The unforgiving minute: Re-evaluating my entire adult life

(I also posted this on my Facebook feed, but trust me: no one there will notice this.)

A "mondagreen" is a song lyric that you've gotten wrong because you mis-heard the original, e.g.: "Hold me closer, Tony Danza," or "Revved up like a douche," or "El Kabong, what's that flower you have on?"

Pandora just played The Hollies' 1972 classic "Long Cool Woman," and for the first time I followed along with the lyrics and discovered that over the last 44 years that entire song -- except for the title itself, which I got entirely right -- that song has been, for me, one complete 3-minute 15-second mondagreen. Every single line I had wrong. Every one. That song hasn't even remotely been about what I always thought it was about. Not. Even. Close.

I have to think about this.

The one song I ever came this close to getting entirely wrong was “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes,” the only song my high school garage band ever wholly ruined.

Minute's up.

The unforgiving minute: Decideds and undecideds

Last night I heard a woman sitting a few seats down from me say this to the man she was with. For verisimilitude's sake, you have to imagine it delivered in a classic early 1980s Valley Girl-speak, and without the slightest trace of irony:

"I've decided to be less judgmental of women. [Pause.] It's not fair to hold them up to my standard."

My initial impulse, of course, was to grab the man by the arm and shout, "Run away! Run away!"

/But then I realized that he knew perfectly well what he had gotten into; they'd been trading passive-aggressive barbs since the moment he sat down with her. He'd long-since made his choice.

I feel much the same way about voters in this election. I've read a number of posts and articles this week mentioning "undecided" voters. I don't believe there are very many of those -- certainly not if the choice is about Trump versus Clinton. Maybe a few dazed or confused Democratic or Republican  voters can still be picked off by third-party candidates, or vice-versa. And a lot of voters -- particularly Trump voters, I suspect, and particularly Trump voters who haven't been in the habit of voting for years -- may be undecided about whether they'll actually cast a ballot at all.

But this year, pretty much anyone who makes it to the voting booth has already made up their mind about who they're voting for, and why.

Turnout, I suspect, will be everything.

Minute's up.

The unforgiving minute: Succession dreams, and scarier things

A couple of days ago, in that last dream you sometimes have before the alarm goes off, I dreamed that Trump and Pence got elected. The residue of dismay from that dream was hard to shake off.

Then, this morning, presumably safe in the wakened world and browsing the news, it occurred to me that if those two got elected, and if Trump (now the Cheetos Jesus in Chief) were to leave the Oval Office suddenly vacant mid-term – whether by getting his hair caught up in the compressor fan of an Air Force One jet engine or succumbing to his signature inability to stay focused – it would be Pence who would succeed him as President of the United States. 

Then, as the shakes began to set in, I realized: Pence, perfectly awful as he is (and I chose that phrase with some care), would merely be first in line to replace him. Based on the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, signed into law by Harry Truman (who could not on his worst day have imagined things coming to this), should Pence slip and fall in the shower, he would be succeeded by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. 

Were Ryan to be killed in a freak weight-training accident, the next in line would be President Pro Tempore of the Senate Orrin Hatch.  

Should Hatch inadvertently impale himself on one of his collar stays, the next in line would be . . . whoever Trump had seen fit to select as his Secretary of State.

I came to about four hours later next to a dumpster twenty blocks from here. Two little kids were prodding me nervously with a stick.

Minute's up, thank heavens.

The unforgiving minute: Sigh. Marco, Marco, Marco.

You had one job to do. Just one.

And you couldn't get it right.


Minute's up.

The unforgiving minute: Feels like fan fiction to me

(Updated below.)

Add my name to the list of people who fail to understand why Sen. Elizabeth Warren's time would be better spent attending the funerals of foreign leaders for the next four to eight years instead of pantsing Mitch  McConnell and making Debbie Wasserman Schultz eat grass (to say nothing of getting under Donald Trump's skin).

Minute's up.

Update:  (6/20/2016) Still think Warren for VP nominee would be a mistake, but if it gives these guys a case the sads, then I'm willing to say I'm no longer 100% against the idea. 

