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Is it is or is it isn't?

 Few former American leaders can so quickly piss off his or her opponents the way former President Jimmy Carter can.

 One doesn’t have to read all the top right-wing blogs or listen to the major reactionary talk radio shows to know that anger is dripping like blood from the Carter-haters today after he stated what many less prominent people have been saying for days. That is, of course, that the behavior behind the “You Lie” outcry of Republican U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina is steeped in racism.

 Now it is no surprise that everyone and their dog who supports Wilson says there is no truth to such a charge. Even President Obama’s press secretary Robert Gibbs says his boss doesn’t agree with Carter’s assessment. We are left to take the Big Man’s word as to whether such a statement from the first African-American president (Obama’s daddy and not Obama himself if you will remember was born in Africa) is sincere, playing politics or are all of the above. Therein is the problem “Bigger than Dallas” as people say down here in Texas unless they live in Houston or Fort Worth.

 Racism is not something one can see like, say, a three-headed chicken. It is not an olfactory sense like whiffing the aroma of a dead mackerel on the beach. Nor is racism to be heard (well, at least the feeling or behavior itself can’t be heard), tasted (except in some rare instances of poisoning) or touched (fill in your own exception.)

 You may call Joe Wilson a racist all you want. One might say that much of the dyspeptic right-wing political actions as of late certainly appear as being spurred by racism, such as keeping the children from watching their president give a speech on staying in school. But the fact is, if Joe Wilson says he isn’t a racist, there is little short of some legal action such as a criminal conviction for a hate crime that will prove it. Ditto for those who screamed that they wanted to save their little innocent darlings from being indoctrinated by Nazi-commie-pinko-homo-freaking-Democrats.

 What makes the charge of racism even more difficult to prove is that save for those who dress like punk-rock icon Henry Rollins, as in his guest gig on FX’s “Sons of Anarchy,” most racists are not going to show outwards signs of racism nor admit their feelings.

 Some racists will jump up and down, shout, knock the crap out of, perhaps even kill you if you dare label them a racists. Why? Because they do not see themselves as such. It’s not nice to be called a racist. It’s kind of taboo.

 On the other hand, if you were raised in a culture in which your parents or grandparents, neighbors and even your society expressed racial prejudice — such as the “White” and “Colored” water fountains and rest rooms I used to see growing up — that doesn’t make you a racist.

 If anyone believed that racial prejudice was going to be quickly dispatched by the election of a black (and half-white) president then perhaps now it is (way, way past) time to come back to reality.

 That there are those in politics who are using the so-called “race card” to their advantage — on both sides — likewise shouldn’t be shocking. That is because the race card is a trick card. It is there when someone says it is there, and it’s not there when someone says it is not.

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At least I influenced one person.

 Only hours after my anger inspired a boycott against all things South Carolina over the “You Lie” outburst by Idiot Joe Wilson I immediately realized I had just written out for all to read another of my bonehead ideas.

 Perhaps instead, I thought, those of us ticked over such a monumental expression of disrespect against our government, our president and our political system should meet the wingnuts with the same coarseness that they are spreading with some seeming success. Maybe those of us should go to the tea parties and townhall and other reactionary gatherings where every utterance by our opponents can be shouted down by our own outcry: “BULLSHIT!”

“I think,” says Rep. “Left Foot Bubba” Tingerhopper, R-Backwater, S.C., “Therefore, I am.”

 “BULLSHIT,” says we.

 Well, maybe not, for it seems my idea of a boycott was a good one.

 I am sure it wasn’t my idea that did the trick. But even though I did suggest boycotting certain aspects of the South Carolina economy — tourism for instance — there might at least be some like minds out there.

 McLatchy Newspapers reported yesterday that state and local tourism officials in South Carolina are being “flooded by emails and calls from people across the country, saying they won’t vacation in South Carolina” due to Wilson’s charge during a joint session of Congress that the president lied.

 South Carolina is home to a number of well-known tourist destinations including Myrtle Beach and Hilton Head.

 Even somewhat more bizarre, at least as far as this blog is concerned, I got an e-mail message concerning the boycott topic from a complete unknown. That is kind of unusual, especially these days since I switched to Word Press from Blogger. I seem to have lost some of my readers, not that I ever had many other than friends or relatives, most of whom are very tolerant people to be mostly conservatives who put up with or at least suffer in silence with my point of view.

