The more we hear about Officer Randall Simmons, the greater our sense of loss seems to be.
Here’s a mournful but very sweet story that’s running in the Daily Breeze today.
And here’s what the LA Times said this morning.
After that, if you need a leavening moment on an entirely different subject, for once Joel Stein is worth reading as he wrenches ObamaPhelia limb from limb (figuratively speaking).
I’m off to teach at UCI. Back tonight.
An example of a true hero – Officer Randall Simmons
In the Arms of an Angel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AewmlG6YQkk
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I have to say that I’m sick of this “Obamamania” bullshit when I have to suffer the pure bile emanating from Hillary Hysterics like Taylor Marsh, Paul Krugman, Erica Jong and the rest. I feel sorry for Joel Stein if he thinks the “Yes We Can” video is embarrassing. And I feel sorry for his mother if she herself is so cynical and vapid as to compare Barack Obama to Peter Sellers in “Being There.” That’s stupid. Pathetically stupid, yet it’s a meme that’s able to make it into some columnist for the LA Times (not that their bar is very high.) Obama has a substantive agenda that is (at least) the equal of Hillary’s. He’s also not lying to people and claiming that HE is the vessel of their hopes and dreams and will WORK HARD to realize it all for them in a nasty, dirty system that he’s spent 35 years getting to know so that FINALLY he can change it. He challenges his supporters to become part of the change process. If you actually listen and aren’t so emotionally detached, cynical or technocratic in disposition (like a certain increasingly demagogic Princeton economist and Times columnist who has taken to attacking Obama for proposing to raise taxes on upper incomes to help keep SS solvent or not lying about threatening mandates as being the key to making health care coverage “universal” rather than reshaping the system FIRST so people at all levels could actualy afford to buy in), Obama promises less than Hillary does in being the “key” to progressive social change. Hillary harkens back to LBJ rather than Martin Luther King, but nobody in their right mind could possibly believe that LBJ would have been able to pass progressive legislation without social movements pushing him. Obama is asking his supporters to help build that pressure from outside the Oval Office that is necessary for ANY president, including himself, to actually enact progressive legislation. Without that kind of synergy we get…another Clinton. I’m not prediciting that there’s any guaranteed success coming from the Obama camp, but at least it’s not a shrug of the shoulders and a “No they can’t” coming from some over-the-hill old gal (Joel’s “therapist” mom) who thinks she’s seen it all. I could really care less about such folks. They’re about as relevant to social progress as one more Xanax prescription or their afternoon martini. To aggressively rob the young of any possibility of “hope” for a new wave of social change is irresponsible and, frankly, more than a bit shameful. This old gal could use some “therapy” and not the dismal, formulaic brand of bromides that are apparently her bread and butter.
I have to say, in fairness, that Stein actually does an excellent job of metaphorically nailing what’s so dispiriting about the Hillaryoids and the candidate herself – Another predictable, deflating and ultimately dismal phone call with your mother in Florida reminding you that she knows better. The only worse albeit appropriate = metaphor would be likening the whole tenor of the Hillary campaign to pharmaceutical ads for post-menopausal women and erectile dysfunction.
Reg, as you know from my posts, I’m very much in the Obama camp for all the reasons you articulate. And I think the “Yes We Can” video is absolutely brilliant. I can’t watch it without crying. Still.
Joel Stein nearly always irritates the sh*t out of me. I think the Times is wasting space with his column. But I thought this one piece was very clever in that he lays out his usual it’s-so-SO-cool-not-to-have-feelings-or-convictions attitude, then in the end knocks it down with his response to Obama’s authenticity. I still don’t particularly like Stein, but I did like this column.
(And yeah, the mother phone call was pitch perfect. I always get the feeling that Hillary supporters are lecturing me.)
I have to admit I skimmed through it first and caught all of the “buzz words” that bug me in dealing with too many Obama critics and on reading it a second time I, as noted above, thought that at the core of it he’d caught the “flavor” of Hillary with almost deadly accuracy (although he couldn’t really drive the stake in Mom.)
