I haven't been writing much about the Presidential campaign lately for two reasons, I think - one is that I'm already sick to death of it and the other is that there are so many other people doing a much better job of it than I'm likely to.  I mean, it's not like there was ever a chance in hell that I was going to vote for the incumbent.  Depending on the Democratic nominee, I was either going to vote Democrat or get my ass out of the country.  That's not to say that I can't imagine a scenario where I would vote for a Republican - I just can't imagine a scenario where I would vote for W.

Part of my reluctance to continue to chime in on the race is that everyone seems to be talking and writing about everything except what's really important - the fact that Bush is a lying, scheming, incompetent asshat that's done more harm to the nation's security and prestige, more harm to the economy (both present and future), more harm to the environment and more harm to polite meaningful public discourse than any other President in history and the fact that the Kerry/Edwards campaign has some concrete, workable plans to at least start addressing some of these issues.  I don't give a flying fuck about whether W fulfilled his National Guard obligations or not - the fact that he dodged the draft by leapfrogging hundreds of less-well-connected guys into the NG and rather than just admitting that, insists on prancing around on aircraft carriers in a flight suit while sending young Americans off to die for specious reasons is what I care about.  I don't care whether John Kerry was in Cambodia on Christmas Eve or whether it was actually a few weeks later - what I care about is that he's got a reasonable plan to help extend health coverage to a bunch of people that don't have it today.

The New York Times yesterday did a pretty thorough job on the whole Swiftboat Veterans for Douchebaggery crap, although I agree with Brad Delong that they could have done a better job of establishing in the lede what a smear job the SVfD ads are:

The important things for readers to know is that this bunch of veterans (a) are tools of the Bush campaign, and (b) are liars. But those facts aren't in the lead: to get those facts you need to read further into the story

Josh Marshall (as always) does an excellent job of putting the smack down.

Amazing. President Bush isn't even man enough to answer a straight question about these Swift Boat ads. (You'll have to pardon my antiquated and gendered language. But I'm not sure English has any more presentable way to convey the same meaning.) Not only will Bush not answer them. He won't even let his press secretary do so.

 

As we've noted, these ads are funded by the president's financial backers, put together by his political associates from Texas, and obviously meant to support his campaign.

 

Just one example from the Austin American-Statesman may serve to illustrate the point ...

The [Swift Boat] group was organized last spring with the assistance of Merrie Spaeth, a Republican public relations executive from Houston, who also was a public relations consultant to independent counsel Kenneth Starr during his investigation of former Democratic President Bill Clinton. Her late husband, Tex Lezar, ran for lieutenant governor of Texas on George W. Bush's GOP ticket in 1994.

 

Obviously folks he's never  had any contact with at all.

 

In any real world sense, this is a front for the president. And for the saps who are willing to give the president the most improbable benefits of the doubt -- that this is something he has nothing to do with and is utterly beyond his control -- well, he won't even toss them a bone by making even the most innocuous statement of disassociation

Ken Layne lays it on the line to a fellow blogger in fire-breathing Gibletsian fashion:

You morons have made Vietnam the Democrats' favorite memory and greatest victory. Then you scream hooray when a gang of addled old Nixon bagmen show up in a teevee commercial to bitch about Kerry fighting in Vietnam, and once again the normal people with lives only remember, again, that Kerry fought in Vietnam and Bush didn't."

 

"But," Tim sputtered, "Kerry clearly claimed he was in Cambodia several days before he was in Cambodia. It was seared--"

 

"Stop that," I said, poking his neck with the corkscrew worm. "Listen to yourself. What are you doing, again? That's right, you're reminding people that the other guy fought in Vietnam. Have you become so brain dead that you think this helps your girly boy Bush? Do you honestly believe the coward boy can beat the War Monster?"

 

Blair tried to shake the confusion from his head. Then his eyes brightened for a moment and he said, "Four months! Kerry was only in Vietnam for four months!"

