sisu

Sunny Sunshine

 
Our Angel Baby atop the dining room table in the early morning light.

Fascinating how the color changes as we move around the table.

"Part of my leftism was a sales pitch"

"You were such a pinko commie pig that you were once recruited by the KGB, is that true?" early-morning provocateur Greg Gutfeld asked Roger L. Simon during Fox News's fast-moving NSFW gabfest Red Eye the other day. "That's true, and I was scared out of my pants," shot back the mystery writer, screenwriter and CEO of Pajamas Media. Check out Roger's look of astonishment when the host conflates him with "the other Roger Simon," introducing our man in Hollywood as an "award-winning journalist and columnist for Politico.com."  What ever happened to fact checking?

"I'm an intellectual to an extent, so I read things through, but I didn't think things through," Hollywood apostate Roger L. Simon tells City Journal Editor Brian C. Anderson re the self-described "fast and loose politics" of his youth:

Part of my leftism … was a sales pitch, not in the most crass sense, but in the sense that Hollywood is a very competitive place, as I'm sure everybody knows, and you have to distinguish yourself in some way, like the kid who raises his hand in school and says "Pick me, pick me." I was trying to be, if not the most left kid on the block, one of the more left kids on the block because I realized that the executive class there sort of envied that …

I went to China in 1979, which fits in with the previous question because when I went to China, very few had gone, and it gave me a tremendous panache. So although I realized when I was there that I was in this massive jail, and I was anxious to leave at the end for sure, when I came back I soft-pedaled that. I even soft-pedaled that in a novel I wrote, Peking Duck — which I believe is still an interesting book because it gives a sense of what it was like there at the time — but I soft-pedaled it because I knew in Hollywood it would be cool for me to have been to China … because very few people had gone at that point …

In Roger's salad days an aspiring screenwriter signaled membership in the tribe of cool by cultivating commie creds, just as today's A-list wannabes in Hollywood, academia and the mainstream media [Do they still have that? --ed] signal membership in the tribe by — in Karl Rove's razor-sharp words describing "Obama's Straw Men" in today's WSJ — "continually characterizing those who disagree with you in a fundamentally dishonest way." Our Gramsci-sodden cultural institutions' recent bout of BDS comes to mind, as we blogged recently:

"To trash Bush was to belong," writes Debra J. Saunders, putting her finger on the primal tribal imperative that underlies the relentless scapegoating of our 43rd president by his political adversaries gadding the corridors of power these last eight years, together with their allies in the media, here and abroad.

It looks like Roger and we ourselves are on the same page. Googling a suitable image for our blogpost, we stumbled upon this RLS quotation from a National Review Radio interview we'd missed a couple of weeks back:

During the Bush era, Bush-bashing was like discussing the weather. And the assumption was that you hated Bush. And if it was otherwise, you wouldn't necessarily lose the job, but your chances went down 80%.

Back to that City Journal interview for one more important insight. "You talk about how every Hollywood star has a kind of 'Mini-Me' inside," prompts Anderson, "the public face that espouses liberal platitudes; they live differently or think differently in their private lives":

Well, it's one of my theories, and I think it holds true, that because Hollywood is so ruthlessly competitive — I think people can guess that it is because lots of people wanna be stars, wanna be writers, fame and fortune is there — people have to fight like Hell to get their positions, and they don't always do nice things, and they become like that, they become callous, and they become tough. They feel bad about that a little bit because people don't like to be that way so they create this "Mini-Me," like the Austin Powers Mini-Me, [who] goes around saying "I'm the most progressive person in town. I'm for the people. I love you," and then they shut the gate on their estate in Bel Air and tell their assistant to go get the dry cleaning.

"Democrat 'compassion' was never about the have-nots — however defined — anyway. It's always been all about 'feeling good about themselves,'" we wrote back in September of 2007 in another RLS-related post, "Simon says OJ dunnit":

"In a riveting narrative [apparently no longer available online], Roger puts his finger on exactly what's wrong with the liberal project":

Aid given to people — no matter who they are — when it is not earned carries with it a level of insult and denigration. It comes from on high to down low and carries with it an implicit message of lowness.

"Reader RJH … sums it up nicely in the comments," we concluded:

That's a good read, and I have heard several variations on that theme from others. Not so much OJ specifically but people that had been lifelong liberals that changed their beliefs after taking a long hard honest look at what affirmative action and other Democrat causes had done to the black community. The black family structure was the strongest in the country. Today it has been decimated by Democrat "compassion." I doubt they could have done more damage if they had tried.

