Bye Bye, love

I'm under the gun with this topic. It's been a crazy week. To explain my haste, perhaps now is a good time to point out an important office rule at Today's Snow Job. We believe in currency. No, not the cheddar. We check that like food inspectors. I mean regular posting. Naturally, none of your faithful writers have ever been accused of being less than completely committed to keeping your gReader inbox filled with tasty work-stalling temptations, but we like to utilize cold threats in order to keep us in line. To that end, our rule is this: if one of us misses a week's response to the topic du semaine, our fellow staffers get to masquerade as the offending writer, and post whatever they please.

A fate worse than death: the tarnishing of an iReputation. And I'm about to be overdue on my post. Thus, herewith.

Fuck: Caroline Kennedy
It's so not cheating the question. As one of three nominees for Obama's actual veep-vetting team, she is a pivotal player in the HBO neo-soap that is the current phase of Decision '08. As such, she needs praise, she needs encouragement, she needs well-earned stress relief. I'm not saying that I personally am a just desert for all her efforts/needs; believe it or not, this game is largely hypothetical (if not entirely mastrubatory--though maybe Caroline and I can help each other out). Neither am I suggesting that Mr. busy-busy-interior-designer Schlossberg isn't performing his marital responsibilities regularly. Only that, given Sweet Caroline's tireless service to the Obama campaign machine, girl deserves some groupie lovin'. Is there--or has there ever been--a Pamela Des Barres of the American electoral parade? ("Interns," you say? Don't be silly, I have worked with interns and they are all nuns and monks.) This could be the ultimate field trip for the wayward, green, idealogically frustrated polisci grads of America. (Or Canada? Can one obtain a visa for deep-job-shadowing? If you ain't no retard, holla "we want green card!")

Ahem, anyway. I would make apologies for sharking vastly older women, except Shmuel has already (indirectly) admitted to lurking in the Today's Snowjob basement, fooling around with Mr. Angry Potato-Head. The gloves are off.

Marry: Wesley Clark
Having just attended a rocking wedding, I have nuptial thoughts on the brain (I also have a hangover on the brain; apologies in advance for typos/bad judgments). In contrast to the popular romantic notion of accepting your mate out of the factory with all of his/her attendant flaws, there exists the much more populist approach of hankering down to some serious post-marriage soulmate-improvement. Bring in the fixer-upper at a bargain (goes the argument), and you'll have an affectionate 'other for life.  Yes, Wes most likely banished himself from Obama's cabinet, let alone the VP ticket, with his incautious remarks on July 1st.  Yet, ladies, Wes remains a provisional catch, and with a little passive-aggressive badgering, he could be much better. He could, for example, try avoiding making gaffes in criticizing the other team's lack of real military experience and its irrelevance to the oval office. Clark, after all, is brimming with Tom Clancy-esque war stories--such as leading his company on in Vietnam after being capped four times with an AK-47--and ostensibly this experience could have lent some political heft to Obama's foreign policy positions. At least, they might have, if Clark was univocally against the Iraq Resolution, which he appears to not be sure about at all. Less flip-flopping, more soundbite-worthy responses in debates. As a fellow with purported professorial aspirations, it shouldn't be surprising to hear him respond to pointed yes-or-no questions with a grey response, but them media-jackals like to speak in binary. This is the digital age. Sweetie, clarify your position on authorized use of force! And don't chew with your mouth full!  Maybe, by 2016, I can take you out in public.

Kill: Evan Bayh
In an effort to provide some contrast to my peers' positions (and to attempt to cover up my incapacity to discuss this topic at their level), I'm leaving HRC out of this. To paraphrase David Plotz, "the number one problem with Clinton as VP is Bill. The second is Hillary." Exchange rank as you see fit. But look. As this goes to print, now that Shmuel's BFF is out of the race, Bayh for VP is being publicly bought at USD$7.8, twenty cents above the last Bill Richardson bid, but at less than half the going price for Hillary (I don't really understand that website, but I am intrigued). That makes him one preference below the first (mistake) for some quantity of armchair pundits who suck at poker. Furthermore, a DC blog points out that ObamaBayh08.com forwards to the Democratic Party's website (generally a smart move; Apple waited and had to buy iphone.com from Linksys at great expense; however other domain name combos with the names of other veep hopefuls have not been bought or forwarded). Yet, the man is clinically deceased. He's an incarnate monotone. His soul is monotone. He makes flat-fingered gesticulations with alternating hands every 4.7 seconds. He should be narrating relaxation tapes. His voice makes me want to be buoyant in a calm, flat pool. He's like a documentary about sand. He's like a Bergman film, only not as funny.

Bayh-Bayh, love.  If I'm not fired for any of the above, I'll be back later in the week.