As I said over at Marc’s today I’m getting tired of the parsing as the Clinton/Obama psychodrama is parsing two very similiar candiates. Both are corporate Dems who drew support for the FIRE Brigrade (Finance, Real Estate, Insurance) types and Obama’s disinterest in his Senatorial duties are truly amazing (missed votes, no hearings in his SubCommittee etc.) plus a set of domestic advisors that could be DLC spokespeople (Am I the only one here who knows that his acknowleged mentor in the Senate was Joe Lieberman?)
Nevertheless I’m going with Obama for one reason. While Hillary can win, she has too much baggage and the emnity of the media. Its unfair but then so is life. McCain is a media darling so his baggage always gets checked. With Hil 51 – 49 is the best we can do.
But McCain, for reasons that I cannot comprehend, has decided that this campaign must be a referendum on the Iraq war. And here Obama can destroy him. AP/IPSOS has a poll showing 50% of the respondents will use those “Stimulus” checks to pay off debets while 70% think the bad economic times are somewhat or mainly caused by the war. You can’t look this gift in the teeth and Barack is also a media daarling – the Great and the Good would be tarred and feathered by their kids if they did otherwhise.
So the possibility of a real blow out with coattails exists. Obama – Richardson in ’08!
(Richardson provides foreign policy experience, a strong anti-Iraq stance, PLus he’s a latino!)
Obama may have missed some votes, but at least he didn’t show up to vote FOR Kyl-Lieberman. And if Hillary’s cynical, calculating vote for the war and inability to admit error over it doesn’t make you wretch, maybe her voting against the landmine ban does the trick for you. Obama voted for the ban.
The notion that there’s no more than a dimes worth of difference between Hillary and Obama doesn’t hold water. One candidate is a pure product of the corporate wing of the Democratic party, and herself served on the board of Walmart for years without so much as a squeak about their extreme anti-union policies while the other comes from the tradition of grass-roots organizing. This is what animates Obama’s lofty “you” rhetoric in appealing to his supporters to take an active role in “change” – no matter how nebulous that concept might become in the context of a presidential campaign – and Hillary claims the SHE is the saavy workaholic who’ll handle your business for you. As I’ve said “elsewhere”, just on the issue of health care, “hiring” Hillary Clinton to reform the health care system is like inviting Donald Rumsfeld back to clean up the Iraq mess. We’ve been down that road before and massive incompetence has been demonstrated. As for the DLC, Obama has rejected alliance with them and Hillary is the head of their most important task force. Obama and Clinton may be “similiar” on paper, but there haven’t been two candidates more dissimiliar in what they convey to the country or in approaching their political message in my memory. Obama asks you to engage with him in addressing problems. Hillary’s asking you to hire her so she can continue to do what she’s been doing for 30-odd years. Not even close. Personally, the more I see of the Clintons in this campaign, the less I want to see of their tired personas and politics in the future. If Dems choose these folks, we deserve our inevitably dismal fate as GOP-lite.
I’ll add that my two biggest criticisms of Obama are that he didn’t break with establishment Dems like Hillary and support Ned Lamont in the ’06 Connecticut primary (he supported him in the general) and that he voted for the energy bill (which was probably a typical farm state sop to corn ethanol, a totally counterproductive “answer” to our oil ills.) On raising the social security cap and on not putting “mandates” at the center of (alleged) “universal” health care reform he’s absoluely right, both politically and on merits. He’s also absolutely right in his “reaching beyond partisanship” rhetoric – which is strategically brilliant and undermines the GOP’s “basemongering”.
I’ll vote for him Reg. I did vote for him here. Why isn’t that enough for you?
We demand complete submission to The Master. (Haven’t you read about it on Taylor Marsh’s blog ?)
Well report me to the Holy Office of the Inquistion and be done with it!
Oprah is currently scheduling your session with Dr. Phil.
Does that mean I can do with a group with Brittney?
You guys dicuss Iraq a lot less frequently, lately. Doesn’t EVERYTHING have to do with Iraq?
See my blog – I know you read it.