 

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously said, explaining "What I mean by that, it's an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do." Translation: Take the money and run when people are preoccupied, and you can get away with spending it in ways they would never agree to were they paying attention.

Unfortunately, now that our "compassionate" betters have seized control of the reins of power, they have no intention of letting "a serious crisis go to waste":

Stimulus Bill Abolishes Welfare Reform and Adds New Welfare Spending.

Yes we CAN "posture and bicker and resort to the same failed ideas that got us into this mess in the first place."

 

Update: Speaking of doing "things that you think you could not do," look, Ma, we're featured in City Journal's "CJ in the News," sandwiched between The Australian's "Grammar falls victim to the cult of Obama" and The Weekly Standard's "Lessons of Katrina."

Update II: "Just about everything [comedian Jim] Carrey poked fun at is now conventional wisdom for the far left," writes Ed Driscoll, who links in "Gore Almighty," a chilling revelation of how "a whole host of hairshirt envirowacko shibboleths" transmogrified in the short span of 15 years into politically correct orthodoxy.

"Why can't we get over our post-Marxist nostalgia?"

"That's just on the way, I suppose, to understanding the late quartets of Beethoven," says philosopher Denis Dutton about "the pleasure that people get from their dogs and cats." Image of Baby defending his turf from our October 2005 post "What immortal hand or eye?"

"These sorts of factors in the human personality cry out for a Darwinian explanation," says Arts & Letters Daily founder and editor, philosopher Denis Dutton in "A Talk With Denis Dutton" at Edge, making the case con brio for his theory that "aesthetics have a universal basis in human psychology, ultimately to be illuminated by the processes of evolution," as Steven Pinker explains in a jewel of an introduction. A few Dutton excerpts that caught our eye:

"It's not just art. Why do people have pets? — other species of animals — and devote inordinate amounts of time and love to them?" I mean, the standard answers have always been, well, they're surrogate children or something like that or they're filling a void in people's lives. No. There's something stronger there, the pleasure that people get from their dogs and cats and other animals that they have is deeper than that. To me that's very curious … Why do we like various cheeses? Why do we like the various foods we like? That's just on the way, I suppose, to understanding the late quartets of Beethoven. They move us deeply. They give us intense pleasure, and music is universal. These sorts of factors in the human personality cry out for a Darwinian explanation.

We are totally sympatico with Dutton's thesis and were delighted with his linking of our species' love of beasts and Beethoven as points on a spectrum. It called to mind our favorite Thoreau quotation:

The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

"Many people believe that this consilience between the arts, humanities and sciences represents the future of the humanities, revitalizing them with a progressive research agenda after the disillusionments of postmodernism," notes Pinker in his introduction. We're not sure what he means by "progressive," but given the pervasive moral relativism left in the wake of the Gramscian march through the institutions, we're skeptical of postmodernism's demise anytime soon. Nevertheless, Dutton on postmodernism's nemesis — universality — is music to our ears:

As a second comes universality. What we've had over the last forty years is an ideology in academic life that regards the arts as socially constructed and therefore unique to local cultures. I call it an ideology because it is not argued for, it is just presupposed in most aesthetic discourse. Allied with this position is the idea that we can seldom or perhaps never really understand the arts of other cultures; other cultures likewise can't understand our arts. Everybody's living in his or her own socially constructed, hermetically sealed, special cultural world.

But of course, a moment’s thought reveals that this can’t possibly be true. We know people in Brazil love Japanese prints, that Italian opera is enjoyed in China. Both Beethoven and Hollywood movies have swept the world. Think of it — the Vienna Conservatory has been saved by a combination of Japanese, Korean, and Chinese pianists …

Pleasure, universality, spontaneous development. We see them in the cross-cultural realities of music, the universality of storytelling, as well as things like food tastes, erotic interests, pet-keeping, sports interests, our fascination with puzzle solving, gossip — the list is indefinitely long. Charles Darwin has a lot more to say about how we evolved as inventive and expressive social animals with our remarkable personalities than has been given credit for. These aspects of evolution have deep implications for the origins and evolution of the arts.

 

"I love William Blake's 'The Tyger,'" we wrote in answer to the question "What is your favourite poem?" for our normblog profile back in October of 2005. "Dazzling imagery red in tooth and claw makes mincemeat of the peaceable kingdom paradigm," we added with relish. In photo Tiny, one of "our own in-house tygers …with fire burning bright in [her] eyes as [she and her brother] defended their turf from the intruder."

