Archive Listing
August 29, 2007 - August 22, 2007
Friday, December 01, 2006
Just in... Pelosi breast
photos... link here.
It's a kind of dancing, isn't it?
TGIF. Yeah, I know it's still Thursday, but it'll be Friday soon enough, and who doesn't want this insipid week to be over?
I'm not going to apologize for not having posted much lately. There was turkey to see to, and stuffing, and gravy, and three kinds of pie. One has to have priorities in this life. Besides, there was this advisory from Michael Kinsley (once a charter member of William F. Buckley's Bum of the Month Club on Firing Line):
So, if you're not an important journalist like, say, Michael Kinsley, there's absolutely no responsibility to weigh in on the hot topics of the day on a regular, or even irregular, basis. It takes a mighty powerful intellect to come up with sage commentary about the incredibly complex doings of our nation and the world. Us pygmies should just leave it alone, and let the experts handle it.
For example, I know I'm just being simple-minded when I look at all the hot news stories of the past week or so and am reminded chiefly of the politically incorrect sport of boxing. Pretty pitiful, huh?
There was the new heavyweight champion of the Congress, Nancy "Dreadnought" Pelosi, immediately putting her title on the line in a bid to make John "The Absc(H)ammer" Murtha House Majority Leader. I should have analyzed it in the subtle terms of chess, or poker, but instead I had this flash of Nancy surprised by a wicked right cross that knocked her to the canvas in the first round. Would she get up? Of course. Champions have to. But she was still wobbly on her feet and survived the first round only by backpedalling as fast as she could, much to the disappointment of cutman Alcee "Impeachy" Hastings.
If I were smarter, I could come up with important predictions about the next few months based on the events of the past week or two, but I'm not. Everywhere I look, all I see is first round sparring, the dull and indeterminate feeling-out process professional fighters employ to take the measure of their opponents. And in boxing, at least, you can't tell that much about how the fight's going to go from the careful bobbing and weaving that generally occurs in the first three minutes. It's a time when even sluggers sometimes act like boxers (Nancy's unexpected knockdown notwithstanding) and jab and feint while they study up on the likeliest opportunities to land a paralyzing left hook later on. After all the pre-fight posturing and polemics of the election campaign, this first round stuff is pretty boring and hardly indicative of what's to come.
Last Sunday, Chris Wallace had three members of the Democratic congressional leadership as his guests -- Charlie "The Taxman" Rangel, John "The Investigator" Dingell, and Barney "Sissyman" FifeFrank. Anyone who'd listened to the blood and thunder these gents offered up during the campaign would have expected them to lay out a legislative agenda along the lines of Rome's post-war policy with Carthage, but they just floated like butterflies and pretended they had no appetite to sting. No, Rangel wasn't going to raise taxes. No, Dingell wasn't going to commence a long march toward impeachment. And, no, Barney wasn't going to lose control and lisp any of the Dems' secret tactics to the opposition. Yawn. There's just no point in commenting on piffle like this.
It's the same with everything else in the wake of the election. George Bush is dancing like a gold-glover, making nice with Nancy and the Baker Commission, landing only a long-distance jab or two from overseas about his commitment to "victory in Iraq," whatever that is these days. The 2008 presidential candidates are dancing -- solipsistic little solos -- to tunes only they can hear about how much the voters are going to love them 23 months from now. Most of them won't last more than a few rounds when the fighting gets underway for real, but they're impressing themselves with their own footwork for the moment. John McCain doesn't know he's a sitting duck for a big right hand. John Kerry doesn't know that the only reason he's still on his feet is because Hillary plans to carry him for a round or two to make sure the fans get their money's worth. Al Gore doesn't know that his so-called charisma is the pure kitsch that may earn big but contemptuous bucks for Rocky VI. Only Bill Frisch was smart enough to throw in the towel before the first punch. There's no point in taking a beating if you never had the spine in the first place.
