Sorry to be late posting this. I had a busy weekend, and actually didn’t go back to watch this until this morning. Saturday the wife and I and several of our descendants participated in the Walk for Life, Saturday night I was at a belated 70th birthday party for my former boss Tom McLean out in Blythewood, and Sunday we celebrated both my 55th birthday, and my younger son’s 28th. Busy, busy. How was your weekend?
Anyway, as for the Biden-Palin skit from Saturday night — very funny, very much above the show’s standard for the last couple of decades, but ya know, nothing is going to hit me with the freshness of that first Palin-Hillary skit. After that, they’ve so far just been good sequels. The true genius was in the first one.
But just so you’ll appreciate the latest such sequel, the below clip from Saturday night’s show is more typical of what we get these days. Don’t bother watching past the first few seconds. It doesn’t get any better…
Kathleen is able to cite her initial defense of Sarah, then her
breathless tension watching her and hoping she wouldn’t screw up. And
that’s something I can’t possibly identify with — worrying about
someone’s performance because I’m a member of the same demographic.
Maybe I’m too self-centered. But I have had to accept that black folks
do that with Obama, and women do that with Hillary Clinton and/or Sarah
Palin, depending on their proclivities. When I see a white guy out
there succeeding or failing, he’s on his own as far as I’m concerned. I
might agree with him or I might not, but it won’t have anything to do
with which restroom he uses or what boxes he checks off on a census
form.
Well, I found myself breathless at times during the debate — whenever Mrs. Palin was speaking — and was really glad when the whole thing was over. But it wasn’t because I wanted to see a woman succeed. And it wasn’t because I wanted to see McCain’s running mate succeed (his choice of Mrs. Palin is one of the few things about McCain I disapprove of). And it wasn’t because she’s a babe. (even though she was cute, when she wasn’t grating.)
No, it was that phenomenon that comes over me when I’m watching a movie or a TV show, and something’s about to happen that will be enormously embarrassing to the character on the screen, and even if you don’t like the character (although it’s worse if they’re likable), you cringe, because you don’t want to see it. You get embarrassed for the human race; you empathize no matter how much you try not to, and it’s painful.
And the awful part is that you see it coming. Often at such moments, I leave the room. Life is painful enough without having your nose rubbed in contrived discomfort.
As I was typing the above, I was struggling to come up with an example, but one just hit me: I’ve never watched the American version of "The Office," but I’m a big fan of the BBC original. I say that in spite of the fact that the entire second season was just excruciating; David Brent got worse and worse. But in that case, I had to keep watching.
I had to keep watching the debate, too, on account of it being my job. But in the end, it went fine for all concerned. But I was tired, from all the breath-holding.
We’ve all been so distracted with serious bidness the last few days that I’ve hardly had a moment to think about Sarah Palin. But I pause now to pass on two things:
I met with Marvin Chernoff over breakfast this morning, and he asked me whether I’d seen the Tina Fey-as-Sarah Palin skit on SNL, and I said I had, but after a moment it hit me that we weren’t talking about the same skit. Turns out she reprised the role Saturday night and I missed it, while Marvin was unaware of the earlier one. Now that I’ve seen the latest (clip above), I’ve got to say it sort of fell flat by comparison, but it would have been hard to match the hilarity of the first effort. It was the funniest thing on that show in decades.
Be sure to check out tomorrow’s op-ed page. Kathleen Parker writes about the tidal wave of vehement reaction she got to her Palin-should-drop-out column the other day.
Remember when I had some dismissive things to say a few months ago about the aggressively stupid promos I get on my laptop regularly from the "Real Message Center?" I’ve noticed lately, during those split-seconds it takes to close that box when it pops up, that they’ve been getting worse and worse.
At least before, there was something from time to time that at least looked like something a reasonably intelligent person who wants to keep up with entertainment news (you may consider that to be a contradiction in terms, but there is a small set of such people) might want to click on, such as clips from a new movie or something. But check out today’s offerings:
Pop Starlets: Beautiful and Dumb
Celeb Love Connections + Amazing Race 13
Sexy Brunettes + Wild Musicians
And yes, I know one of y’all was kind enough to tell me how to turn this thing off so I don’t get the pop-ups any more, but most days it only takes a second or less of my time, and I’ve gotten to the point of morbid fascination now. I don’t watch Reality TV, so this gives me a way to track the degradation of the culture. How will they top (or should I say "bottom") themselves? I expect at some point to see a come-on about sacrificing hot, sexy Christians to lions with laser beams attached to their heads…
You probably already read in the paper that "Boogie Man," the documentary about Lee Atwater, is coming to the Nickelodeon. A fresh reminder came in via e-mail from Judy Turnipseed:
This movie which starts this week at the Nickelodeon about
the famous Lee Atwater features Tom Turnipseed with a lot of other South
Carolinians. Tom will be on a panel about the movie on Friday night.