 

"See? You did it again. You people can't stop reminding everybody that Kerry was in Vietnam, taking lives like your boy eats cookies. Killing people, saving people, holding Life & Death in his hands like a savage gift. He kills the Viet Cong or anybody else he chooses, he saves a U.S. sailor who fell out of the boat, he walks the halls of the Senate deciding who he'll kill or who he'll save. In Vietnam, Kerry is a death's head of gruesome power, while your Bush hides in Alabama, a scared little girl.

Read the whole thing - it's fucking priceless and why I can't hope to compete with these guys! (Thanks to Ed Cone for the link).  Finally Ezra at Pandagon puts to rest the central issue of this campaign - which candidate eats his Philly Cheesesteaks the "right" way - and proves W a liar once again:

Thursday, August 19, 2004

Watching Paul Hamm win the men's all-around in gymnastics after a fall in the vault where he almost landed in the judges' laps and after listening to Tim Dagget say over and over again that Hamms' fall had dropped him from any medal contention was choice.  Watching Adam Nelson vehemently protesting his 5th fault in a row in losing the gold in the shotput despite having a throw equal to the winner was less so - he was clearly out on all of his throws after the first, including the last one.  The swimming was awesome as usual - Phelps is just an amazing athlete and whether he wins eight medals or not, he's clearly the best overall swimmer out there.

But the highlight of the night for me was watching what little they showed of the women's whitewater event.  Rebecca Giddens is simply why we ought to care about any of this stuff.  From her interview where she got such a lump in her throat talking about the support she gets from her family and friends (at least 15 of whom had made the trip there) to her hell-bent-for-leather phenomenal last run to her being the first person in the water to congratulate Elena Kaliska after Kaliska's run knocked Giddens down to a silver, she was the epitomy of what sports is supposed to be all about and so seldom is.  I wish NBC would realize that we really do want to see team handball and badminton and archery and gecko-roman wrestling (sorry, MST3K joke...) - I'm glad they're showing more than they've done in the past, but there's still not enough.  Oh, and more beach volleyball.  Can't be enough beach volleyball...

Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Realized today that I have what I consider to be some of the most underrated artists from the early 80's populating the CD player in the Xterra right now - stuff that I've ripped from the original vinyl (some of this stuff is likely not available on CD, to be honest).

1)  The Hitmen - Four from "Torn Together"/"Aim for the Feet" - Bates Motel (along with the dB's Black and White) is what got me listening to WXYC.  I never had the whole album - I had a neighbor that was the local college rep for Columbia Records, so I got a promo copy with just the aforementioned Bates Motel and three other very strong songs.  "Aim for the Feet" came out a year before, in 1980, and was pretty decent stuff - Slay Me With Your 45 was a nice bit.

2)  Romeo Void - "Benefactor" - Too many people only remember Never Say Never (no, it really wasn't called I Might Like You Better If We Slept Together) - a great song to be sure (and one with a hell of a lot more going on than casual listening might reveal) but the album has a bunch of dark, twisty songs masquerading as dance tunes.  I'm afraid I'm a little unoriginal when it comes to describing saxaphone playing - it always seems to be either "wailing", "smoky" or "fiery".  Benjamin Bossi's playing covers all of those and more.  This was all probably a little too dark for most pop fans and too pop for most goth fans and frankly I'm not sure how many people were ready to hear Deb Iyall sing more about lust than love, but it remains one of my all-time favorites.

3)  Japan - "Japan" - This was something of a greatest hits or best of, as I understand it, probably having to do with label changes and such.  It includes stuff like The Art of Parties, Gentlemen Take Polaroids and Still Life in Mobile Homes, all of which I think got a little airplay on college stations.  I think it's gorgeous stuff and I probably like it more since David "Prettiest Man in Rock and Roll" Sylvian's range is near mine - I can belt out Ghosts or Taking Islands in Africa and sound halfway decent. (An ex-girlfriend once told me when I was singing the Clash's Clampdown that I sounded like Neil Diamond - when singing along to Japan, that's not a bad thing!  But I'd have been a lot less hurt if she'd said Bryan Ferry instead.)

