I don’t follow Major League Baseball, and I am not following the recent Roger Clemens “controversy”. But as my bro, ReWrite, very accurately pointed out to me in an email minutes ago:
every newspaper cover says something like ‘who is the liar’ or ‘who is lying’ … someone should have the balls to write ‘who cares’.
Word!
Filed under Essays
In listening to Hillary’s repetitive rhetoric about her “proven track record”, experience, and day-one readiness, I keep wondering what she is talking about. As I have noted before and ad infinitum, Hillary’s experience/readiness argument fails simply because her campaign stragegy has been failing. Regardless of whether she wins in the end, we have seen her scramble to change her message, voice, and staff.
Does a president who is ready on day one lose her numbers one and two managers before day one? Isn’t choosing your team one of the most important things that a president does? If we practice the way we play, won’t we run a presidency the way we have campaigned for it? If the candidate with all of the solutions has trouble grasping her own message after 35 years of experience, then how will she resolve America’s problems on day one?
The fact of the matter is that Hillary is scrambling and is not ready. With the top politicos in the business on her payroll, you’d think she’d do better than ever-redefining Al Gore. Continue reading
After the popularity of the “Yes We Can” video by will.i.am, now there’s a new John McCain parody video. Then there is always the Onion: Continue reading
Obama has swept the “Potomac Primaries” consisting of my hometowns: Virginina, Maryland and the District of Columbia. Not only did Obama win by large margins in all three jurisdictions, he has also proven that there is no “race card” or ethnocentric voting imperative. The only voters who overwhelmingly sided for Clinton were middle aged women, and there is nothing to indicate that their votes for Hillary was a personal or racial rejection of Obama. They simply preferred Hillary. Everyone else voted for Obama or were equally divided between the two. Continue reading
This weekend I was listening to Bill Clinton defending himself with that self-righteous wagging finger so characteristic of Bill assuming the “self-defense” defense. According to Bill, in relation to his pro-Hillary at-any-cost support, he had done and said nothing wrong. He had said things about Obama that were “factually accurate” whereas others had said things that were “factually inaccurate”.
This was a flashback to Bill and his use of language to exculpate his use of other language. What your meaning of “is is”, not having “sexual relations” with “that woman”, smoking but not inhaling are all sad reminders of how a talented politician can waste so much potential as he tangles himself in his own web of slim.
This got me to questioning the 1990s and what I had once perceived as very good years and, despite Clinton’s holier-than-thou liberal condescension, a relatively successful presidency. But when you really concentrate on those years, I think you’ll find that they were definitely not positive for the Democratic Party (of which I am not a member) and for the U.S. in the mid to long term. Continue reading
I know I now sound like a senile broken record, but the saga continues. Each time I run into the “Hillary experience” or “proven track record” arguments, I get nausea. Hillary’s only track record is in the Senate, and her Senate record is very Bush, very hawkish, and very careful in preparations for a presidential bid. Even if we conceded, for the sake of argument, that she was a co-president from 1992-2000 (and don’t care about the constitutional smell-test), playing behind the scenes president doesn’t count because you’re ass isn’t on the line. But all of the voice-finding, shfits in campaign strategy, misinterpreted statements by Billary, and today changing her campaign manager in mid-game, don’t seem like examples of someone who is “ready for day one” or whose track record is proving reliable.
Meanwhile, Obama’s positive messages and excellent results in Washington, Nebraska and Louisiana highlight that Americans just may be better people than the Clintons have calculated. As so, here is another good New York Times by Frank Rich keeping the Billary contagion in perspective: Continue reading
Now that Grave Error is turning two years old and in the spirit of “We Can Believe”, I have to decide to change Grave Error’s header. I will be rotating the header between three different banners. Continue reading
Filed under Digressions
Yesterday I read a funny piece by a Joel Stein in the L.A. Times explaining how he was actually a little embarrassed by his Obamamania. Sometimes I too watch Obama’s speeches, listen to the crowds chanting “Yes We Can” and think that there is something incredibly innocent and over-the-top about it all. And when I show Obama’s South Carolina speech and explain its importance to my co-workers here in Spain, they just think this confirms their idea of America’s strange cheerleading culture.
But what you have to understand here about Obama’s contagious hope is not that it may be impossible to achieve, but that millions of Americans are coming together with Obama to say that they are fed up with the nation’s politics. And more importantly, they are coming together to say that they want the country to be a better place for all. It is a remarkably powerful message and reflection that our nation is not rotten.
On the other side, I just read this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by Peggy Noonan called, “Can Hillary Lose with Grace” that did a good job of explaining why Hillary is not the person to make this country a better place: Continue reading
I just finished reading Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen about a young man who loses both of his parents in a car accident and joins the circus in the 1930s. Gruen heavily researched the traveling circuses of the time period to create this fast paced, well written and constructed novel. I very much enjoyed it (it was a page turner), but wouldn’t call it a masterpiece. It reminded me a lot of the movies Big Fish and Friend Green Tomatoes and John Irving’s The Cider House Rules. The most powerful aspect of the story was its disturbing portrayal of the helplessness of the aging process. But other than that, I never really understood the whole purpose of telling a story about the circus — other than thinking that it would be a novel (no pun intended) storyline and for some cheap symbolic effect. Continue reading
Filed under Essays, Literature
Make no mistake of it, Spain’s incumbent president, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, probably has the lowest IQ and his cabinet have the lowest combined IQs of any ruling government in Europe. These guys are just dumb, and also naive. They’ve botched almost every foreign policy, economic, and national security decision possible. They have also engaged in activities that have ranged from the utterly incompetent (the AVE bullet train projects) to the offensive (energy company mergers) to the mind-boggling (ETA negotiations). The Ministry of Finance went so far as to blame inflation on the citizens for leaving too big of a tip when ordering coffee (Spaniards never leave more than spare change, by the way), and he told people they should save money by eating rabbit for Christmas dinner. If it weren’t so outright pathetic, it would be laughable.
But never fear, the opposition party, the Partido Popular, led by clueless imbecile Mariano Rajoy and helped by the Spanish Catholic Bishops are making sure that Spain will be ruled for another four years by Zapatero’s PSOE socialist party. Last week, those Catholic Bishops did the democratically responsible thing and actually made a public statement telling Spaniards that as Catholics they were obliged to vote against Zapatero because of his stance on abortion rights and negotiating with terrorists. Last time I checked, Christianity talked about God, not Caesar. It’s more double jeopardy. Bishops should be talking about how we live our lives to stay out of hell, not out of jail.
Then today at lunch while reading the conservative Spanish newspaper El ABC (Marca was already taken), I ran across something incredibly disturbing. Rajoy is proposing legislation to regulate the use of the veil (meaning female Muslims wearing a head garment) in public places and schools. Why? To avoid discrimination against women. Well, this got me going. Spain has the worst income disparity between men and women of any country of Europe. Hey, do you think workplace discrimination in Spain is caused by the 25 Muslim women in the entire country who may wear a cloth on their head?
The ethnocentricism is appalling! Continue reading
Filed under Essays, Living la vida española
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