The unforgiving minute: In which Trump has his Wittgenstein moment

And I bet you won't see that headline anywhere else this week.

Everyone, to the consternation of The Short-Fingered Vulgarian, noticed over the weekend that, once again, he got an endorsement from white supremicists and conspicuously failed to distance himself from it.

This time it was much harder plausibly to ignore than the attaboys of the small-potatoes white supremicists he's picked up so far. No, this time it was a boost from former KKK grand wizard and hitherto GOP pariah David Duke. True, Trump was lying when he claimed to have no knowledge of Duke or his connections, but then no one believed him on that one anyway, so the joke's on him.

But he did promise that he'd do some research and find out who this Duke person was, and what this whole Ku Klux Klan thing was all about. So perhaps there's reason for hope. Perhaps he'll also take time out from his busy schedule to learn more about Mexicans immigration, muslims, 2000 mile-long walls, health care reform, international treaties, tax codes, and First Amendment protections for journalism.

Trump, like the ruling dynasty in North Korea, has done everything, broken every record, conquered all peaks, and so on, so no doubt he's read Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in the original German; I present the common English translation of his seventh proposition here:

What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

From Wittgenstein's lips to your ears, Mr. Trump. 

Minute's up.

The Unforgiving Minute: The homecoming

Let's set the stage first:

Nevertheless, Jeb is a Bush. And if Bushes are anything, they are a family of super-competitors. Ferociously so, across the board.

“At everything from tiddlywinks to backgammon,” says former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, a Bush family friend. They take their contests so seriously they give no quarter even to the youngest members of the family. Which George H.W. learned the hard way when he was just a small boy and his mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, beat him mercilessly at tennis, “right-handed and left-handed,” Barbara says.

I have this picture in my head of the next Bush family get-together up in Kennebunkport. For Easter, maybe. Yeah, Easter. That'd be good.

The servants retire and the family sits down at the dinner table. On a signal from Poppy, he and Dubya put on their "41" and "43" caps. Barbara then scales a cap over the carved ham and into Jeb's lap. He picks it up and discovers it's a mate to his father's and brother's caps – except it has the number "0" stitched on the front.

"You want us to clap now?" smirks his brother.

"Or maybe we should see how you do in the Easter egg hunt first," chips in his dad, with his trademark crooked grin.

Minute's up.

The unforgiving minute: Explaining the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupation in 51 words

First they locked themselves in and refused to come out.

Then they wanted someone to bring them snacks and got mad when it wasn't what they wanted..

Now they're complaining that their phones and internet access have been shut off.

These aren't "militiamen;" these are spoiled teenagers who hate their parents.

Minute's up.

The unforgiving minute: Trump uses the air game to establish the ground game

(Updated below.)

One advantage of living in a late-primary state is that Oregonians won't find their airwaves littered up with trash like this in the next couple of months:

The Short-Fingered Vulgarian's first campaign spot, a fitting punishment for the hubris of voters of Iowa and New Hampshire, recycles some of the early campaign bluster that observers thought would kill his campaign chances months ago, and pounds on his campaign slogan.

So, Mr. Trump, when was the last time America was great? Not saying it's not. Not saying it never was. Just wanting to know when you think it was.

See, it's just that word "again" in your campaign slogan "make America great again." That means you think that, although America isn't great anymore, there was a time when it was great. Can't be great again if it wasn't great at least once before. When was that?

Note that you can't wiggle out of this question by reciting your standard list of grievances against the status quo, or by saying, however vaguely or incoherently, what policies a Trump administration might pursue.

Make it easy on yourself: just name a year. You don't even have to justify it; we can get into that later. Just name a year when you think America was great.

I'm betting you don't have an answer, and not just because you didn't learn much in the history classes at the New York Military Academy. Straight answers to that would be a distraction -- or worse, a disappointment  -- for your base and its uninformed resentments.

A straight answer, however unlikely, might also add to the private embarrassment of some of the celebrity journalists who are doing land-office business off of the coverage of your antics. (But they can be expected to soldier bravely ahead.)

Minute's up.

Update: A partial answer to my question can perhaps be found here.