Monday, August 16, 2004

My appreciation for these Olympic games will go up by two orders of magnitude if Pat O'Brien develops laryngitis.  That is all.

I've been thinking for some time now that the Presidential election may not be the close race that everyone seems to think.  Looks like Ezra at Pandagon and Paul Waldman of the Gadflyer agree.  As I've commented before, from the beginning of the national part of the campaign the Preznit has been running like anything but an incumbent - he's even trying at times to portray himself as a Washington outsider <snerk>.  This does NOT smell like a campaign that has any confidence whatsover.  I've seen a couple of explanations of why the polls don't tell the story and I don't know if I buy those explanations or not - I'm going more by my gut.  Even during the Clinton years (and let us not forget that his popularity was pretty damn high), many people that I worked with or ran into in the normal course of a business day would make snide remarks about Clinton and after that made positive remarks about Bush and no one would call them on it.  Just over the last few months however, I've seen more and more people willing to argue with those guys, even in a business setting, which was almost unheard of even a few months ago.  While in Newark a couple of weeks ago, we had a table at a restaurant with about 14 IT professionals all discussing the Presidential race at once - that would NEVER HAVE HAPPENED in 2000.  Certainly there were quite a few people there that were supportive of W, but to have a group of 14 well-paid IT professionals all in a conference about offshoring more work to India and have fully half of them speak negatively about Bush was just phenomenal!

The other thing that gives me some confidence in this is Kerry's propensity in past races to really surge in the latter stages of campaigns.  We saw some of that in the early primaries.  I don't want to count on that by any means, but it does make me feel a little better.

But by all means, keep believing it'll be close and keep working like it'll be close!  Can't let up for one second.

OK, maybe not quite.  Actually, I was born and I did start out as a child (I wasn't hatched nor did I spring fully-formed from the head of Zeus) but that's about the extent of it.  I did start life almost 44 years ago at Baptist Hospital in the aforementioned Music City, USA and spent the first 12 years of my life there, most of it in the neighborhood off of Porter Rd. between Stratford High School and Cornelia Fort Airport (although I usually just tell people that are only vaguely familiar with Nashville that I grew up in Shelby Park).  I bring this up as it has been a long time since I've spent any time there and through a number of people that I work with that live there and from a few blogs I'm reading from Nashvillians, I'm getting a hankering to go back and see what's what.

[Side note - sometimes I have no idea how I originally arrived at a blog that I regularly read, but there's one that I can trace back - from BoingBoing to The Black Table to The Saucy Librarian to mapgirl's wonderful Nashville Confidential.  If you're not reading it, uh, well, you should be.]

I only bring any of this up as I keep getting hints that my old general neighborhood around Porter Road and Riverside Drive might be undergoing a bit of gentrification. That certainly wasn't the case last time I was there some years ago - it just looked shabbier and less appealing than I remembered - so it would be cool if that's actually happening. I do know that the area from the airport along the river up to the park has been turned into trails, which I think is extremely cool!  I also missed the revitalization of the warehouse district downtown, which was just beginning ten years or so ago the last time I drove through there. Since any remaining relatives in the area are all out around Old Hickory or Mt. Juliet and parts east, I haven't had reason to go on into the city, but I think it's about time.

If nothing else, one of these days I need to make it to the Exit/In - I heard it had closed a couple of years ago and only recently discovered that it had been saved yet again.  It goes back as far as the Cat's Cradle in Chapel Hill but as far as I know it hasn't moved around like the Cradle has - I think the location off West End is the one and only.  I kinda feel like before I die, I ought to check out one of the places that gave both Jimmy Buffet and Steve Martin a start (you knew there was a reason I started with a Steve Martin quote, didn't you?). JennySlash and I did see some now-forgotten (at least by us) Knoxville band at 12th and Porter many, many years ago in Nashville, but that's the extent of my club-going there to date.  We've got a few other small trips already planned over the next couple of months, but maybe by next spring...