MayerBlog: The Web Log of
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Spring Briefs 2009
It’s that time of year again – time for another series of “Spring Briefs” on MayerBlog. As the spring weather heats up, so too do controversies in the world of politics and popular culture. Here are my comments on some current developments:
n The Busybody-in-Chief The new president, B.O., is commonly caricatured by cartoonists as having big ears. Although his ears may be the most prominent feature of his head, physically, if he were to be portrayed metaphorically, in terms of his character, his most prominent feature would be his nose. He just can’t stop sticking it into places it doesn’t belong. The nation’s Demagogue-in-Chief is also the nation’s chief busybody, using the “bully pulpit” of his office – or perhaps I should say, his “bullshit pulpit” – to state his opinion on all sorts of matters that do not fall within the constitutional purview of the U.S. government. Even before his inaugural, he criticized the BCS college football system, calling for national playoffs. Since his inaugural, he has opined about a seemingly limitless variety of topics: D.C. schools’ snow days (coming from Chicago, he thinks folks in D.C. are wimps when faced with winter weather); the Superbowl (he’s a Bears fan, but he picked the Steelers to win); Wall Street salaries (he – who signed into law the nearly-$1 trillion “stimulus” legislation – thinks corporate CEOs’ bonuses are “shameful”); and even the NCAA men’s basketball tournament (as part of ESPN.com's Tournament Challenge, he picked North Carolina to win). It’s only a matter of time before he declares the winner on American Idol. What else can we expect from a president whose reactionary policies are hopelessly mired in the failed paternalistic approaches of the past? From a politician who deceitfully promises “change” and yet who offers absolutely no new ideas, other than a radical expansion of the 20th-century regulatory/welfare state? President B.O., who took an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States” – even though he fumbled the oath, stumbling over its words at his splashy inaugural – ought to actually read the document. If he did, he’d find that the legitimate powers of the U.S. government, including the powers of the president, are limited to just a few matters of concern to the national government, just a fraction of the business of America. (In the famous words of that greatest 20th-century president, Calvin Coolidge, “the business of America is business” – and it’s none of the damn business of the U.S. government.)
n Daschle-ing through the Snow Job In early February B.O.’s original nominee for the office of Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), former Senate Democrat leader Tom Daschle, withdrew himself from consideration (despite pundits’ assurances that his former colleagues in the Senate indeed would confirm him) because of continuing controversy over his failure to pay taxes. As Charles Krauthammer noted in a Feb. 6 column, Daschle “had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.” What Krauthammer was alluding to, of course, was the fact that news of Daschle’s tax problem surfaced after news of similar problems by other “tax-challenged” B.O. nominees, chiefly Tim Geithner, the new treasury secretary. (In retrospect, given Geithner’s failure as Treasury secretary, perhaps B.O. jettisoned the wrong nominee, a veteran crook over an incompetent tyro.) The real scandal in Tom Daschle’s case, as Krauthammer adds (citing former New Republic editor Michael Kinsley), “isn’t what’s illegal, but what’s legal”: “Not paying taxes is one thing. But what makes this case intolerable was the perfectly legal dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years. He’d been getting $1 million per year from a law firm. But he’s not a lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist. You don’t get paid this kind of money to instruct partners or the Senate markup process. You get it for picking up the phone and peddling influence. . . . [Moreover, Daschle] made another cool million a year (plus chauffeur and Caddy) for unspecified services to a pal’s private equity firm . . . .”
