Tag: modo

Just a Splash, Too

Apparently IOKIYAR extends to food choices:

Mitt Romney has a complicated relationship with fast food. He likes pizza, but insists on scraping off the cheese before he ever takes a bite. He likes fried chicken, but only when the skin has been removed. He likes Big Macs, but only after removing the middle bun. He likes Coca Cola because, he explained in his 2004, book Turnaround, it reminds him of polar bears, but he rarely drinks it because he can’t have caffeine. On the trail, Romney has name-dropped Carl’s Jr. and spoken of the wonders of WaWa, but subsists mainly on granola he carries around in one-gallon ziplock bags.

Yes, I understand this is all in service of a broader piece on Mitt’s relationship to Big Food. But, let’s just pause to compare this treatment to that of Candidate Obama in matters gustatory:

SHUSTER: Well, here’s the other thing that we saw on the tape, Chris, is that, when Obama went in, he was offered coffee, and he said, “I’ll have orange juice.”

MATTHEWS: No.

SHUSTER: He did. And it’s just one of those sort of weird things. You know, when the owner of the diner says, “Here, have some coffee,” you say, “Yes, thank you,” and, “Oh, can I also please have some orange juice, in addition to this?” You don’t just say, “No, I’ll take orange juice,” and then turn away and start shaking hands.

You just don’t say “I’ll take orange juice.” It just isn’t done. When in a diner, one must drink the coffee. Everyone knows this. Scraping the cheese off your pizza? Couldn’t be more normal. Remove middle bun of BigMac? No problem, not even worth mentioning, actually. Carry around a few pounds of flavorless mush you call Rootmarm, diff’rent strokes &c. But order orange juice. In a diner?!? Unimaginable. The most shocking thing since (as MoDo told us) “John Kerry sank himself by windsurfing in spandex and ordering a cheese steak in Philly with Swiss instead of Cheez Whiz.” Truly, Candidate Kerry was history’s greatest monster.
And, frankly, can you imagine the level the emasculation meter would go to if it came out that Obama “subsists mainly on granola” out on the trail? Surely the Republic would fall to pieces. More, I mean.

If we’re going to focus relentlessly on the idiotic, can’t we at least apply the beloved false equivalency principle to that as well? Mitt removes middle bun; Democrats for middle bun. Opinions differ. Or, can we simply agree that everyone on this Earth has an odd eating preference of some stripe and just stop mentioning them. All of them. I, for one, just don’t care how my President (past, present, or future) takes his cheesesteak, or if he or she likes them at all, or if Rootmarm is what really turns their crank.
Likewise: diners. Find someplace new, media. There are a million doors in the naked city, and lots of them lead to rooms full of “common” people and are not, in fact, diners. Pie is even served in many of those rooms. So you know. Just imagine the possibilities.

This is true: It is not clear how George Pataki would win over Republican voters with his pro-choice views or record of tax and spending increases. Or his lack of a national political network. Or his lack of charisma. (He once pointed out to Maureen Dowd that he prefers his soda flat.)

Apart from that I don’t see how this can fail.

David Weigel ponders Patakimentum.
America is not ready for a President who prefers flat soda. Ten years, maybe; 2012, no way.
Source: Slate

Amazon Women of the Modo

Holy Lord is Alex Pareene’s Salon piece required reading:

Was President Obama “henpecked” into waging war on Libya by his “Amazon warrior” female advisors? Only if you’re shocked by the thought of women in positions of power actually asserting their power. It also helps if you consider skepticism of military engagement to be inherently “feminine” and think that getting convinced of something by a woman is in and of itself emasculating. And if you’re Maureen Dowd you repeat all that stupid, backward cant, because you’re the hard-charging award-winning New York Times columnist with the most retrograde conception of gender relations this side of Hays Code-era Hollywood.

Dowd’s first paragraph is simply a list of clichéd terms for war-making women. In the rest of the column she purports to be simply compelled by the media attention paid to the role of Susan Rice, Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton in planning the Libyan campaign, but she is actually just reveling in the opportunity to call a Democratic male politician an effete weakling surrounded, as always, by ball-breaking bitches […]. There is little daylight between her “position” on the matter and Rush Limbaugh’s, except that Rush is at least honest enough not to cloak his chauvinism in the trappings of irony.

All I have to say to that is: more please.

Amazon Women of the Modo

Nothing that Does Matter

So good:

It does not matter where presidents or their wives go on vacation. IT DOES NOT MATTER. Presidential approval, election outcomes, support in Congress — nothing that does matter depends on where presidents go on vacation. It did not matter when Clinton apparently polled to figure out where he should go. It did not matter when Bush decamped to Crawford. It did not matter when the Obamas went to Martha’s Vineyard. It does not matter now.

Dowd writes:

In politics and pop culture, optics are all.

By that she means, “In politics and pop culture, optics are all that matters to me.”

You could not ask for a better distillation of why so much political commentary is so completely and utterly detached from what actually affects political outcomes. War and peace, economic prosperity and hard times, real scandals — these things pale beside the fact that the Obamas once went to New York City on a date!

Nothing that Does Matter

This is the unusual case where a Dowd column actually provides some valuable insight, albeit inadvertently. Her desire for a Daddy in the White House who will tell her scary bedtime stories and then reassure her that Daddy will keep her safe seems to be widely shared; the Republicans’ vaunted edge on “national security” is mostly about the “security” in the phrase “security blanket.”

Mark Kleiman