Irony

In the immortal words of Team America, fuck yeah! This has got to be one of the best "get out the vote" initiatives I've seen in a long time.

Via Digg and Twitter and cross-posted at Booman Tribune.

I can totally imagine Ted Olson laughing his head off while writing about the impending bit of historical irony that's in the making by the Democratic Party :

Would the U.S. Supreme Court even take the case after having been excoriated for years by liberals for daring to restore order in the Florida vote-counting in 2000? And, would Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, the dissenters in Bush v. Gore, feel as strongly about not intervening if Sen. Obama was fighting against an effort to change a presidential election by changing the rules after the fact? Will there be a brief filed by Floridians who didn't vote in their state's primary because the party had decided, and the candidates had agreed, that the results wouldn't count?

In short, the way things are going so far, Sens. Obama and Clinton will probably be so close to one another in delegate count by the time of the convention that all those primary votes may be tabulated, but will turn out to be irrelevant to the outcome. Those 796 superdelegate politicians will decide who the candidate will be. Maybe no cigar or cigarette smoke this time, but back-room politics all the same. All those primary voters and millions in campaign expenses locked out of the room.

Now the question is, who's to blame?

Hillary Clinton has actually intimated that her voters are too lazy compared to Obama's. That would explain why they don't trudge through the snow to cast a vote for her Billaryness. And it would also explain why Billary kicked her campaign manager Patti Solis-Doyle to the curb.

Paul Krugman, who's turned into Billary's bitch, says in 'Hate Springs Eternal' that Obama is to blame. Yes, because as Krugman sees it, Obama is a Magic Negro who has Jewish leaders under his spell and has not voters behind him but a cult following of hatemongers who want to turn this country into a new Nixonland.

An ironic image given that Hillary Clinton was at one point a Nixon supporter.

Ugh.

If there ever was a big media juxtapotion of capitalist imperialism and mysogyny this has got to be the one.

This particular portrait haunts me. Not because there is anything wrong with the girl, but because there is everything wrong with making her a piece of exotica.

She may elicit comparisons with the madonnas of the Renaissance; but I feel our Afghani girl was shot to look more like a pre-Raphaelite painting. Check out especially the ladies created by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

With their dreams of brotherhoods, medievalist fantasies and nymph fetish, the pre-Raphaelites artists can be considered one of the most anti-women aesthetic movements of European. I would like to make the point that it is particularly mysogynist exactly because their style was meant to represent women as precious objects.

So when I look at this ironic juxtaposition at The New York Times, I read it not just as a joke. Looking at it closely it speaks volumes about the way in which Americans not only regard women but 'foreign' or colored women.

Call it the Pier 1 Imports effect.

Anything that is not the 'mainstream' American culture or looks like is treated by the purveyors of 'haute taste' as a commodity, as another tradeable piece of furniture or accessory of interior decor.

I usually need little reasons to praise the work of Jon Stewart and the crew over at The Daily Show, even though the show has been lacking the freshness of earlier years. This lack of freshness has to do with the fact that TDS has become the Oprah Book Club of the country's punditocracy. Anybody who is anybody in Capitol Hill and who has a book to hawk will fight tooth and nail to get their 30 seconds of fame with Stewart (or Colbert, for that matter) if it means their book will sell. And even if either has called them a douchebag in past shows.

Which is why I flabbergasted by the timing of John Bolton's appearance on the show yesterday.

He had no book.

He has no project.

He came in to tell Stewart how wrong he was for thinking the current mess over at the Justice Department was a scandal at all.

Bolton went to the show to debate and put Jon Stewart in his place?

Oh. Hell. Yes!

Now that is amazing TV.

You've never seen a whiter Pakistani

So Rahm Emmanuel has upgraded Mr. Van Hollen over at the DCCC.

How nice.

I'm sorry but I had a tad of a knee-jerk reaction when I saw his picture. Then I read this :

Van Hollen To Oversee Recruiting, Fundraising - washingtonpost.com:
On the Hill, Van Hollen is considered part of a younger generation of Democrats whom Pelosi is grooming through leadership opportunities. He is a member of the 30-Something Working Group, an informal team that helped spread the party's message from the House floor during the campaign. He is considered a reliable liberal and has voted against Bush tax cuts, a ban on "partial birth" abortion and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve.

Brendan Daly, a spokesman for Pelosi, said Van Hollen's appointment is a vote of confidence by Pelosi in his political judgment, ability to recruit candidates and raise money. He's one of "our bright young stars," Daly said.

He's is one of the "bright young stars" at the tender age of 47. Yup. He's a puppy. A puppy that represents the New America?

Right.

Why do I have a knee-jerk reaction? Well ... Right now the two most prominent colored people in Congress are two sexuagenerians who have about 50 years combined in office.