The Masticator was started by two Minneapolis-area visionaries as a zine in the summer of 2004. Issue two was never realized, and half of its founding force moved to Brooklyn. Three years later, the electronic version of The Masticator has far eclipsed its single print-bound predecessor. Today, The Masticator posts art reviews, random urban snapshots, gentle political mockery, and other short articles on subjects like cars, fashion, and books.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Revenge of the Lizard People
25-year-old Lucas Davenport of Bemidji, Minnesota -- not John Sandford/Camp's protagonist from the Prey series of thrillers -- is claiming the above ballot was his. Davenport, if that is his real name, says he wrote in Lizard People as a joke. The ballot has apparently been rejected as a vote for Al Franken, even though Franken was checked for senator and the write-in clearly was not.
Now Davenport's ballot has become national news, with mentions in Hardball with Chris Matthews and the Wall Street Journal. And Gawker has taken to calling all Democrats "Lizard People."
"Lizard People refers to the conspiracy theory there's a race of shape shifting lizards masquerading as humans who rule the world, but Davenport doesn't consider himself a believer."
In a list of the best conspiracy theories about a year ago on Wired.com, the Lizard People made the cut:
Lizard-People Run the World
If a science fiction-based religion isn't exotic enough, followers of onetime BBC reporter David Icke believe that certain powerful people — like George W. Bush and the British royals — actually belong to an alien race of shape-shifting lizard-people. Icke claims Princess Diana confirmed this to one of her close friends; other lizard theories (there are several) point to reptilian themes in ancient mythology. And let's not forget the '80s TV show V.
The following is from an op-ed piece in the Sunday, November 1 New York Times. A handful of contributors, including Ari Fleischer (who is kind) and Scott McClellan (who is not)--both former Bush press secretaries--talk about what they will miss about the Bush presidency. Curtis Sittenfeld, who wrote the excerpted, is a liberal and a novelist. She wrote a fictional account of Laura Bush and her marriage to George W.
During the last eight years, when I’ve mentioned to people that I’m completely fascinated by Laura Bush, most think I’m kidding. They see her as a traditional wife and mother, a gracious and well-mannered conservative. And while this might, depending upon whom you ask, be an admirable description, it doesn’t tend to prompt fascination. Oh, I say, but there’s so much more to her!
Among my favorite facts: She spent her 20s working at ethnically diverse, low-income schools and was a Democrat until she married George Bush at the age of 31 — after knowing him just 12 weeks. As first lady of Texas, she’d eat at hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurants, shop at Wal-Mart and fly Southwest Airlines to visit friends. In the White House, in addition to organizing literary events that featured writers who have publicly disagreed with her husband’s policies, she has been far more politically involved than people realize — traveling to Africa and the Middle East to raise awareness for, respectively, AIDS and breast cancer, and advocating for the opposition leader of Myanmar, who has long been under house arrest.
Of course, what’s most intriguing to Democrats like me are the suggestions that Mrs. Bush might still be considerably less conservative than her husband: She has said that she does not think Roe v. Wade should be overturned. Asked in 2004 whether she and the president have gay friends, she told a reporter, “Sure, of course. Everyone does.” And earlier this year, Mrs. Bush spoke publicly of her admiration for Hillary Clinton’s “grit and strength.”
I will miss Mrs. Bush not only for keeping me guessing but also for seeming like an intelligent and compassionate presence in a White House not widely recognized for its intelligence or compassion — for being the one person in there whom I’m pretty sure a lot of us would like even more if only we knew her better.
— CURTIS SITTENFELD, the author of the novel “American Wife”
Flawed Funnyman Franken Frustrated by Flip-Flopping Fool
It always strikes me funny when Minnesota goings-on make New York news, but it's even weirder when Minnesota politics makes Gawker.
Here's what they said:
"Poor comedian Al Franken should've won this, but a third party candidate took more of his votes than Coleman's (instant runoff voting, anyone? please?), and also he didn't run a very good campaign, and also Minnesotans, like many Americans, are in love with the idea of a divided government as some sort of good thing, because we all remember how well that worked in 1994, when the government shut down, as a stunt."