"Why can't we get over our post-Marxist nostalgia for economic or cultural determinism and accept human reality as it actually is?" asks Dutton, seemingly without irony. Doesn't he realize that generations of scholars have long since invested their intellectual capital in the left's utopian, blank-slate, noble-savage project that denies any such thing as human nature?

One more related thought. "Survival of the fittest usually makes one think of the biggest, strongest, or smartest individuals being the winners, but in a biological sense, evolutionary fitness refers to the ability to survive and reproduce in a particular environment," explains the PBS Evolution Library, making a point that people who aren't paying attention often miss:

Popular interpretations of "survival of the fittest" typically ignore the importance of both reproduction and cooperation. To survive but not pass on one's genes to the next generation is to be biologically unfit. And many organisms are the "fittest" because they cooperate with other organisms, rather than competing with them.

The same dynamics apply in the evolution of ideas. As we blogged a few years back in our post "Fear societies, heavy and lite":

Democratic Europe's go-along-to-get-along types in turn call to mind those members of academia who go along with politically correct groupthink they may not agree with in order to protect their careers. Call it "Fear Society Lite." Sharansky's "mechanics of tyranny that sustain such a society" are at work in those lofty intellectual bubbles just as surely as they were in the old Soviet Union and are today in the Arab tyrannies. A repressive society is a repressive society, wherever it may fall on a continuum of brutality and thought control. The crushing of dissent brutalizes the human spirit. Sharansky's optimism encourages the human spirit to soar.

"I cannot understand why there still is so much resistance among academics to such ideas," Dutton continues, puzzled at his peers' willful blindness to "human reality as it actually is":

If you want to be a one-dimensional determinist, go ahead and make it all "culture." My side of the argument isn't trying to make it all "nature," make it all genetics. Human life is lived in a middle position between our genetic determinants on the one hand and culture on the other. It's out of that that human freedom emerges. And artistic works, the plays of Shakespeare, the novels of Jane Austen, the works of Wagner and Beethoven, Rembrandt and Hokusai, are among the freest, most human acts ever accomplished. These creations are the ultimate expressions of freedom.

Like Thoreau's wildest, "The most alive is the freest. Not subdued to any man, its presence refreshes him."

Update: We were horrified to realize, as Charles Johnson wrote the other day, that "The Top 3 GOP Governors [are] All Creationists." We proudly stand with Johnson's band of "Some Anti-Creationism Bloggers" who share Randy Barnett's view that "A Republican candidate who is an avowed adherent to creationism will not be elected President of the United States":

Volokh Conspiracy: Defining "Creationism" down

Noblesse Oblige: Which Controversy? Discovery Institute vs Science

Daimnation!: Darwin’s next fight

The Atheist Conservative: If I saw an angel or if man was made of brass

Chicago Boyz [Hi, Mitch! 'Hope you and Winston are well.]: Happy 200th Birthday, Charles Darwin

Well That’s Just Dandy: I Don’t Know Why This Is So Hard To Understand

Kerplunk - Common sense from Down Under: The Discovery Institute’s willful destruction of Christian values

sisu: "Why can’t we get over our post-Marxist nostalgia?" [Plus, All Darwin All the Time]

An old friend and philosophy geek: Blog Here Now

More here

What hath Got wrought?

Update II: Noah had nothing over Steve at Modulator. Friday Ark  #232 now boarding.

"We haven't seen any purple baby squirrels yet"

A purple-tailed [!] Easthern Gray Squirrel takes advantage of free food meant for the birds but available to a clever sciuridad in our bro and sis-in-law's backyard the other day. After climbing down the bird-feeder wire strung from a branch of the venerable Silver Maple (see photo below), it lands upon the "squirrel-proof" roof of the feeder, shaking down some birdseed onto the ground below. Then it's back up the wire and down the trunk for a tasty lunch. (Ellen Jameson photos)

"A purple squirrel which appeared at a school has baffled experts who are unable to explain its colour," subheads a recent UK Telegraph report [with thanks to our sis-in-law for the link]. The "expert" quoted wasn't really "baffled," but hey. What's a headline for? At any rate, everyone has a theory, and some of them aren't half bad:

"We don't think he is a mutant squirrel but he may have had a mishap around the school," [said the registrar].

"The old building where we have seen him nipping in and out is a bit of a graveyard for computer printers. He may have found some printer toners in there. We haven't seen any purple baby squirrels yet."

