One of the many things John McCain did last night that irritated me was repeatedly invoke the names of Russ Feingold and Joe Lieberman. It felt like a very calculated shout-out (we know how much his ticket likes shout-outs) to Jewish voters, who are turning their backs on him when he needs them the most.
If he wants to pander, that’s fine. What else can he do right now but pander? I’d just like to see him really commit to it, if that’s how he wants to play things. I want to see him take the stage in a yarmulke. I want newsreel footage of him dancing the horah in South Florida — though I don’t know what the occasion would be since he currently has nothing to be happy about.
Most of all, I want him to announce that if he becomes president he will appoint Fyvush Finkel, the beloved Yiddish theater actor and star of TV’s Boston Public, as secretary of the treasury. I mean, you say the name Fyvush Finkel once and it’s like saying Feingold and Lieberman twenty times.
What better way to get your point across? And it might actually sway some of my grandparents’ friends. Oh, sure, they’re all aghast at McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, and it’s true their rabbi belongs to Rabbis for Obama and is outspokenly anti-Palin. But they all loved Finkel on Picket Fences. That has to count for something.
“The fundamental difference between myself and Senata Obama is that I’m completely insane and he isn’t.”
Oh, that John McCain. Saying “my friends” as much as Sarah Palin says “betcha” and “gosh” — and sounding just as insincere. Telling joke after joke that fell flatter than … I don’t know, something that’s really flat. (And how about that terse exchange between Chris Matthews and McCain flack Mike DuHaime on the late edition of Hardball? Matthews clearly wanted to issue a Philly-style beat-down as they went back and forth about McCain’s Tom Brokaw/treasury secretary barb, and I’d guess a fair number of viewers were encouraging him from their couches.) Visibly seething with anger and resentment for 90 minutes as Barack Obama wiped the friggin’ floor with him. He’s really quite the character.
I couldn’t sleep at all last night, just as I couldn’t sleep the night before the vice-presidential debate. (Couldn’t sleep after the vice-presidential debate, either. It took hours for my brain to recover from the trauma of trying to understand Sarah Palin’s answers.) I’m tortured by the thought of having to endure another four years under another Republican president. I don’t know what repulsive stunts the McCain campaign might pull at this point to improve their flagging poll numbers. Part of me thinks they can’t sink much lower than what they’re already doing. Another part of me, the part that has lived around Republicans for 25 years, expects to turn on the news tomorrow to find Sarah Palin delivering a stump speech in Imperial Wizard garb — to rapturous applause and Nazi salutes.
What I do know is that after tonight’s “wipe-out,” as Andrew Sullivan is calling it, I’ll finally get a bit of sleep. Then tomorrow night I’ll start worrying again, if any of you want to join me.
If you fuck with the miniskirt, you fuck with Debbie Harry. If you fuck with Debbie Harry, you fuck with the gays. You do not want to fuck with the gays.
James Nsaba Buturo, the Ugandan Minister of Ethics and Integrity who last month railed against the evils of the miniskirt, told reporters at a Saturday press conference that homosexuality is an “attempt to end civilization.”
Buturo, who is under the mistaken impression that gay people can’t reproduce, said: “Who is going to occupy Uganda 20 years from now if we all become homosexuals?” If I could take a crack at this, I’m pretty sure the answer is — wait for it — homosexuals. Am I right? Do I get a cookie? But Buturo should worry not; the gays are still too busy signing up everyone who wanders into West Hollywood to take a stab at Uganda anytime soon.
Someone finally gets it…
Campbell Brown, the CNN host who destroyed McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds on live TV not too long ago, explains to the New York Timeshow the media lost its way:
“As journalists, and certainly for me over the last few years, we’ve gotten overly obsessed with parity, especially when we’re covering politics. We kept making sure each candidate got equal time — to the point that it got ridiculous in a way.
“So when you have Candidate A saying the sky is blue, and Candidate B saying it’s a cloudy day, I look outside and I see, well, it’s a cloudy day. I should be able to tell my viewers, ‘Candidate A is wrong, Candidate B is right.’ And not have to say, ‘Well, you decide.’ Then it would be like I’m an idiot. And I’d be treating the audience like idiots.”
