Read the comments here on Romney and the hair-cutting furor. I don’t know if it was just the mood I was in last night, but I laughed out loud many, many times.

Is Facebook making us more lonely?

Well, it’s not making me more lonely, because I’m not on it—although I suppose if I thought about it, the fact that I’m not on Facebook could make me feel more lonely. But I do think there’s a tendency for the computer in general to make people less likely to have face-to-face encounters, although paradoxically I’ve probably had more face-to-face encounters because of it, not fewer, because I’ve sometimes met fellow bloggers and even a few readers who might live near me or near places I often visit.

A critique of the article is offered here, but somehow I don’t buy it. I think the author isn’t going far enough back in time to make the proper comparison.

What I’ve seen of Facebook tends to remind me of those annual Christmas letters. We can create a narrative of our lives that looks good, whatever it has to do with reality.

Kind of like in this song:

And, of course, someone did take our Kodachrome away in 2009, although it wasn’t mama. It was just the declining market, due to digital photography.

You know when I first noticed the decline of face-to-face socializing, at least in the community where I lived? The 80s, with the advent of the video store. People didn’t have to go out to the movies, or have people over to schmooze or play cards or whatever people used to do (that’s what my parents used to do). Of course, they could rent a movie and have people over to watch that—and of course, sometimes that happened—but it was really easy, after a hard day, to just rent the movie and kick back at home alone, or just the two of you. I used to meet half the people I knew at the local video store on a Saturday night, getting ready to watch movies at home rather than going out together as they used to. Now, even that minimal amount of socializing at the video store doesn’t have to happen; we can stream the movies directly.

Progress. Convenience. But what is lost?

The WaPo has trouble getting its Romney-the-wicked-and-abusive-gay-bashing-haircutter story straight. A source it quoted in the WaPo story as having “long been bothered by the…incident” said in an ABC interview the next day that he was not present when it happened and didn’t know about it until he was informed of it this year by the WaPo.

Well, I guess a couple of months (or weeks? or days?) can seem a long time when you’re deeply, deeply troubled by something.

Big Journalism writes that there’s more: the WaPo has done a stealth correction on its original piece at its website, eliminating the incorrect assertion without owning up to the change. Not proper journalistic standards, but then the whole piece isn’t up to proper journalistic standards, which are rarely honored any more so who cares?

And two sisters of the supposedly harassed fellow-student of Romney’s in question, John Lauber, have denied knowledge of the story and issued this statement:

“The family of John Lauber is releasing a statement saying the portrayal of John is factually incorrect and we are aggrieved that he would be used to further a political agenda. There will be no more comments from the family.” Said [his sister] Christine, “If he were alive today, he would be furious [about the story].”

Ah, but he’s not alive today, which makes him the perfect victim for the WaPo’s purposes. And the disclaimers won’t matter to those who already support Obama, and maybe some others, too, who won’t necessarily get word of the corrections, as the WaPo is no doubt fully aware.

Allahpundit says what I was thinking:

I thought we were going to spend the next six months having a dumb conversation about whether Romney’s too rich and square and “out of touch” to get the economy back on track. But no, between this and the mind-numbingly stupid Seamus attacks, we’re actually going to have a dumb conversation about whether Romney was some sort of psycho several decades ago.

What’s next?

[NOTE: for those with short memories, the title of my post refers to this.

And yes, of course, the contrast with the lack of interest in Obama's school days---except those facts that support the preferred narrative---is profound. But that's to be expected.

And by the way, while we're at it, that the original allegations have anything to do with actually being gay is preposterous. I was around in the mid-60s, when boys with long hair (such as my very heterosexual first boyfriend, for example) were routinely taunted as looking like "girls" without there being any particularly deep gay sub-context.]

…read this article, and then start reading the comments section.

…of iPads for apes.

Obama’s declaration about gay marriage is getting an unbelievable amount of press.

It’s as though it actually means something, other than that for some reason Obama has decided to abandon his pretense of being against gay marriage. It’s being framed as everything from a political profile in courage—following his conscience even though it will hurt him with voters—to a ploy to placate gay backers and rake in more money. I think it’s the latter, plus a need to shore up his base—a political calculation, just as his previous antagonism to gay marriage was a political calculation. And in that, he’s not much different from many politicians, although a bit smoother and cynical than some.

And I don’t think Joe Biden’s preparatory remarks were a slip-up or an accident.

That said, I don’t think it will affect much in this election, despite the enormous brouhaha. How many voters will change their minds because of this? I can’t imagine it would be many.

