That’s It! Sarah Palin, Get The Hell Out Of My Living Room!

TV personalities are invited into my living room. If I like them, I might grace them with my viewership and make my one woman contribution to their ratings. I might make it a point to watch a show regularly, if it appeals to me. I might even purchase episodes or DVDs. I’m even fussy about my news broadcasts because some anchors are just too damn annoying. If something isn’t entertaining to me for whatever reason, so long. I’m like Luke Skywalker and the remote is my light saber – I will use the force.

But it doesn’t always work.

Try as I might, I can’t seem to avoid the Kardashian sisters completely. They’re just everywhere. I am happy to say I don’t know much about them, but I can tell you their names and probably which are married and other useless bullfunky like that. They’re inescapable. Like football. I’m not a fan football in the NFL sense, preferring the football that actually involves a foot coming into regular contact with the ball, but I can still tell you who won the last Super Bowl. Also, because I was born in America and went to high school, I know the basic rules of the game. Some people and things are just like that. Last year, whether you wanted to or not, you got to know more than enough about John and Kate Gosselin as the nation watched their marriage crumble while the reality television cameras rolled on. In the world of politics, everybody heard all about South Carolina governor Mark Sanford and his Argentinean “soul mate” and saw John Edwards take Bill Clinton’s famous extramarital activities one step farther by insisting that he did not father a child with that woman – which was proven to be quite false indeed. We all heard so much about those events and everyone was saying “Enough! Please!” Well, I’ve reached my media saturation point with someone else.

Dear sweet God Almighty, am I so damn sick of Sarah Palin!

This begged for a picture, but I am in full Palin Overload at this point, so this is as close as I'm getting to putting her picture up here. Bullwinkle is my Sarah Palin Stand-In.

She’s highly opinionated, she’s rabidly conservative, and she is everywhere I look. She needs to get out of my living room – now – but changing the channel isn’t much help. She is mentioned in nearly every US news broadcast. (I’m so thankful we get BBC.) Turn on any Discovery Channel subsidiary and you’ll see the ad for her reality show at least six times in any given hour, so she’s effectively invaded Mythbusters. Browse the internet for anything political and there she is. Her tweets and facebook posts make news in a way many government officials who were actually elected to a particular office can only dream of. She even turned Dancing With the Stars, something else I avoid, into a battle between the right and the left. Did Bristol Palin get as far as she did because of who her mother is (because it’s certainly why she was on the show to begin with)? Did she lose because of all the Palin-haters out there furiously voting against her? Oh, the conspiracy theories abound. Then there is her position as an analyst for Fox News and her reality show fame. You can’t lob a political statement anywhere without it running into some issue she’s been pontificating about over the past few months. Add to that the fact that my own father thinks she’s the best human being to grace this planet since, I don’t know, Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, maybe Jesus, and it’s official – I’m trapped. The American political discourse has turned into Palin World, and I’m tired of it. I’m tired of her. Sarah Palin has been the center of national attention more times in two years than Dubya was in his eight years in the White House. Thankfully, I’m not alone in my Palin fatigue. It’s nice to know the entire country hasn’t gone mad, but it’s disappointing to think about how many people may very well be voting for “that reality show lady” in 2012.

And before people start to screech about my obvious liberal bias, let me point out that I haven’t even mentioned her views and where they differ from my own. This isn’t even about ideological stances, it’s about media overexposure. It’s like that song on the radio that you hear all day long and sooner or later you start to not like it. Sarah Palin is getting over-played fast and, with two years until the next election, I think she runs the risk of going overboard with the self promotion even with those who are more inclined to like her. Her strategy of inundating the country with all Palin all the time could backfire. She has high disapproval ratings as it is and in polls conducted by both Quinnipiac University and CNN she loses to Obama in a hypothetical election by eight points – more than his margin of victory against John McCain in 2008. That is not an insignificant thing to overcome and becoming a pop culture nuisance isn’t going to win people over, it’s just obnoxious.

One More Day ‘Till It’s Over

Am I the only one who is tired of the endless election cycle this country seems to be caught in? I remember when there used to be actual news reported on “the news” – you know, stories about people, places and events that are in no way connected to voting. Ah, those were the Good Ol’ Days! Now we’ll get a few weeks to recover and then the airwaves will be filled with who is or isn’t running for president. It’s maddening and I can’t help but wonder what we aren’t hearing about thanks to all this election coverage, speculation, pontificating, and general crappola. What are we missing? A lot, I’ll bet, but honestly, would you rather be knowledgable about the world or the Tea Party candidates chances of “taking the country back”. I’m not sure where they plan to take us to, by the way, but they’d like to take us somewhere.