(“Well, that didn’t last long,” February 6.) Krauthammer’s point is that Daschle’s tax problem – which really was an ethics problem – exposes the hypocrisy in B.O.’s campaign claim to dispense with Washington “politics as usual.” Daschle’s influence-peddling “represented everything Obama said he’d come to Washington to upend,” Krauthammer notes. That’s not surprising to those of us who saw through B.O.’s phony claims and promises to bring “change” to Washington for precisely what they were: bullshit.
n Fear-Monger-in-Chief Yet another example of B.O.’s hypocritical bullshit has been his pledge (as stated repeatedly during his presidential campaign and then again in his inaugural address) to bring “hope” to Americans. (“We have chosen hope over fear,” he pompously declaimed at his inaugural.) Yet, in talking about the economy, he has used the most outrageous alarmist rhetoric: he began on January 20 by describing the economy as “badly weakened,” then on January 23 said we’re experiencing “an unprecedented, perhaps, crisis,” which by January 30 had become a “continuing disaster for America’s working families.” On the last day of January he said, :Rarely in history has our country faced economic problems as devastating as this crisis”; and a few days later, in early February, was saying the economy was “in desperate straits” and that that “a failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe.” B.O. and his administration clearly were using this alarmist rhetoric to help build political support for his massive, nearly $1-trillion economic “stimulus” plan and for his ambitious plan to take advantage of the “crisis” to push through the greatest expansion of federal government power in U.S. history. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, just after the election in November, brazenly spoke of the new administration’s “Rule one,” as he put it, “Never allow a crisis to go to waste.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking in Europe a few weeks ago, urged her audience of leftist European activists to “never waste a good crisis,” suggesting that exploiting the current worldwide economic downturn could “have a very positive impact on climate change and energy security” – in other words, on advancing radical environmentalists’ anti-energy “green” agenda. B.O. himself, in a radio address in early March, talked openly of exploiting the country’s hard times to “discover great opportunity in the midst of great crisis.” Throughout history tyrants have used “crisis” rhetoric to expand their power: Lenin and Stalin did it in the Russian communist revolution; Hitler did it to bring his National Socialist party to power in post-World War I Germany, while Mussolini similarly exploited national insecurity to bring his Fascist party to power in Italy. The similar technique that B.O. utilized in his recent “State of the Union” address to Congress was astutely identified by Charles Krauthammer, in another one of his insightful columns, “Obama’s `Big Bang’ Agenda” (March 6). Krauthammer writes of the “brazen deception at the heart of Obama’s radically transformative economic plan”: the president’s “rhetoric sleight of hand” in trying to claim that the current economic problems somehow were caused by the absence of his three ambitious legislative plans: a program of universal, heavily nationalized health care; a cap-and-trade tax on energy; and a major federalization of education with universal access to college as a goal. “Amazing,” he writes: “As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest nonsequitur ever foisted upon the American people.” The economic mess has nothing to do with the absence of universal health care, or the absence of “an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon tax, or the lack of college graduates; yet, “with our financial house on fire, Obama makes clear both in his speech and in his budget that the essence of his presidency will be a transformation of health care, education and energy.” Meanwhile, he has yet to unveil a plan to deal with the real problem, the banking crisis (or the housing and credit bubble whose bursting precipitated it). Notwithstanding the exaggerated rhetoric of B.O., his administration and their accomplices in the news media – who continually chant the mantra that we’re experiencing the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression – it can be argued that, in real terms, the present situation is actually no worse than the recession of 1982. As my colleague Brad Smith noted in a recent Columbus Dispatch op-ed (“Washington should halt its unhelpful financial `aid,’” Feb. 27), “The economy is bad, but unemployment (7.6 percent) remains substantially below its 1982 high of 10.8 percent, and economic forecasters predict it will peak well below 10 percent. In fact, unemployment is still below the 1992 peak (7.8 percent) and the 1975 peak (9 percent). . . . Despite the president’s alarmist rhetoric, we are not even in the ballpark of the Great Depression, when unemployment reached 25 percent, exceeded 20 percent for 35 consecutive months, and did not fall below 14 percent until World War II and conscription of millions of people into the armed forces.”
