April 21, 2009
Um, John, that happened like a week ago, buddy.
Is John McCain really just catching onto this story? He’s a little behind the curve on this one:
A recent report from the Department of Homeland Security is downright “insulting” to veterans, Arizona Sen. John McCain said Monday.
In an interview on FOX News, the Vietnam veteran and former Republican presidential candidate said the Obama administration owes veterans an apology after releasing a report last week suggesting that members of the military returning from Iraq and Afghanistan could fall victim to “right-wing extremism.”
Specifically, the report — “Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment” — said right-wing extremist groups may be using the recession and the election of the nation’s first African-American president to recruit members
I’m just sayin’! I guess he wasn’t convinced by Janet Napolitano’s response when she said that DHS isn’t trying to insult veterans.
“The military is a part of DHS,” she protested (too much?). “We have the Coast Guard in our department!”
*Admittedly, this is not an exact quote. I am paraphrasing, here, just a tad.
She sounded like the racist who claims he’s not racist and to prove it tells you about his one black friend. Sorry, sweetheart, we’re not buying it. And, sorry Mr. McCain, but you really need to learn how to use the Internet. You’re only like seven days behind.
Comments (5)April 20, 2009
We’re not all spoiled brats.
S.Logan had a post today that claims our generation is full of spoiled brats and has never known the true meaning of sacrifice. I would like to leave this alone, but I am called upon to respond. And, I must share some of my personal life history, although anecdotal, in my pursuit to refute this claim and then explain why my refutation matters.
I am no spoiled brat. I know what it means to sacrifice. I am the child of a single mother who supported five children without help. We were poor kids growing up in a very rich town, next door to even richer towns. I know the kids she is talking about, but that small fraction of our generation is not an accurate picture.
I know sacrifice like most people in my social circles don’t. I had my first job when I was twelve. I was a live-in nanny in Martha’s Vineyard. I’m from Connecticut. So, I lived away from home and was a live-in nanny before I could drive, or do much else. I worked the day I turned thirteen, watching a six-year-old. They (the family) took me out to dinner, but I spent the rest of the night watching their child in their home where my only transportation out was a bicycle.
Shortly after that, I started babysitting in my neighborhood, until I turned 16. At that point, I got a job at the Genovese opening up in the new shopping center. I would ride my bike to and from work. I rode my bike the two miles there just to fill out the application. That was what necessity dictated. There was no extra money in my home. I bought my own clothes for school starting at 13.
When they experienced layoffs, I got a job at the local grocery store. This was my life. I was responsible for me. There wasn’t any allowance or “Mom, can I get $20 to go see a movie?” There was me. Whatever I wanted to do was up to how much I worked for it.
I finished off my senior year in high school with three part-time jobs, often going from one job to another. I did my first year at the local community college, before moving up to Roger Williams University (otherwise referred to as Rich White Undergrad).
There, I overloaded on classes (six per semester when the average student took four) while working two jobs, equaling approximately forty-five hours per work, while finding time to join, found, and hold leadership positions in several clubs, while authoring articles for several college newspapers. At one point, I was so desperate for tuition money that I sold my car. To say that I don’t know sacrifice is more than just an incorrect exaggeration.
There are plenty of people in my generation that are just like me. They just haven’t realized that conservative ideas better suit their path in life than the liberal ones they have probably been fed. See, people like me tend to feel a level of guilt. A guilt that spoiled brats just can’t understand. We feel guilty that we made it when so many others we know didn’t. We feel guilt for our success. And, guess what party, what ideology, those feelings naturally draw us into? Look at someone like Bill Gates. What drives him to be so liberal when liberal policies are inherently against his best interests?
I was drawn into conservatism because I got sick of it all. I got sick of the fact that I was working my butt off while the government was taking my money (through taxation) to support those who weren’t willing to sacrifice. They weren’t even willing to work. Don’t forget, I was poor. I have seen abuses of welfare. I was the friend of kids whose mothers were on welfare and used their checks to buy drugs.
I have attended CPAC for many years. I usually end up talking to a lot of people that want to hear everything I have to say, and I have always wondered why. Now I get it—it’s because they have never met anybody like me. Their backgrounds are all so similar—rich, white, taken care of—they can’t grasp the knowledge I have of the everyday person. I have the degree from Roger Williams. I’ll soon have the degree from Johns Hopkins. My resume stands up to theirs. Yet, I seem to get something no one else there gets.
I have sacrificed, more than, and less than, plenty of others in our generation. What we need to figure out is how to draw more people like me in. Pawlenty can slap a label on people. Perhaps I fit into his “Sam’s Club Republicans” group. I don’t know. But, I know this much, I find it insulting. As I’m sure most of the people he would categorize this way do.
