Flippin’ the Word

Like addressing wedding invitations in blue ink, there are some things which are “just not done.” One of those things is selling senate seats. That’s just not done.

Except that, of course, people do address in blue ink and politicians do sell political appointments - you’re just not supposed to talk about it. The doers of that which is not done are expected to keep quiet their malapropisms, lest anyone have to voice the obvious.

It’s another brand of “don’t ask, don’t tell” grace, the national allegiance to which ensures peace by preventing the knowledge of anything that would disturb it.

Now Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, with his mouthy sales pitches, has gone and disturbed the peace.

The outrage is not because he tried to sell a senate seat - it was his to sell, after all. It says so in black and white in the Illinois State Constitution.

Of course, the state’s constitution doesn’t explicitly permit the commercialization of democracy, but it is understood for what it is: Something that’s just not done; something to be done, quietly.

The outrage is because the governor violated his cardinal “don’t tell” pact with the people. Nobody wanted to know what went on behind Blagojevich’s closed doors, because while sunshine cleanses it also burns. Plus it’s so much more comfortable in the shade of the shady.

In bringing to light his own flaws, Blagojevich happened to expose that most fatal flaw of our own: The gauzy veil of naivete that blinds Americans to the basest human condition - personal profit - and excises from memory all of the times that our faith has screwed us before.

From our leaders we demand superhuman ignorance of personal gain. We swoon over “democracy,” and then we write into law the allowance -requirement! - that one man elect a senator. That Blagojevich was to fill a vacancy is irrelevant. The point is that democracy by definition prohibits one man - governor or otherwise, vacancy or otherwise - from electing that which is the people’s to pick.

The reason for that - for democracy - is that one man can be bought. Blagojevich was bought…but who put him on the market?

The governor’s actions were totally immoral, unrighteous, irresponsible…in other words, exactly what you’d expect from a mere mortal. So why are we surprised, yet again, that a man behaved like a mortal?

The disappointment should not be in Blagojevich - he met expectations, if only anyone had cared to have any. The disappointment should be in and among the democracy - the collection of people who failed to rule in the collective.

Some of you may have noticed a reader comment on a recent post of mine outlining the myriad ways in which I’m wrong about the perils of High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS). Well, I received even more helpful information from the Corn Refiners Association (CRA) in an email that followed the comment.

Incidentally, the CRA has been on my radar for several weeks. It recently released a spate of commercials that proclaim the inherent wholesome qualities of HFCS. After all, it does originate from corn, and everyone knows that’s a vegetable…so really, my rejection of Pepsi amounts to a rejection of healthy living.

Or so the CRA wants us to believe. It’s clearly in a bind, reeling not only from suckers like me who’ve bought into the HFCS “lie,” but also from the epic failure of ethanol. (In an irony that only real life could present, one of the commercials stars Kool-Aid.)

The commercials are just part of the mendacious PR blitz launched to salvage itself.

Saccharinely titled SweetSurprise.com, the site is another weapon in the CRA’s public relations arsenal of media saturation. And now, they’re taking their message to the streets - starting with little ole me.

Now, normally I don’t get all smugly scientific, but the CRA forced my hand with its reference to research that purports to absolve HFCS.

Four words: Advanced glycation end product. The culprit of hyperglycemia, insulin resistance, immunodeficiency, chronic inflammation, asthma, excessive vascular permeability, and about a million other pathologies, advanced glycation end product has at its root HFCS.

Seriously, the stuff is worse than cigarettes.

On that note, the Corn Refiners Association better watch its back. It’s set to be the next R.J. Reynolds, even without the “Sweet Surprise” campaign. Can you imagine the tobacco industry’s liability had it actually branded its product as healthy?

If I were communistically inclined, I’d be writing my congressman right about now. And if I were actually licensed, I’d definitely be gearing up for a gigantic class action suit.

Alas, I’m neither…so I’ll just keep excoriating HFCS and pissing of the Corn Refiners Association.

Yes: Sarah Palin has, only a couple of weeks into her candidacy, been good for women. But not in the way you’d think. What she’s done is to bring out of the woodwork the millions of women who know better - you can’t have it all, at least not all at once.

Women of Palin’s generation, for the most part, remain hypnotized by feminism, by decades of browbeaten, brainwashed declarations that women can - should - have it all. But those women’s daughters, having looked from the outside in at their mothers’ breathless juggle, have begun to break the “have it all” spell.

In the past several days, as Palin has cast her kids as floats in the “I’ve-got-it-all” parade, I’ve received an outpouring of email from women who know better. Their sanctimony - sanctioned rightfully by Dr. Laura - has evaporated into downright anger. These women - this woman - responsibly gather our ducks in a row, so that one day soon we’ll make deserving homes for children. We can’t wait to start a family, and yet, we’re waiting.

