How I spent my summer vacation...

I should have know that if I took a couple of days off to run up to Lake Tahoe and do a little paddling I would come back to a surging wave of laughable, ridiculous hyperbole and political doubletalk and, sure enough; I was right and then some.   It’s a little overwhelming to try to catch up to it all so I’m not going to do that.  After all, how surprising is it really that Michele Bachman wants to get rid of the EPA, Rick “Big Guns” Perry wants to get rid of social security and Ron Paul wants to get rid of FEMA?  Those are all prominent stories I heard today on the way back down to sea level and, as usual, Ron Paul is the only one to make any sense.   FEMA?  Katrina, and that's all there is to that.

I don’t have a working TV at the cabin – something has knocked the cable out - and ironically the single channel I did get was The Weather Channel.  So while it was mid-80’s beautiful where we were, I got to watch the multicolored swirls of hurricane Irene sweeping over the east coast over and over again, along with various weather guys inexplicably standing out in torrential rain telling us it was stormy and raining unusually hard.   This is a standard practice among weather people.  For some reason they feel that when they say it is raining really hard we are so stupid that they need to show us what that means.  Jill, the weather girl, standing outside with her hair blowing horizontally, struggling to tell Steve, the anchorman, that, boy it is really blowing out here.   Got it. 

When the first winter snow falls in the Sierras it is guaranteed that all of the local news truck will hightail it up to Blue Canyon, typically the first place you hit snow driving up from the Bay Area, so that they can set up their forest of antennae and all report back to us that, “We’re here in Blue Canyon where, as you can see, it is snowing like a son of a bitch, I am freezing my ass off and my hair gel is frozen.  Now back to you, Dick…”  Anyway, as interesting as the hurricane was, I think the coverage was just a little bit overhyped, being as it was hitting the New York – Boston – Philly triangle rather than Puerto Rico or Bangladesh. 

I also heard that Pat Robertson thinks that the earth quake back there that cracked the Washington Monument was god’s way of telling us he was on his way back soon, a portentous bit of news for gay couples, teachers of evolution, and devil worshiping secularists everywhere.

But the funniest tidbit I heard today was about the chorus of analysts and political talking heads taking pot shots at Obama for his choice of summer reading while he was hanging out on Martha’s Vineyard.  It’s unimaginable to me that supposedly serious media types would spend more than 5 minutes thinking about this, as if by him choosing to read Cutting for Stone he might as well be reading Archie comics and is therefore unworthy of the long tradition of presidents with giant intellects and a sign that he isn't up to the job.  What made me laugh out loud, though, was when they compared it to George Bush’s vacation reading list from 2006: biographies of Chairman Mao, Robert J. Oppenheimer, Lincoln, Tsar Alexander II and Babe Ruth, not to mention Camus’ The Stranger, a history of polio and – wait for it – MacBeth.   This is so completely hilarious; first, that his PR people would seriously propose that as his summer reading list while he’s on the ranch in Crawford for a couple of weeks.   I mean, come on; George Bush reading Camus and MacBeth?  Seriously…?  This is a man who struggled to get through My Pet Goat.  If that book hadn't had pictures he’d still be trying to read it.  And second, picturing him sitting around the ranch in the evening…

Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be

What thou art promised. Yet do I fear thy nature;

It is too full o' the milk of human kindness

To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great;

Art not without ambition; but without

The illness should attend it.

“Laura, what the fuck is he trying to say?  Is this English?”  

Funnier still is that Michele Bachman, who is a malapropism waiting to happen, says that her beach reading “is Van Mises” a19^th century economist and social commentator famous for his disdain for socialism.  Sure, Michele, I can picture you on the beach reading this: “Therefore, socialist waste of capital goods is as chronic as the incentives for production and retention of capital are low, while capital goods are coercively monopolised by a dysfunctional State operating with only the data pertaining to interpersonal comparisons of utility, as per democratic production” Yeah, and, "Marcus, could you put some more lotion on my back; I’m just getting to the good part.”   

I say if Obama wants to forget the hellish and unforgiving 4 years he’s going through right now, give it to him.  As it stands right now he will be remembered as a good man trying to do the right thing and failing or as a socialist negro fuck-up, also failing depending on your point of view.  Maybe it’s time to do like JFK and bust out the Ian Fleming.