The mass media are dancing a retro waltz, distracting us all with the brightly repolished Aladdin's lamp called "Realpolitik," which will solve all our foreign policy nightmares by conjuring up an artificial reality in which it's more sensible to believe the lies of our enemies than to fight for what we believe in. I'm old enough to remember that there were a few old sportswriters who thought Sonny Liston would destroy Cassius Clay in their rematch. Most of us knew, though, that all the supposed strengths Liston possessed were irrelevant in the new boxing universe Clay represented. It wasn't the first time the old dogs got it wrong. Max Schmeling knocked out Joe Louis the first time they fought. The Germans thought he could do it again. Here's what happened:
What they will do is laugh. In our faces. As it happens, there's a boxing analogy that's relevant to this situation as well. It's a story about another old dog who'd had his day and was prepared for everything but being laughed at:
Of course, "no mas" is actually a pretty fair summary of the Democrat view of the War on Terror. But there's one important respect in which life is not like boxing. There's no saving by the bell. When you quit in the real real world, that's when your opponents come after you in earnest, convinced they can destroy you utterly because you don't have the courage to defend yourself.
It's still possible the Democrats know this and will lift their gloves again by and by. But there's no way to tell for sure. It's a first round thing. Anyone who tells you he knows what's going to happen later on is lying or delusional. We just have to wait and see. When the dancing stops and the slugging begins in the middle of the ring.
Back to Archive Index
Serendiptity
A new kind of mind-body paradigm for feminists
A NEW DAY. Today's Drudge Report contains two seemingly unrelated stories that I discovered, by accident, to be strangely connected. One has to do with the flap about Lindsay Lohan's letter to the family of Robert Altman. A news story yesterday revealed:
Unfortunately, the letter was riddled with misspellings and grammatical errors, a fact which somehow surprised professional journalists from whom the sorry state of America's public school systems had been nefariously concealed. The article cited an example:
Oddly -- or not so oddly -- the photographers who make a living by crouching beside the cars of female celebrities to shove zoom lenses up their skirts as they exit are morally repelled by the fact that another show biz parasite would recycle their crotch shots without crediting the "lensmen" by name. Enough said about that.
The relevant point here is that thanks to the paparazzi, the internet, and the sartorial habits of the U.S. starlet population, you'd have to be living on another planet (or female) not to know that Lindsay Lohan is still not as famous for her illiteracy as she is for being repeatedly photographed without underwear from distinctly unflattering angles. Yet I've been unable to locate an equally splenetic tirade from her publicist about the nickname "Firecrotch," which has been applied to Ms Lohan as recently as the past week.
Calling her illiterate crosses a line, and calling her Firecrotch doesn't? Is this some twenty-first century perversion of the feminists' obsession with being admired for their beautiful minds rather than their (im)perfect bodies? Or has the attention-getting power of the female body's most intimate locations been smoothly incorporated into the current feminist paradigm: "We can flaunt it, but if men look at it, they're filthy sexist pigs, and thus we prove our superiority and exert our control."
I would have let this go as a transient musing (Lohan seems to have "issues" after all) if it hadn't been for a recent curious development in InstaPunk's site traffic. Two weeks ago, The Headhouse Gang posted an entry on this site about "The New Speaker Broad," which pointed out that among her other firsts, she was the first Speaker of the House to boast "breasts the size of canteloupes." Since then, there has been growing search traffic by internet surfers looking for references to Nancy Peloi's bust. When I clicked on one of these search queries for more information, I found a google list of staggering size, of which the first and most popular link was to a site called Politits. There, it was obvious that the blogger had made a blatant and definitive grab for the Number One spot on this topic. The entry title was:
Several interesting discoveries followed. The blog is the creation of a woman who calls herself D-Cup and whose site photo of herself is this:
So far so good, right? An uninhibited woman who is happy to celebrate her natural endowments along with those of other members of her sex, including Nancy Pelosi. Not so fast. It's more complicated than that. Her bio tells us:
"All things blue." An interesting pun, which contrives to suggest that the blue-state left also owns, by virtue of a color accident, the subject of sex. I'm not making this up. The tone of her Nancy Pelosi entry confirms that she is scornful of those who are googling the Speaker's breasts, and she is particularly scornful if she has reason to suspect they are Republicans:
You see, this entry isn't D-Cup's only one on this particular subject. It's her eighth. You can see the rundown for yourself. Perhaps the strangest one is this, which simultaneously derides men for looking and satirically(?) encourages women to raise money for their favorite politicians by selling photos of themselves:
Despite her obvious quest for traffic, she pauses at one point in her Pelosi blogging to say this:
But it's not over with yet. She posts three more times on the same subject. And we're left with that truly incredible assertion ringing in our ears: "Your breasts really should be your business, and your business alone." Huh? If breasts -- and Pelosi's breasts in particular -- have an explicit meaning in the political context for the reactions they inspire in (evil) Republicans, then they are no longer strictly Pelosi's business.They are a political and philosophical issue. Otherwise, there's no point at all in posting on the subject eight times.