As expected, for the most part the press has dutifully jumped on board. Not only are there the usual fawning tributes to Obama, but there’s been a full court press to paint Romney as not only against gay marriage but guilty of bigotry against gays. It’s been quite carefully orchestrated, I think, beginning with blaming Romney for the resignation of his gay foreign policy advisor Richard Grennell, and now the ludicrous dredging-up of somebody’s memories of something Romney supposedly said to some gay kid in the classroom back in the mid-60s.

This is what the WaPo calls big news these days. And if it were about Obama instead, you better believe it would be under lock and key, like his grades, or something like this, an incident that happened not in high school but in 2003, and is not a rumor but a videotape.

The best comment about the Romney revelations was this one in a thread at Althouse, by “Pastafarian”:

I’ve also heard, from unnamed sources, that in second grade, [Mitt] pulled the pigtails of the girl seated in front of him — her eyes welling with tears. The War on Women was being waged even then.

…does the expected flip-flop on gay marriage.

…while looking nicely coiffed and wearing tasteful makeup.

And yet I’m not going to hit her for hypocrisy. Hillary Clinton is now sixty-four years old, and although she’s no glamour puss, she looks perfectly fine for her age. Every now and then there’s an unflattering photo of her; so what? My ratio of unflattering to flattering photos is about 100 to 1 these days, and I’m not being constantly followed by photographers salivating to catch me in at my worst, like Hillary is.

What’s more, Hillary never really cared about style. She just pretended to in order to further Bill’s career, and then her own. And whatever happened to cool their marriage over the years (and it was plenty), I’m of the mind that at least in the beginning there was some basic heterosexual sexual chemistry.

Many many people have disagreed with me about that, but I offer exhibits A and B:

This is absolutely terrible on both the human and the economic level, and for the Russian aviation industry specifically:

…[A] a Sukhoi SuperJet-100, the first completely new post-Soviet jetliner, went missing during a promotional tour in Indonesia.

The plane is presumed crashed, although Russia’s official RIA-Novosti agency said that darkness and fog have prevented search teams from reaching the site where the plane is believed to have gone down during a demonstration flight near Mt. Salak, about 50 miles from Jakarta.

Russian aviation has been especially troubled for decades, and this new design was supposed to reverse that trend. It had been developed in cooperation with Western giants such as Boeing. But something seems to have gone terribly wrong. Design flaw? Pilot error? Maintenance problems? Perhaps even sabotage?

At this point no one knows, but this is ominous:

But Russia’s airline industry has been hit with a series of scandals, including revelations that many engineers working in aircraft factories have inadequate or fake diplomas.

As for the passengers, they were a bunch of VIPs:

Among the 50 people on board the plane were potential buyers from several major local airlines. Reporters also filled seats as did several people from the Russian Embassy…

The plane, which had its maiden flight in 2008, had seemed so promising until now that 170 orders had already been placed around the world. Indonesia was one of the largest potential customers.

Richard Mourdock primaried and yesterday ousted six-term Republican senator Dick Lugar in Indiana, and the MSM is very upset. As Michael Brendan Dougherty of Business Insider succinctly points out:

The only time the press weeps at the loss of a Republican Senator is when he is replaced with a more conservative one.

Bingo. Lugar was the MSM’s kind of Republican, and I say this even though I’m hardly against RINOs in principle—in liberal states, that is, as I’ve written many times on this blog. But reading Lugar’s paeans to a bipartisanship that at this point exists only in his own mind, and is unilateral at that, is sad. The man isn’t just a RINO, he’s a dino—unfortunately, because I happen to agree with sentiments such as the following, at least in principle (in practice they have gone the way of the dodo):

Legislators should have an ideological grounding and strong beliefs identifiable to their constituents. I believe I have offered that throughout my career. But ideology cannot be a substitute for a determination to think for yourself, for a willingness to study an issue objectively, and for the fortitude to sometimes disagree with your party or even your constituents. Like Edmund Burke, I believe leaders owe the people they represent their best judgment.

Too often bipartisanship is equated with centrism or deal cutting. Bipartisanship is not the opposite of principle. One can be very conservative or very liberal and still have a bipartisan mindset. Such a mindset acknowledges that the other party is also patriotic and may have some good ideas. It acknowledges that national unity is important, and that aggressive partisanship deepens cynicism, sharpens political vendettas, and depletes the national reserve of good will that is critical to our survival in hard times.