Here is a link to a trailer of the movie and how to buy
tickets at the Nick if you want to see the movie.
http://www.boogiemanfilm.com/
Tom, of course, was the object of one of the most outrageously mean things Atwater ever said. Here, from a 1991 story by our own Lee Bandy, is a short version of that bit of history:
Tom Turnipseed, a liberal Democrat who ran for Congress in South Carolina, once accused Atwater of engineering a survey of white voters in which they were pointedly informed of Turnipseed’s membership in the NAACP. Atwater denied the charge, but also said that he did not want to deal with allegations made by someone who had once been "hooked up to jumper cables," referring to shock treatments Turnipseed had received years before as a suicidal teenager.
He said that in 1980, when Turnipseed was running against Floyd Spence.
Did that headline grab you? Thought it might. It was suggested by some of the language I’ve read in the last day or two as writers struggle to explain just why Wall Street’s investment banks are so critically important that the SecTreas says we have to ditch capitalism in favor of a $700 billion gummint bailout.
George Will, in today’s column, calls financial services " the commanding heights of America’s economy." OK, maybe so.
But I had to object to the main leader in The Economist this week, which proclaimed that "Finance is the brain of the economy." It goes on to explain that "For all its excesses, it allocates resources to where they are productive better than any central planner ever could."
OK, but brain? I don’t picture it as being that high in our anatomy. It’s more like the gonads, driving us on with a remorseless libidinal beat, like Snoop Dogg in "Old School" chanting "make money-money, make money-money-MONEY…"
By BRAD WARTHEN Editorial Page Editor KILLING TIME during my too-short stay at the beach over the summer, I flipped on the tube and vegged out briefly over an episode of “The Beverly Hillbillies:” Granny became suspicious of banker Milburn Drysdale. To reassure her, Jed accompanied her to the bank and asked that Mr. Drysdale show Granny her money. Mr. Drysdale sputtered that he didn’t have it, that it had been invested, that it would take weeks to gather that much cash. Jed, deeply disappointed, soberly told him he’d best do so right quick; Granny felt bitterly vindicated in her lack of trust. Oh, those silly, unsophisticated Clampetts! What a laugh! They thought those millions were in actual notes and coins in the vault! What rubes. Too lowbrow for you? Consider Shakespeare’s Polonius, who advises Laertes:
Neither a borrower, nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry….
Oh, that silly, pompous old windbag and his cliches! If he’d minded his own business, “Hamlet” wouldn’t have turned out as a tragedy. Of course one cannot have a modern economy without a whole heap of borrowing and lending — only the richest of us could own homes, or go to college, or drive cars; businesses couldn’t grow; factories would shut down for the lack of raw materials. No one could trade in stocks or commodities. And all wealth is based on the sort of trust that Granny was so reluctant to extend to Mr. Drysdale. Most who have achieved middle-class status seldom hold in their wallets an amount equal to even a single paycheck. If you do direct deposit, your compensation consists of 1s and Os transferred from one financial institution to another, and the only reason your debit card works at the grocery store is that everyone involved, from your employer to your bank to the store, plus various middlemen, trusts that those blips of data represent something of real and quantifiable value. And yet, it seems that on some level, the crisis on Wall Street that so threatens our entire economy is the result of major financial institutions not having sufficient assets to balance their debts — no cash to show Granny, even given time to gather it, in terms I can understand — leading the normally trusting Jeds of the world to say “Hold on!” to such an extent that Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke saw all borrowing and lending about to come to a screeching halt. In the prosaic wording of The Wall Street Journal over the weekend, what those officials saw was “the circulatory system of the U.S. economy — credit markets — starting to fail.” So it was that Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke went to Congress late last week to ask for a $700 billion bailout of our financial infrastructure. Congress was at first deeply impressed. Speaking of a presentation by Mr. Paulson, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said, “When you listened to him describe it, you gulped.” Over the weekend, though, the usual sorts of reflexes kicked in, questions were raised, and more than one voice said, “Hold on.” As one who would have trouble coming up with $700 on such short notice, I find myself wondering whom I trust in all this. And I wonder that even as I remain convinced that I must