This is where the new mind-body problem comes into play. It's vividly on display in another peculiar D-Cup entry responding to a male commenter who wrote, quite rudely, "You should stick to showing your tits and let those of us who can actually reason do the talking." She had this to say (in part) in her rebutttal:
She proceeds to question the commenter's own sexual endowments and then, startlingly, concludes by posting a carefully faceless photo of herself in the nude, with tiny pictures of Bush and Cheney covering her nipples.
It's hard not to see such weirdness as a kind of bifurcated exhibitionism arising from two divided parts of the self, a mind that desperately wants attention and resents being ignored in favor of secondary sexual characteristics, and a body that desperately wants attention period, regardless of what anyone, including the body's owner, thinks. This war between two fragments of fractured identity (the portmanteau monicker Politits is perfect, isn't it?) has to be acted out in terms of politics, where disrespectful men are symbolized by Republicans, and the blogger's compulsion to reveal her body to all and sundry is disguised as a rational mechanism for, ahem, uncovering the deficiencies of the reactionary male. By such tortuous logic we arrive at a scenario in which it is praiseworthy for women to thrust their private parts into the public eye as a demonstration of female power which confirms their superiority regardless of the reaction. If men humbly worship at their sexual portals, women are triumphant. If men ignore or object to the display, they are impotent hypocrites and women are triumphant. If men eagerly seek out and coarsely salivate over the display, they are inferior idiots with one-track minds and women are triumphant. Hence Lohan's apparent unconcern about her genitals emblazoned in closeup across the internet and her simultaneous outrage about being ridiculed for spelling errors. Likewise, D-Cup's belief that she is intimidating critics by posting nude pictures of herself, which is an incontrovertibly backward proof -- satisfying only to her -- of the equivalent force of her intellect. The man who criticizes her mind or body is, ipso facto, a loser in both mind and body.
But the problem here is not so much with men as with women like D-Cup, in which one half of the self wants to own the cake in perpetuity, and the other wants to eat the cake down to the last crumb. In the chasm between these two poles, they fail to see that if men like to look, they're only able to in the first place because women like to show them. D-Cup wants us to look, needs us to look, enjoys showing it off, and has no integrated identity so long as she ignores or misrepresents these facts about herself. Anonymity may be one reason for her faceless photos, but facelessness is also part of the problem that confronts her in the mirror. Who is she today? The razor-sharp intellect that slices through groundless Republican fear of innocent (if woman-killing) muslims? Or the sexual bombshell who can command absolute attention merely by popping out of her bra?
There is a final proof of the identity schism. She lists her favorite sites besides her own, and they embody the split in perfect detail, including ranting female leftists on the one hand and gossipy, double-entendre laden immersions in fashion, pop culture tartlets, and artsy exhibitionism on the other. (Take a look for yourself at Unmentionables Squad, Go Fug Yourself, Blue Gal.and Feministe. The last is outstanding for this entry, which presumes to put Mark Steyn in his place for daring to put down all those oppressed Euro-Muslims. Sheesh. I'll bet Steyn is quivering in fear of the showdown.)
Yeah, I know. This whole post is an exercise in taking an elephant gun to a flea. But there is a serious fault-line in the feminist worldview of the 21st century, and if women won't look at it, someone else has to. The new icon is the slut-queen who transcends all criticism and automatically displaces 2,000 years of western cultural tradition with semi-conscious paganism. If true, it's a notable development. I think the muslims already know how they would deal with it. And if they get the chance, I'm pretty sure D-Cup would start feeling nostalgic for us evil Republicans.
I could be all wrong, of course. If you think so, take a try at explaining it yourself.
