InstaPunk Returns

  HINT: It’s more than flashy hair. President John F. Kennedy now resides in a curious limbo. He was briefly the face of the Democrat Party as it wanted to see itself in the post-WWII era. In hindsight he was an anomaly in the party’s history. Before JFK, the most prominent Democrat Presidential contenders teetered between the crude (Andrew Jackson, William Jennings Bryan, Harry Truman, Al Smith) and the unashamedly elite (Stephen Douglas, Jefferson Davis, Rutherford B. Hayes, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Adlai Stevenson). JFK was an interesting hybrid of both. Like Al Smith, he was a Roman Catholic, like FDR a graduate of Harvard College. His lineage also had its disreputable side, with a family fortune reputedly acquired by bootlegging during the Great Depression. Backed by that fortune, he became famous and successful at an early age but was criticized as callow and rumored to be a philanderer in his first years in the Senate. When he became a presidential candidate, he was a clear brea...

How this post came to be. Saw this promo from the wrecked icon called the New Yorker and was reminded of a post put up here some months ago: Why didn’t I crop out the squatting woman? Truth in advertising.  That’s not true, actually. In fact, it’s a lie. I wouldn’t have stumbled on this lovely screenshot if it weren’t for an image I’d used in a Facebook post some days before: You won’t believe this, but while Iwas posting the pic just above, my wife showed me her ROFL pic from the The Babylon Bee… …Which is obviously directly relevant to the rantings of the Glasser person who thinks everything Trump has ever done or will do is a mortal sin against the Manhattan scripture called The New Yorker. Don’t get me wrong. I used to love The New Yorker. Then they surrendered it to the Smart Women, under the subscription-shrinking stewardship of Tina Brown, whose legacy has led gradually to the dollar-a-copy pitch shown in the first graphic above. Today’s mag looks a like the old one, but tha...

  Sorry. (Still) Not in the Mood. They’re all talking past us. I’m not playing. Oh, okay. If you must … That was then. This is now …

Haven’t been here for a while. Cooling my heels on maybe half a dozen posts for which I have content materials assembled and the writing just awaiting the typing I don’t feel like doing against the relentless pass rush of AutoCorrect/AI. Stranded, I guess. My principal emotion is akin to what I felt back in 2019, when I took a year off from this site because who can write about dread every day? Like then, my mind is telling me the Dark Age is upon us because we don’t deserve to be saved from the fate our enemies intend for us. They’re brain-damaged sociopaths; a near majority of us are just brain-damaged. Good guys and bad guys both done in by appalling lack of education and undeveloped consciousness skills at foreseeing consequences from a Universe-of-One perspective. I don’t like gas prices at the pump, I don’t like the way Trump talks so mean, and the Iran thing I just don’t get, so I won’t vote this time. Fine. We get what we deserve as a nation. That’s the real American Way. No ot...

We, of course, were as offended as anyone by the President’s evident pleasure in  being depicted as Creator of the Universe. His later insistence that it was just a plate of food that happened to have blond hair was disingenuous to say the least. There. That’s out of the way. Putting aside all the bluster about blasphemy by secular observers whose relation to religion is probably a checkbox item, I believe there is a real story lurking in all the feigned outrage. a neon flash of double standards. It’s a media story, probably meaningless to those who aren’t ancient enough to have witnessed Obama’s first year in office. He was kind of everywhere, on every news interview program, every newspaper headline, and every magazine cover. (For the youngsters in the audience, there used to be things called magazines with words and pictures in them. It was a big deal to be featured on their covers.) If you weren’t a big Obama fan — and maybe even if you were — this got to be kind of sickening a...