trust someone. In fact, the restoration of a healthy state of affairs seems to my mean understanding dependent on a multilateral restoration of trust throughout the system. On Monday morning, I read everything I could get my hands on trying to decide what I think Congress should do. Unfortunately, everything I read caused me to question whether I trusted the source. If Mr. Paulson and Mr. Bernanke know what they’re doing, how did things get this bad? Congressional Democrats make sense when they say the bad behavior of executives at these failed financial firms should not be rewarded by the taxpayers, but how much of that is populist demagoguery? And conservatives are right to say that there are limits to the extent that government can shield us from risk and consequences, but at what point do their objections become mere ideological pedantry in the face of a crisis of this proportion? Consider the piece on the opposite page by Paul Krugman. I chose it because it broke down the situation into elements even I could understand. But given his oft-demonstrated animus toward the Bush administration, am I at all surprised that he concludes that he doesn’t like its plan? The really awful thing is that it was trusting the experts — from the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street to an administration headed by, as Gail Collins of The New York Times wrote over the weekend, “the-first-president-with-an-MBA-and-a-lot-of-good-it-did-us” — that got us here. The even awfuler thing is that our only way out of this mess is to trust. We have to rely upon the “experts” in the administration, and members of Congress and their staffs, to draft the right plan and make it work. And then we have to trust our bankers and brokers and each other going forward, or nothing the government can do can get our economy back on its feet. That means we’re going to have to hush up the Granny within us, and given present circumstances, that’s not going to be easy.
Apparently, this is a regular feature the magazine does, but I had never run across it before. Hey, maybe reading up on bidness doesn’t have to be as dull as I’ve always thought it would be. Here’s the most recent list, near as I can tell:
The individual entries aren’t quite as much fun as the concept would imply, so the site is a letdown there. But ya gotta hand it to Forbes for at least trying to be fun.
Taking it another step, the site also lists "the 25 largest fictional companies:"
Not very often these days am I able to say this, but the skit that started SNL last night, with Tina Fey as Sarah Palin and Amy Poehler as Hillary Clinton, was easily up to the standards of the show back when it was funny.
After posting my last post, I went to find this scene from "It’s a Wonderful Life" — one of my All-Time, All-Category, Top Five Movies (in fact, I listed it on the blog as my No. 1, but I go back and forth on that). Interesting thing, when I went to YouTube and typed in the title, the bank run scene came up second — which makes me think others have that scene on their minds.
Surely things aren’t that bad, are they?
Well, if it does come to that, can I be George Bailey? I want to be the reassuring guy who says, "Just remember that this thing isn’t as black as it appears," just before the sirens go by. Then I can say,
No, but you’re… you’re, you’re-you’re thinkin’ of this place all wrong, as if I had the money back in a safe. Th-th-The money’s not here… why, your money’s in Joe’s house, that’s right next to yours, and in the Kennedy house, and Mrs. Maitland’s house, and, and a hundred others. … Why, you’re lending them the money to build, and then they’re gonna pay it back to you as best they can, now what’re you gonna do, foreclose on them?
I’ve always enjoyed that, a nice communitarian lesson in how a healthy community operates economically.
Of course, if you’d rather get 50 cents on the dollar from that free-market monster Mr. Potter, wull-wull-wull go right ahead, but don’t then don’t come crying to ol’ George Bailey… No, wait: I guess George wouldn’t say that, would he?
Almost forgot — I went to see "Tropic Thunder" weekend before last, and as long as I’m offending the Deeply Earnest today, I’ve got to raise this question of those of you who have seen it:
Of all the offensive stuff in that movie — about race, about drug use, extreme gore for laughs, about possibly the most intense use of the "F" word in a mainstream comedy this year (for which there should be an award akin to the "Belgium" one in Hitchhiker), about sexual orientation, about take your pick — if someone had asked you to place money on the one thing that would be so offensive as to inspire a boycott movement, would you have guessed the "retard" references?
Rep. Joan Brady has been kind enough to share with us the above photo of her at the Republican Convention last week.
Having a mind that runs to trivia, it reminds me of this exchange from "Old School:"
VINCE VAUGHN to LUKE WILSON: Did you or did you not have a good time at the party?
