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June 19, 2012 - June 12, 2012

Monday, May 23, 2011

THE ONE I DIDN'T MENTION. The Fox News beltway pundits were quick to dismiss the candidacy of Herman Cain on Friday, and Chris (bluffed my way out of Econ 10 at Harvard) Wallace scored at least one gotcha in his Sunday interview when Cain seemed to draw a blank on the term "Right of Return."  Moreover, Fox News Sunday had him scheduled just after Ron Paul in its stated round of interviews with Republican presidential candidates, which is to say they've already pigeonholed him in the "no chance" column, an interview formality to be gotten out of the way before the heavy hitters are invited in.

I understand the FNS reasoning. However...

However, I can also foresee a set of circumstances -- "What ifs," if you will -- that could make Cain a surprisingly strong candidate in both the Republican primaries and the general election. I'll share these so you can think about them, as I am doing.

What if Republicans in the key primary states understand the surprising strength of Herman Cain's bio better than the beltway cynics do?


This the summary intro paragraph of the Wikipedia biography. It already contains more information about him than you ever get on Fox News, which describes him exclusively as the "former CEO of Godfather's Pizza." But there's a hell of a lot more to Cain's background and personal story than that bit of deliberately contextless ephemera. How many of us know anything about Godfather's Pizza, where it is, how big it is, what its history is, etc, apart from the possibly sinister connotation of its name? So Cain is maybe a figure along the lines of Frank Lucas, played by Denzel Washington in American Gangster, a shady inner city type seeking to go legit by starting up a pizza chain? Think I'm overstating? Here's the actual business history, which reads remarkably differently, in context.


Oh. So would it be an unacceptably long waste of words to say "Herman Cain, an executive of Pillsbury Corporation who was responsible for notable turnarounds of two Pillsbury subsidiaries, Burger King and Godfather's Pizza, the latter of which he bought from the parent company and ran successfully for eight years"?

And are you intrigued by the statement "began working... as a business analyst"? I am. Where does that come from? How does a business analyst get to be a major corporate vice president in five years or so? Maybe because he's smart and very well educated? What else they don't tell you about Herman Cain when he shows up to be interviewed.


I grant that these credentials were flashed briefly (and later rather sooner) on chyron during his Wallace interview, but if you'd blinked you'd have missed them. And in a political establishment obsessed with Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and other Ivy League Schools (plus Stanford, Berkeley, and the U. of Chicago), the real significance of Cain's educational credentials may have passed unnoticed. What's Morehouse College? Something even lesser, perhaps, than Sarah Palin's University of Idaho degree in communications or Reagan's Eureka College degree in sociology?  Well, not exactly.


Morehouse is also habitually included in an august list with its own Wikipedia entry:



It's important to note that these schools don't employ, seek, or express any interest in the term "Black Ivy League." If they did, they'd probably also include the small (450 students) West Texas school, Wiley College, celebrated in the movie about that school's great takedown of Harvard in intercollegiate debate in 1935.

What is important is that Herman Cain is part of a truly great American educational tradition that predates Affirmative Action and proves that intelligence, knowledge, hard work, ambition, and strong family values are the true basis of the American dream. Cain took his undergraduate degree in mathematics and his masters in computer science at Purdue, one of the best engineering and applied sciences graduate programs in the nation. He did it on his own. His business career proves that. No corporate diversity program makes men or women profit-loss line managers unless they're the best ones for the job. His career subsequent to 'Godfather's Pizza' demonstrates this aspect of his character many times over:

Cain became a member of the board of directors to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City in 1992 and served as its chairman from January 1995 to August 1996, when he resigned to become active in national politics. Cain was a 1996 recipient of the Horatio Alger Award.