It seems these days that the Democrats’ specialty is to be highly partisan and uncompromising, and to pretend it’s only Republicans who are that way. The press, of course, co-operates in trying to foster that notion. Witness “Lugar’s Demise and the Constitutional Crisis” by Jonathan Chait, which castigates those partisan, monolithic Republicans and pretends the Democrats are a moderate, compromising group:

Incumbent senators used to have almost no fear that they might be deposed by members of their own party for ideological or partisan deviations, and now that threat has become the most powerful disciplinary tool available to activists. And it’s a tool, moreover, that is being deployed asymmetrically – the homogeneously conservative Republican Party has winnowed out virtually all its moderates, while the Democratic Party remains a looser coalition of moderates and liberals.

Like, for example, Joe Lieberman.

And then there’s the little matter of judicial appointments. Lugar voted to confirm both Kagan and Sotomayor, one of the reasons conservatives turned against him. Chait rails on and on about how the nasty partisan Republicans have blocked Obama’s perfectly reasonable judicial appointments, but I wonder what Chait had to say about this when it was happening:

Soon after the inauguration of Bush as president in January 2001, many liberal academics became worried that he would begin packing the federal judiciary with conservative jurists. Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman wrote an article in the February 2001 edition of the liberal magazine The American Prospect that encouraged the use of the filibuster to stop Bush from placing any nominee on the Supreme Court during his first term. In addition, law professors Cass Sunstein (University of Chicago) and Laurence Tribe (Harvard), along with Marcia Greenberger of the National Women’s Law Center, counseled Senate Democrats in April 2001 “to scrutinize judicial nominees more closely than ever.” Specifically, they said, “there was no obligation to confirm someone just because they are scholarly or erudite.”

On May 9, 2001, President Bush announced his first eleven court of appeals nominees in a special White House ceremony. This initial group of nominees included Roger Gregory, a Clinton recess-appointed judge to the fourth circuit, as a peace offering to Senate Democrats. There was, however, immediate concern expressed by Senate Democrats and liberal groups like the Alliance for Justice. Democratic Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York said that the White House was “trying to create the most ideological bench in the history of the nation.”

As a result, from June 2001 to January 2003, when the Senate in the 107th Congress was controlled by the Democrats, many conservative appellate nominees were stalled in the Senate Judiciary Committee and never given hearings or committee votes.

The pretense that Republicans have a monopoly on partisanship is, quite simply, propagandist poppycock.

Lugar is also 80 years old, which might have had something to do with his defeat, because challenger Mourdock (a name that unfortunately reminds me of both “warlock” and H.G. Wells’ Morlocks), although no spring chicken at sixty, is considerably younger than Lugar.

Will Mourdock win Indiana’s senate seat against Democratic challenger Joe Donnelly? The consensus of opinion is “probably,” although I think it’s way too soon to tell. If so, though, Indiana Republicans saw an opportunity to get a younger, more conservative senator in office, and they understandably seized it.

…is a plus-sized model.

Go figure.

Richard Cohen advises Obama to read Robert Caro’s latest biography of LBJ and learn how to make friends and influence people like Johnson did.

Dream on. In an alternate universe, maybe. In this one, a person can learn a few things and change somewhat as he/she goes through life, but change that basic virtually never happens.

Obama will never become a people person, like LBJ. Johnson relished pressing the flesh, and wheeling and dealing in the Senate for the many years he was a titanic figure there, persuading and arm-twisting and threatening and cajoling. Obama’s power is through the power of his silver tongue (I always saw it as tin, but I know a lot of people differ), his extension of executive power through czars and agencies, his reliance on a couple of leaders in Congress such as Nancy Pelosi (as long as Democrats were in charge, that is), and the assistance of his fawning allies in the press.

It’s hard to come to any conclusion except that Obama is a cold fish, as Cohen seems to recognize. Our current president is uncomfortable among people and crowds, preferring to stay with a small group of very trusted advisors, and only appearing for a short time at events and doing the bare minimum of schmoozing.

He’s never really had to do more than that. He looks down on people from his Olympian heights, removed and distant, above it all, seemingly calm and thoughtful. That’s what’s always worked for him in the past, and it’s suited his temperament, as well.

It’s ludicrous for Cohen to expect a man with that personality, and who spent only a couple of years of a single term in Congress before running for president, to have somehow amassed the skills and the knowledge base of LBJ, a master of power, people, and Congress. Very few people could emulate him, and Obama is probably the least likely person to do so.