My own predictions? Yes, the Democrats looks like they are about to get monumentally spanked. Yes, they will most likely lose the House of Representatives and the presumptive new Speaker of the House is John Boehner – the Man with the Tan. If they don’t take the Senate it will be very close. Angle will beat Reid in Nevada and O’Donnell will get pwned by Coons in Delaware and prove that just saying you hate DC and liberals and Obama and masturbation isn’t enough to get you elected – you still need at least an ounce of qualification. As for my state, I think Blumenthal will pull out a win, but I doubt that we’ll give up our 20 year love affair with Republican governors – a love affair that I don’t think has been good for us, but hey, what do I know?

I would be lying if I said that I was anxious to vote, or that I thought I would make a difference or anything else like that. I’m apathetic at best and totally unmoved by my choices. There isn’t even a candidate running that I am all that pleased to be voting against. I’m voting because about a month ago I wrote a post about how people shouldn’t complain about the outcome of elections they don’t bother voting in and I know that it will be impossible

for me to not fuss if we end up with two Republican senators misrepresenting my interests. In my opinion, if you campaign for a Republican, you are one. Someone just hasn’t told Joe Lieberman that yet. So I have to vote because otherwise I will be a hypocrite, which would be bad enough, but I know people who read this blog and when I see them they will call me out on not voting. So I will leave my home and go and vote – I’ll even vote for one of those two fools running for governor – in an effort to avoid hypocrisy.

I think that this election will be blown out of proportion by everyone. Democrats will ring their hands and cry “Woe are we” when everyone knows we work best under a bit of pressure. Plus when legislation eventually gets bogged down and fails, the Republicans will have some failures to deal with instead of just a list of things they don’t like. They will now have a stake in the outcome of things and that is a good thing. While the Democrats are “woe”ing, the Republicans will be crowing about how fabulous they are and how they are the voice of everything patriotic and they will ratchet up the anti-Democrat/Obama rhetoric. I won’t be surprised if we hear rumblings about finding a reason to impeach the President and everyone in his cabinet before Christmas. They will have forgotten that the only thing the public at large usually dislikes more than a sore loser in a sore winner.

And then there will be the Tea Party-ers and the pundits who love them. They will decree that this one election proves that the nation as a whole a ready to be “Tea Party-ized” back to simpler times. Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there were never “simpler times”. As much as we love to romanticize our history, people have always been the same. Their motives have not always been admirable. Their actions have sometimes been less than noble. Sometimes we were right as a nation and sometimes we weren’t. Also, most if not all of the issues we view as “modern-day”  have always been there in one form or another and have always been contentious. They won’t be disappearing any time soon and they aren’t as easily solved as some might think. Not everyone desires a return to the financial and social climate of the 1890’s or the 1950’s and even if everyone did, you can’t go backwards. The past can always be learned from, but never recreated. So, while I do think the tea party people will have gotten a few of their own into positions of power, I think they are in for a rude awakening as far as how much of their platforms they will actually be able to implement which doesn’t break my heart.

I could be wrong about all of this. Hate my predictions? Well, go vote and maybe something else will happen. Even if you are as apathetic as I am, go out and vote so you can complain about it later.

Why Vote?

Last night, for the second night in a row, in the name of being an informed citizen, I subjected myself to the debates for our state election. The night before it was the senatorial debate which was conducted mostly in that great New England style of intense hatred concealed by well-mannered smiles. Fangs were bared occasionally and then the gentility returned. Last night’s gubernatorial debate was a grudge match, a slug-fest with mics and three-piece suits and without the chair-throwing. I lost count of how many times the two called each other liars without actually saying the word “liar”. It was an annoying, tedious display which makes me wish there were another option out there. I was left with one question bouncing around my mind – with two candidates who I doubt could successfully figure out the way to the restroom, let alone how to sort out the state’s economy, why bother voting? I figured others might be faced with the same thought, so here’s my two cents.

Plenty of people can give good, solid reasons for voting. Some will talk about your patriotic duty as a freedom-loving American. Some can really get going, invoking the images of the service men and women currently deployed in harm’s way, the founding fathers, Abraham Lincoln, God, your mother, apple pie, Uncle Sam, and “Old Glory” to a point where you start looking for a large, robed choir to stand in rows, sway gently from side to side, and start humming the Battle Hymn of the Republic while a bald eagle flies overhead. Others will carry on about getting your message heard, taking a stand, and making DC hear your voice raised loud and proud about <insert volatile issue here>. After a good dose of that, you’re starting to think about marching around outside your town hall carrying a sign with your particular grievance aired on one side and “Fight the Power” emblazoned on the other. Well, while all of that stuff is important, I’m just not that intense. Perhaps I’m suffering from a deficit of patriotism or an overabundance of apathy, but the reason that’s drving me to haul my sorry carcass down to my local polling place, get in the little cubicle thing, and fill out a ballot is a little more pragmatic and a little less theatrical.

