Are my eyes really blue?

Bill Simmons, during his NFL preview column:

Chicago fans have been wondering why I dumped them and adopted the Packers as my NFC North team and Super Bowl pick du jour. It came down to one thing: I didn’t want to root for Jay Cutler. Has he had a likable moment yet? This year will be his coming-out party as the most despised player in football. Every time they show him on the sidelines, he looks like a pissed-off trust-fund kid who can’t believe the valet scratched his Escalade hybrid. And you know what? He makes the league more fun. I like rooting against him the same way I liked rooting against Rick Barry, Bill Laimbeer and the Iron Sheik. We need more Jay Cutlers in sports. Not everyone was meant to be liked.

You know what? I endorse this 100%. #6 needs to start wearing his sunglasses all the time, even on the sideline of games. He needs to start calling himself “Hollywood Jay Cutler.” He needs to play up the whole Vanderbilt angle (despite being from Santa Claus, IN) and be the spoiled punk-ass rich brat who nevertheless has undeniable talent can throw the ball through a battleship. He needs, in short, to be a heel.

It would be the 80s WWF all over again. Come on, it’s the Chicago Bears, it’s going to be 80s anyway. He could be Jim McMahon turned up to 11 and sprinkled with glitter and cocaine. Seriously, if Jay Cutler goes down this road, I will pile all my Redskins S in a big heap and light it on fire and become a 100% Chicago Bears fan.

(And if he wants to throw to Earl Bennett every down, well, I have Easy Earl on my fantasy roster, so let’s go!)

You know, there really is something to be said for getting away from it all. I spent a long weekend down the coast earlier this summer, followed last week by a long road trip that included quality time out on the Oregon coast and in upstate Washington state – hell, about as upstate as you can get without a passport, and in fact, you have to have one anyway because you can’t get there on land without crossing borders. In short, I have spent a good amount of time in places with little enough Internet access and if anything less cell signal.

And honestly, that’s fine. I have been surrounded by fog, mist, cloud cover, marine layer, weather that basically looks at August and laughs and demands a jacket anyway. I have walked out on cold, cold, COLD beaches that have rocks as often as sand and where you would have to be insane to consider sunbathing. I have set up in the blogger’s pit at the beach house, looking out at the sun setting over the Pacific, and spent the whole time reading and writing rather than surfing and watching.

I was fine missing out on the email. I was fine missing out on the social networking, for the most part. I was certainly not sorry to skip the RSS feeds, and the steady stream of bullshit made worse by a Net-enabled world. I actually read text from a book (albeit on an iPhone, often as not) and got through a whole bunch of socially unredeeming but generally amusing stuff. (I would bet real money that “Harry Turtledove” is a series of shell scripts connected to emacs, but I finished the Timeline-161 series anyway.)

I know I’ve said before that I can get by for a week with only the iPhone. I could have gotten by for 10 days with only the iPhone if not for my fantasy football draft – as it is, if you set aside the draft and occasional blogwork, I only pulled on it two or three times the whole way. There’s still no acceptable way to use the iPhone for long-form text entry. But I could scale it down even more. Give me one of my basic phones for emergency contact and maybe the Twitter feeds of my friends (the promotional feeds I can skip), a good stout notebook and a couple of pens, all the Economists and New Yorkers I haven’t gotten through yet, and maybe half a dozen books, and I’m good to go for the long weekend. In a real pinch, give me the iPod shuffle with all the podcasts I’m behind on, and I’ll use that on the trip down or something.

There’s a lot of bullshit out there. Sometimes, instead of trying to reason with it (or add to it), the best thing to do is punt and go have some time for yourself to get your head together. And amazingly, I did the whole thing without pulling out one cigar. Don’t ask me to total up the coffee, though…

Van Jones had to go. Period, paragraph. The whys and wherefores of September 11, 2001 are pretty straightforward, and “asleep at the switch” does not equal “knew date, time and details and still punted.” Basically, if you subscribe to any shade of 9/11-Truther-ism, your place in the political world is out on the curb passing out mimeographed flyers.

Yes, it’s one little slip. I don’t care. So is being caught in an alley getting a Jeff Smoker from a sophomore coed. Either way, you’re out.

Obviously I don’t care if he called Republicans assholes. Let’s face it, being an asshole is one of the core values of being a Republican in the age of Beck, Hannity and Limbaugh. Being an asshole is as important to being a GOPer as being a chickenshit is to being in the TV news business.

Eat shit and die in a fire, you fucking retarded hillbilly.

I thought that the “death panel” shit was the stupidest thing to come out of anyone’s mouth in the last month or so. Then, last week, I heard somebody say that Boise State’s win over Oregon puts them in the driver’s seat for a BCS berth. To which I can only say…

WHAT IS YOUR FUCKING DAMAGE?

What does the rest of Boise State’s schedule look like? Let’s see:

Home to: Miami of Ohio, UC-Davis (!!!), San Jose State, Idaho, Nevada and New Mexico State.

Away at: Fresno State, Bowling Green, Tulsa, Hawaii, Louisiana Tech, and Utah State.

