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Finally...

Rumors swirl....this poster claims a Clinton superdelegate got a call from her today saying she was dropping out tomorrow.

It ends.

More on the Rachel Ray-Michelle Malkin Thing

Agree with everything Quinn said below. See Olbermann for the smackdown:



[PS - Once you really start reading blogs Quinn, you'll finally get up to speed. I know Benaiah and I have been following this unfolding for a week or more]

Vanity Fair Bill Clinton Piece: Hatchet Job or Final Dagger?

So the interesting political discussion of the day has centered on this riveting Vanity Fair article here billed as an expose on Bill Clinton's wild side. Very good stuff even if you're as done with the Clintons and this interminable nomination process as I am.

If you're too lazy to read it all, here are some juicy bits:

No former president of the United States has ever traveled with such a fast crowd, and most 61-year-old American men of Clinton’s generation don’t, either. “I just think those guys are radioactive,” one former aide to Clinton who is still in occasional affectionate touch with him told me recently, referring to Burkle and (to a lesser extent) Bing. “I stay far away from them.”

or this bit:

Over the last few years, aides have winced at repeated tabloid reports about Clinton’s episodic friendship and occasional dinners out with Belinda Stronach, a twice-divorced billionaire auto-parts heiress and member of the Canadian Parliament 20 years his junior, or at more recent high-end Hollywood dinner-party gossip that Clinton has been seen visiting with the actress Gina Gershon in California. There has been talk of a female friend in Chappaqua, a woman in a bar at a meeting of the Aspen Institute, and a public sighting of Clinton, Bing, and a ravishing entourage in a New York elevator that, a former Clinton aide told me, led a business leader who saw them to say: I don’t know what the guy was doing, but it was so clear that it was just no good.

Some of my favorite bloggers are all over the place on this. Sullivan, relentless in his pure hatred of the Clintons, gloats. The Moderate Voice buys all of it....Ross Douthat at the Atlantic has some fun speculation about why this story only dropped now. My favorite:

or it could suggest a conspiracy of silence on the part of the media, based on the fear that pulling the trigger on such stories could get them accused of gossip-mongering or invading the Clintons' privacy. (If the third possibility is the correct one, it's a pretty remarkable testament to the MSM's ability to keep the lid on a story, even in the age of Drudge and TMZ and Gawker Stalker ...)

At TNR Michael Crowley sees a more banal and cynical reason. I'm not to sure what to think of this story, other than it makes a for rip-roaring read. Personally, 6 months ago I could have told you that I appreciated what Bill Clinton had done for the country, and was probably a decent and honorably man at heart despite obvious personal foibles. Womanizing is a time-honored characteristic of many great statesman, but selling out this far is something else:

Even more troubling is Clinton’s relationship with the Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra. This winter, a lengthy investigative report in The New York Times disclosed that, in 2005, Clinton flew to the Central Asian country of Kazakhstan on Giustra’s MD-87 jet for what was billed as a philanthropic three-country tour. The two men had dinner with President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has held the country in a vise-like grip for nearly two decades. At their meeting, Clinton expressed support for Nazarbayev’s bid to head the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which monitors elections and promotes democracy. That position was sharply at odds with official American foreign policy and came in the face of stinging criticism of Kazakhstan’s record on human rights from many sources, including the junior senator from New York, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Within two days, Giustra’s company signed preliminary agreements allowing it to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency. And months after that the Clinton Foundation received a $31.3 million donation from Giustra that remained secret until a Giustra representative acknowledged it late last year. (Giustra has separately pledged another $100 million to the foundation.)

True Life: I've Never Seen a Helicopter

More gold from CNN--I found this article today. A Brazilian governmental agency just came out with pictures of what it describes as one of the last "uncontacted" tribes of people on earth. According to the article, there are around 100 or so tribes in the world left that have never had contact with the outside world. Over half of them reside in the deep Amazon of Brazil and Peru and many of them are threatened by logging and deforestation.

This might be the romantic in me coming out, but there's something so compelling to me about this idea. Most of us watched and I read "Into the Wild" recently--except MAR who needs to get over the uninformed, yet opinionated French Canadian in himself--and this story somehow gave me a similar feeling, though I can't really tell why. At first I thought this might be exactly what McCandless was looking for, but then I started to think that not it at all--McCandless was a product of a system that he perceived to be evil or fucked up or something like that and he wanted out. These people are out. They've never been in. Isn't there something exciting about that?

Imagine hearing a foreign noise and then looking up and seeing something hovering by in the sky and having no idea what it is. What did these people think after the helicopter flew overhead? A sign from the gods? An omen of the coming apocalypse? Sheer terror? I can't even begin to imagine.

