Not that I'd defend Liz Cheney for one mili-second, but I'd wager a small amount that she was taken by surprise that Mary and her wife Heather responded via Facebook to her maundering on Fox last Sunday.
After all, Mary remained tight-lipped and above the fray for years when her father was Vice President. She could be counted on to maintain silence no matter what was said about her and her lover or about the rocky road to LGBT rights.
Why wouldn't Liz expect the same in her quixotic try for the U.S. Senate? After all, La Liz is in a teensy bit of trouble (she's not doing well in the polls), and a pandering bit of disparaging marriage equality would play well with the base (Quite a loaded word, that!) and would possibly give her a poll bump or two up. Right?
Ooops.
Mama bear growled back this time.
And it's about time she did.
Tuesday, November 19, 2013
The Mary and Liz Show
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Sap, indeed
David Brooks, over at The New York Times, has unloaded on President Obama.
Brooks claims to have been “a sap” for believing just about anything Mr. Obama has said over the past 2 1/2 years because of the specifics in the President’s new plan to cut some taxes and raise some others.
But Mr. Brooks’ sappiness really becomes obvious when, towards the end of his column he writes: “at least Republicans respect Americans enough to tell us what they really think.”
Oh, Dave, Dave, Dave.
If you believe Republicans respect the average American, you’re such a sap.
Trust, but verify.
Sphere: Related ContentMonday, June 13, 2011
Plop, Plop
How annoying it is when writers become so lazy that they debase the language along with their ideas. For instance:
Ross Douthat, discussing the current Weiner foolishness, writes “In the sad case of Representative Anthony Weiner’s virtual adultery, the Internet era’s defining vice has been thrown into sharp relief. It isn’t lust or smut or infidelity, though online life encourages all three. It’s a desperate, adolescent narcissism.”
What is “desperate” about Mr. Weiner’s alleged adolescent narcissism? And just how does Mr. Douthat justify adolescent and narcissism? Has there been a diagnosis? Why can’t adults play without being labeled adolescent? (And what could be more narcissistic than putting your writing out there for the edification of others?)
(Full disclosure: I purchased my first convertible in 1986 at the age of 48. A colleague chuckled at my “attempt to recapture my youth.” Huh? Aren’t adults able to enjoy the pleasure of a top down ride? Who wrote those rules?)
Then there’s the recent epiphany of David Mamet into a right wing devotee of she-who-will-not-be-named, and labels NPR “National Palestinian Radio.”
Stupid, unsupported, yea unsupportable phrases indicate a lazy mind. Do they also indicate lazy editors as well as writers?
I cry bovine droppings on this sloppy writing.
Trust, but verify.
Sphere: Related ContentMonday, May 23, 2011
Pish and Piffle
Sometimes Andrew Sullivan is exasperating.
Take this item in today’s Daily Dish: Bronski’s Beat.
It contains these lines:
It has always seemed chilling to me that gay leftists - when pushed to say what they really believe - want to keep gays in some sort of glorious, oppressed, marginalized position, until the majority agrees with the gay left's view of human nature, and revolutionizes straight society as well. This will never happen (and in my view, shouldn't).
Until then, the gay left focuses on demonizing those gays who argue for those who want to belong to their own families as equals, serve their country or commit to one another for life. In this, in my view, the gay left mirrors the Christianist right: they insist that otherness define the minority, even though most members of that minority are born and grow up in the heart of the American family, in all its variations, and of American culture, in all its permutations. No one should be marginalized for seeking otherness. But we are fighting for it to be a choice, not a fate.
All of that because some guy named Bronski wrote a book.
I don’t know Bronski; I don’t care about Bronski; I wish him well, as I would any stranger.
Sullivan, on the other hand (whom I also don’t know except through his writing) is part of my support system—OK, he doesn’t know that nor would he care much. And I find it galling that he would take the words of one, or two or even a hundred of such writers as Bronski and call him/them “the gay left.”
No one in my cohort of friends and acquaintances fits the description of Sullivan’s “the gay left,” but virtually every one of them is gay and/or a politically left person.
Sullivan trips up on his own style when in the first paragraph he uses “gay leftist.” Usually he reserves the suffix “-ist” for such as the odious Christian extremist (Christianist) or the odious Moslem extremist (Islamist).
By the second para he has forgotten that he’s writing about extremists and has omitted the suffix. Which brings me and my friends and acquaintances into the mix. We don’t belong there.
Significant writing error, that omission.
Do you suppose he’ll apologize, Dear Gentle Reader(s)?
Even when reading Sullivan (he will go over the top on occasion), the admonition applies:
Trust, but verify.
Sphere: Related ContentWednesday, May 18, 2011
Frum-a-dumb-dumb
There isn’t much from David Frum with which I agree; this quote, lifted from Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish, is one.
Writing about the Gingrich-vs-Ryan-Medicare-suggestion kerfuffle, Frum pens:
[T]he American public will not accept this kind of reform and will smash any politician who tries to force it upon them. There are ways to reduce the fiscal burden of Medicare, but telling seniors to buy their own damn healthcare is not going to be one of them. I wish it were somebody other than the Kenyan-anticolonialism-sharia law candidate making that argument, but it’s an important argument from any source.
Of course this proposal of Ryan’s is right wing social engineering. How can anyone not see that?
For once in his strange little life, Gingrich gets it right and has to apologize. Where’s the justice?
And I’m loving it.
Trust, but verify.
Sphere: Related ContentMonday, February 14, 2011
What’s the difference?
What’s the difference between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Knights of Columbus?
