This 32-year-old clown who lives in his mother’s townhouse in an expensive part of Washington, DC, bought a Hummer too big to fit in his mother’s garage. He then paid extra to have it jacked up and fitted with super-sized tires. It gets 14mpg and he justifies it by saying he needs it to create the right “image” for the “sports marketing” company he wants to start. He parked the 7-foot-tall penis substitute on the street, and within a week somebody vandalized it, slashing all the tires, breaking all the windows, and keying “FOR THE ENVIRON” [sic] into the paint.
Tough break. That’ll probably put a real dent in his startup bobble-head doll business. Along with the $38,000 he paid for the thing (used), replacing all the tires and windows might even delay his moving out of his mother’s house, not that he appears to be in any hurry. I’m all for the environment, but vandalizing ridiculous cars is probably not the best way to deal with the issues. And if whoever did it gets caught, they should be made to pay restitution fully equal to the cost of a set of windows and tires . . . for a Prius.
All that being said, however, why exactly did the Washington Post give this story more than 20 column inches in today’s paper? A rich white loser in NW DC got his car vandalized? That’s the lead story in the B-section of the paper that broke the Watergate case?!
It’s the complicity in this jerkoff’s insular sense of entitlement that bugs me about this. The article notes that he’s aware of the stupidity and wastefulness of such a machine - he just doesn’t care. But apparently the Post doesn’t care either - and by that I mean not only do they think that his financial inconvenience is more important than his indifference to the environment, but they think that he, individually, is more important than everything they didn’t write about that day.
Washington, for those who don’t know, is divided geographically and economically. The Northwest map quadrant is the affluent section; it houses Georgetown and American Universities, the trendy neighborhoods and popular bars and clubs, the legal and lobbying industry clusters, much of the federal government real estate, the foreign embassies, the exclusive residential neighborhoods like this guy’s mother’s street, and almost all the white people. The Southwest is mostly governmental. The Eastern quadrants are heavily residential/commercial, almost entirely black, and largely a wasteland. Everything you hear about upper-class Washington - the Georgtown political parties, the Embassy Row receptions, the catered fundraisers, the insider salons - that’s Northwest. Everything you hear about ghetto Washington - the local-government bungling, the murders, the drugs, the ravaged school system and dilapidated hospitals - that’s Northeast.
The idea of the Washington Post devoting 20 paragraphs and an anguished photo to the story of a single car vandalism in the NE would be gut-splittingly ludicrous. Murders go unreported there, by the dozens. Every lesser crime, every imaginable urban misery, occurs there in handfuls, or scores, or hundreds of repetitions on a daily basis. The political destruction of local government by Congressional Republicans, and that government’s own ineptitude, are an ongoing, deadly story. Almost none of it makes the hometown paper. Certainly anyone who called the Post City desk and said they lived near the University of the District of Columbia (NE), and not American University (NW), and they’d had their tires slashed and wanted the paper to send over a reporter and photographer to run a sympathetic profile about how they’d been victimized by those mean liberals would be laughed off the line; the reporter could dine off the story of that prole’s presumption for months. But one aggrieved white guy on the border of Chevy Chase is news no matter what happens; the fact that he’s unhappy about anything is reason enough to give him all the attention he wants.
I think this reporter should be required to log at least two dozen human-interest bylines from within walking distance of the Brentwood Metro station before she’s allowed to write about white people again. And as for Hummer-boy, here’s something to entertain himself with while he’s waiting for his new paint job to dry.
July 18th, 2007
|
General, Politics, Economics, Environment, Culture, Media, News & Current Events, Race |
53 comments
So just exactly what is with this hard-on that conservatives seem to have for Fred Thompson, anyway? I certainly understand their frustration with the current GOP field of candidates, but what’s so effing great about Thompson? I mean, if you’re so impressed by vacuous folksy-yet-arrogant rhetoric, why not just eliminate the middleman and nominate Dr. Phil?
July 18th, 2007
|
Politics |
6 comments
Publius does an excellent job. Here are some excerpts:
One reason for the anger is that this war, from the very beginning, has been based on mistaken premises. It’s one thing to have substantive disagreements about agreed-upon facts (e.g., whether tax redistribution rates are too high/low). It’s quite another to disagree about basic facts, and then base policy on that set of mistaken facts. But that’s what we have. (For now, I’m not talking about the wisdom of war — a debate which involves subjective preferences. I’m talking about basic facts. Facts that can be checked, proven, and verified.)
This administration — and many supporters — have from the beginning used facts that are simply wrong. More than wrong — demonstrably inaccurate. Maybe these people were honestly mistaken. Maybe they flat-out lied. (Some of both, I’d say). But regardless, the factual premises underlying the war — and the occupation — have proven mistaken time and time again. Many war supporters, however, simply ignore these inaccuracies. What’s more, these people continue to base their current arguments (including vitriolic nationalist ones like “defeatist”) on the basis of open and obvious factual inaccuracies. (To their credit though, many former supporters have not ignored it and have changed their views — see, e.g., Andrew Sullivan).