There’s not another ranked team on the schedule. There’s not another BCS conference team on the schedule. If you want to punch Boise State’s ticket for New Year’s based on the assumption that beating their best opponent of the year means they’ll run the table, and therefore deserve a seat on the starship, then you’re entitled to your opinion.

BUT.

If you argue that case, then you must now concede the point: strength of schedule has no meaning. Which we knew anyway, when the BCS system itself reverted to a system based on the votes of corrupt coaches and random dilettantes. But Boise State is on ESPN or ESPN2 SIX TIMES this year. They have somehow managed to milk a miracle win by two gimmick plays and the seat of their pants (over the most overrated and bed-shit-tastic team of the 2000s in the Chokelahoma Sooners) into the idea that they are somehow America’s Scrappy Uncrowned People’s Champion and if only given the opportunity to play with the big boys would somehow put the smack down on entire conferences.

Horseshit.

Boise State might get by in the Big Least. Every other BCS conference in the country would send them limping home in shambles by the middle of October. Just imagining them sliding through, say, Cal-USC-Oregon State or Florida-Georgia-Tennessee or even Maryland-GaTech-BC…well, forget it, Johnny, it’s not gonna happen. The usual suspects will whine “but nobody will play the Boise States of the world! Nobody will give them a chance! They’re all scared!” I’m here to tell you the truth: there is no profit in playing Boise State. People in Alabama don’t want to see the Tide play Boise State, they want to see them play Texas and Georgia Tech and Miami and Penn State and Nebraska. If you beat Boise State, big whoop, everyone expects you to beat a team from the WAC and never mind the ranking. If you lose to them, you’ve just shot your undefeated season in the ass, and for what? Do you think Oklahoma’s going to get a pass because they lost to BYU? Do you think people will say “Well, they did lose to a ranked team from a conference with three ranked teams in the top 25 to start the year?” No – what they will say is that Texas and Colt McCoy are now safely in front of the “Big” 12 and Heisman races and that OK/Bradford are no longer in the mix.

Because ultimately that’s what it boils down to. It doesn’t matter who you play, it doesn’t matter how you play, all that you need is plenty of press coverage and the big shiny “and 0” at the end of your record. Boise State is now in line to have that. If you’re going to set them up in Tempe or Miami or New Orleans as a result, then you WILL admit the point: who you beat for the “and 0” is of no consequence so long as you have it.

…a plant if you know who that is, and no it’s not Willie.

I’m on vacation. My evil twin the Scalawag is moblogging on Tumblr. See you after Labor Day.

Newt Gingrich should have retired in the summer of 1995 and gone directly to Biloxi. Or Atlantic City, I don’t know if there was casino gambling in Biloxi by then. The Congressman from GA-6 caught aces on the flop, the turn, and the river – to wit:

* Tremendous public discontent in 1992, to the point of 19% vote for a third party candidate.

* Democratic President elected with only 43% of the popular vote. **

* A Republican Party so long out of power in the House of Representatives that they were willing to hand the controls to this maniac from down South, at a time when the GOP was still not a lead-pipe lock in that part of the world.

* A groundswell of anti-incumbent sentiment going back at least one election cycle.

* A slew of retirements and open seats resulting from changes in the campaign finance laws that would have otherwise resulted in lawmakers giving up a windfall of campaign cash upon leaving office.

* A talk-radio world just coming into its own, providing a megaphone to rile up the faithful and rally the troops.

Newt made a bet: that a guy who wouldn’t last two weeks in a serious Presidential campaign could shift the balance of power to the Congress, and within the Congress to the House, and effectively make himself Prime Minister of the United States. It was a preposterous longshot, especially for anyone who knew APSA’s 1950 treatise on the subject and the institutional difficulties it would present. But he pulled it off.

Obviously, it didn’t last. He was in over his head, and had the misfortune to be up against one of the three greatest political communicators of the 20th century in American politics, and the era of Newt lasted about as long as it took Clinton to be re-elected. Ultimately, the Republican takeover of Congress would have one lasting legacy: providing a supine and compliant legislature to the second Bush administration, which had no room for any executive power not residing at 1600 Penn or the Naval Observatory.***

The Gingrich legacy, if you want to be precise, is in the Senate. Since Bob Dole left to run for President in 1996, the Republican leadership in the Senate has always been Southern – first Lott, then Frist, then McConnell. But Gingrich and his team also introduced measures to limit the impact of seniority, make some changes to how chairmen were picked – in short, took steps to make the Senate run more like the House. And it had an effect – of the current Senate, 53 of 99 have served less than two complete terms. You will probably never again see a Robert Byrd, a Strom Thurmond, a Ted Kennedy – somebody whose career is measured in generations rather than years, somebody with that kind of institutional memory. In fact, two-thirds of the Senate were only elected in the Gingrich era or later, including 25 of the 40 Republicans.

