Whiny Liberal Bloggers Full of Self Importance…and Why Their Helping Obama Appear Moderate

Lately I’ve been biting my tongue.

McCain is such a dull candidate he can’t even get the progressives excited about taking him on. Instead, some lefty bloggers are having a hay day challenging Obama’s “surprise” move to the center.

Instead of focusing on real news, policy issues and solutions, like the escalation of bombings in Iraq, or the fact that Afghanistan is still a war claiming lives, or that it now costs over $40 to fill my Honda Civic (which I’m sure concerns most of you out there)… no instead of focusing on the stuff that really matters, the liberal bloggers like the Kos of KOS (sorry - don’t buy the line about getting out the checkbook and penning $2300) who claim the mantel of progressive have had fun bashing Obama.

I’m fine with critiquing policy positions based on fact, but when discussion becomes skewed by idealism, it starts get old, and I start to get less “slightly left leaning.”

But of course no one’s listening.

Weekend Diary of a Poltiical Junkie

SATURDAY

6:30 AM PST: Turned on CSPAN and watched 30 members of the DNC Rules & Bylaws Committee hash over various arguments on why two states that went against party rules should have a reduction in their penalty because no one thought Hillary would not be the nominee by June of 2008.

10:30 AM PST: Sometime around noon, after all grievances were heard, and the biased arguments of declared members of the committee had been fully aired, everyone took a break (a long break) and decided to talk behind closed doors.

11:00 AM PST: I turned off the TV and missed the removal of one unruly Harriet Christian, a Clinton supporter, but thankfully for YouTube I would later watch it multiple times as I went between fits of tears and laughter.

4:00 PM PST: Clicking between DrudgeReport, CNN and HuffingtonPost, I learned that Obama had officially resigned from his church, the United Trinity Church of Christ. I found myself both empathetic and a bit peeved that he did this (I’d not watched his explanation until later - and when I did, it made more sense, as it related as much to the burden being placed on the church than his political aspirations). Now I just wish people that weren’t going to vote for him in the first place would give it up.

5:00 PM PST: Or sometime around that time the DNC Rules & Bylaws committee finally meets again (yeah!) , and I watch as rude Clinton supporters interrupt continually during the motion, debate and vote period. Finally, as the ruling on Michigan is discussed, Harold Icki (a Clinton supporter, and supposedly the one that was supposed to stack the deck in her favor) decides it’s finally his time to pontificate and accuses the rest of his colleagues of hijacking 4 votes from Hillary (actually 2 votes considering they were half votes). He seems convinced that this would have made a difference and obvious to the fact that during the long recess his candidate was very close to getting a lot less.

SUNDAY

12:00 PM PST: Or sometime around this time, I learned that Obama lost Peurto Rico to Hillary Clinton (big suprise). Hillary claimed she’d now had the popular vote (bigger surprise considering she’s made this claim for over a month now and no ones been listening). And that she planned on continuing her campaign until she truly owned everyone in the United States a wad of cash.

3:30 PM PST: Logged on and created a profile on Hillaryclinton.com, thinking I’d try a bit of party unity myself and create havoc on the blog posts of Clintonistas. I think they saw through my black male disguise though because I never saw a single comment get posted.

4:00 PM PST: I decided, heeding her call for money, to donate $10 to her campaign. Along with the donation I sent a memo explicitly requesting that she use this money to payback the supporters she was defrauding with her argument that she actually had a chance to win the nomination.

5:00 PM PST: On barackobama.com I write a blog post, explaining my devious donation…and it seems Obamacans didn’t see my humor. I realized there really is a rift in this party…wow…I never would have guessed. I get a sense that this is what happens when generational shifts create chaos in government. The old skin doesn’t shed without some blood.

———

Note: Times are likely inaccurate but hopefully the general chronology coincides with your own weekend, fellow political junkies.

Congratulations Clinton! You’re officially the candidate for…

the racists that still exist in this country.

What disturbs me is that there is obvious racist sentiments leading to Clinton’s victory in West Virginia. There were reports in exit polling that two-thirds of the voters in West Virginia would not vote for Obama because he is black. This should disturb Clinton more than anyone. Why should she celebrate in their votes? And it should disturb her supporters. It taints anyone that supports her.

Clinton has no chance of winning the nomination. It’s over. It’s long been over, but the Democratic party has been patient with her. And yet she continues on, based on the hope that super delegates will cozy to her broad base appeal argument.