It is my personal belief that, if you choose not to vote, you have automatically forfeited your right to bitch about the outcome of that election. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people going on and on about what a terrible person Senator “X” or Representative “Y” is – they’re lairs, they’re criminals, they’re the child of Satan – and then, when somebody asks them who they voted for since their so upset, it turns out they didn’t vote at all. Usually there’s no good reason why they didn’t – just pure, unadulterated laziness. I hate that. I’m left wondering where all their passion was on election day and, even if their arguments for why the political figure in question should be incarcerated are perfectly valid – this is Connecticut after all – it all turns to noise pollution as far as I’m concerned when the complainer admits they never bothered to vote against their current nemesis. It’s hypocritical bull funky, I tell you! So, if you want the ability to firmly plant your forehead against your palm and bemoan the sheer idiocy of your elected officials, get thee to a polling place come November 2nd.

America, please, either get out and vote, or shut the hell up!

Thank you.

Old Enmities, New Violence

There was violence in the streets in Belfast yesterday. It was the same old grievances being acted upon by a new generation of fighters. I just don’t get it.

As a small child, I remember watching the news as Ireland and North Ireland fought bitterly on the screen. It really upset me because the place where the fighting was going on didn’t look very “foreign” to me. The buildings and homes looked just like areas of the city in which I lived at the time. The people didn’t look very “foreign” either with their jeans and sweatshirts and baseball caps and sneakers. I asked my grandmother why they were fighting and she tried to explain the split between Protestants and Catholics and how two groups who were so similar could hate each other so much and for so long. She did a pretty good job, but that didn’t make the fighting any more sensible to me. I must have been being a pain because my grandmother finally looked at me and said “Every little boy and girl in the world is born the same. No one is better or worse than anyone else. Those people weren’t taught that.” I remember that so well I can almost hear and see her saying it.
Time marches on – I’m now an adult, or should be anyway, with a great interest in world events and foreign policy and my grandmother has been gone for several years now, but this conflict makes no more sense to me now than it did all those years ago in the kitchen of our small, old house. It’s so senseless and it’s been going on as long as I’ve been alive and for ages before that. There are plenty of conflicts that are older than me – Israel/Palestine springs immediately to mind – but, while I find it hard to justify any of them, this one strikes a particular chord with me. I’ve read about it and talked about it and learned about for years, but at the end of the day, I’m just as confused and disgusted as I was when I was following my grandmother around our kitchen peppering her with an endless stream of questions.

There are some articles from the BBC here, here, here, here, and here. I’m sure there will be a statement made by someone of governmental importance and I’ll update with that once I find it.

Commendable Behavior From Someone I Don’t Expect It From

I’m not exactly what you’d call a fan of Nancy Pelosi and not just because I think fandom and politics go together like potassium and water. Sometimes she says and does things that just irk me. On occasion, I shake my head and think “And she’s third in the line of succession.” Still, I like and admire her tenacity even though her stands are sometimes to my left – not impossible, but no easy task either. I’m not bothered by the fact that she’s more liberal than I am. Hello! She’s the congresswoman from San Francisco not the Bible Belt. I’m still supposed to stagger back in sheer amazement at her liberalism? I don’t think so.
Honestly, the biggest argument for my lack of a strong opinion of her is that her being re-elected or not is simply out of my sphere of influence. I don’t have the money to donate to any campaigns and I don’t live in her district, so it’s not up to me whether she stays in Congress or not. I am also not a congresswoman, so I have no power to choose the Speaker of the US House of Representatives. It’s all out of my hands and I, unlike so many, refuse to flip out over elections in which I cannot participate. Now, if I had a substantial income and were able to donate significant amounts to campaigns all over the country, well then, my tune would change but I’m just a spectator at this point.

So what could move me to applaud someone whom I am otherwise unlikely to comment on one way or the other? Grace in the face of bad behavior. This is what made me actually proud of Nancy Pelosi.