Celebration Guns

Fuck:
Jim Webb. *shudder*

Now that you've had time to recover from that unpleasant image (warning: not the last one this post), let's review the pros and cons of Senator Webb (D-VA) as Obama's VP pick. Like your average skinny pale urban lefty who's never fired a gun (my family's lineage includes draft-dodgers from four continents in at least five separate wars) and generally likes the stuff white people like, I'm a big Jim Webb fan. Chris' post below highlights five considerations to look at when picking a VP, and Webb helps with at least three of them. He's from Virginia, an electorally significant swing state Obama is making a serious push for. His military heroism and leadership experience shores up Obama's foreign policy inexperience, and he is a self-described proud redneck Appalachian, a symbol of the same segment of the electorate that Obama had trouble reaching during the primary. But even though he provides balance to the ticket, he still reinforces several of Obama's key messages. He was as prescient on Iraq as Obama, and I'd really like to see the people who were right about Iraq from the beginning rewarded for their political courage. He's a former Republican (appointed to Reagan's cabinet) and Washington outsider, which dovetails nicely with Obama's message of change and unity.

Beyond that, he's just cool. As a freshman Senator, he passed a veterans' benefits bill that both Bush and McCain opposed and are now trying to take credit for. When asked by George Bush how his son (who was fighting in Iraq at the time) was doing, he told the President he wanted his son to come home. Bush, with typical tact, said "“I didn’t ask you that, I asked how he’s doing,” and Webb, like so many of us, was "tempted to slug the commander-in-chief". Another of his signature issues is the rising economic inequality and disappearance of class mobility in America. He wrote highly acclaimed Vietnam War novels, and Obama/Webb would be the most literary ticket since the ill-fated Duke/Gifford campaign of 2000. And while Webb is a conservative on some issues, his deviations from the Democratic party line are of the type that would help Obama win. Dude loves himself some guns, to the point that his aide was arrested for carrying Webb's loaded pistol through the senate. I totally understand. If I was a new Democratic Senator in Bush's Washington, I'd be packing heat too - you never know when Dick Cheney's going to "take you on a hunting trip." This scandal would reassure gun-lovers that President Obama won't take their guns away. Webb's also critical of affirmative action. Barack Obama would be smart to embrace a move to a class-based rather than race-based affirmative action, on the grounds that his own kids really don't need any special treatment.

So far, so awesome. What's the problem here? Well, Jim Webb, like all great writers, drew on his most profoundly affecting experiences to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. The Republicans are going to destroy him. From the third paragraph of his 1979 article "Why Women Can't Fight":

"I once woke up in the middle of the night to the sounds of one of my machinegunners stabbing an already-dead enemy soldier, emptying his fear and frustrations into the corpse's chest. I watched another of my men, a wholesome Midwest boy, yank the trousers off a dead woman while under fire, just to see if he really remembered what it looked like."

Where to begin? How long after Obama picks Webb as VP that Chris Matthews and Wolf Blitzer are earnestly asking whether Obama supports voyeurist necrophilia? Remember, this is the media that has made an issue of Obama's bowling score. They would love an excuse to talk about dead naked Vietnamese women for three months. And this is just Webb`s articles. When Karl Rove has wet dreams (what? I already warned you!), he dreams of attack ads based on Webb's novels. For example, from Webb`s 2002 novel:

“A shirtless man walked toward them along a mud pathway. His muscles were young and hard, but his face was devastated with wrinkles. His eyes were so red that they appeared to be burned by fire. A naked boy ran happily toward him from a little plot of dirt. The man grabbed his young son in his arms, turned him upside down, and put the boy’s penis in his mouth.”

Webb's opponent in his 2006 Senate run tried this same attack, and it ended up backfiring. Webb responded to the attack by reading a list of his novels blurbs, exposing himself as that most unattractive of people, a writer who has memorized his own clippings. (In the same speech, he also claimed to have written more books than George Bush has read.) Dick Cheney's wife published her own works of lesbian erotica (there was a clear warning! It was way back in the second sentence of the post!), and got away with it, but she's a Republican, so it was ok. On the other hand, the effectiveness of these attacks may be blunted by the fact that Lost Soldiers was praised by none other than Vietnam Vet and Arizona Senator John McCain.

However, even if these attacks don't work, there's still the matter of a 1979 article by the name of "Why Women Can`t Fight." It`s a virulent attack on women in the military and specifically women entering the Naval Academy, at one point listing the ratio of men to women in the dorms and calling them a "horny woman's dream". He's concerned both for the male students receiving unfair evaluations from female supervisors, and for the female students who are apparently losing their gender:

"It is a delicate balance for any Academy graduate, looking back on those four years and measuring what he received in return for pouring every last hot ounce of his youth into Annapolis. But part of the price, until now, has never been sexual identity."

Um, ew. According to women who attended the Naval Academy in the early '80s, the article was used as an excuse to mistreat female students. The politics of selecting Webb are pretty crap, as an anti-feminist would be particularly galling to women disappointed by Hillary's narrow loss. But on the merits, choosing Webb would be even worse. Obama should not choose someone who was on the wrong side of a civil rights struggle. I'll leave you with one more quote, from the novel Something to Die For (and seriously, you were warned. If you choose to keep reading, that's your decision, not mine):

“Fogarty . . . watch[ed] a naked young stripper do the splits over a banana. She stood back up, her face smiling proudly and her round breasts glistening from a spotlight in the dim bar, and left the banana on the bar, cut in four equal sections by the muscles of her vagina.”

Now, Today's Snow Job has no problems with consensual public acts between a woman and a banana. But I have a feeling that the American media will. When Obama spoke out against invading Iraq, he famously said he wasn't opposed to all wars, just to dumb wars. Going to battle with Jim Webb at his side is a dumb war.