She’s absolutely right, though I’d change “Then it would be like I’m an idiot” to “That would make me an idiot.” There’s no ‘like’ about it. And I can already hear the Fox News faithful, who won’t settle for anything less than being treated like total idiots, taking umbrage at her analysis and shaking their tiny fists and screaming: It’s not your job to tell us about the sky! You’re not a meteorologist!
Also at the Times:
For all the starburst magic she worked on Rich “Never Going to Live This Down” Lowry, Sarah Palin failed to sexually arouse Gail Collins and Bob Herbert, whose post-debate columns were appropriately somber.
Collins concludes:
This entire election season has been a long-running saga about the rise of women in American politics. On Thursday, it all went sour. The people boosting Palin’s triumph were not celebrating because she demonstrated that she is qualified to be president if something ever happened to John McCain. They were cheering her success in covering up her lack of knowledge about the things she would have to deal with if she wound up running the country.
Herbert writes:
But after Senator Biden suggested that John McCain’s answer to the nation’s energy problems was to “drill, drill, drill,” Ms. Palin promptly pointed out, as if scoring a point, that “the chant is ‘Drill, baby, drill!'”
How’s that for perspective? The credit markets are frozen. Our top general in Afghanistan is dialing 911. Americans are losing jobs by the scores of thousands. And Sarah Palin is making sure we know that the chant is “drill, baby, drill!” not “drill, drill, drill.”
Bob is forgetting that the “baby” is important. It’s what sends things we’d rather not imagine ricocheting through Rich Lowry’s living room. Speaking of which, if you missed Keith Olbermann naming Rich Lowry the “Worst Person in the World” last night, you can watch the segment online. Lowry’s mention starts around the 90 second mark and it’s an instant classic.
Kristin Davis should join her next time…
Cynthia Nixon kicks ass, but you probably already knew that. Addressing a standing-room only crowd as she campaigned for Barack Obama in South Florida last week, Nixon ripped into Amendment 2, a superfluous anti-gay initiative cynically designed to drive homophobes to the polls on November 4. As she points out, that already worked in 2004:
“In Florida… [Republicans] have tried to do again what they did four years ago: they put anti-gay initiatives on the ballot to bring out the homophobes in droves. What happened four years ago was so horrible. It was such a kick in the stomach. We all felt like we were the scapegoat, like we were the target.”
Nixon went on to say:
“It’s going to be really close in Florida. But my hope is that when Barack Obama wins, we’re going to know that those were LGBT votes. And last time they used us as a wedge, but this time we’re going to be the edge.”
You can read more about Amendment 2 at SayNo2.com.
And finally…
I don’t get all the media interest in a supposed rivalry between CNBC anchors Maria “Money Honey” Bartiromo and Erin “Street Sweetie” Burnett. Maybe it’s that I can’t get past their sexist nicknames, which make them sound like wisecracking Joan Blondell characters trying to claw their way to social respectability in an early ’30s comedy. Maybe it’s that I’m not a sexually frustrated hedge fund manager with X-rated dreams of turning on the TV one day to find them in the heat of an erotically charged catfight over tech stocks.
Whatever the case, I found this Vanity Fair article about the two of them interesting because it mentions that Burnett played college field hockey. Have you ever seen a woman on TV and thought to yourself, She definitely played field hockey? It happens to me only rarely, but Burnett was one I felt very strongly knew her way around a stick. Which is one of the many reasons I cringed (and gagged, and cringed some more) when Hardball host Chris Matthews went all lecherous on her last year. Didn’t he see Red Eye? Didn’t it teach him anything?
Colonel Sanders on the importance of the surge… and honey mustard sauce.
“Oh, yeah. It’s so obvious I’m a Washington outsider complete idiot.” That’s what I got out of last night’s debate, which I had to watch with my thumb on the ‘mute’ button because Sarah Palin’s grating voice and cheerful vacuity were hurting both my ears and my brain. Has a politician ever gone on TV and seemed so happy not to know anything?
There was no escaping her intellectual inferiority last night. I tried to do so by reading her answers (which were technically non-answers) via closed captioning instead of listening to them, but all that did was make my eyes cross. The woman is fundamentally incapable of saying anything that makes sense.
Rock Hudson and his lesbian wife, Phyllis, laugh at the stupidity of the public.
