Archive for October 13th, 2010
Chicago Media working as arm of Rahm Emanuel's mayoral campaign
I’m just going to say this, even though I know some of you are going to use it as an invitation to say bad things about the Clintons (which it’s not)…but the way Rahm Emanuel is behaving in his bid for Chicago Mayor is very reminiscent of how Hillary Clinton’s top advisors and 2008 campaign behaved through most of 2007.
That’s when Team Hillary thought it had the nomination all sewn up and Clinton’s advisors largely came off as aristocrats who only had to go through the formalities of the primaries to claim the prize officially.
There’s such an arrogance about Rahm Emanuel…and it’s disgusting to see the Media bullying people not to ask him tough questions.
The Media and Democrats believe Emanuel is going to waltz to a coronation in Chicago…and ignore the fact people don’t want him to be our Mayor.
This is not going to end well for Emanuel.
People in Chicago get more upset every day by the way he is behaving, and by how much the Media is pushing him on this city.
Voters are just not going to take it quietly.
An Open Letter to Straight Guys: No, gay dudes don't live and breathe to see you in the shower
With DADT in the news again, I just have to chime in with something absurd I consistently see on conservative sites whenever the issue is raised — and that’s the weird conspiracy theory some straight guys (very vocal ones at that) seem to have that gay dudes keep pushing DADT because they want to join the military just so they could shower with straight men.
It’s seriously one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. In my entire life.
It’s so ridiculous, you’d think this wouldn’t even need to be addressed but after another judge ruled against DADT all sorts of forums flamed up with this shower conspiracy thing yesterday, so I thought I’d finally settle this once and for all.
Let’s just get to the absurdity of a person, in 2010, going to all the trouble of joining the military just so he could shower with other guys — because that’s some fetish of his.
For about $40/month that same gay dude could join the YMCA, which are mostly older facilities…that have the old-style gang-shower rooms like what most people imagine the military has (at least in movies, and on Gomer Pyle USMC). If this was really about showering with straight guys, then why not just join this gym and live their fantasy every day, for as long as they want? The Y is also a month-to-month membership, so a person could quit any time he wants…and not be locked into a four year military commitment. Just in case shower time was not as much fun as he hoped it would crack up to be.
Part of why this shower conspiracy comes up, I think, is because straight guys I’ve known live and breathe to see women naked — and seem to go crazy when they encounter bare breasts in public that belong to strangers. Hence, Mardi Gras, St. Patrick’s Day, and the popularity of Halloween in Wrigleyville where girls seize the occasion to dress as sexy as possible. Because some straight men seem unable to control themselves around (near) naked women, I think these same guys assume gay dudes must be wired the same way…and that if they were ever naked around a gay guy he would behave the same way a straight guy would at Mardi Gras or whatever.
That’s really not the case, at all.
Another naked guy is not as exotic to a gay man the way a nude woman is to a straight man. It’s apples and oranges. Or, escargot and oysters, if you will (R.I.P. Tony Curtis).
It’s hard to imagine any gay guy in the military standing there in a shower room being all pervy — because no doubt the rest of his team would find that socially unacceptable and there’d be in-unit consequences for that behavior. The same way the unit wouldn’t allow someone to stink because he didn’t like to bathe or wouldn’t let him be messy and get the rest of the barracks in trouble. The units seem to self-police all sorts of infractions, and I don’t think they’d have any more trouble handling someone being pervy than they’d have dealing with someone being racist or anti-semitic in-unit. The same would hold true for people being homophobic, if a service member was out and open about him or herself.
Because I’ve never been in the military, I don’t feel comfortable stating an opinion on DADT, the same way I’ve always been grossly uncomfortable weighing in on abortion. I’ve had a lot of friends in the military, a surprising number of whom have been gay. I’ve dated some Marines. They were great guys who never had any problems in their units — and everyone knew who they were and what was up with them. To my knowledge, neither of them ever tried to rape anyone in the showers, so overcome by the eroticism of something totally non-erotic that they just couldn’t control themselves.
A lot of this shower conspiracy stuff reminds me of Islam, in a strange way.
Women in Islam are forced to wrap themselves up in sweltering hot sheets and cover every inch of themselves because men just can’t control themselves. It’s asinine in the year 2010 to believe in any such nonsense. There’s no excuse for a Muslim man not being able to control himself, whether a woman is in a bikini or running through the streets impersonating Lady Godiva to the best of her abilities. It’s absurd to excuse bad behavior because a guy “couldn’t help himself”.
For some reason, there really seems to be a portion of the straight male population that thinks gay dudes are like those Muslims, and protections need to be put in place to protect straight men from being objectified and accosted by gays. What’s ironic is that the guys who are so vocal about the shower conspiracy nonsense don’t realize they put themselves into the roles of those burqa-clad Islamic women — since they claim they need to be protected with great modesty from the advances of men who would find them irresistible.
I thought straight guys were supposed to be tough, rough, and tumble. Can’t they stop any advances from the one gay dude out of a million who has some brain defect that prohibits him from getting the message that a guy’s not interested in him?
