straight talk express // Current

The Make-Believe Maverick

McCains early life of recklessness and dishonesty. Called McNasty and punk by his school friends. The good "dirt"... more

wanamoka
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The truth about 'Straight Talking' John McCain

A man who I had once voted for has abandoned everything he believes in to spread lies about another candidate. Just like George... more

elsonwvu
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Who Am I?

"I am under 45 years old, I love the outdoors, I hunt, I am a Republican reformer, I have taken on the Republican Party... more

JoKnows
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Democrats Compare Obama to Jesus

Bless his heart! In this clip, Cohen compares Obama to Jesus and implies Palin to be like Pontius Pilate. Does this make... more

JoKnows
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Female Politicians Should Study History

I haven't read much of Camille Paglia's writings, but this article has prompted me to take another look at her:
She wrote about McCain and Sarah Palin in a more thoughtful stance than I had thought a self-confessed "dissident feminist" would. ( I particularly liked the jellyfish comparison!)

As Camille Paglia said:

"As a dissident feminist, I have been arguing since my arrival on the scene nearly 20 years ago that young American women aspiring to political power should be studying military history rather than taking women's studies courses, with their rote agenda of never-ending grievances. I have repeatedly said that the politician who came closest in my view to the persona of the first woman president was Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose steady nerves in crisis were demonstrated when she came to national attention after the mayor and a gay supervisor were murdered in their City Hall offices in San Francisco. Hillary Clinton, with her schizophrenic alteration of personae, has never seemed presidential to me -- and certainly not in her bland and overpraised farewell speech at the Democratic convention (which skittered from slow, pompous condescension to trademark stridency to unseemly haste).

...Here's one episode. My father and his visiting brother, a dapper barber by trade, were standing outside having a smoke when a great noise came from the nearby barn. A calf had escaped. Our landlady yelled, "Stop her!" as the calf came careening at full speed toward my father and uncle, who both instinctively stepped back as the calf galloped through the mud between them. Irate, our landlady trudged past them to the upper pasture, cornered the calf, and carried that massive animal back to the barn in her arms. As she walked by my father and uncle, she exclaimed in amused disgust, "Men!"

Now that's the Sarah Palin brand of can-do, no-excuses, moose-hunting feminism -- a world away from the whining, sniping, wearily ironic mode of the establishment feminism represented by Gloria Steinem, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose shameless Democratic partisanship over the past four decades has severely limited American feminism and not allowed it to become the big tent it can and should be. Sarah Palin, if her reputation survives the punishing next two months, may be breaking down those barriers. Feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership.

Right now, I don't believe much of what I read or hear about Palin in the media. To automatically assume that she is a religious fanatic who has embraced the most extreme ideas of her local church is exactly the kind of careless reasoning that has been unjustly applied to Barack Obama, whom the right wing is still trying to tar with the fulminating anti-American sermons of his longtime preacher, Jeremiah Wright.

The witch-trial hysteria of the past two incendiary weeks unfortunately reveals a disturbing trend in the Democratic Party, which has worsened over the past decade. Democrats are quick to attack the religiosity of Republicans, but Democratic ideology itself seems to have become a secular substitute religion. Since when did Democrats become so judgmental and intolerant? Conservatives are demonized, with the universe polarized into a Manichaean battle of us versus them, good versus evil. Democrats are clinging to pat group opinions as if they were inflexible moral absolutes. The party is in peril if it cannot observe and listen and adapt to changing social circumstances."

Thank you, Camille - I'll be bookmarking your column for the future!I haven't read much of Camille Paglia's writings, but this article has prompted me to take another look at her: She... more

JoKnows
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3 months ago

LeBron Doesn't Respect the Fans Who Pay His Salary

Sports stars don't seem to get it nowadays. If the folks in Ohio pay his salary (they do by attending the games!), then... more

JoKnows
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3 months ago

Hillary Just One of Many

She wasn’t going to “stay home and bake cookies”, she was going to reform the health-care system: if we elected her husband, we were thus going to get “two for the price of one”. With those words, Hillary Clinton launched herself into America’s national consciousness, and began a political career that very nearly brought her the Democratic presidential nomination earlier this year. Though she lost that contest, along the way she succeeded in making herself into something more than an ordinary woman in politics. She became an archetype, the Female American Politician.

More than that: she became the archetype of the Powerful American Woman. She herself once explained the hostility she inspires as the misdirected fury of men who were angry at a “female boss” or other female authority figure. They felt bad about being subordinate to a woman at work, so they took it out on her.

This was not entirely accurate: some people disliked Hillary just because she was Hillary. But it’s true that her personal style – frequently chilly, determinedly frumpy, visibly calculating, pointedly humourless – did come to seem like a kind of norm. That’s why, when she lost the Democratic nomination, it wasn’t hard for some to see it as a defeat for all women. If Hillary couldn’t make it in national politics, her disappointed supporters declared, then no woman could.

As anybody who has been watching the news for the past week will already know, that statement turned out to be dead wrong. As it turns out, there are numerous ways for women to be politically powerful in America, and they don’t all involve wearing shapeless trouser suits and looking frosty: Sarah Palin, enter stage right.

The interest in her and her life story is no fluke, either. Following the failure of Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Palin is suddenly, and flamboyantly, the most prominent female politician in the country. At age 44, she is also the most prominent representative of her generation of women – a generation which already looks set to be different, in important ways, from its predecessors.

There is, at the moment, even a potential first lady who seems destined to break, if not glass ceilings, then at least preconceptions about what that particular job means, with all of its loaded cultural connotations. Michelle Obama is equally articulate, equally maternal, and no less well-groomed that Sarah Palin. She gave a convention speech which was, in its way, no less revolutionary – in her allotted half-hour, she portrayed herself neither as a traditional first lady, nor as a presidential substitute who would set up her desk next door to the Oval Office, but as rather something different altogether – a successful career woman as well as a mother, a dedicated activist and a wife.

Instead of a tough suit she wore a soft dress. Instead of telling the American public they would get “two for the price of one”, she seemed secure enough about her own identity to simply support her husband. As it happens, she, like Sarah Palin, is 44 years old.

None of this is meant to imply that Hillary Clinton’s generation is finished, let alone Hillary herself: she may well be back in the national game, in 2012, 2016, or later. But the appointment of Palin does bring the Hillary Era to an end – she isn’t the archetypal Female American Politician anymore, she’s just one of many.
She wasn’t going to “stay home and bake cookies”, she was going to reform the health-care system: if we elected... more