Monday, November 2, 2009

Thoughts While Shaving: Dierdre Endorses Dem…Dead English Language Curator Kogan…What to tell Catholic Bishops Asking $$ for CHD…and More.

scozzafava


Scozzafava for Owen.

Immediately after New York Assemblywoman Dierdre Scozzafava pulled out of the 23rd district congressional race because she was running third in a poll, the Obama White House raced to the phones to entice her to endorse the Democrat in the race, Bill Owens. Despite her earlier insistence that she is a lifelong Republican, she did just that. And the liberal vulture media are pulling for Owens to beat Doug Hoffman to use it as a “teaching moment” to nudge the GOP leftward, using the old canard you have to be a RINO to win.

It proves once again how duplicitous liberals are. And it shows that Newt Gingrich, long touted as the smartest guy in the room, can use a little humility which he can store up along with his hubris. A former insurgent against the GOP House establishment himself, he has come to be too comfortable with the establishment. He’s kept saying that, after all, Deirdre was picked by the party. Wrong: she was picked by a series of establishmentarian Republican groups…country-clubbers…who see nothing wrong with someone who favors abortion rights and same-sex marriage and has had ties to ACORN. Gingrich should have remembered his own insurgency and known better.

The following are winners nationally in this project: Sarah Palin who endorsed Hoffman along with a number of others…Tim Pawlenty who endorsed her…Fred Thompson. Scoring a flat zero each: Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee who hung back and stayed neutral. But Newt gets the booby prize.

All the same I’m rather disappointed Dierdre pulled out. That leaves only one overweight Republican candidate running in a special election: Robert Christie for governor of New Jersey. This is the especial minority group to which I belong and which needs greater representation in politics. The Democrats have a leading figure in Barney Frank. Whom do we Republicans have but Christie? Disappointing.

Rick Kogan.

Rick Kogan (Rick isn’t short for Richard he will have us know since he was named after the trendy old restaurant and bar Riccardo’s) has referred to me as a serious purveyor of incorrect English grammar…citing 14 cases of faulty usage in my article Thursday about the Trib and Sun-Times. Yeah, probably guilty as charged although I haven’t counted `em. Unlike Rick I don’t have an editor and type this myself…sans proofreader—the article to which he referred at 12:30 a.m. To expect a liberal to forgive a white fairly well-off conservative traditionalist writer of grammatical errors is fruitless.

He also said I am 90—nine full years older than I am. I’ll take that as an example of Rick’s devotion to journalistic accuracy. But to my ungrammatical errors first:

Winston Churchill, a master of English prose once concluded a fiery address to the House of Commons by ending his sentence with a preposition. A hostile Laborite called him on it. Churchill’s tart response:

“That, sir, is a charge up with which I shall not put!”

Noam Chomsky the linguist well accepted in Kogan’s journalistic social circles suggests that with English, “usage rules”…pointing to how sentence structure, wording and rhetoric have changed since Chaucer’s Middle English. No new regulations were handed down but through dint of years people did by violating the old. At age 90 can’t I be excused for wanting to step up the pace of change before I meet my Maker?

But to Rick: thank you for adding to my age by nine and sneering so superiorly. Especially for having taken the time to so assiduously count my double-digit grammatical offenses. Now let me offer him yet another digit…stemming from the Latin digitus meaning “finger.”

The traditional one finger salute. Wth the salutation “Conjugate this, baby.”

Why the GOP Switched to Knox.

In 1936, the almost dead-on-its-feet Republican party met in Cleveland to nominate a ticket of sacrificial lambs to take on a ragingly popular team of Roosevelt and Garner. It quickly decided to nominate the popular governor of Kansas Alf M. Landon whom they nicknamed “the Kansas Coolidge.” But who to run with him? The overwhelmingly popular choice was then stripling Governor Styles Bridges of New Hampshire, the nation’s youngest governor who was readying a run for the U. S. Senate. Bridges was willing, even eager, to give up the Senate run in favor of the vice presidential nomination—even if he were to lose, which was a certainty. He savored national exposure which he could parlay into a future national replay.

So, the GOP Elders decided: Bridges it was to be. Everybody shook hands in the smoke-filled back room and prepared to march out to the convention arena to get it done. Then a genius among them thought it over, told them the consequences and everybody turned on their heels and strode back into the room to pick another candidate.

They chose in Bridge’s place Col. Frank Knox, publisher of The Chicago Daily News.

Why didn’t they stick with Styles Bridges? Did they find a serious character deficiency? Nope. Just this:

With the ticket Landon-Bridges, Democrats were sure to invent the slogan: “Landon Bridges Falling Down.”

Landon-Knox went down to the worst defeat in electoral history up to that point. And that same year, Bridges was elected to the U. S. Senate, served as president pro-tem when the Republicans took it over in 1953 and remained in that chamber until his death. Incidentally, he became a fictional centerpiece in Allen Drury’s famous and enduring novel of the Senate “Advise and Consent.” Involved in a furious battle of personalities with Sen. Lester Hunt (D-Wyo.), the rumor was that he got rid of Hunt by blackmail: Unless Hunt were to resign his seat, there would be revelation that his son was a homosexual.

Hunt resigned—and as private citizen later killed himself. That story, fictionalized, became the major theme of Drury’s Pulitzer-prize novel.

Catholic Bishops Hitting Parishioners for CHD.

This being November, Catholic churchgoers should get ready to be hit by a contribution request from all Catholic bishops just before Thanksgiving. The bishops will be appealing for monies to the Catholic Campaign for Human Development---the group run by a few liberals who steered $7.3 million to ACORN in the past ten years but which now since the scandal sorely repents it.

Don’t provide absolution for this bishopric handful’s grievous sin and give them another chance. Please.

The way to handle that is when the basket is passed during Mass, clasp your hands together in prayer—praying for the Holy Spirit to take up the slack, taking politicized alms from the hands of the bishops, some of whom have left-wing intent.

And while He’s at it, providing Divine assistance to better the crop and fewer Lefty prelates.

Fem Supporter Blasts Criticism of Roeper.

A female supporter of the Sun-Times’ Richard Roeper writes on my email (thomasfroeser@sbcglobal.net): “Why do you insist on saying Roeper’s column is designed to appeal to young people? Are you stuck in 1989 [sic]? The Sun-Times doesn’t target Roeper’s column to young people, nor is his subject matter to that demographic. He writes about pop culture, politics, sports, movies, local news etc. etc. etc. In other words it’s a GENERAL INTEREST COLUMN, MORON. He’s not even that liberal (in favor of gun owners’ rights, in favor of capital punishment, regular guest on O’Reilly factor etc. etc…Every time you do the `aging liberal bachelor’ things about Roeper, you sound like a senile old man. Fine, we get it. You’re incredibly jealous because he probably makes 20 times what you make. But [ejaculatory reference to the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity] try to be a little more relevant and on point!…”

An outraged devotee, obviously.

But, tell me, readers, what does “stuck in 1989” statement mean? What happened that year? Write to me at the same email she used. And thanks.

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