For a party that defines itself by preserving the rights of the individual, the Republicans have certainly failed in tapping into a core constituency. We are here: people who have built their lives living on Republican principles. We just might not realize it. And, until it is brought to our attention, we will continue to support liberal policies based on guilt. Like the minority who can only contribute his success to his own hard work that promotes affirmative action, we need to be reached by the message of how personal responsibility, instead of government welfare, is the only way that all can hope to succeed.
Don’t get me wrong, I think there are plenty of people in this generation, and those coming up (with their cell phones at age 9) that are spoiled. But, there are plenty of us who are not. It’s just that our upbringing has positioned us to be more inclined with the Democrats. It’s not always about social issues. I just wish that conservatives (Republicans?) would get this.
Republicans get angry that they are always seen as the party of the rich. I don’t believe that. They are not the party of the rich. They are also not the party of the poor. Both parties ignore the poor, and both are headed and ruled by elitists. The general public gets that and that is why most people don’t vote and the ones who do are more inclined to identify as independents.
I don’t think my generation is filled with more spoiled brats than the last. But, perhaps that’s just the social circles I run. What do I know?
UPDATE: As many of you may know, other than our battle for Big Sexy, S.Logan and I have only met once. Due to the geographical distance between us, we have not had the opportunity to have a sleep over filled with painting each other’s nails, doing each other’s hair and the obligatory pillow fight (in our panties of course!). That has kept us from really getting to know each other on a personal level, and only allowed us to stumble upon our similar histories through blogging.
Perhaps, as a generation we are spoiled. We have been coddled. We have never been asked to sacrifice. But, whose fault is that? Surely it is not our own. President Bush was presented with an opportunity to present our generation with a call to arms; instead he presented us with a call to shopping. When I hear the older generations talking negatively about our generation it aggravates me. I mean, who raised us? If we’re so spoiled, who did the spoiling? But, that’s beside the point.
I have enjoyed every part of my life and wouldn’t give any of it back. What you got was a snapshot, not my life story. There are plenty of people who have had it way worse than me. A fact that I have always been aware of. Perhaps I fit into the spoiled brat category, but I know there are members of our generation who don’t.
My point was more political than personal. And that just because our generation hasn’t been asked or forced to sacrifice on a grand scale, doesn’t mean none of us know what real sacrifice is, are incapable of it, or are spoiled.
I guess I disagree with her premise that in America “excess pervades even the lowest common denominator of society.” Simply being American, born in America, does not mean that you grew up with excess. I know from personal experience that there are plenty of people in America who are barely living.
Republicans and conservatives could do a lot to attract members of our generation like me. My point is that, we are lured into the Democrat party because even though we got out of our situations through hard work and dedication, we still know so many who didn’t. We are convinced by liberals that as someone who did succeed, it is our responsibility, through government programs, to support those who didn’t. Since we’re not hearing an effective conservative message tell us otherwise, we fall into the wrong line.
Instead of labeling a whole generation spoiled, why not consider that there are many who aren’t and that those people are likely receptive to the conservative line? When people aren’t being insulted with labels (whether being labeled spoiled, Sam’s Club Republicans, etc.), they might be more receptive to our message. It has to start with the acknowledgement that not everyone has lived a life of privilege and excess.
As for our generation making sacrifices, don’t worry, our time for sacrifice will come. Just as the generations below us will be forced to sacrifice, too. At some point, the bill the politicians are running up will come due. And, it won’t be the “Greatest Generation” that pays for it. They’ll all be dead by then.
Check out what others are saying about this story as it develops: The Other McCain, Pundit and Pundette, A Conservative Lesbian, and Little Miss Attila.
UPDATE II: Apparently, I was linked with my own memeorandum thread. I’m pretty psyched about it! This is only my second time. It’s been over a month since my first.I just didn’t know the proper protocol the last time. Now, I’m on it. Will update posts in future to reflect linkage on Memeorandum.
UPDATE III: Troglopundit weighs in.
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Here illegally? How about in-state tuition?
I know. I really need to give the illegal immigration thing a rest, and I will, just not today:
Champions of a proposal to allow illegal immigrants in New Jersey to pay in-state college tuition could be forgiven for believing, after years of frustration and defeat, that their cause may finally have momentum.
A blue-ribbon panel convened by Gov. Jon S. Corzine to study immigration matters unanimously supported the proposal in a report issued last month, and the governor has also endorsed the idea. Meanwhile, a new, more liberal wind blows in Washington.
