Thursday, March 31, 2016

The Confirmed Bachelor (CB) Hall of Fame

To those ambiguous people of all genders and all
Sexual orientations
Who plainly exist, and just as plainly do not
Appear in any sitcoms
Who are not necessarily wholly opposed to the idea
Of sexual or romantic partnership
But for whom it has always just ranked... well,
Rather low on their list of priorities -- But wait, you ask --

Friday, March 11, 2016

Doublethink

At last night's GOP debate, Marco Rubio let slip a phrase about something called "human rights." What are those again? They certainly sound incongruous in this setting. This was, so far as I can recall, the first reference anywhere in any of these debates to the idea that human rights a) exist at all; and b) are a good thing. The phrase in context reads: "There has not been a single democratic opening; not a single change on the island in human rights. In fact, things are worse than they were before this opening." The island in question is Cuba -- this is the Miami debate the Thursday before the March 15th primaries, after all.

The remark appears in the debate transcript not long after another, quite different reference to Cuba. This one shows up in Rubio's sanguinary meditation on "the way you defeat terrorists.":
"[I]f we capture any of these terrorists alive, they're not going to have the right to remain silent. And they're not going to go to a courtroom in Manhattan. They're going to go to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and we will find out everything they know and we'll do so legally."