WILL FERRELL: I had an awesome time.
VAUGHN to FERRELL: I know you had an awesome time. The entire town knows you had an awesome time. I’m trying to ask Mitch whether he had an awesome time.
We don’t need to ask Joan whether she had an awesome time. Maybe not as good a time as Frank the Tank, but a fine time nonetheless.
Over the weekend, going through some of the stuff my daughter brought when she moved home from Pennsylvania, my wife found a travel case full of CDs I’d about given up on. Some of them were favorites — albums I had bought on vinyl in my youth, such as Steve Miller’s "Your Saving Grace" and The Band’s "The Band."
I put The Band’s master opus into the player in my truck yesterday, and it transported me back. I love those indescribable autumnal tones and word imagery. Over the weekend, we had watched the odd, uneven "I’m Not There," and the scenes with Richard Gere wandering through the faux old-timey (vaguely western, vaguely country) landscape and town were obviously an attempt to evoke that very same feeling, especially the parts around the bandstand. Far less successful, of course.
But you know how it is when you read or see or listen to something from your youth, and you see a flaw you didn’t see back then, and you’re sorry you noticed it? An extreme example of this was the time about 20 years ago when "The Dirty Dozen" came on television, and I said to my in-laws, "Oh, let’s watch this; this is good," and then minute after awful minute dragged by until I felt constrained to apologize for it? When I had seen it at 14, it had been good; I assure you.
This was more subtle. I’m listening to "King Harvest (Will Surely Come)," which makes the October wind blow like no other, and I’m suddenly struck by the incongruity of these two lines:
I will hear ev’ry word the boss may say, For he’s the one who hands me down my pay.
Which makes perfect sense on one level — the words being spoken by a failed farmer who wants to make a go of his new job. But, with its suggestion that the worker’s position and future are dependent upon doing the will of the boss, it’s wholly inconsistent with the repeated theme that he is now "a union man now, all the way."
This later passage is more consistent with that attitude:
Then there comes a man with a paper and a pen Tellin’ us our hard times are about to end. And then, if they don’t give us what we like He said, "Men, that’s when you gotta go on strike."
But wait — maybe the "boss" is the union boss, not management. That way it works. I feel better now. (Come to think of it, I believe that’s the way I sort of unconsciously understood it years ago.)
In any case, I still love the song, and the whole album. I stopped it in the middle of the second play this morning, and put in the Steve Miller, to keep myself from getting tired of it. (It’s much better than the Steve Miller, but perhaps that’s an unfair comparison — especially since I haven’t heard the much stronger second side yet.)
As I noted earlier, the masculine equivalent of Sarah Palin’s specs and tied-up hair is to wear a coat and tie. The effect in both cases is to project seriousness of purpose.
So what are we to make of the fact that, all of a sudden, the male candidates for president and vice president are, quite deliberately, showing themselves in public without neckties?I don’t mean as a sort of occasional thing for a barbecue, but all the time. And don’t try to tell me this is just happening without somebody thinking about it; campaigns think about everything these days, as Peggy Noonan noted the other day (writing about Obama’s acceptance speech, the last time he was seen wearing a tie).
This has been coming for some time. As far back as 2006, Joe Biden was regularly appearing here in S.C. with a jacket, but no tie… sort of the Paul-McCartney-on-the-cover-of-Abbey-Road look. Here’s proof of that.
Then, I started noticing Obama doing the same. And McCain, too. And Huckabee and even Romney.
Here’s what worries me about this… those of you who are old enough to remember will recall how JFK killed men’s hats. There are some authorities that dispute it, but then there are many who believe Oswald didn’t act alone. Suffice it to say that before JFK, men wore hats. Afterwards, they didn’t.
Obama could do the same with the necktie. Biden and McCain aren’t so much of a threat, because when they go tieless, they just look like they’re been playing with their grandchildren and didn’t want them chewing on their ties. They don’t look natural that way.
But there’s been altogether too much loose talk about Obama’s charisma. No less an authority than Ted Sorensen has sat in my board room and pronounced Obama the rightful heir to Camelot. He’s already known as The One. How long can it be before he’s dubbed The Tieless One? (Note the picture above — while Biden just looks like he’s on his way to play golf, Obama is making that "early-60s, Best-and-Brightest" statement again with the white dress shirt, sleeves rolled up).
So, if the necktie industry, moribund as it is, wants to save itself, it had better do what it can to elect McCain. Because if Obama’s elected, every day will be casual Friday.