My argument against the broad based appeal and the idea that Obama can’t win white, working class American’s is basic. I don’t want to be in a party that has racists. Period. I thought that was the other party (in fact the last two presidential elections West Virginia did in fact go to Repubicans). So if the Democratic party wants to make the argument that in order to win the election, it must appeal to this group, then sorry - I’m not party to that.

In fact if Hillary truly is not a racist then I’d expect her to come out and reject, repudiate and denounce the votes of the two-thirds of West Virginia. But of course we wont’ hear anything like that, instead we’ll have to endure another three weeks of torture as this nomination process slowly bleeds campaign money that could be going to the fight against McCain.

Wow…it makes you proud to be an American for the first time… right Michelle?

Vogue Magazine, a Confession, and the Confused Artistry of Annie Leibovitz

I’m in the checkout line at Safeway with two beers and shaving cream and I notice the latest issue of Vogue.

Is this for real?

With all of the uproar over race, racism, and a media that keeps picking at the scab, how could such an insensitive cover make the stands?

I left the checkout with two beers, shaving cream and the April edition of Vogue, and a bit of fire for the keyboard with three points to make.

First point. If you’re a photographer, and your going to rely on Photoshop to pull off your ill-conceived gig, do it right.

I’m a graphic designer by trade and not a physicist, but I’m pretty convinced the cover image is a mediocre Photoshop job ( please comment if you feel otherwise.) One of the tell-tale signs of a manipulated image versus the real deal is gravity - the way bodies press against objects, or folds and light shadows bend and fall. In this photo, Gisele is weightless. While I know 99% of us couldn’t even dream of doing what Lebron does on the court, try to do what he’s doing in this photo. Even LeBron couldn’t pull this off.

First, find someone about half your weight and who is comfortable running suspended in your left arm. (It also helps if they don’t have a right arm.)

Now grab a basketball and assume a pose that goes somewhat like this. You’re in a wide stance and dribbling the basketball. Your left foot, (the same side as you’ll be holding whomever you convinced to play Gisele), hovers a few inches off the ground. Your Gisele should now assume the running pose in your left arm. Keep dribbling the basketball with your right. Now as Gisele fakes running, casually keep her restrained.

Keep this pose while I ready my camera.

Now comes the tough part. Roar at the camera. Don’t say cheese. That’s too wimpy. Make this a deep roar from the depths of your being, all the while looking straight at the camera and dribbling the basketball.

Oh, and Gisele, while you’re running, levitating and being restrained, give us a goofy smile and look somewhere way up in the rafters just over my left shoulder.

I hope you get my point. This cover is a concoction, and one of the worst kind, because it takes it’s influence from a movie, King Kong (1933), with a long history of controversy over it’s racist innuendo, and places it smack dab between my beer and shaving cream. Lesson here: If you’re going to concoct, know how to mix your ingredients.

This brings me to point two, a confession on creative arrogance.

Artists deal in manipulation of images. We see, process, and then regurgitate in whatever medium we prefer with the hope that others see what we see. From the moment we’re born, images are coming in, embedding themselves in our subconscious. And herein lies the problem. No two people have ever been exposed to the exact set of images, or reality.

In college, after I changed my major from Marketing and decided to dive head first into the process of becoming an Artist, I created art under the concept of shock first, question later. The unconscious intrigued me. Juxtaposition without reason, became reason itself. This was 1995 and I’d created a painting that stirred people, angered people. This is a painting for which I’m not proud. But at the time I wouldn’t take any criticism. I said, it’s how the images appeared, I created, I’m stepping back now and I disassociate myself from it. How was I to know what those to symbols meant anything other than my original intention? It’s all ART, right? Wrong. Lesson two: Don’t assume you have no responsibility to self-censorship.

And so I’m going to finish this long soapbox post with my final point.

Annie Leibovitz is a portrait photographer of great fame. At one time we’ve all seen her work. Because of her fame, and the expanse and recognition of her work, I’m going to make some assumptions. First, that she’s smart with a world view and has a great creative perception. That she knows her history of symbols and imagery.

As the photographer for this Vogue cover, Annie knows very much that she’s doing a play on the King Kong movie posters of the 30s (a time when the question of whether racism was ingrained in American life is a mute point). And yet she chose this as the construct for her LeBron and Gisele shot.

