Business Items

I really wanted to provide a standard set of bullet points this week. I wanted to direct you to the campy charm of Lolo Jones‘ website, Run, Lolo, Run. I wanted to tell Brunson that I’m currently working to eliminate the Flash intro and move this site to being entirely split between WordPress and Joomla. I wanted to explain how Captivity could be both a mechanically sound filmic indictment of societal trends toward voyeuristic sadism and an utterly atrocious movie. I wanted to communicate a whole slew of undirected thoughts, but I’ve been captivated by the dissent within the Democratic party.

One can only assume that the people at PUMA sought to imply some relation to the cougar, in its recent vernacular form, when selecting their acronym. Perhaps the PUMAs see cougar subculture as some new manifestation of feminism. Personally, I thought feminism had more to do with fighting things, and I’ve never known anyone to argue with the idea of women having more sex - particularly if that sex is with men. More to the point, PUMA’s formal interpretation is “People United Means Action,” which I’m lent to point out is grammatically incorrect; colloquially, it’s “Party Unity My Ass!”

If you haven’t already guessed, PUMA is a splinter PAC (registered as a 527, just like the Swift Boaters) of Democratic voters. They’re calling for the heads of Howard Dean and Donna Brazille, among others, pledging fealty to Hillary Clinton (HRC) as “leader of the Democratic Party” - a position she’s never sought, to my knowledge - and generally spreading bitterness and spite throughout the world. These are people actively trying to make HRC the Ralph Nader of 2008.

My complaint about PUMA is similar to my critique of most second-wave feminisim: they do a bang-up job of expressing their feelings of disenfranchisement - the validity of which I don’t contest at this juncture - without providing any coherent plan for global domination. With respect to second-wave feminism, I’ll admit that those women were battling an ongoing social condition. By contrast, the HRC presidential campaign has come and gone. Even a successful coup were staged at the convention next week, the resulting campaign would have just enough time and resources to limp into a loss to McCain, which no one wants.

Even before PUMA drew my attention, I’d been thinking about HRC this week. “Why?” you ask? Nastya Liukin reminded me of the junior senator from NY. The young gymnast isn’t much for smiling. In fact, with the exception of medal ceremonies and the rare occasions on which she’d pleased her father, Miss Liukin projects the affect of someone who firmly believes she is struggling against the entirety of the known world. While her perception to that effect may have been accurate - and exacerbated by NBC’s blatant eagerness to valorize Shawn Johnson - it was by no means endearing. For similarly valid reasons, HRC projected a similar affect during the primaries, and it had a similar effect on her audience. One does not become a good teammate or leader by sheer force of determination.

On a more logistical level, The Atlantic ran an article in its September 2008 issue that outlined the internal struggles of the most recent Clinton presidential campaign. Even I, an admitted Obamaniac for some time, can see some lack of journalistic objectivity in this article. Nonetheless, the facts it reports appear to be both accurate and documented, and they certainly indicate that the campaign, which advertised HRC as a candidate ready to take executive office, suffered from a lack of central control. This irony seems to be lost on the PUMAs, who worship HRC without requiring her to directly acknowledge their existence.

Then again, perhaps I’m allowing myself to get rankled over nothing. When describing PUMA’s plans for Denver, their website notes “We will have a 46″ flat-screen TV set up for everyone to watch Hillary’s historic address on the 88th anniversary of Women’s Suffrage.” If that’s supposed to be impressive, then we ought to just hold a convention in my living room, where there are two TVs, a 57″ and a 60″. Quoth Matt Johnson: “That’s like inviting a bunch of people over to my place to watch; we’ll have nachos and Keystone Light.” A related note from TMQ: “The NFL switched its opener to a 7pm start time so the game does not conflict with John McCain’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention that night. This suggests the presidency is more important than football, an idea I am not entirely comfortable with.”