The current short-term crisis is not unprecedented, but the president’s proposed response is: not just billions but trillions in new government spending, coupled with talk of yet another major “stimulus” and of spending hundreds of billions more to nationalize health care. As Smith concludes, “Each day the government seems to announce some new plan for interfering in our private affairs, including our finances and retirement planning.” We have, under the current administration, “a frenetic, unsettling government that cannot stop doing something when the best thing it could do is to let what has been done already have a chance to work.” What B.O. is counting on is the same assumption that every socialist throughout history has made: that capitalism is so resilient that, no matter what burdens government may place on the working of free economic markets, capitalists will still find a way, somehow, to make profits and thus bring the economy out of the current recession. And that B.O. and the Democrat leaders in Congress can then claim credit for the recovery, by utilizing the post hoc, propter hoc logical fallacy – that simply because the recovery occurred after passage of their “stimulus” program, they can claim that it happened because of the stimulus (rather than, as is really the case, in spite of it). The problem with this game plan is that B.O. and his administration may have gone too far with their alarmist rhetoric, turning their negative assessment of the economic crisis into a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. The real problem, though, isn’t with the alarmist rhetoric but with the misguided actions the president is taking. It’s not mere coincidence that stock prices have continued to fall steadily since the election and since B.O. inauguration: Wall Street is simply reacting rationally to the probable outcome of his policies – his actions, not his rhetoric – which logically, and inevitably, will not only fail to solve the financial crisis but will make our economic problems worse. (It truly should be called “the B.O. Bear Market.”) As Charles Krauthammer also noted in his March 6 column, “The markets’ recent precipitous decline is a reaction not just to the absence of any plausible bank rescue plan, but also to the suspicion that Obama sees the continuing financial crisis as usefully creating the psychological conditions – the sense of crisis bordering on fear-itself panic – for enacting his `Big Bang’ agenda to federalize and/or socialize health care, education and energy, the commanding heights of post-industrial society.”
As Krauthammer concludes, B.O.’s agenda is “intellectually dishonest to the core”: the “fraudulent claim” that health, education, and energy are both the cause of our financial collapse and its cure “is the rhetorical device by which an ambitious president intends to enact the most radical agenda of social transformation seen in our lifetime.”
n Fawn-tasy Island Although Charles Krauthammer has argued (in the above-mentioned Feb. 6 op-ed) that the new president’s “honeymoon” with Congress has ended – maintaining that the “legislative abomination,” the so-called “stimulus” bill, which was B.O.’s first signature program, has exposed the hypocrisy in the new administration’s “fairy tale” that it represented a different kind of politics – Krauthammer’s thesis doesn’t seem to apply to the national news media. For them, the honeymoon’s not (yet) over: members of the media are continuing their love affair with B.O., fawning over him – or (to use the apt word in the title of Bernard Goldberg’s new book) “slobbering” over him. (See Goldberg’s A Slobbering Love Affair: The True (and Pathetic) Story of the Torrid Romance between Barack Obama and the Mainstream Media. Former Clinton advisor Dick Morris, in a Feb. 8 column, “Why Bernie Goldberg Has It Right,” notes that the book, “despite its long title,” is important to read, to understand how partisan the American media have become.) As one example of the national media’s B.O.-mania and bias in favor of the administration, consider NBC’s Today show the morning of Wednesday, February 25, the day after B.O.’s “State of the Union” address to Congress. Matt Lauer’s teaser at the opening of the program repeated the Democrats’ mantra that the present economic situation is “the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression,” presented a clip showing B.O.’s speech at its rhetorical height, and then asked, “But are the President’s proposals specific enough? We’ll ask Vice President Joe Biden.” Imagine the Today show anytime over the past eight years choosing former V.P. Dick Cheney as the principal commentator, giving his reactions to one of George W. Bush’s major speeches, and you’ll quickly realize the double standard of the news media and the favoritism they’re showing to the administration now that their guy’s in the White House. That same day, February 25, another segment on Today featured an interview with Mrs. B.O., Michelle, talking about life in the White House – a puff piece that epitomizes the way the network news (and especially NBC and MSNBC) have become virtual public-relations arms for the Democratic Party and the B.O. administration. In so doing, the news media are abdicating their vitally important role to act as watchdogs over those wielding governmental power – a role that, at a minimum, requires them to act objectively, if not skeptically, rather than as fawning cheerleaders for the administration. The media has yet to realize that B.O., one of the least-qualified men ever elected president, is in way over his head (his admittedly large head), and that his presidency is based on nothing but bullshit (what I call “B.O.b.s.”). In other words, the media have yet to make the obvious call that “The Emperor Is Naked!,” as I did in my Oct. 16 blog essay.
