Moe Lane

Third word: OK.  Fourth word: not so much, maybe.

James Lileks is either less merely elementally offended by the Vice President that we’ve been saddled with, or else he’s better at hiding it:

It takes years of yoga to learn the posture necessary for speaking clearly with all your feet in your mouth. But for some the skill comes naturally, which brings us to Joe Biden. Those who saw Dick Cheney as an evil genius crouched silent in the shadows of the Oval Office like Nosferatu must enjoy Biden’s high profile: he’s out there daily with the sunny enthusiasm of Ronald McDonald opening another store. And, quite often, telling everyone to have a Whopper.

Read the whole thing, and no need to point out that Whoppers come from Burger King: remember, this is Biden that we’re talking about, here. Unlike Lileks, I’m not convinced that the VP’s unrehearsed comments represent the thinking of this administration, mostly because I’m not convinced that there’s anything that represents the thinking of this administration. The slapdash strategy of the White House towards pursuing its goals – which apparently can be summed up in two words: ‘sign something‘ – could be easily making the Vice President’s utterances look more important than they actually are.  After all, we’ve become accustomed to having someone who should be taken seriously being in that spot – so when POTUS is giving us rhetoric with the semantic content of tapioca pudding, it seems natural to assume that VPOTUS at least is providing something with more heft to it.  Whether this is a justified assumption, or not.

Still, either way… you know, ‘they told me that if I voted for John McCain‘ we’d end up with a Vice President who kept mucking up things on a fundamental level – and they were right.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Henry Allingham, world’s oldest man at 113, died this weekend. How did he do it?

Mr Allingham once jokingly attributed his longevity to ‘cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women’.

For that matter, ‘wild, wild women’ are distinctly off of the agenda at this point. Not that exploration of the implications of that particular plural form was ever really on the agenda, but then I’m given to understand that the complications from situations where n>2 could end up being remarkably synergistic in their effect anyway.

OK, I can’t let this pass. Via Instapundit, this bit of nonsense:

“People are scared,” Glorioso said. “This is the worst economic time anyone under the age of 80 has ever experienced, and you can’t discount people being afraid. Now that we are in July, the fear is turning to disappointment that the president hasn’t fixed everything yet. I don’t know why they thought he could change everything by now, but some did.”

I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.

They thought that because he told people that, you… politician. Did you think that nobody kept a permanent record?

Moe Lane

…just back from Shakespeare in a park.

Moe Lane

PS: I’m writing this on a Mac. Can’t say that I’m all that impressed, though.

Down Under, Men At Work

It seemed a good idea at the time. Still does, actually.

Seeing the in-laws; Shakespeare in the park – well, a park – and the laptop stays at home, so light blogging this go-round. And I mean it this time.

Picking some sites at random to read, instead:

Deceiver.
Protein Wisdom.
Skepticans.
Age of Sail.
Jules Crittenden.
Fausta.

While I certainly agree that Jane Eyre is a great novel; but what it really needs is…

Well, it simply needs to be recast in a setting that’s had an unsuccessful alien invasion: one where the invaders attempted to create various kinds of psionic mutations in the captive human population. Jane can be a precognitive; Rochester could be some sort of former Man In Black with a mad pyrokinetic in his attic; and I guess that Rivers would be a telepathic mesmerist and secret agent of the last few aliens hiding out on Earth.

Hey, they put zombies into Pride & Prejudice, and the result’s been on the best seller list for months. And now they’re going to do Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters – no, really:

…so don’t tell me that wouldn’t sell.

Moe Lane

Or so this blog reports.

To be honest, I was never entirely pleased with Howard’s performance in Iron Man, and I liked Cheadle a lot in both Hotel Rwanda and Ocean’s Eleven – so this isn’t really bugging me. Robert Downey and Gwyneth Paltrow are coming back to reprise their roles, and that’s probably the key to the movie right there.  The article that spawned all of this… well.  Some weird stuff going on there, maybe.  On the other hand, the preliminary buzz on Star Trek was worrisome, too – and that turned out OK.

We’ll see.

Moe Lane

Yup. Come up with an ad that quotes him.

The inhuman fiends.

Via American Power.

Crossposted to RedState.

(Via AoSHQ Headlines) It’s a good interview, mostly because P.J. O’Rourke is happy to answer “Surely you agree…” questions with all the assurance of a man who will never, ever run for political office. Would that more people did that – and that’s with the understanding that doing so would keep them from running.  We need less people in politics, and more impolitic people.

However, my favorite Q&A is this one:

AVC: Do you worry that some people might dismiss your more serious points because they’ll just assume you’re joking?

PJO: No, I don’t worry about it. It’s much better to have your arguments dismissed because you might be joking than to have your arguments dismissed because you’re not telling the truth. I’ll pick “I’m kidding” anytime over “I’m lying.”

I like that.  I may steal it.

Moe Lane

PS: He’s got a new book out. Driving Like Crazy: Thirty Years of Vehicular Hell-bending, Celebrating America the Way It’s Supposed To Be — With an Oil Well in Every Backyard, a Cadillac … of the Federal Reserve Mowing Our Lawn.  When the title’s too long for Amazon.com…

Somber opinions on the space program from Charles Krauthammer:

WASHINGTON — Michael Crichton once wrote that if you had told a physicist in 1899 that within a hundred years humankind would, among other wonders (nukes, commercial airlines), “travel to the moon, and then lose interest … the physicist would almost certainly pronounce you mad.” In 2000, I quoted these lines expressing Crichton’s incredulity at America’s abandonment of the moon. It is now 2009 and the moon recedes ever further.

Next week marks the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing. We say we will return in 2020. But that promise was made by a previous president, and this president has defined himself as the anti-matter to George Bush. Moreover, for all Obama’s Kennedyesque qualities, he has expressed none of Kennedy’s enthusiasm for human space exploration.

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Twenty-one minutes long, but worth every second: this Breitbart interview with Harry Alford was done over the phone, so you can safely stick it in the background and listen and not miss anything.

Mr. Alford, as you remember, went round and round with Senator Barbara Boxer* over some racial attitudes that the latter has yesterday; he expanded on this a bit more. Highlights from the interview:

• He and the NBCC are not shills for Republicans. In fact, they’re going to be on the other side on the health care issue. Mr. Alford himself is an independent.
• This level of racially-motivated condescension is all the more outrageous because he’s never been treated like this before, in over a decade of testimony.
• Mr. Alford’s – fully justified – outrage seems based on the fact that he was there to testify as a representative of a Black business organization, and Senator Boxer kept treating him as a Black representative of a Black (business) organization. Who was Black. Like all these other Black people who agree with Senator Boxer, so their Black opinions were just as relevant as Harry (Black) Alford’s.**
• So if you’re going to dispute a report being used by the NBCC, and you simply must get your own Black people to back you up, they’d appreciate it if you went and got ones who can at least address the issue from an informed state.
• And, oh yes: Boxer and staff ran away surprisingly quickly after the hearing.

Really, listen to the whole thing.

Moe Lane (more…)