Cain hosted The Herman Cain Show on Atlanta talk radio station News Talk 750 WSB, a Cox Radio affiliate until February 2011 and serves as a commentator for Fox Business and a syndicated columnist distributed by the North Star Writers Group. In 2009, Cain founded "Hermanator's Intelligent Thinkers Movement" (HITM), aimed at organizing 100,000 activists in every congressional district in the United States in support of a strong national defense, the FairTax, tax cuts, energy independence, capping government spending, and Restructuring Social Security.

The Clintons would later blame "Harry and Louise," the fictional couple in the ads aired by the insurance industry, for undermining health reform. But the real saboteurs are named Herman and John. Herman Cain is the president of Godfather's Pizza and president-elect of the National Restaurant Association. An articulate black entrepreneur, Cain transformed the debate when he challenged Clinton at a town meeting in Kansas City, Mo., last April. Cain asked the president what he was supposed to say to the workers he would have to lay off because of the cost of the "employer mandate." Clinton responded that there would be plenty of subsidies for small businessmen, but Cain persisted. "Quite honestly, your calculation is inaccurate," he told the president. "In the competitive marketplace it simply doesn't work that way.

Joshua Green of The Atlantic has called Cain's exchange with Clinton his "auspicious debut on the national political stage.

Cain was a senior economic adviser to the Dole/ Kemp presidential campaign in 1996.

In 2004, Cain ran for the U.S. Senate in Georgia, pursuing the seat that came open with the retirement of Democrat Zell Miller. Cain sought the Republican nomination, facing congressmen Johnny Isakson and Mac Collins in the primary. Cain and Collins both hoped to deny Isakson a majority on primary day in order to force him into a runoff. Collins tried to paint Cain as a moderate, citing Cain's support for affirmative action programs, while Cain argued that he was a conservative, noting that he opposed the legality of abortion even in cases of rape and incest. Cain finished second in the primary with 26.2% of the vote, ahead of Collins, who won 20.6%, but because Isakson won 53.2% of the vote, Isakson was able to avoid a runoff.

Let's review. He's more than the "former CEO of Godfather's Pizza." He's a man of notable educational accomplishment, at least six different careers -- businessman, lobbyist, grass roots activist, senatorial candidate, columnist, and talk show host -- but he's no rolling stone dilettante. He has a vision of how things ought to be, he has rock-solid principles, and he's determinedly his own man. Hmmm. How does all that match up with anyone we know?

What if the Republicans and Democrats continue to wander in the wilderness without a budget deal, a real plan for reducing the deficit, an effective strategy for reducing gas and food prices, or the beltway pundits' demanded solution for reduction of unemployment and resuscitation of the stricken American economy? Remember the Trump boomlet? He's never held political office either. Yet people responded because they sensed a need for economic and political common sense, er, business sense. Trump failed to sustain his flurry for several good reasons. He's a New Yorker with no real feel for the rest of the country. He's a man who made a huge and frequently imperiled fortune out of an inherited fortune, he's an egomaniac who can't take a joke at his own expense, ever, and as Herman Cain adroitly pointed out, "He's a bully."

If they can overlook all these crippling defects to give Trump an even momentary advantage in the polls, why might they not respond to Herman Cain, who succeeded in business on smarts without contacts or anything but his own brain, character, and determination. If the economy continues to tank, his lack of public officeholding may vanish as a crippling demerit. Nobody knows where the so-called Independents really stand. If the U.S. Government still has no budget in 2012, no plan for forestalling national bankruptcy, the outsider, nonpolitical status may become the greatest advantage of all.

What if the tea partiers, establishment conservatives, moderate Republicans, and even Independents are fed to the teeth with being called racists for their every opposition to Obama policy?

[Really really FUCKING sick to death of malignant libel...]

We all know that opposition to Obama isn't about race. The truth is that a Herman Cain candidacy could be Obama's worst nightmare. Think about it.

Let's get the MSM spin out of the way immediately. For sure, they'll try to attack Herman Cain as a Clarence Thomas Uncle Tom, a Republican stooge standing in the way of the One, the Obama.


But would it work?