TV wildlife expert Chris Packham believes Pete will moult and lose his purple fur in time for spring. He said: "I have never seen anything like it before. Squirrels will chew anything even if it's obviously inedible. It is possible he has been chewing on a purple ink cartridge and then groomed that colouring into his fur.

 

We were skeptical until we did a little googling and found — in the comments at boingboing — a link to this video of a "squirrel having a dust bath":

I think the toner hypothesis is not only valid, but also very likely. I have a pet hamster and he just LOVES to dust himself with very fine dust; it makes his coat very good looking and soft to the touch. This is true of many rodents, and here is a video of a squirrel exhibiting the same behavior.

Just for fun, one more unsought bit of lore that fell into our lap while we were googling "purple squirrel," from a WSJ "Careers" article:

"Purple squirrel" is a code word job recuiters use for "the dream candidate that doesn't really exist, or if they do, they're very elusive."

If only your being "the dream candidate" for that all-important job were only a dust bath away.

Note: Lots more squirrel blogging, red (in tooth and claw), white, black and gray here.

You make me smile with your art

"You know you’re gonna have a good day when your breakfast smiles at you," writes food photographer and rib tickler extraordinaire Elisson. (Blog d'Elisson photo)

"Now, that’s what I call a real Happy Meal!" says Elisson, who knows what a hungry eye wants:

[FYI, this is exactly how my plate looked when it arrived yesterday morning. Except for the raisin eye-pupils, which I added in order to provide a “demented” effect.]

Yes, but it's those very artfully placed cockeyed raisins that transform the objet trouvé into a work of art. Plus, like all great art, it contains layers of meaning, sending the mind's eye of the beholder on flights of fancy and self-revelation. For example, give his breakfast a quarter turn, and you're in EXTRA Happy Meal territory:

"A variation of :) that implies someone is extra happy," says Sharpened Glossary Definitions of Emoticons of the above emoticon.

Continuing to read into Elisson's original "statement," try turning it 180, and we're talkin' Eric Cartman of "South Park":

 

According to Wikipedia, South Park creators "Stone and Parker have said that … Cartman is largely inspired by All in the Family patriarch Archie Bunker, and creating him as a 'little eight-year-old fat kid' made it easier for the two to portray a Bunker-like character after the introduction of political correctness to late-20th-century television."

What can you read into our own artful edible, Mr. Grapefruit, a regular on the Sunday Breakfast circuit?

Update: New layers of meaning, with religious overtones, emerge from a midmorning imail conversation:

She: I always thought that :-D was a snide thing, not a happy thing, and have been using it inappropriately for YEARS.

We : LOL. Spreading extra happiness unbeknownst to you.

The Lord does move in mysterious ways.

"Seven ways from Sunday"

In the long stretch between breakfast and supper, Tiny visits her late, great brother Babe's aerie of choice, the top of the piano just across the room from where we sit at our computer. As we wrote only last September of our precious, seemingly robust baby boy, "Unconcerned with what talking heads are calling "the mess we're in," GOP (grand old pussycat) leader Baby Cakes shares the platform with the Republican base ("Ivory" elephant memento of our Kenyan Holiday last century).

"I have no idea why I bother to take photographs," wrote Elisson not without irony in the comments of our previous Tiny post, "Peaches and cream":

One image of Tiny, and I am completely outclassed, seven ways from Sunday.

Sissy, once again you have taken a beautiful subject and successfully Gilded the Lily.

Lots of lovely comments from some of our favorite blogfriends and TIny fans. Go check them out.

Santelli reads the tea leaves

Top billing on Drudge this afternoon for CNBC's Rick Santelli's Rant for the Ages," a refreshing cup of tea for the "forgotten man." More about him below.

"Y'know, Cuba used to have mansions and a relatively decent economy. They moved from the individual to the collective. Now they're driving '54 Chevys, maybe the last great car to come out of Detroit," quipped CNBC host Rick Santelli in what News Busters is headlining a "Rant for the Ages" — a truth-to-power call for a new "Tea Party" in response to President Obama's redistributionist mortgage-bailout plan — delivered from the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade this morning to the delight of traders and television viewers alike.

Floor traders gave thumbs up to Rick Santelli's "just say no" rant protesting the Orwellian inversion that is President Obama's mortgage-bailout monstrosity.