The greatest lesson our mothers taught us was an unwitting message: You can’t have it all. We listened.

And then Sarah Palin makes hackneyed remarks about “18 million cracks in the glass ceiling” and pretends that all women strive to be like her. That used to be so, but no longer. We watched our mothers. We know better.

News of John Edwards’ affair has the entire commentariat proclaiming the death of his political career, the inanity of which was best demonstrated by Edwards’ reply that he isn’t sure he ever had a place in future politics at all. I’d go one step further to say that he didn’t have much of a past political career either - just a sporadic, hyped-up presence easily deflated by a curious lack of gravitas.

Seriously, it seems like Edwards’ political imprint is best remembered as profoundly disappointing. He’s bobbed in and out of the political sphere, emerging in the throes of a big election and then retreating until the next one. The declaration that this affair has finished him glosses over the disappointment that has defined his career. The fact is that Edwards’ never had much of a political career, and any semblance of one was overshadowed by the reality of his hype.

Until now.

For the first time in a long time, Edwards’ political stock is on the rise. While certainly counterintuitive, the truth is that Edwards - with his careful coif and earnest empathy  - stands to benefit from an infusion of bad-boy.

That’s because women are born gluttons for punishment, in love-hate with the heartbreakers. Edwards’ infidelity has handed him what he’s been lacking all along: That boy-from-the-mill image that he’s flailed to cultivate is now kind of believeable, his wrong-side-of-the-tracks image buoyed by the female penchant for just that.

And, naturally, there is a distinct measure of sexuality that factors in too. Every woman occasionally fancies herself a homewrecker. Dating back all the way to Eve, it’s empowering to think that we can seduce - even if we never actually would. And the seduction is sweeter when its subject is righteous - like Edwards - because there is nothing more raw to a woman than being that irresistible. We’re all Jezebels, at least in our fantasies, and Edwards, with his Tom Cruise-esque appeal, is the perfect canvas on which to project our homewrecking illusions.

And this effect is only heightened in a political environment that’s all about women, like the kind we’re in now. Ostensibly it is feminism that fuels current politics, though that is a sentiment that is at once naive and cynical - naive in that it presumes that women vote for the politics and not the politician; cynical in that it presumes that women’s and men’s politics are at odds. Like always, it will be feminine - not feminist - values with which women vote.

To have an affair was probably the shrewdest political move Edwards ever made. Sure the reaction is icy and indignant - but just superficially. After the dust has settled, Edwards’ indiscretion has the potential to propel him - finally - into political success, Elizabeth beside him as the couple enters the world from which its long been sidelined.

Republicans are effed: Primary turnout was down, voter registration is way down, and conservatives kind of hate their presidential candidate. Meanwhile, Democratic primary turnout was higher than ever, voter registration has skyrocketed, and progressives literally worship their candidate.

But why are the elephants on the endangered species list? Mostly because conservatives have quit acting like conservatives, the latest example of which is the mad dash to out-green the Democrats at the Republican National Convention.

Both parties have deployed “greening directors” to turn the conventions into models of efficiency, using wind and solar power, hybrid cars, and recyclables.

But while Democrats come off as hip and with-it, Republicans reek of effusive gratuity. Planetary doom is the legion - and legend - of the left, and when conservatives try to co-opt it, it just seems insincere. Like the last one to laugh at a joke, or the last kid picked for basketball, Republicans are left looking like a shrinking violet, a wallflower who can’t quite get it right.

And just as the one who laughs last laughs loudest, the Republican party is desperately trying to prove itself, to out-green the party which defined green as a movement rather than a color. In doing so, the right is losing a little more of its identity - and highlighting the left’s identity.

As part of my series on the curious state of the U.S. economy, one of the things I’m looking for is the possibility that the Piper has come a-knockin’. So far I’ve highlighted how bad it ain’t, an inconvenient truth you’re apparently not supposed to talk about.

Today, though, I came across some evidence which may indicate that the tides are turning, potentially marking an important shift in the series, the significance of which is in fact the reason for the series - to show in microcosmic snapshots why the financial doomsday refrain is overblown, sounded as a last-minute alarm before our penchant for prodigality catches up with us.

Bottled water is the ultimate status symbol, signifying a nation’s prosperity by gentrifying that most basic of substances. In the past decade, Americans have shunned free tap water for the costly bottled stuff - a luxury made feasible only by an economy in full bloom. Or by credit cards. Whichever.

Anyway, it looks like some people are turning back toward the proletariat, opting for tap water instead of its bourgeois counterpart. What was last year a $17 billion industry is gearing down as Americans are forced to revamp their budgets.