It would be risky risky business. Risky risky risky business. If tea-partiers and flyover country conservatives coalesced behind Cain, racism would be off the table except for the left-wing 30 percent, despite the fact that they control the media and the academic and pundit classes. The incredible racial ugliness everyone is expecting in the 2012 campaign would be derailed if not silenced (albeit never wholly silenced, so long as lefties live). But the MSM attacks would ultimately fail.



The MSM trying to take out Herman Cain as an Uncle Tom will destroy them forever. Number One. They can't erase the popular support he can receive from Americans between the coasts. Number Two. If they want to take on Herman Cain's Southern Baptist roots, won't that bring up Obama's Reverend Wright connections? Unflatteringly? You betcha. Number Three. If Obama got credit for being a community activist, Cain should get credit for being a far more effective political activist (even if neither held office while they were 'activating'). Number Four. We're listening to what Cain says, not how he says it. But speaking of how he says it, he doesn't have two voices. He doesn't sound white when he's talking to Congress or Brian Williams or Chris Wallace. He doesn't sound like a show-biz, deliberately 'g'-dropping preacher when he talks to the folks. He just sounds like a man from Georgia who knows the difference between speaking dramatically before a crowd and speaking thoughtfully on a cable TV news set. It's a continuum. He's not two different people with two opposite and isolated poles; he exhibits no simple black and white reversals (oops, my PC bad.). He has no chin-up-in-the-air Mussolini pose. He has no Harvard Law School, hectoring, I'm smarter than you and you better not forget it tone. He's a guy whose list of top ten favorite pieces of music would probably have something on it for every American, and it wouldn't be a political lie.

MSM, try telling anyone that this man is not black enough to suit the blackness standard of the New York Times, Rolling Stone, and Al Sharpton. They'll laugh you out of the fucking ballpark. He graduated from the same college as Martin Luther King. He's from Georgia, not Hawaii. He went to graduate school in Indiana, not Boston. He's us in all the important ways and we like him because we know him and what God he believes in and if that's makes us racists for not preferring the new Lincoln Obama, okay. There's no standard of pure blackness Obama can pass that Herman Cain doesn't surpass by a hundred percent. But the more important standard is that of being American. When the dam breaks, when the enemy invades, when the economy collapses, when the tornado strikes, I'd be proud to stand with Herman Cain at the front lines of whatever it is. With Obama I know I'd be expecting an order to sacrifice myself for his excellency. Or to keep from damaging Michelle's shoes.

[Two talk show memes I'm tired of. Imus has moderated his post-bin Laden cheerleading to "I may not vote for him, but I really like Obama. Everybody does. He's a likeable guy. That's got to be a real problem for anyone running against him." And an otherwise estimable local Philly talk show host keeps repeating that "Obama gives a great speech even if he's not too good on his feet." Both points are nonsensical except for the willingness of people who should know better to repeat them. Obama is NOT likeable. He's an arrogant, condescending, jug-eared nerd whom most people would actively dislike in person. And his speechifying triumphs are long done. Any third rate PR guy could pen the empty platitudes that won the first election; when he has to speak for real he gets tentative, inaccurate, and his first instinct is to lie and ridicule those who disagree. Since the ones he's ridiculing are invariably some of us, it's a losing strategy that can't be called "good" oratory.]

In case you hadn't figured it out, I'm rooting for Cain. (I confidently expect that by nine a.m. this morning he knew more about the Right of Return {made up lefty issue that will never get any traction in negotiations} than I ever knew.) He's the most conservative candidate in the race. And maybe, just maybe, the one who has the best chance of winning on the issues.

Can't get excited about boyish wannabes like Romney and Pawlenty. And who else is left?

Maybe the longshot is our only shot. You tell me. But imagine the final What if:

What if the next Reagan is sitting right under our noses. We've been waiting, pining, desperately yearning for him. What if, just like Reagan, he turns out to be the most conservative with the best demographic chance of winning? And What if he turns out to be the inspired one, the one who can grow as he has always demonstrably grown in life, to be the ultimate rebuttal of everything the left has always derogated about what is most American, and thus leads to an entirely unexpected American Renaissance.

