Saturday, November 20, 2010

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 11: Common-Sense Conservatism for Dummies

In the course of walking from door to door, encouraging my neighbors to help elect Sarah our next president, I am often asked exactly what we common-sense conservatives believe. I think the core belief that separates us from others is in what I’ll call the no-brainer, the simple truth that “hides” in plain sight, but is actually right there for all to see if we don’t allow ourselves to be misled by a lot of fancy rhetoric of the sort in which B. Hussein Obama specializes.

Let’s take our crippling national debt, for instance. Ask a liberal what we can do to keep from saddling our grandchildren with it, and they’ll sneak a peek at their teleprompter, sip their vitamin water to buy time, clear their throats, furrow their eyebrows, fiddle with their cufflinks, have another sip of water, and intone a catchphrase like “cap-and-trade” or “global warming.” But a common-sense conservative will cut right to the chase:

Spend less.

Duh! Does somebody really have to have a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard to tell you that? Alternatively, drill, baby, drill, and sell the oil we don’t use to the Chinese — at an inflated price! Double-duh!

A lot of the people I talk to want to discuss the whole unemployment thing, and I by no means shy away from doing so. We common-sense conservatives recognize that the obvious solution isn’t for the government to hire a lot of undocumented aliens to build bridges to nowhere, for instance, but to lower taxes on the very rich. When Uncle Sam overtaxes the American CEOs, COOs, CFOs, and what have you of big multinational corporations, they, not surprisingly, become disgruntled, and a disgruntled C-whatever-O is rarely as productive as a gruntled one. The corporation’s profits dwindle, and people have to be laid off. This is so hard to follow?

When you actually reduce that same C-whatever-O’s taxes, though, everyone comes out ahead. The C-whatever-O himself works harder and more creatively, meaning, in many cases, that more people need to be hired, rather than fired. When he or she goes home from the office, the C-whatever-O is likely to feel that he or she can hire more domestics or gardeners, and how are these dark-skinned people going to get out to Greenwich or Scarsdale or Bel-Air or Presidio Heights or what have you if not on public transportation? So now more bus drivers are hired to drive more buses, which need servicing by more mechanics, who can afford to get their hair cut more often, so now you’ve got a lot of barbers who suddenly have disposable income with which to take the missus out to dinner, where they leave bigger tips than they might have previously, which means a lot of waitresses can now afford airfare to go visit their grandkids over the holidays, and buy more and bigger presents for them, so now teens who might otherwise be roaming the streets getting each other pregnant or selling crack are being hired as wrappers. Maybe that puts a couple of probation officers or cops out of work, and it’s always sad to see any American stripped of every last shred of self-respect, but the society as a whole come out far, far ahead, and that's what common-sense conservatism is all about! Hello?

Much is made by liberal nay-sayers about American students scoring far lower on math and science tests than their Asian counterparts. I suppose it takes a common-sense conservative to explain that the difference owes to American kids being a lot more well-rounded, and unwilling to spend 18 hours in the library.

We common-sense conservatives believe that the rich are rich for a reason — that they’re smarter than the poor, or harder workers, or just loved more by God. We believe that they deserve our deference and even veneration. We have no problem whatever with their getting to keep a higher percentage of their incomes than you or I, because their doing so guarantees that we continue to have any income at all.

Join us, fellow American. Drill, baby, drill!

Friday, November 19, 2010

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 10: People Who Say Frickin'

I began volunteering two weeks ago for the Committee to Elect Sarah in 2012 because it was the right thing to do for my country. I anticipated a lot of resistance or even hostility from those of my neighbors who’ve allowed themselves to be hoodwinked by the lamestream media, and asked nothing for my efforts beyond a feeling that I’d done my bit to help restore America to its traditional pre-eminence among nations. I was delighted to discover that only a tiny handful of my neighbors hadn’t come on their own to embrace the values for which Sarah stands — but not nearly so delighted as when I was informed that, because I’d raised more money for the campaign than any other canvasser in southern Dutchess County my second week, I would be one of half a dozen local volunteers invited to meet the candidate and her family when they visited New York City to publicize her new reality show Sarah Palin’s Iowa.