Or at least, he would get the "credit." The fact is that, as I have noted twice in recent columns, Gallup has found that only 6 percent of American men wear a tie to work every day. I, of course, am of the 6 percent, and am determined to wear the thing every day until I retire. I mean, I have to now — it’s a statement. Before, it was conformity. Now, it’s a statement of adherence to traditional values and seriousness of purpose. I’ll have you know that I bought on of the last bow ties at Lourie’s — in fact, it may have been the last bow tie they actually sold.
I also still have a Wilson Jack Kramer Autograph wooden tennis racket, although I don’t use it any more. I do use my old persimmon 4 wood, though. When I’m hitting it right, it’s the best club in my bag; the ball flies like a rifle shot. Which reminds me, I’m not working today…
Those of you who did not like my referring to Sarah Palin as a "babe" yesterday probably won’t enjoy this post, either. But I am honor-bound to be honest with you, my readers. Also, I have a journalistic duty to tell y’all as much as possible about a candidate about whom so little is known, even if it’s based on nothing but my overactive imagination.
I had never before seen a picture of Sarah Palin, and yet from the first moment I saw her, she looked familiar. Did she to you? If so, you’re dating myself. It’s not so much that Gov. Palin looks like a particular individual. But she’s a dead-ringer for a stock character that frequently appeared in sit-coms back in the ’50s and ’60s. If you’re my age, you’ve seen that character dozens of times.
It’s Spring Tonic time, and Granny hands it around to the family, giving Jed a double dose because he made a mean comment on it. Meanwhile, at the bank, the secretary Gloria Buckles, who has worked on the Clampett account, has said she can take the paper work to Jed. When she gets up there, she transforms herself from a plain secretary to a gorgeous one, with her sights set on Jed’s money. She flirts with Jed, telling him that she needs a mountain man to make her happy. The family is worried about this young gold digger, and the fact that Jed has had a double dose of tonic. They call Drysdale and he rushes over, not recognizing Gloria. She reveals that her and Jed have discussed marriage, and when questioned, Jed says it is true. Gloria asks when they should set the date, and Jed says a few years, because that is when Jethro will be of marrying age. Jethro runs off with Gloria, and Jane runs after them to get her man back. Elly asks her father why he doesn’t want to marry her, and he says you have to start worrying when the bait starts chasing you.
Do you recognize her now? Yes, she’s the frumpy secretary who first appears in a conservative business outfit, wearing glasses, with her hair tied up on top of her head, who, at a critical moment in the plot, suddenly removes her jacket, whips off the glasses and lets her hair come tumbling down, and immediately looks like Miss America.
Of course — and this was the really cheesy thing about this plot device — she looked like Miss America when you first saw her, just Miss America with glasses and her hair done up. I never could decide whether the sitcom writers really thought America was stupid enough to be surprised by this plot device, or whether we were supposed to see through it, and see the transformation-to-glamour coming — you know, so that the folks at home would say, "I know what’s going to happen — watch this!"
That’s what made me realize that’s who Gov. Palin reminded me of. She IS beautiful, obviously so, and the specs and the tied-up hair are simply devices meant to say to us, "I’m serious; I’m not just a babe; you can vote for me."
The bad thing about this is that on some level, deep down, some of us who grew up on 50s and 60s TV are thinking, "This is gonna be good — watch this!" (And subconsciously, we’re expecting a scene in which she suddenly lets her hair down and removes the glasses, and of course, Cindy McCain walks in at that moment and says, "John! Who is THIS?" and a befuddled McCain goes "Hominahominahomina," and the laugh track plays.) Or maybe that’s the GOOD thing, in terms of keeping voters interested in the ticket. I don’t know.
By the way, I couldn’t find a picture to illustrate what I was talking about, but here’s video of the relevant part of the Beverly Hillbillies episode. The transformation of Gloria Buckles occurs toward the end of the first part:
Forgive me for going into Cliff Clavin mode here, but…
I had a little fun with the "Godfather" cliche of business-vs.-personal in my Sunday column. But it’s a little-known fact that in the novel (as opposed to the movie), Michael Corleone did say it was personal, and not business.
The irony is that the "it’s not personal… it’s strictly business" line is probably the most quoted from the movie. It’s used in business, sports, anywhere and anytime American males do something distasteful for which they do not wish to be held morally responsible. It’s like the kinder, gentler, all-American version of the Nazis’ "I vas only followink orders."
