Bloodthirsty Liberal

Danke Schoen, mo**erfu**er:

On Tuesday, during a town hall meeting in New Hampshire, Obama was trying to make a point that the federal government needs to watch their spending the same way American families do. But he used Las Vegas as an example, for the second time.

“You don’t go buying a boat when you can barely pay your mortgage. You don’t go blow a bunch of cash on Vegas when you’re trying to save for college,” Obama said.

Some Las Vegans said Obama should not have picked on Sin City.

“Every time he says something, conventions cancelled, stuff like that. That’s probably what’s going to happen,” said Las Vegan Neil Peterson.

But the mayor may be the most livid Las Vegan.

“He’s not our friend. I don’t know about Nevada, but Las Vegas, he’s sure not our friend,” Goodman said. “He has a real psychological hang-up about the entertainment capital of the world.”

“Everybody says I shouldn’t say it, but I’ve got to tell you the way it is. This president is a real slow learner,” Goodman said.

…

“I want the president to straighten this out. If not, he’s not welcome in my city, as far as I’m concerned,” Goodman said.

President Obama doesn’t like this country very much, does he? We’re bitter clingers, we have places like Vegas, we need our souls cleansed, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for (who was waiting?)… well, excu-u-u-u-use me, Mr. President, but I like schlock. I’ve never been to Vegas, and I might have been snooty about those who had back in my liberal days—but God, how pretentious!

If Siegfried and Roy didn’t exist, we’d have to create them.

Las Vegas is nothing to be embarrassed about; in fact, it’s a monument to the triumph of capitalism, both legal and illegal. From a gleam in Bugsy Siegel’s eye to the Strip—there’s no greater success story in American history.

There’s more light generated in one night on the Strip than in the entire Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in a year.

You know who’s playing the MGM Grand over the next month? David Copperfield, Jon Bon Jovi, Lily Tomlin, just to name a few. Are we a great country or what?

You know what’s playing in President Obama’s vacation paradise of Martha’s Vineyeard? Nothing. Oh wait, I take that back. I see that Fan Ogilvie, West Tisbury Poet Laureate, hosts a reading of Newly Beloved Poems on February 14th at the Chilmark Tavern. Admission is free, needless to say.

UPDATE:
I don’t think I’d be dissing Oscar Goodman if I were President Obama. Unless he wants to end up in the Potomac with cement overshoes:

During his career as a defense attorney he represented defendants accused of being some of the leading organized crime figures in Las Vegas, such as Meyer Lansky, Nicky Scarfo, Herbert “Fat Herbie” Blitzstein, Phil Leonetti, former Stardust Casino boss Frank ‘Lefty’ Rosenthal, and Jamiel “Jimmy” Chagra a 1970s drug trafficker who was acquitted of ordering the murder of Federal Judge John Wood. His most notorious client was reputed Chicago mobster Anthony “Tony the Ant” Spilotro, who was known to have a short and violent temper. In the semi-factual 1995 movie Casino, the character of Nicky Santoro was based on Spilotro and was portrayed by actor Joe Pesci.

Connected by nothing except the coincidence of their deaths.

Who better to remark honestly on the legacy of Howard Zinn, but former leftist extraordinaire, now echt-conservative, David Horowitz?

The other day a reporter from NPR called me and asked me for my comments on the death of the lifelong Stalinist and propagandist Howard Zinn. I was a little reluctant because I knew that whatever I said, legions of unscrupulous myrmidons on the left would jump on it and say I had spit on Zinn’s grave.

…

Sure enough the bottom-feeders at FAIR pounced on my bite and accused me of spitting on Zinn’s grave. So here’s what I said that was cut from the interview. I’m not putting quotes around it because it’s from memory, but it’s pretty close to some of my remarks and captures the sense of others:

No one should celebrate the death of another human being unless they are child-molesters or murderers. Howard Zinn lived to a ripe old age (87), and bad human being that he was, I wouldn’t begrudge him an extra few years; he’s done about as much damage as he could.

Howard Zinn was a Stalinist in the years when the Marxist monster was slaughtering millions of innocent people and launching his own ‘final solution’ against the Jews. Put another way, Howard Zinn was helping Stalin to conduct those slaughters and to enslave all those who had the misfortune to live behind the Iron Curtain. Howard never had second thoughts about his commitment to leftwing totalitarians and never flagged in his political commitment to freedom’s enemies. In the years since Stalin’s death, Zinn supported every enemy of the United States in every war, and devoted his writing talents to every socialist tyrant including Mao Zedong who killed 70 million Chinese in peacetime because they got in the way of his progressive agendas.

When the Cold War was over and freedom had won — thanks to all the political forces and figures (e.g., Reagan and Thatcher) that Zinn opposed – Zinn continued his malignant course. He supported America’s enemies right to the end including the Islamic Nazis whose first agenda is to finish the job that Hitler started and then to impose a totalitarian theocracy on the infidel world.

