The real explanation of the president's gay marriage flip-flop

Lot's of pundits are breathlessly hailing the courage and groundbreaking heroism of our fearless leader. You know, he's so courageous and heroic that he finally admitted to holding a view expressed by Dick Cheney back in 2009. 

I might as well reiterate here that I don't give a rat's ass one way or the other.  If you want to be gayly married, then good for you.  I don't think your Creator sees it that way, but I can't for the life of me figure out how any of this is a government issue.  I'd prefer to keep the government out of all of our lives as much as possible.  At the same time though, I would appreciate an end to the lectures about how normal and natural all of this stuff is.  Hetero sex creates new humans.  Gay sex does not.  Gay sex is therefore, by definition, unnatural.  That being said, I don't care.  Marry whomever you like and I'll (not) marry whomever I like.  We can keep the government out of it and leave each other alone.

But we never leave the government out of anything, do we? We have to engage in horseshit discussions of "rights" that are apparently being denied to people.

Hospital visitation is one that the people on the radio like to talk about.  Seriously dude, get the fuck out of here.  When my buddy Mr. Pedro was in the hospital prior to his death, I could go and visit him whenever I felt like it.  I'm not his wife.  I'm not related to him in any way (and we also happened to be of the same gender).  But I could visit him in the hospital.  Nobody had to redefine an English word for me to do so.  If one individual is being prevented from visiting another individual in a given hospital, then there's a hospital policy problem.  Not a government problem.

Inheritance is another one, right?  Inheritance is a simple matter of estate law.  States have skewed estate law in favor of married couples, to be sure.  So why not just fix that problem?  Require spouses to do what anybody else would have to do in order to direct their assets following death - fill out a will.  Simple enough.  And one more phony talking point about discrimination can go by the wayside.  If I want to leave my belongings to Jennifer Aniston (who clearly would be my wife in this imaginary scenario) and you want to leave your belongings to your gay lover, then fine.  We'll both fill out a contract stating that these are our preferences and life will go on.

My point here is to illustrate how phony and contrived this whole 'controversy' is.  The fact that Obama was afraid to pick a side was only a small indictment of him.  He's a spineless jellyfish when it comes to all kinds of issues, so why would this one be any different?  The Chicago way dictates that the right position on any given issue is the one that keeps a politician in power - nothing more, nothing less.  He's a Chicago machine politician in every sense of the phrase.

No, the larger indictment falls on the voters who sit around and wait to see about this stuff.  It's an imaginary controversy with a simple solution, yet we've spent years and decades wringing our hands and gnashing our teeth.  He is a coward about the issue only because we don't have enough sense to realize that it's not an issue in the first place.  We're the ones who theoretically embrace freedom, only until someone else's freedom seems a little yucky to us.  Whether it's the freedom to be filthy stinking rich or the freedom to be a flaming homosexual, we all pick and choose which freedoms are offensive to us.

So Obama had to pick a side on this particular issue, after years of trying to play both sides.  It's a funny thing about divide-and-conquer politics.  Some of the coalitions that you assemble over the years will end up on opposite sides from each other.  In particular, the party preferred by black people and Hispanic people has wound up also as the party preferred by gay people.  And do you know which groups of Americans are fairly hostile toward gay people?  Bible-thumping rednecks?  Yeah, to an extent, sure.  But also blacks and Hispanics.  These groups of people are largely Christian in their beliefs and largely hostile toward homosexuality in general.  But they're also mostly Democrats.  So a Democrat hoping to hold the coalition together would be well-served to straddle the line as long as possible.  It's not Obama's fault.  It's our fault.  We're the ones who vote along arbitrary and illogical lines most of the time.  He's just another player in the game.

So now the chattering class are trying to analyze whether the new Obama will benefit or lose from the new position on gay marriage.  The simple and obvious answer is that the president will neither gain nor lose significant votes by taking this position.  A few more gay people will turn out to vote and a few more anti-gay people will turn out to vote.  Most people will still vote based on the economy.  That's the reality.

What Obama will gain is money.  He's spent the last three years trying to fuck over the Wall Street crowd any time he had the chance.  The Wall Street crowd were his biggest supporters last time around.  It's entirely possible that they'll end up being his biggest supporters this time as well, but numerous stories have noted that his fundraising hasn't met expectations thus far.  Better get the far left jazzed up again, eh?  What better way to do it than to embrace one of their pet causes?  It's just simple mathematics.

But I think that explanation is a little too simple.  I have another theory.

Suppose you were married to a woman who was always blowing your money and lecturing people about what they eat and whining about your job.  You might start to wonder what other options were out there, right?  So now you have a big-money fundraiser wth Ricky Martin coming up next week.  That Ricky Martin sure is a dreamboat.  And he probably doesn't even care if you want to eat a cheeseburger every now and then.  Maybe you start thinking...

Yep, that's right, I said it.  Barack Obama supports gay marriage now because he wants to marry Ricky Martin.  Go ahead and try to find that kind of hard-hitting analysis on CNN.