UPDATE. La Malkin is all over Britney for the same wardrobe offense(s) committed by Ms. Lohan. She's also offering advice that I'm pretty sure isn't wanted. You be the judge.
UPDATE 12/07/06. The author of Politits has responded to this entry in a very ladylike way. I applaud the tone of her argument and though I disagree with her on multiple issues -- you can read my comment at her blog -- I withdraw much of my charge about dual identity. In truth, she's as frank as I could hope for. Now, if we can just adjust her political perspective...
UPDATE 4/5/07. Yes, we do finally have what you're looking for. Pictures. You'll find the link here.
A new kind of mind-body paradigm for feminists
A NEW DAY. Today's Drudge Report contains two seemingly unrelated stories that I discovered, by accident, to be strangely connected. One has to do with the flap about Lindsay Lohan's letter to the family of Robert Altman. A news story yesterday revealed:
The 20-year-old actress, who scored a
part in Altman's last movie, A Prairie Home Companion, made the
interesting decision to go public with a condolence letter she wrote to
the Altman family in the wake of his death from cancer last week.
Unfortunately, the letter was riddled with misspellings and grammatical errors, a fact which somehow surprised professional journalists from whom the sorry state of America's public school systems had been nefariously concealed. The article cited an example:
Patt Morrison, a columnist with the Los
Angeles Times, begged to differ, calling the letter "alarmingly
incoherent" and questioning what it was Lohan had learnt at the Long
Island schools that gave her straight As.
For my part, I find Patt Morrison alarmingly ignorant, and I
question where in the hell Patt has been for the past couple of
decades. Howsomever, the starlet has clearly perceived the coverage of
her epistle as a gross public humiliation. A counterattack
was launched
today:
Actress Lindsay Lohan's publicist fired back at the media on Thursday, saying journalists had crossed a line by mocking a heartfelt letter the screen star wrote following director Robert Altman's death last week.
Spokeswoman Leslie Sloane said the note -- which one columnist suggested was composed by Lohan on "one of her legendary party benders" -- was instead dashed off by the distraught 20-year-old actress on a Blackberry, moments after she learned Altman had died.
The phrase "crossed a line" is especially interesting. That's where the second Drudge item comes in. The headline reads 'Hollywood's Most-Hated Web Site' Faces Lawsuit Over Photos.' The story is about a website called Perez Hilton, which among other outrages:...routinely posts the most salacious
celeb shots - like this week's panty-free Britney Spears - without
crediting the photographer or agency. The ripped-off lensmen say the
site, which bills itself as "Hollywood's Most-Hated Web Site" routinely
fails to pay for use of their pics.
Oddly -- or not so oddly -- the photographers who make a living by crouching beside the cars of female celebrities to shove zoom lenses up their skirts as they exit are morally repelled by the fact that another show biz parasite would recycle their crotch shots without crediting the "lensmen" by name. Enough said about that.
The relevant point here is that thanks to the paparazzi, the internet, and the sartorial habits of the U.S. starlet population, you'd have to be living on another planet (or female) not to know that Lindsay Lohan is still not as famous for her illiteracy as she is for being repeatedly photographed without underwear from distinctly unflattering angles. Yet I've been unable to locate an equally splenetic tirade from her publicist about the nickname "Firecrotch," which has been applied to Ms Lohan as recently as the past week.
Calling her illiterate crosses a line, and calling her Firecrotch doesn't? Is this some twenty-first century perversion of the feminists' obsession with being admired for their beautiful minds rather than their (im)perfect bodies? Or has the attention-getting power of the female body's most intimate locations been smoothly incorporated into the current feminist paradigm: "We can flaunt it, but if men look at it, they're filthy sexist pigs, and thus we prove our superiority and exert our control."
I would have let this go as a transient musing (Lohan seems to have "issues" after all) if it hadn't been for a recent curious development in InstaPunk's site traffic. Two weeks ago, The Headhouse Gang posted an entry on this site about "The New Speaker Broad," which pointed out that among her other firsts, she was the first Speaker of the House to boast "breasts the size of canteloupes." Since then, there has been growing search traffic by internet surfers looking for references to Nancy Peloi's bust. When I clicked on one of these search queries for more information, I found a google list of staggering size, of which the first and most popular link was to a site called Politits. There, it was obvious that the blogger had made a blatant and definitive grab for the Number One spot on this topic. The entry title was:
Nancy Pelosi and her Big Rack, Juggs,
Tits, Implants, and Bra Size.
