seriously?

1. Senator Brown posed nude for Cosmopolitan to help pay tuition for law school?

2. Senator Brown, when questioned about Elizabeth Warren’s statement that she kept her clothes on, and took out student loans to pay her bills, responded with “Thank God”?

3. Cosmopolitan carries pictures of naked men? Since when?

But seriously, Credoaction.com circulated a petition this morning asking Senator Brown to apologize. It went on for two pages.

I have just a couple of questions.

First: Are we so short on attention span or lacking in commitment to an idea we must have a link to click on every three column inches or we won’t be bothered? Is it too much work to scroll up in an email? The problem is, if you’re like me and don’t really like to be told what to do or what to think, by the third iteration you’re probably just feeling irritated and/or rebellious. (No. I don’t wanna. You can’t make me.)

And, while his comment on her supposed level of attractiveness may be what is making some people angry, isn’t what we really should be getting angry about the fact that he could pose nude and dismiss it with an offhand comment while any woman doing the same thing wouldn’t be elected township clerk?

It seems to me like this is all just a bunch of noise to distract us from some of the real issues at hand.

Why don’t we talk, instead, about what Ms. Warren said so eloquently, and which, as far as I can tell, remains unanswered?

 

My feelings about this, this pathological avoidance of actually talking about things that actually matter, are being fanned by the latest statistic:

So, while police posts are closed, and our roads and bridges crumble, and unemployed benefits are cut, and disadvantaged college students limp to class because they can’t afford health care for their chronic neurological problems, and art and music programs are removed from schools, and teacher’s pay is cut, CEOs who make four hundred and seventy five TIMES what the average worker makes shouldn’t be asked to pay more in taxes.

And this opinion is popular among the masses because ???

I DON’T GET IT!

Sorry, I’ve gone way off on a tangent.

Or maybe not. Tangents seem to be the method of choice by most politicos to deflect actual conversation, actual decisions, actual acts. Better just to talk about stuff, and say a lot of things that don’t matter, or don’t mean anything.

Mitt Romney, today: “If you want a president who wants the United States to be the most powerful nation in the world, I’m your man. If not, well, you have that President already.”

Oh, that.

The questions of a) what makes a country “powerful,” and b) why does the United States have to always be the MOST powerful (isn’t that what kind of pisses off everybody else about us?) remain to be answered.

Maybe tomorrow.