Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

John McCain Seattle

Originally uploaded by soggydan

A few months ago, the GOP gurus were upset, but now they are happy. How can they be happy? All their most Rovian candidates were shot down in the primaries by John McCain, who’s never been in their pockets.

The GOP gurus are happy because they feel confident that McCain can be pushed into a graceful exit before the convention. Having taken the (minimal) heat and (even less) scrutiny from press for a year of primary season, he will step aside for a candidate who will look clean, exciting, and new, swapping loser for winner.

Republicans have been thinking about how they could profit from the Torricelli model since 2004.

Who is the secret candidate we will be handed? Condoleezza Rice? Maybe, but more likely General Petraeus.

Wow! If you’re in the US this morning, you already missed this.

I wondered if my coffee-deprived, early-morning-in-Europe eyes were playing tricks when I noticed that the big front-page picture story of the NY Times online when I woke up in Paris (which would be about 2 a.m. in New York City) had disappeared by a few hours later. “Despite Tough Times, Ultrarich Keep Spending” had been deep-sixed into “NY Regional.”

As a search result from the NYT Archive, however, it’s still “Front Page - News.”

Dethroned St. Michael in Castel Sant’Angelo

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

In 590 AD, the archangel Michael decided to sheath his sword and stop killing Romans with plague.

The expression on this statue by Raffaello da Montelupo (1504–1566) says so much. Immortal Michael can’t really understand why puny humans care so much about whether their lives end with plague or with some other horror.

I would like to see a new kind of Peace Corps created, even a short one, for politicians whose decisions shape people’s lives. Just for a week or two, I’d like these powerful guys to be assigned randomly to some not-prosperous neighborhood and given not quite enough money to meet all their needs.

Let them cope with public transportation and busted-up second-hand cars instead of a limousine, chauffeur, and police escort. Let them argue with tired emergency room personnel on behalf of a sick kid whose parents don’t have good insurance. Heck, let them stand in line to buy macaroni with food stamps.

I wish Democrats would move a little bit faster to shore up the American infrastructure of schools, streets, bridges, buses, and decent jobs that pay a decent wage to people who work hard–all things our parents took for granted but that the rich “archangels” of Team Bush have heartlessly plundered because none of these things mattered to their own lives and families.

Chinatown exterminator

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Yes, yes, yes! And this morning on Daily Kos the top-recommended story is my expose of the latest phone-jamming news!

First, McClatchy Newspapers found an insider source to confirm that the US Department of Justice protected Republican bigwigs from their slow-walked “investigation” of the 2002 Election Day phone-jamming scandal.

Second, two advance reviews of phone-jamming tell-all How To Rig An Election are full of dark seedy details of GOP dirty tricks.

Bring on Boston’s Red Dragon Exterminating Company!

sneering squirrel

Originally uploaded by Fifi LePew

Of all the condescending and unfairly snarky non-reviews of a good book I’ve seen in the New York Times, this morning’s haute hit-piece on Gods Behaving Badly takes the let-them-eat-cake gâteau.

..although Ms. Phillips fulfills her purely lighthearted ambitions for this story, she provides a cautionary example to budding novelists everywhere. Though her background includes stints as an independent bookseller and BBC researcher, she also has a blog full of her thoughts about the hot competition on a television dance-contest show. When writers lived on Mount Olympus, they didn’t talk about things like that.

A blogger? Dear me! And she blogs about TV dance contests? How dare such a low-life pen light-hearted novels about what-if worlds of deposed Greek gods stuck into modern-day London? You or I might imagine this concept is clever. The book’s craftmanship is so seamless you or I just may not notice the author’s “writing.”

You or I might even think those are virtues worth praising in someone’s first novel? Hmmph, sniffs Ms. Maslin, the novel is “flossy, high-concept.”

Author/blogger Marie Phillips mildly remarks that Maslin “could hardly squeeze another spoiler in and still stick to the word limit.” In fact, the plot spoilers are the best of Maslin’s obnoxious review, which falls apart even by its own limited logic when she tries to tell readers that these wildly inventive plot twists have been torn from a book that is (Maslin says) “sitcomlike” and “suggests the help of fiction-writing software.”

In case you can’t tell, I’m angry because I loved this book, first published in England and given show-placement in Uppsala’s English bookstore on the front table with Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman–whose fans will adore it. I don’t know Marie Phillips and I don’t want to know Janet Maslin, whose contrastingly reverent review of Dean Koontz’s glurge about his dead dog also makes me feel nauseous.

But then “real writers,” even when they stumble, all deserve real respect (”Nice clothes there, Emperor!”), quite unlike a mere blogger.

According to the Washington Post, George W Bush did something different this year when he “met” with Nobel Prize winners.

