Author: Stagger Lee

I’m cutting down from my original 5000-word post to get to this, so here goes:

Continue reading “Abridged”

Imagine you support a football team that is really a good team, near and dear, that just hasn’t managed to get over the hump. And then, all of a sudden, they’re in the Super Bowl. You’re thrilled beyond belief, you’re so close to the championship you can scream…but they’re playing the games at the rate of one play per day. No tickets, no TV, no radio, no internet, and all you know about what’s happening is what the players mention as they come back to the bench.

What would you do? I’ll tell you what you’d do: you’d be a nervous wreck for, like, two months.

But that’s the thing about sports: you derive an immense amount of joy just from being happy for the guys who are actually out there winning the championship.

So I’ve had occasion to do a lot of reflecting lately. Figuring out how you’re going to cope with your job, your family and your future will do that to you. And I’ve noticed that I’m starting to remember a lot of things I had forgotten about, and vividly at that.

One of those things is Led Zeppelin.

Yes, I have always known that Led Zep is at the pinnacle of rock, and they were all over our car stereos twenty years ago as we first abused our new licenses, and I bought Mothership as soon as it hit iTunes, and “Good Times Bad Times” was sort of the unofficial anthem of the Vanderbilt team that ran riot through the top 25 right up until they shat the bed in the NCAA tournament. But flipping through some of those tracks tonight, I am really remembering for the first time in a long, long, long time just how awesome the music is. And I close my eyes and there I am, pushing a Monte Carlo with 125,000 miles on it, glass tops in the trunk, marveling at how General Motors can built a 5-liter V-8 that only turns over 160 horsepower (I get damn near that with better torque out of a 5-cylinder now), wind whipping through a full head of hair because I’m still only 16 and I have redneck fringe, jacket sleeves jammed up past my elbows and two aces in the band of my hat in the front seat (two down, two to go, four aces means state championship), constantly glancing down at that blue sparkly thing on my hand that means I’m going to be a senior shortly, and Black Dog cranked to the stars, Hey hey mama say the way you move, gonna make you sweat gonna make you groove, and I’m just utterly rockin’ out and it’s great to be alive, and what’s with that horn honking, and–

–and whoops, that’s not a Monte Carlo burning down I-65, that’s a Rabbit stopped at a green light at the corner of Stevens Creek and DeAnza, and the people behind me are pissed.

Whoops.

* Family’s always trying, isn’t it?

* The more I see and hear of him, the more I am convinced that Joe Biden is going to be the Charles Barkley to Obama’s MJ: don’t dare get between him and a microphone, and you’re going to be cringing waiting for him to drop a clanger, but the potential entertainment value is through the roof. It ought to be an interesting week.

* I still despise him and think he’s a jackass, but Kobe Bryant gets a pass this week. What he did overnight Saturday was incredible to watch – as was Dwayne Wade’s effort. Seriously, when you can bring Dwayne Wade off the bench, you should be unloading whoop ass by the case. But anybody who thought a bunch of NBA stars couldn’t come together, play as a team, subvert 12 egos for one goal – well, these guys looked like a million damn dollars and a bunch of them are talking about wanting to come back in 2012. Lock and load and find some cover.

* There was zippy fog in the city yesterday. My plan had been to use the effects of the fog to offset the effects of the company, and yet? No fog. I am bitter and I want a refund. That lunkhead Austrian robot from the future has a LOT to answer for this year.

* “John McCain was a POW!” is the new “Did you know Jerome Bettis is from Detroit?”

* Whatever you may have thought of Margaret Thatcher in the past, this may be the saddest thing I’ve ever read:

Thatcher’s condition has deteriorated so much that she forgets that her husband, Denis Thatcher, died in 2003, her daughter said in a memoir that is to be published next month and was serialized over the weekend in the Mail on Sunday newspaper.

“I had to keep giving her the bad news over and over again,” Carol Thatcher wrote. “Every time it finally sank in that she had lost her husband of more than 50 years, she’d look at me sadly and say ‘Oh’ as I struggled to compose myself. ‘Were we all there?’ she’d ask softly.”

* I didn’t post that much about the Olympics this year. Every time they come round, I tend to think about where I was four years ago and what was happening with my life. And while I’m remembering 2004 (housesitting, early days at the last job, still disoriented from the move), I’m thinking just as much of 1988, when the Olympics didn’t start until school was back in and I was starting my junior year…and having the kind of start to the year that normally gets listed in history books as “The Gathering Storm” or something like that.

* Leona Lewis is all right but no Robert Plant. But Jimmy Page is still the Death Star. Every hair-metal swill ever made collapses prostrate in fear before the opening chords of “Whole Lotta Love.”

* Coffee makes everything better. However, the girl behind the counter looks at you funny if you reply to “Room for cream?” with “No, but room for whiskey would be great.”

* My Buddy Vince Says [redacted for NDA]

Finis.

…I’m still not convinced, but I’m willing to go wait-and-see. It just reminds me too much of ’88.

Meanwhile, the Medium Lobster breaks it down much better than I ever could. I still think Galactus, Eater of Worlds would have been a good call. Obama/Galactus? Tell me you wouldn’t pull THAT lever.

“A Vice-President cannot help you, he can only hurt you.”

-Richard Nixon

This was a Fize.

(more past the link, or beneath the jump)

Continue reading “Bad call.”

The WineRack may be the world’s top intersection of devious and genius.

I am deeply, deeply. truly sorry for using a load-bearing pun during the lunch hour.

Also, I am apparently six years old.

The narrowing of the race stems from mid-July, right around the time Steve Schmidt’s influence as the new showrunner for Team McCain began to take hold. That’s when the whole “Celebrity” theme first emerged, to be clubbed over and over without reticence, and the constant exposure of the new memes (and some whipped up out of whole cloth by media whores* ) is taking points off the front-runner.