I wasn’t surprised to learn that we would be dining at Applebee’s, whose macaroni-and-cheese I know to be a big favorite of Sarah and other hard-working average Americans. I was a bit surprised to discover that the restaurant would be closed, while we were dining, to the general public, as the general public has come to include an ever larger proportion of common-sense conservatives. But then I realized that autograph hunters and well-wishers would probably make it impossible for any of the Palins to enjoy their meals. If they could close Luddite Bros. department store in Memphis for Elvis, they can certainly close the Times Square Applebee’s for the next leader of the free world!

We five lauded volunteers were led to a big banquet table, to which a big bowl of guacamole and pork rinds (Todd famously won’t allow tortilla chips at the family table) were quickly brought. We volunteers made awkward small talk and munched for a few minutes before the Palins — all except Track, who of course is in Iraq defending our freedom — entered to the accompaniment of Heart’s "Barracuda," which I’d understood Sarah to have been forbidden to use, but some people don’t let Big Government tell them what music they can and cannot enjoy.

In person, Sarah was a little bit smaller than I’d expected, and a little more wrinkly, but as soon as she said, “Hiya!” and grinned her famous grin, all that was forgotten. She’s got to have the whitest teeth in the world, and a really firm grip for a girl, and enough charisma to float a battleship! I wish I’d had a chance to tell her how grateful I am for what she’s doing for our country, but she had the other volunteers to bedazzle, and macaroni to ingest, and it wouldn’t have done for me to try to monopolize her attention.

All her kids were charmers, aside from the controversial Willow, at whose age one is hormonally incapable of being anything other than brutishly surly. When I offered her my hand, she rolled her eyes as though to say, “I am like so sure!” and put both hands behind her back in revulsion.

Traditional as she is, Sarah and her daughters and the female volunteers clustered at one end of the table, while I and Todd and little Trig and the other male volunteer, Jeff, or possibly Geoff, were left to chat manfully to each other. When Jeff tried to kickstart the conversation by asking what it was about tortilla strips that Todd disliked, The First Dude scowled at him in silence for a long moment before snarling, “I’d be glad to tell you if it were any of your frickin’ business.” Jeff blushed luridly, betraying himself as something other than a man’s man, as both Todd and I, I think, instinctively recognized each other to be.

I normally give a wide berth to people who say frickin’, but this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, so I took an excessive swig of my Mountain Dew, belched defiantly, and said that in my view there was no thrill in the world comparable to that of going into the wild and shooting something dead. I expected Todd to offer me his fist to touch my own against and to growl, “You got that right!” What he did, instead, though, was snicker, “You sound like a guy who’s never given the future leader of the free world a mustache ride,” which I found a little ungracious, but of course it isn’t Todd I’ve been going door to door for, nor Todd for whom I and countless tens of millions of other common-sense conservatives will so eagerly vote.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 9: Your Nobody 'Til Somebody Loves You

Canvassing in my little town on behalf of the Committee to Elect Sarah in 2002 again today, I was struck by how many of my neighbors liked the idea of recruiting Iraq president Jalal Talabani as Sarah’s presumptive running mate, this in the wake of his having declined to sign the execution order for Tariq Aziz, convicted last month of persecuting Shi’ites not liked by his boss, the late Saddam Hussein. Many folks expressed that they were pleased about this because Aziz was the highest-ranking Christian in Saddam’s inner circle, and perhaps the Middle East’s pre-eminent Episcopalian.

When I interviewed him for Conspicuous Consumption magazine in 1994, I found Aziz to be very much more charming than his frequent rants on the evening news about the West’s being a moral cesspool had led me to expect. He proved to be solicitous and courtly, in fact, an implacable kisser of women’s hands and holder-open of doors for them, twinkle-eyed and wry. And once he had a couple of glasses of gjw, a sort of Iraqi sake, down his throat, he turned into an utterly irresistible raconteur; I wish I were able to relate to you his hilarious story about Michelle Pfeiffer, whom he dated briefly in the 1980s, but after being a major film star for so long, she can easily afford to hire lawyers.

Naturally, not all my neighbors were inclined to let Terry — as Aziz invited me and other Western friends to call him — off the hook, especially when it meant that little videos of his hanging wouldn’t proliferate on the Internet, as had those of Saddam’s. One retired John Deere mechanic over on Offal Street summed up the feelings of many when he said, “The fact that the guy’s a Christian doesn’t mean he didn’t do whatever it was he was convicting of having done, gassing Kurds or whatever.”