No, seriously, life really does suck most of the time.

Somebody somewhere decided to create this horseshit.  As beautiful as an energetic pianist may be from time to time, there's far more of... well... this.




That's just fucking awful.

The kinetic Korean pianist or the useless blonde bimbo?  Which do we enjoy more?  I know, personally, that I'd enjoy the bimbo more, but the question was posed in the sense of measuring societal value.  I'm pretty sure neither of these broads is hopping into my bed any time soon.  So we're left to assess actual talent.  There's no contest.  Clearly.  Yet, you know what?  That Kendra broad is 100 times more famous.  We're fucked.  As a society, as a culture, we're fucked.

This is why I drink.

Life, in general, sucks.

For those of us who spend our lives being mocked by the lovers of Nietzsche and his ilk, the realization that life on earth is pretty lousy is nothing new. We've known this for thousands of years.  We're pretty sure that there's a payoff coming somewhere down the road, but we're prepared to accept that we'll never know when that 'somewhere down the road' will be reached.  And we're pretty sure that nothing we experience in this life is all that critical in the grand scheme of things.

For those of us who live our lives in the present and have a hard time looking beyond the horizon, the realization that life on earth is pretty lousy is nothing new. We've known this for thousands of years.  We're pretty sure that we can affect things on the margins, but we're prepared to accept that we aren't actually going to shape the world in any meaningful way.  And we're pretty sure that everything we experience in this life is awfully important in the grand scheme of things.

Most of you who have read my musings over the years will be quick to note that I place myself squarely within both categories.  I'm the perfectly imperfect prototype of the modern hypocrite.  I do believe that God's will is going to be done, one way or another.  At the same time, I'm not ashamed to acknowledge that God's will pisses me off quite a bit of the time. The proper approach would likely be to bow my head and lead the most virtuous life possible.  Instead, I usually choose to be a useless degenerate and pursue whatever amusements I might find from day to day.

Not all parts of life suck though.  Some parts are beautiful (and I'm not even discussing naked broads this time, I swear).  I came across this article as I was perusing various parts of the interweb last night.  The Cliff's Notes version is that some Korean gal signed a contract to record Beethoven's piano sonatas.  The rest of the article seems to consist of the author trying to impress you with how cultured he is, or something.  The article did convince me to take a look at Ms. Lim's work though.




24 years old and awfully talented.  I tend to like my women more European and my music more fun, as a matter of personal taste, but I can't deny that this chick is bringing a pretty awesome style to some pretty well-traveled tunes.  Maybe she'll get around to recording some of that Tchaikovsky stuff one of these days.

But anyway, yeah, some parts of life don't suck. That's all I was really trying to say.

We won again.

A while ago my brother and I played Motor City Trivia at a local pub in Novi.  We won.  Tonight, after the Tigers turned in yet another pitiful performance, we decided to go to Mixx and have some dinner.  I had purchased a couple of vouchers from one of those 'daily deals' websites some time ago, so we had a $20 head start on the night. We ordered a pizza and began to watch the NFL draft.  Then some broad came over and asked if we were interested in playing the trivia game. Sure, why not?

We won the first game even though we missed a few questions along the way.  My brother got zero out of ten right.  I got about seven out of ten.  Then, during the second game, the stakes were a little higher. We had come from behind to win the first game with an aggressive wager on the final question.  This time around, we were within two points of first place going into the final question.

We chose to bet the maximum.  Go big or go home, as the saying goes.  The question had something to do with the largest metropolitan area in the world to begin with the letter C.  Chicago comes to mind right off the bat, obviously.  So then you're left to think of other choices.  Paris?  Doesn't begin with C.  London?  Ditto.  Rio de Janiero?  Nope.  We (and by 'we,' I mean 'I') went down the list.  Moscow, Tokyo, Beijing, etc.  Then we (meaning 'I') came to Cairo.  That one starts with the letter C, but is it bigger than Chicago?  Hard to say.  My brother chimed in with the sort of insight that only he can offer.  "There are a lot of Arabs in Egypt."

I took a monent to think it over... yep, I think he's right.  There are a lot of Arabs in Egypt.  We handed in our answer slip and waited for the results.  Apparently everyone else, aside from one team, had guessed Chicago.  That other team had guessed Calcutta.  Shit, I hadn't considered India.  Those bastards do have a lot of people.  Over a billion, I think.  Why hadn't I thought of this?

The trivia broad read off the final results.  One team had 32 points.  Another had 34 points.  Shit, we had 57 going into this last question and 20 was the maximum wager.  Neither of those could have been us.  We waited for the final results.  The correct answer was... Cairo.  We won again.

I'll be a son of a bitch.  Four trivia games.  Four victories.  First prize is only a $15 gift card for each game, but you know what?  That's $30 that we didn't have before we went out for dinner...  again.  Four for four, mofos.  Aided by my slightly mentally impaired brother, I'm undefeated. Winner winner chicken dinner.

Yeah baby!