But the problem for McCain is that the numbers remain pegged at 45%. Looking at how the percentages have changed, it doesn’t appear that the Rove Schmidt offense has accomplished much beyond coaxing some wavering Rs back into the fold. And if you’re running the show for the R’s, you know that number’s never going to climb by much. The economy’s in the shitter, Iraq’s going nowhere, Osama Bin Laden’s still alive, and the incumbent Republican President is more popular than herpes but less than the clap. By rights, if you’re running the Rs, you’re trying to make sure the most padded part of your ass is what gets kicked and hope nobody holds it against you next time out.

And yet.

For Schmidt, it’s back to the Rove offense, because at this point there’s nothing else to run. If the GOP is going to win, it won’t be on issues or on the record of the last eight years, it’ll be because enough people got turned off to Obama to skip out on voting – and the GOP base got whipped into enough of a frenzy to come out in droves. Basically, Obama has to be made radioactive, which is why you’re seeing all the “celebrity” stuff. Obama is for movie stars and shallow college girls. Real Americans wouldn’t vote for that. Plus, there are enough other people down South who can pump out the racist stuff; no need for the campaign to do it.

And yet.

Basically, for this to work, Bob Barr has to be a non-entity, Ralph Nader’s army of retards** needs to be bigger than ever, the Obama ground forces need to completely flop on their registration and get-out-the-vote operation, and the political press needs to roll over and play dead. Right now, the only piece of the puzzle in place is the press (and maybe Barr).

And the big fear, if I’m running the campaign, is that this is the rope-a-dope. That Obama’s gone on vacation, phoned it in for two weeks, spent all that time on the beach watching Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt – and next week, he’s going to have a captive audience, the very forum that made his name four years ago, and a switch from “primary” to “general election,” which means the odometer resets on that whole arsenal of donors who kicked in $50 million just last month. By Labor Day, he’ll have his convention bump, a fresh start, and the promise of as much as $150 million down the stretch to sell the dream. If I’m Steve Schmidt, the thing that makes me bolt upright in bed at 3 AM is the thought that this was the best shot, and all it got was a statistical tie – and in six weeks, it’ll be back to a 150-EV loss.

Needless to say, that’s not much of a future. So if I’m running the GOP campaign, I’m going for a “shoot the hostage” play: on Thursday morning, as everyone gets ready for Obama’s big speech, I’m rolling out Joe Lieberman as the VP nominee for the GOP.

This does a couple of things. For one, it ensures that Obama has to share the headlines for the rest of the week, possibly kneecapping the post-convention bounce. For another, it provokes wave after wave of orgasmic rapture in the DC punditocracy; the idea that the brave political maverick has reached across the aisle for his VP – and not for just anybody but another maverick, the one who was the Dems’ VP only eight years ago – well, the magical unity pony will be in the barn, and if there’s one thing the press cannot help but salivate over, it’s the magical unity pony.

Now I know what you’re saying: “You’re crazy! The Republicans won’t take a northeastern Jewish liberal as their VP!” And I say: that’s where you’re wrong. Who was the first Democrat off the blocks to bemoan the perfidy of Bill Clinton during impeachment? Who was the first to cast aspersion on Hollywood and the video-game industry for their lack of morality? Who put up a matador defense down the stretch in 2000? And more to the point, who’s the most gung-ho advocate of subduing the Middle East by force? If McCain’s going to win this thing, it’s not going to be on any “culture of life,” it’s not going to be on anything economic, it’s going to be on the big-stick approach to international affairs and nothing else. And Lieberman, as the only Likud Senator, is a reliable advocate for the big stick.

Besides, remember all the crocodile tears about how conservatives would rather vote for Hillary than McCain? They’ll get over it. They always get over it, because the constant refrain at the end of the day is always “the other guys are worse.” The people who constantly complain about having to vote for the lesser of two evils? I’ll give you a hint: they’re never Republicans.

So that’s the move: McCain-Lieberman. It also pays off in one other way: it forces the Democrats to basically drop the penny as far as Lieberman caucusing with them. Making him a full-on Republican dumps the Senate back to 50-50, and irrespective of how much business the Senate is transacting for the rest of the year (not much) or what kind of provisions are already in place to handle a reversion to a split house (hint: not worth the paper they’re written on, if push comes to shove), it creates a cauldron of merry mayhem at a time when the Ds can ill-afford to have a flaming shitbag on their back stoop. Think “the Democrats are clinging to power when they don’t have a majority” and “Why is Obama not voting on the reorganization of the Senate?” and remember that the Congress has an approval rating below herpes right now.

I’m not saying it’s a perfect plan, or even a good one. What I am saying is that this is the kind of year where the GOP stands to take it right in the ass, and the only way to prevent a complete disaster is to do something to radically change the game. In this case, Trek fans***, my choice is simple: torpedo the damned freighter.

* Not gender-specific, but a shout-out to an old blog called Media Whores Online which did a good job pummeling the press for the way it bent over backwards to try to prevent conservatives saying mean things about them. Besides, specifically calling Cokie Roberts a dumb whore would, I think, be an unfair slander against the good name of whores. Whores built San Francisco and don’t you forget it.

** I’m not kidding. If you vote for Nader in 2008, you are a mental defective. This is not opinion, or rage, or abuse, it is a fact, and it is indisputable.

*** Not much of a Trek fan myself, but I needed something other than a Keanu Reeves movie that would let me employ the “shoot the hostage” angle. Look, it’s 1 in the morning and I’m trying to rage myself to sleep, whaddya want from me? Besides, you just read 1300 words of this drivel, so who’s the donkey now, wise guy?