What has no Place in the Campaign

This is the ridiculous shit that Bennett, Palin, McCain, and Obama are rejecting and upset about. Idiocy, pure idiocy. Make sure and look at the poll at the bottom of the page.

Knocked Up: A Live Blog While Watching CNN

Oooooooooo, breaking news that Sarah Palin's daughter is a baby mama. (Maybe FOXNews can finally use that phrase in the correct context.)

Now, of course all these reporters are asking Obama to say something about the situation; he chose the high road (and for once, I agree with Bill Bennett who said whatever the reason--politics or personal ethics--it was a good move) and denounced talking about families during the campaign.

Democrats aren't usually ones to hit families (think of Billy Carter, Roger Clinton, and even McCain's imaginary Black child in the 2000 primary), so that call is probably more rhetoric than substance. Obama should have, however, used the response to put the ball firmly in the Republican court. Responding that Dems aren't really the ones who have the problem with this issue and suggesting that those questions are more appropriate for McCain, Bush, Rick Warren, James Dobson, etc. They are the ones who usually have an issue with this sort of thing. They are the ones who would be scandalized if it happened to someone they knew. Dems don't tend to be judgmental about this sort of thing--and indeed, Obama admitted his mother had him when she was 18 and he was conceived out of wedlock. It would have driven the point home--without being a "dick move"--on the differences between Democrats and Republicans on this issue.

But either Obama and the Dems didn't want to, were afraid to (the likeliest case), or didn't think of (which I seriously doubt since I thought of it in 5 minutes) hitting this note. I just don't see why there was such delicacy in this area. Sure an "I-told-you-so" is inappropriate, but it wouldn't hurt to put the conservative base to it and see what they say in response.


UPDATE: And now I am disagreeing with Bill Bennett again. Short honeymoon, I guess. Bennett is upset that the Center for Reproductive Rights has already made a statement regarding Bristol Palin and her baby. Of course, it's attacking abstinence-only education for sexual education. Bennett did not like this and ranted that it's exactly what Obama just asked people not to do. I disagree for 2 reasons.

1. Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council said, "Fortunately, Bristol is following her mother and father's example of choosing life in the midst of a difficult situation. We are committed to praying for Bristol and her husband-to-be and the entire Palin family as they walk through a very private matter in the eyes of the public." He said this today. He's attempting to downplay Bristol's mistake (premarital sex, getting knocked up) and playing up her choices that do fall in line with his organization's policies (pro-life). If Perkins can do it, why can't the CCR? I just don't understand why when something happens to a conservative it's private and is never discussed in terms of national policy (Rush Limbaugh and drug addiction, Bill Bennett and gambling, Larry Craig and homosexuality, etc.). Outlawing abortion, which McCain and Palin both support, seems to take away that personal, individual choice. It ceases to allow a difficult situation like this to be a "private matter" and involves the government in what would otherwise be a medical and moral issue that should not extend beyond the bounds of the family.
2. Obama was talking about the election and the campaign, not about issues. Sure the Dems shouldn't use this for cheap political points, but advocacy groups aren't running for office and don't have any reason to follow those rules--especially when it hits right at the heart of the issue they center their work on. Talking about it makes total sense to me. The CRR is all about sex-ed and is against what Palin's mom stands for, so there's no reason not to point to Bristol as a shining example of the policy failures they see right now. Bennett's argument that we should stay away from family issues is either disengenuous or deeply flawed because people and the events and issues in their lives make up the damn policy. Bennett seems to have forgotten that the government exists to serve and protect the people, and the people do not exist to advance some sort of governmental moral imperative.

College Football has Begun

I have nothing more to say until Tuesday. (h/t: EDSBS)

Wolf Blitzer is Secretly a Rock God

Wolf Blitzer (aka, "The Beard") loves him some music. He keeps commenting on the good music, and Anderson Cooper called him out tonight and let everyone know that The Beard used to rock it on the keyboards. Really. Apparently, The Beard wears that well-groomed face-mane in order to hide his earlier identity as Harold Faltermeyer, the keyboardist par exellence who performed "Axel F"--known to most people as the Beverly Hills Cop song.

I don't know why. John Roberts can morph from a vee-jay named J.D. Roberts into the host of CNN's American Morning.

It's amazing what 20 years and a haircut can do.

So why won't The Beard admit that he was and is a keyboard savant? Is he afraid of being associated with Beverly Hills Cop and that if he finds The Beard, Eddie Murphy will ask him for money? Or perhaps The Beard was somehow responsible for Eddie Murphy's "hit" single? Whatever it is, I think Cooper is investigating or blackmailing and The Beard really doesn't want people to know about it.

Peter Fonda Makes me Sad

I just saw a commercial for some TimeLife series of 60s psychedelic rock, and I'll be damned if they didn't trot an over-the-hill Peter Fonda out in his little Easy Rider leather jacket and shades to shill for this collection. That's a damn shame. It's on the level of using Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box" on Guitar Hero II. Or Bob Dylan shilling for GAP.

I want to ask if this is what we've been reduced to, but I think I know the answer. It probably has something to do with Foucault, or Zizek, or Althusser, but that doesn't make it any less depressing for Fonda, Dylan, or...Courtney Love or Dave Grohl. Not sure who would control Nirvana songs, but he or she should be ashamed.

Stupid Green Elitism and Stupid Southern Pride

So I've just watched the most recent episode of 30 Days, Morgan Spurlock's FX program. In this episode, a hunter from North Carolina (George) moves in with a family in Los Angeles--one of whom works for PeTA. It was an interesting episode, and George for the first few days recited the counterarguments that I've heard a lot in my classes. For years now, I've taught segments from Peter Singer's Animal Liberation and Michael Pollan's "An Animal's Place" in my classes--and the shit really hits the fan when we talk about Singer. Freshmen tend to respond very negatively when someone says that animals have (or ought to have) the same rights that humans have.

