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Jeb Bush Really Trying to Screw Marco Rubio


It feels almost personal.

While he’s not come out of the gates too elegantly, Jeb came out of the gates not to subtly trying to hamstring Rubio.

Jeb came out an immediately seized the one issue Rubio was hoping would set him apart (and also mitigate, for the general election, his radical Tea Party-ism), immigration, and ran with all across the Sunday shows and dominated national coverage in a way that Rubio has failed to do (beyond reaching those Beltway pundits who are only read by other Beltway pundits).

And, he’s tied up all the big Florida fundraisers. This will hamper even Rubio’s ability to raise money for his Senate account, because he can transfer those federal dollars over to a presidential bid, so bundlers won’t want to fill that account either, but where it might really hurt is in those pseudo-outside groups (SuperPACs, 501C4s, etc), who won’t get some of those $25k-250k checks to fund his travel around the country, ostensibly doing something else, but really campaigning, and also to plain old promote his name and attack his enemies.

And all this before Jeb even gets into the game.

I still don’t think Jeb’ll get the nod. I think his time has passed. But he’ll have some of the best knife fighters in the game on his side and they’ll all be looking to take out a piece of Rubio. I suspect that, to some extent, Jeb just plain doesn’t like Rubio rising so high, so fast and stealing his thunder and that he’ll pull a Dick Gephardt (who basically sacrificed his own campaign in 2004 to take down Howard Dean) and just try to see to it that Rubio doesn’t get it (which could take the form of beating up on Rubio for President campaign or just making it too hard for Rubio, so that he stays in the Senate and misses his best/only chance to run).

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Poor Marco Rubio


He just can’t catch a break. After a solid twenty-four hours about his unique, humiliating brand of physical comedy (desperate dives for the water bottle, plus a nationally broadcast flop sweat), the story has switched to, ‘in our frenzy to write about Waterbottlegate, we neglected to point out how awful the actual speech was.’

When this happened to Bobby ‘Kenneth the Page’ Jindal, it got his rising name wiped off the shortlist when Mitt was looking for veep.

A smart consultant might have told him not to deliver the rebuttal, but apparently, Rubio either doesn’t have such consultants right now or he’s not listening to them.

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The Graveyard


While no one could have predicted that Rubio would suffer from a hilarious flop sweat and embarrassingly intense dry mouth on national television, the slot following a president’s state of the union address is a notable graveyard of failed national ambitions; a high risk opportunity without a lot of real upside (you’ll always look less presidential than a president addressing congress and the nation).

Which leads me to ask: did Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, and Bobby Jindal (himself a noted failure in the same slot) engineer Rubio’s appearance just to take him down a notch?

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A Moment Of Silence


Please bow your heads as we honor the passing of Marco Rubio’s chances of being president.

I kid, of course, but yeah… I mean he actually gave a decent, though bland and uninspired, speech, but that dry mouth and his desperate lip smacks before grabbing the water bottle… his handlers may be telling Rubio that it won’t overshadow his introduction to the national stage, but, um, yeah, it totally overshadowed his introduction to the national stage and when his name is mentioned for the next four years, this will always be brought up (and in eight years, he’s going to be bald, and that’s never good for one’s presidential ambitions).

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Reviewed: Henry V At The Folger Shakespeare Library


Last night, I got my Christmas present – a night at the theater with a lovely lady.

She took me to see the Folger’s production of Henry V.

Back in the day (well, back in 1989), my friend Matt and I were taken by Beverly and Joe, two grown ups (Matt and I being in junior high) from my church (that was during an interlude in my longstanding atheism/agnosticism), to see the Kenneth Branagh movie of the play. It was definitely one of those defining moments in my life: the classics were freaking cool! People were executed, slaughtered in the field, hung from the neck until dead (I was a fourteen year old boy, so this was the kind of stuff that impressed me).

This Henry V was something very different.

