<$BlogRSDURL$>

Monday, February 05, 2007

Trust Al Gore? 



So, Gore is at unbackable odds to follow in the footsteps of Michael Moore to the Oscar podium.

He may even win the Nobel Prize. Presumably, he could win votes there from some of the same Europeans who gave the once-prestigious Nobel Peace gong to Jimmy Carter, apparently because doing so served "US and A weeth a leetle keeck in ze shins", or something to that effect.

Reactions to An Inconvenient Truth are reminiscent, to some extent, of those to Fahrenheit 911.

I didn't see either of those films, but did see Bowling for Columbine. As a non-American whose gast has been flabbered by the ubiquity of guns in the US, I confess to sympathy for the kernel issue therein.

One certainly must appreciate Moore's film-making talent. However, the venal slob completely lost me with his sophistic little "Osama-was-right-the-US-deserved-it" narration as planes crashed into the World Trade Center at the end (of the film about guns).

Then at the Oscars, of course, there was that famous and stereophonic howling preview of his next film.

Wonder what Gore will do up there, on the podium.

Will he plug his new anti-Bush book? Challenge Hillary? Will he provide a sequel to that line he so enjoyed laying on a live audience in one of the trailers I saw for An Inconvenient Truth:

"Hello, I'm Al Gore, and I used to be the next President of the United States."

Personally, that was probably the point at which I proactively decided not to hurry along to see the film. What a vindictive little chimp, I thought. Imagine what might have become of Richard Nixon if he had carried on in a similar fashion to Gore after the 1960 election.

That was the election which Nixon (nominally) lost to JFK by an ultra-slim plurality of 34,227,496 votes to 34,107,646 (translating to a broader 303-219 Electoral College margin).

Nixon had good reason to wail and whinge, but chose not to.

Here's what Paul Johnson says about that result in his A History of the American People:

If Nixon, instead of Kennedy, had carried Texas and Illinois, the shift in electoral votes would have given him the presidency, and the evidence of electoral fraud makes it clear that Kennedy's overall 112,803 vote plurality was a myth: Nixon probably would have won by about 250,000 votes. Evidence of fraud in the two states was so blatant that ... Eisenhower urged Nixon to make a formal legal challenge to the result. But Nixon declined. ... A legal challenge ... would have produced a "constitutional nightmare" and worked heavily against the national interest.

Nixon not only accepted the force of this argument but he actually pleaded successfully with the New York Herald to discontinue a series of articles giving evidence of the frauds ...

This behaviour - ruling out the justified pursuit of self-interest in order to promote the national interest - from probably the only American politician in recent history to be reviled nearly, but not quite, as much as Joseph McCarthy.

The detail supporting a Nixon case for a recount dwarfs that of the chad-based legal suits initiated by Gore.

In some Chicago electorates - these being strongly influenced per se by that city's notorious ganglanders of that era - the number of votes cast exceeded (by thousands) the number of voters registered.

Nixon let it go, with the national interest in mind.

Whereas Nobel nominee Gore, who not only could easily have foreseen the huge damage his court challenges and ongoing and very public denunciations would do to national as well as democratic standing and credibility, but also had the Nixon precedent to follow if he wished, decided instead to pursue a meretricious, self-interested and largely unjustified political-legal witch-hunt.

Should we be surprised if allegations as to both distortions in his documentary as well as hypocrisy in the environmental prudence he preaches vis-a-vis his own practices prove to be correct?

When he instigated legal proceedings to disrobe George Bush of the presidency and award it to himself, Gore's supporters led us to believe that their candidate was a victim of an unprecedented electoral outrage. But democracy, particularly representative democracy, yields strange and often imperfect results. There are at least two examples of 19th century US presidential elections where the defeated candidates were far more hard done by than Gore, and I again paraphrase Paul Johnson:

Case 1:

In the 1876 election Samuel Tilden beat Rutherford Hayes easily, both in the popular vote (4,284,020 to 4,036,572) and in the Electoral College (184 to 165). However, because 20 electoral votes were in dispute, and because the commission deciding the dispute was controlled by Hayes’ party, he was declared elected!

Case 2:

In 1824 Andrew Jackson beat John Quincy Adams in the popular vote (153,544 to 108,740) as well as the College (99 to 84) and carried 11 states to Adams’ 7. Yet Adams was declared the winner (!), because constitutionally (at the time) the Adams-leaning House of Representatives had to pick the winner where a majority of all College votes weren’t won by any single candidate (78 College votes having been won in 1824 by two other candidates).














// posted by spinbad @ 5.2.07

Sunday, February 04, 2007

Rudd Ka Bin 





There it was again, this time somewhere in readers' comments at news.com.au:

"Did I mention that Mr Rudd speaks Chinese Mandarin fluently and respects Asian cultures?"

Yet another version of the persistent canard about Australian Labor leader Kevin Rudd's magical linguistic ability coupled, as it often is, with the implication that Australia's current PM is a cultural idiot next to Rudd.

In truth, I'd be surprised if:

a) The number of Australians with Chinese ethnicity who actually do speak fluent Mandarin doesn't number somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, if not close to the million mark;

b) A good number of those Mandarin speakers didn't have a snigger at the inherent ignorance with which said factoid was first presented by the cabal of triumphal Howard-haters in the local media; and

c) A sizeable further sub-set missed the sub-text that partly propelled the newsworthiness of the story: that it was unusual for a REAL (white, Anglo-) Australian, let alone a real Australian politician, to be a master of Mandarin. And this from the self-described culturally sensitive left.

Regarding b), the spin on Rudd's Mandarin speaking when he first became Labor leader was that he spoke an elite vesion thereof, a higher version, a cleritic version.

Any fool - at least anyfule with any kind of meaningful exposure to not only Chinese, but East Asian languages in general - knows that precisely the opposite dynamic is true, that polite versions of said languages are the first port of call for the new student. Real mastery comes with fluency in the nuances of class, sex, locality and and in the vernacular of the street.

Tin-Tin probably speaks better French, and my money says that John So will prove to be a better politician.




// posted by spinbad @ 4.2.07

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Inside a sponsorship deal ...  
Spinbad has learned that an A-list European retail brand, which shall remain unnamed, has recently activated sponsorship of a very well known Australian sports franchise, which must also remain unnamed.

The partnership is as unlikely as you could possibly imagine. It has only come to fruition because the battling sports franchise has been fortunate enough to fall into unprecedented support at the big end of town.

As part of the deal the athletes and related staff, some of whom may have only ever seen a quality suit on television, now must be attired at all (off-field before-camera) moments in high-end branded stuff that might make Eddie Macguire salivate.

A tailor was flown out from Europe this week to measure the clients up. He was shocked to discover that some of them:

- had never heard of his employer (you'd have to be trying really, really hard to achieve that)
- failed or forgot to wear underwear to the measuring session
- were of such huge physical proportions that special outfitting measures will have to be taken.

The deal is locked but some key people are wondering whether it will continue to be wise for female representatives of the brand to have contact with the team, whether the suits will be appreciated at the pub, how the whole enterprise will eventually rank in the history of bad ideas, for how many minutes the distributed attire will physically last, whether the concept of dressing numerous individuals uniformly will be attractive, how this situation came to be in the first place. Developing.

// posted by spinbad @ 1.2.07