Zinn’s wretched tract, A People’s History of the United States, is worthless as history, and it is a national tragedy that so many Americans have fallen under its spell. It is a political cartoon which even the socialist magazine Dissent described as an intellectual fraud, which it is. All Zinn’s writing was directed to one end: to indict his own country as an evil state and soften his countrymen up for the kill. Like his partner in crime, Noam Chomsky, Zinn’s life’s work was a pernicious influence on the young and ignorant, with destructive consequences for people everywhere.

UPDATE: David Horowitz has decided that he came down a bit too harshly on Zinn. The above text is revised to remove the description of Zinn as a “wicked man.”

Got it, David. Subtract “wicked”. We’ll accept the rest as written.

Just a couple of words on J.D. Salinger.

There’s been a curious trend among some obituaries and remembrances to denigrate Salinger’s contribution to American letters, pretty much summing it up as “overrated”. It’s fine if you didn’t like The Catcher in the Rye. I did. I think I still do (it’s been a while). Obviously, it speaks more toward the adolescent point of view, but so what? Are we supposed to reject The Old Man and the Sea because we are neither old nor a fish? Salinger nailed the character, and I think made him universal. We all reject “phonies”, we all walk around barely able to comprehend or tolerate what we absurdly call the world. And if Holden Caufield is an unreliable narrator and a bit of a whiner, have you listened to yourself lately?

But though Catcher may be his best known work, among writers I know, Nine Stories is his most influential. If you’ve ever written a short story (I’ve written several, started quite a few more), you can see how Salinger does what he does, but you can’t see how to do it yourself, short of copying it shamelessly. I imagine other amateur artists feeling the same way when looking at a Mozart score or a Raphael fresco.

I don’t think it can be stressed enough that Salinger was a post-war writer. No one wanted to acknowledge the damage that had been done to the psyches of the young men who survived almost four years of war, whether in the meat-grinder of combat or merely in the vise of military bureaucracy. I feel the sounds of mortars and anti-aircraft fire echo throughout Salinger’s work, even when war is never mentioned. His reputed embrace of Buddhism and his rejection of the world fit into this narrative, it seems to me. Catch 22 (1961) and Slaughterhouse 5 (1969), two seminal works about the absurdity and futility of the war, were written more than a decade later; even The Naked and the Dead (1948) couldn’t beat out “Bananafish” (published in the New Yorker 1/31/48).

I can’t say I embrace the rest of his work similarly. Franny & Zooey began to lose me, and I still look at Seymour and Carpenters on my shelf with a mixture of guilt and disappointment. With his retreat from the world and into the Glass family archives, Salinger left me behind. Not everybody, but me and many others.

Some have raised the issue of the importance of Catcher to several famous psychopaths, Mark David Chapman and John Hinkley most notably. I suppose then we have to condemn everything from the Bible to the Koran to Jodie Foster for similar culpability.

Again: not your cup of tea, don’t sip. But a huge influence—on writers, actors, singers, you name it. And a great writer. I feel I have to say.

The New York Times? Are you kidding me? USA Today? Is that supposed to be funny?

There’s only one publication to turn to when you want unvarnished truth (and the latest on Brad and Angelina’s sex life—which is the same thing, really):

No sooner than John Edwards admits paternity to the world, and jets off to Haiti presumably for penance to aid the victims of disaster with no cameras (Hello, CBS - what ARE you doing here?) then he gets into a row with baby mamma Rielle Hunter over the health care of their daughter Frances Quinn.

Historically, (look it up) John Edwards was a huge proponent for health care coverage for all Americans when he was running for president.

But the disgraced former candidate recently balked at paying a $5,000 dental bill for his love child daughter, who is uninsured, say sources.

Edwards’ mistress Rielle Hunter took their daughter Frances - who turns 2 in February - to a dental specialist in Charlotte, N.C., in late December because the child had developed tooth decay.

“Rielle can’t believe that she had to have her lawyers fight with John’s attorneys to get this taken care of,” said the source.

“Frances is doing fine now, but Rielle is still fuming mad that their daughter has no insurance and that she had to beg John to foot the dental bill.”

Edwards made health care a big part of his campaign when he was running for the White House, before The ENQUIRER exposed his extramarital affair.

Take your typical WaPo dispatch or NYT monotone, and see if it matches that lively writing style. You can’t make it past the first sentence.

In other news:

Nicole Richie has gone on a crusade - a health crusade!

She’s vowed to boost the health of two of her closest friends - actress Mischa Barton and celeb stylist Rachel Zoe.

The health-conscious reality star - who has overcome her own eating disorder and drug problems - is encouraging pudgy Mischa, 24, to lose weight and Rachel to add 15 much-needed pounds.

Finally! Health care, terrorism, the economy—and not one word spoken in the nation’s village square about what’s happened to Mischa Barton!

I ask you:

I’m not a nutritionist like Nicole Ritchie, but weight doesn’t seem to be her biggest problem. How about a little positive reinforcement, Nikki? She looks like she could use it.

PS: Let’s try that experiment.

NYT:

Advocates of more aggressive steps to address the national debt failed Tuesday in their effort to create a bipartisan commission to press for tax increases and spending cuts, but President Obama now plans to establish a similar panel by executive order in his State of the Union address on Wednesday.