Several interesting discoveries followed. The blog is the creation of a woman who calls herself D-Cup and whose site photo of herself is this:
So far so good, right? An uninhibited woman who is happy to celebrate her natural endowments along with those of other members of her sex, including Nancy Pelosi. Not so fast. It's more complicated than that. Her bio tells us:
A lover of all things blue. If my
mother told me not to, you can bet I did it. Except for vote
Republican. The stories I could tell, and often do. INTERESTS: Sex,
Politics, Justice, Writing.
"All things blue." An interesting pun, which contrives to suggest that the blue-state left also owns, by virtue of a color accident, the subject of sex. I'm not making this up. The tone of her Nancy Pelosi entry confirms that she is scornful of those who are googling the Speaker's breasts, and she is particularly scornful if she has reason to suspect they are Republicans:
They are still at it. And now Donald
Rumsfeld's getting in on the act. I'm still getting lots of hits from
people who have committed Google and Yahoo searches, among other more
obscure searches, on some variance of the word breast and Nancy Pelosi.
I have a question for these people...Do you really think you'll find a picture of the lead Democratic knockers on the internets?
Alert the Fundies - They Still Have Some Work to Do
The searches come from all over the world, but mostly from the "Christian" United States.
Suffering from Short-Timer's Syndrome Donald Rumsfeld Surfs the Internets
Many of the searches are coming from the DC area, but the most interesting one today came from the Pentagon at 1:24p.m. on a Wednesday. This person was looking for "nancy pelosi big rack." Donald - we're on to you...
What Is Wrong with Kansas?
I'm guessing some rightwing radio douchebag had something to say about Madame Speaker's hoots today. I've had a lot of action from Kansas. What gives?
I have a question for these people...Do you really think you'll find a picture of the lead Democratic knockers on the internets?
Alert the Fundies - They Still Have Some Work to Do
The searches come from all over the world, but mostly from the "Christian" United States.
Suffering from Short-Timer's Syndrome Donald Rumsfeld Surfs the Internets
Many of the searches are coming from the DC area, but the most interesting one today came from the Pentagon at 1:24p.m. on a Wednesday. This person was looking for "nancy pelosi big rack." Donald - we're on to you...
What Is Wrong with Kansas?
I'm guessing some rightwing radio douchebag had something to say about Madame Speaker's hoots today. I've had a lot of action from Kansas. What gives?
You see, this entry isn't D-Cup's only one on this particular subject. It's her eighth. You can see the rundown for yourself. Perhaps the strangest one is this, which simultaneously derides men for looking and satirically(?) encourages women to raise money for their favorite politicians by selling photos of themselves:
So, girls, screw oil, screw big pharma,
screw those damn lobbyists....you can do this on your tits alone! Add
photos of your bootie (for the bigger dollars) and your pink parts (for
the really BIG money), toss in some video (for the super-special
billionaire donors) and you've got your warchest (no pun intended).
And the beauty of my plan is that you don't ever have to deliver beyond a peek. You can leave the real prosititution[sic] to the boys in Congress.
And the beauty of my plan is that you don't ever have to deliver beyond a peek. You can leave the real prosititution[sic] to the boys in Congress.
Despite her obvious quest for traffic, she pauses at one point in her Pelosi blogging to say this:
Now I can remove my bra and rest.....
Finally, a note to Ms. Pelosi - your breasts really should be your business, and your business alone. My apologies for, um, taking part in this free-for-all. I look forward to your leadership in the House and am, quite frankly, glad that we're getting this juvenile stuff over with now.
Finally, a note to Ms. Pelosi - your breasts really should be your business, and your business alone. My apologies for, um, taking part in this free-for-all. I look forward to your leadership in the House and am, quite frankly, glad that we're getting this juvenile stuff over with now.
