Brand Music

So, if the phone call comes at 3am and The Hillary need make a snap and public decision, while bombs explode in Midtown Manhattan, people die while The Hillary's make-up artists make her publicly presentable?

Even Kinsley, in his inane column on the unfairness of being The Hillary, admits at 3am it will make no difference that The Hillary looks like the 60 year old woman that she is - ordering the response jets into action takes no make-up - but the idea that The Hillary on the campaign trail is disadvantaged by her vanity in a vanity contest is as sexist as the sexism it purports to attack.

It's true: The Hillary, if photographed waking up, helmet hair tangled, wrinkled cheeks un-pancaked, would suffer unimaginable mockery as the photo pings around the world from pc to pc, and her candidacy as a 60 year old woman would crater like a pox mark on her face before foundation fills it in, and so the fuck what? She's not running as a Hillary, she's running as The Hillary, soulless, genderless, yellow-pantsuited emissary of CLINTON INC.

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She's not Elton John. She's Elton John's "music."

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• On boycotting elections.
• The poverty of the presidential campaign.
• Last two paragraphs, Clinton INC's doctrine.
• Leahy and Casey, winking to super-delegates. Why doesn't someone go to Harry Reid and tell him, shut up, go back to obscurity, give the Majority Leader job to The Hillary? Oh.
• On David Brooks' mancrush.
• World's shittiest human is morally aghast that Democratic candidates use exaggeration and hyperbole.
• The Pastor flogs "compassionate conservatism," one more time. He's self-replicating guano, The Pastor.
• Veepstakes. Edwards is in Clinton's columns of choices, as is Obama.
• Though Edwards' donor prefer Obama. Profiles in courage, that John Edwards.
• Hillaryist says no to voting for McCain if Obama nominee. (Again, no snark intended. The author is worth reading - her adoring commenters are morons - but she's worth reading for perspective, wrong as it often is.)
• The threat to rich Democrats.
• Obama missed a tax-loophole: what's his game?
• Fat Albert, loser (h/t Cynics' Party too for the Elton John pic.)
• Metros 20 least-used stations. Morgan Blvd?
• What will bookstores do without a new Potter? (And, since that link is to The Millions, Happy 5th Birthday!)

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Time Literary Supplement reviews the new selected later poems of Ashbery, calls him a "poet for our times."

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Just Walking Around

 

What name do I have for you?

Certainly there is not name for you

In the sense that the stars have names

That somehow fit them. Just walking around,

 

An object of curiosity to some,

But you are too preoccupied

By the secret smudge in the back of your soul

To say much and wander around,

 

Smiling to yourself and others.

It gets to be kind of lonely

But at the same time off-putting.

Counterproductive, as you realize once again

 

That the longest way is the most efficient way,

The one that looped among islands, and

You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.

And now that the end is near

 

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.

There is light in there and mystery and food.

Come see it.

Come not for me but it.

But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.