And, despite what the media and the government want you to believe, this is a good thing. We’ve been in desperate need of a shake-up to rid us of the notion that we’re somehow entitled to the best of the best simply by virtue of being an American.

I have high hopes that current financial straits will finally get people to live within their means - and I believe that the decline in bottled water purchases is a harbinger of the shift from frivolity to frugality.

Of course, as long as welfare recipients can use food stamps to buy bottled water, I probably shouldn’t expect the rest of us to settle for the stuff from the sink.

The story is not that bottled water sales are down. It’s that they were ever up so much in the first place.

In response to a recent article I wrote, South Carolina political blog Not Very Bright is hosting a contest to see who can come closest to mimicking my dazzling verbal stylings. Click here to have a go at it.

The media’s acting all meta, agog at new research showing that there is a news bias - a conservative bias.

A study by the The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University found that “the big three” - ABC, NBC, and CBS - exhibited more negative opinions of Barack Obama than John McCain. Since the general election campaign began June 8, (the day after Hillary Clinton conceded the primary) the networks expressed negativity about Obama in 72% of their opinioned coverage. Comparitively, network opinions about McCain were negative 57% of the time.

The media - which, make no mistake, are center-left - are breathlessly pointing to these numbers in an effort to excuse their blatant preoccupation with The Anointed One. Since the beginning of the general election campaign, the networks have devoted 166 minutes of airtime to Obama - more than twice as much as the 67 minutes of coverage McCain received.

So, opportunists that they are, the media are using the results from the George Mason study to explain away the charges of liberal bias - specifically, Obama bias. To that end, they are citing the study as evidence that not only are they not Obamamaniacs, they’re actually disproportionally harsh to the Democratic candidate. 

And in doing so, they’re inadvertently showing their hand.

The study’s import has been bloated, magnified by a media guilty of a bias and in search of a rationalization. The thing is, accusations of a liberal bias were never based on the qualitiative merits of news coverage. The liberal bias “myth” was born of what the media presents, not necessarily how it’s presented. Because the subject of coverage is key - not the angle from which that subject is shown. Such is the basis for the PR adage, “any press is good press.”

In this way, the media can’t expect to exonerate themselves merely by showing that - despite their excessive coverage - they’re sometimes critical of Obama.

And what did the researches consider to be negative, anyway? Apparently, they defined “negative coverage” pretty liberally…so to speak.

For example, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell was considered to have negatively portrayed Obama when she said that he “has problems” with suburban women and white men. Facts are facts - even negative ones - and the media’s declaration of them cannot legitimately be viewed as negative coverage. In fact, though I haven’t seen that particular segment, there’s probably a better-than-even chance that Mitchell was actually making some bigger, positive point about Obama…arguing, perhaps, that Obama leads in polls, in spite of the fact that he “has problems” with certain key demographics.

See how suavely I turned Mitchell’s statement around? Well played, right? Well, that’s exactly what the media is doing with the George Mason research: Overstating its implications, understating its curious methodology, and molding it to suit their particular purpose.

Well played, indeed.

I’ve been writing a series about how bad the economy ain’t, and apparently somebody’s listening. First my theory was co-opted by the McCain camp, and now it’s being echoed by Ben Stein. Behold:

“People think times are really, really bad, but it is an amazing thing if you are out there among them: the hotels are full, the airlines are full, the high-end shops are full, the Wal-Mart is really, really, really full, the highways are full, the trains are full.”

 Amen and Hallelujah.

There’s a hum on the blogs, growing steadily into a buzz, about how a gallon of gas costs more than a gallon of milk.

Apparently I am to understand that gas costing more than milk is some incredible inequity. Ever the contrarian, I have to wonder: In what divined scripture can I find the guarantee that Americans shall not pay more for their gas than for their milk?

For one, I’m flummoxed as to why milk and gas are even being compared. Sure, they’re both available by the gallon, but outside of the metrics they’re just not comparable. That’s like complaining that a pound of gold costs more than a pound of silver: Of course it does!

When asked why gas should cost less than milk, people generally respond that we use more gas than milk so therefore it should cost less. That may sound like deductive reasoning, but it’s actually devoid of even a scintilla of logic. Since when is quantity of use an absolute determinate of price? The truth is that gas is more expensive than milk because it is simply more valuable than milk - which is why people pay for it, even as its price rises. It’s just that valuable.

Now that I’ve set out the above logic for those intent on comparing gas to milk, I’ll now state the fact that gas doesn’t actually cost more than milk. At least that’s what USDA says in their most recent consumer price index, plus I got milk while filling up today and I paid $4.39 for the milk and $3.98 for the gas.

Apples ‘n oranges, people. Apples ‘n oranges.