But it's not over with yet. She posts three more times on the same subject. And we're left with that truly incredible assertion ringing in our ears: "Your breasts really should be your business, and your business alone." Huh? If breasts -- and Pelosi's breasts in particular -- have an explicit meaning in the political context for the reactions they inspire in (evil) Republicans, then they are no longer strictly Pelosi's business.They are a political and philosophical issue. Otherwise, there's no point at all in posting on the subject eight times.
This is where the new mind-body problem comes into play. It's vividly on display in another peculiar D-Cup entry responding to a male commenter who wrote, quite rudely, "You should stick to showing your tits and let those of us who can actually reason do the talking." She had this to say (in part) in her rebutttal:
I’m thinking I ought not take much
stock in his opinion.
Nevertheless, it gives me an opportunity to explore the idea that women who think and express their opinions threaten the notion of order for this guy. He’s cut from the same cloth as the old boss who called me DCup. He’s the guy at meetings who spouts his opinions and bristles if everyone else around the table doesn’t concur. He’s the guy who’d prefer that anyone not blessed with a penis stand by quietly until it’s time to f**k [asterisks mine--IP] – oh, yeah…and while you’re over there can you fetch me my…….cook my …….wash my…… raise my....
These guys happily support the Republican Party which has eroded women's rights in the last several years. They’re Republicans because they fear. They fear women, Muslims, blacks, Mexicans, gays. Even though they control the largest amount of wealth, land and power in the world – they fear. It reminds me of a line from M*A*S*H where Margaret Houlihan says to B.J. Hunnicutt, something like “you only fear losing so much because you have the most to lose.”
Nevertheless, it gives me an opportunity to explore the idea that women who think and express their opinions threaten the notion of order for this guy. He’s cut from the same cloth as the old boss who called me DCup. He’s the guy at meetings who spouts his opinions and bristles if everyone else around the table doesn’t concur. He’s the guy who’d prefer that anyone not blessed with a penis stand by quietly until it’s time to f**k [asterisks mine--IP] – oh, yeah…and while you’re over there can you fetch me my…….cook my …….wash my…… raise my....
These guys happily support the Republican Party which has eroded women's rights in the last several years. They’re Republicans because they fear. They fear women, Muslims, blacks, Mexicans, gays. Even though they control the largest amount of wealth, land and power in the world – they fear. It reminds me of a line from M*A*S*H where Margaret Houlihan says to B.J. Hunnicutt, something like “you only fear losing so much because you have the most to lose.”
She proceeds to question the commenter's own sexual endowments and then, startlingly, concludes by posting a carefully faceless photo of herself in the nude, with tiny pictures of Bush and Cheney covering her nipples.
It's hard not to see such weirdness as a kind of bifurcated exhibitionism arising from two divided parts of the self, a mind that desperately wants attention and resents being ignored in favor of secondary sexual characteristics, and a body that desperately wants attention period, regardless of what anyone, including the body's owner, thinks. This war between two fragments of fractured identity (the portmanteau monicker Politits is perfect, isn't it?) has to be acted out in terms of politics, where disrespectful men are symbolized by Republicans, and the blogger's compulsion to reveal her body to all and sundry is disguised as a rational mechanism for, ahem, uncovering the deficiencies of the reactionary male. By such tortuous logic we arrive at a scenario in which it is praiseworthy for women to thrust their private parts into the public eye as a demonstration of female power which confirms their superiority regardless of the reaction. If men humbly worship at their sexual portals, women are triumphant. If men ignore or object to the display, they are impotent hypocrites and women are triumphant. If men eagerly seek out and coarsely salivate over the display, they are inferior idiots with one-track minds and women are triumphant. Hence Lohan's apparent unconcern about her genitals emblazoned in closeup across the internet and her simultaneous outrage about being ridiculed for spelling errors. Likewise, D-Cup's belief that she is intimidating critics by posting nude pictures of herself, which is an incontrovertibly backward proof -- satisfying only to her -- of the equivalent force of her intellect. The man who criticizes her mind or body is, ipso facto, a loser in both mind and body.