Norman Bertram Coleman, as some readers know, used to be a Brooklynite (moved to Minnesota after law school in Iowa), Jewish (no longer practicing), Married (his aspiring actress/model wife wanted an "open" marriage), and a Democrat (became mayor of St. Paul in 1993 as a Democrat and switched parties in 1996). Ironically, he was the Republican point man on accusing Kerry of flip-flopping.
Franken turned out to be surprisingly un-charismatic as a candidate. Running as a comedian seemed too Ventura-esque, so he started calling himself a "satirist" and stopped being funny. Consequently, he stopped being likeable. Or everyone realized he never really was that likeable in the first place. Still, he had to be better than Norman Bertram Coleman. Any Democrat would be.
What were Minnesotans thinking? How could the state that brought Obama 1,573,210 votes give Coleman a win? 1,211,435 people voted for Coleman -- just hundreds more than the 1.2 million that voted for Franken.
One way of looking at it -- as Gawker does -- is to blame the third party candidate, Dean Barkley. He actually had the job just before Coleman did. He's the guy Governor Ventura named as a temporary replacement when Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash two weeks before the 2004 Senate race.
"Barry Goldwater was one of the icons of the Republican Party and, yes, would be unhappy with many of the recent failures from within. I speak about this all the time and how mad I am that Republicans have lost their way. However, we do not find our way back by sheepishly going over to the other side. My father worked to rebuild the party in 1964 by taking it back from the liberal Establishment. He would work to do the same thing today."
That's Barry M. Goldwater, Jr., the son of the famous Arizona Republican Barry Goldwater, who lost the race for the Presidency in 1964 by a landslide. Goldwater Jr. was writing in the Huffington Post, trying to undo some of the damage his niece CC Goldwater did when she endorsed Obama on the same website.
"Nothing about McCain, except for maybe a uniform, compares to the same ideology of what Goldwater stood for as a politician. The McCain/Palin plan is to appear diverse and inclusive, using women and minorities to push an agenda that makes us all financially vulnerable, fearful, and less safe."
“I’m just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick."
So said Terrellita Maverick, an 82-year-old descendent of Samuel Augustus Maverick, to the New York Times last week.
As frequent readers will recall, Maverick was my word of the day in mid-September. Maverick came into the English language in the late-nineteenth century, a coinage after the Texas rancher, the aforementioned Samuel Augustus. He was not like other ranchers; he would not brand his calves.
According to the Times, the Maverick family has a history of liberal politics that goes back to the 1600s. And maverick isn't the only word the family has coined. Here's the Times:
Sam Maverick’s grandson, Fontaine Maury Maverick, was a two-term congressman and a mayor of San Antonio who lost his mayoral re-election bid when conservatives labeled him a Communist. He served in the Roosevelt administration on the Smaller War Plants Corporation and is best known for another coinage. He came up with the term “gobbledygook” in frustration at the convoluted language of bureaucrats.
Fontaine's son Maury Jr., who died at 82 in 2003, was a crusading lawyer in the tradition of William Kunstler. He served in the Tecxas legislature in the 50s, and when his colleagues invited Senator Joseph McCarthy to speak, he authored a counter-amendment inviting Mickey Mouse as a substitute. “If we’re going to invite a rat to visit our state,” he said at the time, “why not invite a good rat?”
With a legacy like that, it's no wonder Mavericks are in an uproar over McCain's adoption of the word. A columnist in the San Antonio Express-News, the paper that published Maury Maverick's column for years, wrote an indignant piece in September saying in part:
Unfortunately for McCain, a maverick is not someone who before 2008 occasionally broke with the status quo within his own party by acknowledging the clear threat of climate change and championing the need to give unauthorized immigrants a path to legal residency.
"By definition," the columnist Jan Jarboe Russell continues, "the leader of any political party is not a maverick. Mavericks are loners and more often than not are defined by lost, principled battles."
