Bush Taps DeLay
 

Don't buy his BS for a minute. I had drinks with Sidd on Friday and he is serious. He is going to put money into Delay's campaign if it looks like he is going to lose. So if Delay gets vulnerable I may have to fit Sidd for some cement shoes. Or at least dig up some dirt on him.

Write what you know
 

Zell Miller's new book is titled...

Write what you know
 

Slavery also cannot explain the difference between American blacks and West Indian blacks living in the United States because the ancestors of both were enslaved. When race, racism, and slavery all fail the empirical test, what is left?

Culture is left.

The culture of the people who were called "rednecks" and "crackers" before they ever got on the boats to cross the Atlantic was a culture that produced far lower levels of intellectual and economic achievement, as well as far higher levels of violence and sexual promiscuity. That culture had its own way of talking, not only in the pronunciation of particular words but also in a loud, dramatic style of oratory with vivid imagery, repetitive phrases and repetitive cadences.

Although that style originated on the other side of the Atlantic in centuries past, it became for generations the style of both religious oratory and political oratory among Southern whites and among Southern blacks--not only in the South but in the Northern ghettos in which Southern blacks settled. It was a style used by Southern white politicians in the era of Jim Crow and later by black civil rights leaders fighting Jim Crow. Martin Luther King's famous speech at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963 was a classic example of that style.

While a third of the white population of the U.S. lived within the redneck culture, more than 90% of the black population did. Although that culture eroded away over the generations, it did so at different rates in different places and among different people. It eroded away much faster in Britain than in the U.S. and somewhat faster among Southern whites than among Southern blacks, who had fewer opportunities for education or for the rewards that came with escape from that counterproductive culture.

Write what you know
 

Interesting. Unfortunately, Zell was worried about having sufficient gravitas, but I think the forward gives the book the heft that it needs.

Write what you know
 

I think that if this book doesn't do well, it won't be because Zell bored the readers, but because the readers bored Zell.

I actually read that book.

Write what you know
 

• "A Deficit of Decency" addresses specific issues where Miller sees a need to return to a basic sense of duty. Miller writes in the preface, "There have been ten generations of Americans since this nation was founded….Each left this nation in a little better condition than they had inherited it from their parents. This is the first generation at risk of doing the opposite. Why? I have come to believe that it is because we failed to acknowledge and discipline ourselves with the spiritual truths that have made us great for these two hundred years—faith, family, country, values. This book is about how one man thinks they may be restored and yet save this great civilization from itself."

Now which generation, exactly, is fucking everything up? Zell looks a bit too long in the tooth to be a boomer, and we all know the Greatest Generation is beyond reproach. I know he ain't sayin' that shit 'bout me.

The hits just keep on comin'...
 

More DeLay news....

http://www.time.com/time/nation/arti...054596,00.html

Bush Taps DeLay
 

FWIW, Sidd talks a lot of shit when he drinks.

Write what you know
 

Don't be too sure, Weed. Check out Chapter 11, "Our Town and Our Youth: A Review of The Lazy, Ungrateful Liberals Who Deserve to Be Shot."

Write what you know
 

Umm...I'm not listed there, am I? Could you take a look? I would, but I don't feel like it.

Write what you know
 

Look, doing the all-nude, all-male production of Our Town wasn't my idea. Our drama teachers told us it was avant garde and who were we to question? And as I recall, they were of Zell's generation.

Generation X never got a fair shake from day one, and now Zell Miller wants to put some mess on us? No fucking way. If I've got bad manners it's Hunter S. Thompson's fault. If I think about sex too much it's Henry Miller's fault. If I drink too much it's because Bukowski made it sound fun. If I lie it's because Nixon taught me how when I was just knee-high to a black and white television set. And if I ever get around to dodging the draft it'll be because I have lots and lots of other priorities.

I'm not bitter, just confused. When I respond to you seriously, you get all pissy because I'm not giving you room for humor.

When I make a joke (and c'mon -- "The Belle Curve" -- that was funny shit) then you get all snide and smug and accuse me of being insufficiently intellectual because I reject the book without reading it.

Anyway. Good to know that there is room for humor again. Whenever Bilmore's sense of moral and intellectual superiority doesn't squeeze it out.

For Spanky
 

Andrew Sullivan writes in The New Republic the most comprehensive review I've read so far about the divide in the GOP today between the conservatives of faith and the conservatives of restraint. It's pretty damned long, but worth the read.

Heh.
 

It's in a jar on my shelf.

(Sorry. Old joke. More properly, for the old guy who says "I have the heart of a thirty-year-old.")

Still, this was funny. Had to be on purpose.