It's happened before. How good is your imagination? How strong your faith?

Stronger than dirt, I'm thinking.

Friday, May 20, 2011

LOVING ANNIHILATION. Somehow I missed the big surprise that's in the offing, but I knew something was up when I ran across two utterly unexpected news items on the same day. First there was a Fonda cussing out Obama in four-letter terms that involved the word "traitor"(!?). Then there was a poll indicating that only 27 percent of the youthful faithful who voted for Obama were planning to do so again. Heavens to Betsy, I thought. What's the world coming to?

Coming to an end, I learned. Golly. Tomorrow is the big day apparently. I'd gotten used to the idea that we had till 2012 when the Mayan calendar nobody ever much cared about suddenly mind-melds with the Anthropogenic Global Warming set and does us all in for crimes against glaciers and polar bears or something. The new deadline is unexpected and it's caught me kind of off guard, to be honest.

So what are you planning for your last day before The Rapture? I'd been thinking about hosing down the back porch and its furniture, getting ready for a summer that used to be on the way.

Now? I suppose this will ge me branded as stodgy and even irreligious in some quarters, but I'm planning on hosing down the back porch and its furniture, getting ready for summer.

Here's how I look at it. I'm really really really really tired of all the people on the religious right and the self-righteous left who just can't wait for the world to come to an end. What the fuck is wrong with them?

I kind of like living in the world and plan to continue doing so.

Talk to you again on Monday. Like always. If you're not banking on it, that's really unexpected. But who couldn't use some rapture?

Thursday, May 19, 2011

NO ACCOUNTING FOR WHERE IDEAS COME FROM. I have no real good reason for this post. Like so many things, it was a weird process of association. Mrs. CP was wondering what people really think of my deerhound posts, and I said I thought they found them entertaining without necessarily wanting the dog. Because they're too much to handle, too high maintenance, though spectacular. I thought it was like the way I feel about Ferraris, exotic and cool as hell but, you know, no way for me.

So I wallowed this morning in more deerhound videos, which was fun, of course:


But I also realized I'd picked the wrong point of comparison. Deerhounds aren't Ferraris. Ferraris are refined and smooth and upper class to the point of snootiness. Deerhounds aren't that at all. Borzois are. Afghans are. Greyhounds are. Not deerhounds. Deerhounds are rude and crude and loud and obnoxious, over the top and frequently vulgar. Which is when I remembered the AC Cobra and started looking at Cobra videos. Which led me to a whole new line of thinking.

Something about atavism. Like the way if there had ever been any dogs in the Lord of the Rings movies, the only ones who would have fit in would be deerhounds and wolfhounds. And as I looked at the Cobra videos, I realized that they too have become ancient, a throwback to a more primitive, more vital time. In some ways even more so than the much older Bugattis and Duesenbergs. We can still find the fashion line of the sleek and the opulently stately in the automobiles of today. But there is really nothing to compare to the height of automotive madness that was the Cobra. Not even the obviously imitative Viper, which is an all too quiet parade machine.

Several other things are notable and perversely relevant to our current state of affairs. The Cobra may have been the last truly gestalt collaboration between the Brits and the Americans in technology. Its basis was a typically tiny Brit sportscar called the AC Bristol. American Carroll Shelby figured out that he could shoehorn a small-block Ford V-8 into the engine bay, which was the birth of the original 289 Cobra, a beast that slew Corvettes by the hundreds in SCCA racing in the mid 1960s. Then came the typically American upping of the ante. Shelby figured out how to jam a NASCAR-quality big block Ford engine with four Weber carburetors producing more than 500 horsepower into a slightly modified AC chassis with an ass-end swollen to accommodate much bigger, grippier tires, and an ultra-legend was born. The 427 Cobra weighed next to nothing, had an automatic transmission because no one could manually shift fast enough to maximize its acceleration, and it could go from zero to sixty in 3.9 seconds and zero to a hundred in well under 10 seconds. Depending on the gear ratios selected, it could reach 200 mph with virtually linear acceleration. It cost about $8,000.

It was also, for all its British roots, loud, flashy, and so instantly and terrifyingly fast that you couldn't be a silver-haired banker looking for young tail and safely own it. You had to know how to drive it or the car would flat kill you. The suspension was good, but with almost unlimited power under the throttle, you can get sideways and off the road in a heartbeat. The Cobra was no rich Casanova's rolling bedroom.

The engine was so highly tuned that it could only operate on Sunoco 260 megatane gasoline, no longer available today (sigh). It was so radically configured that the engine roughness you hear in the videos is a function of a racing cam that barely runs at idle; it wants you to stamp on the throttle and hit a sweet spot of 7,000 rpm -- in other words, it's junk around town; no environment for sweet-talking 18-year-old girls into your clutches.

It has become one of the rarest of all automotive legends. Only 200 of the 427 Cobras were ever made. Most of them still survive, having come gradually into the hands of those who know how to drive them and care for them. At the same time, no car in history has ever inspired such a vigorous replica industry. Obviously, the thing speaks to individual souls in a way few cars ever have,

Here's the rub. The Cobra is clearly an archetype of the fossil fuel evil liberals want to remove from our lives. Yeah, it got crappy gas mileage. But it was also an apex of the automotive esthetic. While they piddle around in their Priuses, I can't help thinking that we're losing something important about ourselves.

Is this how you want so see yourselves in the more responsible progressive age? Or do you dream in your deepest hearts of something more like this?


Sorry for interrupting your New Age meditations...

THE DIAMOND STATE. Prevoiously, we have noted this:


Lately, it's gotten much much worse. On the Friday of Easter weekend, I tried to cross the bridge and discovered that it was down to one lane. It took me more than 45 minutes to traverse one mile of bridge approach. When I finally got onto the bridge, there was still no sign of actual work being undertaken. Just a cop car or two and a miscellaneous truck parked in one of the lanes. But I think I now know what that travesty was all about:


Yeah, the bridges need work. Ha ha. Who doesn't get it by now? The suckers don't want that one-lane stuff. Soften'em up for a few months with long delays and mucho inconvenience. Then they'll be happy to hear that repairs will be made with a 33 percent increase in the toll. Private sector capitalist enterprises struggle to keep inflation in single digits, even in a time of runaway gas and food prices. Governments just fart in your face and raise prices by a third because they always have the option of mafia-style protection: you wouldn't want anything bad to happen during your daily commute, would you? Would you?

You know what I'm saying? I think you do.

Delaware. Home of "Jovial Joe" Biden. Who cares so much about the little guy.

F___ off, Joe. Yeah. That's what I'm saying.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

WILLIE.21.1-2. A lot of sloppy stupid stuff going on, but not much that's worthy of an essay-type post. So maybe you'll forgive me for a series of non sequiturs that don't add up to anything but a self-satisfied InstaPunk smirk.

Trump is out. Color me bored. As I predicted, he found out PDQ that politics is a blood sport in which even self-ordained titans can be laid low in seconds. Still, I have to concede that Big Hollywood had a point about a certain debt of gratitude we probably owe him.

Speaking of Big Hollywood, this was a delightful reminiscence about John Wayne, and this was an educational reminder about the substance of Ronald Reagan and the careless viciousness of the left-wing media.

Schwarzenegger. Pretty tired of the celebrity rules in Kally-FOR-neea. No journalist could have sussed this out when he ran in the first place? Were they protecting Ahnold or their only frail link to the Kennedy royalty? Doesn't matter. The whole episode is very Hollywood, very Kennedy, and very over the top. Just like the whole bankrupt state of Kally-FOR-neea. Do I care? Not at all.

