TWGB: Perspective is a Dangerous Drug

 

Something very stupid happened today: Donald Trump as a candidate for POTUS had a hearing before the Supreme Court of the United States as to whether he was eligible to stand for president having participated in an insurrection against the US government, while the current US president, his opponent in that year, was exonerated of a charge regarding keeping classified documents but got some backhanded BS from a partisan Republican Special Counsel about being old with a bad memory. 

So, of course, the discourse on the socials is about the latter, not the former. 

To put things into perspective for me, I selected photos of both guys at my age (roughly) and they look terrible. (I'm not going to drop a selfie but I'm not looking my age--I'm fat but not old.)  Neither settled into their 50-something hairlines with grace. Trump's eyebrows were always bad, but at least this was before he applied his makeup with a wet turd. One is thinking, the other, mid-talking. It looks about right. 

Does that seem shallow?  Bitches please! I'm seeing people talk about whether Biden is a gaffe machine when he's been one since he was younger than me. He has always BEEN confusing names and whatnot, but getting off deep one-liners. And Trump has always been a crook. 

Dianne Feinstein Has Left the Senate

There is something jarring in considering that Sen. Feinstein was voting right until the end, giving her last vote really hours before her passing. It could speak to her drive and dedication to public life. It could also speak to the misperception of older politicians of their indispensability and their mortality alike. 

There's something of a "praising with faint damn" tack I want to tread softly with: she represented a more conservative Democratic Party than I prefer even while being a pioneering female senator. She still had her incredible moments, working on gun control, working to repeal DOMA, the release of the Senate report on torture, recently the reauthorization of VAWA.  It's easy for activists to criticize her moderation and willingness to reach out across the aisle--her job as a senator wasn't to be uncompromising but to find areas of areas of compromise for a purpose.

I don't know if there was any inkling of infirmity when she ran in 2018. I do know that the decline of her health in her final years and the speculation that she wasn't fully competent marred her final term. It gives one a terrible sense of pause: her eyes were those of a person whose body had been through the wars. Couldn't she have spent those final years at ease?

Could she have? Or did a sense of purpose make that seem impossible? And having forged on despite being condescended to in the Senate itself by such august personages (in their own minds) as Larry Craig and Ted Cruz, who tells her when to quit?  

That might just be a grain of thought elder statepersons will need to hold their own counsel about--to know not when to be told, but to realize when their age is telling on themselves.  But as for Senator Feinstein, she served until the very end. 

My Nostalgia Is Acting Up

Eminem defies NFL and kneels in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick during Super Bowl halftime show https://t.co/XDI07ULqDk

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) February 14, 2022

They told Slim Shady to please stand up, but Slim Shady said God sent him to piss the world off.

There was a lot of commentary on Twitter about how this half-time show was about my generation, and frankly, we never did say we were going to die before we got old. We said don't you forget about me. And we are getting old, and I wish more of us were getting wise. 

The fucking kids aren't all right. Charlie Kirk thinks the half-time show was full of sexual anarchy. This dumb man-baby must have been peeing in his diapers through the Janet Jackson and Prince half-time shows. He literally comes off like John Lithgow's character in Footloose.  That's two Footloose references I've made this month. I may be getting old. I repeat myself. Matt Walsh, middle aged but younger than me, doesn't know "woke" means aware, and Marshall Mathers is aware he's a white guy who owes a fuckton to Black music and Black people. That he's supposedly making amends for anything else is Walsh's own bullshit. 

I'm glad the convoy asshats didn't come to LA to fuck with the Super Bowl despite what loons like Wendy Rogers and Senator Rand Paul wanted. That would have been a shitshow--all those Confederate flags in LA. I don't think those two remember how things could go, because they forget that urban America is also real America. They think it would scare the shit out of people who live in the cities that right-wing dumbasses think have been burned down by BLM. They forget riots that have happened not even thirty years ago. 

I don't, The truckers don't, either, and they probably know that unlike Ottawa or Windsor, if you go to LA or NY or Philadelphia, you might meet with an entirely different atmosphere that isn't going to wait for police action because nope. Residents will find a way. People have turned out en masse for deceased kids they didn't even know, and some jackasses want to disrupt the shelves at Acme and whether our own kids get fed--are you for real? 

Updated: The Teter Totter

I am going to leave the story as originally posted, both in the interest of not being a punk myself and owning up--Lesson for myself: don't post mad and don't get pissed-ass moralistic because you might have to eat what you wrote someday. Although I maintain my position that honest-to-goodness rotten people do show up at these rallies, I understand that protesters also use tactics that are antagonistic and also, I should keep in mind that stories have two sides (even if only one side was widely reported at the time of my posting. )

Shirley Teter is 69 years young and is appalled by what Trump stands for. Among other things, she doesn't like that he is the bottom when in bed with Putin; and when she brought this perfectly obvious fact out to one of the Trumpensturmers, they tried to knock the taste out of her mouth.

Although she fell on her oxygen tank, she will probably be okay. But the coward who did this to an old lady with an oxygen tank is a coward and a punk. And he's lucky that a Trump rally is so full of punks no one thought to rough him up for swinging at an old lady, because that is shit-hearted and otherwise gutless. There was a day when if you took a swing at an old lady, some sensible citizen would have dropped you.

