Unless Something Unexpected Happens

Hillary will be the Democratic nominee for President and an idiot will be the Republican nominee.  I can say the latter because they are all idiots.

But the Republicans Will Not Stop Lying

U.S. Intelligence Chief Reportedly Finds No Top Secret Information On Hillary Clinton's Email

A.E. Hotchner - Hemingway in Love

A.E. Hotchner is a writer and journalist who was Ernest Hemingway's friend for his last 13 years. This is Hotchner's final memoir of his friendship with Papa.  This short book is so poignant and sad. It is so because of the sad ending of Hemingway's life.  It is also sad because he brought on himself most of the sadness in his life.

Meeting Hemingway for the first time in the spring of 1948 on a magazine assignment.
P. XI

The author wrote an earlier memoir of his years with Hemingway which I read in 1974.  Now he embellishes and finished his story.
P. XVII

The story of Hemingway's ECT treatments is horrendous as they were administered with no anesthetic.
P. 4

"Ernest's zest for life was infectious."
P. 6

The details of the author's visits to Hemingway's room in Rochester where he was receiving "treatment" are painful
P. 11

In 1954 Ernest Hemingway was involved in two straight airplane crashes in Africa.  If that had happened to me I think I would never have flown again.
P. 21

How did Pauline get into this life?  Because Hemingway let her into his life.
P. 34

Fitzgerald warned him about Pauline Pfeiffer, but he didn't listen.
P. 64

Hemingway was not a good father or husband.  He brought most of his woes upon himself.
P. 100

I'm 61 years old and I'm empty.
P. 162

With any luck maybe I'll dream of Paris.
P. 163

Dreams of Hadley.
P. 165

According to the author, Hemingway WAS under surveillance by the FBI.
P. 167

The final theme of this memoir is that at the end of his life Hemingway may have realized that he blew it when he let Hadley, his first wife, get away.  She was his first love and his greatest love.  He ends life completely broken down and with regrets.

Word Comes

I just got word. Warhol was wrong. We now get 20 minutes of fame up from 15. Use your extra 5 minutes wisely.

Moyna's New Hat

Moyna's got her a brand-new leopard skin pillbox hat. I want to wear it too, but she won't let me. I'm just sitting here with my belt wrapped around my head and she, sitting there in her brand-new leopard skin pillbox hat perfectly balanced on top of her head. It ain't fair. I'm telling you. It just ain't fair.

Republicans Cry

They cry over their debate rules.  They just don't want to be held accountable for their wacky positions on the issues.

Explaining the Republican Party

by Kim Messick

But an insistence on purity cuts both ways. It pushed GOP officials into a dialectic with their voters, one that replaced the the Party’s earlier engagement with modern history. As Republican doctrine became increasingly right-wing, so did its support among the electorate. Liberals and moderates largely fled, becoming Independents or Democrats. Each turn of this screw produced a Party more dependent than ever on its most radical elements, which of course simply drove it toward wilder rhetoric and harsher policies. The Southern Strategy worked, if anything, too well. The GOP’s effort to capitalize on the mid-Sixties disaffection of Southern whites made it into a Party largely alienated from everyone else. In the 2012 election, the South accounted for 70 percent of Mitt Romney’s electoral votes.

It also left the GOP at the mercy of the peculiar habits, cognitive and cultural, of its purified, sanitized “base.” For these voters, as the events of the summer made clear — the rise of Trump and Carson, the sacking first of John Boehner and then of his hapless hand-picked successor, Kevin McCarthy — have little if any attachment to the Republican Party as an institution. Their contempt for the GOP “establishment” could not be more obvious. (A generation back, most of them were Democrats.) What matters to them is their ideology, an ideology based on a wholesale rejection of the social changes wrought by modernity. Simply put, they despise the modern vision of a society in which distinctions based on race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, have no place. On their view, these distinctions between persons are etched into the fabric of the world itself by the world’s author, God. To ignore them, to try to build a social world without them, is both hubristic and perverse. It is, quite literally, heresy.

The GOP base no longer looks to history for instruction. It doesn’t ask itself how to adapt conservatism to the modern world; it asks how it can adapt the modern world to its version of conservatism.  That world it regards as hopelessly fallen, as so much detritus to be swept away. This is the explanation for the indifference to — if not contempt for — evidence and empiricism that Saletan so clearly perceives. A “fact” about the world ceases to matter when one rejects that world and regards it as little more than a shadow, an unnatural lure contrived by secular-humanist conspirators. Why take an interest in the “evidence” gathered from such a place? What authority could it possibly have?

ADVERTISEMENT

Doubtless there is a large measure of opportunism behind the Republican candidates’ complaints about the CNBC moderators and the “lamestream” media generally. Given the chance, what politician would not prefer less scrutiny to more? But the chance was created by the anti-modern rage of the GOP base, which is perfectly sincere and not at all opportunist. If a “fact” has no more force than the reality it describes, then a questioner has only as much authority as the facts he or she marshals. The rest of us may regard the CNBC moderators as trying — always imperfectly, but genuinely trying — to speak truthfully about a world we all share. But the Republican base rejects this as a sham. No truths can be dredged from the muck of modernity. What looks like a question is really an attempt to assert a spurious reality, conspiracy disguising itself as objectivity.

After the 2012 election, much was made of the curiously hermetic quality of today’s GOP — its retreat into a “bubble” in which the Republican faithful listen only to themselves. Who can forget the sight of Karl Rove on election night descending into the bowels of Fox News, certain that the election was not really decided in favor of Barack Obama, only to run headlong into the stubborn empiricism of Fox’s statisticians and researchers? Rove’s judgments were mistaken, Fox anchor Megyn Kelly chided, just something “you tell yourself as a Republican to make yourself feel better.” If 2015 has taught us anything, it’s that more and more Republicans are incapable of appreciating the distinction.