I’m not happy about the election results in policy terms, but there’s a societal benefit here, and the person who put it best might just have been Chris Rock. At his show in Richmond this spring (and probably plenty of others too), the thing he said he most looked forward to from this election was that a generation of kids, including his own, would grow up with Barack Obama — a black man — as their childhood image of “what a president looks like.”
Well, he’s got his wish. And now, nobody can tell a black kid that he or she can’t be president, or anything else that kid wants to be, or that America is so intractably racist that success is impossible for them. The celebration in Chicago puts the lie to all that. Congratulations, President-elect Obama; what President Bush called the soft bigotry of low expectations is one societal pathology that we can damn well put to bed tonight, and that’s good for all of us.
4 November 2008
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Sure, Obama has few qualifications, little experience, and in many ways we couldn’t disagree more with his platform. We hope he’s lying. But we (are really damn tired of defending Bush/never liked him anyway), McCain (has pissed us off for years with his grandstanding/should have kept it up), and Obama sure does talk pretty. Oh, and Palin? Ew. Populism. So what the heck, give him a shot.
And by the way, can we get an invite to the inauguration party? Just one of them? Not even one of the big ones? Please?
(See, T. Coddington Van Voorhees VII understands!)
30 October 2008
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No real content, just a collection of links gathered mostly from Insty and Treacher, assembled here because I’m getting tired of Googling everything that comes down the wire — and good Lord, there’s a lot of it.
8 September 2008
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/ Tags: politics
After a bagarre generale on the New York Times’s Slapshot blog this weekend and another throwdown on a Caps blog, old friend-of-BTN Eric McErlain wondered Wednesday at the NHL Fanhouse why it seemed to offend people that Sarah Palin calls herself a “hockey mom”:
To tell the truth, I’m a little flummoxed over the whole thing. After all, baseball fans have gone the better of the last two terms with an unpopular President who loves the game so much he holds tee ball games at the White House lawn, and we don’t hear much carping from them. If anything, learning biographical details like these are pretty common over the course of a campaign, and I’m having trouble figuring out why learning Palin loves hockey is all that different from knowing Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) loves hoops.
It’s not, of course, unless being a hockey fan is supposed to make us different from Sarah Palin.
Read More »
4 September 2008
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/ Tags: hockey, politics
