Personal Asides: Frank Nofsinger Takes Dorothy Parker Pastel Blue Quip No. 2 Followed by Jesse Taylor…Poetry Quiz…Look at Lovie’s Leather Comments and Give Me Your Playback…Michael Barone’s Masterpiece.

Nofsinger.

Connecticut’s Frank Nofsinger answered Parker pastel-blue quip No. 2 followed by Jesse Taylor of Chicago…their answers shown on Reader’s Comments. Congratulations to both. More on Parker: Dorothy Parker’s maiden name was Dorothy Rothschild but she was not of the famous banking family. Parker was her first husband, the forerunner of several to follow. She evidently had a life full of successes laced with some inner-insecurities, having tried suicide twice, beset with alcoholism and evidently a woman who had her quota of male admirers. She was a far-lefty who flirted with communism in the 1930s. She was cremated and, believe it or not, her ashes bounced around in a file drawer for some years. Then they were consigned to the Martin Luther King, Jr. foundation.

Poetry Quiz.

Try this with no search engines. Here is the entirety of his poem. Tell me who wrote it. It’s one of my favorites.

I know a Jew fish crier down on Maxwell street with a/ voice like a north wind blowing over corn stubble in January./ He dangles herring before prospective customers evincing a joy identical with that of Pavlowa dancing/ His face is that of a man terribly glad to be selling fish, terribly glad that God made fish and customers to whom he may call his wares from a pushcart.

Another by the same writer:

Why does a hearse horse snicker/

Hauling a lawyer’s bones?

The Huey Long Factor.

Lovie’s Leather, a contributor to this and other blogs and a very thoughtful one, rips this Blog a new orifice for its remarks on Topinka which said that Topinka’s election would be a disaster for the GOP. This Blog recognizes that it is politically incorrect for a partisan Republican to say what it did…and also recognizes that it believes in certain social policy absolutes. One is pro-life which struck it with a devastating force when, at age 45…a father of four…it saw the killing of unborn life certified as a constitutional right; another is opposition to legal recognition of the gay life-style, a belief that does not countenance vilification of those of homosexual inclination.

Those two absolutes it freely acknowledges, but being cast as the 21st century Illinois version of Huey Long is rather interesting. Huey Long was seen as an incipient “man on horseback,” a revolutionary who could overthrow the system and install a demagogic dictatorship or cult of personality in its stead. This Blog is a tad too elderly to ride horseback or overthrow anything. Has it not been critical of Blagojevich in the past? Let us turn this over to our public and have a plebiscite. Your comments, please.

Michael Barone.

No one knows the electorate…or this country demographically…better than Michael Barone, co-author of the Almanac of American Politics who is senior writer at U. S. News & World Report. The other day in the Wall Street Journal, he discussed the changes in the Democratic party with such precision that I’ve got to excerpt it and recommend you read it in its entirety at www.realclearpolitics.com . It’s important to me because of the point I’ve been making about the changes in the Democratic party when Humphrey and Scoop Jackson were around and now. Nobody says it better than Barone.

Compactly, Barone finds that “the center of gravity in the Democratic party has moved, from the lunch-bucket working class that was the dominant constituency up through the 1960s to the secular transnational professional class that was the dominant constituency in the 2004 presidential cycle. You can see the results on the map. Joe Lieberman carried by and large the same cities and towns that John F. Kennedy carried in the 1960 presidential election. Ned Lamont carried most of the cities and towns that were carried by Richard Nixon.” Transnational is Samuel Huntington’s word for those who say “our country is no better than any other and in many ways it’s a whole lot worse.” Lieberman is an “exceptionalist” which puts him somewhat…somewhat, not on everything…on a par with most Republicans i.e. he has portrayed himself as religious, a critic of vulgarity and obscenity in the arts, a supporter of school-choice.

Exceptonalists included FDR, JFK, Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. They are centered mostly in the working class as well as in all sectors of Republicans. Barone says “The working class Democrats of the 20th century voted their interests and knew that one of their interests was protecting the nation in which they were proud to live. The professional class Democrats of today vote their ideology and, living a life in which they are insulated from adversity, feel free to imagine that America cannot be threatened by implacable enemies. They can vote to validate their lifestyle choices and their transnational attitudes.”



Of course secular transnational professionals are in the Republican party as well, most particularly in the better suburbs and in the higher reaches of corporatedom. In Illinois, they would very easily be grouped around Jim Thompson because their secularity and his are identical.