I feel like the worst kind of son of a bitch saying this, given how utterly critical it was in my last life – it’s sort of like pissing on the Magna Carta – but “Folkways of the U.S. Senate,” the seminal 1959 article by Donald Matthews that is to Congressional studies what V.O. Key is to Southern studies, is only of interest as a historical document now. The modern United States Senate is a louder, prouder, more obnoxious version of the House of Representatives – and at least in the lower house, the Speaker has the power to make the trains run on time. I take no pride at all in saying this, as a former Senate Youth (1990) and former acolyte (however briefly) of Bruce Oppenheimer, but it’s got to be said: the title of “world’s largest open-air kindergarten” no longer belongs in the south wing of the Capitol.

* I hope that if she ever sees this, Dr. Barbara SInclair can find it in her heart to forgive me for aping the title of her landmark book on the Senate, which I am not worthy to carry into the toilet for reading material.

** Ah, but how much did Bush the Elder have? The people who went around crowing about “only 43%” were annoying as hell simply because yes, it’s less than a majority, but it’s more than your guy got. I think that was largely sour grapes at the idea that they should have won if not for Ross Perot – and on that score, I will say that they have a legit beef, but there’s no blue ribbon for should’ve.

*** Look, if you still think Unca Dick didn’t have final veto around there, I don’t know what else to tell you.

Whenever the topic of death comes up, I always think that the experience of losing someone close to you is something that plunges you into a deep dark place – and the person that surfaces is never the person who went under.

For Ted Kennedy, too much of his life was shaped by death. One hopes that he finally found refuge from all the ghosts.

With him goes virtually the last fighter from an era of pre-Vietnam muscular liberalism – an era of happy cold warriors who saw nothing wrong with drawing lines in Berlin, or Cuba, or Southeast Asia, while bringing the same sort of crusader instinct to the home front on things like racism and poverty. There was an age when people believed that you could literally do anything and everything – heal the sick, make the lame to walk and the blind to see, walk on the moon, make the poor at least moderately comfortable if not reasonably affluent, have black and white hold hands in harmony and drive the Reds out of the peace-loving nations of the world.

At some point, we ran up against our limitations as a country, and in too many ways and too many places, we somehow decided that if we can’t succeed, we shouldn’t even try. Ted Kennedy was a memento mori of those limits, but he was also something like the ghost of a guilty conscience – a reminder that there was a time when possibility was endless and America’s goals and dreams weren’t measured out in feasible expectations and half-loaves.

I wrote a few days ago that Ted Kennedy would probably have been gone from the Senate years ago had some sort of national health care passed. Something, anything – full-on NHS-style socialized medicine, national single-payer, some sort of pool-plus-mandate-plus-subsidy hybrid, anything, just as long as every American could see a doctor when they needed one without feeding their entire worldly livelihood into a chipper-shredder and going bankrupt. It’s probably just as well that the cancer got to him first, because seeing the dream deferred yet again after almost five decades of trying…well, watch your life’s work run on the rocks for fifty years and see how well you take it.

There’ll be time enough to grill later, but for now, house rules state that everybody gets a free pass across the river. Hopefully the boatman brought the Chivas.

It’s sunny out now, brighter than at any point all weekend. For somebody who gets reverse-SAD and is actively depressed by the heat and the humidity and the direct sunlight, this is not a good move. It’s been a decade or so since the beach meant warm sunny weather and bodysurfing and the like – living in close proximity to San Francisco, Half Moon Bay, Pacifica and the like has led me to think that cool and overcast with “marine layer” is the default state of the ocean. And honestly, I’m really OK with that. I would much rather see the surf from under a jacket with a bracing dose of Scotch whisky to hand, with the cool comfort of sea mist drifting in with the sunset.*

But at the moment, the sun has broken through the clouds, there are sparkles on the breakers, and the blogging pit at the beach house is starting to get uncomfortably warm with a good three hours of sun left and the light streaming directly through the windows. Not really the desired result, but then, I guess you can’t have everything. I confess this beats the hell out of the old style of beach – the chaos of the Redneck Riviera, the endless plethora of airbrushed T-shirts and salt-water taffy and go-kart racing. The quiet-solitude approach to beach vacationing suits me infinitely better, which I guess is a testament to the desire to get into 5-space and make everything else disappear for a while until I can recharge.

Pace those endless drives of the previous post, I’m wondering whether the prolonged road trip served the same purpose in the old days. Just me, a car, a radio and some terrible junk food, and a long way to go. Problem is, in the old days, it was an easy way to wind up too much in my own head and spiral out into all manner of unhealthy mental digressions. These days, the most driving I ever do is on autumn Sunday afternoons when I decide that the gas burned driving around listening to Sam and Sonny calling the game on satellite radio is ultimately going to be less expensive than heading down to Dan Brown’s to watch the big screen and wash away the misery in cut-rate Guinness.**

If I had the money, retiring to the coast somewhere in the vicinity of HMB and parts north would be ideal, especially if I could retire today. I may have to settle for visiting the city in the Sunset or Richmond and parts west to get my fog fix, though…I don’t think I can afford to quit work right now.

* At this point the evidence of my ethnicity should be insurmountable.

** Seriously, how much proof do you people want?

What happens when your entire life as you know it is blown up and completely replaced within four months with one you never could have conceived of? I’ll give you a hint – it’s a tad bit disorienting…

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