I think it’s the military’s business, not the court’s, and not mine as a private citizen who does not understand military life (no matter how many Marines I’d ever date), to decide military policy. But, from what I understand of the policy, there’s already rules against fraternization and so long as the military would enforce those rules as it sees fit I don’t really understand what the fuss is really about when it comes to gays in the military. They are already there. From what I understand, on air craft carriers, for instances, there are actually sections of the mess halls where all the gay service members sit, together, that form sort of a Boystown at sea. Certain jobs in the military seem to recruit gay members almost exclusively (communications for men, carpentry and mechanics for lesbians). And there are apparently parts of those ships that might as well be run as a Steamworks annex.
It seems gays have been in the military since, oh, Alexander the Great, and it sure looks like there’s already a thriving gay subculture in uniform, just based on my personal anecdotal experience with gay service men and women. Hell, we have a gay commander-in-chief currently. Welcome to Hope and Change!
At the end of the day, though, this is not a civilian issue to decide. It’s a military one.
Just like, as a gay man, I don’t weigh in on abortion because that’s something that’s never going to personally affect me and I think it’s absurd for me to try to force an opinion I’d have on women…since I’m never in my life going to be involved in any kind of abortion-related decision. I’m never going to wear a military uniform, so I’m out of my league telling the military what it should do about anything.
I think it’s absurd and a great waste of energy to pretend gays aren’t already in the military, so it’s ridiculous not to formulate a policy rooted in reality that deals with what’s already there. I also think abortion is the most brutal and horrific decision a woman would ever have to make, leading up to what must be the saddest possible nadir of her existence (that she will have to answer for, if not to a God she believes in, but to her own conscience for as long as she lives).
I just think part of the DADT issue that can be resolved today is the obsession with the showering. Nobody cares about seeing you in the shower. You don’t have anything people haven’t seen before, in the year 2010, with the Internet and the invention of eyes and everything…and if you really are some sort of remarkable, never before seen, specimen then you should be flattered all these gay guys drop everything to stare at what an absolute Adonis you are.
In that case, what are you doing in the military when you should be on a giant billboard in Times Square making the world a better place by spending all your time in only your underwear.
Get over yourselves.
Are Democrats really stupid enough to threaten 401(k) plans?
Honestly, I don’t even know what to say about this.
Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa is threatening 401(k) plans — insisting Democrats can use the lame duck, post-defeat session of Congress to ram through a measure that would seize your personal 401(k) plans and use them to prop up the union pension plans that are imploding.
Are these people really this crazy?
For the last few months, we’ve been hearing talk of Democrats insisting they have “nothing to lose” once they are defeated in November, and that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid would use the last few months of power they hold to cram as much statist legislation through in the dead of night as possible…with the Left realizing it would not have this much power for another several decades at least.
I’ve never bought into this just because of the permanent damage that lame duck session would do to the Democrat brand.
Yes, the individuals who’ve been defeated in 2010 won’t technically have anything to lose by voting for insanity…and they could leave office giving their constituents a giant F-U. But what happens to them then?
Ben Nelson saw in Nebraska what happens when an elected official bucks the will of the people and does something crazy: after casting the deciding vote for Obamacare in the Senate on Christmas Eve, Nelson has been booed at, spit upon, and harassed everywhere he goes in Nebraska. I expect this to continue for the rest of his life…and it will be remembered when he’s up for re-election in a few years. His career is over, and any hope he had of spending his retirement as a celebrity former Senator being wined and dined all over town is gone. The man is a pariah, as well he should be.
This is what would happen to everyone who uses that lame duck session to screw over the American people.
Bigger picture than just these individuals, I don’t know how the Democrats would ever recover from doing something like this in the lame duck session.
The party’s brand has already taken punches that will take years to heal from, just from alienating all the Jacksonian/Clinton Democrats who are now Independent and siding with Republicans — and will continue to do so for years to come.
But if Democrats really and truly tried to take people’s 401(k) funds away from them and redistribute those to the unions…or tried to ram through Cap & Tax or other madness during that lame duck session…it’s impossible to imagine the blowback the Democrat Party would suffer.
This would, in fact, permanently equate Democrats with Communists in the minds of Americans.
I don’t know how the party remains viable after that…and I don’t know what happens to the American media once the Democrat Party is revealed as a Communist entity, since the media is so tied to the party.
The world as we know it would suddenly pop…and the rage that would fill the streets over the 401(k)s would be something unprecedented.
It really boggles the mind to even think about this…that’s why I still can’t imagine Democrats really doing anything like this.
There would be a march on Washington over those retirement accounts, and there aren’t enough bullets in the Capitol’s armory to shoot down all the Americans who would march upon that building and tear it down brick by brick if Democrats really and truly tried to take those 401(k)s.
This would also be a disaster for the unions…a tipping point where Americans would finally be forced to see these parasites for what they are…and in the aftermath of this power grab Americans would come after the unions right after they finished taking down Congress.
Can anyone think of a historical example where a government did something so insane, so against the will of its people, that the public saw this as a tipping point and rose up against it?
This gets into 1789 France territory.
As stupid as they are, I just don’t see Democrats being foolish enough to go there.
Wednesday Open Thread: October 13th, 2010
What’s on your minds this Wednesday?
What are people talking about in your part of the country?
