One of a kind?

In yet another sign of desperation, President Bush, the leader of the free world, went as far as to quote a blogger (not me) when trying to give credibility to his assessment of the conditions on the ground in Iraq.  More than anything else, this further goes to show the proliferation of the blogosphere into mainstream politics. But whether it increases or calls into question the reliability of the message of those who use them as sources is still not clear.

The following is an excerpt from the March 28 Press Briefing from Dana Perino (filling in for former FOX commentator and current White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, who is out after he was re-diagnosed with colon cancer this past weekend).
Q: In his speech today, the President also quoted from a blogger in Iraq as an example of positive developments there, people who see positive developments. Is this really representative of what’s going on in Iraq, one blogger? Is this what the White House is relying on?

MS. PERINO: No, Jessica, you have to look at all the different inputs that are coming in, and General Petraeus’s reports, and from the commanders on the ground, and your own colleagues’ reporting over there. We know that there are real challenges. Obviously, real challenges remain. We have lots of violence. But I think what the President was doing was taking an opportunity to talk about what one person’s expression is. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t other people having that same expression. Certainly nobody can deny what General Petraeus has been saying and reporting.*

Q Dana, back on the issue of the bloggers, the unnamed Iraqi bloggers that the President cited and tried to use to help make his argument for progress in Iraq — this is an administration that doesn’t respond to anonymous quotes in established media outlets here in the United States. The President is citing these anonymous — two anonymous Iraqi bloggers to help make the argument –

MS. PERINO: It’s one input from many different inputs that are coming in regarding progress on the ground.

Q Isn’t that a little ironic, though?

MS. PERINO: No, I don’t think it is. You guys call me with anonymous quotes that you want me to respond to all of the time, and sometimes I do. Sometimes I do. I have before.

Q But as a tactic, for him to be — is there something that prompted that specific –

MS. PERINO: I’ll look into the — I think that maybe somebody found it compelling, the President wanted to include it in his speech. And I’ll see if I can get more for you on it, but I don’t think it’s unusual. Blogs are new for all of us, and I know that you all look at them, because then you call me and ask me what we think about the blogs.

Q On the speech today, on these bloggers, does the White House know the identity, or is this just something someone came across –

MS. PERINO: Can I check? I don’t know, I’ll have to check. It was quoted in a Wall Street Journal article at some point. I think I let some of you know that this morning.

Q And just now the White House came upon them?

MS. PERINO: I’m not sure. I don’t know if somebody saw it initially. I don’t know. We can try to check into it. We keep records on that.
*Omar and Mohammed Fadhil write an English-language blog, IraqTheModel.com, from Baghdad. These two brothers, who are both dentists, met with President Bush in the Oval Office on December 9, 2004. Their writings have been widely sited in news outlets like the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Investor’s Business Daily. On March 5, 2007, they authored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Notes from Baghdad.”

In the spirit of the SAT, which I scored a 930 on (or was it a 390?), I give you this:

Cherry blossom is to Spring as cleavage is to ぎりぎり(girigiri) girls.

Bare tree is to Winter as shoulder is to ちらリスム (chirarism).

A potent combination:

Business meetings with ever-flowing baijiu and an email from Mom who demands not to be quoted in my blog.

Sometimes your blog is just whacked. Are you smoking crack or what. You must have to much time on your hands or not spending enough time communicating with others.
Is there anyone there you can speak enlish too. You seem lost in your own head and believe me that is not a good place to be. And DO NOT and I repeat DO NOT post this on your blog.
I get worried when you start rambling and cussing. It isn’t good. Take care of your mental health. You are a million miles away and honestly I have no way of knowing how you really are. So please don’t rant.

Love
W

No use copy/pasting, so I’ll just give my response here.

Yo, ro, shi, ku

You spelled English wrong and mixed up your 2s. I don’t need to speak English when I have a smile like this

Time is on my side, not my hand.

It’s rambling in your head, poetry in mine.

First you’ll ask me to stop ranting. Next is flaunting, and finally flatulating. I’ll be the only guy full of gas and ego if you get your way. Lemme do my thug thizzle.

Get at me W(orm),

Smarty pants Sestito

Retreating ambition, seeking solace in the same velvet couches that harbor discarded pocket change, he edged closer to the roped off entrance, dressed head to tow in finely pressed self-doubt.

Chastity exists wholly in a life seduced by feardom

Control asymmetrically in shriveled palms

Progress ambiguously in us all

The 蛋 is done, now it’s time for some 饭

groped, her body occupied by loneliness

mind entertaining a betrayal of dependence

heart wobbling like a drunken penguin

a March of decayed desire

Him: But I don’t have protection.

Her: It doesn’t matter.

Him: Yeah. We have coitus interruptus.

Her: No. If you pull out, the terrorists win.

I’d been carry around the term “hyphenated American” in my back pocket for quite a while, but until a few weeks ago, had never felt compelled to use it. Today, out of intellectual curiosity, I gave it the G treatment. Turns out, according to answers.com (I couldn’t access wikipedia because of the whole censorship thing going on here), “the term “hyphenated” was in slang use by 1893, and was common as a derogatory term by 1904.