Either way, there is some sort of organization working to make sure that deforestation and logging don't disturb these uncontacted tribes--obviously, I couldn't support their cause more. While globalization has ushered in a new era of communication, exchange of ideas, and free flow of communication, we all too often ignore the negatives that accompany globalization--namely, the erosion of culture. Don't get me wrong--I'm all aboard the globalization train. However, I think that, especially in the society in which we were raised, adherence to a particular culture is often perceived as one dimensional or closed minded or even ignorant.

I think that the importance of cultural preservation is only going to grow as the "dark" corners of the world (I'm taking on the voice of an imperialist intentionally) become "illuminated" by our nosiness and arrogance. Already, something like 1 language disappears every 14 days.

I can only hope that seeing a helicopter fly overhead is the only bullshit these people have to deal with and that whoever has access to them decides to respect their land and culture. Already, the article says some group has been monitoring them for 20 years, which sounds like what you do with herds of buffalo and it sort of makes me want to vomit. I can just imagine some True Life: Encino Man Discovery Geographic special about one of these tribe and I'd like to think I'd have the strength to boycott.

P.S.--Into the Wild will be an upcoming weekly topic MAR

Dunkin Donuts succumbs to conservative scare tactis

Everyone criticizes me for reading CNN, but today I came upon this article. Basically, conservative wacko Michelle Malkin--who I am sure everyone other than me knows all about, since I am fairly out of touch and get my news from places like CNN.com--put the hit out on a Rachel Ray Dunkin Donuts online ad in which she is pictured wearing a black and white paisley scarf. According to Malkin, Rachel Ray was not wearing a scarf, but a keffiyeh, which, "for the clueless, is the traditional scarf of Arab men that has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad." Malkin goes on to note that designers and left wing icons have high jacked the style in a display of anti-American sympathy for murderous terrorists.

Though I did not know anything about Michelle Malkin before today, I have done a little background research and I have to say that I'm sorry I even stumbled upon this story in the first place. My life was probably much better before I knew that Malkin even existed--like my life was better before I went fishing for the first time and had to ask my Dad what happens to the fish when it isn't moving any more.

The most frustrating part of the story is that Dunkin Donuts actually pulled the ad and issued an apology. Really? Really? I thought this was a joke when I first started reading it. I could be wrong, but isn't the keffiyeh simply a piece of clothing that people wear in the Arab world? Isn't associating a piece of clothing with terrorism a watered down version of assuming that the middle eastern guy on the plane is going to blow it up? The only real analogy I can think of would be an Arab person thinking someone is anti-Muslim because he is wearing a suit and tie.

What people like Malkin do is divisive, counterproductive, and plain irresponsible. This sort of scare mongering is exactly the type of shit that got us into the global mess that we find ourselves in today. If she were sitting here right now, she would tell me that I am being anti-American and that I'm helping the terrorists, but I think we are all sick of that bullshit rhetoric--at least I hope we are.

Croc vs. Shark

Cool.

Last Words

So I was going to post something quick about famous last words (my personal favorite has got to be Galileo's "...but it moves")...and I came across this link.

Browsing the page I got to Kurt Cobain's last words in his suicide note:

I don't have the passion anymore, and so remember, it's better to burn out than to fade away. Peace, Love, Empathy. Kurt Cobain.

I was shocked....this is from a Neil Young song, and also just seems wrong to me. Who thinks that its better to burn out than fade away? Where does this sentiment come from? Is this part of a self-flagellating strand of rock that is historically unique? Wiki says this about the Neil Young song:

A lyric from the song, "it's better to burn out than to fade away," became
infamous in modern rock after being quoted in Nirvana frontman Kurt
Cobain's suicide note. Young said that he was later so shaken that he dedicated his 1994 album Sleeps With Angels to Cobain.

It just seemed to me like an incredibly depressing rationalization by someone who had already made up their mind...or maybe it is somehow perversely related to machismo? Is there some veneer of honor associated with not playing it out through your twilight years? Isn't that the opposite of honorable? It seems to me that he took the easy-way-out, the coward's route.

My immediate repulsive reaction to Cobain's words were not simply an outgrowth of my distaste for suicide, but was also stimulated by one of my favorite speeches of all time. The last section of MacArthur's speech before Congress after Truman fired him:

I am closing my fifty-two years of military service. When I joined the army, even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all my boyish hopes and dreams. The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the plain at West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished, but I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barracks ballads of that day which proclaimed most proudly that old soldiers never die; they just fade away.

And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Good-bye.

Old soldiers never die; they just fade away...

That's honor in spades.