She was being heckled by healthcare activists and Code Pink, but the issue she’s discussing isn’t what has me singing her praises. It’s the way she’s handling the uproar that I admire.
Last summer, when senators and congress people went home to try to sell healthcare reform, many met with strong opposition in the various town-hall meetings they held and their reactions generally fell into one of two categories – fight or flight. They either got just as belligerent as the protesters and got into verbal sparring matches or they ducked out as soon as a few loud hecklers started crowing. Speaker Pelosi did neither of these things – she calmly delivered her speech. Even when her security detail came up to the podium and said that the demonstrators were throwing things and the speaker should leave, she waved them off. “I’m not leaving.” And she didn’t. She delivered her half-hour speech in full though her security people were anxiously standing by.
It’s got to be obvious at this point that I generally have no soft spot in my heart for hecklers. It’s a wimps form of protesting. Standing in a crowd of people and just squawking takes no conviction. Standing holding a sign where everyone can see you or standing up in one of those meetings, stating your name and outlining all the problems you have with a particular proposal requires some gumption. If you feel strongly about something, you should have the wherewithal to stand up and take ownership of what’s tumbling forth from you mouth. Anonymously yelling grievances, or insults, or whatever at some politician, in my opinion, is nothing more than a cheep attempt to get on TV. “Look at me! I’m the stupid jackass at the [insert politician’s name here] rally!” It’s nothing but rude and gets even worse when people start throwing things… at a seventy-year-old woman… whose daughter and baby granddaughter are in the audience. Oh yeah, that’ll gain you a bunch of support for your cause. Real classy!

For standing up to asshats without losing her cool, Speaker Pelosi gets a gold star!

Nicely done.

After the Glow Wears Off – Why Fandom Doesn’t Work With Politicians

In the aftermath of the explosion of the Deep Water Horizon – that oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico – and the subsequent ecological catastrophe which is, as of right now, still intensifying something is happening in the minds of many Americans. They are realizing that Barack Obama, the President of the United States, is not a super hero. He cannot take out his Super-Duper Galactic Fix-It Ray and make the problem and all the foibles that come with trying to fix it just go away and neither can Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, or anyone else. Winning an election gets you a very big job, a place in the history books, and that’s it. The pants you put on in the morning may be bullet-proof – yes, they do exist – but you still put them on the same way anyone else does.

In the 2008 presidential election, particularly on the democratic side, much was made of the candidates’ personalities and whether or not they were “likable” enough. If it hadn’t been for that, I believe I’d be sitting here kvetching about the latest mistake President Clinton made – President Hillary Clinton, that is. She had everything – money, connections, experience – everything but a triple dose of charisma and that was her downfall. She couldn’t change who she was, so she lost. It’s not fair, but it’s the nature of the game. You have to be “likable” and you either are or you aren’t. For many people Barack Obama was The Man – the man to elect, the man to back, the man you’d want to have a beer with, just the man. In the world of Political High School, he was the captain of the football team and valedictorian all rolled into one while then-Senator Clinton was the jealous, geeky, overachiever on the debate team, and John McCain was the guy who played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons. Neither of them had a chance in hindsight.
The problem with popularity in politics is, just like in high school, it’s fleeting. To be known simply as “popular” is to be unknown and invisible in a week’s time. Politics is a business fraught with unpopular positions. With some perpetually contentious issues like abortion, to take a firm stand one way or the other is to alienate a large section of the voting population. The only thing worse than taking a strong stand on a divisive issue is to take no stand at all. That just makes you look weak. If you manage to get elected, a whole new world of “un-likablity” opens up and is furthered by omnipresent mass media. Make one mistake, say one thing out of line, forget to smile at someone and it’s news and news always offends someone. Make a offhand comment about women in the workforce and someone will say you’re against stay-at-home moms and therefore single-handedly out to destroy the traditional American family. Question military expenses and you’re an evil, marxist, terrorist, hippy, America-hater. Innocently point out the good qualities of a colleague of the opposite sex, or of the same-sex if you are known by the public to be openly gay or lesbian, and you may very well end up being dragged by your sinificant other to couple’s counseling and have to explain yourself. Choose not to go to church and you become evil and completely anti-American even though there are plenty of Americans who don’t attend church and are also not enemies of the state.
These things all pale in comparison to what happens when a big problem comes along – unusually polarizing legislation, Supreme Court appointments, some sort of unforeseen tragedy. That’s when that cult of personality really begins to crack under the weight of the task at hand. It becomes blindingly clear that you can’t walk on water or fly or shoot lasers from your eyeballs. You’re still disappointingly human with only twenty-four hour days just like the rest of us. The pedestal you’ve been placed on by your supports erodes away from beneath your feet and you come tumbling down to earth to rejoin the rest of us mortals. People start to ask “What if? What if I’d pulled the other lever or checked the other box?” This is the predicament that our current president finds himself in. It’s not fair, but it’s the nature of the game. Presidents seem like they have more power than the rest of us and to some extent they do, but we forget they’re also astoundingly human. I could go into specific presidential examples of human frailty – the same problems we see every day in our own lives – but why bother. It’s all old news.
One would think that, in light of these recent events, we as a nation would be less inclined to idealize our political figures but it seems more prevalent today than it was two and a half years ago. For example, Sarah Palin could make a statement saying something needs to be acted upon and thousands of people would go out and make it happen regardless of what “it” actually is. The task is completely immaterial simply because Sarah Palin said “it” should be and they think Sarah Palin is the best human being that ever lived and is right all of the time. Ron Paul, the Congressman from Texas, has a similarly devoted and vocal following. Hillary Clinton, the current Secretary of State, still has quite a fan base even after her election lose and employment with the Obama administration, and some of them are fiercely loyal. Just search Clinton 2012 to see the kind of rumors bubbling up as campaign season approaches with all of these diehard fans lying in wait, though, historically, a primary challenger to the incumbent president has never won the nomination and only serves to split the party and make an election victory that much harder to achieve. Even so, hope springs eternal for some of her supporters who view her as the best hope for democrats in 2012. I say that’s a long ways off and a highly unlikely turn of events. Her high approval rating will plummet if she turns on the administration who employed her for three years or so. Nobody likes a turncoat not to mention that putting your sense of loyalty into question is never the best political move.
And what about Mr. Obama and his charisma? Well, while he may recover some popularity for one reason or another – these things go days by day – it’ll never be quite the same now that everyone knows he isn’t a super hero or a jedi knight or some other spectacular being. It’s like having a really attractive roommate. Everyone sees them as this Adonis-like figure, but you’ve seen them at their worst – hung-over, unhappy, angry, first thing in the morning – and you know that they have their moments just like anyone else. You can’t idealize someone after that because you know that they are no more or less than human.