Nowadays, most usage experts recommend dropping the hyphen because it implies to some people dual nationalism and inability to be accepted as truly American. The Japanese American Citizens League is supportive of dropping the hyphen because the non-hyphenated form uses their ancestral origin as an adjective for ‘American’.

By contrast, other groups have embraced the hyphen, arguing that the American identity is compatible with alternative identities and that the mixture of identities within the United States strengthens the nation rather than weakens it.

And still other, more enlightened figures, stand in opposition of including other nationalities, hyphen in between or not, before “American”…and they’re in good company.

During World War I the issue arose of the primary political loyalty of ethnic groups with close ties to Europe, especially German Americans (and also Irish Americans).” Former President Theodore Roosevelt delivered a gem of a speech to an Irish Catholic audience in 1915. I’ve copied that speech below. Arguably better, and certainly more succinctly put, was one sentence from former President Woodrow Wilson who regarded “hyphenated Americans” with suspicion. He said, “Any man who carries a hyphen about him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”

… There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all. This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else.

The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.

For an American citizen to vote as a German-American, an Irish-American, or an English-American, is to be a traitor to American institutions; and those hyphenated Americans who terrorize American politicians by threats of the foreign vote are engaged in treason to the American Republic.

Americanization

The foreign-born population of this country must be an Americanized population - no other kind can fight the battles of America either in war or peace. It must talk the language of its native-born fellow-citizens, it must possess American citizenship and American ideals. It must stand firm by its oath of allegiance in word and deed and must show that in very fact it has renounced allegiance to every prince, potentate, or foreign government. It must be maintained on an American standard of living so as to prevent labor disturbances in important plants and at critical times. None of these objects can be secured as long as we have immigrant colonies, ghettos, and immigrant sections, and above all they cannot be assured so long as we consider the immigrant only as an industrial asset. The immigrant must not be allowed to drift or to be put at the mercy of the exploiter. Our object is to not to imitate one of the older racial types, but to maintain a new American type and then to secure loyalty to this type. We cannot secure such loyalty unless we make this a country where men shall feel that they have justice and also where they shall feel that they are required to perform the duties imposed upon them. The policy of “Let alone” which we have hitherto pursued is thoroughly vicious from two stand-points. By this policy we have permitted the immigrants, and too often the native-born laborers as well, to suffer injustice. Moreover, by this policy we have failed to impress upon the immigrant and upon the native-born as well that they are expected to do justice as well as to receive justice, that they are expected to be heartily and actively and single-mindedly loyal to the flag no less than to benefit by living under it.

We cannot afford to continue to use hundreds of thousands of immigrants merely as industrial assets while they remain social outcasts and menaces any more than fifty years ago we could afford to keep the black man merely as an industrial asset and not as a human being. We cannot afford to build a big industrial plant and herd men and women about it without care for their welfare. We cannot afford to permit squalid overcrowding or the kind of living system which makes impossible the decencies and necessities of life. We cannot afford the low wage rates and the merely seasonal industries which mean the sacrifice of both individual and family life and morals to the industrial machinery. We cannot afford to leave American mines, munitions plants, and general resources in the hands of alien workmen, alien to America and even likely to be made hostile to America by machinations such as have recently been provided in the case of the two foreign embassies in Washington. We cannot afford to run the risk of having in time of war men working on our railways or working in our munition plants who would in the name of duty to their own foreign countries bring destruction to us. Recent events have shown us that incitements to sabotage and strikes are in the view of at least two of the great foreign powers of Europe within their definition of neutral practices. What would be done to us in the name of war if these things are done to us in the name of neutrality?

One America

All of us, no matter from what land our parents came, no matter in what way we may severally worship our Creator, must stand shoulder to shoulder in a united America for the elimination of race and religious prejudice. We must stand for a reign of equal justice to both big and small. We must insist on the maintenance of the American standard of living. We must stand for an adequate national control which shall secure a better training of our young men in time of peace, both for the work of peace and for the work of war. We must direct every national resource, material and spiritual, to the task not of shirking difficulties, but of training our people to overcome difficulties. Our aim must be, not to make life easy and soft, not to soften soul and body, but to fit us in virile fashion to do a great work for all mankind. This great work can only be done by a mighty democracy, with these qualities of soul, guided by those qualities of mind, which will both make it refuse to do injustice to any other nation, and also enable it to hold its own against aggression by any other nation. In our relations with the outside world, we must abhor wrongdoing, and disdain to commit it, and we must no less disdain the baseness of spirit which lamely submits to wrongdoing. Finally and most important of all, we must strive for the establishment within our own borders of that stern and lofty standard of personal and public neutrality which shall guarantee to each man his rights, and which shall insist in return upon the full performance by each man of his duties both to his neighbor and to the great nation whose flag must symbolize in the future as it has symbolized in the past the highest hopes of all mankind.

“Our aim must be, not to make life easy and soft, not to soften soul and body, but to fit us in virile fashion to do great work for all mankind.”

How great is that line? President Roosevelt killed it!

These days I’ve spent a lot of time reading speeches from former Presidents. They have a special flare that the Bushes and, yes, even Clinton, lack. I wonder if it’s the politics or the people, the ideals or experiences, that leave me feeling deprived. If today’s so-called leaders could articulate ideals like those and combine them with the current means of distributing information, would we even be discussing apathy towards politics?