On the heels of last week’s New York Times article about gay actors finding work in Hollywood comes this piece by MSNBC contributor Michael Ventre, who declares the “days of Rock Hudson-style facades over” while acknowledging that discrimination remains an issue for entertainers seeking an audience of millions. The latter part we’re in agreement about; when it comes to the former, I don’t know what the heck he’s talking about.
Unquestionably, there has been a shift over the last few years in how closeted Hollywood celebrities conduct themselves in the media. Rather than going through the elaborate charade of cooking up fake heterosexual relationships for public consumption (not that those things don’t still happen as well), more celebrities seem to be adopting the “my private life is off-limits” approach their British counterparts have long taken, an efficient way of avoiding both coming out and being actively closeted.
However, the American way of doing it sometimes seems to miss the point. You’re not preserving your personal integrity when you tell reporters your private life is off-limits and then proceed to spend 20 minutes yakking about your children, all the while failing to mention the fact that you had them with a partner — the same partner who was probably making sure they did their homework while you were off on a press junket pretending to be a single parent. What that ultimately exposes is an astonishing lack of integrity, made only slightly more palatable by the fact that a phony heterosexual love interest wasn’t dragged into the mix.
That more gay celebrities seem resistant to the idea of entering into sham relationships is certainly encouraging, but I question how much of it can be directly attributed to that optimistic, familiar standby that society is evolving. When it comes to the public embracing openly gay entertainers, that evolution can only happen as quickly as famous gay people allow it to. They have to keep coming out if we’re ever going to get anywhere, and when you compare the number of gay Hollywood types to the number of out Hollywood types, it’s clear there is still a great deal of progress to be made. And it’s only natural to wonder how many recent comings-out have been completely organic and how many have been the function of an increasingly invasive, ‘open 24/7 on the Internet’ tabloid media.
Are celebrities rejecting the Rock Hudson facade on their own, or is Perez Hilton rejecting it for them? I think the two are inextricably linked, but I’m also cynical enough to believe that the significant challenge of being a public figure and remaining closeted in the year 2008 has led to more recent outings than any newly unearthed altruistic impulses on the part of gay celebrities. Which leads us to another point of Ventre’s that I have to disagree with:
When gays and lesbians in the entertainment industry come out these days, they’d probably be advised to throw lavish coming-out parties to ensure that attention will be paid. In the year 2008, when tolerance levels appear to be at an all-time high — not ideal by any means, and with lots of room for improvement — such an announcement is often quickly consumed by the 24-hour news cycle, and digested by a more enlightened populace.
How many lavish coming-out parties has Hollywood ever held? More often than not, at least in recent memory, a short statement is released, or a matter-of-fact acknowledgment is made in an interview, and the blogosphere takes it from there. Heather Matarazzo, Sarah Paulson, Cynthia Nixon, T.R. Knight, David Hyde Pierce, Neil Patrick Harris — none of them were looking for a media circus when they came out, and few had the stature to warrant one, though the “Same Sex and the City” headline opportunities presented by the Nixon story were too great for most newspapers to resist.
Clay Aiken bucked the trend last week with his double whammy People cover and Good Morning America appearance, but most celebrity outings remain relatively low-key affairs — and are likely to stay that way when the majority of those electing to come out are faded pop stars or actors who work primarily on stage or in television.
Salon’s David Talbot scared me like Freddy (the world needs a Sugababes reference every now and then) two weeks ago with his article “The Pastor Who Clashed with Palin,” which explained why even 80-year-old retired Baptist ministers think the Governor of Alaska is “Jerry Falwell with a pretty face.”
The article detailed Palin’s interest in book banning (gay books, natch), her work as an anti-choice crusader, and her wacky creationist belief that man and dinosaur walked the earth at the same time in what had to have been an Odd Couple-esque “Dinosaur = Oscar Madison, Humans = Felix Unger” arrangement. Then there was the issue of her reported response to Philip Munger, an Alaskan political acvitist, when asked if she believed in the End of Days. According to Munger, “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime.'” (What about Elvis and Tupac?)
Now comes an article in today’s L.A. Timesthat determines Palin “treads carefully between fundamentalist beliefs and public policy.” It quotes John Stein, who helped her early in her political career, as saying “She’s got a fine-tuned sense of how far to push.”
