Phil Bailey just called to ask me to fill in on the show this evening for Thad Viers, since it looks like the House is going to go into the night on the vetoes (he said they were on No. 46 or something).
Yes, that’s “Pub Politics,” the very show on which Sen. Jake Knotts called certain parties “ragheads,” or so I’m told. Somehow, Phil and Wes (Donehue) have yet to get around to posting that episode where I can see it. (In the paper this morning, it was, oddly enough, referred to as an “Internet radio show.” Maybe things have changed. Both times I was on it, there was video.)
I say it’s a “Fun Post,” but you know what — the fun of being mocked by “The Daily Show” is starting to wear thin. Even Jon Stewart, so charmed by us last week, seems to be getting sick of all the absurdity here in what he terms “America’s whoopie cushion, South Carolina.” There was an edge to his delivery last night — as when he said, “Only South Carolina can take a silk purse and turn it into a sow’s anus” — that seemed to say, “Enough already with you people!”
This bit of fun comes to you courtesy of our pal Burl Burlingame out in Hawaii.
You have to watch it long enough for the music to start before it gets good, but it’s worth the wait. Nothing like a bit of musician humor.
And Burl should know from musician humor, being a talented purveyor of melodies himself. Rather than having spent the last 40 years talking about starting a band the way I have (still working on the name, and the playlist), he has played in a number of them.
Very little-known bit of music trivia here, sort of on the order of Moonlight Graham‘s half-inning in the bigs, only much more small-time: Burl and I were in a band together VERY briefly back in the summer of 1971, right after we graduated from Radford High School. The band was together for the length of one rehearsal, over at Steve Clark’s house. Burl played harp (harmonica for you non-musical squares out there), and I was the front man. Thought I was Mick Jagger.
And what does all this have to do with politics, which is what you usually come to this blog for? Well, a few years back Steve Clark ran for one of those congressional seats in Texas that the Republicans caused such a stir by gerrymandering into existence. But he dropped out before the actual primary.
And — wonder of wonders! — I just discovered (looking for a link) that he’s running AGAIN, as a “Tea Party conservative.” At least, I think he’s still running. His campaign Facebook page hasn’t been updated since February.
To get a sense of just how wildly absurd it is to me to think of Steve this way, check out the picture of him
in 1971, and compare it to his campaign picture. And no; I’m not telling you which one’s which. DANG! I thought there’d be more of a contrast (I had not yet looked when I typed that last sentence) — I forgot that Steve, who even then spoke of a career in politics, used to always tuck his shoulder-length (or at least Prince Valiant-length; somewhere in that range) hair back behind his ears before being photographed. Crafty, eh?
Maybe if this campaign also goes belly-up, we can get into some serious negotiations about getting the band back together.
This promises to be a long and hairy day, with GOP lawmakers in the House poised to knuckle under to a discredited governor’s indefensible vetoes.
So I thought I’d start it with some fun, to give us the strength to bear it all.
I’ll start with this really awesome tribute video I found on YouTube last night. How did I find it? Well, I was posting that item about the death of Jimmy Dean, and I said something about him being the Sausage King of America, which of course was a play on Abe Froman, the Sausage King of Chicago, and I went looking for a link to explain that for those of you who are not well schooled in Ferris Bueller, and I ran across this. (And yes, I linked to it yesterday, but y’all don’t always follow links.)
Thought at first that this was a pretty good Vincent Sheheen video when someone brought it to my attention via Twitter — then I saw it included other Democrats, such as Ashley Cooper and Rob Miller, each of whom has no primary opposition.
But Sheheen — technically speaking — does have primary opposition. I’m quite sure he’s going to get the nomination, but it does seem that someone is jumping the gun a tad here.
Still, back to where I started, it’s a pretty good video. Makes some strong points well.
