mld, March 2, 2003 at 6:16:00 AM CET

Dissin' Sheila

As advertised, I attended the "Pro-America" rally in downtown Houston today. As I predicted, the turnout was much larger than the peace march of a few weeks ago. The organizers, two local talk radio stations, claim eight to ten thousand folks attended. That frankly, seems a bit high. I asked a mounted cop what he thought, and he guesstimated five or six thousand. The peace march folks claimed three thousand, real world observers put it at 1500, tops.

The rally today might have been even bigger, but they quit letting folks into Jones Plaza, as it was just too crowded. I got there right at noon, and almost didn't get in. They were, as we used to say in the Corps, packed asshole to bellybutton.

The crowd was predominantly middle to upper middle class, well-behaved, and unabashedly patriotic. I saw several folks literally wearing the flag. Lots of Viet vets in their old uniforms. Uniformly well-behaved, and lot of families with young kids.

You can see pics here, here, here, and here.

I had to choose between carrying a camera, or my signs, so opted for the signs. I had three, the most popular of which was this one...

Aren't Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys Cute?

I must have seen dozens of folks bust out laughing when they saw it, and had many requests to hold it up so people could take a pic of it.

Another one that people also liked was this one...

But I think you had to be old enough to remember the Viet Nam War protests to really get that one.

Finally, I had this one, though as it turns out I barely used it...

All I can draw is a line in the sand and hasty conclusions, so I had Cookoff Girl make them for me. She gets all the props. :-)

The signs look much better than these pics, which are actually vidcaps, as my digital is on the blink - for some unknown reason, when you press the shutter button, nothing happens.

That's me with the "Fuque the French" sign

Anyway, back to the rally...

I have two major observations. First, the speakers sucked. It seem that the art of addressing a live audience is a dying art. Some lady from the DAR started off by saying she wouldn't be speaking long. In case you've never heard, speakers that begin by saying they'll be brief never are. Brief speakers just get on with it without that announcement - that's part of the reason they're brief.

Chris Baker and Pat Gray were the best speakers of a bad lot. They are the morning and evening talk radio hosts for the station KPRC that organized the event.

Infamously conservative Congressman Tom Delay spoke, and while the crowd seemed to like it, I thought his speech was rather bland. Given the size and ideological enthusiasm of the crowd, he coulda/shoulda had them going like holy rollers listening to Billy Sunday. I don't know what got him to where he is, but it sure wasn't rhetoric.

And then there was Sheila...

Sheila Jackson Lee, a member of the house from the Houston area, has been one of the most outspoken critics of President Bush and GWII. She voted against the resolution to use force last fall, and introduced a measure to repeal that resolution a few monsth ago. She was a staunch defender of Clinton during his impeachment.

The radio station, billing this as a "Rally For America" had invited both ends of the spectrum to attend. Lee, well-known as publicity hound, (Bush pointedly ignored her oustretched hand as he made his way down the aisle at the last SOTU) chose to attend, arriving late, with a escort of HPD officers to trundle her through the crowd and up onto the stage. As one of the other speakers was running late, the organizers offered her a chance to speak.

Heh.

In it's official account of the rally, the Houston Chronicle said she was "was greeted with some boos."

Yeah. And King Kong was a monkey.

Why'd she get booed so harshly? Well, it's one thing to be a liberal, it's another to be one like this, and her reputation does precede her.

I have to give her credit for moxie, though. She stood up there for maybe five minutes, spitting out her speech into the storm of defiance that rose up from the crowd, drowning out her words despite the best efforts of the PA system. Between the boos, hisses, and chants of "USA!" and "BUSH!BUSH!BUSH!" I couldn't hear anything she had to say. I read later it was some standard palaver about how she loved the country, and respected our opinions even though we disagree, blah-blah-blah.

Despite that, though, I did not hear a single obscenity or insult directed at her, or any threats of violence. A few of the local media made hay by mentioning that she was escorted out by Houston police, the implication being she was in danger.

Well, of course she was escorted out, as she was in. So was Tom Delay - it's SOP for politicos at big functions like that.

I've no doubt that had anyone even looked like they were about to harm her, any bystanders would have taken the idiot down.

That didn't keep her from getting an earful, though. :-)

Not that it seems to have changed her mind. The very next day, while speechifying in a local church, she was quoted as saying:

"We have lost if we go to war."

Heh. Wanna bet?

For another blogger's version of the rally, go read Laurence Simon's account over at Amish Tech Support.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention this yesterday - after her speech, SJL headed off to the side to get some camera time with the local news crews. As soon as the cameras snapped off, she bustled off into her chauffeur-driven vehicle, a, you guessed it, big black SUV.