n Hope for the GOP? The national Republican Party – which arguably was the segment of the U.S. population that suffered most from the eight years of George W. Bush’s presidency, and which then suffered from another near-fatal self-inflicted wound by nominating John McCainiac as its presidential candidate in 2008 – might finally be seeing the proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel,” the key to its political comeback in the 2010 and 2012 elections. That key may be found in, of all places, the GOP’s delegation in Congress, where every single Republican member of the House and all but three RINOs (Republicans in Name Only – Specter of Pennyslvania, Collins and Snowe of Maine) in the Senate voted “No” on B.O.’s first major signature legislation, the massive $787 billion “stimulus” bill (aptly called “porkulus” by conservative pundits). The legislation has massive new government spending on health care, education, energy, and the environment – a “hodgepodge of government spending,” said Rep. Eric Cantor (R.-Va.). Dan Mitchell of the libertarian Cato Institute called the package a “Trojan horse” that houses “a combination of payoffs to different Democratic constituencies.” What the near-unanimous rejection of the $787 billion abomination means is that Republicans finally have found their long-lost limited-government principles and have begun to develop the political backbone they’ll need to stick to those principles. Ironically, B.O. has united us – the opposition, that is – and has given us common cause in fighting against his misguided policies.
n Rush (Man of the) Hour Rush Limbaugh has been getting lots of free publicity lately, courtesy of the Democrats and their friends in the news media, who’ve been trying to demonize him in order to split Republicans and to stir up popular support for B.O.’s policies. The FOBOs (friends of B.O., as I call them) have feigned outrage at Limbaugh’s supposed remarks about “wanting the president to fail,” but they took his words out of context. As Rush explained in his inspiring talk at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington in late February, “What is so strange about being honest and saying, `I want Barack Obama to fail if his mission is to restructure and reform this country so that capitalism and individual liberty are not its foundation? Why would I want that to succeed?” Bravo, Rush, bravo! The Democrats are right about one thing: there is a struggle now going on in the Republican party. But it’s not the personality conflict between Limbaugh or RNC chairman Michael Steele, over leadership; it’s a far more profound struggle between two camps that are competing, not just for control of the party, but for its very “soul” – for the principles that will guide the party into the 21st century. On one side are so-called “centrists” or “moderates” in the party who would concede the legitimacy of the welfare state and would make the GOP merely a watered-down, somewhat less socialistic version of the Democratic party. On the other side are a coalition of traditional conservatives, libertarians, and free-market advocates who still value capitalism and the American free market system and who oppose on principle all efforts to move America further down the road to socialism. What Rush Limbaugh has done, so eloquently in recent weeks, is to show Republicans which side offers victory – and hope for keeping alive the American dream.