First a few excerpts then some thoughts on why Santelli's words resonate with the "forgotten man" who is forced to foot the bill for his betters' feel-good social-engineering schemes:

Santelli: The government is promoting bad behavior … How about this, President and new administration … Why don't you put up a web site to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers' mortgages …

(Traders in the pit start clapping and cheering.)

Joe Kernen, in studio: They're like putty in your hands …

Santelli: No they're not, Joe. They're not like putty in our hands! This is America! (Turns around to address pit traders.) How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors' mortgage that has an extra bathroom and can't pay their bills? Raise their hand. (Traders boo. Santelli turns around to face CNBC camera.) President Obama, are you listening?

Trader sitting nearby goes over to Santelli's mike: How about we all stop paying our mortgage? It's a moral hazard …

Santelli: We're thinking of having a Chicago Tea Party in July. All you capitalists that want to show up to Lake Michigan, I'm going to start organizing.

In FDR's narrative, the forgotten man was the "little fellow … at the bottom of the economic pyramid," Lee Cary explains in "Awaiting the Awakening of the Forgotten Man" at American Thinker. But today's forgotten man is closer to 19th-century Yale professor William Graham Sumner's model of the tax-paying citizen whose productivity provides the pecuniary resources for government charity, the author explains, quoting from Sumner's 1884 essay "On the Case of a Certain Man who Is Never Thought Of":

They therefore ignore entirely the source from which they must draw all the energy which they employ in their remedies … and forgetting that a government produces nothing at all, they leave out of sight the first fact to be remembered in all social discussion — that the state cannot get a cent for any man without taking it from some other man, and this latter must be a man who has produced and saved it. This latter is the Forgotten Man.

The friends of humanity start out with certain benevolent feelings towards "the poor," "the weak,'" "the laborers," and others of whom they make pets. They generalize these classes and render them impersonal, and so constitute the classes into social pets. They turn to other classes and appeal to sympathy and generosity and to all the other noble sentiments of the human heart. Action in the line proposed consists in a transfer of capital from the better off to the worse off …

"Millions of votes cast by the forgotten man helped elect Barack Obama," Cary writes:

Now, less than a month in office, in the wake of the fast, forced-feeding of a gigantic spending bill that no member of Congress is known to have even read, one wonders if any among the forgotten man has awakened to the consequences of what has happened, and will happen …

Most of Sumner's forgotten men and women who voted for Barack Obama, who will pay the expanded interest on the nation's new debt burden, have yet to awaken. A few have. Sadly, some never will. But to many, an awakening will eventually come, after time, and considerable pain. But it will come.

The forgotten man has had enough and isn't going to take it any more [via Instapundit].

Looking at the above CNBC poll of readers ready to join Rick Santelli's "Chicago Tea Party," together with a groundswell of pitchfork-bearing bloggers, we'd say the awakening may be happening sooner rather than later. Professor Sumner foresaw where utopianists always go wrong:

All schemes for patronizing "the working classes" savor of condescension. They are impertinent and out of place in this free democracy. There is not, in fact, any such state of things or any such relation as would make projects of this kind appropriate. Such projects demoralize both parties, flattering the vanity of one and undermining the self-respect of the other.

Exactly what blogger Minh-Duc, a proud American citizen and blogger who had escaped the tyranny of Communist Vietnam, wrote three years back, as we quoted in our post "It does not take into account the psychology of people":

People are never content with bare subsistence — especially if it comes in the form of hand out and charity. It degrades them and robs them of their self-esteem. It is a shameful existence. Men need pride from their own labor. Self-reliance brings personal honor and pride — a sense of ownership over one's own life. This is why the free-market economy is not only an efficient and effective system — it is also a humane and honorable one.

In related news, this happy thought just in from Professor Reynolds:

WE ARE THE CHANGE WE’VE BEEN WAITING FOR: Rep. Gohmert Says Republicans Will Cancel Spendulus Bill If GOP Takes Back Congress in 2010. I can’t think of a better reason to vote Republican.

Thank you, Mr. President, for your assist in awakening the forgotten man.

Peaches and cream

Oh high alert late afternoon, Golden Girl Tiny reads the sights and sounds and smells of the landscape that is her territory to defend.

The pale midwinter light paints her fur and the surrounding vegetation a subtler version of Maxfield Parrish's dazzling "Daybreak" palette of midsummer.

 

Update: "Tiny is extremely round. 'Reminds me of birds who puff out their feathers to insulate themselves," writes our imail correspondent. "Sort of like this," we i'd back with a link to the above image found in a google image search for "puffed bird." Separated at birth?

