Ain't Half The Man, But . . .

So Dubya has been lying low. I guess the RNC asked him to stay out of the spotlight until the election was over - didn't want McCain to get tarnished by Dubya's approval ratings. Cheney apparently came out of his undisclosed location long enough to re-iterate his support for McCain. I seriously doubt that will be a net plus for him, either.

One of the things that the Presidency does to the men who hold it is age them. Obviously, they were going to age four or eight years in that timespan, anyway. But the office makes them old before their time. Reagan worked very hard to disguide this, with hair dye and makeup, but he couldn't hide the toll it took on his mind. Carter, Bush the Greater, and (especially) Clinton just wore it. Watching Clinton age over his eight years was a little shocking, honestly. Gore has aged gracefully over the past eight years - I wonder what he'd look like now if it had been him in the Oval Office.

Anyway, when I saw this picture of Bush the Lesser, I noticed how much he's aged - he's gone pretty much completely grey, and unlike Reagan hasn't bothered to cover it up - but what really struck me is that he's starting to look like his dad. If you look at the political cartoonists' caricatures of him and his father, they look nothing alike - his are Ernie-style, horizontal, while his father's are all vertical lines and chin. And there are good reasons for that; they really don't look that much alike. But in that photo, he has his father's facial lines, and the deep bone structure starting to show against the roundness of his facial flesh.

It took the hardest job in the world to bring out the family resemblance. That's actually kind of sad.

Ain't Half The Man, But . . .

So Dubya has been lying low. I guess the RNC asked him to stay out of the spotlight until the election was over - didn't want McCain to get tarnished by Dubya's approval ratings. Cheney apparently came out of his undisclosed location long enough to re-iterate his support for McCain. I seriously doubt that will be a net plus for him, either.

One of the things that the Presidency does to the men who hold it is age them. Obviously, they were going to age four or eight years in that timespan, anyway. But the office makes them old before their time. Reagan worked very hard to disguide this, with hair dye and makeup, but he couldn't hide the toll it took on his mind. Carter, Bush the Greater, and (especially) Clinton just wore it. Watching Clinton age over his eight years was a little shocking, honestly. Gore has aged gracefully over the past eight years - I wonder what he'd look like now if it had been him in the Oval Office.

Anyway, when I saw this picture of Bush the Lesser, I noticed how much he's aged - he's gone pretty much completely grey, and unlike Reagan hasn't bothered to cover it up - but what really struck me is that he's starting to look like his dad. If you look at the political cartoonists' caricatures of him and his father, they look nothing alike - his are Ernie-style, horizontal, while his father's are all vertical lines and chin. And there are good reasons for that; they really don't look that much alike. But in that photo, he has his father's facial lines, and the deep bone structure starting to show against the roundness of his facial flesh.

It took the hardest job in the world to bring out the family resemblance. That's actually kind of sad.

Things I Never Thought I'd Hear Part 521

Pro-Obama bluegrass. I kid you not.

--

It seems to me as if the McCain campaign is running a Discworld play. They're trying to change the narrative, rather than the reality on the ground, in the belief that changing the story will affect reality for them. Now, I'm a postmodernist and a witch; I have a certain amount of sympathy for the idea that the meaning does affect the expression, and changing the former can change the latter. But you have to actually do the work on the material plane, too. You can do all the prosperity spells you want, but if you don't show up to work, you still won't get paid.

--

Does anyone else think it's ironic that the LDS church is one of the primary forces pushing Prop 8 in California so hard? Or are they figuring this is karmic payback, so to speak? The government made them give up their religious beliefs about plural marriage to become a state, so they're angry that anyone else gets to have a definition of marriage that might include two women? It's especially piquant when the NeoPentcostal fundies start arguing that gay marriage is morally equivalent to polygamy. (Just once, when one of them does that, I want someone to ask them on camera if that means that they think the Biblical patriarchs and kings were sinners.)

Things I Never Thought I'd Hear Part 521

Pro-Obama bluegrass. I kid you not.

--

It seems to me as if the McCain campaign is running a Discworld play. They're trying to change the narrative, rather than the reality on the ground, in the belief that changing the story will affect reality for them. Now, I'm a postmodernist and a witch; I have a certain amount of sympathy for the idea that the meaning does affect the expression, and changing the former can change the latter. But you have to actually do the work on the material plane, too. You can do all the prosperity spells you want, but if you don't show up to work, you still won't get paid.

--

Does anyone else think it's ironic that the LDS church is one of the primary forces pushing Prop 8 in California so hard? Or are they figuring this is karmic payback, so to speak? The government made them give up their religious beliefs about plural marriage to become a state, so they're angry that anyone else gets to have a definition of marriage that might include two women? It's especially piquant when the NeoPentcostal fundies start arguing that gay marriage is morally equivalent to polygamy. (Just once, when one of them does that, I want someone to ask them on camera if that means that they think the Biblical patriarchs and kings were sinners.)