake of continuing political entertainment, I expressed the hope that vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin not be dumped but remain on the ticket through Election Day. Indeed, her stand-up routine Thursday night (i.e., she didn't fall off the stage) allayed my apprehension, and we’ve since been treated to her statement, after reading in the paper that McCain had decided to give up Michigan, that she wants to go there and try to turn the tide, and to her statement, reported this morning, that Obama has palled around with terrorists.

The front page where I read about the alleged palling around also informed me that in Alamance County, North Carolina, 5,203 new voters have registered since last November 1, and Democratic registrations have outnumbered Republican 2,660 to 679. The proximity of the two news items of course made me wonder whether Palin had heard the news from Alamance County and hoped to play Moses here too.

But in this morning’s New York Times, op-ed columnist Frank Rich, in his column, “Pitbull Palin Mauls McCain,” suggests that nevertheless Palin may very well be “dumped”—but not in the way you may be thinking.

After enumerating a number of particulars about “Mr. Past, poor old John McCain,” Rich asks,

So how can a desperate G.O.P. save itself? As McCain continues to fade into incoherence and irrelevance, the last hope is that he’ll come up with some new game-changing stunt to match his initial pick of Palin or his ill-fated campaign “suspension.” Until Thursday night, more than a few Republicans were fantasizing that his final Hail Mary pass would be to ditch Palin so she can “spend more time” with her ever-growing family. But the debate reminded Republicans once again that it’s Palin, not McCain, who is their last hope for victory.

You have to wonder how long it will be before they plead with him to think of his health, get out of the way and pull the ultimate stunt of flipping the ticket. Palin, we can be certain, wouldn’t even blink.

The “wouldn't even blink” was a reference to earlier paragraphs about how Palin had responded to Gwen Ifill’s question how the two vice presidential candidates would govern “if the worst happened” and the president died in office. Without hesitating or even blinking, Palin said “that as a ‘maverick’ she’d go her own way.”

I think she winked, though.