Tuesday, March 11, 2008

News Roundup: Stupid Human Trix


First and most prominent Dunderhead of the Day Award: Get Down in the Mud & Fling Feces Through a Proxy (Not the First Time)


The Clinton Campaign's Willie Horton Moment

To Geraldine Ferraro of the Hillary Clinton camp, for trying to fan the flames of racism against Barrack Obama:
"Ferraro, who sits on Clinton's finance committee and has spoken at her rallies, sparked the firestorm when she was quoted by a California newspaper as saying: 'If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position.'
"Obama...called the remark by the Democrats' 1984 vice presidential nominee 'patently absurd.'
"'I don't think that Geraldine Ferraro's comments have any place in our politics or the Democratic Party,' he told Pennsylvania newspaper The Morning Call.
"His campaign clamored for Ferraro's head, noting the swift resignation of an Obama aide last week after her remark that Clinton was a 'monster' sparked howls of outrage from the New York senator's team. [...]
"Clinton said only that she did 'not agree' with Ferraro's portrayal of Obama as the privileged recipient of affirmative action, and found it 'regrettable' that supporters might resort to personal attacks."
This after Clinton purportedly tried to portray herself as the Democratic frontrunner by "magnanimously" offering Obama the Vice Presidency when in fact the two are still in a dead heat, and previous manipulative stunts such as darkening photos of Obama to make it appear his skin tone is blacker than it really is, allegedly.
With nasty political personal attacks like this ~ speaking to nothing like real issues or policy positions, illustrating only that Hillary herself will do ANYTHING to win~ from a Democrat, who needs the GOP?
Next we'll be hearing from the Clinton camp that they're doing Obama a favor--after all, it's what everybody's really thinking, isn't it--shouldn't Obama toughen up and face it now?
But Clinton doesn't really want to go there ~ the same unspoken "bigotry of soft expectations" applies to women who try to enter the traditional white male citadels of politics, law and other professions, and in fact, the Obama rejoinder (which does address substantive issues of experience upon which Hillary herself campaigns) is true--she's been in the White House as a First Lady, which is not to be confused with the actual Chief Executive. She attempts to amalgamate that experience with her experience in Congress, and unfortunately overreaches.

Second Stupid Human Trick of the Day:




Speaking of white males with power pennies to burn, your Demon has to note the unfortunate fact that a great many of them can't keep their peckers in their pockets, and it seems there's an even more unfortunate correlation of power to their pitiful underestimations of the political consequences if they're discovered ~ and I don't mind noting that this is and has been true on both sides of the aisle, though conservatives today aren't mentioning that little nugget of info.
Wall Street is in a state of bliss today to learn that its nemesis Eliot Spitzer has been outed as a frequenter of prostitutes. As a woman myself, along with untold numbers of women everywhere, I know what kind of pain the male human proclivity for whoring (not to mention the talent for blaming it on the objects of their unchaste desires) causes, but I'm not of the opinion that it's a matter of great public interest in and of itself, unless of course it involves children, people who are incapacitated, sex slaves or any right-wing televangelist who's been caught in said acts and cried in public in the past 10 years.

Unfortunately, like crusaders before him, Spitzer saw fit to apply a standard of morality to others that he couldn't uphold himself. It's one thing if the whoring was more than tangentially related to his famous investigations on Wall Street (did captains of industry indeed throw money at call girls and prostitutes, and in so doing, adversely affect the companies' interests), along with the more usual forms of raiding consumers and investors of money that they otherwise would have realized?)
The latter is a justifiable and worthy goal, especially now, when disparaties of wealth are insane and cannibal capitalism under Bushco has driven the world economy into the ground. However, Spitzer is learning, like political elites from both parties before him, that it is ever advisable to remove the log from one's eyes before complaining of logs in others.'

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2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Peter Sagal's comments on Talk of the Nation on Tuesday cast some light on this situation, I think.

I will try to paraphrase them;

There are people who reach a point of wealth and power such that, for all practical purposes, there are no rules that apply to them.

Spitzer spent his career investigating those people. Sagal thinks he might have gotten curious, then seduced, by the idea of what it was like to be one of them.

4:45 PM  
Blogger Demon Princess said...

Hey Frank,

Thanks-I didn't hear that show, but it does make a sort of sense. What is "normal" has a lot to do with what peers think is "normal," and we shouldn't forget that although Spitzer had humble immigrant beginnings, his father amassed a fortune, and Eliot himself attended the most elite East Coast schools. He was at once an outsider AND an insider.

Newsweek also takes a swing at explaining Spitzer's behavior in terms of "risk-seeking personalities," whereby risks have to escalate over time to get the same thrill, which would also be true of a lot of people in the Wild West that Wall Street (and politix generally) have become recently.

10:25 PM  

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