Those who didn’t want to talk about Terry all seemed to want to talk about Willow Palin’s having told one antagonist on Facebook on Tuesday, “Your effin fat as hell. Stfu,” and another, “Your such a faggot.” Many were outraged that the lamestream media had been making such a big deal of the middle Palin daughter having, metaphorically, extended her middle finger in defense of her mom’s and big sister’s television programs, Sarah Palin’s Iowa in the one case, and Dancing With Unwed Mothers in Bristol's. “When your in that situation,” one of my neighbors wondered, rather eloquently, I thought, “What are you supposed to do, just lay down on your stomach and let them cornhole you?”

Others were delighted with the introduction of the heretofore seldom-seen STFU, which they’ve been delighted to welcome to their existing arsenals of acronyms, which in most cases already comprise ROFL, LMAO, the rather earthier LMFAO, WTF, and OMG.

But of course there were a couple of elitists who described themselves as “dismayed” (a word as popular with Obama socialists as eschew and palpable) by Willow’s allegedly appalling grammar. To them I say get a life. For the average person who hasn’t been to Yale or Harvard or one of those, your is perfectly fine in all contexts, readily understood — and isn’t that the whole point? — by all.

As for the faggot business, it’s just like the lamestream press to assume the worst when it comes to the Palins. In the United Kingdom, a faggot is either a cigarette or a smaller, weaker fellow pupil whom you feel morally compelled to tyrannize (actually, tyrannise) until he attempts unsuccessfully to hang himself with his school tie, which failure serves only to fan the flames of your and other pupils’ sadism. Knowledge of other cultures is not known to be a hallmark of the Palin household, so we can probably infer that Willow was using it in the more familiar former sense. If this is true, and wholesome young people are now calling one another cigarettes derisively, shouldn’t Big Government, which has for so long been so eager to crush the American tobacco farmer under the jackboot of oppression, be happy, rather than indignant?

I worry about Sarah asking Jalal Talabani to be her running mate. I worry that a lot of people might think she was trying to install the Taliban as vice president, and your all wet, in my view, if you anticipate many Americans being comfortable with that idea.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 8: The Republican Frontrunners Compared

I canvass on, and the response remains gratifying. I have observed only one household that was enthusiastic about Obama’s recent tour of weird Asian countries; it was headed by an IT consultant from Mumbai whose wife had a red dot on her forehead. I thought at first that he was introducing himself by profession — as a deejay — but it turned out that he was an IT consultant, and that his name was actually Vijay. I have literally never interacted with an Indian person I found less than charming — though there were moments when Ms. Somi Guha and I wanted to dismember one another — and this was no exception, but I share Sarah’s (unstated, but let’s not be naïve, shall we?) belief that both we and the Indians themselves would be happiest if they stayed on the reservations we were kind enough to grant them, and on which we, bending over backwards to be fair, let them run casinos and ingest peyote to their hearts' content.

I also encountered a couple of voters who, if the election were tomorrow, said they would be more likely to vote for Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. I appreciate that the latter hides his evangelical fanaticism under great geniality, and has an irresistibly cute surname, one that simultaneously evokes perhaps the greatest character in all of American fiction — Huck Finn — and Applebee’s, which in many communities represents the pinnacle of fine dining. I appreciate too that he can play the bass guitar a little bit, but so could John Kerry, whose last name evoked a beloved Stephen King heroine, and how much good did it do him? I would like Huckabee a lot more if he had a cute regional accent and didn’t think of gay, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered as perverts, except in cases where their (mis)behavior warranted it, as it does far too often!

As for Romney, we’ve never had a president with a more down-to-earth, have-a-coupla-brewskis-with nickname — compared to Mitt, Jimmy and Bill sound like Chauncey and Fauntleroy. (Speaking which, am I the only American sports fan who marvels that there are no professional point guards or cornerbacks named Fauntleroy? Looks to me like an opportunity waiting for an unwed teenaged mother to seize it!) Mitt’s also got the advantage of looking fantastically presidential. Who wouldn’t prefer to see big, chiseled-featured, gray-templed Mitt squeezing the hell out of the hand of a fellow leader rather than B. Hussein Obama, with his disproportionate ears and teeth?