Allison Mendel, an attorney who sued the state of Alaska seeking mandated health insurance benefits for same-sex partners of state employees, says Palin “has been careful not to squander all her political capital on social conservative issues.” All the Times has to say on the insurance matter was this:
Palin also did not challenge an Alaska Supreme Court ruling that mandated health insurance benefits for same-sex partners. Instead she signed a nonbinding referendum that asked voters their opinion on the issue.
While it’s true she didn’t challenge it, she had a few things to say about it, all pandering to bigoted voters.
The part of the Times article that really got to me, though it may seem trivial to some, goes back to Palin’s comments about dinosaurs. Bill McAllister, her chief spokesman as governor, is asked about it:
McAllister said that he never heard Palin make such remarks about dinosaurs and that Palin preferred not to discuss her views on evolution publicly.
“I’ve never had a conversation like that with her or been apprised of anything like that,” McAllister said. He added that “the only bigotry that’s still safe is against Christians who believe in their faith.”
If ever a statement deserved to be met with a chorus of boos and the throwing of rotten tomatoes, it’s that crap about “the only bigotry that’s still safe” being “against Christians who believe in their faith,” but I wouldn’t expect the anti-gay, anti-choice crowd to understand that.
Just wanted to remind you all, in case you missed it any of the eight thousand times he pointed it out last night: John McCain was never voted Miss Congeniality.
McCain seemed to wear this failure like a badge of honor, not realizing it was both a groaner of a line and a repeated reminder of his appallingly unqualified running mate, who isn’t allowed to take questions from reporters but used to put on a swimsuit for a panel of judges in hopes of winning a tiara.
Truthfully, a Miss Congeniality title could only help his campaign at this point; McCain’s irritability and juvenile unwillingness to even look at Obama during the debate hasn’t played well with voters. Plus, if box office returns are any indication, America loves a bumbling but ultimately competent beauty pageant contestant.
McCain seemed to have the bumbling part down as he informed us of the advanced age of his pen (which appeared to be a Sharpie) and launched into countless meandering anecdotes of dubious relation to the topics he was asked to discuss. What he didn’t do was convince anyone he could foil a terrorist plot as ably — or dare I say as adorably — as Sandra Bullock.*
* Well, I’m assuming she foiled the plot in Miss Congeniality. I’ve only seen about ten minutes of that movie but the fact that a sequel was made indicates everyone survived. Bullock, come to think of it, is no stranger to battling terrorism. There was Dennis Hopper in Speed, Willem Dafoe in Speed 2, cyberterrorists in The Net, the beauty pageant terror plot in Miss Congeniality. And I won’t even get into Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. She’s a one-woman Department of Homeland Security.
If they’re anything like my grandma, they’ve been known to accidentally buy dog food for their cats — and then pass it along to you, sighing, “I don’t know, Pepper wouldn’t touch it, but maybe yours will like it.” That’s crazy, right? It makes you question their mental competency almost as much as the hideous sweaters they give you each holiday season.
The sad fact of the matter is some grandparents aren’t qualified to make important decisions, like who to vote for in the upcoming presidential election, on their own. That’s where we come in, for reasons Silverman helpfully explains in this video.
I’m fortunate in this regard. My grandparents, while insane, are not insane enough to vote for John McCain. But they are Jewish septuagenarians, a group McCain was hoping to frighten into supporting his bid for the presidency by having other right-wing sleazeballs suggest that Obama has some kind of secret, religiously-motivated political agenda that would threaten Jews.
Fearmongering is, as Karl Rove taught us in 2004, an effective way of grabbing votes. But the only candidate capable of terrifying Jews this election season is Sarah Palin, whose church is tied to all kinds of things that most Jewish voters would find alarming. (See: this and this. My grandparents aren’t Internet-savvy, so I’ve been printing these types of stories out for them to distribute to their friends.)
If your grandparents need a swift kick in the ass, take a page from Sarah Silverman’s book and tell them what’s what. If that fails, you could always point out — respectfully, lovingly, and of course with great tact — that odds are they’ll be dead in 10 years and you’ll be around for another 50. Which is why it’s monumentally important they don’t fuck this up for you. And if they let you down, it’s off to Shady Pines.
