... indicating the answer is no, they did not put a whole lot of thought into appealing to women. When you make something light, you should think about how important the product will be to women, who are touchy about carrying things. Anyway, for our light days, we have iPhones. For our heavy days, we have the iPad? The iMaxiPad? Come on, guys!
Last night, I'd done another one of my Obama-is-like-Bush posts — re global warming and polar bears — and Zachary Paul Sire commented:
It's just as bad now that Obama is doing it. Worse, even.
Palladian taunted:
But you'll still love to tongue his armpits, won't you Zachy baby?!
Yanking me onto his side, Zachary came back:
You always hysterically try to paint people who voted for Obama as some kind of mob of horny, brainwashed maniacs, so is that what you make of Althouse, who voted for Obama?
And what about you, darling Palladian? Are we to assume that you voted for John McCain, or did you not vote at all? Just because there is no magic candidate that reflects all of your wildest hopes and dreams doesn't mean you have to take it out on everyone else.
Sometimes, people have the fucking balls to go with a candidate and hope for the best. Sorry you couldn't man up.
Palladian says he mainly thinks of Zachary as a horny, brainwashed maniac, and as for Althouse, he sees why I voted the way I did, though he disagrees. As for himself, he says:
I voted for McCain/Palin, but it was a meaningless vote considering my state and district. I voted out of contempt for the other candidates and as a protest against the incredibly distressing mob mentality exhibited by the citizens of my city. I was actually not going to vote for anyone on the Presidential/Vice-Presidential ticket but when I was in line at my polling place, someone laughingly said "we're racking up the votes for our man Barack!" and a few people cheered which irked me enough to pull the lever for the opposition ticket.
"Just because there is no magic candidate that reflects all of your wildest hopes and dreams doesn't mean you have to take it out on everyone else."
Huh? See, this is the difference between lovers of liberty and freedom and people like you. We don't want or need a candidate who reflects all of our "wildest hopes and dreams". We want a candidate who will leave us alone. Neither party generally delivers such candidates. It is liberals (and often also conservatives) who need to be "led", who look for a politician to be their "savior", who vest their "hopes and dreams" in the person of a politician. This is a mistake, a pathetic vestige of our dark days when we dropped on bended knee and surrendered ourselves to worldly kings and potentates.
It was your candidate who based his entire campaign upon the ambiguous and ultimately meaningless word "hope", it was you who looked to him to reflect your wildest hopes and dreams of further enslavement to the State and further erosion of our national character. And, as it always happens, it is you who ended up with the political equivalent of vaporware inhabiting the Oval Office.
"Sometimes, people have the fucking balls to go with a candidate and hope for the best. Sorry you couldn't man up."
It's funny to hear liberals constantly, un-ironically, deploy the rhetoric of masculine power (balls, fucking, "man up") in defense of the weakest of feminine traits. There's nothing manly about "hope". Men don't hope for things, they make them happen. You sold your birthright for a mess of pottage. There's nothing manly in that.
Reap the whirlwind, dear Zachary. It's wonderful to watch you twist in the wind.
But why haven't I posted about the tea party protests? A longstanding issue in blogging is the interpretation of the failure to post. Too many people think the absence of posts indicates an opinion of mine that the topic isn't important, when only it means that I have nothing I want to say on the subject.
You know, despite what might look like massive evidence here on this blog, I'm not too interested in politics. And I've never been attracted to demonstrations and protests. I instinctively avert my eyes — unless I'm there in real life with a camera and I have some hope of catching a view of something quirky or weird. I've participated in exactly one demonstration in my entire life — back in 1970. I went along with chanting a chant — it happened to be "Open it up/Or shut it down" — and I felt rather embarrassed to be doing something completely out of character for me.
I'm aloof and bemused about things political, you see, and I have been for more decades than — in all likelihood — you've been alive.
But it is Tax Day. I'm not steamed about Tax Day. I've done my taxes. I minimized the stress by using Turbo Tax. I noted with a smidge of disgust that the PDF of my returns is 57 pages long, but I moved on.
Nevertheless, I see that Glenn Reynolds has an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about the tea parties, so here:
Today American taxpayers in more than 300 locations in all 50 states will hold rallies -- dubbed "tea parties" -- to protest higher taxes and out-of-control government spending....
The movement grew so fast that some bloggers at the Playboy Web site -- apparently unaware that we've entered the 21st century -- suggested that some secret organization must be behind all of this. But, in fact, today's technology means you don't need an organization...
There's good news and bad news in this phenomenon for establishment politicians. The good news for Republicans is that, while the Republican Party flounders in its response to the Obama presidency and its programs, millions of Americans are getting organized on their own. The bad news is that those Americans, despite their opposition to President Obama's policies, aren't especially friendly to the GOP....
This influx of new energy and new talent is likely to inject new life into small-government politics around the nation. The mainstream Republican Party still seems limp and disorganized. This grassroots effort may revitalize it. Or the tea-party movement may lead to a new third party that may replace the GOP, just as the GOP replaced the fractured and hapless Whigs.