The unforgiving minute: Flubber

Here's a pro tip:

If you have to tell your readers that a particular word choice is (or isn't) intended as a pun, it's probably not much of a pun (or is simply careless writing) and should be left alone to do its job as best it can without prodding (or written out).

The writer who inserts "(pun/no pun intended)" is the rough equivalent of the late night host who deliberately flubs a joke so he can use all his carefully rehearsed ad libs.

The pun may be the lowest form of wit -- opinions vary -- but it is nevertheless a form of wit and should therefore be allowed to go about its work, however humble, without being upstaged by its own creator.

Minute's up.

The unforgiving minute: Attention Android Lollipop team

For the record, if I'd wanted a tablet that arbitrarily locks up important screen features and maybe will fix itself if I power it down and back up again, I'd have purchased a Windows product.

Seriously, ever since Lollipop got pushed onto my Nexus 7 last week, the screen rotate feature works sometimes, sometimes not. Powering off/on restores the function sometimes, sometimes not. I've worked my way through the troubleshooting checklist and the only thing left to try appears to be a full cloud backup and a factory reset. I am understandably reluctant to take that step. Any suggestions from readers would be most welcome.

So far, my experience of Lollipop comes to some layout features I don't find an improvement, and some others that I'm told are there but I'm not seeing. Ordinarily, I would never install the 5.0.1 version of any software, especially an OS. I don't like to do somebody else's beta testing for free. This time, obviously, I didn't get a vote.  

Minute's up.

The unforgiving minute: Everybody gets pinched, but you did it right.

Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog is teasing out an interesting theory about the effects of his indictment on Texas Governor Rick Perry's presidential plans:

Incessantly trolling liberals was working for him. Tacking hard to the right on immigration was working for him. Being a martyr to evil liberalism might work for him, too.

Will indictment help Perry's chances in 2016 – at least in the GOP primaries?

I've recently begun to think that the Republican party, in its current form, has moved beyond win-at-any-cost; now even winning seems to lose some of its fizz for them unless they win dirty. Going there is no longer a tactical last resort; it's become both proof of one's willingness to play "hardball" against the enemy, and evidence that one buys into the post-Reagan ideology that government-created laws are part of the problem (or the post-Nixon article of faith that, if the President does it, it isn't illegal).

Both working historian Rick Perlstein and working journalist Charlie Pierce agree that there's a strain of Republicanism that judges its candidates by how underhanded – if not flat-out felonious – they're willing to get. Once that happens, something like Perry getting indicted for putting the screws to a Democratic-led ethics investigation of his own administration's shady doings becomes less of a political embarrassment to be covered over and more of a sacred rite of passage to be celebrated:

Perhaps we should change his nickname from "Governor Goodhair" to "Governor Goodfella." I like to think Molly Ivins would approve.

The unforgiving minute: Street cred

When George Will posted his column last week about how unfair it was that rape survivors sometimes try to hang on to a little of their dignity, most people simply treated it as a stupifyingly misogynist rant of potentially career-derailing inappropriateness. (After all, Helen Thomas became an overnight unperson for something that's only different according to your political taste.)

But Roy Edroso has it nailed: Before he knelt chin-deep in the fever swamp of Fox News, whenever George Will wanted to assure his audience that he was a regular guy, just like them – and not, say, an effete, sanctimonious prig – he'd write a column on baseball. But at his new home, they don't give a rat's ass about baseball; it's not the American pastime they're most interested in.

So goodbye ruminative considerations of U.S. policy, hello war on women, only with a bow-tie, and the brethren may consider their cause uplifted by the endorsement of a genuine intellectual. (Camille Paglia must be kicking herself.)

The "Paglia" capper made milk come out of my nose.

Minute's up.

(Phil's image source.)

The unforgiving minute: Inevitability

Let's be realistic: If you name someone Crystal Metheney, it really is only a matter of time until she gets arrested for "shooting a 'missile' into a car."

She'd have had a better chance of turning out okay if her parents had named her "Maleficent."

Minute's up.

