Category Archives: politix

Welcome to the Team, Condi!

Everyone’s letting the masks slip these days! Is it the August heat? First Paris Hilton reveals that she’s actually shrewd and funny. Then Morgan Freeman decides to stop pretending his marriage is working (he and his wife have been secretly separated since December!). Now Condoleeza Rice has admitted she’s an Obamaniac:

“Look, I’m a Republican, all right? Senator McCain is a fine patriot and he would be a great president. But there’s something to be said for fresh blood.” … Rice was also asked “Would you feel safe with a President Obama?” to which she responded, “Oh, the United States will be fine.”

Check out that future tense! Very sly.

I’m going to try to move away from thinking about politics and polls all the time, the ridiculousness of which this New Yorker piece captures nicely. If only there were more distractions. At work, we’re grinding through the last month before we go live — exciting but stressful — and mourning the sudden loss of our CTO. The office feels a bit like a bachelor pad these days, lacking necessities like toiletries and water (not to mention an HR department and an Office Manager) but boasting a big-ass flatscreen TV and an X-Box to go with it.

When I told a friend about the X-Box, she replied, impressed, “Are you guys like Google now?” The answer is, Absolutely, if the employees at Google have to fish used paper towels out of the trash can to wipe their hands.

Largely, the boys in the office are thrilled to get to play Rock Band and Avatars Play Soccer and Shoot That! And That Too! Get Him!. But I’m past the point in my life where I can enjoy watching other people work a controller. At least you can use the X-Box to play DVDs. Chipper McCheerful and I are staying after work to watch Season 3, Disc 3 of The Wire.

Top Five Things Wrong with McCain’s Newest Ad

#5) Britney Spears <3s President Bush. Remember this, from 2003?:

CARLSON: You’re going to be on the National Mall [in Washington, D.C.] soon performing for Pepsi and the NFL and also to support our troops. A lot of entertainers have come out against the war in Iraq. Have you?

SPEARS: Honestly, I think we should just trust our president in every decision he makes and should just support that, you know, and be faithful in what happens.

CARLSON: Do you trust this president?

SPEARS: Yes, I do.

This interview also includes the following unrelated, hilarious exchange:

CARLSON: You worked with Pepsi for a long time. Candidly between you and me, how much Pepsi do you think [you drink] on an average day?

SPEARS: I really do like Pepsi.

CARLSON: Really?

SPEARS: I really do.

CARLSON: What’s your favorite kind?

SPEARS: My favorite kind of Pepsi? Pepsi’s Pepsi.

CARLSON: You don’t drink Diet Pepsi.

SPEARS: No, just regular Pepsi.

Britney is my idol. Okay, back to the list!

#4) The Hiltons <3 McCain, or <3ed, anyway, to the tune of $4,600, the maximum allowable donation to his campaign. Now, not so much.

#3) McCain <3s 25-year-old blond heiresses. His own wife was one when he met her. #2) The world <3s Obama -- why isn't that a good thing? #1) The GOP <3s celebrities.

This shit makes me tired. Worse is the most recent deflating Gallup poll, which puts Obama only one point ahead. In one corner, you have a young, dynamic, intelligent, good-looking, thoughtful, church-going family man. In the other, you have the technologically illiterate Grampy LaGrumps who traded in his first wife for a far younger lady, one who came with a well-connected political father and no embarrassing personal disfigurements. And voters are painfully divided?

Well, as I do every four years around this time, I will try to keep from sliding into cynicism about the American people.

Obama shrugs off New Yorker cover

“It’s a cartoon. … I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it.”

While everyone else chokes on the foam coming out of their own mouths, Obama manages to convey that he’s not angry about being satirized and that he understood the magazine’s intent; THEN, he apologizes to Muslims. I will go into a happiness coma if a man this calm and intelligent gets to sit in the Oval Office.

Speaking of elections & cartoons, this Kansan gets my vote, and he’d get my $8.34 too if I could use PayPal (can’t. complicated.).

{found @ Gawker}

Summer in the city!


All of a sudden I totally can’t stop with the pictures. I got this from a very entertaining, globe-trotting LJ friend (not to be mistaken for a person I know in real life) and I feel that it’s sort of appropriate, given the weather. The tagline at the top, in case you can’t read it, says, “A tedious adventure-romance!”

Chase me down with poison-tipped spears if you must, but I have to admit I don’t mind heat. Of course, this a little extreme, especially for early June. Luckily our apartment is a bit of a cave and has remained cool for the most part. We haven’t had to turn on our A/C yet and we even managed to cook last night. Come visit! We have a hose we can spray you with in the backyard!