But even the most hopeful immigrant advocates in New Jersey concede that these developments may not be enough to push the proposal, which is outlined in several bills, through the State Legislature, particularly during a recession and in a year in which the governor and the entire Assembly faces re-election.
Choosing his words carefully, Shai Goldstein, executive director of the New Jersey Immigration Policy Network, said, “We’re cautiously optimistic.” He paused, then added: “There’s been pushback on this.”
The bills, versions of which have languished for years in the Legislature, would allow an illegal immigrant who had attended a New Jersey high school for at least three years and graduated to be eligible for in-state tuition at a publicly supported college or university. (College tuitions and fees paid by out-of-state students are on average more than 90 percent higher than those for New Jersey residents, the panel said.)
Illegal immigrants, advocates argue, should not be penalized for their parents’ actions. Also, they say, allowing students access higher education will encourage more immigrants to excel in high school, multiplying the state’s intellectual capital and empowering its work force.
You would think New Jersey of all places would have learned its lesson about illegal immigration when four of Newark’s teens were shot, execution style (three died, one survived), by illegals a couple of years ago, shortly before the teens were scheduled to head off to college. Apparently not. I’m sorry, I must have misplaced my sympathies because they lie with the teens who were shot and their family and friends, not with the illegal immigrants.
It’s not about punishing the children of illegals for the decisions of their parents, but we also shouldn’t be rewarding their parents by providing their children with a discounted education. This policy change would benefit illegal immigrants while penalizing American citizens from other states. Why should an illegal from another country get a discount that an American from another state can’t get?
This just creates the incentive for more illegals to move to Jersey. Not that I care that much. We’re talking about Jersey, the armpit of America. Unfortunately, it probably won’t be the politicians and illegal immigrant advocates that pay for these often deadly choices. It will be the citizens of New Jersey who pay with thier lives when some criminal who snuck into our country illegally decides to break the law, again.
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Terrorists were waterboarded: Boo hoo!
In addition to the MSM trying to win our sympathies for illegal alians, I guess we’re also supposed to feel bad about waterboarding terrorists:
Sorry, won’t get any sympathy from me. Especially when considering the left isn’t against torture, they’re against torture of their favored groups (and, yes, terrorists are one of their favored groups as they are out to destroy America, just like the left). They seem to have no problem with waterboarding when joking about doing it to conservatives.
Comments (0)April 19, 2009
The Chronicles of Testaclese: Chapter Seven
Here it is, your weekly edition of The Chronicles of Testaclese.
Chapter Seven: Introduction
I interviewed a group of men between the ages of sixty-five and seventy-five. These interviews were the most poignant of all, possibly because many of the men had never had a penis interview before. Unfortunately, most of the men in this age group had very little conscious relationship to their penises. I felt terribly lucky to have grown up in the masculinist era. Once man who was seventy-two had never even seen his penis. He had only touched himself when he was washing in the shower, or going to the bathroom, but never with conscious intention. He had never had an orgasm. At seventy-two he went into therapy, and with the encouragement of his therapist, he went home one afternoon by himself, lit some candles, took a bath, played some comforting music, and discovered his penis. He said it took him over an hour, because he was arthritic by then, but when he finally found his penis, he said, he cried. This monologue is for him.
Chapter Seven: The Flood
Down there? I haven’t been down there since 1953. No, it had nothing to do with Eisenhower. No, no, it’s a cellar down there. It’s very damp, clammy. You don’t want to go down there. Trust me. You’d get sick. Suffocating. Very nauseating. The smell of the clamminess and the mildew and everything. Whew! Smells unbearable. Gets in your clothes.
No, there was no accident down there. It didn’t blow up or catch fire or anything. It wasn’t so dramatic. I mean…well, never mind. No. Never mind. I can’t talk to you about this. What’s a smart boy like you going around talking to old men about their down-theirs for? We didn’t do this kind of thing when I was a boy. What? Jesus, okay.
There was this girl, Amy Smith. She was cute—well, I thought so. And tall, like me, and I really liked her. She asked me out for a date in her car….
I can’t tell you this. I can’t do this, talk about down there. You just don’t know it’s there. Like the cellar. There’s rumbles down there sometimes. You can hear the pipes, and things get caught there, little animals and things, and it gets sticky, and sometimes people have to come and plug up the leaks. Otherwise, the door stays closed. You forget about it. I mean, it’s part of the house, but you don’t see it or think about it. It has to be there, though, ‘cause every house needs a cellar. Otherwise the bedroom would be in the basement.