 

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mld, February 12, 2003 at 5:58:00 AM CET

"Eenie-Meenie-Minie-Mo..."

"...pick a seat, we gotta go."

Two years ago, so said one 22 year old Southwest Airlines stewardess flight attendant, as the plane was about to depart, as she tried to chivvy the still unseated passengers into grabbing a seat.

So what, you ask?

Two of the unseated passengers were black females, and they are now suing Southwest for the stew's "racist" remark.

I shit you not.

Read the story here.

Perhaps an explanation is in order.

Back in the old, unenlightened days, there was a nursery rhyme that went like this:

"Eenie-Meenie-Minie-Mo, Catch a nigger by his toe, If he hollers make him pay, fifty dollars every day."

It was used like the old "hot potato, cold potato" counting out rhyme to attempt to randomly choose something as important as who got to bat first at the local sandlot ballgame.

Later, (about the time my fortysomething self started wearing long pants) the offending second line was changed to:

"Catch a tiger by his toe."

Most kids nowadays have never even heard the original version, which dates back to before the Civil War.

After I read about this, I asked a few of the black people I ran into today for their reaction. None of them had heard the story in the news. I repeated the "Eenie-meenie..." phrase to them, and asked if they found it offensive. To a (wo)man, they looked at me as if I was a brother from another planet.

After I explained why I had asked, they were, hmm, unsupportive, to say the least, of the lawsuit.

One woman, working the counter at a fast-food franchise, (and incidentally, about my age, and so, old enough to be cognizant of the original version of the rhyme) replied, "You are kiddin' me."

I opened the paper and showed her the article.

She shook her head and said:

"Some people will try any kind of way to get some money that don't belong to them."

Couldn't have said it better my own damn self.

UPDATE - 2004-01-23: In a burst of common sense I've come to think of as rare in our increasingly litiginous society, a jury found for the defendants, that is, the airline. The full story is here, but in case it falls off into the you-gotta-pay to read archives of what we residents of the Houston area call The Comical, here's a snippet or two...

"Sawyer and Fuller said the rhyme immediately struck them as a reference to an older, racist version in which the first line is followed by the words "catch a n----r... (For my overseas readers that might be wondering, the word is "nigger" - you'll hear it all the time on hip-hop and rap records - its Voodoo Magick Power to incite seizures in the black population of AmeiKKKa strangely absent, (see below) as are lawsuits by middle class black Americans against the artists and their record companies for dropping the N-Bomb in public- mld)

...by the toe." They testified at the two-day trial that they were embarrassed, humiliated and frustrated. Fuller said she suffered a small seizure on the flight home, which said was triggered by the remark. Later at home, she said she had a grand mal seizure and was bedridden for three days."

Is that hilarous, or what? Who knew that a nursery rhyme had such deadly power? I cannot help but think of the old TV Show "Sanford & Son," when old Fred would fake heart attacks to try and get his way. Life imitates Art. I wonder if Fuller used to watch the show. "Scott A. Wissel, appointed to represent the women after they filed a handwritten complaint, declined comment about the verdict. In his closing argument he said Cundiff's use of the rhyme was tantamount to a racial slur."

Does this shyste..., err, ambulance chas, err, lawyer's name strike you as oddly fitting? If there is a god, please tell me Scott pronounces it to rhyme with "easel."

Finally, Fuller protests... "It's a shame that the jury pool we had to draw from did not have one black and not one minority," she said." Well, there were seven men on the jury, but wait, oh yes, even though that men are in fact a minority, they don't count as such in Bizarro PC world.

But if what you really meant, Ms. Fuller, was that you shoulda had some more (presumably more sympathetic to your whack-ass attempt to extort money from a big company) blacks on the jury, I have a few points.

First, your attorney had every chance to get some blacks on the jury during the voir dire phase of the trial. But I'm guessing that any lawyer capital S Stoopid enough to take this case on a contingency basis is maybe not the star of the local bar, so to speak.

Second, who the fuck is the racist here? The jury would have had to be composed of morons for you to wins this case. Seems you don't have a very high opinion of your ethnic group.

Finally, the poor, put upon, downtrodden, held down by the White Man, Ms. Fuller, who was, by the way, going to Las Vegas on vacation, (Ain't it great that we live in a country when even the oppressed can afford such a lifestyle?), laments... "Something has to be done to make sure there is justice in America for blacks." Hon, you just got a heapin' helpin' :-).