Between Opus Dei and the Masons and the Muslim Brotherhood?
Which organization really is a threat to our way of life?
Just askin’.
Sphere: Related ContentThursday, March 13, 2008
Muckroom Follies 3.13.08 Historical Accuracy?
Over at the Muckroom, one William Rusher offers another paean to William F. Buckiley, Jr., and the mid-20th century rise of "conservatism."
That's OK. One expects, Dear Gentle Reader(s), that such would appear upon the occasion of the passing of Buckley and that such will continue for some time. After all, given the current public regard for the conservative movement as exemplified by the Bush administration, they're going to resurrect whatever shining moments they can for as long as they need.
One wonders, though, why they don't include President Lyndon Johnson as a major player in the rise of conservatism. After all, Mr. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which, according to some, gave the conservatives the opportunity to capitalize on the festering social unrest of the day: America was a segregated country when LBJ came to power. It wasn't when he left. From his very first hours in office, he would move to combat it on a broad front. But he also knew not an inch would be won cheaply. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is to many of us a watershed in American history. It was one of the most exhilarating triumphs of the Johnson years. Yet, late on the night of signing the bill, I found the President in a melancholy mood. I asked what was troubling him. "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come," he said. Even as his own popularity soared in that heady year, the President saw the gathering storm of a backlash.
Senator Goldwater's "Southern Strategy" enabled the Republican party to gain a foothold in the South, and the rest is, as they say, history.
Buckley's intellectual foundation making aside, the conservatives of 2008 would not have been so successful without the progressive vision and determination to do the right thing of Lyndon B. Johnson.
Don't, though, expect too many conservative water carriers to acknowledge LBJ's contribution. They're ashamed of what it made them do.
Sphere: Related ContentMonday, March 3, 2008
Bill and Andrew; Babe and Truman
Did Andrew Sullivan miss an idea or two about WF Buckley's attitudes towards gays, and, thus, WFB's basic attitude about Andrew, specifically?
Already, Dear Gentle Reader(s), we have explored a specific instance, available in Andrew's own blog, wherein Buckley dismissed the possibility of equality between a non-gay marriage and a gay marriage--Buckley's position is more general, but the marriage issue is within the "penumbra."
Just a little bit of Googling "William F. Buckley Anti-Semite?" leads to a very interesting web site for CampusProgress.org in which one Tim Fernholz reminds us of the writings of Buckley in which Buckley flirted with anti-semitism ("[Buckley] found that conservative politician Pat Buchanan had said “things about Jews” that were anti-Semitic, but excused it as “[t]he iconoclastic daemon having a night out on the town.”); racism (“The central question… is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes…. National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct…” In other words National Review opposed civil rights legislation. Buckley later characterized that stance regretfully, saying, “I think that the impact of that bill should have been welcomed by us.” [Remember that the Republican Party made good use of racial politics in its rise to prominence in the South.]); and homophobia ([Buckley, in the late 1960s] “the man who in his essays proclaims the normalcy of his affliction [i.e., homosexuality], and in his art the desirability of it, is not to be confused with the man who bears his sorrow quietly. The addict is to be pitied and even respected, not the pusher.”)
Sullivan has been quick to point out that Buckley did manage to change his mind on some important issues "So the most influential conservative of his generation endorsed both the Vietnam and the 2003 Iraq wars, and came to regret doing both." Nowhere, however, does Sullivan indicate that Buckley ever changed his mind about Sullivan's sexual orientation, or his recent marriage in Massachusetts.
Buckley is often described as "patrician." Doubtless he was that; he certainly behaved with the sense of entitlement which inflicts so many who are conscious of their upper class status.
One is mindful of the relationship between the Babe Paley crowd and Truman Capote. As long as he was a metaphorical lap dog, entertaining, and non-threatening, Tru was invited. When he showed the first sign of independence, he was no longer tolerated.
Buckley never gave indication, so far as his current references show, that gays were little more than his own metaphorical lap dogs. He nurtured those whom he found in his company; but then, he never admitted his error about their lives being mere addictions or they, themselves, being pushers.
Surely Sullivan doesn't think his core being makes him an addict, or that his well argued positions on equality for non-gays and gays alike make him a pusher, and Sullivan in no way ever writes about his core "sorrow."
Sullivan is a hero, albeit flawed, to this blog; Sullivan's own hero is far more flawed. Would he could see it.
Trust, Andrew, and mourn, but verify.
Friday, March 23, 2007
Andrew, Politico, Reagan
Yesterday several bloggers jumped the gun with respect to the Edwards campaign and the effect Mrs. Edwards' battle against cancer would have on it.
While most people are crediting (?) Politico with the first erroneous posting, too many were too eager to follow suit and several, among them Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, posted that the campaign would be suspended, just a few minutes before the actual news conference would announce that Edwards would continue his campaign in defiance of the cancer and its ramifications. Politico should have waited a few minutes; Sullivan certainly should have waited, why risk one's integrity on the word of someone else's "scoop" in this day of easily verifiable facts?
Back in the 1960s Mark Lane's Rush to Judgment warned against arriving at a conclusion without proper investigation.
Ronald Reagan in the 1980s warned against accepting too easily Soviet assurances of geo-political detente with "Trust, but verify."
It seems ever 20 years or so we need to be reminded of engaging in precipitous actions without having taken prudent precautions--planning for peace in an invaded country; repeating a "scoop" without double checking the scoop.
While it might be easy to forget Mark Lane's contribution to caution, it is less easy to understand how so many contemporary conservatives forget Mr. Reagan's suggestion. They invoke his memory, reverentially, with frequency.