The entire production emphasized the stage bound aspect of the play. The set itself was a series of scaffoldings which were set with beams on ropes that were partially lowered at various times to indicate various locales, but which still served to emphasize the artificiality of the set. Actors also played multiple roles, which, again, brought the audience’s gaze onto the fact that this was a play and not real. It wasn’t as explicit as that moment in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (the book, not the movie, people) when the author pulls up short and flat out tells the reader that this is just a book s/he is reading and that the characters aren’t real and none of this really happened, but it was pretty explicit. Though, of course, the broad sweep of events in Henry V actually happened.

Henry himself was played by Andrew Schwartz, instead of the usual actor, who was, apparently, ill last night. While he was at times uncertain and stumbled over a line or two, that also served the purpose. While still making clear the artificiality of the entire act of staging a play, it also really pushed the costs of war. This Henry was callow and uncertain and didn’t truly understand the cost of his actions to others around him. It’s actually hard to imagine anyone else playing the part in this production.

The notes in the playbill talked a good bit about how the quagmire-ish conflict in Ireland informed Shakespeare’s play. I don’t know whether it was intentional, but having read that, I can’t help but think of this and the Iraq War. The staged aspect brought to mind the political staging of the war by neocons for our consumption. At the end of the play, the Chorus reminds the audience that things went to hell in a hand basket almost immediately after the events depicted, what with  the disastrous, brief reign of Henry’s son (Henry VI) and the whole War of the Roses thing. So the entire episode could be viewed as the initial, made for television, stage of the Iraq War, when the statue toppled, before… the entire rest of the war and occupation.

Anyway, the run of Henry V has been extended, so go see it or something.

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Oxford Exchange.


I came across this list, from the ABA, of the new, indie bookstores that opened up last year.

I scrolled through, looking for places I’d lived. Dover, Delaware has a new bookstore. That’s good. My sister in Delaware is moving to Shanghai and the kids are all grown and almost finally out of little, ol’ Delaware, so I won’t be going back so much, but it’s still good to think that, should I find myself returning, there will be a new bookstore to replace some of the one’s lost (Atlantic Books, I knew him Horatio!).

Then, lo and behold, Tampa! Oxford Exchange opened up near the University of Tampa (where my Delaware sister’s youngest child has applied to attend).

If you clicked on the link, you’ll see that they are really just advertising their food.

But I sent my parents there on a scouting expedition. My mother is a radical anglophile and so I suggested that father take advantage of the English style afternoon teas they offer and get on my mother’s good side.

He took my advice and I was assured that the tea came with scones and clotted cream and all that good stuff.

Also, that it’s a good bookstore. The clerk was knowledgeable, had some suggestions based on my mother’s affection for pre-war novels from England.

So, going to have to take a road trip some day soon.

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End Of The Road For Jeb


It’s getting close to the moment when we can finally call it quits on the presidential ambitions of a certain John Ellis, ‘call me Jeb!’ Bush.

Last year, his very presence would have sent Mitt packing to one of his many mansions and while he might not have won, he couldn’t have done worse than Mitt who, contrary (as it turned out) to his reputation for managerial acumen, proved himself unqualified to so much as lead his merry band of maladjusted misfits out of a paper bag.

Now, not only has Rubio taken on the dubious role of Florida Republicans’ favorite son, it’s not even clear if an ideological space left for him.

Rubio, Rand, and Jindal look to be everyone’s favorite flavor of tea bag. Christie is the ‘can do’ pragmatist for the rare Republican primary voter who is looking for the bare minimum of competence. Ryan is the super fav of voters who want a president capable of looking boyishly handsome and super dreamy while failing basic math on national television. Right now, it’s hard to see Jeb finding room anywhere except next to an unloved sad sack like Jon Huntsman, fighting to play the role on CNN of the man everyone thought would one day be president but wound up never even coming all that close.

That Bush-ie running for Railroad Commissioner in Texas might one day amount to something, but in 2016, ole Jebbie will likely be meditating on how his best days ended a decade before.

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Booksellers’ Favorite Books


Guernica published some favorite books of 2012, as named by some independent bookstore owners.

Included in that list is Mojo, an indie book and music store in Tampa, and Atomic, which is located in Baltimore and is also the place where I bought myself a copy of Andre Breton’s Mad Love to tide me over just an our before checking myself in for surgery (though I more bought the book to tide myself over for the recovery, rather than surgery itself, for which I was thankfully, chemically knocked out).

