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.

Quote of the day: Special Fact-Check Edition

(Updated below.)

They are truly floundering now, and it's a marvel to see, like watching armadillos try to swim.

- Charlie Pierce, the Sultan of Similes, the Ace of Analogies, and Master of Mammal Metaphors, marveling at the dreadful performance byTrump surrogates in the run-up to Election Day.

It's a wonderful image – suggestive of plummeting to the bottom of the lake with a minimum of satisfaction and a maximum of splash. And that's certainly the situation Trump surrogates find themselves in these days.

But as it turns out, it's not the situation that actual living armadillos find themselves in. The Google thing took less than a second to point me to a web page called Armadillo Fact File (yes, of course it exists) in response to my three word search query: can armadillos swim? (Click to enlarge. )

One tinkers with brother Pierce's prose at one's peril, but I modestly – humbly – suggest that the position that Trump surrogates like Gingrich are finding themselves in is less like a happy armadillo skillfully crossing a river (although the disturbing image of “gulping air into their intestines” sounds nearer the mark than any of us should find comfortable) and more instead like a luckless, lumbering creature trying desperately but unsuccessfully to avoid a particularly unattractive Nemesis.

Perhaps it's more like watching an armadillo try to outrun a 1958 Buick Roadmaster.

Just a suggestion.


(Updated, later the same day:

Okay, now I'm flattering myself that Pierce is just messing with my head. Here he is, reflecting on the $100 eponymous signature cocktail at the newly opened Trump International Hotel, a few blocks away from -- and as close as Trump'll ever get to -- the White House:

I'm really not ready for someone to tell me that the problem with my Bloody Mary is that there isn't enough winter-wheat in the Yeltsin Juice. But it is of a piece with the candidate himself, who has the over-aesthetic taste of a Bonobo in a $1,000 tux.

Yes, the somber, sad-eyed bonobo does look dreadful in a $1000 tux.

Ì Googled it.)

You heard it here at p3 first!

(Welcome Crooks & Liars readers! And thanks yet again to friend of p3 Batocchio!)

So Donald Trump Jr. (that's the brother who takes his hair grooming tips from early-1990s Bret Easton Ellis serial killers rather than from his father) had this to say about his father and the presidency:

“Unlike Hillary Clinton ― who’s gotten very rich being a politician, peddling American influence ― he hasn’t,” he continued. “This isn’t only a step down, but he wants to make sure that all Americans, all ethnicities and backgrounds, have the same opportunities to do what he’s been able to do, to start a great family, start a great business.”

Really. Seriously. This is what Donald Jr. considers a “step down” for his dad:

The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.

He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.

The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.

Well, first of all, of course he thinks that, because it's never entered the head of father or son that this might be about anything but money and brand.

But second, I called this! I called this back on July 5!

If Trump does bail out, I'd expect him to justify it much like Farage did: He's accomplished everything he set out to do (of course he has! he always does!), so why waste his time actually being President of the United States -- which he could easily do, if he wanted, and he'd be so good at it you wouldn't believe it -- when it's so obviously a step down from being Himself?

You're welcome, America.

Quote of the day: Trophy kills

Adventure tourism for the idiot rich

- Matt Tiabbi, describing the buzz driving Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

The description could be applied just as appropriately to the “big game” African safaris of his two sons. The only difference would be that the carcasses left behind by the father include the traditional transfer of presidential power, the modern Republican party, and the very idea of an American political commonwealth, whereas his sons left behind a trail of needlessly dead elephants, leopards, et cetera.

Donald Jr. (that's the one who takes his hair grooming tips from early-1990s Bret Easton Ellis serial killers rather than from his father) even carried on the family tradition of Love for the Little Guy by insisting that “the villagers were so happy for the meat which they don't often get to eat. Very grateful.”

Quote of the day: Dodging versus deferment

(Also known as the First Law of Conservation of Schmuckiness.)

If Trump is a draft-dodger for having taken a II-S (or four of them), he is among millions of "draft dodgers" and so you need to STFU because you're outnumbered.

The heel spurs letter is more interesting, mostly because of the timing.

Spurs are not permanent and, had the lottery not made it irrelevant, he'd have had to go back to confirm that they were still an issue, but, yes, he dodged the draft, based on one medical deferment. And, as Chris Britt notes, it puts him in no position to comment on other people's service.

Here's the thing: You don't have to lie to make this guy look like a schmuck, and you don't even have to lie to make him look like a draft dodger.

And you sure as hell don't have to slander the millions of us who took student deferments.

That's Mike Peterson, known to loyal p3 readers for his blog Comic Strip of the Day, clarifying an important legal and ethical distinction that seems poorly (sometimes, I suspect, willfully) misunderstood in the age of the all-volunteer army.

Eleven years ago, I found myself in the wretched position of having to defend the bloodthirsty likes of John Bolton and Dick “five deferments – count 'em, five!” Cheney, in defense of a larger principle. Or at least to make sure that they were damned for what they really are. As I wrote at the time:

Claiming a legal deferment instead of enlisting is no more "draft dodging" than taking the standard exemption on your 1040 form is "tax evasion."

On the subject of "dodging" the draft: If you don't want people to have legal ways of getting out of military service, don't create legal ways for them to get out of military service. If they avoided service legally, and you still don't like it, then your problem is with the law, not the person.

And--here's where the trouble lives--a law that's administered unequally, depending on how wealthy and connected you are, is a law worth having a problem with.

Legal ways to avoid service have always existed, often but not always tied to how much disposable income you have. The thing about Trump is that he thinks anything that doesn't benefit him first, most, and – ideally – alone, is for chumps. If, instead of a military draft, we'd had a Clinton-style national service program at the time, he'd have pulled whatever strings he could to get out of that, too. It's of a piece with his stated belief that not paying taxes makes him “smart” – he believes the opposite, that the idea of a commonwealth is stupid.


(And no one asked me, but I have to say that giving Ann Telnaes a live target would almost -- not quite, but almost -- be worth having Cheney back in the public light again.)

Let's review: The absence of a federal Election Day holiday is not theproblem

I've been seeing a lot of items on my Facebook feed the last day or two showing President Obama and Senators Warren and Sanders touting the notion of an Election Day federal holiday. 

 I still say that's a solution in search of a problem.

As I wrote in May:

A federal holiday for Election Day (or moving it to the weekend) misses the point. The problem is hardly that Americans are yearning for more time to participate in the Norman Rockwellesque living tableau of exercising their freedom to vote.[...]

Consider the status quo, where Republican-controlled statehouses, encouraged and abetted by the Roberts Court, are ever on the lookout for innovative ways – as well as tried-and-true favorites from the days of Jim Crow – to suppress voting by the wrong people, such as making them stand in line for hours at a polling place, perhaps only to find out that it had mysteriously run out of Democratic ballots, or had been deliberately understaffed, or moved to the far side of town, or closed altogether, or required some form of ID that was expensive if not completely unobtainable. And that's if they haven't had their names struck from the rolls by some bureaucratic error (always an "error;" never a "purge.")

All that a federal holiday for Election Day would accomplish is letting them draw holiday pay for the experience, rather than having to take the day off on their own nickle. I suppose that's an improvement, but not much of one. It certainly doesn't do anything to get at the basic problem, which is that one of our two political parties has vote suppression baked into its basic electoral strategy.

If you want a voting system that tends to raise participation while being nearly, if not completely, impervious to suppression (as well as statistically nonexistence “voter fraud”), you want the Oregon vote-by-mail model.

And as a bonus, you won't have to listen to the Chanber-of-Commerce types complain about yet another federal holiday for which workers will expect to get paid.