But the problem here is not so much with men as with women like D-Cup, in which one half of the self wants to own the cake in perpetuity, and the other wants to eat the cake down to the last crumb. In the chasm between these two poles, they fail to see that if men like to look, they're only able to in the first place because women like to show them. D-Cup wants us to look, needs us to look, enjoys showing it off, and has no integrated identity so long as she ignores or misrepresents these facts about herself. Anonymity may be one reason for her faceless photos, but facelessness is also part of the problem that confronts her in the mirror. Who is she today? The razor-sharp intellect that slices through groundless Republican fear of innocent (if woman-killing) muslims? Or the sexual bombshell who can command absolute attention merely by popping out of her bra?
There is a final proof of the identity schism. She lists her favorite sites besides her own, and they embody the split in perfect detail, including ranting female leftists on the one hand and gossipy, double-entendre laden immersions in fashion, pop culture tartlets, and artsy exhibitionism on the other. (Take a look for yourself at Unmentionables Squad, Go Fug Yourself, Blue Gal.and Feministe. The last is outstanding for this entry, which presumes to put Mark Steyn in his place for daring to put down all those oppressed Euro-Muslims. Sheesh. I'll bet Steyn is quivering in fear of the showdown.)
Yeah, I know. This whole post is an exercise in taking an elephant gun to a flea. But there is a serious fault-line in the feminist worldview of the 21st century, and if women won't look at it, someone else has to. The new icon is the slut-queen who transcends all criticism and automatically displaces 2,000 years of western cultural tradition with semi-conscious paganism. If true, it's a notable development. I think the muslims already know how they would deal with it. And if they get the chance, I'm pretty sure D-Cup would start feeling nostalgic for us evil Republicans.
I could be all wrong, of course. If you think so, take a try at explaining it yourself.
UPDATE. La Malkin is all over Britney for the same wardrobe offense(s) committed by Ms. Lohan. She's also offering advice that I'm pretty sure isn't wanted. You be the judge.
UPDATE 12/07/06. The author of Politits has responded to this entry in a very ladylike way. I applaud the tone of her argument and though I disagree with her on multiple issues -- you can read my comment at her blog -- I withdraw much of my charge about dual identity. In truth, she's as frank as I could hope for. Now, if we can just adjust her political perspective...
UPDATE 4/5/07. Yes, we do finally have what you're looking for. Pictures. You'll find the link here.
posted at
12:07 pm
by
InstaPunk
Thursday, November 30, 2006
The Friday Follies
It's a kind of dancing, isn't it?
TGIF. Yeah, I know it's still Thursday, but it'll be Friday soon enough, and who doesn't want this insipid week to be over?
I'm not going to apologize for not having posted much lately. There was turkey to see to, and stuffing, and gravy, and three kinds of pie. One has to have priorities in this life. Besides, there was this advisory from Michael Kinsley (once a charter member of William F. Buckley's Bum of the Month Club on Firing Line):
Surfing aimlessly, I stumbled upon a
Web page that describes itself as "The definitive site for finding out
'What is Doug Doing?' " Doug himself writes: "So I know what you all
are thinking . . . Doug never updates this!" Doug seems genuinely
apologetic about not keeping us up to date on the minutiae of his life.
For myself, I'm worried sick that the grad course and two music history
courses Doug is taking this semester, which he says are driving him "a
little crazy," may not leave him enough time to keep the page totally
current.
So, if you're not an important journalist like, say, Michael Kinsley, there's absolutely no responsibility to weigh in on the hot topics of the day on a regular, or even irregular, basis. It takes a mighty powerful intellect to come up with sage commentary about the incredibly complex doings of our nation and the world. Us pygmies should just leave it alone, and let the experts handle it.
For example, I know I'm just being simple-minded when I look at all the hot news stories of the past week or so and am reminded chiefly of the politically incorrect sport of boxing. Pretty pitiful, huh?
There was the new heavyweight champion of the Congress, Nancy "Dreadnought" Pelosi, immediately putting her title on the line in a bid to make John "The Absc(H)ammer" Murtha House Majority Leader. I should have analyzed it in the subtle terms of chess, or poker, but instead I had this flash of Nancy surprised by a wicked right cross that knocked her to the canvas in the first round. Would she get up? Of course. Champions have to. But she was still wobbly on her feet and survived the first round only by backpedalling as fast as she could, much to the disappointment of cutman Alcee "Impeachy" Hastings.