I’m just a little too whitebread boring, I guess. I’ll try to work on that, if I can figure out the criteria for being the cynosure of all eyes in 2010: I mean, is it OK to claim to have done the horizontal mambo with ANY lawmaker, or do the standards require that it actually be Nikki Haley (because, you know, she just hasn’t been made to look like enough of a victim yet)? And are all ethnicities fair game? Can I say “wetback” or “mick;” is the “N” word going too far? Or does it have to be about Indians specifically? If so, it’s not fair, because Jake’s taken the best one. “Dot-head” seems thin stuff by comparison. And I hate to fall on the inaccurate, feeble slurs that Larry Koon supporters used against her in 2004, talking about worshipping cows and the like.
Or should I just go with my strength, and hope y’all will have me back because you think that after Jake Knotts’ performance, the show needs a little class to redeem it? Yeah, that’s the ticket.
What to say about Jake’s venture into what he terms “Saturday Night Live” humor? A number of things, I suppose:
First, thanks for holding yourself back there, Jake — seems I usually hear the full construction as “raghead sumbitches.” So you exercised some restraint. Either that, or you realized halfway through that she’s a chick, and can’t technically be a “sumbitch.”
That was really creative. Usually, the term is applied to A-rabs and the like. To expand its scope to include half-Kenyans and Sikhs displays a linguistic originality that is noteworthy.
Is that Andre Bauer camp a bunch of strategic geniuses or what? I hadn’t thought there was anything else that could make Nikki Haley look more like a martyr than what we had seen thus far, but these fellas just never say die; they can always go another mile.
Cindi Scoppe has got to be feeling really self-righteous today (if you can imagine that), being certain about how right she was to kick and scream and complain every inch of the way when I insisted that we break with precedent and endorse Jake last time around.
I might as well take down my video of Jake telling his life story (“How Jake became Jake…“), because it’s just going to seem way too dull after Wesley and them put up his latest performance on the Web.
Must I lower the standards of “The Brad Show,” if I ever have a second installment of it, in order to get viewers?
There’s plenty more that could be said, yet on another level, I sort of feel like enough has been said already.
Just got this from regular contributor Stanley Dubinsky, with this commentary:
Anyone who says that Israeli soldiers opened fire first, or that they came to kill (or even hurt) any of those aboard the Turkish boat, is lying … the “humanitarians” own video says otherwise.
Make of it what you will. Personally, I’m fed up with Israel taking the blame for every damned thing that happens amid all that insanity over there. Want to blame Israel for something? Get on them about all those settlements on the West Bank. That’s an unnecessary provocation — although not nearly as overt as the provocation from these activists doing everything they can to provoke these troops into violence.
The very idea that any nation would unequivocally condemn Israel for what happened — much less MOST nations, which is what we’re seeing — is outrageous. I’ve really about had it with the opinion of the “international community” with regard to Israel.
Did somebody screw up? Yes, in failing to carry out this operation in a way that prevented hostiles from provoking gunfire. In failing to assume that there were people present who would act this way, and boarding in sufficient force to control the situation. This must not be allowed to happen again. But rest assured, whatever Israel does to try to control such a situation, there will be provocateurs thinking of ways to take it to the point of bloodshed.
Perhaps you think there should be no blockade of Hamas. I’d be interested in hearing that argument. But as long as there is one, as as long as there are blockade runners, we run the danger of this happening.
I hate to pick on Henry when he’s dealing with death threats — and I hope and pray that comes out OK for him — but I forgot to mention this after I saw it a couple of days back.
Have you SEEN that thoroughly outrageous new TV ad of his? After having put out a fairly reasonable piece recently (which contrasted nicely with some of the stuff his rivals were doing), he now comes out with yet another bid to out-extreme the other Republicans.
I would compare it to the infamous 1964 daisy petal/mushroom cloud ad, except it actually contains MORE radical distortion of reality. To quote from the text:
They’re circling…After bailouts and takeovers…The Vultures want more. Our healthcare… our hard earned money… our liberty. South Carolina’s sovereignty is under attack… by politicians preying on our freedoms. Henry McMaster is leading the fight for the conservative cause….