Of course, if we’re going strictly on looks, Sarah is our best choice by a very, very large margin. Can you imagine how the national mood will improve at the sight of the first photos of her receiving Germany’s Angela Merkel — who’s a lot more a GNWF than a MILF, if we’re being honest with each other — or Australia’s Julia Gillard, who might be viewed as a 2 in a flattering light, but isn’t going to take anybody’s eyes off Sarah, who I think most guys would agree is at least a 6.75 (in the over-45 category) at the moment? I know what you’re thinking — that if we elect her in 2012, she’ll be 60 by the time her second term ends, and who’s that hot at 60? Consider this: by 2024, cosmetic surgery will probably have advanced to the point at which Julia Gillard can be a 7, if that’s what she wants, and we’ll probably have made huge strides with botox too.

What I asked voters to bear in mind is that Mitt’s five identical sons look like human Russian dolls, and exclaim, “Holy crap!” when excited, and that his wife Ann is a grown-up version of the universally lusted-after cheerleader in high school who wouldn’t speak to you because she frankly didn’t even see you — you were invisible to girls that hot — or, worse, was so patronizing you wished she really hadn’t seen you. We conservatives know the type only too well. They’re mostly married to so-called progressives with degrees from one of the big elitist East Coast universities — Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and so on — with a lot of ivy. And we common-sense conservatives, in the process of taking back our country, say to hell with ‘em!

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

George Bush"s Missions Accomplished: A Review

It should surprise no one that former president George W. Bush’s memoir Missions Accomplished has incurred the disdain of the lamestream progressive media to the extent it has. Did anyone really imagine they were going to read the book objectively? However brazen they may be about their contempt for a leader we common-sense conservatives are confident will come to be recognized as one of our greatest ever, you’d think they’d at least laud his remarkable candor, but fat chance!

He is universally condemned for his lack of candor, and yet how many reviews have you read to date that even mention his disclosure of a brief affair with Katy Perry, then high in the charts with her "I Kissed a Girl," in the last months of his presidency? “The thought of Katy with her tongue halfway down the throat of a [Dallas] Cowboys cheerleader made it so I could have driven nails with [it],” isn’t quite candid enough for you, lamestreamers? And how about the author's admission that when Brokeback Mountain was screened for him and Laura and the Cheneys and the Rumsfelds and the Powells in the White House theatre, he got so turned on watching Jake Gyllenhal and the late Heath Ledger kissing that he had to pretend to have just remembered an important foreign policy decision he had to make, and excused himself to take matters into his own hands, if you will, in the nearest gentlemen’s room.

Much has been made of his assertion that Kanye West’s remarks about his indifference to black people after the flooding of New Orleans was the most disheartening moment of his eight years in office — more disheartening, that is, than learning that another couple of dozen American servicepersons had been blown to pieces in Iraq. While ridiculing him for that, the lamestreamers conveniently ignore his having had the moral courage to nominate not only a black woman, but one with a weird (and not just Shaniqu'aa-weird!) given name, as Secretary of State. He was advised that Condoleeza Rice’s appointment would make America a laughingstock, but he stuck to his guns.

Anyone like myself, whose enthusiasm for sports has always far exceeded his aptitude, can feel the author’s pain when he talks about how, when he tried out for the Yale football team in 1965, the team’s coach, Solly Hemus, snickered at him openly and suggested he might be better suited to cheerleading. Of course that humiliation was nothing compared to that which GWB suffered in his boyhood, when he commonly overheard his mother and handsome former baseball and Navy hero father refer to him in conversation as either “the little dickhead” or Turdblossom, which scarring appellation he would famously repurpose later in life. Those of us who have grown up with a more charismatic younger sibling — former Florida governor Jeb Bush in his case, Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Michael Vick in my own — can identify all too easily with that particular brand of agony.

