"Pedal misapplications."

"Now there's a euphemism for the bureaucratic ages."

Andrew Sullivan on Elena Kagan's "emotional orientation" — emotional orientation?

Apparently, there's a new euphemism. I hadn't seen this one before, and I haven't heard the argument for why it's a good one. Is it something like the way we started saying "gender" instead of "sex"? Maybe "sex" is something that people are supposed to keep quiet, and that makes it hard to insist that talking publicly about someone's sexual orientation is appropriate and important. But there are problems with the term "emotional orientation." It suggests that all of your emotions are centered around your sexual preference. Perhaps the term is intended to convey an argument that if you are gay and not open about it, your public persona is shallow and false.

Anyway, Sullivan says:

There are three possibilities, it seems to me, behind the kerfuffle over Elena Kagan's emotional orientation. The first is that her orientation is heterosexual and she is merely a dedicated career person who never had time for a date. The second is that she is lesbian, and she remains in a glass closet, and the Obamaites, revealing their usual tone-deafness on gay issues, never asked and blundered into this. The third is that she is a highly cautious political lesbian who has drawn a line around her real life in order to prevent her orientation being used against her - especially by the Christianist right.

He suspects it's the third and that Obama knows it and is going along with the cautious approach to forestall criticism from the right. Sullivan thinks that Obama doesn't mind "provok[ing] an outing from his 'left'" because then "senators [could] rally around the closet their generation cherishes and defend a person from 'charges' that invade her 'privacy.'"

Note the use of quotes— "left," "charges," "privacy." If it's not sexual orientation but emotional orientation, the revelation is not really an invasion of privacy? "Left" is in quotes, I think, because Sullivan is in the category of persons who are being provoked yet he still styles himself as a conservative.

If the left/"left" outs Kagan...

The president can say, appealing to the middle, that he respects privacy and has reluctantly allowed Kagan to come out under despicable pressure from people like me. 

Allowed Kagan to come out... Obama hasn't been keeping her in.

Then he dares the Christianist right to vote against her merely because she is a discreet lesbian. And so his jujitsu becomes a triumph for gay rights, and his nominee, who I suspect is far more left-liberal than anyone now believes, helps shape the court for a generation.

I'm not sure what he means to conclude here. The post is titled "The Kagan Rope-A-Dope?" and ends, after the part quoted just above with "Where's that rope again?" If you perceive that someone is playing Rope-A-Dope with you, you should choose not to take a shot at them when they are in that position. (The image is of a boxer leaning against the ropes looking easy to hit but in fact tricking his opponent to wear himself out taking harmless shots.) So why what does "Where's that rope again?" mean?

Is Sullivan saying he sees why he shouldn't try to out Kagan, because he doesn't want her — he thinks she's a big lefty! — on the Court? Or is he saying he should try to out her, because it would be "a triumph for gay rights"? If it's the latter, then he doesn't understand the term Rope-A-Dope and he's not even trying to maintain his conservative credentials.

He's looking for the rope — Where's that rope again? — but what is he planning to do with it? Maybe he intends to be the one playing Rope-A-Dope, and he's inviting people to take energy-expending shots at him. I'm not sure how that would work.

"Obama's use of Meds Yeghern 'is an elegant dodge to avoid using the 'g-word'..."

"... but the substance of what he states about what happened gives no comfort to those who cling to the Turkish official version... '1.5 million Armenians were rounded up and massacred or marched to their death.' Despite the passive construction, that assumes intentionality."

"We call on the local radio stations to stop broadcasting the songs and all music as well."

"We give them a 10-day deadline and any radio station found not complying with the orders... will face sharia action.... We also issue orders banning the local media from using the word 'foreigners' to refer to our Muslim brothers coming from outside the country to help us fight against the enemy of Allah.... Every Muslim fighter can come to Somalia to fight the enemy of Allah and we would also invite Osama bin Laden to the country if the we get the opportunity."

It's springtime in Mogadishu.

The "drifter" and the "bug man."

The Daily News reports, in straightforward prose:

The straphanger killed by an exterminator gone mad was a mentally ill germophobe who used his bag to keep people at a safe distance, friends said Sunday.

"He didn't like people to sit next to him," said Phenix Hall, a volunteer who befriended Dwight Johnson at a Manhattan soup kitchen years ago. "Dwight was famous for placing his bag on the seat beside him."

The 36-year-old drifter was knifed in the neck early Saturday after arguing with bug man Gerardo Sanchez, 37, who wanted to sit next to Johnson on the half-empty D train....

A passenger pulled the emergency brake, which meant that the train stopped between stations, with 20 or 30 people trapped with the killer and the dead/dying man. When the train reached the station, the horrible confinement continued, as the doors were kept shut until the police got the killer.

The Daily News has a poll: "Do you believe the authorities did the right thing by instructing the motorman to keep the doors closed when the train stopped, moments after a homeless man was stabbed to death?" Right now, the police are losing, but not by all that much.

The story is interesting for a number of reasons, including — in the text but not the poll — the retro term "drifter" instead of the usual PC "homeless man." Homeless suggests that if only this individual had a shelter of his own, there would be no problem. Drifter implies that there is something inherent in the man's nature that keeps him from putting down roots.

Drifter imputes some romance and mystery to a man's story:

"Oh, help me in my weakness,"
I heard the drifter say,
As they carried him from the courtroom
And were taking him away.
"My trip hasn't been a pleasant one
And my time it isn't long,
And I still do not know
What it was that I've done wrong."

Homeless sounds empty and needy:

I am homeless, come and take me
Into reach of your rattling drums.

But Dwight Johnson's problems are not embodied in either word. The man was mentally ill and terrified of germs. We slangily call germs "bugs," and Gerardo Sanchez made his living killing insects, which are also slangily called "bugs." Now, the Daily News calls Sanchez "bug man." "Bug" can also mean to bother and it can mean to freak out. There is a lot of bug in the story of the drifter and the bug man. Johnson and Sanchez were each concerned with bugs, they bugged each other, and they bugged out.

And now, poor Johnson is dead and Sanchez's life is ruined.