Hey, I’ve been guilty of using it, to help me separate personal feelings for a newsmaker from the responsibility to report or comment without reference to those feelings (Hey, he’s a nice guy, but this is business…). But it can be a pious copout, if you’re a real human being.
And that was Mario Puzo’s point. In fact, the central theme of the novel, and of other works by Puzo, such as The Fourth K, was the exploration of the personal as opposed to larger societal obligation, such as to the rule of law. The seduction of The Godfather is that you are invited to care about these characters personally, and forget that they are unapologetic, sometimes murderous, criminals.
Anyway, the central speech in the novel occurs just before Michael goes off to kill Sollozzo and the police captain. He’s speaking to Tom Hagen:
…Tom, don’t let anybody kid you. It’s all personal, every bit of business…. They call it business, OK. But it’s personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? The Don. My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. He took my going into the Marines personal. That’s what makes him great. The Great Don. He takes everything personal. Like God. He knows every feather that falls from the tail of a sparrow or however the hell it goes. Right?…
It’s the epiphany around which the whole story is based. But somehow, as great as the movie is, that got left out. We were left with the opposite impression of the point. Odd, isn’t it?
One of the things expected of someone in my job is that I know things — lots and lots of things, enough to reach critical mass so that I can deal with complex issues against a fairly massive context. (More than that, of course, I need to know how the things I know fit together and interact, but that’s another subject.) That means knowing history, but being very up to the moment as to what’s happening now.
And generally, I meet that test — sometimes quite literally. I have a very good working knowledge of history and of political systems, but also popular culture. I’m good at tests of broad knowledge, and also at Trivial Pursuit. But every person’s knowledge is finite. I only know the things I know by NOT knowing a lot of things that other people take for granted. Sometimes, the things I don’t know are things people would assume I do know, such as who’s who on TV news. Other times, it’s something that other folks just keep up with without thinking, such as sports.
A couple of days ago, there was this big headline in our paper, "Bringing up Beecher," and I got this strong impression that I was supposed to know, without being told, who this Beecher was. There was a large photograph that made me think he was a football player, judging by attire, and assuming that was him. (Of course, I could have read the story, but that would be like cheating, wouldn’t it?) My eyes moved on, and I thought no more about it. Coincidentally, the next day, I was a captive audience in a meeting in which someone happened to mention that someone named "Tommy Beecher" was a relatively untested USC quarterback. Ah. Good to know. This will save me from embarrassing myself if I am surrounded by people who dwell in this alternative universe called Gamecock football (this has been known to happen). It will save me from asking my reflexive question:
"And who’s this Beecher when he’s at home?"
I am, of course, channeling George Harrison’s wonderful scene in "A Hard Day’s Night," when he’s surrounded by people for whom "Susan" is the center of the universe, and they assume she’s the center of HIS universe, and comedy ensues from that disconnect.
I often feel like George when in the company of sports fanatics. They can’t believe I don’t know who they’re talking about (although I try harder than George to hide the fact, because I don’t like shocking people; nor am I trying to be "too cool" for their enthusiasms a la George). For my part, I’m amazed they don’t get the movie allusion if I do say, "Who’s this (blank) when he’s/she’s at home?" For that reason, I seldom say it any more. I just stay quiet and try to infer what in the world they’re on about, and hope my ignorance isn’t plain to see. Because I’m supposed to know stuff.
He is the perfect complement, just chock full o’ experience, thereby compensating for Obama’s greatest weakness. Yeah, Joe can talk you to death, but he’s a smart and thoughtful guy, and about the only Democrat who was putting forth a real plan for Iraq back when it was the thing to talk about. (You’ll notice that now that the surge has succeeded, and we actually can talk about timetables for withdrawal, they’re a lot quieter on the subject.)
Unfortunately, I have reason to believe that it will be neither Biden nor Sebelius. Apparently, the folks at the WashPost know something, and they’re giving us a hint with their headline: "Obama Says He Has Chosen His No. 2."
Obviously, that means he has chosen veteran actor Robert Wagner.
business, OK. But it’s personal as hell. You know where I learned that from? The Don. My old man. The Godfather. If a bolt of lightning hit a friend of his the old man would take it personal. He took my going into the Marines personal. That’s what makes him great. The Great Don. He takes everything personal. Like God. He knows every feather that falls from the tail of a sparrow or however the hell it goes. Right?…