We packed our bathing suits when we down to Swarthmore this past weekend for Mr. Ben’s five year reunion, thinking we could sneak down to the Crum. There was no time but I’m definitely putting it on the agenda for next year, when I am the star and Mr. Ben is the spouse. There were no non-Swarthmore spouses at his reunion, it should be said. Marrying a non-Swattie five years out is, apparently, as unthinkable as working for profit. Every conversation I had with someone led to them telling me about their good works or their Ph.D. program. “And what’s *your* thesis about?” I asked, over and over again, batting my eyelashes like Scarlet O’Hara.

At breakfast on Sunday, I had the surreal experience of bonding over Henry Fielding with a boy I last saw dirty dancing on-stage with a friend of mine at Sager, Swarthmore’s annual sextravanagza (“boys wear a dress, girls wear less!”). In fact I have a great picture of him pretending to bite her face. He’s now doing a doctorate in British literature at UVA. Naturally.

On the subject of bad boy behavior, please do yourself a favor and read this amazing article about how McCain ditched his first wife after she was in a disfiguring car accident. Of course, we can’t turn on our backs on every politician who commits a sexual indiscretion; we understand that tremendous, unfeeling egotists must screw around, trade up, be cruel, and generally make themselves feel sexy and powerful at the expense of their wives. So, as a society, we seem to set the bar pretty low: no transporting multiple hookers across state lines and no sex with children.

All the same, McCain’s story takes my breath away. I mean, you know it’s bad when people are willing to go on the record:

Ted Sampley, who fought with US Special Forces in Vietnam and is now a leading campaigner for veterans’ rights, said: ‘I have been following John McCain’s career for nearly 20 years. I know him personally. There is something wrong with this guy and let me tell you what it is – deceit.

‘When he came home and saw that Carol was not the beauty he left behind, he started running around on her almost right away. Everybody around him knew it. ‘Eventually he met Cindy and she was young and beautiful and very wealthy. At that point McCain just dumped Carol for something he thought was better.

‘This is a guy who makes such a big deal about his character. He has no character. He is a fake. If there was any character in that first marriage, it all belonged to Carol.’

Even Ross Perot joins the beat down!

Ross Perot, who paid her medical bills all those years ago, now believes that both Carol McCain and the American people have been taken in by a man who is unusually slick and cruel – even by the standards of modern politics.

‘McCain is the classic opportunist. He’s always reaching for attention and glory,’ he said. ‘After he came home, Carol walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona. And the rest is history.’

When a self-centered Texas billionaire calls you out, you know you’re in trouble.

Ready, Set, O!


The primary season is blessedly, finally over. Slate’s Hillary Death Watch moved her chances down to a red zero. And as to speculation that she should/could be put on the ticket — an idea on par with inviting the Macbeths to come along on your summer vacation — Beam had this to say:

Clinton’s handling of the past two days has all but closed off the possibility of an Obama-Clinton ticket. And that’s just one of the 78 reasons Clinton won’t be veep. Obama could never run as anti-Washington yet pick the personification thereof as his second. Clinton would never be able to cede the spotlight, as VPs must. And Bill’s presidential library would pose its own set of headaches, the Wall Street Journal reports today. If there were a Hillary Veepwatch, it would be hovering around 0 percent, too.

Please let it be true.

Meanwhile, isn’t our new President-to-be handsome? Wasn’t that fist bump great? And don’t you think he should be outfitted in a mandatory bulletproof vest for the next five months?

Bring it home, B.O.

Asheville <3's Obama, according to this short graphic series from the NYT, and western North Carolina is less sure of him (one character in the strip shouts from the sidelines, “He’s a Muslim!”). This jives with what I saw when I was there: Obama signs all over! Interestingly, where there weren’t Obama signs, there weren’t McCain signs either, even in the wealthy, white Atlanta areas.

Obama seems to be moving with more purpose these days (cutting off the batshit crazy Jeremiah Wright, for one thing). Hopefully it will be enough. I can’t handle this race much longer. I can’t lose any more respect for the Clintons or Americans in general; it will be bad for my liver.

Disturbia: Women Who Make Us All Look Bad edition

It’s been a week for disquieting news from the womb-bearers. First, there’s this new book by a plastic surgeon to help small children understand why their mommies are voluntarily going under the knife. There’s no explanation given except the mother’s dream of looking like a pageant winner.

To start with, the mother looks fine; by the end, post-procedures, she looks like a more exaggerated cartoonish version of herself, in hot pink no less. The once-skeptical daughter looks thrilled. Thanks, newly high femme Mom, for perpetuating irritating stereotypes! (Via Newsweek)

Next up, the abortion art installation from Yale, created by a student who inseminated herself and then induced miscarriages.