The proposal for a commission died when its supporters could not muster enough votes in the Senate to push it ahead, reflecting unwillingness among many Republicans to back any move toward tax increases and objections among Democrats to the prospect of deep spending cuts in Medicare and Medicaid.

Okay, it could be worse, I guess.

Like this:

When President Obama appears before Congress and the nation on Wednesday night to deliver his State of the Union speech, his goals will be to reset his agenda, assure his demoralized party that he has not given up on key priorities and try to convince a skeptical public that he can still change Washington.

After which, he will walk across the Potomac (or will he merely part its waters? tune in to find out!) and heal the wounded at Walter Read.

How many times have I looked up the name of that mournful Scott Joplin rag Marvin Hamlisch used so effectively in The Sting?

And then forgotten what the hell it was again?

“Solace (A Mexican Rhapsody)”, that’s it! It’s the Impromptu Schubert never lived to write, the Nocturne Chopin forgot. My favorite of all Joplin’s rags.

I haven’t sampled every performance on YouTube, but close enough. Even though this is on an electric keyboard and even though he takes a few too many liberties, I love his quarter-to-three-no-one-in-the-place-’cept-you-and-me approach. If this music doesn’t capture the loneliness of midnight, I don’t know what does.

It’s a rag, but it’s infused with the rhythm of tango and habañera (get the rhythm of Carmen’s habañera in your mind before listening). So, Latin, if not exactly Mexican.

PS: The most familiar sections (excerpted in The Sting) come around the three-minute mark.

I got this off Hot Air, and suppose I could just send you there, but I would be proud to host this on my own site.

Stewart is past my bedtime, pathetic to say, so I can’t say all his stuff is this good. But certainly some of it is. I may have to find time to watch more of him on line.

I can’t say I’ve read all of Robert Parker, but I’ve read a lot.

And now there will be no more.

It’s a pity he passed today, when all attention is focused elsewhere, but his passing should be noted:

Robert B. Parker, whose spare, eloquent sentences turned the tough private investigator Spenser into one of Boston’s most recognizable fictional characters, died in his Cambridge home Monday. He was 77.

Publishing 65 books in 37 years, Mr. Parker was as prolific as he was well-read. He featured Spenser — “spelled with an ’s,’ just like the English poet,” he said — in 37 detective novels. He also wrote 28 other books, including a series each for Jesse Stone, the police chief of fictional Paradise, Mass., and Sunny Randall, a female PI in Boston.

I will write something more about him in a few days.

I suppose it’s understandable that Dr. Death would, uh, live up to his name:

A former coach says Steve Williams, who wrestled professionally as Dr. Death after a successful college wrestling and football career, has died. He was 49.

Williams’s family said he died Tuesday night in Lakewood, Colo., after a long battle with throat cancer, according to Stan Abel, former wrestling coach at the University of Oklahoma.

You don’t suppose he abused “dietary supplements”, do you? Professional wrestlers have the odd habit of dropping dead before their time, and I wonder if it might be too much Ovaltine, or something.

And if it’s not professional wrestlers dropping like flies, it’s rock drummers.

Cue Spinal Tap:

James “The Rev’’ Sullivan, drummer for the Orange County heavy metal band Avenged Sevenfold, whose apocalyptic songs full of biblical imagery resurrected for a new generation the sonic template of ’80s hard rock laid down by acts such as Guns N’ Roses and Metallica, died Monday at his home in Huntington Beach. He was 28.

A statement released by the Orange County coroner’s office said that Mr. Sullivan was found unresponsive inside his home and that no other information is available because an investigation is underway.

A spokesman for the Huntington Beach Police Department said there were no signs of foul play and Mr. Sullivan was pronounced dead at the scene.

And he’s the picture of health!

I suppose if I have a point to make (that’ll be my New Years’ resolution), it’s that life is pretty special, and I can’t fathom how guys like Dr. Death and The Rev would piss it away. I can’t say for sure that they did, but their deaths certainly lie at the end of a path well-trodden by those like them who came (and went) before.

Maybe there are lives so miserable they are not worth living, but I think the instinct to live is the most fundamental in all creatures. Which is why heroes like soldiers and cops and fire fighters are evolutionary freaks. And why rock drummers and wrestlers and others who abuse their bodies and think they can cheat death are perversions of that instinct.

I’m sure Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Williams are mourned by those who knew and loved them, and my words of no help. I’m sorry for that. I’ve been taken to task for that before (when I noted the death of a dare-devil rock climber who tempted fate, died, and left a young child behind).

But I didn’t know them—had never even heard of them before reading their obituaries in the paper this morning—and I too am sad. It’s sad when any life is ended prematurely. I’m sorry—if not for them, personally, then for the waste.

No kidding, but about the same time Aggie was rocking out to Elvis, the BTL family was YouTubing to a mellower sound:

I’m also not kidding that I said, “I don’t care if it’s gay, the girl could sing.”

We report, you decide:

Once you’ve stared down a bull moose (from 150 yards away, through a telescopic sight), William Shatner isn’t so scary. In fact, it’s hard to tell the two apart.