Say what? If I believed half this nonsense about the Dems in Washington (who are not, near as I can tell, running for SC governor, so why is Henry running against them?), I’d say it was time for SC to fire on Fort Sumter again.
Yesterday, I praised Henry McMaster for his latest campaign ad. Yeah, the praise was pretty damned faint, and I disagreed strongly with a great deal of what he was saying, but at least it was done with a tone and attitude that made you feel good about South Carolina — or at least got the impression that Henry felt good about South Carolina. And that’s too rare these days from our friends in the GOP.
Take, for instance, the pair of videos unveiled today by the Nikki Haley and Gresham Barrett campaigns.
We have Nikki labeling her rivals with the GOP cusswords “Bailouts,” “Stimulus spending” and “Career politicians” — about as neat a job of giving opponents short shrift as I’ve ever seen (as if those terms sum up the totality of who these men are) — before going on to say, in that hagiographic way she has, that SHE is the one true “conservative.” Whatever the hell that word means anymore. (It certainly doesn’t mean what it did when I was coming up.)
Then we have Gresham Barrett promising to be the meanest of all to illegal immigrants (the scoundrels!), and pass “a common-sense Arizona law.”
Sorry, folks, but neither of these glimpses of your values or your attitudes toward the world in general make me feel good about the idea of you being my governor. Not that you’re trying to please me, I realize; but that’s all I have to go by…
Right after the Palin/Haley event Friday, I rushed home because my youngest granddaughter was spending the night at our house. So, with Jim Clyburn droning on on the TV in the background, I tuned him out and forgot Nikki Haley as well.
I thought what this little candidate had to say was far more profound and engaging.
(By the way, all that slamming and banging you hear also in the background is my wife fixing dinner. I’d have helped her, but I was busy, you know, babysitting. In the middle of this clip, my wife comes over to help me by tickling the baby’s tummy with the stuffed toy and otherwise joining me in showing how silly grandparents can get when interacting with a baby.)
What I meant to do was applaud Henry McMaster for a positive campaign ad, which helps remove the bad taste from some of his Obama-and-his-allies-are-dangerous-radicals approach of late.
I don’t agree with everything Henry’s saying in this ad, titled “It’s time to show the world what South Carolina can do”:
I have a plan to put South Carolina back on the Path to Prosperity. We’ll grow small business with lower taxes and less regulation. Encourage innovation and recruit high paying jobs in emerging industries. Expand our ports and open our economic door to the world. Improve education with choice, accountability and higher standards. It’s time to show the world what South Carolina can do!
… especially the idea that “choice” is the very first thing our schools need. Or that “lower taxes and less regulation,” while laudable in themselves, will substitute for building the workforce that businesses want and providing the basic societal infrastructure they need. But what I like here is that Henry’s talking about SC presenting a positive face to the world (for a change), instead of making us look like the wacky extremists that too many think we are already.
He’s talking about what he’s FOR, rather than trying to resonate with negative people about what they’re against.
Gene Garland, back during this discussion, mentioned the two wonderful BBC mini-series based on the first and third books in Le Carre’s Karla Trilogy.
Nothing better has ever been offered on the telly, in my view — with the possible exceptions of “Band of Brothers” and “The Sopranos.”
The amazing thing about them is that they are such good representations of books that are essentially about … meetings. Meetings and interviews. Sort of gives me hope that someone will see gripping drama in a story about an editorial page editor. (Guess I need to write the book first, though, huh?) All of the key action happens in meetings. By contrast, the middle book in the Trilogy — The Honourable Schoolboy — was all about action and exotic locales. Which is why the BBC didn’t do that one — too expensive. But it was also the most forgettable of the three. Smiley was in power in that one, whereas in the other two he was in exile, only the Circus couldn’t make do without him. (Perhaps you think, given my situation, I’m harboring fantasies of Oliver Lacon coming to my house one night and asking me to straighten out the newspaper, unofficially of course. Well, I’m not. But it’s an intriguing plot line…)
This could have fallen completely flat on the small screen, but it’s to the credit of all concerned that it positively glittered in the BBC version. And not just because of Alec Guinness as Smiley. The whole cast was fantastic.
