Sunday Funnies

Who won? Depends.

Which probably means Governor 39% won by not losing ... even if he really didn't do anything to win.

First: Why doesn't anybody who covers these ever write about what a supreme ass Rick Perry is?  His conduct is mostly obnoxious and occasionally reprehensible. He's rude, condescending, snide, boorish and basically a jerk and that's only when he's not acting like Dick Cheney. As a matter of fact he's almost a blend of the preceding governor and the former vice-president/domestic-terrorist understudy; a snarl with a smirk.

Good ol' Burka thinks he won going away...

So, who won? I think Perry was the clear winner. He got all of his messages out, anti-Washington on highway funding and securing the border, proud of having a vision on transportation. He took a big hit on the Enterprise Fund, but he didn’t yield, insisted it would work out. He didn’t ever say Everybody wants to move to Texas or engage in a lot of braggadocio. It was pretty clear that he wasn’t excited about being there, but every time they took a shot at him he would just grin a little more. I’m sure that he was gritting his teeth behind that grin. When he was asked for information, he knew his stuff cold. He came across as a serious politician. Hutchison had no energy. She was very weak on the issue of how to fund TxDOT. It’s like that beer commercial where the guy can’t say he loves the girl. Can’t get the word out. Ttttaxes. Ttttolls. BBBonds. She wants to audit TxDot. Perry killed her. TxDOT gets audited every two years, he said.

Medina came across as more of an amateur this time. Last time she was spunky. This time she was old news. I was impressed that she nailed the question about how much starting school teachers made. The questions weren’t really good for her. She didn’t have a lot of opportunity to score points with the tea party crowd. Her issues are pretty esoteric. Property tax versus consumption tax. Nullification. I think this debate was really set up to be a fight between Hutchison and Perry for the GOP base vote, not the crazies. It was her last chance to win them over, and she didn’t come close to doing it. Perry by a mile.

Mmmmmmnnnot quite, Paul.

If he won, it was only because Kay Bailey was pathetic (he's dead solid about that) and Medina was not the kid-that-nobody-expected-to-be-in-the-finals this time (she had a higher bar to clear and missed it).

Medina's backtracking on secession after they showed tape of her calling for it  on the south steps of the Capitol was her Waterloo. She did get a few good shots in and she aced a pop quiz answer or two, but she's really just a flash in the pan.  The ultra-loonies will stick with her but the movement will be toward Rick Perry because they all hate Kay so much.  Her nuance on Roe crushes her with these people.

Rick Perry lied through those grinning, gritted teeth so many times, advanced his BS talking points ('"I always stand on the side of life"... and I'll kill ya if ya don't get outta my way') until the mods and panelists cut him off, determinedly ignored his opponents while they spoke, and generally acted like the petulant frat boy Medina called him in the WSJ (but backed away from when grilled about it) until the clock ran out.

Winning by not screwing up, and by having the lamest opposition ever.  Yeah, he's on a winning streak, all right.  Other reactions:

Peggy Fikac: Well, it was a debate

KHOU: Mobile text poll results give edge to Medina (has links to the debate video)

RG Ratcliffe (and Peggy Fikac): Many attacks, few suggestions

John Cobarruvias:  Wayne Slater won

Texas Tribune: No knockout in final round (audio analysis of the debate going forward to March 2) and Watching the Focus Group (I'll spare you the click-over: all but one of a group of GOP undecideds thinks Perry won)

Burnt Orange and Texas Blue also live-blogged. (Sorry fellas, but with Facebook and Twitter also offering all the instant analysis anybody could ever want, live-blogging anything has become more boring than being alive.)

Following up two recent posts *make that three*

-- "TeaBuggin'" drew an enormous amount of unique visitors and click-throughs this week. The post connected the escapades of filmographer/"pimp"/"telephone repairman" James O'Keefe, his employer/contractor Andrew Breitbart, and Governor Rick Perry, who hosted Breitbart and other right-wing bloggers in an Austin get-together just this past weekend. Perry praised the "New Media" which Brietbart advocates and O'Keefe creates.  Maybe some enterprising journalist will ask the governor how proud he is of their most recent work in tonight's debate.  Meanwhile, you can view Brietbart (who demonstrates the same unhinged rage in person that he does in his writing on his blog) and MSNBC's David Shuster squaring off -- loudly and rudely -- in this video:



... and Perry and Brietbart and the other conservo-bloggers worshipping their weapons and each other in this video (Pajamas Media will allow you to watch it a limited number of times before they force you to register).

