Fascinoma

Re: the exposé of the abortive hookup with Christine O'Donnell by a young Philadelphian. A great many people seem to be congratulating themselves for condemning the indiscretion of the piece and also for sympathising with O'Donnell. But that's a bullshit reaction. O'Donnell doesn't deserve the least bit of sympathy. She is not a private citizen anymore, she's running for high public office; moreover she hasn't ever really done anything professionally but run for public office -- it's her grift as it were. So, just on that account she loses a fair amount claim to privacy. But any claim that she may have had left should be forfeit to the fact that she promies if elected to do all she can to intrude the state into the most private matters of everybody in the country.

The writer of the piece in Gawker comes off as callow and extremely conventional, but let’s not forget that O'Donnell is a woman who won her spot on the ticket by implying her Republican opponent was gay. I’d say O’Donnell’s defenders would have more of a case if he’d actually had sex with her and then told the tale. But what happened here was way weirder and less moral than that, and a bit more reflective of O’Donnell’s whackjob toxicity.

Let’s review: O’Donnell shows up on an unnounced booty-call at the home of her aunt’s tenant (bit of a power play there), on the strength of a brief meeting months before; she drags the guy out and leads him in drunken merriment, then persuades him to help her ditch her wing so that she may go home with him discretely. When she gets him back to his home she announces there won’t be any sex because she’s a virgin. She’s done everything she can to lead him to expect sex, which she then denies. That’s her legal right of course, and for a gal of 16 or 18 or 22 it’s more common and maybe more understandable. But it’s a rally bizarre piece of work for a fortyish woman to pull on a 20-something man, and she’s very lucky the guy didn’t toss her out into the night, or worse, drunk as he also was. (Not that tossing her etc would have been right either.)
Anyway, the story is not som much about an odd drunken hookup per se; it’s about something a lot more pathologically manipulative, and… entitled. Sorry Amanda, O'Donnell's not just a confused girl out for fun, she's a powertripping, hypcritical, manipulative, prick-tease.

Maybe it could have been told more tastefully, but I think if you’re paying attention and not just clutching your pearls, it adds valuable inside information to the dossier on this Tea Party darling. These people are not simply misguided, they are malignantly twisted in their souls, down to the smallest aspect of their lives it often seems. It’s foolish and dangerous to pretend otherwise.

Fawn Williams finally got the axe from NPR. Way overdue. As usual, of late, NPR screwed the pooch, in this case by making Fawn look like a martyr for free speech. In fact, he is and has long been a fascist hack for the Toxic News GOP Support Team, which should have gotten him fired a long time ago -- but didn't. Now Fox will trumpet the lie that Williams got fired for his relatively innocous sounding admission abpout how he gets all vaporous when Muslims are on the plane, when in fact it was undoubtedly the cumulative humiliation of having the sellout mofo dirty the brand on TV, plus the specific situation -- his remark came during an extended hand-job on Bill O'Reilly, a real test of the knee pads staged to assure the Great White Douchebag he's right to hate Muslims reflexively.

So I'm a little jet-laggy still and waking up very early with my head sort of in mid-sentence with itself and anyway today, I woke up with a vivid memory of a dinner I was at last spring with the Lobbyist among some very nice liberal people, all of us (well maybe not me so much) hyper-educated, successful and distingushed. One of the other dinner guest was a constituitional law professor at a very good state university, who nonetheless (or perhaps therefore) was about as smug and puerile as it is possible to be without getting punched. He made a lot of sort of snide jokes which aimed to show what a sensible centrist adult he was, how he wasn't buying into the bullshit of the left or right etc. At one point he went out of his way to sneer at Keith Olberman and Rush Limbaugh in the same clause and I objected instantly, and fairly forcefully "False equivalence." People glanced at me and as if I'd ripped off a big fart, and then turned away and preteneded I'd said nothing. Howdy Doody went on pontificating for the rest of the dinner sumgly assured that he was delighting all in earshot, except perhaps myself, who (it was obvious from my reception) was beneath consideration. People like him, criminally self-blind in their professorial imbecility, are why academia is no place for most decent people.

Now, I fault our hosts generally, nice as they are, for their generally panglossian and centrist view of things, for the argumentam ad temperantiam which underlies their general outlook. And this morning it occurs to me me that the tendency to find equal fault on both sides in American politics is a form of intellectual negligence, even evil in its most banal form. Its aggregation across the American populace will be the undoing of the world.

In any case, I won't be doing that dinner again.

I had another danger-filled mission for the Ministry of Elegance so, once I had vanquished evil (the Trafalgar Square Chapter), the Lobbyist and I were again galavanting at taxpayer expense, this time in the UK, where we studied up on accelerating the spread of socialism in Amerika, while also covetting many of the extravagant goodies on offer in Mayfair and drinking drinks and breaking bread with all manner of effete intellectuals. Heavenly. I wondered yet again why if even the English can have a crackerjack railroad system that gets one from Edinburgh to London in 4.5 hours in wified comfort with regular passages of a drinks cart, whyu can't The Greatest Nation Ever? Hell, even the Italians run a dandy train system; the all-powerful yanks, not so much....

I see the Tea Partiers haven't gotten any more attractive in the fortnight I went without them. Their ascendance is proof positive that here, just as much as in Germany, the scum will have a Hitler of their own.

While abroad we visited a calico cat who emigrated when John Ashcroft was pretending to be Attorney General. A very beautiful kitty.