I’ve watched this clip of Sarah Palin trying to explain her foreign policy experience to Katie Couric twice now, and I’ve read the transcript more times than that, and I still don’t know what the hell she’s saying. All I got out of it is that Sarah Palin can’t form a complete sentence, and that I’ve heard drunken winos — and Tracy Morgan — make more sense than this elected official who somehow ended up the Republican vice presidential candidate.
For example, what’s this business about “our next door neighbors,” which are “foreign countries,” being in Alaska? My elementary school must have had really crappy geography textbooks, because I thought Anchorage and Juneau were in Alaska. I didn’t realize foreign countries were also wedged into the state.
Makes all those stories my grandparents used to tell me about their grandparents fleeing to the U.S. from Imperial Russia to escape anti-Semitism seem kind of meaningless, doesn’t it? Turns out they were in “the state that [Palin is] the executive of” all along. And Canada? Also in Alaska. My sister, a baby dyke who’s obsessed with Tegan and Sara, and Canada by extension, will be disappointed to hear that. She was looking forward to visiting Montreal one day and it might dampen her enthusiasm to learn she’ll really just be going to Fairbanks.
Palin’s comment about Vladimir Putin and how he “rears his head” in Alaska by coming into their airspace is equally fascinating. Hopefully Couric followed it up with questions about whether he does so in a helicopter with Natasha Fatale at his side. If Palin answered yes, that raises all kinds of other questions, like why she hunts moose when we need Bullwinkle to thwart the Russians, and whether she advocates aerial squirrel gunning. If Bullwinkle must die to make burgers for Bristol and Trig, we at least need assurance that Rocky is safe.
After everything that came out this weekend about a certain crazy-eyed, caribou-hunting vice presidential candidate, it would be really easy to ramble on for a few dozen paragraphs about this Sarah Palin character and the repulsive way she has thrown her teenage daughter under the bus in exchange for heightened fame. (Is she not, in a sense, the Michael Lohan of politics?)
In fact, there’s so much to say about Sarah Palin — the corruption scandal; the incalculable sexism of a campaign that thinks female voters who supported Hillary Rodham Clinton would consider voting for an anti-choice, anti-gay politician simply on the basis of her possessing both a uterus and sassy go-go boots; her bizarre decision to spend the critical hours leading up to her son Trig’s birth performing more tasks and traveling more miles than your average Amazing Race contestant — that I’m not sure Blogger has the bandwidth to contain all of it. I’m also not sure my sanity could survive such a task, as I’m a pretty impatient, all-around disagreeable sort to begin with, so I’ll leave the heavy typing to Salon’s Rebecca Traister, who covered all the bases quite nicely yesterday.
And while you’re at Salon, why not stop to take in what Thomas Schaller had to say about Sarah Palin and John McCain’s support of abstinence-only education programs. If you’re too lazy to click, this it it:
What’s galling is this: When the subject is a pregnancy to an unwed, minority teenage mother growing up in some (presumably Democratic) urban area, that pregnancy becomes fodder for lectures from conservatives about bad parenting, the perils of welfare spending and so on. But when the subject is a pregnancy to an unwed, white teenager from some small town in a Republican state, that pregnancy is…a celebration of the wonders of God’s magnificence — and choosing life!
That is a bit curious, isn’t it? I’m just hoping that CNN anchor Campbell Brown, fresh off her “live vivisection” (as Josh Marshall put it) of McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds on the issue of Palin’s foreign policy experience, gets the chance to shock and awe another hapless McCain staffer with a few choice questions about reproductive rights, sex education (the kind that talks about common sense things like birth control instead of the Bible. If Bibles really kept people from having sex, don’t you think hotels would’ve removed them from all of those bedside tables by now?) and how you can make a five-month old baby with Down syndrome a prop in a political campaign while simultaneously telling the media to back off the story of his 17-year-old sister.
To be clear, I agree with Barack Obama’s statement that the children of political candidates should be off-limits. Sarah Palin’s daughter, who didn’t choose to become a public figure, doesn’t need to be criticized by the world for having sex and getting pregnant. Her body is her business. But my body is also my business, which is something anti-choice politicians like John McCain and Sarah Palin don’t seem to understand. That’s what the media needs to be focusing on right now, not how many expletives Palin’s future son-in-law uses on his MySpace page.
