In Eric Cantor's high school yearbook picture (h/t
Kaili Joy Gray) he was already wearing his trademark sneer:
Doesn't it remind you of your mother saying, "Keep making that face and it's going to freeze that way." In Cantor's case it actually happened!*
*The yearbook quote is from Victor Herbert's 1905 hit Mlle. Modiste, text by Henry Blossom.
You think young Eric might have been in a high school production, as the crotchety Uncle Henri? Sure wouldn't be where the sneer came from, though.
Non-cognitive Elites
Via Balloon Juice, that's what the National Organization for Marriage is recruiting for the permanent campaign to keep marriage just like it is in the Bible, except with a couple of differences (for instance, nobody will be required to shtup his widowed older sister-in-law to provide her with sons to hold onto her share of the estate, as happened to poor Onan in Genesis 38:8-10*). NOM is looking for
a community of artists, athletes, writers, beauty queens and other glamorous non-cognitive elites...
John Cole thinks they mean stupid people, as in elites whose glamor is not connected to their cognitive capacities, but when I read it I think of Zombies!
*This story is really more outrageous than I remembered it, featuring YHWH at his inexplicably ill-tempered Kafka-father worst. Jacob's son Judah has a son called Er whom he marries off to a girl named Tamar, but when the kid commits some unspecified wickedness the Lord has him killed. Then Judah assigns the second brother, Onan, to provide Tamar with children, but the latter has obvious reasons for not wanting his dead brother to have heirs, so whenever he "goes in" to her he "spills his seed upon the ground". Whereupon the Lord has him killed as well. There's a third brother, Shelah, but Judah is beginning to see a discouraging pattern here, so he tells her the boy is too young and sends her back to her father's house to wait until he's older. Some time—possibly years—later, after Judah's own wife has died, he's on a sheep-shearing visit to Timnah when Tamar plants herself on the road disguised as a prostitute and tricks him into impregnating her. Not having recognized her, when he hears that his daughter-in-law has gotten pregnant he's about to have her executed when she proves to him that he's the father ("OMG, that babe on the road to Timnah was you?") and he has to take her and her twin boys in, though he does not lie with her a second time. The first twin, Perez, is the ancestor of King David, whose married life was likewise not exactly on the Santorum-approved model.
Quote from a campaign commercial (audio
here: and you have to listen, there are errors in the transcript) by then candidate, now governor, Susana Martínez of New Mexico:
Criminals take advantage of weak laws by giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. As governor, that will not happen.
There's a lot of linguistic weirdness packed into a small space here. A straight parse of the first sentence suggests that the giving of licenses is a kind of technique for taking advantage of those unidentified laws, not the goal of it. And since her aim is to get rid of the laws that allow the DMV (i.e.,
not criminals) to give licenses to illegal immigrants, that's a very peculiar way to describe them.
But licenses for illegal immigrants are
popular
in New Mexico, and the legislature has refused to dump them three
times. My guess would be that her story is just a spurious "problem"
like voter fraud; that there are fewer criminally-provided licenses in
illegal immigrant hands—since they can get legal ones—than there are New
Mexico teenagers with fake birthdates. The grammatical twisting,
though, makes it just all the harder to understand what she's up to,
you're too busy translating it to hear it critically.
But the best bit is the other sentence, with its illustration of
that special psychopathy of the Republican in authority, who has never
entirely made it out of that infantile phase where self and other blend
into one. After the election, she seems to be saying, the governor won't
exactly be
her; the governor will simply
be, and the situation will be different.
Best historical commentary that was never made: When Zhou Enlai said of the French Revolution that it was "too soon to say". It turns out, according to
Chas Freeman, who was there, he was only talking about the upheavals of 1968. Freeman added that
the misinterpretation “was too delightful to set straight” at the time.
Which I totally understand. If I have a beef it's that he ended up telling the truth after all. It's
still too soon!