If I were smarter, I could come up with important predictions about the next few months based on the events of the past week or two, but I'm not. Everywhere I look, all I see is first round sparring, the dull and indeterminate feeling-out process professional fighters employ to take the measure of their opponents. And in boxing, at least, you can't tell that much about how the fight's going to go from the careful bobbing and weaving that generally occurs in the first three minutes. It's a time when even sluggers sometimes act like boxers (Nancy's unexpected knockdown notwithstanding) and jab and feint while they study up on the likeliest opportunities to land a paralyzing left hook later on. After all the pre-fight posturing and polemics of the election campaign, this first round stuff is pretty boring and hardly indicative of what's to come.
Last Sunday, Chris Wallace had three members of the Democratic congressional leadership as his guests -- Charlie "The Taxman" Rangel, John "The Investigator" Dingell, and Barney "Sissyman" FifeFrank. Anyone who'd listened to the blood and thunder these gents offered up during the campaign would have expected them to lay out a legislative agenda along the lines of Rome's post-war policy with Carthage, but they just floated like butterflies and pretended they had no appetite to sting. No, Rangel wasn't going to raise taxes. No, Dingell wasn't going to commence a long march toward impeachment. And, no, Barney wasn't going to lose control and lisp any of the Dems' secret tactics to the opposition. Yawn. There's just no point in commenting on piffle like this.
It's the same with everything else in the wake of the election. George Bush is dancing like a gold-glover, making nice with Nancy and the Baker Commission, landing only a long-distance jab or two from overseas about his commitment to "victory in Iraq," whatever that is these days. The 2008 presidential candidates are dancing -- solipsistic little solos -- to tunes only they can hear about how much the voters are going to love them 23 months from now. Most of them won't last more than a few rounds when the fighting gets underway for real, but they're impressing themselves with their own footwork for the moment. John McCain doesn't know he's a sitting duck for a big right hand. John Kerry doesn't know that the only reason he's still on his feet is because Hillary plans to carry him for a round or two to make sure the fans get their money's worth. Al Gore doesn't know that his so-called charisma is the pure kitsch that may earn big but contemptuous bucks for Rocky VI. Only Bill Frisch was smart enough to throw in the towel before the first punch. There's no point in taking a beating if you never had the spine in the first place.
The mass media are dancing a retro waltz, distracting us all with the brightly repolished Aladdin's lamp called "Realpolitik," which will solve all our foreign policy nightmares by conjuring up an artificial reality in which it's more sensible to believe the lies of our enemies than to fight for what we believe in. I'm old enough to remember that there were a few old sportswriters who thought Sonny Liston would destroy Cassius Clay in their rematch. Most of us knew, though, that all the supposed strengths Liston possessed were irrelevant in the new boxing universe Clay represented. It wasn't the first time the old dogs got it wrong. Max Schmeling knocked out Joe Louis the first time they fought. The Germans thought he could do it again. Here's what happened:
What
happens when you know what victory is and have the guts to pursue it.
Now the Dems, the MSM, and a great many American citizens have
convinced themselves that a negotiation strategy which had some
successes in a world of two superpowers with much to lose will also
work in a world where the most vicious enemies of the one superpower
have nothing to lose and are (literally) dying to lose it. They tell us
to our faces that they hate us, that they intend the extermination of
the Jews, and that they are prepared to train their children to die
killing us for generations. And we somehow think that they'll change
their tune if we ask for their cooperation and assistance.What they will do is laugh. In our faces. As it happens, there's a boxing analogy that's relevant to this situation as well. It's a story about another old dog who'd had his day and was prepared for everything but being laughed at:
Not
pretty to watch, is it?
Of course, "no mas" is actually a pretty fair summary of the Democrat view of the War on Terror. But there's one important respect in which life is not like boxing. There's no saving by the bell. When you quit in the real real world, that's when your opponents come after you in earnest, convinced they can destroy you utterly because you don't have the courage to defend yourself.
It's still possible the Democrats know this and will lift their gloves again by and by. But there's no way to tell for sure. It's a first round thing. Anyone who tells you he knows what's going to happen later on is lying or delusional. We just have to wait and see. When the dancing stops and the slugging begins in the middle of the ring.
posted at
12:36 pm
by
InstaPunk