…snip…
This is maddening, but it’s one part of the long history of factual inaccuracies that have provided the foundation of both the war and current war supporters’ arguments. These inaccuracies are what makes “us” so angry — we feel we have been dealing for almost five years with arguments that are (at best) factually inaccurate or (at worst) consciously dishonest.
…snip…
[Y]ou simply can’t — in a democracy — have a meaningful debate or make an informed decision if you’re using the wrong facts. Same deal with our policymakers. It’s a sad day when we must hope Bush and McCain are lying because otherwise they are implementing war plans on the basis of gross factual errors (or fantasies).
Read the whole thing.
July 18th, 2007
|
General |
13 comments
Violating my religion and linking Michelle Malkin:
On a $5 dare from friends, 13-year-old Justin Porter climbed 35 feet up an electric transmission tower. Who was to know such an adventure might prove dangerous? 19,700 volts later, his mother, Anna Thebeau, is suing the electric utility, Ameren, saying it should have fenced off the tower against trespassers, should have posted a big warning sign on it, should have designed it so that it could not be climbed up, and should have insulated the wires far overhead.
Why does this story catch my interest? Because when I was 15 years old, three friends and I were arrested in the City of Milwaukee for climbing a steel framework electric transmission tower just outside a power substation on our way home from school. Except that ours was a wee bit bigger. We climbed about 75 feet up, and the tower was carrying 275,000 volts.
We didn’t stop at climbing the tower, either. We had carefully balanced atop it two shopping carts and a Christmas tree. We were just about to bomb one of the carts off the tower when I saw the police coming. D’oh! Worst part is, we’d been doing this for nearly a year (the climbing part, not the carrying-stuff-up part).
Thankfully, nobody ever got hurt (apart from what our parents did to us). It was especially fun for me, since I had the good judgment to get arrested on my father’s birthday. My brother (then 19) bailed me out, so we were going to just not tell him, but the arresting officer decided to do due diligence and call my Dad to notify him. When he responded to my “Happy birthday” with “Happy birthday my ass,” I knew I was in for it! [You thought I was an idiot now? The “me” of yore was far, far worse. I was so dumb, I was even a Republican, but that’s another story…]
You might be wondering how I know that the tower carried 275,000 volts. Well, it’s because my friend’s idiot father, wanting to make a point, called the electric company to find out. Since we were all minors, the police were prohibited by law from identifying us to the power company. But Idiot Dadtm voluntarily identified himself to the power company on the phone, at which point their lawyers sent him a letter and a bill for $828.82 to cover the hazardous pay time it required to remove the stuff we balanced up there. (That number is forever ingrained in my head, by the way.) So instead of getting off with just the $38.75 each that was the maximum fine for minors at the time, we all had to chip in $207.21 extra to pay that bill. Actually, our parents had to do that, and we had to pay them back.
Finally, this goes without saying, but: Kids, DO NOT try this at home!
July 18th, 2007
|
I do too have a life |
12 comments
This is disgusting:
Last September, a black high school student requested the school’s permission to sit beneath a broad, leafy tree in the hot schoolyard. Until then, only white students sat there.
The next morning, three nooses were hanging from the tree. The black students responded en masse. Justin Purvis, the kid who first sat under the tree, told filmmaker Jacquie Soohen: “They [other black students] said, ‘Y’all want to go stand under the tree?’ We said, ‘Yeah.’ They said, ‘If you go, I’ll go. If you go, I’ll go.’ One person went, the next person went, everybody else just went.”
Then the police and the district attorney showed up. Substitute teacher Michelle Rogers recounts: “District Attorney Reed Walters proceeded to tell those kids that ‘I could end your lives with the stroke of a pen.’ ”
… Jena, a community of 4,000, is about 85 percent white. While the black community gathered at a church to respond, others didn’t see the significance. Soohen interviewed Jena town librarian Barbara Murphy, who reflected: “The nooses? I don’t even know why they were there, what they were supposed to mean. There’s pranks all the time, of one type or another, going on. And it just didn’t seem to be racist to me.” Tensions rose.
Robert Bailey, a black student, was beaten up at a white party. Then, a few nights later, Robert and two others were threatened by a white man with a sawed-off shotgun at a convenience store. They wrestled the gun away and fled. Robert’s mother, Caseptla Bailey, said: “I know they were in fear of their lives. They were afraid that this man was going to shoot them, you know, especially in the back, running away from the scene.”
The next day, Dec. 4, 2006, a fight broke out at the school. A white student was injured, taken to the hospital and released. Robert Bailey and five other black students were charged … with second-degree attempted murder. They each faced 100 years in prison. The black community was reeling.
Now ask yourself: are the good white folk who don’t think nooses hanging from a tree are racism or who think its terrible that black kids would sit on a bench where white kids sit going to treat a white and black job applicant the same? Are they going to fund schools for blacks at the same rate as white kids? Are they going treat a black man in front of a jury the same as a white man?
Nows tell me again the pretty little fairy tale of the end of racism and a color blind society.
July 18th, 2007
|
General, Legal Issues, Culture, Race |
10 comments