So as I watched George spend 30 days with the LA people, I was reminded of my experiences with these students. You hear these things over and over again:

• animals are made to feed us
• we evolved/were meant to eat meat
• God put us above all other animals: it's in the Bible (that one especially bothers me when they don't capitalize "Bible")
• we are more advanced than all other animals, so we can do anything with them we want
• the world could not support us if we all became vegans
• if we didn't animal test, lots of humans would die as a result
• animals raised in CAFOs don't know any better, so it's not really a problem

All of these have a multitude of of responses, but often they tend toward the shrill and dogmatic--when they make any sense at all. Now, I am personally sympathetic with the animal rights movement, and I agree with most all of their core tenets. I do not think that animals are meant to feed us or that we, by virtue of our more powerful place in the food chain, have a right to test on, abuse, or industrialize animals.

But I do eat animals. I eat bacon (or "meat candy" as it is known in our home), beef, chicken, etc. But I do a lot of research on where my food comes from. I don't buy meat from anywhere but the butcher and a local family ranch, and our bacon comes from Beeler's, a natural pork-producer from Iowa. The point is that I don't have a problem eating a cow or a pig or a chicken--as long as they got to live the lives they were supposed to live. I won't eat a chicken that's been raised in a cage its entire life, and I won't eat anything raised in a CAFO.

What was missing in the first part of the 30 Days episode was the animal rights folk putting themselves in the place of someone else whose cultural experience isn't the same as someone from LA. We got the indignant suburbanites who are disgusted that someone could go out and "murder and animal in cold blood." That pissed me off. Because North Carolina is viewed as stupid and backward (and...Southern...), that way of thinking and cultural experience isn't valued at all.

It was actually George who (eventually) made the good faith effort to understand where these people are coming from; they made no attempt to understand him and his life. All he got from a lot of the people was hard-core, unrelenting rhetoric: "I don't think we have a right to kill any animal for any reason."

Maybe I'm going to sound like Carl Rogers here, but beating someone who disagrees with you about the head and neck with your own ideas seems to further entrench those ideas with which you disagree. Maybe George isn't ready to become a vegan. Why not start with the basics: make him understand that animal suffering is just as wrong as killing animals--for good or bad reasons. The worst that happens is that he listens, because he sure as hell wasn't listening when people were telling him how he should stop eating meat. So you maybe have one more person who is making informed choices about where his meat comes from; he is, as Wendell Berry has pointed out in The Unsettling of America, becoming an informed consumer and voting with his purchases. That will hurt KFC or Carl's Jr. much more than standing out there in a chicken costume pretending to butcher Col. Sanders!

It just bothers me that people who are so certain they have the moral or intellectual high ground--the Moral Majority, PeTA, Pro-Lifers and Pro-Choicers, The Sierra Club, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and the other screechers on conservative talk radio, Michael Moore, Al Franken, and the other screechers in liberal media outlets, etc.--cannot really talk to people who disagree. Well, it's not that they can't talk to them; it's that they can't listen. They are unwilling or unable to place themselves in another's shoes, to take a moment to imagine why someone might think something different.

That's the real problem here. No North-Carolina-born-and-raised-hunting-man is going to listen to a bunch of white-bread-upper-crust types lecture him about how he's going to live his life. The most fruitful approach would have been to bond over a mutual respect for animals (even if they can't see the respect for animals in hunting, it's there...usually). Then once that common ground has been established, they could move on to other ideas about which they disagreed. OK. Not a big deal. Everyone learns something, and hopefully the better idea wins out in the end.

Honestly, I'm not sure that any of this made a helluva lot of sense. But that's what bloggin's for, apparently.

The Beard and the Board

So I was very entertained last night by the frustration of CNN reporters Wolf Blitzer and John King--or the "Beard and Board," as I like to call them. Lake Co., Indiana didn't report very quickly, which was a legitimate problem that Jeffrey Toobin (whom I like more and more every time he speaks) pointed out early in the broadcast.

The Board was getting irritated because he was running out of ways to dramatically zoom in on Lake Co. and finally took to electronic finger-painting (which he rather sheepishly erased when they cut back to him). The Beard was likely getting cranky because he wanted to get home to the real Situation Room--a 180-degree home theater that plays looped episodes of Grizzly Adams with an IV hookup for mainlining the tears of Katie Couric.

They finally got the mayor of Gary, IN on the phone and asked him what was going on. He gave a non-answer, so the Beard and even the Board repeatedly asked again and again. As the exasperated mayor kept giving the same non-answer, the undercurrent of these questions quickly became clear: "we are trying to make good TV out of this, and your slow vote-counting is making us look bad."

CBS called Indiana for Clinton very early (about 6.30pm here on the west coast), and CNN didn't call it until much later (about 10pm here). That certainly made CNN look bad compared to all-but-defunct CBS News, and you could hear the panic in the questioning of that poor bastard. The Beard and the Board were raking this guy over the coals in their frustration, as if it were his fault they ran out of stuff to talk about and only had cornbread to eat (and, of course, the Beard couldn't eat the cornbread for fear of getting crumbs in his lush swath of meticulously-groomed, virile, ivory face-mane).

At the end of the night, Clinton won and Obama lost; there's only so much "news" in that--especially since CNN et al. were telling us for the last week that was what was going to happen. There are only so many graphical representations of that we can care about and only so many mayors we can listen to. I will let Charlie Rose and Bill Moyers tell me who to vote for; I only need CNN to tell me who everyone else voted for. If they can't do that in a timely manner, it devolves into masturbatory theater loosely based on a political race. (Theater that I'll still watch because I have a man-crush on David Gergen).