 

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mld, February 9, 2003 at 9:29:00 PM CET

Dowdy Doody

I feel sorta bad even bringing her up. She gets beat up all over the blogosphere, so it makes me feel like a bully piling on, or worse, just some mindless dittoheaded clone marching in lockstep with the right wing.

But still I have to ask - how on earth does Maureen Dowd keep her job?

Read her latest. (Note: registration required at the NYT. Look upon that as a chance to toss some sand in the gears - I think I told them I was a 20 year old black girl making over $100,000 per year, but it was a while back, so I forget :-)

Ok, come back after you're done.

You back? Now go read something else on the Web. Cruise over to one of the blogs listed on the right, if you're out of ideas. One Hand Clapping has some good thoughtful essays to read. See you back here in about fifteen minutes, but take your time.

Now, my question for you...

What was Dowd's editorial today about? Can you tell me in one sentence what her thesis was today? What were we to take away from her consumption of dead trees and bandwith and the time it took to read her?

That column was just mental junk food, except that junk food at least has some caloric value. This goes beyond that to some sort of magic diet junk food from which all nutrition whatsover has been removed - all that's left is the taste, and the illusion that you've eaten something. You could read Dowd's stuff for a week straight, and emerge from this without one fact, one clue, not one more jot of insight than you had when you started. I read better stuff on the web, written by folks that do it for free, and do that better job every day, not just the one or two or however many columns she pens per week.

Of course, sometimes a good taste can make even the content-challenged essay palatable. Lileks could pick up a bottle of ketchup, read the ingredients, and blog 1,200 words on that, and I'd enjoy it. (James, if you're reading this, and I know you're not, consider that your next challenge on a slow news day.)

But the only taste Dowd cooks up is a flippant condescending sneer. The impending war is "scratching the Saddam itch." Rumsfeld is "Rummy," and he's not travelling to Europe to try to strengthen our alliance to oust Saddam, which most of the Left thinks of as a Good Thing - gotta have a multilateral strategery and all, but "jetting around the world," simply so he can insult Europe at a closer range.

More Dowdisms: The orange alert made me wonder again why the Bush administration has spent the last year and a half hyping the Iraqi menace instead of singlemindedly hunting Al Qaeda.

Note, first, the underlying assumption - that the Bush administration is "hyping" the Iraqi menace, as if all of the sudden they were spinning Captain Kangaroo into Hannibal Lecter. If we were, a thoughtful op-ed writer opposed to the war might actually argue how exactly we were doing that, how Saddam isn't as bad as we've made him out to be, etc. But then you'd actually have to think of a reasonable argument. Doesn't seem as if Dowd has that sort of intellectual horsepower. If she does, she certainly isn't inclined to use it.

Next, one must wonder if she read her own paper enough to have heard of operations in Afghanistan? We took a bunch of prisoners that are still sitting in their detention cells leaking information that leads to arrests and foiled attacks to this day. Dowd may not think that we're effectively pursuing the war against Al-Qaeda, but I'd wager a lot of the Al-Qaeda leaders disagree.

Finally, perhaps she does not realize that the US government is huge, chock-full of assets of varying types, some of which are best used for ousting Saddam (say a carrier battle group, or a young Marine infantryman) and others, (for instance, a FBI investigator), that are better used to track down terrorists? And that the use of one does not hinder the use of the other? And that a prudent president will use all of his tools to protect the American people? That these two tasks are compleatly independent of one another, and the level of effort put toward one does not effect the level of effort toward the other?

She writes that "hawks" say: "And we can set an example to other countries: `If you cooperate with terrorists or menace us in any way or even look cross-eyed at us, this could happen to you.' " She never spcifies exactly which "hawks" she's referring to, because then, you know, you might actually have to prove that statement. Pentagon warmongers? Warbloggers? Who knows? These are the hawks that soar the skies of DowdWorld, evidently much more easily offended than the kinds that fly around here. They start wars for giving them a hard look.

A more fair statement of a real world hawk's position (say, mine) would be "If you defy UN resolutions for twelve years, commit genocide on you own people, invade other countries, commit acts of eco-terror, torture and kill your opponents, encourage suicide bombers by giving them rewards, and blow your seven or eight Last Chances, then we're taking you down. Oh, unless you decide that rather than getting killed, you'd rather just live out your life comfortably in exile."

It's really easy to win arguments with your enemies, or make them look stupid, if you get to put words in their mouth. Except all that Dowd's doing is making herself look stupid.

She can't even win an argument with herself.

UPDATE: Cripes. It was bad enough to read her in the NYT, but now, I gotta see it again, a few days later, in my own hometown rag, the Houston Comical. Sigh. We can't even get our tripe fresh.

 

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