He actually met with them, or at least with one of them. And that one he met with was the President-elect of the year 2000 (at least by popular vote), Peace Prize winner Al Gore.

It’s easy to let eyes get hazy over this photo–just imagining how the whole world would be different if Al Gore had become US President back in 2000 instead of George W. Bush–starting, maybe, with a President who paid attention to memos with titles like “Bin Laden determined to strike in US.” Or at least a President

• more focused on Bin Laden than on Saddam Hussein
• with nobler priorities than cutting rich people’s taxes and killing Social Security
• whose patriotism cares more about our Bill of Rights and less about flag pins

But that’s not how it turned out, and doesn’t George Bush look delighted!

Take one former Republican rising star, whose years spent “pushing the envelope” on campaign tactics have left him cynical–and very ready to talk. Allen Raymond spent three months in prison for phone-jamming crimes, telling the Boston Globe later that Republicans were now so “ultra-aggressive” and “ruthless” that he feared saying no to RNC-bigwig James Tobin could shut his consulting firm out of future business.

Add one former Page-Six gossip-bigwig, Ian Spiegelman. Gawker printed (I won’t even quote it) the blistering letter that got him fired from the New York Post. He’s said to describe himself as a “revenge fetishist.”

Put them together and what you get might be a real page-turner–How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Law Breaker. Coming out soon from Simon and Schuster.

More on this in Blue Hampshire. It’s quite a story

Outdoors playing with cold wet leaves

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

Today’s NYT says that even monkeys “rationalize” past decisions–so that, for example, expressing mild preference for blue candy rather than red quickly transforms itself into strong preference for those blue candies.

In my American middle-class life, my car is blue candy. It’s so easy to drive to the grocery store instead of walking, to drive into Boston instead of taking the subway, even to drive the kilometer to Harvard Square if I know Harvard Book Store will tempt me to buy lots of books.

Living in Stockholm, my car got turned into red candy. Parking is expensive. Buses and subways go everywhere, and go there often. Besides, walking and biking and busing are what people do here. So the one-plus kilometer walk back and forth to work, time spent outside in every kind of weather, is no longer an “inconvenience” to avoid, it’s just something I do–and more-or-less enjoy.

Because I can rationalize, just like anyone else!

Swedish packet for Lipitor tablets

Originally uploaded by betsythedevine

… (people I’ve sat next to at various dinner tables in various countries)–every one of the ones taking cholesterol meds (every one that I asked, btw) takes Lipitor, and not its generic sibling simvastatin.

Yes, yes, I know this is grossly unscientific. Maybe more grossly unscientific than (er, grossly bit follows, skip to next paragraph?) my art historian friend who claimed “scientific” proof that shaving one’s legs made leg hair grow faster–she had shaved only the front of her leg-fronts for years, and found (in her 40s) that now her leg-fronts (shins) were hairier than her leg-backs (calves.) She was not happy when I counter-exampled (do you want to read this?) that I saw the same shin-to-calf difference despite shaving (or not) both, year after year.

Grossly bit ended; on to new-but-unscientific addition. My US doctor says that Lipitor is no better than Simvastatin, and my HMO makes me pay more for L-not- S. But when I needed prescription pills here in Stockholm, a Swedish doctor looked at my near-empty bottle of Lipitor and remarked, “Oh, so they found Simvastatin didn’t work for you and had to upgrade you to Lipitor?”

My US doctor to the contrary, I’ve been happy to pay extra for Lipitor. And can it be totally coincidence that she used to criticize me regularly, when I took Simvastatin, for not “doing enough” to reduce my cholesterol? But now I keep getting good marks for cholesterol virtue?

Just my very unscientific two cents on NY Times story.

Old Sink

Originally uploaded by artsyevie

Amazingly, the guy who said this asked the New York Times to keep his name a secret.

”He brings you the entire kitchen sink, and says, ‘Look what I brought you, a kitchen sink. Let’s throw it at the guy.’ You have to have a grown-up around who says, ‘Well, I’m not sure we should throw the entire kitchen sink at the guy, but what an interesting brass spigot you found.’ ”

The “he” in question is Christopher Lyon, an opposition researcher perhaps most noted for claiming a NH politician’s wife was part of an “orgasm cult.” But our need for grown-ups has much wider relevance.

Any campaign can attract somebody who sees nothing wrong with tearing up opponents’ signs, disrupting their events, or even jamming their phones on Election Day.

So campaigns need experienced “grown-ups” to slow down such hotheads. The tragedy of Republicans under Karl Rove is that experienced politicians were afraid they would be fired if they stood in the way of dirty tricks, which had been admiringly re-christened “pushing the envelope.”

What the world needs now is fewer pushed envelopes and a lot more grown-ups.