 Sherry, from somewhere, e-mailed me:

 “You influenced me. 
 
My ancestors spent a couple generations in SC the first part of the 18th century.
 
I want to be proud of that and I said so in my letter to the tourism site.
 
How about a Boycott South Carolina facebook site?”
 
 Why not?
 I pointed out to Sherry that many of my ancestors came from North Carolina. So
I suppose someone will figure out that is the origin of my churlishness.
 “Yep, damn Yankee. Just like I figgered.”
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And don't get me started on Jay Leno

 As cliches go it isn’t bad: “Opinions are like a**holes everybody’s got one.”

 Surely that is not as absolute as it seems for surely someone for some reason or the other is missing an a-hole and some unfortunate is bound to have more than one as in the accompanying cliche: “He/she/it ripped me a new a**hole.”

 Such an orfice might be an unusual introduction to a critique of Jay Leno’s new primetime TV show were it not for the fact that the human a-hole, Kanye West, was a guest on Leno’s first-ever last night. Jay, the Chin Man, Leno racked up a variety of critiques overnight elucidating the good, bad and ugly of his escape from early late-night. There is too much for me to pick and choose and link. Start with Google News if you need someone to get your link up.

 This I will say about the first primetime Leno. Yee-awwwn. That’s actually an extended yawn.

 Nothing differed last night on the new Leno show from his routines off the old one. If it works, why fix it? Because it doesn’t work, Jay. It hasn’t worked in a long time. I like only so much of Jaywalking. Now they do a take-off on the local high school football extra on Friday nights where a ditzy cheerleader or acne-eaten seventh-grader gets asked the meaning of “facemask” but fails to answer the question. It is barely funny when a professional comedian like Leno does it but it sucks royally when attempted by a bored local small-market sportscaster and an assortment of clueless high school-junior high students.

 Even Jerry Seinfeld fell flat. Not because he is, rather because Leno was uninspiring. The skit with Seinfeld interviewing Oprah on screen was about the funniest piece.

 And Kanye West? If I had a pet ego I’d shave it’s ass and name it Kanye West.

 Enough said?

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This is a drill. This is a drill.

 Five of the scariest words a sailor can ever hear when at sea are “This is not a drill,” followed by “General quarters. General quarters all hands man your battle stations.”

 That only happened once to me during the year I spent on board a destroyer in the Western and Southern Pacific. We were somewhere out in the middle of the WestPac during the early evening. I was sitting on the mess decks watching some movie when I began hearing this weak, persistent sound.

 I told some guy sitting next to me: “That sounds like the general alarm.” Sure enough it was. The alarm sounded and those scary words were followed by an even scarier scene. My battle station was a couple of decks aloft in Combat Information Center. As I made it to the main deck I could see thick, black smoke coming from below decks in the engine spaces.

 We weren’t in combat conditions nor were we headed into such a scenario. I knew from the smoke that there was fire — hey, think I discovered something that day? — and that was the reason for GQ. My buddies in the Hull Technician gang,  the main damage control guys, quickly extinguished the fire and all was soon well again. But that little incident showed it is good to be trained for emergencies and know what is and what isn’t an emergency.

 I bring up this anecdote as I think of the drill that apparently scared some folks Schickless last week in Washington. By now most of you have heard about what turned out to be a Coast Guard drill on the Potomac River just about the time President Obama was to have given his remarks on Sept. 11, 2009, honoring those who were killed in the crash of American Airlines Flight 77 exactly eight years before at the Pentagon.

 The story about the Coast Guard drill in a nutshell is that, well, they were drilling with small boats on the Potomac. Some radio traffic became mixed up with the reality of what was going on. Some of the media — most notably CNN — went with what little they had and apparently caused a bit of hysteria. Then everyone began running with both hands on their asses for cover.

 I am not a big fan of CNN these days. My falling out with the cable network has nothing to do with politics as much as it does with their falling standards of excellence. They have lost many good news people. Some of the people whom I used to like have joined the “Let’s do melodrama” bandwagon which is running news into the ground.