For the best use of meeting dynamics ever on television, I invite you to watch the first two minutes and 8 seconds of the clip above, which in a beautifully understated manner, and only one very short line of dialogue, sketches the personae of the four major characters (other than Smiley). Entering the room on the clip are, respectively, the actors playing Toby Esterhase, Roy Bland, Percy Alleline and Bill Haydon. (As Control said, “There are three of them and Alleline,” the characters whose code names give the book its title.)
This is just so real. If you have, as I have, spent ridiculous amounts of time in meetings with a small group of people you knew almost as intimately as member of your own family, the little touches of how people establish their roles and characters in small ways will ring as true as anything you’ve ever seen. It feels, for me, exactly like the daily editorial board meeting, with each person wandering in in his own unique way and initiating wordless rituals that say so much.
I think I’ve about worn it out. Not only is the picture dim, but I get these unwanted stray bands of color across the top of the frame. It comes and goes, but today I just couldn’t get it to go away.
I’ve posted here an unedited three-minute clip to give you a slice from Sanford’s presentation today (the sound still works pretty well), and to show you how bad the camera problem is.
It was pretty much all the stuff he’s been saying. The apology, the pitch to ask the audience to help him make his last 14 months more productive than the past 6.5 years by getting some of his agenda enacted, etc.
I’m really down about my camera… Even if I had the money, they don’t sell ’em like this any more… The great thing about it was that I could use it so unobtrusively. The photo below, which you see as a header on individual posts here on the blog, is perhaps the only photo I have of my camera in use. Note that I could hold it down on the table with my left hand while taking notes with my right. I could hold it in this position — rather than up between the subject and me, thereby disconcerting the subject and making normal conversation difficult — because it has one of those little screens that flips out and rotates in several directions, like the ones you usually find on video cameras. Yes, they still make some still cameras that do this, but they tend to be much larger and more cumbersome than this model. Sigh. All Things Must Pass, the man said…
The answer to the above question is an emphatic “No!” I mean, I need a job, but let’s not get carried away — I don’t need one badly enough to dive into all that partisan foolishness in Washington.
But I offer the question, upon which I elaborate in the above video, as an illustration of the kinds of crazy thoughts that can occur to one when faced with such displays as the one Joe Wilson put on last night.
I hear that in response to Joe’s acting out, his opponent in the last election, Rob Miller, pulled in buckets of campaign contributions since last night. Rob Miller is a nice young man, and I’m truly grateful for his service to his country in combat as a United States Marine, but he was a decidedly unimpressive congressional candidate in ’08.
Surely there’s somebody out there, someone better than Rob Miller and far better than me, who can offer us a real choice in 2010. Surely…
Did you know there was a BobbyHarrell.com? Well, there is. And if you go there, you can read the Speaker’s letter calling on the governor to resign. There’s audio, too.
The Speaker of the House calling on the governor to resign is a significant step — or would be, if we thought there was the slightest chance the governor would listen to the Speaker or anyone else in South Carolina.
But I tend to focus on funny things. Such as this one little thing that the governor said on Keven Cohen’s show yesterday:
Bottom line, I was gone over that weekend.
Let’s see — he left on Thursday, came back on Wednesday, and that’s a weekend? Maybe in Argentina, but not here…
Still experimenting with my new Webcam. Today, I got to thinking about our governor’s “Apology Tour,” which prompted the above commentary. And if you can’t stand looking at me on video, here’s the script I worked from:
The governor is going here, there and everywhere in South Carolina to “apologize” for his sins.