n It’s a Hit! – But Just a Bong Hit One of the hot news stories (especially on newspapers’ sports pages, or in late-night comedians’ monologues) in early February focused on a photo of 23-year-old champion Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps smoking from a marijuana pipe – aka a bong – at a private party in South Carolina. Since the story broke, Phelps has been facing what arguably has been the greatest crisis of his career: he was suspended from competing for three months by USA Swimming; he was dropped by one of his major sponsors, Kellogg Co.; he was threatened with criminal prosecution by a sheriff in South Carolina (who subsequently decided not to press charges); and, most recently, he’s endured a series of embarrassing interviews in which he’s been asked to apologize for his “mistake.” It’s all much ado over nothing. The only reason it’s a controversy is “reefer madness,” the continuing paranoia, or phobia, about marijuana – a naturally-existing drug that has many beneficial medicinal uses and which, when used recreationally, is no more harmful to users’ health than many legal drugs (alcohol and tobacco immediately come to mind), a drug that would be legal if the USA had sane drug laws, laws based on reason rather than irrational phobia. USA Swimming, or any other sports authorities, arguably might have valid concerns if Phelps were using some sort of performance-enhancing drug – but that’s certainly not the case with marijuana, which has quite the opposite effect. To put it bluntly, it’s none of USA Swimming’s damn business what Phelps does in his private life – whether he made one “mistake” by succumbing to peer pressure and taking a bong hit while partying with some other college-aged guys (as seems to be the case here) or whether he regularly smokes marijuana (as many other 23-year-olds do). If it’s the latter, and he somehow manages to compete successfully – then all power to him, he really would be the greatest athlete of all! Neither did Phelps’ singular “mistake” give Kellogg Co. a justifiable reason to terminate its sponsorship deal, apparently under some sort of “morals clause” in the contract, on the assumption that his scandalous behavior made him somehow less fit to be a “role model” for the kids who eat Kellogg’s cereals. But what about all those dope users who also eat Kellogg’s cereals when they get the munchies? The company seems to be thumbing its nose in their faces. To their credit, almost all of Phelps’ other sponsors have decided to stand by their man, including Swiss watchmaker Omega (which issued a statement affirming it was “strongly committed” to its relationship with Phelps and calling the controversy a “nonissue” that concerned only Phelps’ “private life”), swimwear manufacturer Speedo (which called Phelps “a valued member of the Speedo team”), and Hilton Hotels Corp. For those of us who’d like to see an end to reefer-phobia and to have both the government and sports authorities adopt rational drug policies, the lesson is clear: Boycott Kellogg’s – and wear Omega watches and Speedos when staying in Hilton hotels.
n Presti-digital-delaytion Perhaps nothing better epitomizes the failure of the federal “Nanny State” than the U.S. government’s botched mandate to convert television broadcasts from analog to digital signals. For most of the past year, U.S. TV watchers have been inundated with warnings about the “big switch” to take place on February 17, 2009 – but now it won’t take place until June 12, because members of Congress worried that millions of Americans weren’t ready for the switch. So, in early February – barely two weeks before the original deadline – Congress voted to delay by four months the transition to digital. Like so many other problems in American society today, the problem was caused by Congress in the first place. Rather than allowing the broadcast industry to modernize on its own – which would mean allowing the free-market system to work as it should, matching consumers’ demand with producers’ supply – Congress mandated the much-touted “new era in TV viewing” by forcing most of the nation’s broadcasters (all but a few low-power stations) to cease broadcasting analog signals and instead broadcast TV signals only in digital. Despite the program’s self-serving propaganda (emphasizing the superiority of digital picture quality), Congress was motivated by more than a paternalistic regard for consumers’ welfare: it also aimed at regaining control of the segment of the broadcast spectrum occupied by analog signals and redistributing that segment to other uses, including mobile broadband and public safety – which the U.S. government already had auctioned off, netting more than $20 billion for the U.S. Treasury. ($20 billion used to be a great deal of money, but it’s now a drop in the bucket, compared to the nearly $1 trillion of U.S. taxpayer money the Democrat-controlled Congress recently spent in the “porkulus” legislation.) When Congress originally had decreed February 17 as the deadline date for the big switch, it also appropriated $1.3 billion for a program offering $40 coupons for American consumers to buy digital converter boxes. (By an amazing coincidence, the average cost of the boxes ranges from $40 to $70. Had the government not offered free coupons – up to two per U.S. household – to help “subsidize” the cost of the converter boxes, no doubt they’d be cheaper, by about $40, the cost by which the “free” coupons inflated the market price of the boxes.) Now, as part of the recently-enacted “porkulus” legislation, more money will be spent to further inflate the cost of converter boxes, just so no American will be denied the opportunity to see B.O. give another televised address to the nation – or appear on Jay Leno’s “Tonight” show to promote his dishonest agenda.
