Posted on 10/29/2006 9:38:35 AM PST by Chi-townChief
Leave it to our Southern cousins to make Playboy scandalous again. The magazine's a relic, hobbled by octogenarian Hugh Hefner locking his arms around its knees while the culture scoots off without him to scale new heights of naughtiness.
They put sexier stuff than Playboy on the sides of CTA buses. But it causes a stir in Tennessee. Let Democrat Harold E. Ford (below) -- who is black and for some reason wants to be a senator from the Volunteer State -- attend a Playboy party, and the Republican National Committee is running vile TV commercials with a sultry blond actress pretending to know him from the party and cooing a blatant play on old racial fears.
We up North need to know about this because we assume the whole "black-men-gonna-steal-our-wimmin!" pathology died out with George Wallace. It didn't, apparently, but is alive and well in the party of Lincoln. How sad.
Hot times for geriatrics
I’ve been to a Playboy party thrown by Hugh Hefner, and it was an advertisement for staying home.
The event could have been funded by the American Family Institute. Too crowded, too loud, no food, and Hef way off on some platform with his trio of hireling girlfriends, dancing like my Uncle Max, with his fists in little balls jiggling merrily away. Any random church picnic is sexier.
Dept. of silver linings Has George Bush made it fashionable to admit you were wrong? I would think his digging in on Iraq would inspire the general public to go over our own lives like a tailor searching a new suit for pins, trying to find errors to admit.
I have one ...
A commercial for Attorney General Lisa Madigan just came on. When she ran four years ago I thought she was a whelp clouted into office by her dad, powerful Springfield pol Mike Madigan. It didn’t help that she blew into the editorial board like Leona Helmsley interviewing the chambermaid staff. And then there was her wardrobe ...
But she’s done a good job. Brought down a lot of criminals, kept a clean office. So I officially pronounce myself mistaken about her — as if she’d care — apologize for past unkindnesses on my part, and welcome her to the realm of acceptability.
Rum raisin still OK Love must have been in the air 11 years ago, because a lot of kids’ birthdays in our circle are clustered around Halloween.
A friend’s son had the typical sleepover for nine, count ’em, nine 11-year-olds. (Are they “tweens”? Sounds girlish. How about “twixts” for boys?)
There was pizza and a scary movie that, given the demographic, was ho-hum for some and too scary for others. There was poker — a foretaste of adulthood which kids of that age view with the same wide-eyed delight they would show had you tossed them the car keys and told them to go out for a spin.
My friend Sandy, being a details-oriented guy, provided pretzel logs for the kids to snack on and, if they liked, pretend were cigars. A nice touch at the poker table.
There was one kid, however, who refused to puff on the pretzel cigars, explaining that smoking was bad, and a vice, and dangerous, and he wouldn’t even pretend to smoke.
One of those sentiments that send admiration and alarm bolting out of the gates and racing, neck and neck down the old mental track.
You want your kid to be the kid who sticks to his values in the face of eight friends dealing stud and puffing on their pretzel logs. It’s good that smoking is being backed into a cultural corner, good for the public health.
And yet ...
We who ate candy cigarettes and played tough guys with our chocolate cigars have to pause to see such indoctrination. There’s something unsettling about it. It’s like when a toddler starts shrieking at you because your slow in putting your seatbelt on. He’s right, of course. And yet ...
Spare the rods, save a child.
Death of defeatism A thousand bucks will buy you a flight to Hanoi — $1,057 to be exact, on a major airline, according to something called cheapflights. com. Though I imagine there are a few layovers involved, just looking up the price made me want to go.
Hanoi is the capital of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, as the country has been known for the past 30 years, ever since the United States pulled out and the Communist north invaded and conquered the South. About 80 million people live in Vietnam, and it is seldom in the news.
Turned out, the fall of Vietnam did not cause the nations around it to topple “like dominoes” to the Communist menace. The 57,000 American soldiers who died there died trying to stop something that, when it occurred, was not the awful outcome we had been told it would be.
A bit of history that keeps rapping insistently at the back of my mind whenever the administration talks about how crucial victory in Iraq is to the War on Terror.
It wasn’t me The hard news reporters — “the real reporters” as I think of them — don’t talk to me much. They’ve got better things to do, fish to fry, news to cover, and can’t waste their time with some clown padding through the newsroom in his jester’s motley, at each step the bells on his floppy cap jingling derisively.
So I was a little surprised to get an e-mail Wednesday from one of them, in her professional capacity. What, she wanted to know, was my connection with Dr. David Cornbleet? The Michigan Avenue dermatologist who was in a column I wrote in 2000. He had just been brutally murdered. What did I know?
I answered, honestly, that I picked his name at random, flipping through the phone book, and printed it out because I thought it sounded funny. I never met the man and knew nothing about him. Still, even the coincidental connection felt eerie. I’m sure men have gone to prison on less.
Today’s chuckle: I’m not sure if this is funny or just true. Anyway, it’s from our old friend John O’Rourke: You know you're getting old when you’re brushing your teeth and you can't remember if you're getting up or going to bed.
mailto:nsteinberg@suntimes.com
Sound like Steinberg somehow inexplicably lost a few years in the mid-to-late 70s.
It's starting to look like your boy Neil is backsliding a bit.
The left is really stretching.
Here's the ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkiz1_d1GsA
Nothing racist about it!
Two million dead Cambodians...
I guess it could have been worse.
I agree with Steinberg. Let's get back to the kinds of ads where George Bush implicitly dragged a Black man to death behind a pickup truck. Good clean political fun.
So what was vile about the commercial? It wasnt near as vile as the one the DNC ran about the black guy being dragged behind the pickup truck. I keep forgetting everything the Republicans do is vile,everything the Dems do is OK.
This is another good one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pQH_DLQzyg
Excellent post!
That sentence is the best reason I've seen yet for the continued outlawing of marijuana.
I believe one must be a racist to see racism in that ad.
The deal is that he wants to portray himself as a church going Christian AND play around at Playboy partays. Hypocrite.
Leftists view everything with racist eyes.
The ad is funny. As Mort Kondrake said yesterday, the Democrats are just trying to play the race card, again. This is the 21st Century; it's not the 50s with poor Emmett Till.
Man, those Democrats are really repulsed by the thought of inter-racial couples.
It's all they seem to talk about.
A bit of history that keeps rapping insistently at the back of my mind whenever the administration talks about how crucial victory in Iraq is to the War on Terror.
The reason ethical morons such as this writer hold views so discordant from reality is that they are implicit racists - those millions of short yellow people who died under post-Vietnam withdrawal socialist regimes don't really count as people.
The same perverse logic is equally dismissive of the fates of hundreds of millions of humans in the Mid-East.
I remember these morons from university. Back in the day, they idolized Mao, Castro, and Uncle Ho, all for the approval of their peers, so far as I could see. They are beneath contempt.
Not the "racist" white vote (probably an insignificant minority of voters) but the black women vote.
Leftists view everything with racist eyes.
---
And it is because secretly, they are all racists themselves. Kind of obvious if you know basic psychology.
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