Having assumed that the only music he liked was by Republican shitkickers, I was intrigued, speaking of Turdblossom, to learn that GWB tried to commission Trent Reznor to compose something more contemporary than “Hail to the Chief” to be used for his entrance music, but that Karl Rove overruled the idea. The reader can certainly understand why GWB was thinking at one point of having Rove pushed out of Air Force One somewhere over the middle of the Antarctic, only for his state visit to Antarctica to be cancelled in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

I have yet to see a single mention, laudatory or otherwise, of GWB’s having sent Aung San Suu Kyi a Sony PlayStation 3 in 2007 to make just a little more bearable her ongoing house arrest in Burma, or Myanmar, or whatever it’s calling itself this week, though the press would surely be all over New Zealand’s John Kay or the Bahamas’ Hubert Alexander Ingraham having demonstrated comparable generosity and thoughtfulness. What does this profoundly good man have to do for a syllable of lamestream approbation?

Monday, November 15, 2010

Sara(h) Smiles, Part 7: Sarah Palin's Iowa

Every time I think of writing about some fascinating aspect of my life other than my new-found admiration for Sarah Palin and my volunteer work on her behalf, she just keeps pullin’ me back, in the words of Al Pacino in Revenge of the Godfather, — except I can’t be sure without getting it from Netflix again and you can be assured there’s little chance of that happening, whether he dropped his g, as he wasn’t playing an average, normal American like you and I and Sarah, but an Italian-American gangster raised on the East Coast among elitist liberals who imagine they know better than you and I about things in which they have Ph.D.s while you and I, or at least you, dropped out of high school.

In any event, you’ve no doubt heard by now that Sarah’s new reality show, Sarah Palin’s Iowa, debuted last night on TLC, and that the lamestream media are all shook up about her celebration of the so-called Hawkeye State’s mountains and prairies and oceans white with foam and what have you. The whole thing, they say, is a brazen attempt on Sarah’s part to endear herself to the voters whose voices will be heard first when the presidential election primary season kicks off in about a year and a half.

I, for one, love the program, and would probably do so even if I hadn’t embraced common sense conservatism a couple of weeks ago. The concept, if you’ll permit me to use that sometimes-overused word, is uniquely compelling. Each week, a celebrity (Sharon Osbourne was Sunday night’s) parachutes blindfolded into a cornfield in the middle of the state with a bagful of energy bars, a liter of drinking water, a paperback copy of Sarah’s best-selling memoir Going Rogue, a multipurpose knife, and the Bible. If he or she can make it to the International House of Pancakes in Waterloo without being first being picked off by Sarah’s husband Todd and other sharpshooting Alaskans who sharpened their skills shooting wolves from helicopters, he or she becomes eligible for consideration as Sarah’s running mate in 2012. Not only democracy in action, but meritocracy too; to the winner go the spoils!

The sight of Ms. Osbourne very nearly bleeding to death along the side of Interstate 35 just south of Ankeny on Sunday night was very deeply moving, and I think reminded all of us of the importance of the responsible, rather than whimsical, use of firearms, our access to which is guaranteed by the Second Amendment.

Some lamestreamers have decried the hyprocrisy of Sarah’s bewailing would-be biographer Joe McGinniss, not an heir to the Guinness brewing fortune, moving in next door to her in Wasilla as an invasion of her family’s privacy. If she’s so protective of her family’s privacy, they whine, why is she displaying them, warts 'n' all, in her reality show? That's exactly the sort of pettiness you have to expect in today’s ever-more-fractious political environment — not that I either know or care what fractious means, having been befuddled by fractions, as by all math, as a boy.

In other news, it’s just been revealed that Randy Scheunemann, Sarah's foreign policy adviser, a member of her inner circle, and a person the spelling of whose surname requires intense concentration, has since 2003 been paid over $150,000 by the billionaire philanthropist George Soros for promoting Burmese cuisine as a viable alternative to Thai cuisine for American diners.

Because Glenn Beck recently exposed Soros as a "puppet master" orchestrating a coup "to bring America to her knees," I suppose the lamestreamers would like to see Scheunemann lynched or deported or something. We common sense conservatives, though, recognize that there’s some good in everyone. That Soros is intent on handing our country over to the Greeks doesn’t mean that his efforts on behalf of those with peanut allergies don’t deserve commendation. Indeed, my understanding is that negotiations are under way to invite Soros onto SPI as celebrity guest, with Beck as guest marksman.

And there are those who’ll tell you this isn’t a great country!