Friday: Day two of Osama dead, I am still unemployed

Just sayin’.  Atrios is tracking the numbers.  The BLS churns the stats today.  I would like to say that I feel privileged to be counted among the 474,000 losers lucky duckies who filed for unemployment in April.  But I can’t because it sucks.  There are a lot of good, hard working, extremely intelligent, well educated people with degrees and experience in highly desirable fields who are out of work, including every adult Brook depends on for her economic security and health insurance.  (And there are some people who are working only by the sheer virtue of being on someone’s A list who haven’t contributed anything of value for the past 10 years.  You know who you are.)

Thank you President Obama and Congressional Democrats for diligently focussing all of your efforts on putting us back to work.  Oh wait!

Corrente linked to Distant Ocean’s post yesterday about our aspirational creative class’s sycophantic adoration of Obama in spite of his complete detachment from everything they purport to care about and quipped that if Glenn Beck sounded like Garrison Keillor, progressives would eat his words with a spoon.  From Distant Ocean’s post (HT Katiebird):

Who gives a royal rat’s ass if the Democrats speak good English, finish a sentence, or handle questions well?  Look at the policies, for Christ’s sake.

Unfortunately they do care, and care very much, if the Democrats speak good English, finish a sentence, and handle questions well.  That’s it.  That’s all it takes.  Just a president whose words are more pleasing to the ear, no matter what they’re actually saying.  Someone articulate and educated.  Someone who’s probably listened to a few episodes of This American Life.  Someone who reads the New Yorker or the New York Times or best of all, both.  Someone who has a favorite espresso drink, whatever it may happen to be.  In short, someone who at least gives the appearance of being one of us.

Just that and nothing more and the tedious minutiae of betrayals and crimes is not only forgiven, but all but forgotten.  The platitudes of Democrats like Obama are not just“the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair”, but over reality.

Now, I will take issue with Distant Ocean’s characterization of Bill Clinton.  If there was one thing Clinton was never accused of it was being heartless.  If anything, he got criticized for emoting too much.  And I have to add that while Obama has a lot on his plate leftover from the Bush administration, he didn’t have the endless investigations that Clinton had to put up with.  They were expensive, time consuming and distracting and had a substantial effect on the way he governed.  But whatever.  The squishy lefties will never ever acknowledge that Clinton was a pretty decent president that the vast majority of Americans would give their right arms to have back in office right about now.  He will forever be the guy who passed welfare reform, as if the aspirational class has ever had direct experience with welfare {{rolling eyes}}.  Forget the fact that with low unemployment during the 90s, welfare was pretty much unnecessary, let us not allow facts to get in the way of what we think poor people deserve, like a miniscule check that keeps their families in perpetual poverty rather than a good job that gets them out of it.

Anyway, Distant Ocean is right about the rest of it.  Obama epitomizes the Starbuck’s slurping suburbanite with the professional wife who gives it all up to stay at home so she can be there for the kids who are in school and don’t really need her to be there anymore.  They will get all self-righteous about their “choice” to sacrifice the extra income.  Oh, please, gag me.  If you can afford to stay home when your children no longer require daycare, that’s not a sacrifice.  But I digress.

Whatever the cause that made lefties aspire to the upper middle class suburban lifestyle also may reveal their utter lack of concern with the unemployed right now.  Poor people they can wring their hands over.  It makes them feel good to demonstrate their largess, like charitable subsistence wages that do not require yearly pledge drives and sustainable memberships.  But they can’t feel sorry for the  educated unemployed because those suckers demonstrate a complete lack of ability to network.  They brought this on themselves.  Then there is the 401k thing again.  You can’t get too worked up over the unemployed if they are the means by which your portfolio grows.  The Republicans are no doubt celebrating the serendipitous convergence of their drive to lower wages and the aspirational lefty’s current obsession with automatic rebalancing.  It will be shortlived but timing is everything in this game.

But Distant Ocean is a little late to this party.  We Democrats in Exile were way ahead of the game.  In fact, the current version of the Democratic Party of which Obama is its iconic member, isn’t really interested in representing Democrats.  They’re after something else:

I’m getting kind of tired of being written off by my party except for the whole, “We need your vote” thing. I want my nominee to pander to me. I want him to make me promises he does not intend to keep. I want to sit at the cool lunchtable. So, today, I am registering as an “unaffiliated” voter. I mean, I’m a well-paid, suburbanite, college educated, working in a very creative field and I can shoot latte like the best of them. Plus, my boobs don’t sag so I will fit right in with all of the other Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Models with PhDs in Architecture that Obama has in his plus column.

Now that I am “unaffiliated”, I’m like one of those really attractive singles on hot dating sites. Obama is going to want my vote big time. When I was just a Democrat, I was completely unsexy. But I have shed that old skin, sort of like dermal abrasion, and I’m brand sparkling new and beautiful and so much smarter than I was just a few minutes ago. And my mind is suddenly unburdened. Yeah! I’m no longer worried about Social Security because that was the *old coalition’s” problem. Or universal healthcare because shared responsibility means that I might actually have to acknowledge the working class. Or high gas prices, because if people are spending too much on gas to drive to work, they should just buy a house closer to each of their jobs. Duh!

Any day now, Obama supporters will be knocking at my door and ask me to get a membership in their exclusive club. I will be treated like a queen once they scan the voter’s rolls in NJ and see my name. It will be like, “Oooo, Riverdaughter is a “creative class” unaffiliated. Well, we must really ask her to do a round of golf with us or share a latte.” I will be pampered and courted and made to feel better than all of you losers who comment on this blog.

We shall see next year whether the high unemployment in the burbs, that dirty little secret behind the Lexus SUV windshield, rears its newly independent contractor (without bennies) head.  I know *I* will remember in November.

Moving on…

What are we to make of this?

Is that Joe Biden with a fascinator on his head?  I’ve read some attempts to decipher this picture but they’re all from guy journalist, trembling with admiration for Obama’s cool reserve.  So, here’s my take based on my years of experience in a male dominated field.

Hillary is the only woman at the table.  She may be stifling a yawn or covering her mouth to prevent an aerosol of viral saturated droplets from infecting Joe when she coughs.  Or she may be genuinely shocked, amazed and concerned by what she is seeing.  (It’s probably just a live blog from inside the compound) Regardless of her expression and intent, it will be interpreted as a moment of weakness that she feels anything at all, as if any of those guys have any experience at all gunning down anyone in hand to hand combat.  (Well, except for maybe the dude in the uniform)

She’s dressed professionally.  Some of the other guys look semi-professional too.  It reminds me of the male medicinal chemists I used to work with at the first pharma I worked for.  They wore a “uniform”: Khaki Docker chinos, long sleeved Oxford shirts (usually light blue) and sensible shoes.  But for presentations, they always kept a secret weapon in their desks- a tie.  Yep, you can be a hands on, smelly labrat but the minute you put that tie on, you automatically become the voice of authority.  Hillary would look stupid in a tie so she dresses professionally while Obama and Biden can get away with casual clothing because everyone knows that they can wear a tie if they want to.  So, the absence of a tie on either of them is sort of like negative space.  It’s there because it is so obviously NOT there.  All of the subordinate beta males in the room wear ties.

Hillary also looks like she’s the busiest.  She’s got stuff on her computer and her lap.  Her hair is done.  You can say what you want but Hillary is no slacker and she takes her responsibilities seriously.

This makes absolutely no difference to the guys in the room.

I guarantee it.