 

J R by William Gaddis

J R by William Gaddis is a novel that comes recommended not just for its relevance to various financial crises and burst bubbles that have afflicted us since its publication in 1975, but for its unique style and meticulous genius that made Gaddis quintessentially representative of post-modern literature and a direct influence on an immeasurable glut of novelists to come. At over 700 pages, comprising mostly of unattributed dialogue and no chapter breaks, J R is a sometimes rather difficult and often hilarious and prophetic epic about the role of money in twentieth-century America told through a middle-school student who learns about stock and commodities trading from a field trip and builds a financial empire over his school’s payphone. Gaddis has an unmatched ear for human speech and the kind of characteristic patience that is necessary to construct tomes like this and his first novel, The Recognitions, a masterful thousand-pager about authenticity and forgery published twenty years prior. A dense and rewarding modern novel, J Ris made of the stuff that will make any hungry reader feel full.

Mojo Books & Music is located in the USF area of Tampa, FL. Mojo features a wide array of used and new books, vinyl records, cds and dvds—not to mention a serious coffee and tea bar.

 

 

Vacant Lot And Modular Chain-Link Fence Set by Gary Kachadourian

Local artist Gary Kachadourian has made a number of posters and booklets of seemingly mundane items found largely in urban areas over the years. On the surface, his projects seem like lo-fi photocopied photographs, but they are actually incredibly detailed, hand drawings that are hyper realistic. Vacant Lot is a 1/32nd scale, cut-n-fold paper set of a far too common image in the city—a fenced off, vacant lot, complete with a discarded shipping pallet. It’s an interactive work of art, in handmade, booklet form.

Atomic Books is Baltimore’s famous, weirdo, underground, alternative indie bookstore.
Literary Finds for Mutated Minds!

—Benn Ray, Co-owner, Atomic Books

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2 To 1


I said earlier that Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio made very different bets on the (first; there will be more) fiscal cliff compromise.

Well, the third major contender (right now; don’t tell me things are in flux and it’s way too early – I know that, but that isn’t stopping Rubio from visiting Iowa and Christie from pushing his way into national television), Chris Christie, has taken that bet and is putting his chips on the same hand as the one Ryan assembled.

Christie is betting that competent, reality based and compromise-based governing will be a winner in 2016. I mean, it will almost certainly be winner in the general election (real compromise; not ‘moving a miniscule fraction over from from the most extreme right and calling that compromise’ compromise). What the bet consists of is the hope that primary voters will forgive such things in the hope of putting forward someone who could conceivably win a general election – which is not where the GOP is right now, but everyone pretty much agrees they need to inch over in that direction if they ever want to be more than a frighteningly angry mob shouting in a large room in front of C-SPAN cameras on the south side of the Capitol building.

We’ll see.

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Two Bets


Two figures are currently the de facto frontrunners for the still non-existent 2016 GOP presidential nomination contest: Wisconsin wunderkind and math-challenged pseudo-intellectual, Paul Ryan; and the man constitutionally incapable of balancing his own checkbook, Florida’s favorite cipher, Marco Rubio.

Rubio made his career on the successful bet that, in a Republican primary, Tea Party dog whistles could derail one of Florida’s biggest political giants. As one of of only eight Senators to vote against the first step in averting the so-called fiscal cliff, Rubio doubled down on that bet.

Oddly, it was Ryan who went the other way. Ryan made his career by churning out factually suspect and arithmetically inaccurate reams of paper that purport to provide political heft to the economic and budgetary delusions of the far right. Yet… it was Ryan who made the daring bet that things would be different in 2016. That he could win his party’s presidential nomination and also cast votes based on some tenuous grasp of the fiscal situation at hand. It was a bold move, and I’m sure there was some behind the scenes wrangling with Boehner (maybe involving threats to Ryan’s continued chairmanship of the Budget Committee? I don’t know, I’m guessing), but it was still an interesting and bold gambit.

In short, Rubio bets that the GOP stays crazy for the forseeable future, while Ryan bets that (necessary) political evolution will speed up in time for his to make a play for the nod.

I never thought I’d say this, but I hope Ryan’s right.