News Flash – Tights Are NOT Pants!

I have never been what anyone would call trendy or stylish. I have always had far too imperfect a figure to try to emulate the “perfect” specimens in Vogue – specimens that magazine editors still feel the need to Photoshop nearly to the point of being unrecognizable. My mission when buying clothes is to simply find something that fits right and that’s hard enough. I’m sure there are some of you who know how I feel. It is my chronic lack of personal style that keeps me mute on the topic of fashion… usually. I have, however, reached the point at which even I feel the need to speak out for I have seen one too many nylon-encased buttocks being openly displayed. Women of the world take note –

TIGHTS ARE NOT PANTS!!!!!

They are similar to pants. Almost pants. The ghost of pants, if you will, but they are not to the bum-covering or bum-supporting caliber of pants. Yes, I said bum-supporting and, unless you are as fit as is humanly possible, and cellulite-free, and are under thirty, and have never even thought of birthing children, your butt benefits from the shape-assisting support of proper pants. The never-ending quest for the perfect pair of jeans stems from the fact that a good-looking butt is generally a well-supported butt.

The issue of bum coverage is two-fold. The first has to do with opacity. You cannot see through pants. This is not always true with tights. We all have those people who we are or have been close enough to that they know what kind of underwear we prefer – friends we shop with, obviously significant others past and present have a clue, roommates, ect… – but everyone in the mall/grocery store/city doesn’t know you like that, so it’s just awkward.
The second issue is one public vs. private interest. Almost no one wants to know every topographical detail of your ass, especially if they don’t know your name. Your doctor doesn’t want to know that much about your ass. Please, keep the dimples and jiggle to yourself. If you’re wearing underwear, I don’t want to see it. If you’re not wearing underwear, I don’t want to know and I really don’t want to see it. Believe it or not, I’m not alone in feeling this way. There are plenty of people who have no desire to have advanced knowledge of the muscle tone you have (or have not) achieved in your gluteal region and those that are interested aren’t going to want to have that information shared with the rest of the world. They want to feel special.
Tights are great when worn properly – i.e. not as pants. They’re great under dresses, skirts, and oversized shirts as long as they cover your butt as opposed to making it a billboard for Victoria’s Secret… or your local gym… or a strip club… or McDonald’s.

One final note for those of you who think I’m totally off-base here. Remember, it’s not just svelte twenty-somethings and college sorority girls who have adopted this pants-less look. I saw a woman who had to be pushing sixty walking around like this as well as gaggle of girls who were maybe – maybe – fourteen. It’s gross.

:Rant Complete: