"We expect Mitt Romney and the Republicans to outspend us. What I will not abide..."

"... is getting outspent by a margin that negates all the hard work our volunteers are doing."

Email from Barack Obama. I read it out loud and repeat I will not abide. Meade says "The dude abides."

Here's a discussion from English Language & Usuage:

I'm unfamilar with the word "abide" which is famously used the the movie quote "The Dude abides" (The Big Lebowski).

Looking it up in a German/English dictionary makes me believe it's "The Dude lives on", but I heard the word used on a way that makes it seem to be a variant of "approve," as in "The Dude does not abide this behavior."

I hear it used as "to obey" a lot, as in "we must all abide by the rules".

Can someone shed some light into the meaning of "The Dude abides" in the context it's been used?

Here's the top-rated answer:

Some discussions of the movie reference a peaceful, almost zen acceptance, as well as the idea that

The Dude will always be around.

A discussion on Reddit of what "the Dude abides" means has some consensus that it's an

Intentionally vague phrase hinting at the fact that The Dude Lives, in his unperturbable state of dudeness, somewhere.

and that the definitions "accept" and "continue" make sense in this context.

As @wfaulk points out, today we usually use abide transitively to mean things like trusting in, accepting or obeying; so it doesn't mean The Dude accepts or endures a particular thing, but I agree that the phrase still can imply a sense of patience or toleration, even if it's just the way someone waits or continues.

If you look at the etymology of abide, you can see how some of these meanings emerge:

O.E. abidan, gebidan "remain, wait, delay, remain behind," from ge- completive prefix (denoting onward motion; see a- (1)) + bidan "bide, remain, wait, dwell" (see bide). ... Meaning "to put up with" (now usually negative) first recorded 1520s.

Biden!

and going back to bide:

O.E. bidan "to stay, continue, live, remain," also "to trust, rely" (cognate of O.N. biða, O.Fris. bidia, Goth. beidan "to wait"), apparently from PIE *bheidh-, an extended stem of one root of O.E. biddan (see bid), the original sense of which was "to command," and "to trust" (cf. Gk. peithein "to persuade," pistis "faith;" L. fidere "to trust," foedus "compact, treaty," O.C.S. mmi>beda "need"). Perhaps the sense evolved in prehistoric times through "endure," and "endure a wait," to "to wait."

I think you're right: The Dude endures; The Dude lives on.

But The Dude will not abide... or will he? And will he abide Biden?

Should I not call the President "The Dude"? Obama is famous for calling a little boy "dude" when he said "Touch it, dude." And Jon Stewart famously called him "dude." That was back in 2010. It was much debated at the time. Here's Parker and Spitzer — remember them? — batting it around. And here's a WSJ blog:

Was it disrespectful for Stewart to address the president using a term that’s more commonly exchanged between two college guys sharing a bong?

Chooming.

Since the days of George Washington, America’s top leader has been addressed as “Mr. President.” Even Martha Washington called her husband “Mr. President.” Congress at one point considered the loftier title of “His Highness the President of the United States of America and Protector of their Liberties.”...

Then again, Thomas Jefferson once said that he hoped that “the terms of excellency, honor, worship and esquire will forever disappear from among us.”

Yes, it's really not too American to worship the President.



Odd that "The Big Lebowski" has become our prime association with "abide." There was a time, not so long ago, when it would have been the great hymn — "Abide With Me":

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.....

Justice Scalia "was not only gregarious and engaging but seemed to get the joke and seemed to get the absurdity of what I was doing..."

Says Kevin Bleyer, a "Daily Show" writer, who — writing his book "Me the People," got Scalia to do an interview.

I was a little bit nervous that he wouldn’t suffer me and my foolishness. It was a relief when he... seemed to understand the intention of what my book is.

He's good at discerning the intention of the drafters of various documents. 

"Fox went with GloatFest 2012... MSNBC went with MSN be sad."

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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"Father's death made Obama realise he could do more with his life than smoke pot Michelle tells Jon Stewart."

A Daily Mail headline. Details:

On the Daily Show, Stewart joked that the stories about the president as a young man resembled the 'script of a Cheech and Chong movie.'

While the First Lady didn't directly address the claims in Maraniss' book, she did say that her husband underwent a change during his college years.

Mrs Obama responded by saying: 'By the time he was in college, like so many young people, he realised that he could do more with his life.'

'He had a mother that was always saying you're so gifted, you're so talented, slap him on the head, "get yourself together."'

Watch the clip at the link. After she gets that far and Stewart tries to push her farther, she says "I'm not taking the bait," and Stewart says "Don't worry. It's organic."

By the way: "slap him on the head" seems to take domestic violence as a joke.

"40.6 trillion dollars in debt. Over 9% unemployment. But you know what Milwaukee? Those are just facts."

"And at its best, this country has never been about facts. It's been about belief. It's been about looking at the facts and saying, 'No.' "

"The Daily Show"'s John Oliver, doing standup comedy in Milwaukee last night, and (according to the Journal Sentinel) experiencing "one fleeting moment when he lost his crowd" — apparently, because he aimed some criticism at Barack Obama.

Hilarious hypocrisy.

Is she playing along... or is it really as hilariously hypocritical as it looks?

The reason why every not-Romney candidate but Bachmann has had a surge.

We're experiencing the Santorum surge now, and it seems that the conservatives looking for a way to stop Romney have simply converged on him after the sequential failure of their efforts to converge on Perry, Cain, and Gingrich. But why not Bachmann? She won the Iowa straw poll back in August. If she was that strong then, why was she denied her turn for a surge?

There was her blunder talking about the HPV vaccine causing mental retardation, but that was a single incidence of loose talk, relaying an anecdote, and I doubt if most people even remember that.

I think what has held her back is her husband. A candidate's spouse matters. It was recently reported that when Newt Gingrich was divorcing his first wife, he (supposedly) said to a close friend: "You know and I know that she’s not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of a president." Now, Gingrich is on his third wife, and she's relatively young and pretty (though she strikes many people as weird). But Gingrich's decline coincided with some intense focus on Callista. I'm not saying his decline was all about Callista. He had his surge, and that drew all sorts of scrutiny and criticism, and there was plenty to bring him back down. Yet the wife — and the wives — have mattered.

My question is: Why did Michele Bachmann get passed over in the sequence of surges? And my answer is that once people saw what her husband Marcus was like, they excluded her from consideration. For a female candidate, the spousal question is quite complicated. We expect the candidate herself to live up to some of the expectations we have — consciously or unconsciously — of the wives of male candidates. But what of the husband? Who will be the first First Gentleman in history? What's he supposed to be like? The role needs to be invented. And it couldn't be invented with the raw material that is Marcus Bachmann. Once people noticed him and tried to imagine him as the first First Gentleman, they ceased to conceive of her as a possible President.

If you don't remember how Marcus Bachmann burst into the national consciousness, refresh your recollection:

"Top Ten Peacemakers in the Science-Religion Wars."

The 2011 list, assembled by Paul Wallace at Religion Dispatches.

John Stewart is #8, for mocking the American Atheists who sued about the 9/11 cross.

Lots more at the link. #1 is Terence Malick for the movie "The Tree of Life":

It is indeed a strange and beautiful world. Malick, in his graceful and courageous film, reminds us that it is made stranger and more beautiful the more we open ourselves to it.

Both the closed-hearted scientism of atheist hardliners and the narrow creationism of religious fundamentalists kill our strange and beautiful world by flattening it beyond repair.

Class politics in Zuccotti Park.

Aptly and hilariously exposed on "The Daily Show":

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart

The U.S. Supreme Court violent video games case + the Wisconsin Supreme Court "chokegate" story...

... melded into a brilliant segment on "The Daily Show":

The Daily Show - Moral Kombat
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The last thing Jon Stewart says here is incredibly cynical about courts. It's also very well set up by what has gone before and deserves both laughs and serious conversation.

A nicely intense exchange between Jon Stewart and Chris Wallace.

Say what you will, I loved this balance of hostility and respect... and facts and emotion.

(Via Memeorandum.)

Jon Stewart has put his friendship with Anthony Weiner above comedy.

And joking about how he's done that wasn't funny either. But this made me laugh.

ADDED: Jon Stewart should just come clean and admit that it has never been the show's agenda to mock people in the order that they are mockable. The calculation has always included how much Stewart & Co. enjoy mocking them. He's a comedian and not a journalist, so it doesn't make sense to call him biased. He's choosing his targets for his reasons, which include political ideology and personal relationships. We understand that. Move on. The effort to be funny about that last night failed. But I hope some viewers have learned from this and become more sophisticated about what the show is. The show influences viewers to think that various people are stupid/evil/corrupt, but it could just as well be making them think that a different set of characters is stupid/evil/corrupt.

Jon Stewart is gentle...

... to his friend Anthony Weiner.

See, this is why comedians shouldn't have friends.

The new gay is: Minneapolis!

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"Where is the outcry from PETA?"

Asks a commenter at the Isthmus post about the camel the "Daily Show" brought to the protest.

Where's the outcry? Probably hanging out with the outcry from the Freedom From Religion Foundation over the Reverend Jesse Jackson leading a prayer (with the crowd of protesters in the Wisconsin Capitol rotunda):



(By the way, Jackson's prayer does not violate the Establishment Clause, and in fact, he has a free speech right to do what you see in that video. That is my official professorial opinion.)

"The Daily Show" brings a live camel to icy downtown Madison to do a comedy skit, and it gets entangled in a metal fence and falls down horribly.

This is difficult to watch...



Background and more video here. The show's comic actor John Oliver was on the scene. Obviously, the idea was to play on the comparison between Egypt and Wisconsin, which has been pushed by the local protesters.

Truly nauseating. The linked piece in the Isthmus says it "ends happily" because the animal is eventually able to stand up again. Ithmus is a newspaper of sorts. Let's see if — instead of smiling on camera and calling it a happy ending — the reporter finds out where the TV crew got the camel, who thought it was acceptable to bring a camel out in the ice and snow, who decided to put a collapsible metal fence around the animal, what training the handlers had, why the owners of the camel entrusted its welfare to these people, and what ultimately happened to the animal?

I kind of hate driving traffic to the Isthmus (and to the same reporter who wrote an article trashing me as an egotist because I declined to give him an interview), because it seems to be treating this as a kooky, quirky YouTube moment. It's not. It's animal cruelty.

I'd like an investigation. Should someone be prosecuted?

ADDED: The reporter, Jack Craver, apparently obliges John Oliver who tells him to shut off the camera. The animal struggles for 10 minutes, we hear in the final video, but there's no video of most of that — it seems because Craver bowed to the authority of a comedian. Craver refers to Oliver as a "correspondent." Hello? He's an actor.

In that final video, Craver turns the camera on himself right after the animal finally struggles to its legs. I realize he's happy that the animal has managed to stand up, but I find it hard to believe that is a face of a human being that just watched an animal suffer for 10 minutes.

You know, the world is real. And "The Daily Show" is fake.

IN THE COMMENTS: Jack Craver stops in and I respond:

Craver writes: "I did not oblige John Oliver's request to turn the camera off. As the video shows, I kept the camera on and shot two more videos."

You say, in the final video, that there were 10 minutes of the camel on the ground, but you do not show 10 minutes. The video with Oliver ends a few seconds after he asks you to stop, and the next video begins at some later point.

