Rift between political conservatives and mainstream values continues to diverge

Ah, Karl Rove. Keep talking. Your "Permanent Republican Majority" isn't coming any sooner than the Rapture.

The majority of Americans are okay with this.

Two news stories buried in the back pages were incredibly significant nonetheless. On the same day that Tennessee's State Senate voted to forbid any discussion of homosexuality in kindergarten through 8th grade classes, Gallup released a poll that showed a majority of Americans approving of same-sex marriage. That's right. More than half the country wants to hear to guys--or girls--say, "I do."

While I have no doubt that older generations of Americans felt a sincere reservation towards the subject, it was disgusting to watch crass individuals like Rove try to gin up opposition to equal marriage rights while timid Democrats timidly looked at the polls and failed to articulate the right thing. Six and half years later, public opinion has understandably shifted. Gay marriage, along with higher taxes on the rich,
a one-way plane ticket home for our men and women in Afghanistan, and increased regulation of the financial sector, is a majority opinion in the United States.

Just like the photo above, love is love

George McGovern better start filing his papers before it's too late!

Maureen Dowd faces conflicts with reality

Oh, Miss Maureen Dowd, how I once enjoyed reading your bi-weekly column until I realized it was just a waste of time.

I know that sounds harsh, over the top criticism, and maybe a little bit wrong. But so too is her column.

He's Bambi! No, Dr. Spock! Now he's Paul Newman!

I stopped reading her opinion pieces because she was just re-wording, or in some cases, reprinting the news on page 1 and adding adding clever nicknames to the various political players of the day. Problem was, these nicknames had a tendency to reveal her own misconceptions rather than illustrate the mixture of "politics and Hollywood," that she tries to portray. Case and point: Referring to Barack Obama and "Bambi," during the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries. In the aftermath of Osama Bin Laden's killing, he is now "Cool Hands Barack." Given that Barack Obama campaigned on attacking Bin Laden even if he was in Pakistan without consent of the Pakistany government, it is clear that he was never naive. Barack didn't change, but Dowd's opinion of him certainly did. And if Dowd bothered to watch or at least read about the President's appearance on "60 Minutes" last week, she would have learned that "Cool Hand Barack" doesn't exactly have ice in his veins.

Although these nicknames might be mildly amusing, it is hard to justify extending these nicknames into a 750 word essay. To phrase it another way, it's kind of like the Saturday Night Live sketch that should have ended after the first joke--but just goes on, and on, and on. And given that these nicknames tend to reveal Dowd's own biases rather than illustrate truth, what's the function of giving her a twice-weekly opinion platform in the New York Times--especially now that I'm paying for it!!

Yesterday's piece put me over the edge. The title was "Corsets, Cleavage, Fishnets." Wow. Is Joe Biden cross-dressing? Is this about the absurdity of Fox News anchors? The latest in the absurd parade of Mama Grizzlies? I thought it was worth reading. Alas, not so much.

Dowd instead took deep exception to popular culture. Fair enough, most of pop culture is garbage. But if you thought it was some fault to the American public, or the avarice of corporations appealing the the lowest common denominator, you were wrong. Apparently, there is a vast, male conspiracy in the entertainment industry to put women down, and she's got the scoop!

What evidence does Dowd utilize to support this claim? She quotes two unnamed television executives--one male, one female--who echo each other, each saying that men are confused. Gender roles have changed, and after watching Christina Hedricks' character on "Mad Men," the male sex can't get enough. Everything on television and the big screen is a male fantasy. Sort of. As usual in her columns, Dowd doesn't bother backing up her claims with evidence. "Mad Men" is in limbo because its contract wasn't renewed of creative differences between network executives and the show's creator, Matthew Weiner. The exec's wanted to eliminate characters and broadcast shorter episodes to save money. (Weiner should be commended for not bowing to such foolish demands, but that's another story).

Even Dowd herself has a hard time reconciling her logic when she writes about a redux of Charlie's Angels. "Sure, the angels of Charlie (Robert Wagner) look hot in thigh-high black boots, red vinyl minidresses and devil’s horns," writes Dowd. "But they have skills, like building car engines, cracking safes hanging upside down after drinking two Cosmos, and putting 'the cat in cat burglar.'"

Um, that's always been the nature of the original show. And the movie. Attractive women fight crimes. Was Dowd unaware of that? How can this be some sort of new trend? And yes, the women on television and in movies are attractive, but has Dowd ever noticed so are the men! 

Reading her loopy logic is like a train wreck. The Green Lantern, approximately the 15 billionth comic book-turned movie of the last ten years is another "recent example" of Dowd's newly discovered trend about male domination in the movies. Apparently, Dowd knows what men want, and it's the half-naked Ryan Reynolds. When Dowd writes that Hollywood is a male dominated business, she is presuming too much when she assumes that most of these men are interested in women.

Maureen Dowd makes a false assumption when she assumes
that most men in Hollywood are heterosexual chauvinists.

Maybe my expectations are a little high for Ms. Dowd, who, unlike David Brooks, was once an award-winning reporter who wrote about actual news. Then again, that makes her quoting of unnamed sources all the more inexcusable (see Miller, Judith).