 I have also mostly stayed quiet about the Obama administration until now. Specifically, I think Obama needs to send some of the people who run his communication shop off to somewhere less visible, like perhaps Antarctica. I would include among them Chief of Staff, Mr. Personality Himself, Rahm Emmanuel and that teddy-bear-of-a-guy Press Secretary Robert Gibbs.

 While Emmanuel did nothing in particular that I know of in this specific debacle with the Coast Guard, Gibbs came out in a snit that day blaming the entire shebang on the media and specifically CNN.

 From my experience in both public safety and as a journalist, I cannot find any major mistake made by CNN. They jumped ahead on something that could have been major, but they were handed the opportunity on a brass serving platter by the Coast Guard.

 What was the Coast Guard thinking? Or, what were they thinking that particular day and time? Or, what were they not thinking?

 News people have to perform all kind of balancing acts, but in this particular instance I think the ones who erred on the side of something major  that was given to them by the Coast Guard came out all even. In other words, CNN. 

 The Coasties who came up the idea to run a drill when they did where they did perhaps have been inside the Beltway too long. Perhaps a nice cruise somewhere will clear their heads.

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Did you know it's raining? No but if you could hum a few bars …

 The rain continues, on and off, here in the upper corner of the Texas Gulf Coast. It’s been like this for a couple of days. The weather people say we’ve got ourselves a:

COMPLEX WEATHER SITUATION WITH A COASTAL SURFACE TROUGH/WARM FRONT LOCATED OFF THE SOUTHEAST TEXAS AND SOUTHERN LOUISIANA COAST.

 I’m sure that it’s a heck of a lot more complicated than that, but it’s good enough for me. The local weather folks out of the NWS Lake Charles office say that any tropical formation “seems unlikely at this time” and the National Hurricane Center gives this system less than a 30 percent chance for any type of cyclonic activity. But having slept through Hurricane Humberto, which formed two years ago tomorrow, I can tell you that these pesky little systems which stick around in the Gulf and build can jump up quicker than a jackrabbit with a firecracker up its wazoo and commence to giving objects ashore a senseless thrashing.

 So hopefully this — system — will just be a rain event. And in such event, one needs a little background music. For that, I found this Web page compiled by a person with even more time on his hands than I have. He has put together a list of rain-related songs. I will show some he listed a few of mine too, in no particular order, and then you can look at his page and go wild. Stay dry.

A few rain songs: From the “Rain Songs” blog and a few off he top of my head.

  1. Rainy Night in Georgia — Brook Benton
  2. Let it Rain — Derek and the Dominoes (Eric Clapton)
  3. Rainy Night House — Joni Mitchell
  4. It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’ — Folk song
  5. I Can See Clearly Now (the rain is gone) — Johnny Nash
  6. Blue Eyes Cryin’ In the Rain — Willie Nelson
  7. Fire and Rain — James Taylor
  8. Candles in the Rain (Lay Down) — Melanie (Safka)
  9. Raining in My Heart — Slim Harpo
  10. Thunder Island (about being caught in the rain while … ) — Jay Ferguson
  11. Have You Ever Seen the Rain? — Creedence Clearwater Revival
  12. A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall — Bob Dylan (not the kind of rain you’d want)
  13. Here Comes the Rain Again — The Eurythmics
  14. Rainy Day Woman — Waylon Jennings
  15. Who’ll Stop the Rain? — Creedence Clearwater Revival
  16. Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35 — Bob Dylan
  17. Texas Flood — Stevie Ray Vaughn
  18. Louisiana 1927 — Randy Newman
  19. When the Levee  Breaks — Led Zepplin
  20. It Never Rains in Southern California — Albert Hammond

Of course, there are tons and tons of rain songs. It would seem people write almost as many songs about rain as they write about love. And of course there are those songs which have to do about loving in the rain (“Thunder Island”) and loving the rain (“I Love a Rainy Night” by Eddie Rabbit, which is not listed above because I don’t particularly like the song.) I am not a big fan of No. 20, about it never raining in So. Cal. either. I listed it because I was sitting somewhere to avoid a August 1977 rainstorm in San Diego where I heard on the TV playing there that Elvis had died. I thought about the irony of the Albert Hammond song and it raining like hell as I found out the King was dead. Oh, and there’s Elvis’s “Kentucky Rain.” It was an okay song, but I liked his much older stuff better.

 Oh well. Here is music to drown by. Just don’t drown.