Update II: All animals all the time at Modulator's Friday Ark #231.

Light effects

The "SUE Lamp," a one-of-a-kind keeper from the Tuckman's shop for our sis, in three easy steps:

1. Using carpenter's glue, bond two sets of two pieces of three-quarter-inch pine together, one for the base, the other for the "sue."

2. With a few skillful turns of band saw, drill press and dremel tool, remove everything that doesn't look like "sue" and drill diagonally up from the bottom and vertically down from the top of the "u" to provide a channel for the cord. In the base, drill halfway down from top and then halfway in from the back to complete the channel.  Fine tune with rasps and files.

3. Finish things off with 3 coats of Gesso, wet-sanded, followed by countless coats of water-based high-gloss enamel by Krylon. Total cost of materials: c. $30 (wood was available "free" from shop inventory of leftovers). Total labor: 40 hours. A little gem of a thing.

"Awww. You shouldn't have."

We had provided technical assistance utilizing LinoType's online "Font Finder" and "Create sample" features, scrolling through the "Sans Serif" category to find a face that matched Tuck's original back-of-the-napkin sketch (above). We hit the jackpot with two members of the "Neue Helvetica® Font Family," "85 Heavy" and "86 Heavy Italic," using italic for the "s" and "e" and regular for the "u" to get a nice distribution of positive and negative spaces and the solid vertical upright that would hold the Home Depot lamp hardware and K-Mart lampshade. We got the sample into Photoshop for a little cutting and pasting and size adjustment, and the finished product was astonishingly close to Tuck's second sketch (upper right).

The wrapping paper itself, printouts of the logo in various colors on 8 1/2 x 11 sheets,  provided documentation and a witty commentary on the design process. Tuck used his paper shredder to get the reference to the lampshade's fringe along the bottom, and Tiny, sitting atop the printer behind the gift package in the countdown to supper the other afternoon, lent the necessary surrealistic air of mystery to the proceedings.

Tuck looks on with proprietary satisfaction at Saturday presentation ceremonies for the belated Xmas gift Down East, where family members gathered for a Valentine's/Mummy's Birthday luncheon of comfort foods featuring Fanny Farmer's classic Beef Stew with Vegetables — the Bourguignonesque version slow-cooked on the stovetop with red wine and beef stock — freshly baked Pillsbury Italian and vanilla ice cream with addictive Butterscotch Sauce [Mummy's signature Sunday treat way back when]. We made our dessert sauce the old-fashioned way — following the superbly written and illustrated "How to Make Butterscotch" at Simply Recipes: No more corn syrup!

The "card" was a copy of Tuck's working drawings, suitable for framing.

 

We love the playfulness of the beaded fringe that hangs from the pale ivory lampshade. Let there be light!

"Timeless wisdom versus hopenchangy socialism"

"So how do conservatives hold on to power when the population has been trained for two or three generations of Left-tinged rule to reflexively expect 'government to fix it' — whatever it may be?" wrote The Barrister at Maggie's Farm presciently back in October of 2006 in what we called, in our own post on the topic, "a tour de force essay that puts its finger on what ails us." (Unattributed image of Maggie and Ronnie, deep in conversation, on a brisk walk through the woods at [presumably] Camp David.)

"I never liked soaring rhetoric, and coupled with creeping (leaping?) socialism, I like it even less," we wrote in the comments of Texas Rainmaker's inspired imagining of what a Reagan/Obama debate would sound like:

Timeless wisdom versus hopenchangy socialism.

We imailed the link to Goomp, who writes back "Excellent and scary." Roger Kimball has a transcript of exerpts to whet your appetite. Be sure to treat yourself to the whole thing early and often, a cautionary tale that resonates and rouses our better angels. Our own personal favorite is this little holier-than-thou lecture/sermon of First Lady Michelle Obama's from February of 2008:

And Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism, that you put down your division, that you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zone, that you push yourself to be better and that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

"GAK. I couldn't even listen to the whole thing," imails our sis:

She: Good God, Ronnie must be spinning in his grave at how short a time it's taken to come to this.

We: I know. The phoniness of Obama's "soaring rhetoric" is what gets me . . . vs. the calm, measured rhetoric of OUR RONNIE.

She: "Soaring rhetoric" interspersed with plenty of "uh, uh, uh"s.

As Vladimir Lenin would have said, "The lie that an insufferable blowhard is a "brilliant speaker" told often enough becomes the truth.

Update: Maggie's remembers.