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
Yes. Precisely.
That is so true, but in my opinion, it's because the Republicans are such wimps. They've had so many chances to bring Democrats down and they let it go. They're a bunch of cowards. The most recent one was that slime ball, Harry Reid. The Democrats brought Tom DeLay down for less than that. Will the GOP will ever learn? It doesn't look like it.
My thought exactly.
yeah let the democrats toss more Oreo cookies at Steele so the media and people like him don't have to be outraged about it
Did you know a vote for a Republican is a vote to burn down a black church?
Who knows how many South Vietnamese died premature and violent deaths because of the Communist takeover? The media has been remarkably incurious about that, giving the impression that the worst that happened to anyone was to be sent to a "re-education camp." How many died at sea trying to escape the Communist paradise is unknowable but undoubtedly a sizeable number--tens of thousands? hundreds of thusands?
I think you're wrong about that. From Wikipedia:
"On September 30, 2005, Steinberg was arrested and charged with domestic battery. [1] The charges against Steinberg were dropped after he completed a 28-day alcohol rehab program."
the left is jsut trying to play the race card again....
not a peep from them with the byrd car dragging ad against Bush.....
not a peep this week from them or the msm regarding
harold ford sr. calling a white reporter...a "cracker"....that is not racism!!!!
and ya know what I'm talkin about!!!!
OK... we must not have been watching the same Mort!!!
I watched The Beltway Boys yesterday and Mort stated that the ad was "clearly" racist.
If Steinberg can play the game of making false accusations of racism, I don't see any reason why I can't do the same.
That statement by Steinberg can only be interpreted in one way - Steinberg is clearly a racist white supremacist who does not value Asian life as highly as he values the lives of people of the white race. To Steinberg, the deaths of millions of Asians at the hands of Communists, the human misery of the boat people, the fates of millions more sent to "re-education camps" and forced to provide slave labor, and the millions of others whose lives have never lived up to their hopes and dreams because they live in a Communist "paradise", none of that means a thing, because in Steinberg's racist mind they are just a bunch of vermin who don't deserve any better than what they got.
We might have thought that Steinberg's brand of racism died out at the same time as the demise of the career of David Duke. It didn't, apparently, but is alive and well in the party of Clinton. How sad.
I think you got Mort confused with Fred Barnes. Fred condemned the ad and Mort took issue with him (they both wear glasses).
Vice-versa, I believe. Which is somewhat surprising because I've always considered Kondracke to be a rare thinking liberal.
This whole thing is so silly. A couple months back, there was a big controversy over whether or not Ford's grandmother was white or black. He claimed she was white. Now, he's upset over the insinuation of an interracial "hook up?" Politics!!!! Argh
Mort sits on the left and Fred on the right -- which is apropos.
Are you sure Mort Kondrake said that? Because all I've read says it called the ad racist.
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