She speaks, yet she says nothing: “I believe strongly that art should be a medium for politics and ideologies, not just a commodity,” Shvarts said. “I think that I’m creating a project that lives up to the standard of what art is supposed to be.”

Uh huh. Well, does the project speak for itself?

The display of Schvarts’ project will feature a large cube suspended from the ceiling of a room in the gallery of Green Hall. Schvarts will wrap hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting around this cube; lined between layers of the sheeting will be the blood from Schvarts’ self-induced miscarriages mixed with Vaseline in order to prevent the blood from drying and to extend the blood throughout the plastic sheeting.

Schvarts will then project recorded videos onto the four sides of the cube. These videos, captured on a VHS camcorder, will show her experiencing miscarriages in her bathrooom tub, she said. Similar videos will be projected onto the walls of the room.

I think her uterine lining must be smarter than she is. This is why I kind of hate art. It gives people cover to be snotty & self-absorbed.

I have only divided outrage left for the Georgia belle who was scared to be Michelle Obama’s roommate at Princeton. She and her mom are still semi-racist but reflect ruefully on their fears at the time. Michelle Obama turned out to be the stately, witty, graceful woman we all know, but she and the Southern GOP-member-to-be never exactly bonded. Perhaps out of guilt, the belle and her mother (who still doesn’t believe in intermarriage) are considering voting for the big O. How many such sins do you supposed will be atoned for at the ballot box this year?

the art of sitting still

Goddammandblastit, I’m gonna go crazy at some point from the waiting. Brooklyn College did a round of notification by phone in late February during which I was *not* called; they have emitted not a peep since. I know because, so help me, I’ve started reading the frequently and frantically updated 2008 Admissions Blogs.

I am trying to remind myself of the following details, all of which are only Lightly to Moderately True:
– I don’t care whether or not I get in (light)
– Whether or not I get in I am a worthwhile person (moderate)
– I can still be a writer without an MFA (moderate)
– An MFA program can’t teach you persistence and dedication, which are the fundamental building blocks for an actual writing career (moderate)

What is very true is that I cared a lot less, and was a lot less nervous, before I did some rudimentary wandering around the internet two weeks ago and discovered the actual acceptance rate. Friends, why did I do this to myself, apply to only one really good really selective program with no back-up plan to help soothe the savage ego-beast?

It’s enough to make a person consider finding peace in a $5,000, life-ruining embrace. (Mr. Spitzer, I vomit on you from a distance. You have THREE DAUGHTERS, you arrogant, irritating, disappointing, testosterone-driven douchebag. I hope your relevant sexual organs shrivel up like old carrots, not that I wish you any harm.)

I am also worried for friends who are hearing from other programs. Oh, March, what a blustery and frustrating month you are.

musical interlude II

To cleanse your palette of that vulgarity, here’s some straight up inspiration.

This is why my heart trills for the man, and this is why my father dismisses him. He, my mother, and my uncle, all of them Clintonians, mocked me all weekend for being a naif. Obama, my father said, memorably, is the candidate of Unitarians, vegetarians, and college professors. He’s a Hope-peddler! Maybe he’s right. Still, how can you resist the call?

haduuuuuuuKEN!

Politics is a hilarious sport, as subtle and intricate as a game of Street Fighter II, and this article nicely captures the reasons why. Don’t bother reading it though. I’ll give you the Be Kind, Rewind-esque summary:

MCCAIN: [fearmongering half-truth and distortion about Romney]
ROMNEY: [inarticulate shriek of rage, followed by:] You say you’re sorry!
MCCAIN: I will not say I’m sorry! YOU say you’re sorry — to the TROOPS!
ROMNEY: [whimper of defeat]
RANDOM ADOLESCENT OBSERVER: Ooh, snap!

Meanwhile, Obama has whomped Hillary in South Carolina by a 2:1 margin. Go team! But of course that doesn’t silence the critics who are still whispering that America isn’t ready for a black president. Dude, how dumb are you? That’s not the question. Of course American isn’t ready for a black president — in the abstract. But people are always ready and willing to crown an individual an Exception.

Margaret Thatcher and Golda Meir were both wonderful examples of this phenomenon. I doubt whether either country, if polled, would have said it was ready for a female leader; certainly they haven’t elected one since. But the right person at the right time can make at least the majority of the voters, in societies that remain racist, sexist, and generally closed-minded, look past those traits.

It’s a bit like going gay for just one person. I feel like the country can go gay for Obama, if you follow my logic. It’s not exactly Dr. King’s dream fulfilled or anything, but it’s a start.