Poseur Alert

America’s reigning master of bullshit weighs in on the baseball steroid scandal. It is of course, a metaphor for everything:

Just about everybody, it seems, is on one kind of steroid or another these days. They’re trying to find a way around reality with steroids that boost their career, or conceal their motives, or propel them into a crowd that magnifies their personal power. The Stephen Glasses, James Freys, Jayson Blairs, J.T. Leroys, and Scott Thomas Beauchamps inject themselves with the steroid of fake facts. The religious fundamentalists have the steroid of fanatical self-righteousness, and the scientific fundamentalists who react to them have the steroid of, well, fanatical self-righteousness. The political bloggers make use of the steroid of implacable outrage. The libelous, or seductive, or predatory Internet user rides high on the steroid of an "avatar." And there is the steroid of political messianism boosting the pro-Iraq War crowd, and the steroid of cynical groupthink juicing up audiences addicted to the "comedy" news shows. And there is that most American steroid of all — the one that seems to give you a way to triumph over your own limitations — the credit card.

Lee Siegel has won the Poseur of the Year Award before. But the prize for 2007 is still open. Today is the last day for voting. Have at it.

Hope, Fear, Young And Old

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It’s neck and neck between Clinton and Obama in New Hampshire and Iowa. And here’s a fascinating glimpse of the choice:

The poll finds a divide in support for Clinton and Obama among age groups, with about two out of five voters age 18 to 44 in both states saying they favor Obama and about the same margin of Democratic voters age 65 and above backing Clinton, though Edwards gets a similar margin of support from that group in Iowa.

Furthermore, Clinton continues to hold onto support from older women. In Iowa, she gets 43 percent of the vote from women age 45 and over, twice as much as Edwards and Obama. The numbers are similar in New Hampshire.

It’s between the older generation versus the younger; those afraid of the Republican machine and those who want to transcend  that bitter struggle. I liked this rationale for Clinton:

"You can’t sit across the table from somebody all those years and not talk business," says Klenske, 81. "If you’re a farmer’s wife you pretty much know as much about operating a farm as your husband does."

This is what Clinton does for feminism. She makes it indistinguishable from nepotism.

(Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty.)

Hoops With Obama

Can you tell anything about a presidential candidate by playing basketball with him? I guess this is Matt Yglesias’ bailiwick, but this Sports Illustrated piece is fun:

Obama was confident but not cocky, unselfish but unafraid to shoot. On court he showed the same balance that has fueled his political rise; he could talk trash without seeming mean, compete feverishly without seeming angry. Yet few knew how central the sport — "my first love," he calls it — was to his self-image as a mixed-race child: How the greatest gift from his absent dad was a basketball, how playing gave him his closest white friends and a place where black skin wasn’t a disadvantage. When a coach, a close friend, casually threw out the word n—–, Obama says, "It reminded me that race is complicated, that people are complicated, that you could have ugly strains even among people who were otherwise decent…. It does not necessarily mean they’re bad people."

Here’s some classic highschool footage of Obama on the court:

Moore Award Nominee

An early contestant for 2008:

Say what you will about the looming catastrophe facing the world as the pace of global heating and polar melting accelerates. There is a silver lining.

Look at a map of the US.

The area that will by completely inundated by the rising ocean—and not in a century but in the lifetime of my two cats—are the American southeast, including the most populated area of Texas, almost all of Florida, most of Louisiana, and half of Alabama and Mississippi, as well as goodly portions of eastern Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina … What we see is that huge swaths of conservative America are set to face a biblical deluge in a few more presidential cycles.

One more day to vote for 2007’s contestants! Right now, it looks as if the award may be renamed the Olbermann. There go my cable invites. Check it out.

Bin Laden’s Grudge Against Bhutto

Useful history:

Bin Laden has plotted against Bhutto since she first became prime minister of Pakistan. In the fall of 1989, in the lead up to a crunch no-confidence vote in Pakistan’s parliament, Bin Laden, based then in Peshawar, tried to sway the outcome by sending money to Islamabad to buy votes. According to testimony in Peter Bergen’s 2006 oral history The Osama bin Laden I know, Bhutto, on discovering Bin Laden’s involvement, personally phoned up King Fahd of Saudi Arabia and demanded the Saudis rein him in. The Saudis called Bin Laden back for consultations and promptly confiscated his passport, cutting him off for a while from the al-Qaida organisation he had founded in Pakistan the year before. The episode presumably did not endear Bhutto to Bin Laden.