The unforgiving minute: Mommas, don't let your utterly insulated Villager pundits grow up to be cowboys

you can be dang sure

- That's Maureen Dowd, so proud of her Kennedyesque phrasing, attempting to apply the local lingo in her column about the squatter/rancher in Nevada and his armed-wacko supporters.

It's kind of sad, really.

The unforgiving minute: What are you grateful for?

A bit of standup schtick for years has riffed on this question: Why do people who imagine they have been in touch with their past lives always imagine they were someone cool? A pharaoh, rather than someone who was forced to build the pyramids? One of the kings or queens of France, rather than someone who emptied their chamber pots into the open sewers of Paris until they died of cholera at thirty?

I'm remind of this puzzle by the recent bout of slave-era nostalgia encouraged by the states-rights deadbeat rancher in Nevada who fell off the Fox News speed-dialer when he went too far and "wondered" if African-Americans weren't happier as slaves. Funny that people like this always imagine that, back in the old times which were not forgotten, they naturally would have been one of the wealthy plantation owners like Ashley Wilkes or Gerald O'Hara.

They never imagine themselves as some poor schlub stuck in the dirt-poor class by rich folk, maneuvered into being grateful that at least they weren't "Negroes."

Minute's up.

The unforgiving minute: Still waiting

As we all settle in to watch Jeb "The Smarter One" Bush begin his dance of the seven veils, this might be a good time to recall that, after packing an extraordinarily high number of gaffes and missteps into a comparatively short Wyoming Senatorial primary campaign last fall, Bush's fellow legacy Republican Liz "Spawn of Dick" Cheney pulled out of the race in early January, offering this explanation:

Citing health concerns in her family, Cheney said the issues arising prompted her to end her GOP primary challenge to Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.).

“Serious health issues have recently arisen in our family, and under the circumstances, I have decided to discontinue my campaign. My children and their futures were the motivation for our campaign and their health and well-being will always be my overriding priority,” Cheney said in the statement.

Three months and one day later, we're still waiting for any particulars on the needy-relative story to emerge. . . .

The unforgiving minute: That's so 1992!

I rarely have occasion to mention the Drudge Report around here. (In fact, I just checked: In nine years, this is his seventh mention, and the first to be directly about him.)

This could be why:





Amanda Marcotte, at the link above (from which I also lifted the screen capture), helpfully points out that ketchup slipped to second place on America's tables about 20 years ago. That was a few years before Drudge got his start as a Hollywood/Washington gossip source, dumpster-diving for overnight box-office numbers and apparently vowing never to update his site again.

But even though I wasn't much of a Seinfeld fan, even I knew about the classic 1992 episode “The Pitch:”

If your browser won't display the embedded version, click here. 

The Drudge Report: A blog about nothing.

Minute's up.

The unforgiving minute: That moment when you realize how screwed we are

Today was a beautiful, clear day, low 60s, not quite t-shirt weather anymore but not crisp enough to count as football weather. I was walking down the street, just drinking it all in, and then suddenly I realized:

Under the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, this guy is second in line to the presidency of the United States.

In another era, for a different leader, it would have been a stunning rebuke. For John Boehner, it was just another embarrassing stumble in a speakership studded with them.

House Republican leaders canceled a planned Tuesday night vote on a Boehner-backed proposal to resolve the debt and budget crises hanging over the U.S., but the dramatic news was met with shrugs and snorts. Facing a critical test, having brought the nation to the brink of default, the nation’s top Republican failed to rustle up the votes once again—and the humiliation took nobody by surprise.

The next thing I knew, I was sitting on the curb with my head between my knees and an EMT was telling me to keep breathing slowly.

Minute's up.

The unforgiving minute: It is, as they say, an ill wind . . .

This seems like an odd plan anyway, since white apartheidists don't really have what you'd call a winning tradition at Gettysburg to begin with.

A planned Ku Klux Klan gathering in Gettysburg, Pa. was canceled due to the government shutdown, Philadelphia's WCAU reported Tuesday.

A Maryland-based KKK group was approved to hold a rally on Saturday at Gettysburg National Military Park, according to WCAU. Park officials told the news station that the rally won't happen because they revoked all permits for special events when the shutdown began Tuesday.

Minute's up.