-- The snickering and implied sexism noted in "iPad: Mini or maxi?" also made several rounds elsewhere throughout the online world. Here are some pictures of the, ah, "hybrid product" introduced by Apple and Steve Jobs earlier in the week, courtesy Freetechie. And Feministing piled on, observing the probable lack of women's input on the name. But Apple has endured snark before about its branding and seems poised, as usual, to capitalize on the power of its product (and not its marketing).

Update: And Obama's State of the Union address, advanced here in cartoons and reacted to here by our Alliance, drew only a muttered 'you lie' instead of a shouted one, this time from Justice Samuel Alito. Demonstrating his remarkable judicial temperance, Alito scowled, shook his head, and said "not true" in response to the president's criticism of the Citizens United v. FEC decision handed down last week. Republican reaction -- led in ever-embarrassing fashion by our very own John Cornyn -- was proto-typically hypocritical. It conveniently overlooked GOP presidents' own harsh criticisms of Supreme Court decisions such as Roe v. Wade. And as the world comes around once more, we recall that Alito, as a Reagan DOJ attorney, had a hand in crafting legal strategies to overturn Roe as well.

Say no to activist judges? Republicans lie.

Howard Zinn and J.D. Salinger

I note their passings this week with greater woe in admitting that I have read neither A People's History of the United States nor Catcher in the Rye.

Proudly, unabashedly radical, with a mop of white hair and bushy eyebrows and an impish smile, Mr. Zinn, who retired from the history faculty at Boston University two decades ago, delighted in debating ideological foes, not the least his own college president, and in lancing what he considered platitudes, not the least that American history was a heroic march toward democracy.

Democracy Now! collects his appearances on their program, which you may select, watch, and listen. In November 2008, Zinn was in Houston to give the keynote address at the National Council for the Social Studies annual conference.  You may watch that speech here.

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Mr. Salinger’s literary reputation rests on a slender but enormously influential body of published work: the novel “The Catcher in the Rye,” the collection “Nine Stories” and two compilations, each with two long stories about the fictional Glass family: “Franny and Zooey” and “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.”

“Catcher” was published in 1951, and its very first sentence, distantly echoing Mark Twain, struck a brash new note in American literature: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”

Though not everyone, teachers and librarians especially, was sure what to make of it, “Catcher” became an almost immediate best seller, and its narrator and main character, Holden Caulfield, a teenager newly expelled from prep school, became America’s best-known literary truant since Huckleberry Finn.

With its cynical, slangy vernacular voice (Holden’s two favorite expressions are “phony” and “goddam”), its sympathetic understanding of adolescence and its fierce if alienated sense of morality and distrust of the adult world, the novel struck a nerve in cold war America and quickly attained cult status, especially among the young. Reading “Catcher” used to be an essential rite of passage, almost as important as getting your learner’s permit.

The novel’s allure persists to this day, even if some of Holden’s preoccupations now seem a bit dated, and it continues to sell more than 250,000 copies a year in paperback. Mark David Chapman, who killed John Lennon in 1980, even said the explanation for his act could be found in the pages of “The Catcher in the Rye.” In 1974 Philip Roth wrote, “The response of college students to the work of J. D. Salinger indicates that he, more than anyone else, has not turned his back on the times but, instead, has managed to put his finger on whatever struggle of significance is going on today between self and culture.”

Many critics were more admiring of “Nine Stories,” which came out in 1953 and helped shape writers like Mr. Roth, John Updike and Harold Brodkey. The stories were remarkable for their sharp social observation, their pitch-perfect dialogue (Mr. Salinger, who used italics almost as a form of musical notation, was a master not of literary speech but of speech as people actually spoke it) and the way they demolished whatever was left of the traditional architecture of the short story — the old structure of beginning, middle, end — for an architecture of emotion, in which a story could turn on a tiny alteration of mood or irony. Mr. Updike said he admired “that open-ended Zen quality they have, the way they don’t snap shut.”

Mr. Salinger also perfected the great trick of literary irony — of validating what you mean by saying less than, or even the opposite of, what you intend. Orville Prescott wrote in The New York Times in 1963, “Rarely if ever in literary history has a handful of stories aroused so much discussion, controversy, praise, denunciation, mystification and interpretation.” 

So many people I know well -- and more just in passing -- were so moved by both men's words that I felt compelled to mark their deaths, and I hope I can make acquaintance with those words in the very near future.