"Republican senator John McCain is still raising questions and hackles."

Hackles again! Can't get enough hackles in the big media... when the topic is Republicans.

A few days ago, the NYT lit into Ted Cruz: "Texas Senator Goes on Attack and Raises Bipartisan Hackles." And now, it's John McCain who's ruffling the feathers of big media, whose meme is The GOP died. So, whenever a Republican Senator is anything by docile and deferential, the Death-of-the-GOP meme must be swapped out long enough to discipline the outlier. The standard message is: Nobody likes you. Metaphor of choice: Hackles. You're raising hackles.

Here's my meme for that media discipline: When they say hackles, I say hacks.
The article with the headline quoted in this post title is at The Washington Post. Here's some of the text:

The 76-year-old will be 80 when he is again up for reelection in Arizona in 2016. “I have seen a number of occasions around here where people have stayed too long,” McCain said during a recent interview in his Russell Senate Building office. “I have seen people who were real giants in this institution deteriorate, and unfortunately, we remember them at the end.”

Endings matter in politics. If McCain is approaching the exit, this term could determine how he will be remembered. (“In the way people think of him,” former GOP Arizona senator Jon Kyl said, “in the near term, it matters a great deal.”)

Right now, like it or not, the five-term senator is stuck in “get off my lawn” territory, lashing out at his friend-turned-foe Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee for defense secretary; incessantly tugging at what McCain is convinced is a coverup of the September attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya; lambasting the president; and railing against indiscriminate defense cuts. If hard-core conservatives feel burned by McCain’s resurgent reform spirit, the media that he once called his “base” have essentially written him off as an angry and sour loser who once went through a maverick phase but has, in the words of “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart, gone on a “seven-year quest to negate every good thing he’d ever done.”

Wow. That's heavy-handed! They're saying: The GOP is supposed to be dead, and you're at the grave's edge, old man. Old, old man. You look old. Old men when the say what they mean and they say it with passion seem like they're saying "get off my lawn." Har harr. Old man! You're going to die soon.

You don't have to be a genius to extract the bias and see the real message: McCain is effective.

By the way, the hackles article about Cruz depicted him as too young — hadn't been around long enough to be speaking with intensity and passion. 

Hacks!

ADDED: I deleted a line that was in this post for a couple minutes: "by the way, hackles are not feathers." I based that on what I'd read — quickly — in the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary when I wrote the "hackles" post about Cruz:

The hackles of a cock are erected when he is angry; hence with the hackles up, said also of a dog on the point of fighting when the hairs at the top of the neck stand up or of a hound when near the fox and on the point of killing him, also transf. of a man when aroused. Hence hackles is sometimes put for hair, whiskers, etc.

I pictured the cock's comb, but reading more of the OED entry "hackle," I see:

The long shining feathers on the neck of certain birds, as the domestic cock, peacock, pigeon, etc. Also, the feathers on the saddle of a cock. a cock of a different hackle, an opponent of a different character.

Al Gore performs a breathing exercise...

... when he realizes that Jon Stewart's use of the phrase "voracious over-eater" isn't going to turn into a reference to Gore's obesity:



(My edit, my interpretation of what's going on here.)

Why are gun-death statistics inflated with gun-suicide numbers?

"I thought we had a right to die...."

Obviously, one reason is: to get bigger numbers. But I think the people that lump gun deaths together believe (or want others to believe) that guns are really dangerous. When it comes to suicide, there are 2 ways to think about the deadly effectiveness of guns: 1. For those who really want to kill themselves, guns are a sensible choice, or 2. The scary deadliness of a gun tempts weak/impulsive persons to go ahead and do something that wouldn't happen otherwise.

You can easily see that those 2 ways to think represent the mindsets that lead to libertarian or authoritarian answers to all sorts of questions. #1 would allow the individual to make his own decisions and to take care of himself, and #2 thinks the individual — call her Julia — needs to be helped and protected (even from herself).

Sorry to go all gender-y, but I'm interested in talking about suicide and attitudes about guns in the context of gender difference, because 4x as many men as women commit suicide and 56% of male suicides use firearms compared to only 30% of female suicides. Those statistics are skewed by the fact that guns are an effective method. It might be that the gender disproportion is because men choose the method that leaves fewer survivors of attempts at suicide. I note that 40% of female suicides use "poisoning" (presumably, that includes drug overdosing). What's the proportion of females attempting suicide by poisoning to females succeeding in killing themselves with poison?

If you have a fantasy of rescuing those who are in the process of committing suicide, you might think taking guns away will give you a better shot.

ADDED: It occurred to me, after the Sandy Hook murders, that blaming guns is a secular substitute for blaming the devil. People find it too challenging to figure out why a human being would do this terrible thing and they latch on to the idea that the gun made it happen. Suicide presents a similar challenge, and one way to fathom it is to say: It was the gun. Isn't it like saying the devil made him do it? The gun/the devil is a great go-to answer, freeing you from wracking your brain about the workings of the human mind.

"Is this just math that you do as a Republican to make yourself feel better or is this real?"

Megyn Kelly asked Karl Rove — as hilariously/painfully magnified by Jon Stewart:

[VIEW CLIP HERE.]

As the tags below indicate, there's some other material in that clip too. If you're one of those who find this painful rather than hilarious, I would recommend that you seriously contemplate the meaning underlying the humor. It's important.

Email from the Obama campaign: "Ann -- Have you seen the 'Gangnam Style' music video? (So great.)"

"Well, here's another video you can't miss."

Last night, President Obama went on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. He talked about the debates, his plans for a second term, and Joe Biden's swimwear.

... Seriously.

Seriously? Why do you people want to seem like such lightweights? Like it's all a big joke? Because you think that's what young people respond to? 1. I'm not young, and you sent this to me, and 2. It's actually possible that young people are struggling and suffering and worried about the future, and they are looking to the government to solve some real problems, and they're disgusted by concept of government as silly entertainment.

The audience completely failed to cheer or applaud when Jon Stewart announced that Obama was the guest on "The Daily Show."

Here's the whole show. You'll have to put up with a commercial, and then what I'm talking about happens is the first thing after the intro music, 20 seconds in.

"Hey, everybody," Jon Stewart yells in his usual way, trying to get people stoked for the show. "Welcome to 'The Daily Show,' my name is Jon Stewart. We got a good one for you tonight. On our program, uh..." He looks comically at his notes as if maybe he forgot he has the President of the United States on his show. He continues, using a rising inflection obviously intended to evoke a strong response from the audience: "this evening, tonight, the President of the United States Barack Obama..." Nothing. Cheers were intended there. Stewart elongates the sentence with material that I think was either improvised or intended to be muttered overwhelmed by rapturous noise from the audience: "... will be joining us on the program tonight." And then a joke: "He's the star of the new film 'Here Comes the Boom.'" And that gets a laugh, a small laugh, which is interesting because of the way it points up the contrast to the utter absence of reaction to the news that the President was on the show.

This audience — presumably, the key demographic of young adults who went mad for the man last time — is not excited at all.

ADDED: It's "Here Comes the Boom," not "Here Comes the Boo," as I thought I heard, transcribing. I pictured something for Halloween, but it turns out: "A high school biology teacher looks to become a successful mixed-martial arts fighter in an effort to raise money to prevent extra-curricular activities from being axed at his cash-strapped school."

Tammy and Tommy debated again last night.

We'd gone out to the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery to hear physicist Sean M. Carroll give a talk about the universe. The universe might give birth to baby universes. Who are you to say it doesn't? And time — time is a very obvious concept, he said, before portraying time in a way that was quite weird. These cosmologists, such comedians. You can read this: "From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time." Here he is on "The Colbert Report" trying to get a word in while Stephen Colbert anxiously strives to make sure it comes out funny. I thought Carroll's solo explanation of everything was highly amusing. It's all about entropy. From the Big Bang on, it's movement toward entropy, and even when things become more complex — producing all the detail of the world we live in now — it happened along a path from less entropy to more.

We walked home, talking about and reframing the discussion. The moderator — a Madison media character — fielded questions from the brainy audience and inserted a question of her own: What do you have to say to these people who won't believe in global warming? Politics. Always politics in Madison. It's our own special brand of entropy. Meade and I blabbed about such things. Did Carroll say that we only "remember" the past because, since it had less entropy, we have the sense of knowing what it was, like when we see a broken egg — Carroll had a lot of PowerPoint slides of eggs — we know the egg of the lower entropy time — a whole egg — but there are many diverse possibilities for the egg's higher entropy time — scrambled, quiche, rotten — and so we can't "remember" it?

Home, I said, "You must want to watch the baseball game" and Meade said "I want to watch the Tammy and Tommy debate!" Both of these things, along with President Obama on "The Daily Show," were preserved on the DVR. So we watched Tammy and Tommy, and that was pretty funny too. The moderation was hilarious. They'd ask a question and Tammy and Tommy each had a couple minutes to answer. Then they'd declare a 6-minute period in which Tammy and Tommy could talk about anything, interact in any way, hog the time, interrupt, be as polite or impolite as they saw fit with absolutely no intervention from the moderators.

Tommy got all impassioned and began many sentences with "Ladies and gentlemen." He assiduously refrained from calling Tammy Tammy. She was "my opponent." And the message was: Ladies and gentlemen, my opponent is incredibly, unbelievably liberal. Tammy seemed nervous but never broke from her prim, schoolmarmish demeanor, as she repeated the message about Tommy: After he was governor, he became a lobbyist and made a lot of money.

So, ladies and gentlemen, it's a simple decision. What irks you worse: liberals or rich guys?

Now, back to your regularly scheduled entropy.

"When four Americans get killed, it’s not optimal... The government is a big operation and [at] any given time something screws up."

Obama, on "The Daily Show."

"I feel like I'm prepared emotionally to perform in a state like I've never been prepared before."

"When you're exposed to some slightly crazy people in arctic conditions, there's no way the state can hurt me now."

That's "The Daily Show"'s John Oliver, who's performing in Milwaukee tonight, and the preparation he's referring to is his coverage of the Wisconsin protests last year. At the link, there are 3 clips from that coverage, and we just laughed hysterically at this one where he interviews state senator Jon Erpenbach, as if he's a terrorist, hiding out in his "cave" in the tribal stronghold of Illi-no-EEZ.