n Octo-Womb The bio-medical ethics cottage industry has been stirred up over the past several weeks with the national debate over Nadya Suleman, the 33-year-old single California woman who gave birth to octuplets the last week of January. The saga of Ms. Suleman has been slowly unwinding in the news, and each new revelation helps complete the picture of possibly the most irresponsible mother in the world today. She is the biological mother of 14 children, all created through in-vitro fertilization: the octuplets, whose birth resulted from the simultaneous implanting of six fertilized embryos in her womb, have six older brothers and sisters, ranging in age from 2 to 7. Ms. Suleman is unemployed, and she depends on government welfare payments to support both herself and her huge family. Ms. Suleman, or “Octowomb” as I call her (an apt name alluding to her single most famous accomplishment), epitomizes all that is wrong with the modern “welfare state” and the way in which it fosters, and even rewards, personal irresponsibility. By all accounts, she is unfit to be a mother: she lacks the wherewithal to provide minimally adequate care for her children, either financially or psychologically; indeed, she appears to be “mentally challenged,” to put it euphemistically, or to be a “nut,” to put it more bluntly, as testified by her own mother (who said in an interview that Nadja has been “obsessed” with having children since she was a teenager), the public-relations persons who have quit working on her behalf, and by her own well-publicized 911 phone call (the day she mislaid one of her children and called frantically, saying she’s “going to kill myself”). As a libertarian, I’m uncomfortable with the state second-guessing parents’ child-rearing decisions, but I also believe government has a legitimate role in protecting the rights of children who are suffering from parental abuse or neglect (when objectively defined and proved by credible evidence). And while I generally take a broad view of reproductive liberty (the freedom to procreate, or not to procreate), I consider that liberty – like all other aspects of liberty, rightly considered – to be limited by actions that are harmful to others. Personal freedom goes hand-in-hand with personal responsibility. Just because Ms. Suleman desperately wants to be a mother – and, apparently, has some sort of sick psychological “need” to be a mother (whether of one, two, six, or fourteen children) – should not entitle her, in the law, to be free to be so, relieved of the awesome responsibility that bringing any child into this world ought to entail. Again, by all accounts, “Octowomb” is an unfit mother who doesn’t deserve to have custody of any of her manufactured children. California child-welfare agencies should place these innocent victims of Ms. Suleman’s insanity in appropriate foster homes, giving them the chance to live healthy lives in the homes of fit adoptive parents. And the fertility doctor who helped her realize her sick fantasy – the doctor who violated the professional guidelines of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) that limit the number of embryos to be implanted – ought to lose his state license to practice medicine. Maybe he should be forced to take care of two or three of the pups from the litter he helped to create.
n Damn Socialist Tinkering Once again, earlier this month, Americans were forced to undergo the inconvenience of setting all their clocks one hour ahead, to Daylight Saving Time (DST), as mandated by an act of Congress. I’ve previously written about this misguided law, yet another one epitomizing the folly of government tinkering with virtually all aspects of our daily lives. I’m pleased to see Al Neuharth, founder of USA Today and usually a left-wing supporter of government tinkering in the economic sphere, in a recent column calling for the abolition of DST. Noting how a reader has written him to complain how DST has interfered with her chickens laying eggs – in other words, as Neuharth puts it, “what this foul extra hour of early morning darkness means to her fowl” – he observes that now “chickens join parents of school-age children, farmers, city-folks with early morning jobs,” and others in opposition to the law, created by lobbyists for “the late-night crowd,” who pushed Congress to extend DST. “Getting rid of DST would give most people – and chickens – something to crow about” (“Even chickens hate daylight saving time,” March 6).