But he doesn’t mean it.
I remember how, during the 2002 campaign, Dick Harpootlian kept saying Mark Sanford was a poor little rich boy who could not possibly identify with ordinary South Carolinians. At the time, I recoiled at such class-based prejudice.
And yet, maybe Dick had a point, in a way. Because what we’re seeing now is a guy who thinks the rules of the world are that if Mark Sanford does something wrong, there are to be no consequences.
He just apologizes, and we’re supposed to forgive him. If we don’t do so right away, then in his world there’s something wrong with us. We have some sort of wicked ulterior motive or something if we don’t give him the forgiveness that is his due.
It doesn’t occur to him that he should have to pay a price. But he should. And the minimum, the down payment, should be that he doesn’t get to be governor any more.
Think of the creative energy it takes to produce something like that on YouTube, and the site is just full of stuff like that.
This was brought to my attention by my high school classmate Burl Burlingame, who blogs out of Honolulu. He works for the Star-Bulletin. Aside from the fact that he still has his job, he and I have been on parallel tracks lately. He also just fell into the twin traps of Facebook and Twitter, so we have commiserated this week.
Burl and I graduated from Radford High School in 1971. You may recall I wrote something about those days in my column last fall, “Barack Like Me.” Burl got into journalism earlier than I did; he published an underground newspaper at Radford. The one thing I remember clearly about that was that he used to refer to our principal, who was virtually never seen by the students (I never saw him that whole senior year, although I knew people who said they’d met him), as “the Ghost Who Walks.” The principal’s name was Yamamoto. Not the admiral who planned the Pearl Harbor attack; another Yamamoto. (Actually, come to think of it, he could have been the admiral for all we knew, since we never saw him.)
It’s particularly meaningful to me that Burl posted something making fun of Nazis. You may have noted that the lede story in The State today was about a high school prank. A particularly nasty, destructive high school prank, but still a senior prank. Our senior prank at Radford back in 71 was less destructive, but more creative.
About a dozen of us staged a revolution to take over the school. Or rather, in guerrilla fashion, we took over a classroom at a time and quickly moved on. We wielded water guns, and wore rather elaborate paramilitary costumes. Most of us had recently seen Woody Allen’s “Bananas,” and were largely inspired by that, only we were far more international. Our leader was Steve Clark, who was dressed in full military regalia as “El Presidente.” He spoke only Spanish in keeping with his character, which no one but I understood, so I translated all of his commands, being second in command. My character’s back story was that I had been a top officer in the Israeli Defense Force but had been drummed out for something or other and had turned mercenary. Overly elaborate, perhaps, and the nuances were probably not obvious to our audience, but we didn’t care.
Burl’s character was an unrepentant old Nazi whom we had found hiding in Argentina, loudly fulminating at everyone in a vaudeville German accent. He would particularly abuse me, since my character was supposed to be Jewish, and of course I would take offense, and our comrades would have to separate us to prevent violence. Yes, it was that politically incorrect. We wanted to be edgy, and thought ethnic humor, even ethnic humor that dark, to be funny, a la Mel Brooks with “Springtime for Hitler.” We were kids, and stupid. Or rather, a little too “clever” for our own good.
We were most successful in taking over Mrs. Burchard’s English class. Mrs. Burchard was my favorite teacher ever. You can see a picture of her on that same page that I linked to about Mr. Yamamoto, on the virtual yearbook that (I think) Burl put together a few years back. (Cute, isn’t she?) She was a real sport, and played along. When some of her underclassmen students failed to give El Presidente proper respect (as we defined it), we lined them up against the blackboard and hosed them down with the water guns — but only after Mrs. Burchard had fallen on her knees before us to beg us to spare them. She was awesome.
The revolution ended badly, as most do. Some juniors mounted a counterattack on our position, and I caught a water balloon in the groin. C’est la guerre.