Huckabee's out, too. I thought, to be honest, that it was a non-item. But then I heard him as a guest on a local Philly talk radio show. Not being a candidate apparently empowers him to speak more bluntly about what he thinks. My jaw dropped when he dared to say what so many people know but don't have the nerve to express: Obama is a shallow thinker, bright, sure, but not penetrating enough to be even a passable president. He also described contemporary American politics as a kind of cesspool (my distillation, not his words), in which money can elevate the worst over the best. Maybe Huckabee does have a role to play in the upcoming campaign follies. I'm reevaluating.

Three cheers for Hillary. The first major political figure to give the finger to Jimmy Carter he's richly deserved throughout his self-serving post-presidential bid for acclaim. Asked if she wanted to meet with him after his trip to North Korea, she said, "No." Then she elaborated. "HELL no."

Three more Republican candidates are all but out. Gingrich mouthed off the cuff once too often. Good riddance. His lame support for ethanol and global warming alarmism was already a fatal long-term problem. His betrayal of Paul Ryan's brave effort to address the budget and the deficit were the last straw. Huntsman is done before he even got started. He accepts global warming because 90 percent of scientists do, which they don't. Add to that his gushing praise for the leadership of Obama and nobody will vote for him in the primaries. Thank goodness. And Mitt Romney refused to admit that RomneyCare in Massachusetts was a mistake. He prefers to quibble about bureaucratic differences between the progam that's bankrupting Massachusetts and the ObamaCare program that will bankrupt the United States. Nobody wants to hear why Romney is technically blameless for an evidently socialist government intrusion into the health care mess he personally sponsored and passed into law.

O'Reilly debated Jon Stewart on the subject of the rapper Common's invitation to the White House. He lost. Because he never made the only point that matters. The president can invite anyone he wants to the White House. (Dumb as hell to stake your whole position on opposition to that elemental truth.) But is it a good idea? In this case, no. Bad PR move. We already know how Obama feels about white cops interacting with African-Americans. This wasn't a good time to remind everyone that he's black first and American second. But neither O'Reilly nor Stewart could bring themselves to mention the elephant in the room. You know. We're all too polite to bring up race. Advantage lefties. Stewart was the cleverer one, but his smarts can't overcome presidential stupids.

Nancy Pelosi's congressional district accounted for 20 percent of April's waivers of compliance with ObamaCare. You couldn't make this stuff up. Nothing to see here. Move along.

60 percent of the French think Americans set up the IMF chairman with sexual assault charges. Those would be the same French who think Roman Polanski sodomizing a 13-year-old is not so much rape as droit de seigneur. And they can't understand why the "no bail" decision. Maybe they should ask Roman about that.

InstaPunk had something of a set-to (see Comments, too) with the Ron Paul faithful. Now they're uncharacteristically silent. Somehow I don't think they're bored. I think they're tongue-tied.

And, finally, just for fun, Apotheosis posted this photo in a comment on our latest post about the deerhound Raebert.


All I can tell you is, that dog's NOT Raebert. If there's a more comfortable spot to be had, he's in it. Trust me.

I know you do. Because I'm at the center of everything...

Monday, May 16, 2011

THEY'RE RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT, DAMN THEIR HIDES.... They always seem to lose the framing arguments, don't they? Today's the day the debt limit is scheduled to go critical. The Republicans talk about cutting spending. The Democrats talk about the frightful human costs of cutting federal programs and the more sensible alternative of raising taxes.  The Republicans resist raising taxes because that somehow hobbles the government's responsibility to create jobs in a weak economy. Because it's rich Republicans who create jobs when they're not otherwise engaged in supervising the custom builds of their $100 million dollar yachts. Why the Democrats tend to win such confrontations. Republicans talk vaguely about growing the whole economy, which the Dems instantly reduce to the old lingo of "tickle down economics," and voters confront the pitched battle between those who would penalize ordinary working people versus those who want to make the richest pay their fair share.

The simple truth the Republicans never state flat out: