Well, its day two on the other side of the Atlantic. Waking up in an upper hotel floor and having to make myself ready to go work and not having the usual things around. In an acknowledgment to advancing years, I went to bed last night at 10:40 pm. My younger self would have me beaten with an empty Yingling bottle.
But then again, I am waking up at about six each morning-which means its about 8 hours sleep for the night. Which hopefully will keep me from falling asleep in boring meetings.
I am enjoying getting to listen to NPR at its “real” time. Instead of having to download Podcasts and replay the following day.
Marco Rubio joined the growing crowd on the clown car that is the ranks of GOP hopefuls who want to become President. I found his rationale for running interesting-and it was appalling to see the softball questions he was thrown this morning on the morning shows. For example, when asked why he was running he went into his usual spiel about how he was running to restore the American dream. He was asked a question, about his reasons for running and his response went along the lines of, “blah blah blah, American Dream, and American has rich people, and anyone can achieve what these people have done. ‘America is great because non-rich people can own houses and build a life her’ “.
Which was fine, except as with all the GOP nominees the details are in the fine print of what they say they believe. Take Mr. Rubio. He wants Americans to be able to have a home, a car, and life. But what the interviewer failed to ask him was the necessary follow up question: “How do you propose to help Americans to do this when, for example, you say you want to strip millions of those Americans of health insurance, by repealing the ACA and allowing insurance companies to go back to screwing them.” They did not ask him the all-important question of what was his alternative? Then in a segue, they should have asked this follow up: Senator, “how would address the fact that increasing numbers of them are not allowed to enter the housing market because their wages are stagnant and their buying power is less than it was last year?”
This is what galls me about most of the media. They don’t sake hard-nosed questions-primarily because they are slaves to their corporate masters. And corporate masters don’t like their ability to screw average Americans out of millions of dollars to be effectively challenged.
And then there is the weird history Rubio would prefer you ignore:
In 2012, The New York Times Magazine asked Rubio about this; here was the exchange:
After you became the first Cuban-American speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, in 2006, your mentor, Jeb Bush, presented you with a sword. What was that about?
Chang is a mythical conservative warrior. From time to time, if there’s a big issue going on, you’d see Jeb say, “I’m going to unleash Chang.” He gave me the sword of Chang.
From which mythology does this conservative warrior hail?
I think it’s a Jeb Bush creation.
But it’s not a Jeb Bush creation. It’s a Poppy Bush creation — it’s a preppy in-joke of his. As Timothy Noah explained in 2012, Bush the Elder used to say “unleash Chiang” while playing tennis, as “partly an expression of sincere competitive spirit and partly a self-mocking acknowledgment that he had what his daughter Doro Bush Koch, in a memoir, lovingly describes as ‘a bit of a weak serve.'”
And note that the proper spelling of the name isn’t Chang — it’s Chiang, as in Chiang Kai-shek, who was the exiled leader of the anti-communist Chinese in the Mao era. Poppy was mocking anti-communists in America who wanted to “unleash Chiang” to topple the mainland Chinese government. As Noah wrote:
Unleashing Chiang would not have been a good idea because Chiang could not win (he’d already been whupped once by Mao’s army) without the U.S. dropping a few atom bombs on mainland China, and perhaps not even then. (You’ll recall we had a hard enough time with the Chinese in Korea.)
When Rubio discussed “Chang” with the Times interviewer, Noah scolded him for not understanding the history behind the reference:
This blog gives Rubio an F in post-World War II history….
Since Doro knows its real provenance, I assume Jeb must, too. Rubio does not.
But I’m with Brad DeLong, who thinks Jeb didn’t get it:
… George H. W. Bush’s sons — even the smart one, Jeb — never got the joke. They, you see, didn’t know enough about world history or even the history of the Republican Party to understand who Chiang Kai-shek was, or what “Unleash Chiang!” meant. Hence Jeb Bush’s explanation that twentieth-century Chinese nationalist, socialist, general, and dictator Chiang Kai-shek was a “mystical warrior… who believes in conservative principles, believes in entrepreneurial capitalism, believes in moral values that underpin a free society.”
Precisely — Jeb took a joke about conservative zealotry and turned into a celebration of conservative zealotry.
It is going to be a long 18 months.