John McCain’s Republican challenger in Arizona, a woman named Kelli Ward, has long believed in a federal plot to poison Americans with the chemical trails some aircraft leave in the air.
Yet Ward’s keen sense of the endurance of certain visual effects fails to extend to the traces old attack ads leave in the mediasphere. Maybe Ward thought Mitt Romney’s 2008 attack ads against McCain had vanished into the Celestial Contrail and become fair game… Whatever her motives, her campaign simply, er, repurposed them…?
Kelli Ward, one of U.S. Sen. John McCain’s three Republican primary challengers, may have found a way to overcome her campaign-funding struggles: just tack her name at the end of an old Mitt Romney attack ad against McCain from the 2008 presidential race.
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Stealing and signing with your own name is a gesture quintessentially postmodern, an instance of Appropriation Art, in which artists like Sherrie Levine re-photograph canonical early twentieth century photographs and sign them with their own name. But just as Sherrie had to deal with a bit of copyright static, so Kelli is in receipt of legal correspondence from a Romney rep. Something about “blatant infringement” of “protected work”…?
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“How could anyone do anything so dumb?” asked Mr UD this morning when I told him about it. “Didn’t she know she’d be caught?”
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Without wanting to get too conspiratorial (in this UD defers to Ward and her man Donald Trump), UD will point out that if you reshuffle the letters in KELLI WARD you get (roughly)
LIKED RAWLS.
I.e., Ward is a secret John Rawls lover. John Rawls! The famous left-liberal political philosopher! Could Ward’s inner struggle between right and left account for her otherwise unaccountable behavior?
Extremely good writers can take what you know, re-charge it, and scare you.
… in a collective bad mood because of you know who.
Buttons seen on arriving women delegates.
‘YOU’RE A WOUNDING SON OF A BITCH’
— Louise Bryant
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‘Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.’
— Sylvia Plath
***********************
‘WHAT IF SHE ACTUALLY ENJOYED HER DEBASEMENT?’
— O
Trump/Gingrich: a presidential ticket that would have more infidelity than the collected works of Philip Roth & John Updike combined.
Jeet Heer.
… organizers are working on smoothing out any contradictions between a ferociously anti-pornography platform and a presidential candidate whose namesake hotel hosts the annual eXXXotica Expo.
[Trumper Warning]
Every week or so, a new high-profile woman (Megyn Kelly, Elizabeth Warren, Ruth Bader Ginsburg) pulls a football out from under Donald Trump.
Like Charlie Brown, he can’t help going for the thing, kicking the air as it’s pulled away and landing on his ass.
UD thinks it’s time for the strategy to go international. Malala Yousafzai held the ball out for Trump last December, but he didn’t go for it because he hadn’t yet won the nomination. UD hopes whoever’s coordinating the LVP strategy thinks to tap Malala again. Whiff time.
[Trumper Warning]
[Sing it with me.]
O Bobby Knight
The nominee is calling
From coast to coast you’re the best he could do
Yes you’re a star
But you are not six-sided
So no one here will mistake you for a Jew
We need you so
Our polling stats are falling
Punch up our show
As you punched out your teams
Throw us a chair!
O sucker punch our children!
O Knight Divine! O night when Trump is crowned!
O Knight Divine! O Knight, O Knight Divine!
Frederick Seidel.
Now for her vice-presidential prediction:
Look for a Trump/Shkreli ticket.
Their synergy is highlighted here:
Perhaps the only accident that could hurt Trump’s numbers would be a hot mic that revealed him as thoughtful, empathetic, or even kind… [His] rise, in business and in politics, is based on exploiting others’ weakness.
We like to think that America invented the future. We are comfortable with the future, intimate with it. But there are disturbances now, in large and small ways, a chain of reconsiderations. Where we live, how we travel, what we think about when we look at our children… Two forces in the world, past and future. With the end of communism, the ideas and principles of modern democracy were seen clearly to prevail, whatever the inequalities of the system itself. This is still the case. But now there is a global theocratic state, unboundaried and floating and so obsolete it must depend on suicidal fervour to gain its aims…
[Post-9/11, it is] clearer to me than ever, the daily sweeping taken-for-granted greatness of New York.
Don DeLillo, “In the Ruins of the Future.”