Oh, Amy, Amy Smith. Right. Amy was very good-looking. She was a catch. That’s what we called it in my day. We were in her car, a new white Chevy BelAir. I remember thinking that my legs were too long for the seat. I have long legs. They were bumping up against the dashboard. I was looking at my big kneecaps when she just kissed me in this surprisingly “Take me by control like they do in the movies” kind of way. And I got excited, so excited, and, well, there was a flood down there. I couldn’t control it. It was like this force of passion, this river of life just flooded out of me, right through my boxers, right onto the car seat of her new white Chevy BelAir. It wasn’t pee and it was sticky and smelly—well, frankly, I didn’t really smell anything at all, but she said, Amy said, that it smelled like sour mild and it was staining her car seat. I tried to wipe the flood off my shorts. They were a new yellow sporty pair of short and they looked so ugly with the flood on it. Amy drove me home and she never, never said another word and when I got out and closed her door, I closed the whole store. Locked it. Never opened for business again. I dated some after that, but the idea of flooding made me too nervous. I never even got close again.
I used to have dreams, crazy dreams. Oh, they’re dopey. Why? Rosanne Barr. I don’t’ know why. She never did much for me in life, but in my dreams…it was always Rosanne and I. Roseanne and I. Rosanne and I. We’d be out. Roseanne and I. It was some restaurant like the kind you see in Atlantic City, all big with chandeliers and stuff and thousands or waiters with vests on. Rosanne would give me this orchid boutonnière. I’d pin it to my blazer. We’d laugh. We were always laughing, Rosanne and I. Eat shrimp cocktail. Huge shrimp, fabulous shrimp. We’d laugh more. We were very happy together. Then she’d look into my eyes and pull me to her in the middle of the restaurant—and, just as she was about to kiss me, the room would start to shake, pigeons would fly out from under the table—I don’t know what those pigeons were doing there—and the flood would come straight from down there. It would pour out of me. It would pour and pour. There would be fish inside it, and little boats, and the whole restaurant would fill with water, and Rosanne would be standing knee-deep in the flood, stuck to the floor, looking horribly disappointed in me that I’d done it again, horrified as she watched her friends, like Madonna and the like, swim past us in their tuxedos and evening gowns.
I don’t have those dreams anymore. Not since they took away just about everything connected with down there. Moved out the whole works. The doctor thought he was being funny. He told me if you don’t use it, you lose it. But really I found out it was cancer. Everything around it had to go. Who needs it anyway? Right? Highly overrated. I love the dog shows. I sell antiques.
What would it wear? What kind of question is that? What would it wear? It would wear a big sign: “Closed Due to Flooding.”
What would it say? I told you. It’s not like that. It’s not like a person who speaks. It stopped being a thing that talked a long time ago. It’s a place. A place you don’t go. It’s closed up, under the house. It’s down there. You happy? You made me talk—you got it out of me. You got an old lady to talk about her down-there. You feel better now? [Turns away, turns back.]
You know, actually, you’re the first person I have ever talked to about this, and I feel a little better.
Credit Card Companies = Bad!
It’s always the big bad companies extending credit that are to blame and never the people who took and used the credit:
White House economic adviser Larry Summers told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that President Obama plans to join a push planned by congressional Democrats on “credit card abuses” as part of looking out for the little guy while rebuilding the nation’s financial system.
“We need to do things to stop the marketing of credit in ways that addicts people to it,” Summers said.
Summers told moderator David Gregory that Obama is concerned about “the way people have been deceived into paying extraordinarily high rates that they wouldn’t have paid if they knew what they were getting themselves into.”
I’m so sick and tired of the Obama Adminstration blame game. It’s always the big bad companies that are responsible, and never the people. We take on these credit cards, this debt. It can’t be argued we don’t know what we’re doing. We are adults. If a person is too irresponsible to read the fine print, make late payments, or overcharge their card–leading to higher rates–it is their responsibility and their fault.
The credit card companies are pretty good at letting you know what will happen. You made a deal with them when you accepted, activated, and used the card. Just because you don’t like where it ended up, doesn’t mean the company is to blame. The American public needs to reject this rhetoric and start taking responsibility for their own actions.
UPDATE: Wait a second, if paying taxes is patriotic because it will help the government help us out of this financial crisis (that was caused and created by the government, pretty much), then wouldn’t paying higher rates on our credit cards to help the banks and lenders out of the current financial crisis be patriotic, too? It’s just a thought.
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Rule Five Sunday: Gabrielle Union
As you should all know by now, it’s Rule 5 Sunday. There were a lot of women in the running this week. I woke up this morning with Gabrielle Union on my mind, so she is the winner. Enjoy, boys!
Stay tuned for your weekly edition of The Chronicles of Testaclese later today!
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