And I don't assert what I don't know. I say "apparently" and "it seems." If you have the full 10 minutes of the suffering camel on the ground. Please post it. Or send it to me and I will post it. And please tell me why your face looked so fresh after looking at that 10 minutes of torture. And why you wrote a cutesy post about it as if you were pleased that you got to see a celebrity and scoop some video.

"It's news to me that my article that you gave a generally positive review last year, and that your husband gave 'a solid A-" was meant to trash you.'"

Well, you need to think a lot harder about a lot of things. You are quite unsophisticated, and I don't particularly enjoy embarrassing you because you are or were a UW student and I am a teacher. See if you can figure out why we addressed your article like that. See? I'm a teacher. I'm trying to teach you to think better. I'm sure you know you were trying to trash me and I am sure your colleagues at the Isthmus knew that and I'm sure the folks around the law school saw it that way. Now, be a man and admit that, and then go back and think through why Meade and I patronized you the way we did.

How it looked in the Capitol rotunda at 2 p.m. on Sunday as the anti-Scott Walker protests continue.

Note the banner: "Stewart/Colbert/We came to your rally/NOW come to OURS!"

"Reince Priebus elected GOP chairman, replaces Michael Steele."

"Priebus won late Friday afternoon after seven rounds of balloting. He received 97 votes out 168 ballots cast."

The Wisconsin guy with the strange name made it.

ADDED: I guess ridicule on "The Daily Show" isn't so bad after all. January 4th:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Top of the GOPs
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The NYT asks whether Jon Stewart is "the modern-day equivalent of Edward R. Murrow."

"Did the bill pledging federal funds for the health care of 9/11 responders become law in the waning hours of the 111th Congress only because a comedian took it up as a personal cause?"

These kids today are so afraid of looking stupid that they won't get serious, collectivize, and change the world — declaims Mark Ames, spittle flying.

Stephen Green (via Instapundit) calls attention to this Mark Ames article (from October) "The Rally to Restore Vanity: Generation X Celebrates Its Homeric Struggle Against Lameness." Green cherrypicks a remark that appears at the very end:

Anytime anyone says anything libertarian, spit on them. Libertarians are by definition enemies of the state: they are against promoting American citizens’ general welfare and against policies that create a perfect union. Like Communists before them, they are actively subverting the Constitution and the American Dream, and replacing it with a Kleptocratic Nightmare.

Green — without noting that the Ames's whole article is about lameness — snarks that spitting is "lame." Instapundit grimly labels it "The Descent of the Left."

But let's look at Ames's whole article — and not be distracted by the terrible practice of spitting on libertarians. (I will not be side-tracked into blogging about what the lefties would say if the spit were flying in the opposite direction.)

Ames was reacting to the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rally, which to him was the manifestation of the younger generation's need to keep an ironic distance from politics — an effort to avoid lameness. Ames wants young people to rediscover liberalism, which was "once devoted to impossible causes like ending racism and inequality, empowering the powerless, fighting against militarism, and all that silly hippie shit." (Ames himself is 45, by the way, too young to have been a real hippie, but older than the people he criticizes.)

Ames found the Rally to Restore Sanity "depressing and grotesque" — like "some kind of sick funeral party  for Liberalism, in which Liberals are led, at last, by a clown." (Aw, come on, Ames. The liberals have been led by a clown before. Just not a very funny clown.) Ames is disgusted by the way the rally-goers take pride in how smart they are because they "don’t take themselves too seriously":

That’s why they’re following a clown like Stewart, whose entire political program comes down to this: not being stupid, the way the other guys are stupid–or when being stupid, only stupid in a self-consciously stupid way, which is to say, not stupid. That’s it, that’s all this is about: Not to protest wars or oligarchical theft or declining health care or crushing debt or a corrupt political system or imperial decay—nope, the only thing that motivates Liberals to gather in the their thousands is the chance to celebrate their own lack of stupidity! Woo-hoo!