Terrellita Maverick, the author of the quote of the day, is Maury's sister. She's even more indignant:
“It’s just incredible — the nerve! — to suggest that he’s not part of that Republican herd. Every time we hear it, all my children and I and all my family shrink a little and say, ‘Oh, my God, he said it again.’
McCain Gets Freaked Out By Minnesota Conservatives
Ah, Minnesota. Just as I defend my home state as more progressive, more enlightened than others, some smalltown old lady tells Senator McCain on national television that she's scared of Obama because "He's an Arab."
This is the state that Tyrone Guthrie chose for his theater company based on the high level of education of its citizens. A state that had very high subscription rates for the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's. That was a long time ago.
Yesterday, it seemed even McCain was startled by the dim wits of his fans. It happened at a town hall-style meeting in Lakeville, Minnesota, a city of about 50,000 that lies 20 miles south of Minneapolis. "I admire Obama," McCain said amid boos from the crowd. "I want everyone to be respectful."
Later, one man said, "We're scared of an Obama presidency."
"I have to tell you," McCain said very seriously. "Obama is a decent person, that you do not have to be scared [of] as President of the United States." Here the crowd yells protests. "Now look, if I didn't think I'd be one hell of a better president, I wouldn't be running, okay?" he recovered.
But then it happened again. A wild-haired older woman in the crowd says haltingly, "I can't trust Obama. I have read about him, and he's not, he's not, ah... He's an Arab." Here, McCain starts shaking his head vigorously. "No, no, no," he says. "No?" the woman asks.
McCain takes the microphone from her. "No. No ma'am. No ma'am. He's a... he's a decent, family man citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on, on fundamental issues, and that's what this campaign is all about. He's not," McCain admonished, waving his hand at her dismissively.
Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times, writing about the incident, noted that McCain "did not correct her false depiction of Mr. Obama." I think he was trying to when he called Obama a "citizen" and said at the end, "He's not."
But as Bumiller notes, this is not unusual for a McCain event:
Crowds in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have repeatedly booed Mr. Obama and yelled “off with his head,” and at a rally in Florida where Ms. Palin appeared without Mr. McCain, The Washington Post reported that a man yelled out “kill him.” At the same rally, a racial insult was hurled at an African-American television cameraman.
In McCain's frenzy to get elected, he's been ushering in the same unsavory fringes of the Republican party that William F. Buckley and other tried so hard to purge in the 1950s and 60s. He's encouraged this sort of behavior, and it's finally started to make him nervous.
“I don’t think it’s that big a deal,” his campaign manager Rick Davis told reporters. “I think political rallies have always attracted people who have an emotional connection to the outcome of an election.”
He's right, of course. People behave badly at these things. When Paul Wellstone died two weeks before election day four years ago, his funeral turned into an embarrassingly ugly display of liberal righteousness. Republican senators, in attendance at Williams Arena on the University of Minnesota campus out of respect and held captive by decorum, were booed and made to feel like jerks for coming. And so the election was handed to the suddenly solemn and respectful Norm Coleman.
I don't think undecided voters ever really like negative campaigning. But as the economy worsens, voters start paying a little more attention to what the candidates are saying. They hear attacks and wonder where the solutions are. McCain's use of the Obama's tenuous association with 60s activist William Ayers as an attack tool simply doesn't sway anyone. If Senator McCain has an October surprise, he'd better present it quick.
Looks like I spoke too soon when I said Al Franken was in trouble. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported on the 4th that Franken has a solid lead against Norm Coleman for the first time:
The Minnesota Poll results suggest Franken may be riding the coattails of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, who has widened a lead over Republican John McCain in polls across the country. But the advertising war in the race also appears to be a factor decidedly in Franken’s favor.
Coleman's negative ads are taking their toll on him. And Coleman's approval rating is at 38 percent.
There's another candidate in the race though. Independent Dean Barkley is polling at 18 percent to McCain's 34 and Obama's 43. Barkley is up in the polls, too, taking votes from Coleman.