Magazine covers don’t spontaneously materialize. They start with a creative concept and a story. They are a collaboration between creative direction, editor, photographer and subject. Leibovitz was given a subject. A black man, a celebrity, and great athlete, and a blond woman, a super model. When the idea was conceived to shoot a photograph in the likes of the King Kong film poster, I’m going to guess this made some on the creative team a bit uneasy, but they went along with it. They were dealing with creative genius, and of course, it’s all in fun. And so the process that would produce this cover started. Leibovitz, thinking she was doing something daring, in the same mold as her photograph of Whoopi Goldberg in a bathtub of milk (another photo that could be questioned for its creative intentions), or her Demi Moore pregnant cover for Vanity Fair.

Unfortunately, the imagery and predisposition to make this photograph was already in Leibovitz’s unconscious way before this shot took place. It probably started in childhood with images from the 40s and 50s and has been reinforced all through her life. And her creative arrogance, and the fact she’s likely a politically liberal person with an open mind, means her mind is closed to her own prejudices, that she’s unaware of the myth she continues through her art. The myth that black men are primal brutes, that the blond damsel is their prize. There are a million ways to arrange and photograph two attractive celebrities.

Leibovitz gave us this.

For those interested here’s a list of other commentary on the subject of this Vogue cover:

1. ESPN Sports, Jemel Hill, March 21, 2008

Smoking in the Name of Kids

I’m not gonna dive into this issue much but this is where I part ways with Liberals of the Left. I’m not against taxes. I’m just against unfair taxes. Slapping another “Tax for Children’s Health Care” is just such a tax. It seems whenever we Lefties want to get tax money, the easiest way is go after the smokers. Who really likes cigarettes anyway? I know I don’t (although IrishSpacemonk may be seen with a cigarette but that’s because he’s an entertainer.)

Here’s where I get confused. Hear me out. A cigarette tax is a regressive tax, in that it taxes harder the poor in society. The poor in society are often the very people that need health care assistance for their kids. Cigarettes are addictive and getting off the addiction isn’t easy, nor free. We want to have a society free of smokers. But a society free of smokers will not fix the problem that uninsured kids that still need health care. And where does the money come from then? I was reminded of this a month or so back when Hillary Clinton was asked about a ban on cigarettes. There’s no way a lefty could be for such a ban when you think of all the tax revenue that would disappear. That’s the bind.

So here’s my three points against with slapping smokers with another cigarette tax to pay for kid’s health care.

1. The tax is regressive, taxing the poor more heavily than the rich
2. The tax takes advantage of an addiction that we are trying to fight, and when the fight is successful, tax revenue declines, despite the remaining need for health care of kids
3. Increased prices for cigarettes will not make the use of cigarettes go down - look at illegal drugs for a perfect example

In Oregon, this tax attempt is called, the “Healthy Kids Initiative” (Measure 50). I’m not for big tobacco. In fact why not cap the price of cigarettes and tax the tobacco companies instead? Make it come from their bottom line. What I’m against is an $0.85 per pack tax on the poor, to pay the health case expenses of the poor….what do you think? Give me an argument to the contrary and I might change my mind.

American Politics At Home And Why Nothing Ever Gets Done

This drawing is a bit late for the Friday Drawing for a Reader (see the Blogger Bomb #2 for an explanation), but it’s here all the same.

I’ve overheard the above conversation many times, probably because we don’t typically get married based on political preferences, or one’s political disposition changes over time. Either way, reader Bill’s point about Oregon’s one Democrat and one Republican Senator canceling each other out is a direct reflection of this couch talk on the home front.

Perhaps we should get Gordon Smith and Ron Wyden together in a little counseling chat. Of course, my preference would be to change the color of Gordon to blue, but you can’t always get what you want.

Complex Legislation Mean Some in Congress Never Read

This week’s, Drawing for a Reader, is for Bill, from out West, who drew my attention to this recent story about Dianne Feinstein.

I wish I didn’t have to pick on Democrats so much, considering that this IS a slightly left-leaning political cartoon blog, but the current Democrats have been such easy targets recently with their authorization of warrant-less wiretapping, inability to make progress on the Iraq War, and their failure to pursue impeachment proceedings of Bush & Associates.

The Congress isn’t entirely at fault. Because nothing has been done to curb the influence of Corporations (who often write the bills), legislation that must be voted on are huge, complex works that would probably make Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” read like a cartoon…no offense to Tolstoy, cartoons are fun.

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