Howard Wolfson writes…

OH wait, hold on. Are we sure? I could have sworn… Sorry, ok, what I obviously meant to say was — “Randall K. Jewell of Springboro, Ohio”? That’s not a very good name. Don’t you think? Maybe it’s just me.

So the letters page in todays Times is kind of funny. The first three or four letters tell the editorial board how and why the editorial board sucks — which was to be expected, as they no doubt received a truckload of letters to that effect. It might be the EB’s way of letting the world know how they feel about the really lame HRC endorsement they were assigned to write — or it might not be that at all, but surely it’s revealing in some way that the anti letters they chose to print are on the whole very very good. The first one, from Dayton, Ohio, starts out thus:

“You endorsed the wrong candidate.”

We have to wait until letter #5, but someone does appear to like the endorsement almost as much as he likes Senator Clinton — which is to say, a lot! Sort of! Actually, I don’t know what to think of this. At first I thought: they’ve picked a really embarrassingly bad — and near the end, vaguely pathological — pro-HRC letter. Why, I wondered, did they do this? Surely there was an intelligent and earnest argument to be found, someplace, that might represent the pro-HRC side, but then I remembered that I have yet to see or hear such an argument, anywhere, by anyone. It can’t be written, because it doesn’t exist yet. So, this then. (Can we deal with this “she’s a mom” crap? What does it mean? To me it just sounds low-class.)

To the Editor:

Thank you for spelling it out with such crystalline clarity. I’m a liberal Democrat, surrounded by similar others who’ve been enthusiastic about Senator Barack Obama. I’ve said repeatedly that he’s not ready to be president and leader of the free world. Probably in 10 years, but not now.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is tough, strong, smart and a mom. She’s been called just about everything, but over time, who a person really is, inside, becomes transparent, no matter what she says or is said about her.

[...]

Randall K. Jewell
Springboro, Ohio, Jan. 25, 2008

The thing in bold — it’s not a “sentence,” so let’s not call it that. But is this person trying to say that the advantage we have with Hillary is that… we’ve been exposed to her for a very, very long time already, and… that many lies have been told about her, but not to worry, Fraudbot is so “tranparent” by now… that… we can sort out the truth… ourselves? or something, “no matter what she says [...] about her[self].”

I’m going to bed.

-max mason

Nevada, Hispanics & Women: Problem? [UPDATE: No. Or maybe.]

Update: Internets swimming with tales of HRC dirty tricks, thuggery, voter-intimidation, more. Start here, here, here etc.

I’ve never been to Nevada, but I’ve met people from Nevada, and I’ve known for years that I (and everyone else) have been pronouncing it “wrong” — why they think anyone cares, I cannot fathom. Did you know that Nevada has the highest suicide rate in U.S. America? Maybe I’ll find a link for this… but it’s true. Why wouldn’t it? It might be just the legalized gambling, but New Jersey always has the lowest suicide rate, so I doubt it.

So, why do she-voters and Mexicans have such deplorable taste in presidential candidates? I don’t know, but if you study the suffragette movement (which I doubt would be much fun, so, don’t) — well, some people actually have, and it’s not pretty. (Pun?)

The other day on DemocracyNow!, Amy Goodman had as her guest a professor of something or other at either Princeton or Chicago, or possibly both (ah, good — we have a name and a website) whatever, she was very good, and she spent half an hour ripping Gloria Steinem a new one, going through that column and explaining line-by-line how Mrs. Steinem is a moron who knows bugger-all about history while apparently assuming there’s nothing patronizing or degrading about employing her very own Hypothetical Black Woman to set up her piece-of-shit NY Times op-ed piece. (I paraphrase, but that was the thrust.)

Then Amy brought Mrs. Steinem on the line for the second half, and if she said anything memorable, I don’t remember it. But by then the lady professor had already given a very useful lecture about how women got the Vote in U.S. America, and some of the details are fascinating. For example, nearly all the major figures in the Movement — like that unsuccessful dollar-coin woman — were actively, even stridently anti-black — not so much in a segregationist sense, but more in a ‘pro-lynching’ sense (maybe I should footnote this later) — and one of them — Alice B. something — liked to go around calling Frederick Douglass “Sambo.”

