Sunday, July 06, 2014

The summer's self-help book

As so many begin to realize Barack Obama is just another corporatist War Hawk and grow disenchanted, Peggy Noonan shows up with the summer's self-help book How To Stop Loving That Man.  Using her usual mixture of personal stories and shoddy research, Peggy explains how you can walk away from a political crush.  This is the second chapter of her new book.


noonan


Sure things seem tough but there are tougher moments.  Take it from me, the Honey Boo Boo of the 90s,  there are tougher moments.

Admitting the orgiastic moments are over really is a first and easy step. Especially compared to all the heartache and pain that awaits.

Sure, kids today in The Cult of St. Barack think they invented something new.

They didn't.

We were worshiping George Dubs from the moment he swaggered across the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln and drooling over that mounded package while Barack Obama was still dreaming of one day becoming a US senator.

It was years later when I grasped that if you put tight straps on either side of any small object, the tightening will make it protrude.

Obama might be able to pull of something similar -- even in his Mom jeans.

And before George Dubs there was Abe Lincoln himself who campaigned shaking his impressive rail splitter and with the slogan, "Come up and see me sometime."



The key here is to remember that you are in a political marriage.

This candidate showed up and caught your eye while promising so much.

And when the fireworks no longer go off, when the passion has fled, you should as well.

As the noblewoman and avant-garde artiste Kim Kardashian once put it, "My decision to end my marriage was such a risk to lose ratings and lose my fan base.  I had to take that risk for my inner peace and to be happy with myself."

Because it's one thing to be trapped in a bad real life marriage but why be trapped in a bad political marriage?

Ditch that man, ditch him.

That's the great thing about this country, every four years we have a presidential election.

I can almost be faithful for four years.

Well, I can almost pay attention for four years, anyway.

Okay, more like two.

 But I can fake it for one so that adds up to three.

That's good enough because the fourth year is all about selecting the new man.


After the great HW and his thousand points, I flirted at length with Bob Dole, George Dubs, John McCain and Mitt Romney.

Heck, for one drunken night in July of 2007, I flirted with Dennis Kucinich after mistaking him for Ron Paul


Hormones.

It's all about hormones, as Thomas Hobbes explained in Leviathan as he outlined the social contract theory.

If there's anything I've learned from my many years of writing social commentary and political analysis, it's that Hobbes was correct, it is all about hormones.

We vote on hormones, we feed on hormones, we live on hormones.

And we always need that new rush.

Obama's tired and you deserve better.

And you will find it once you are willing to admit that it's over.

You need to be firm but loving with yourself.  Remember that it was Socrates who first popularized the phrase, "Did I do that?"


The really good thing about making this decision in 2014 is that it gives you all of 2015 to get in better shape.  (See my third chapter  "Fiscal Restraints and Bondage, Tighter Thighs and Autoerotic Asphyxia.")

While all the others come off like a herd of Monica Lewinskys, you'll be the Jennifer Fitzgerald of the bunch.