And, in all fairness to Ms. Dowd, she also hasn't completely missed the mark. She grew up in a time when women weren't allowed to do anything (thanks Title IX)! As a result, when she sees attractive women on television, she cries foul, insisting that women are only appreciated for their bodies. Apparently, she forgot that the name of the show "Mad Men," is mad men! It's a scathing indictment of the male behavior of the past, not cause celebré. Don Draper is mad much the way the villains were in great works of Charles Dickens. Would anyone read Oliver Twist as hagiography to 19th century orphan industry?

Sadly, I think David Brooks would answer in the affirmative to that question (it's wealth creation! He would argue), but someone like Maureen Dowd would no know better. The same holds true for summer movies and television shows. Dowd should do a lot more research and back up claims with actual evidence before signing her name to it.

Based on the last 15 years of her career, that may be wishful thinking, but at least for the rest of us, we can retain belief in equal rights of men and women without seeing misogyny everywhere.

Osama Bin Laden never lived in a cave

You heard it here first.

In case there was any doubt, the man never, ever lived in a cave. Osama Bin Laden died the way he lived: in incredible luxury. In a three-story mansion, complete with western cola, Nestle chocolate bars, and homegrown marijuana. And the pornography, lots and lots of pornography.

It's a shame that President Obama dismisses releasing many of the facts related to the recent raid as "spiking the political football." Hey, Barry Sanders never spiked a football, but he knew when had crossed into the Endzone. Right now, President Barry needs to communicate to the millions of Muslims openly sympathize with the terrorist leader, because their sympathy is based entirely on ignorance and misconception.

The misconception is that Osama Bin Laden was some sort of freedom fighter, a man born into wealth who rejected his life of privilege to "go underground" and "fight oppression." The problem with this theory is that Bin Laden's involvement with the Mujahideen has always been subject to debate, with no firsthand evidence that he ever actually fought the Soviet army in the 1980s. The fact that he was born rich and spent the last several years of his life living in luxury is indicative that he never learned to live without.

In time, the truth will come out. The videos of him walking through the mountainous regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan will be revealed to be nothing more than cleverly staged photo-ops. Each video of Osama and his "death to America tirades" probably started as follows: "All right everybody, hop in the van. I look great in just five minutes--with just for men! We'll drive to these mountains over here, make sure the camera doesn't face the road. I want to do all this in one take. Afterwords, we'll get stoned and eat chocolate!"

The man may no longer be alive, now the myth must die. People all over the world need to know that this alleged terrorist mastermind was nothing more than a psychotic millionaire. People in the Muslim world need to know that he didn't care about them, he merely saw them as pawns in his own web of personal delusion.

So by all means, Mr. President, tell the truth. Granted, the truth must dazzle gradually, but it is better to inform rather than let ignorance and misconception fester. That too, can make the whole world blind.

Someone needs to tell the Grey Lady there is no Room for Debate

Arg. Deprived of one my main sources for news, I finally buckled and paid the damn subscription fee for the New York Times. In spite of how often I criticize it, The Times is still a reasonably good news source more often than not, particularly offering more depth than other news outlets. And I like Paul Krugman, and their Travel Section, and the fact that they police their own comment boards so that the discussions generated actually enhance, rather than obscure meaning.

And then I see something that makes me cringe because it is virtually no value to the reader and producer of news alike.

One of the web-exclusive features of the Times is a somewhat slapdash "Room for Debate" opinion "thing." I really don't know what to call it--other than garbage. I say this because on the subjects the Times chooses, there is absolutely no room for debate among sane, thinking individuals. Basically, some editor for the paper selects a few people of expertise and they write a few paragraphs on a given subject of "debate."

The most recent exercise in this debacle was military spending. Some nameless editor simply phrased the question as follows:

Annual military spending has risen more than 70 percent in inflation-adjusted terms since 2001. With the drive to reduce the deficit, the current $700 billion Pentagon budget is considered by budget cutters to be a good place to find savings.
Which areas of the Pentagon budget should Leon Panetta, the next defense secretary, target for savings? What kinds of spending could most easily be cut back? How big a peace dividend might be expected from withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan?

The debate should have been settled last week when an elite team of Navy Seals--not a military force of 100,000 soldiers--killed Osama bin Laden and made off with a virtual truckload of Al-Qaeda information. And for seven of the eight online "debaters," it was. One could read seven different iterations of the same theme: remove American soldiers from large commitments overseas and stop spending a literal fortune on cold-war era programs. I could read this from the perspective of a retired military colonel, A university professor of international relations, a history professor (you know, to mix it up a little bit), a "Lecturer" at Harvard University, an MIT research scientist, and even the Koch brothers funded Cato Institute research fellow. Oh, and Ronald Reagan's Assistant Secretary of Defense. When people of opposing political perspectives agree with each other, that's not debate. That's agreement. The lone outlier in this discussion was Mackenzie Eaglen of the ultra-right wing Heritage Foundation. Her proposal was Donald Rumsfeld's failed policy with her name on it: more troop presence, more money for weapons programs, coupled with pay cuts for soldiers and outsourcing tasks to civilian personnel. Yeah, like that saved money.

Maybe the New York Times can do a little cost-cutting of its own and eliminate this stupid "debate" forum and just report on the facts. The headline and sub-head might read as follows: "Experts across the political spectrum call for reduction in military spending, Heritage Foundation still mired in its own web of delusion.

Just a thought.