n Twitter-dum and Dumber There’s a new phenomenon sweeping the nation: Twitter. One uses Twitter to send “tweets,” or electronic notes (limited to no more than 140 characters), to one’s online friends, family, and other subscribers. What’s really remarkable about the Twitter phenom is that its fans aren’t just young people who might find text-messaging too intellectually challenging. Politicians and journalists have gone Twitter mad, too. As Leonard Pitts, Jr., a columnist for the Miami Herald, recently noted, several members of Congress were seen, during the president’s “State of the Union” speech, “hunched over their handheld devices madly tweeting, like fifth graders passing notes in the back of the class.” One Republican Congressman from Virginia reported, “I am sitting behind Sens. Graham and McCain.” CNN’s Roland Martin, stuck at an airport in Chicago while trying to get back to snowed-in New York City, tweets, “No flights allowed in. I was on plane in Chicago, we pulled out, got word, now back at gate.” And NBC’s Ann Curry, in the snow-bound city, reported: “All Stars are not the proper shoes for NYC today. But seeing this dark city frosted in white is worth my cold toes.” That’s, I suppose, what passes for eloquence in the world of “tweets.” But Pitts’ criticism of this phenomenon truly is eloquent. As he writes, “In the 90s, you often heard people complain of how memoir writers and afternoon talk shows had turned our public spaces into a communal confessional, intimate secrets once necessary for whispering now shouted into the other like an order at a fast-food joint. Ten years later, we are not just sharing secrets; we are sharing lives. And not the good parts, either, but the banal, the mundane, the everyday. . . . Now here is Twitter, which encourages you to narrate your life in real time as opposed to, well . . . living it. I’m sorry, but include me out. I will never Twitter you. In the first place, you have better things to do. In the second, I am not that interesting. No one is.”
n Idol Speculations Another new season – the 8th, believe it or not – of American Idol has been airing on Fox TV, to continued high ratings. As in past seasons, the news media has tried to stir up controversies, even where there really aren’t any. First were the stories about the new, fourth judge, Kara DioGuardi, whose main purpose seems to be functioning (somehow) as a calming influence on Paula Abdul. Then came stories about the new “twists,” or “tweaks,” in the rules this year: resurrection of the old rule allowing the judges to pick “wild card” slots (only 9 of the top 13 finalists were picked by the viewing public), coupled with a new rule allowing the four judges to “save” one finalist from being eliminated prematurely (a rule that in practice, thus far, seems downright tacky, as it means that each finalist not “saved” by the judges gets to be rejected twice, first by the viewers and then by the judges). Then came the Internet rumors that one of the finalists (guess which one) is – gasp! – gay. Finally, just this week, came the even juicier Internet chatter (a rumor spread, perhaps deliberately, by an “A.I.” staffer) that the show’s producers have already picked the final four contestants – allegedly Danny Gokey, Alexis Grace, Adam Lambert, and Lil Rounds – and have somehow “fixed” the show so that one of these four will win. (It’s a rumor already proven at least partially false when Alexis Grace was eliminated this week.) The finalists this year are generally a talented group, but once again (like last year) the men seem more talented than the women. Lil Rounds impresses me as the strongest of the female singers, but any one of three guys – either Danny Gokey, Adam Lambert, or Matt Giraud – could emerge as the best. I like Adam Lambert, who is both a superb singer and a smooth (yet flamboyant) performer, thanks to his background in musical theater (wink, wink). But, despite his devoted fan base (they have to be devoted in order to still vote for him after his outrageous performance of Johnny Cash’s Ring of Fire this week), I don’t see him as the winner. I also like Danny Gokey, mainly because he wears glasses; he’ll go far in the competition – perhaps all the way to the final two – because his singing talent is coupled with a moving “back story” (his sorrowful loss of his wife, who died during heart surgery just a month before his audition). But I’ll stick my neck out and predict, as my pick for the final winner, Matt Giraud. Matt is a fellow Michigander (originally from Ypsilanti, he’s now a piano player and has “a gal” – a girlfriend, that is – in Kalamazoo). Nicknamed “White Chocolate” when he was a kid performing soulfully in gospel choir, he seems like a cross between Michael Bublé and Billy Joel (especially when he’s playing at the piano). Best of all, he’s a true dark horse contestant, one of the four “wild card” finalists, whom none of the pundits picked as a stand out at the beginning of the season – just the sort of guy who’ll really shake up expectations as the show continues to surprise viewers.
| Link to this Entry | Posted Thursday, March 19, 2009 | Copyright © David N. Mayer |
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