- In Canteyville, USA, a warning for Washington lawmakers
By Kathleen Parker
Sunday, April 4, 2010; A13
CANTEYVILLE, S.C.
If thy name is Incumbent, you might want to start packing up those D.C. tchotchkes.
November is likely to be a cruel month.
That, at least, is the view from "Canteyville," which you won't find on a map. There is no town by this name in South Carolina, though there ought to be. Canteys are as common as front porches in this part of the country.
For these purposes, Canteyville is a state of mind, a late-night invention born of spirited conversation at a sporting clay club in the state's unfortunately dubbed "Midlands."
...The Obama administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress have acted on the conviction that they know best and that citizens eventually will come around. This may sometimes have been historically true, but here's another truth: If you can't convincingly explain the beauty of a policy to the educated, hardworking people of Canteyville, you might have a policy problem.
- Steele, strip clubs and the GOP's family values
By Yael T. Abouhalkah, Kansas City Star Editorial Page columnist
Poor Michael Steele. In the latest line of "when did you stop beating your wife" questioning, the RNC Chairman is having to deny that he spent any funds at a high-cost strip club.
The Republican National Committee went on the offensive Monday, saying it will investigate the expense by an unnamed RNC official of $1,946 at the Voyeur West Hollywood strip club in February.
Here's the media report that started the ruckus Monday.
And here's part of the RNC's response about Steele's potential involvement in the strip club spending:
The chairman was never at the location in question, he had no knowledge of the expenditure, nor does he find the use of committee funds at such a location at all acceptable.
Take that.
Still, the use of Republican National Committee funds for that kind of expense would appear to violate one of the GOP's cardinal rules:
Don't do anything that makes us look hypocritical when we talk about good old American values.
- Ersatz America
by digby
…But contrary to Parker's romantic view of what life is like outside the green room, there are actually a whole lot of Americans who aren't white, conservative Republicans. And they actually are far more indicative of "salt-of-the-earth-hardworking-regular folks" since virtually none of them are wealthy southerners living on faux farms playing at being good old boys on the week-end.
When these Villagers make one of their anthropological treks out into the country and come back with their report, the Real Americans they seek are always either white midwestern conservatives, white western conservatives or white Southern conservatives --- usually rural, always "small town" and often sitting around a table eating and and complaining about how the world has gone to hell and a handbasket. It's like they all set out to find Real America based on their memories of 1960s TV Mayberry --- a world that never really existed and certainly doesn't exist now except among wealthy land-owners trying to create a bucolic vacation spot to entertain their urban socialite friends.
Her America is a nation that exists only in the Villagers' and Disney Imagineers' minds. But it ends up infecting the politics of this country because these people all reinforce each others' fantasies when they get back to the "greenrooms and talkshows" and give a completely skewed impression of who "Real Americans" are and what "Real Americans" think. Oddly, it turns out they always think exactly the same way the villagers do. Go figure.
