Hattie's Web

The dude vote

From Edward McClellan at Salon:

Feb. 26, 2008 | The movies don't get any manlier than buddy cop flicks. They're romances for guys, portrayals of male marriage. Two men with clashing personalities -- the strait-laced family man, the trigger-happy hot shot -- team up to form a crime-fighting force that's more powerful than their individual egos. In the search for opposites, it's amazing how many movies cast a white guy and a black guy. Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx in "Miami Vice." Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith in "Men in Black." Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in "Lethal Weapon" I through X.

John Stodder, a 52-year-old blogger from Palos Verdes Peninsula, Calif., looks at the presidential field and sees another buddy-cop pairing: John McCain and Barack Obama, supposed mavericks who break their parties' rules, bound together by a common mission -- keeping Hillary Clinton out of the White House.

And:

From George Washington to George W. Bush, the Oval Office has been a guy kind of place. Guys are on a 43-0 run. And some guys would apparently like to keep it that way. A recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll found that, among men, McCain beats Clinton by 9 points. Against Obama, he only ties. There are also plenty of guys who voted for Barack Obama in the primaries but will switch to John McCain if the lady gets the nomination -- even though they'll have to leap over a huge political divide to get there. (At the end of 2006, John McCain had a lifetime rating of 83 from the American Conservative Union; Barack Obama pulled an 8.)

Leslie Fiedler wrote about this phenomenon in Love and Death in the American Novel. The great American male black-white romance, he said, was Huckleberry Finn. Tom and Huck. And guess who Hillary is? Why that darned Aunt Polly trying to get Huck to whitewash the fence!

Come into the raft, Huck Honey!

Exciting times at Aunty Hattie's

The whales are here. I saw four of them doing their synchronized swimming routine yesterday. Flippers up, tails up. I have seen one mother and calf, too.

In other excitement: I got up to go to the bathroom at 3:00 a.m., and there was this terrific crash. I woke up on the floor, having passed out momentarily, and the crash was me hitting the bathroom floor. I have a flu bug our last guest left me and have been very weak, and I think it was fever and dehydration that literally brought me down.

I'm better today with not too much bruising.

McCain

McCain could win. Check out Pandagon on the subject. He has positioned himself as a middle of the roader and has worked with League, for instance, on campaign finance reform. He's very clever at getting people on his side. If Obama wins the nomination and if McCain can play experience and white Protestant malehood against Obama's  background, as I think he will, I believe he will win. Michelle Obama will be a huge target.

Notice how the McCain lobbying scandal has dropped off the radar. He's getting protection. It does not take any imagination for me to believe that a lot of the white men who voted for Obama will end up voting for McCain. I think fair numbers of them were really voting against Clinton.

Stafford Clarry, again

I'm putting this up top, because of some new comments.

Great blog

Stuff white people like. I like all these things, so I am white.  Thanks, Jennifer.

Time to get behind Obama

No more criticism from this quarter. The cons have tons of money to lavish on people who will be willing to work night and day to dream up nasty things to say about Obama. His wife, of course, is a prime target. She's not only female, which is bad enough; she's also black. She'll get the Hillary Clinton treatment but even worse. Here is a particularly loony toons example, pointed out by Sadly, No and most entertainingly commented upon.

Click on cartoon for enlargement, if you must.

Imagine. Chris Muir is crying that he can't get syndicated because of his views. His lack of graphic talent and incoherent text have nothing to do with it, I'm sure.

What a rich pile of manure wingnuttia is providing bloggers with. I think it would be really great to put on my "victory" garden. Victory for the Dems, that is.

Sadism, how we love it.

I must confess that I enjoy sadism lite sometimes. I agree with Steve Kalas that, as with him, my desire to think of myself as great and good conflicts with my unconscious or sometimes conscious desire to put others down; as Kalas puts it:

"I do sometimes condescend to people. And when I do, I want to and I like to. My highest truth? Condescending to people who really, really deserve it -- bullies, intellectual snobs, reprehensibly stupid people, self-righteous prigs, people having me on with emotional dishonesty, et al. -- fits my values just fine, not to mention it's a whale of a lot of fun!

I don't expect he'll reform, even in these days of the Obama love-fest, and I know I won't.

Update: forgot link. It's there now.

Big turnout at our local caucus

At the last caucus there were two voters; this time there were at least 200.

We met one of our friends there, a man in his 70's,  who said he had been avoiding us because he was voting for Obama and knew what I would think of that. He said, with a lump in his throat, "I'm going with the young people." To him it was the 60's all over again. I don't think so. The 60's was real, and the changes were enormous. We have had years of reaction and regression, but I am not convinced that what we're looking at now is real. Where's the struggle?

So since Obama won in Wisconsin, it does look as if it's all over for Hillary Clinton. Now the big guns will turn on Obama. It's already happening.

Update: Obama creamed Clinton in Hawaii. No surprise.

Update update: Two local activists that I greatly admire voted for Obama: Nelson Ho and Helene Hale. Nelson said that he had never seen such excitement in the Democratic Party (He wasn't around in the 60's), and Helene says Hillary could not get elected because she has "too much baggage." Helene is an ex council member and ex state representative and shrewd politico who is 90 years old. She really has seen it all.

Strange bedfellows dept.

Cal Thomas and David Brooks are saying some of the same things about Obama that I am.  They are very nasty, however; I would never belittle Obama or his supporters. It may seem that I am doing that when I point out how his campaign is being run, or that people are getting hopes up that may be dashed, but really I think he would make a fine president. Still, I prefer Hillary Clinton.

In any case, we have got to get a Democrat in the White House.  McCain, Bush's heir, would be a disaster. I don't know who could solve our military and war problems, but I know McCain for sure would get another conservative on the Supreme Court, and women could lose their abortion rights.

But clearly the neo-cons are now afraid he might win and are shifting their attacks away from Clinton and toward Obama.

On a lighter note:

Remember Harvey the Invisible Rabbit who was eight feet tall? The joke was, shake hands with Harvey. When you shook hands with the Invisible Rabbit, you got the punch line, "What are YOU shaking hands with?"

This all may have deep meaning, but probably not.

Anyway, making fun of guys is always fun for  Aunty Hattie. It's one of the signs of my rapidly approaching dotage.