And one (me) (I) gets (get?) the impression that the more recent feminist Movements have been no different in the way they define and understand the term “women” to mean “white women” exclusively. And it’s hardly controversial or original to observe that white feminists hate black men in a way that’s much more total and much less ambivalent than their general anti-male petulance. As for black women, Steinem likes hers to remain imaginary, and in that she seems to typify her Movement.

AH! That’s right, I was going to tie this in with… ugh, is it worth it? First, I think “immigration” is a bullshit issue, and if reports of a McCain victory in South Carolina are true, then that sort of validates my intuition about that fake emergency. Anyway, where was I? My point is that I’m not a right-wing exterminationist, and I can’t think of anything more unAmerican than going around demanding people’s Papers. Really, fuck that.

Now, at the risk of generalizing about several tens of millions of persons, let’s note that it has been noted elsewhere that Hispanics are much more hostile to black Americans than white Americans tend to be.

I think there’s a basic American sense of fair play — the get-in-line and wait your turn ethos — that too many immigrants seem not to subscribe to. When an American is in a new neighborhood, or out of town, or whatever, we tend to defer to the locals if the locals have been locals for a long enough time — we might think that someone’s neighborhood is a dump, or someone’s State is retarded, but as long as our opinion is an outsider’s opinion, it’s not going to get validated by anyone.

This is something that, it seems, a lot of newer arrivals DO NOT GET even remotely. Suppose you just arrived in U.S. America last week, and you live across the street from some black people who’ve lived in the same house for 90 years but whose lawn-care habits you find deplorable. What, if anything, do you do? Your answer, far too often, will depend on whether you’re a Mexican bigot or not.

So, the Nevada Democratic caucus. What happened: (1) Women Voters who’re so liberated that they still think of themselves only as Women Voters (?) joined forces with (2) some other people (I wasn’t there) to give 50 per cent of the vote to someone who has made a career out of being someone’s loudmouth wife. Now what?

When people vote for the Clintons, what exactly are they picturing? What do they have in mind? What are all these wonderful Clintonian 1990s “ideas” W.C. is so angrily defending? I mean, eight more years of what? I’m an American, my television has a V-chip, and I don’t have health insurance. I should be in their ads, but I’m not. What are they selling?

Another problem

This has been going on for well over a year, but there’s this series of ads for a popular old-people-sex pill, and each one features at some point a bucolic scene of two claw-foot bathtubs next to each other, sometimes in a field of clover, other times on the edge of a cliff.  WHY?  What are these senile impotent morons doing in moldy feculent bathtubs out in the glory of nature or whatever?  WHAT IS THE POINT OF THIS?  HOW DID THEY GET THE BATHTUBS OUT INTO THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE?  WHY???

Goodbye, world.

My very own Vista Sucks post!

I don’t have a PC and have never been in the same room as this new crap operating system, but my advice was recently solicited by someone who should know better. Well.

I thought XP was disgusting enough in its day. Apparently Vista is so godawful that it’s inspiring nostalgia for XP — yes, that is sick and awful and depressing, but in a way not impossible to understand, given that under the right conditions XP sometimes “worked.” According to Microsoft’s own propaganda, Vista comes with a lot of pointless and retarded features and in the Windows tradition their initiative surfaces at all the worst times — but this will only be a problem if you can get it to run, and you may not want that to happen.

Or then again, you might. My own little Vista due-diligence audit led me to a thread of comments full of stupid arguments denouncing the most recent addition to the “I’m a Mac. I’m a PC” television ad campaign. There exists a cohort of self-identifying Windows enthusiasts who simply cannot abide this kind of thing. I don’t know why. None of them knows how to use an apostrophe, which might be a clue.  Would you declare your allegiance to, like, a 1984 Chevrolet Citation, unless you were being paid?

See? This isn’t worth reading, or thinking about, and by post #200 or so I only wanted to slit my throat, but then I read this and changed my mind. This is first-rate:

this argument is so awesome. everyone who contributes a comment is a fucking genius!

if you don’t want to see the ads, don’t watch them. buy a freakin’ tivo. if you like windows, more power to you….linux? even MORE power to you.OS choice is all about personal preference and familiarity. As is hardware purchase. Buy and use whatever you want and shut the fuck up about it.

I mean really…who cares? I dont give a shit if you’re mormon or hindu. You’re all retards.

More here.

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