Progressive bloggers will be reluctant to mention Obama's vulnerability because they will not want to take the chance that they have inadvertently opened Republican eyes to a gambit they had not already noted. (Karl Rove enthusiastically encourages all underestimations of his cunning and shrewdness. [You don't believe that? Just ask him if the World's Laziest Journalist has him pegged with complete accuracy. Go ahead. We dare you to ask him. {He will probably deny knowing me.}])
Cynical columnists, who delight in venturing into taboo territory, might write a spoiler column about this opening for a possible Republican strategy. Any such renegade pundit would probably get more Democratic appreciation if they just inject obscure and esoteric cultural minutiae into their efforts. Such as?
Up until Thursday, June 2, 2011, this columnist had never heard of the writer from Dublin named Charles Lever. On that day we betook ourselves to the location in Berkeley CA which is our secret source of pop cultural delights and bought four books:
Bernard Shaw's "Major Barbara," H. G. Wells' "Tono-Bungay," Hesketh Pearson's "Oscar Wilde His Life and Wit," and Robert L. Heilbroner's " The Worldly Philosophers." We purchase all four for less than a quarter of a dollar.
Two of the books, Pearson's and Shaw's, mentioned the Irish writer named Charles Lever. We consulted "The Penguin Companion to English Literature," edited by David Daiches, and learned about the existence of a 34 volume collection of his work or a 37 volume collection edited by Lever's daughter.
The four books contained enough raw materials for about a thousand columns in the Life-Arts field.
However, on Friday June 3, 2011, a friend lent us a copy of Douglas Brinkley's "The Majic Bus," and since we are very enthusiastic about road books we will have to read that one.
Then we went for a walk and stumbled across a bargain bin copy of Donald L. Miller's "Masters of the Air," and since we have a mystical connection to B-17 bombers from WWII, we will have to read every word of that book before writing a review.
That night we finished watching a VHS tape of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," and realized there was enough new material in that old film for several columns. The year 1939 is considered by some critics to have been Hollywood's Halcyon Year and Mr. Smith was nominated for 11 Oscars - . The theme of an honest man fighting a political machine backed by media ownership, might have some relevance for non Fox-addicted political thinkers. The idea that patriotic idealism is preferable to greed and bribery might be worth a column.
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