Poetry Friday: The Bowerbirds by Dana Goodyear

http://wellreadchild.blogspot.com/2008/02/poetry-friday-bowerbirds-by-dana.html

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Political Wankery (the latest debate and the “Oh SNAP!” nihilism of our public discourse)

Here is a word for all of these sighing Madam Bovaries of the political world, these political deconstructionists. They are nihilists. And because nihilism dominates our public discourse, Obama is incommensurable with it. He is a mystery. Here our the nihilistic premises that underly everything the political class in the United States has to say today:

* Nothing is significant beyond the question of whether it titillates us, whether it is fuel for our wankery. Everything is a matter of appearances, fashion, style. Nothing is about the signified, for there is no such thing as the signified. We skate lightly over the surface of things, and there is nothing underneath beyond self-interested motives.
* All is Will-to-Power. Therefore all motives are attributable not to sincere belief but to strategy. Everyone’s intentions are transparent. We live in a war of all against all. We are sophisticated because we are cynics who see that beneath the appearances to see that there is … nothing … except will-to-power.
* Yawn. When we are not stimulated by the appearances or by conflict, we quickly get bored.

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Hillary Clinton’s Rhetorical Offenses (and why words matter)

Hillary Contra Obama, in five acts: http://ketchupandcaviar.com/2008/02/25/hillary-clintons-rhetorical-offenses-and-why-words-matter/#play

Act I, Scene I: Enter Clinton, stage right, wearing coronation robes—grand, radiant, inevitable. In the beginning the thought of not winning no more occurs to her than the thought of being a peasant occurs to a queen. The audience knows as soon as she walks onto stage how brittle these great expectations can be—that she’s set up for a fall, that the tragic seed of the unraveling exists in the rigidity of the expectations. When there is just the slightest hint of resistance to these expectations, things do indeed begin to unravel.

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Poetry Friday: The Voice by Thomas Hardy

Here’s my post at The Well-Read Child

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Black Candidates are Being Elected by White Southerners

I often argue to friends who say that a black man can’t be president in America that American race relations are more complicated than the usual stereotypes make them out to be. In Alabama no less:
Yet there are parallels. The very quality that voters here highlight, in so many words, as one of Mr. Fields’s [...]

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Hillary is With It

I watch these about seven times a day:

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Obama’s Legislative Accomplishments–and how this experience helped him win

I think it’s significant that Obama has more experience as an elected official than Clinton, especially in light of the fact that he a) built a massive legislative record during that time and b) used the same skills with which he built that record to run a superb campaign against Clinton. Here’s a graphic that illustrates the fact that Obama has far more legislative experience than Clinton, especially when his time in the Illinois State Senate is taken into account–he sponsored more than 800 substantive bills to Clinton’s 20 (and these generally run the gamut from establishing the “Kate Mullany National Historic Site” to naming courthouses).

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