Trumpenvolken have either stopped seeing sense, or this happened where no sense-having people were around. All the same, is this not deplorable? What do you need to see if this isn't deplorable enough?

In response to the two comments below, I wanted to see what I could find out about the incident. For the most part, I discovered that a lot of right-leaning sites covered the additional info from Breitbart, and I hadn't seen a lot of left-leaning sites do that--so my thinking being what it is, I wanted to see if there was straight news (neither-way leaning, journalistic, not-partisan) that gave me more of a picture of what transpired. The problem I began to have is that we do underestimate the deviousness of a feisty granny with a good story--at the same time, I'm not ageist and able-ist enough to discount that a 71-year old man with cataracts can't deck an old broad in the jibs. So of course I wanted to see the video. And I just want to point out, if we've got what looks like wrong-way cell phone video posted at Breitbart for our source, my liberal instinct is "Yeah. Right. Pull the other one." The edited ACORN videos. The edited Shirley Sherrod video. They've presented video before in a way that frames an issue a certain way, without it actually being what happened.

And it really shows her walking behind him, then I can't quite tell if she touches him--and then the camera unhelpfully is jostled all about and you can't make out what the hell went on. It doesn't seem to make what happened entirely concrete for me either. So now I have the sympathetic version of her side of the story, the version presented by Mr. Campbell's lawyer (who is obviously going to give his client's side in the most sympathetic light, obviously), and a video that doesn't make heads or tails. There is some eyewitness information, and the part of the story where people went after him (although he was not arrested then and there because police themselves did not witness the incident) might suggest they what people saw was him hitting her. And yet?

Somebody's Getting a Look, Anyway

So, I'm not sure why Donald Trump decided that it was OK to get "lookist" in recent comments regarding Hillary Clinton's appearance, except that, since he's already tried to get personal regarding her health, he's decided that he's perfectly free and clear to use anything about her he very well likes. And judging from what he very well likes, I suppose it is true--character tells. (So does desperation.)

Some people would say that his use of Hillary Clinton's physical appearance (she is generally appropriately dressed and well groomed, even if I have so many issues with these shapeless jackets, just as a person who appreciates good tailoring) is a sign of sheer sexism. I say he's questioned Barack Obama's presidential qualities also--so that isn't entirely it. (Although I think it may be a component, to be sure.)

But what does "having a presidential look" even mean, anyway? The recently departed Phyllis Schlafly said that women shouldn't even be president  because all of our best presidents were men (although to be fair, all our really crappy ones were men, too--that's how monopolies work.)

Presidents have looked all kinds of ways. They have had longish hair and short hair, beards and mustaches and been clean-shaven. They once wore breeches just below the knee and stockings until trousers became fashionable. Some wore wigs. Are we ready for a president in bobby pins?

And the unfathomable orange spray tan and green highlights? Are we ready for a president who is pictured mocking the disabled like so?

We're looking right the hell at him, people. He smiles and his face is like a catcher's mitt grew teeth.

This is a visual poem of the unflattering:

Does he look quite well? Is his nurse Melania looking after him adequately? Is he ok? Doesn't he just look terrible? Is this presidential? Is it? Is he going to live to see debates? So low-energy. Tired. Sad!

This was a there he never needed to go. But he went there. So. I'm unfair--I went there.

Jack Lalanne dead at age 96--unfathomable.

I'm in a weird place regarding Jack Lalanne--I'm an FA, HAES person, but I also lifted my share of weights back in the day, and idolized the spirit of making one's body an actual temple like Jack Lalanne actually represented. He made his body a testament to fitness. He lived his life physically ready for anything, His body was a bomb-shelter, a brick house, a fortress mighty and strong.  His spirit was indomitable, his will indefatigueable, and his capacity for push-ups and all that was beyond my slacker ken of how things get done.

Ideally, he should have lived forever, the poster-elderchild of how to have and maintain a body at peak fitness. My own grandfather died at 98--allowing a colon cancer to win over his body because he couldn't fathom accepting a colostomy in his later years as being too great an indignity. My father-in-law is a rotund man of 97 years, who gave far less of a shit about eating or excercising well, but lived for his garden--the man's diligence to his tomatoes and basil is what I think living is about--Daddy has taught me that you have to care about something. He loves his garden and his family--and he lives. My Granddad loved his family, and playing cards and telling jokes. Maybe both my spouse and I are just lucky to have these great genes where our progenitors are long-lived. But none of our forebears lifted weights or pulled boats with their teeth or looked especially beautiful in bathing suits after the age of fifty.

Jack Lalanne juiced, and jogged, and set a marvelous example, that other men outdid sitting on their arse and watching Wheel of Fortune.  And yet the idea that this particular person is done seems so remarkable. How does such a powerhouse of fitness pass? Did he go quietly? Shouldn't he have expired in the midst of a monsterous series of leg thrusts? Fit to the bitter end?

When I was conventionally fit, he was one of my idols, a furnace of humanity, always burning with energy. That a man in his 90's passes now, is not unthinkable to me. But it still seems out of tune with his image--Brylcreamed and jumpsuited, and ready to drink a quart of beet juice and do push-ups until somebody is gonna puke. And not Himself. He was a marvel. It's always shocking to find that marvels fade.I wish his family peace and good memories.