It's a liberal trope that I've been following over the past week, after Isthmus reporter Bill Lueders wrote a piece called "The Triumph of Stupidity," in which he triumphed over getting UW polisci professor to say the voters are "pretty damn stupid." It's that "What's the Matter with Kansas?" notion that liberals have — that people who don't vote for liberal candidates are too dumb to know where their own interests lie. Ames is looking at the other side of that phenomenon: Liberals themselves are caught up in their self-image of not being the stupid ones, and, Ames is saying, this obsession of theirs undercuts the old-time, serious liberal project of remaking the world in pursuit of big, broad ideals like equality.

Ames has a great insight into "why so many Gen-X/Yers turned against Obama": "he made them look stupid."  They took Obama seriously. They believed. And that set them up to look.... lame!

Ames writes many paragraphs trashing E. A. Hanks's "Dear The Left: A Breakup Letter." (She's Tom Hanks's daughter!) Hanks seems to want to separate herself from political movements and embrace something like libertarianism. Ames declaims:

If the ruling class has enormous amounts of money and power and collectivizes in a variety of billionaires’ unions and special interests unions, and your answer is, “I’ll go it alone, at least I won’t look stupid” then you’re just fucking stupid.

So it is all about not looking stupid? Anyway, after much verbiage, which I'm skipping, including the part about Bob Dylan — marvel at my restraint! — he gets to his point, which is that liberals need to cast individualism aside and get collectivized, even though that's not distanced and ironic and unserious:

Collective action is the only possible way to change shit. Large numbers of collectivized nobodies rallying to demand what they want–a better cut of the pie...

Pie! Michelle said we could have pie!

... and a better world to live in. It’s the only thing that power-elites fear and the only way to get them to negotiate.... You’ll have to stomach being around people who are lame, and who say lame things, and you’ll feel lame—so you’ll have to decide which is lamer: the fear of being lame, or forming an alliance with people lamer than you in order to struggle against people far meaner, far more greedy and destructive than the lame people you hate—people who have no qualms about being lame when they collectivize, so long as they destroy you and grab everything they want. 

In other words, don't mock the Tea Party. Get out there. Be like them. Be mockable. That's the first of 3 prescriptions Ames ends with. The third is the one Green quoted: Anathematize libertarians. (The metaphor is to spit.) And the reason for anathematizing libertarians is Ames's second prescription:  liberalism needs a big, serious goal to collectivize about and that goal is the redistribution of wealth:

[P]eople need money. Then if they have money, they need Life. Then they might be interested in “ideals” set out in the contract that this country is founded on. Ever read the preamble to the Constitution? There’s nothing about private property there and self-interest. Nothing at all about that. It’s a contract whose purpose is ...  a “more Perfect Union”—that’s “union,” as in the pairing of the words “perfect” and “union”—not sovereign, not states, not local, not selfish, but “union.” And that other purpose at the end of the Constitution’s contractual obligations: promote the “General Welfare.” That means “welfare.” Not “everyone for himself” but “General Welfare.” That’s what it is to be American: to strive to form the most perfect union with each other, and to promote everyone’s general betterment. That’s it. The definition of an American patriot is anyone promoting the General Welfare of every single American, and anyone helping to form the most perfect Union—that’s “union”, repeat, “Union” you dumb fucks. 

Ames is still playing on his audience's fear of being the stupid ones — even as he spews some crazy shit he wants us to hear as brilliant. Don't be a dumb fuck, believe me when I tell you: This individualism is a trick the billionaires are playing on you. Come together, live as One.

Ames boldly palms this off as constitutional interpretation. The "more perfect union" in the Preamble isn't the reallocation of powers between the federal government and the state governments to deal with the problems that arose under the Articles of Confederation. No, Ames's big, serious lie — and you should worry that you're a dumb fuck if you don't believe it — is that the Constitution compels us to set aside our individual pursuit of happiness and dedicate ourselves to the collective.