I just saw my first Obama ad on television. New York seems strangely insulated from much of the presidential campaign--it'll probably support Obama by large margins--even with the current economic crisis centered on Wall Street.
Minnesota, however, is a battleground state in the presidential race again. This always surprises me, just as its violent opposition to light rail and commuter trains surprises me. Has Minnesota suburbanized so much that it has lost its socially and politically progressive roots?
I mentioned to a colleague here in New York that Minnesota was historically very Democratic, and he was surprised. The last time Minnesota voted Republican in a presidential election was 1972 (Nixon vs. McGovern). Minnesota was the only state in the nation to carry Walter Mondale in 1984. It never voted for Reagan; in 1980 it was one of five states (with Hawaii, Georgia, Maryland, and West Virginia) to carry Carter. (There are some good electoral college maps here.)
Then again, the state that brought Paul Wellstone to the Senate turned around and voted for Norm Coleman. And it's put conservative Christian evangelical Tim Pawlenty in the governor's mansion twice--on an anti-tax platform; very un-Minnesota.
McCain has been outspending Obama in Minnesota--he doesn't want to lose the state they held the Republican Convention in--but according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune this week, Obama is ahead of McCain there 55 to 37. That's a big boost for Obama, who was neck and neck with McCain in September. The paper says:
Obama's surge in the state can be attributed to voters' belief in his ability to deal with the nation's worsening economy, his performance in the first presidential debate and an increase in the number of Minnesotans who call themselves Democrats.
But not all polls agree. USA Today's poll has McCain ahead of Obama in Minnesota by one point.
I doubt the miserable economy will help McCain rally in Minnesota and change more than 35 years of voting for Democrats, but I do think Norm Coleman will win again; I have little hope for the dud that is satirist-cum-politician Al Franken.
She started out as a deliciously rich dessert for the press: she looks good on camera, did great at the RNC, has the necessary Christian credentials, and has a sort of a frontierswoman/Washington outsider appeal that seemed perfect. But after a couple of big interviews, she's come out as far less appealing. She didn't know what the Bush doctrine was, she thinks being across the water from Russia gives her foreign policy experience and she thinks Alaskan oil makes her an energy wonk when it actually makes her, paradoxically, a welfare state Republican.
Now listen to this -- it's from Kathleen Parker at the conservative National Review:
If BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.
If Palin were a man, we’d all be guffawing, just as we do every time Joe Biden tickles the back of his throat with his toes. But because she’s a woman — and the first ever on a Republican presidential ticket — we are reluctant to say what is painfully true.
What to do?
McCain can’t repudiate his choice for running mate. He not only risks the wrath of the GOP’s unforgiving base, but he invites others to second-guess his executive decision-making ability. Barack Obama faces the same problem with Biden.
Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.
Do it for your country.
That's the end of a column that came out today. How can Palin even look like she's speaking the same language as Joe Biden? Conservatives are starting to see this, and it's freaking them out.
Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.
He echoes other conservatives, like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Frum, and Ross Douthat in his nervousness about Palin's readiness to be second in command.
Here's some of what George F. Will wrote in the Washington Post during the RNC:
So, Sarah Palin. The man who would be the oldest to embark on a first presidential term has chosen as his possible successor a person of negligible experience.
Will goes on to make a nuanced argument, which is why he, like Brooks, is a joy for liberals to read (even when we disagree with them). "Clearly," Will writes, "experience is not sufficient to prove a person 'qualified' for the presidency. But it is a necessary component of qualification."
The National Review's Greg Pollowitz makes a half-assed counter to Brooks' column with a link to a Weekly Standard piece by Dave Juday that says "When it comes to energy policy, the Alaska governor is the most experienced politician on either ticket." The evidence being her serving on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.
"I guess serving on the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission is a lot like being a board member with Bill Ayers and the Chicago Anneberg Challenge, only with responsibilities," writes a smug Pollowitz. Come on. Is that all you got?
This hollow defense may be one of a number of signs that the tide is turning, once again, to Obama. The New Republic pointed out yesterday that the McCain campaign is on the defensive again.
