TOBY PETZOLD

crash

Just got back from visiting with my Great Aunt Lescia up in Georgetown. She’ll be 89 Tuesday, but since I can’t be around for anything she might be doing then, I had to get my time in with her today. She’s a great old gal in the West Texas fashion and still going strong.

If I weren’t a fool, I’d get myself up there some day when it’s just me and her and chat her up about the old days with pen and paper. She’s always telling me to, but that’s one of the curses of relative youth: a tendency to invincible procrastination.

If only there were some consequence!

Here’s a funny thing over at Salon about John and Elizabeth Edwards (emphasis mine):

By most accounts she has always been the campaign’s leading strategist and still is. But lately she has emerged as its leading risk taker, too. At the end of June she won the nation’s attention — and the gratitude of many — for confronting right-wing provocateur Ann Coulter live on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” after Coulter called John Edwards a “faggot” at a conservative conference in January, and joked in June about wishing he’d be assassinated.

She “won the nation’s attention”? On fucking Hardball? Think about how “meta” that is. Hardball itself pulls in about three or four hundred viewers a night. Mostly shut-ins and widow-women. But the clip of that manufactured “confrontation” —as scripted as a campaign ad— has probably been seen by a million. From there, including people like myself who have never actually seen the clip, it’s merely discussed by a few million more. What a sick snowball. Out of a nation of 300 million, a tiny fraction catch wind of some media-made shit-stir of a very minor celebrity candidate and Joan Walsh says the nation’s attention was “won”? When did that happen?

Oh, just about the time that phrase entered Ms. Walsh’s mind. 

John Edwards’ recent demonstrations of the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity are truly appalling. Be it the cornpone or the luxuriant locks, he really is, after all, no different from the sickening John Kerry: a user of women or emotions and even resumes —all in the pursuit of money and renown.

These are lightweight men. Folded doilies of masculinity. Their presence in the modern Democratic Party make me nostalge for stronger minds. Roosevelt, Truman, and Johnson. Dean Rusk and Henry Jackson. Substantial Democrats in foreign policy…

No. The nation’s attention has not been won.

I fear a calamity.

Jack Shafer at Slate gives us the lowdown on Lyndon Johnson and our dearly departed former First Lady. On the topic of a local radio station here in town in the Age of the New Dealers:

Once Lady Bird completed her purchase of KTBC, the “five years of delays and red tape, or delays and unfavorable rules” from the FCC that had stymied the previous owners “vanished … and slowness was replaced by speed,” according to [Robert] Caro. In short order she got permission to broadcast 24 hours a day (KTBC had been a sunrise-to-sunset station) and move it to 590 on the dial—”an uncluttered, end of the dial” where it could be heard in 38 surrounding Texas counties. It was no coincidence. Lyndon and Lady Bird recruited a new station manager, promising 10 percent of the profits, and Lyndon told him that the changes in the license restrictions that would make KTBC a moneymaker were “all set.” In 1945, the FCC OK’d KTBC’s request to quintuple its power, which cast its signal over 63 counties.

When Lyndon visited William S. Paley, president of CBS radio, and asked if KTBC could become a CBS affiliate and carry its lucrative programming, he didn’t have to spell out why the request should be granted. The radio networks feared the regulators in Washington as well as the members of Congress who regulated the regulators. KNOW in Austin had been repeatedly denied the affiliation because a San Antonio “affiliate could be heard in Austin.” CBS Director of Research Frank Stanton approved Johnson’s request.

Hee hee. Read the whole thing.

Why are the Democrats universally calling for our expedited withdrawal from Iraq? Because they know that it cannot be done. And, so, they make great hay and show of what is really their unprincipled opposition to the War for Iraq not because they have some grand strategic idea in mind, but because it is the best trick they know. Iraq, to the average anti-war Democrat, is mostly just a fundraising point. It’s a big bag of Abu Ghraib and daily car bombing footage to hang around Bush the Younger’s neck.

One would have expected by now that such dolts as Reid, Pelosi, Levin, Murtha, and Obama would have understood that we aren’t leaving Iraq until the mullahs have left Teheran.

Pay attention, hippies: Iran comes next, if not Syria. We don’t leave until all the family business is settled.

Went and stood by Mrs. Johnson’s coffin for a moment very early this morning.

Her attendants from the entrance on up were preternaturally gentle and calm, which made an impression on me. As did the dawning light and the orange glow of the Tower.

That’s hers and mine, see.

Thank you for adding to the beauty of Texas in the springtime, madame.

And you remain the essence of elegance, kindness, and charm. 

Good night, Mrs. Johnson.

I don’t know much about him, but I have always liked Richard Carmona. He’s a smart man, a bad-ass, and a real hero. 

His criticisms of this Administration for its ideological censorship of his public statements while he served as our nation’s Surgeon General are welcome to me. That’s because conservatives in this country need to have men like Carmona slap them in the face and say, “If you don’t want degenerate Dhimmicrats running this country, you’d best get over your bullshit views on homosexuals, birth control, abortion, and whatever else.” And that’s a fact. Republicans are risking everything by letting the evangelicals bully them.

Thanks, General, for being legitimate.

Larry Johnson, the ex-Company man who’s cashing in on his resume with the anti-Bush Left on a Plame-like scale, is so mad at New York Times columnist David Brooks that he has published a photograph of a very conspicuous object in front of Brooks’ residence —a residence which Johnson makes sure you understand is literally in his own neighborhood.

As I told Johnson, if I were Brooks, I would take that as a threat.

UPDATE: Hat tip to Eschaton, where ad hominem shit like Johnson’s is tolerated.

UPDATE No. 2: Johnson writes me with this:

There is no address, no picture of his house.  What in the hell are you talking about?  Putz!

Far be it from me to argue with a man who shares a barber with Prince Valiant, but the suggestion behind publishing the photo is clear, Larry. I’m not saying you put a horse’s head in Brooks’ bed; I’m saying you’re a chickenshit who’s obviously run out of ways to excuse the Wilsons’ self-aggrandizing and hypocritical behavior.

(Thanks to Protein Wisdom for the linkiness.)

Did it happen in your market, too?

I’m watching Nadal and Djokovic just then in the second semi-final match at Wimbledon —and here comes six or seven seconds of some sort of Babar the Elephant animation.

Not exactly Heidi busting in on the Jets and Raiders, but what the hell?